The semester here just ended. This Fall session was a long, hard trip. Classes, especially the string of Qualitative and Quantitative classes that we've been sweating through here at Neag.
The highlight of the semester...other than pulling A's again...has to be the string of conferences I had the chance to pull off with my friends and colleagues in the field. We had the thrill of presenting at NCTE in San Antonio, NRC in Orlando...and then ARF in virtual Sanibel Island.
NCTE was incredible. I was involved in two great presentations with my colleagues. The first, Allow it to be YouRTube went very well. The second, I think went even better. I'm beginning to think that I want to start focusing my talks and PD sessions on areas such as poetry or short stories; instead of framing them all on New Literacies and technology. I think I can "talk" to people in different communities by framing my words around their discourse. And then work my technology and New Literacies magic. Feel free to check out my NING page there (more on that later). I included all of the materials there for our YouRTube presentation.
NRC was a homerun. I had the opportunity to present at an invited session about the open response items from the Dispositions Instrument that Greg and I built last year. I really appreciate the invite given by Erica Boling, David Lund and others from the technology committee.
Greg, Lisa and I then presented together. My presentation was about the factor analysis that we ran on the Dispositions of Online Reading Comprehension (DORC) instrument that we created. We presented some initial results and findings. We just found out the other day that just under 10,000 students have taken the DORC....so we should have some new results in the near future.
We wrapped up our whirlwind week in Orlando with the year 3 installment of the TICA talk with our colleagues from Clemson. It's always a blast to work with all of them.
Finally we had a chance to give a keynote with Don, Doug Hartman and Katina Zammit to the American Reading Forum conference in Sanibel Island. The conversations that followed sparked a lot of questions in my own thinking around technology and the work I do.
I'll upload some pics from these talks and the video Lisa took of my invited session. You can all take a look at the fancy outfit my Wife bought for me for my big talk.
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