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Congratulations to Helen Hinders, Aplington-Parkersburg Middle School; Krista State, CAL Elementary of Latimer; and Larry Thompson, Four Oaks in Mason City who are this year’s AEA 267 Outstanding Paraeducator Award winners.

Visit the AEA booth at the Iowa State Fair

re•fuse•nik (n) somebody who refuses to agree to, take part in, or cooperate with something, especially on grounds of principle (informal) Why do I think people are Refuseniks? Let's look at a little history: The first major introduction of computers into the classroom took place, essentially with the introduction of the Apple II-e computer. The Apple II-e was introduced in 1983 and became a staple of campuses around the world. So, in order to keep things simple, let’s just say it was 1985 by the time Apple II-e’s really hit it big in the classroom. So, without too much mathematical calculation going on here, it is not a stretch to say that computers have been in the schools for at least 24 years. A teacher, even with 35 years experience today, will have had 63% of their professional life exposed to computers in their work environment. A teacher with less than 24 years of experience will have not known a school without a computer.

"A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously in the open fields."

Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.

“ambient awareness.”

A talkback board. We gave everyone post-its in their registration packets and encouraged them to post their questions and comments, especially on the “gaps” in the conference, to the board. The board was directly outside the main conference room.

If you don't engage in multiple back channels, you may not see multiple use cases. Different tools are best for different types of interaction. Just because post-it notes didn't work at WebWise doesn't mean they don't work in galleries... as we know from the success of many talkback boards.If you ask visitors/participants to try a new tool, make sure it has as low a barrier to entry as possible. I have yet to see a museum set something up that is as simple to use as Today'sMeet.If discussion is the goal, you don't need user profiles - you just need a way to talk. If building up a personal profile/relationship with the institution is a goal, people need to uniquely identify themselves.Think about the possibility for asynchronous back channels that allow visitors (and staff) to share deep content with each other over time. Consider, for example, the rich conversation on Flickr about this image from the Chicago World's Fair. You could imagine a comparable conversation available to visitors onsite alongside exhibits or artifacts in the galleries.If possible, find ways to show the real-time location of people who are engaging in the back channel. The Mattress Factory's new SCREENtxt application uses a location-based system so that visitors can identify whether other participants are onsite at the museum or not.Make allowance for emergent back channels that visitors/users "bring with them" to the experience. These tools are particularly valuable for the "portal to the world" back channel use case. Every time I see a kid take a cellphone photo in an exhibit, I know that photo will immediately travel to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. How can your system capture that activity?