All teachers should watch Chris Anderson (the guy who heads up TED ideas worth spreading) talk about crowd accelerated innovation, and the impact this IS having and WILL HAVE on how people educate themselves through web based mediums like online video. At one point in the video Chris talks of how TED presenters like Jill Bolte Taylor really raised the bar with her TED talk, literally forcing others to step up. Will it be online video education providers like Salman Khan who do the same for education?
Methinks it’s time to step up.
I’m figuring those of you reading this now are a few rungs up the ladder already. It’s time to introduce a few people who are at the bottom of their ladder of understanding to 18.53 minutes of Chris Anderson speaking to them, and we just might see them take the first step.
Nothing like a good flash mob to lift your spirits, get you moving and bring a smile to your dial. This flash mob came together in Rome and were promoting a new season of the US show ‘Glee‘.
I’m feeling a sense of glee tonight. I suspect there are plenty of Victorian educators feeling the same way. It’s end of term time here in Victoria, and it’s been a long, cold, packed to the rafters term three. I’m so looking forward to some downtime and a few sleep ins. Maybe I can get rid of those black rings under my eyes over the next fortnight!
If you’re looking for something else to bring a little mirth to your life, check out the range of demotivators posters on offer from Despair, Inc : – ( .Thanks Adrian Bruce for sending out the link on Twitter this afternoon. I was chuckling for quite some time looking through the range.
Have you ever been conscious of working in a state of Flow. Those moments when the learning becomes your whole being, everything else fades and extraneous noise can’t permeate your focus on whatever is is that occupies your attention. I’ve been moving in and out of states of flow for the past three years, ever since I discovered the potential of connected learning. Yes, I’d experienced states of flow before that too, but not necessarily connected to the work I do as a teacher.
Last week, I watched one of my students immersed in Flow. We’ve been focused on poetry as a writing task, and have been tying it to our study of The Running Man and the Vietnam War. (Note the cross curricular nature of this study- my students have not only been working on text analysis, but they have been learning about the impact of the Vietnam War on society. It’s so important to have our students able to link learning experiences and understand that learning doesn’t have to be compartmentalised into the 60 minutes they spend in a History class or an English class). The students have to select an image representing a war situation and then write a poetry piece in response to it. My student selected a photo that many of you will be familiar with; the picture of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed by the chief of Vietnam’s national police. She’s a student with natural curiousity, and she was intrigued with what might be the story behind this picture. She spent the lesson drilling down that story; conducting her own research via the Web and discovering the stories of the victim, the perpetrator and the photographer.
Now, I could have been the teacher who said, “Don’t waste your time doing that, just get on with the task of writing that poem”. But really, what’s the point in doing that? She was self directing her own learning at that point, and was teaching me in the process of doing so. I, and other students in the class, discovered the story behind that photo and we left that class with new understanding. My student left that class with a deep understanding of that photo and this will help her shape a poem that I’m sure will have meaning for her. To my way of thinking, that’s what’s important; something meaningful , not just something fired off because it’s the next assessment task.
And here’s what else I think. This is why it’s important we support and encourage 1:1 programs in our schools. My student could self direct her learning in that classroom because she had a computer with internet access in front of her. Imagine that class without it. She may have found the photo on her own volition before she came to class, but she wouldn’t have been able to drill down the learning. She could have imagined what may have been, and she could have gone home to do that investigation, but instead she was able to immerse herself in the state of flow and be energised by this experience. Yes, some would say you can do the same thing with pods of computers close to classrooms, but I’ve worked in environments like that before and it’s fraught with the difficulties of ensuring access when you have other classes also wanting to use these pods. The fact that it was so natural for her to use what for her is her pen and paper and research device rolled into one just makes sense.
Schools have some important decisions to make. As we see the cost of computing devices, be they smart phones, iPads, iTouches, netbooks etc, become increasingly cheaper and accessible, decisions need to be made about how schools manage such devices. Do school administrations really think they can continue to dictate the terms of access? Many parents of the students we teach are already sending their children to school with 3g enabled phones giving them access to the unfiltered web. We should be harnessing the learning potential of these devices and accepting that kids are going to bringing their own personal computers, iPads or phones with them to school rather than discouraging their use. The knowledge economy we are living in today demands that we know how to;
collect the information necessary to consider a problem or issue
employ critical thinking skills in the evaluation and analysis of the information and its sources
formulate logical conclusions and present those conclusions in an appropriate and effective way (Information Age Inquiry)
I’m pretty sure my student was doing all three of those things in last week’s class. In fact, as I write this, she’s just submitted her poem via email. It’s pretty damn good; original thinking on display, and reflective of all of the above.
Sometimes we have to just let the learning happen.
It’s very apt that I use a video referencing a pet, considering the angst of the last 24hrs. Once again, a pet issue has occupied my time. Not the cat this time. No, it was the dog (again!) She wandered off sometime last afternoon and we located her this morning at the local pound. In the midst of this I attended the SLAV 50th Anniversary Dinner in Melbourne last night, and then this morning found my way back to the city again to look at new furnishing options for our now in construction school library. No rest for the wicked!
There’s been plenty I’ve wanted to blog about this week but I haven’t been able to get to this space. I thought I’d share a few links with you of some of the things that passed my way that might prove of interest.
Google Instant shows results as you type, and it will be coming to your desktop when you conduct a search using Google in the coming months.
“The extra bandwith and data transmission speeds of next-generation (4G) mobile networks mean it could soon be possible to listen to music streaming straight from the internet anywhere where there’s reception…”
He goes onto to query whether anyone would bother purchasing from sites like iTunes if this becomes standard practice. Interesting, and worth reading.
So much passes by me in a week, it’s hard to find time to share all the good stuff. This weak attempt might help those of you who aren’t plugged into Twitter and rely on people like me to keep you informed.
Have a great weekend. End of term fast approaching Aussie Educators!!
I delivered ‘What is a Digital Footprint and why would you want one?’ at the Leading a Digital School Conference here in Melbourne last week. You’ll have to follow the link to my wikispaces page to view it as the code from Sliderocket is not supported in WordPress. It was very well received, even though I’d been frantically putting the slides together the night before! I’ve written this as a paper for Synergy, the online journal published by the School Library Association of Victoria. It will be published sometime in October. You’ll have a little trouble following a couple of the slides without the benefit of listening to what I was talking about, but hopefully you’ll get a sense of what I think is an important message that our teachers need to hear.
What was encouraging about this conference was the feeling I had that more people are open to the idea of infusing new ideas into their classroom practice. Martin Levins has done a good job of dissecting keynote speakers’ presentations so I’d encourage you to visit his blog and take a read. The conference ning has a presentation resources tab where you can find some of what went on. Garry Putland’s slides are worth a look, and even though Michael Hough’s slides were text heavy, a lot of what he had to say was very pertinent. Teacher Librarians should rejoice; he spoke glowingly of the worth of our skill set in our schools today.
Thanks to the conference organisers for putting on a great conference. Another great part of the conference was getting to meet Leanne Windsor, a Librarian who has returned to Australia from Japan recently, and who I follow on Twitter. We had a fun time laughing our way through the conference!
Thank goodness for improveverywhere! Here are the wonderful people of New York City donning Black Tie attaire and formal evening gowns for a day out at Coney Island. I just love watching people from all walks of life embracing the spontaneous nature of these events and putting smiles on the faces of the people they encounter. When it comes down to it, this is a vital ingredient of human interaction. The ability of human beings to intrigue and entertain one another.
I’ve been at a the Leading a Digital School conference here in Melbourne the last couple of days and have barely had time time to resurface after having to present two sessions on Thursday. One of those was new and I was creating slides to support the presentation on Wednesday night. I don’t know about you, but I seem to be chasing my tail on a constant basis at the moment. I think this is becoming a recurrent theme for me. You must be sick and tired of me returning to the same annoying rant all the time. I’m getting a little tired of it myself to be honest with you. Perhaps I just need to wise up to the fact that this is the state of my existence and I need to get used to it!
The conference has been really great. Lots of enlivened discussions, but a real sense that schools are thinking outside the square and acknowledging the ubiquitous nature of computing and what we need to be doing to respond to this societal change.I’ll write more over the weekend after I’ve returned home.
I hope your weekend is everything you want it to be. Enjoy. : )
Last week was extremely busy, and a combination of successes and failures. I’ve been grappling for awhile now with what to do as an alternative to Ning. We’ve paid for a few networks in the school to be mini networks, and that’s no headache at $20.00 for the year. A mini network enables you to have forums, blogs, to embed videos and pictures and to run this ad free. It suits the functions of the Yr 9 Ning we run, which is into it’s second year now, and other Nings that support our book club and our Sleepout for Schools effort. Another teacher runs a Ning that has pages and chat and her faculty has paid the $200.00 fee to sustain this for the year. As I’m sure you’ve gleaned if you read this blog regularly, I’m a big fan of Ning and its use as a virtual learning community in our school. I don’t object to having to pay the fees either; I think we’re going to see more Web based services begin to charge and I think our school communities will have to start budgeting for this, just like we do for placing books on library shelves or subscribing to databases.
Last year we ran a really successful Ning for a week long inquiry project at Year 8. That Ning contained groups and chat, and the students used these really productively throughout the course of that week to publicise what they were investigating and to collaborate and organise themselves. This last week saw the Inquiry week run again and we wanted to use Ning to support the students and encourage transparency with what they were doing. The issue for us was this; the project runs for one week of the year. Did we want to pay $200.00 for a Ning, a cost that was necessary if we wanted to encourage the formation of groups and utilise chat? Well, no, we didn’t.
So, I looked for alternatives. I set up a site using Grouply, but it wasn’t as intuitive as Ning and forum discussions didn’t seem to be highlighted on the front page, you had to move into a tab to see them. We wanted the students to see forum discussions front and centre when they reached the page. It also didn’t support any sort of chat feature so that made it limited in its use for us. A bit of a callout for suggestions on Twitter led me to Wall.fm, and it seemed I had found the answer.
Wall.fm lets you have forums, blogs, photos, videos and, importantly for our needs, groups and a wall where you can post comments. (a bit reminiscent of Facebook) There are only a handful of themes so you can’t go to town customising the look of the site, but it is functional. You can make it private or have it open. I set it up and it looked like it was going to do the job we needed it to do. I launched it with the kids on their first day of solid research and they were keen to get started. Frustratingly, we hit hiccups when a number of them were unable to validate their membership because the emails didn’t reach their inbox. It was hit and miss. Some kids were flying and forming groups and leaving comments, and others were locked out of the site. As a result, we didn’t have the dynamic virtual learning environment supporting this inquiry like we had last year. Pretty disappointing for all of us.
I sent a message through the site asking why it may be that we were having issues. I tried changing the email address at the back end of the site to see whether or not validation emails could then get through. No reply at all from the help desk at Wall fm. left me floundering really. If you can’t get support then that doesn’t bode well for a social network really.
Ning don’t look like they’re going to announce education packages that will make something that runs for a limited time frame affordable. So I’m once again looking for an adequate alternative that gives me what Ning Pro can do but at a reasonable price. If my project ran the full year and I needed groups and chat, then I don’t think $200.00 is a big ask. I’d happily fund it through a budget. But a short term project like the one we’ve run really doesn’t warrant the outlay.
So, the hunt continues. I’ve been recommended to try out Grou.ps, so I’m going to set up a trial space and see if I can make that workable. If anyone’s had any success with Ning alternatives, I’d love to hear about them. I spent time tonight uploading videos and photos to our Yr 9 English Ning, and I have to tell you, I just love the ease of uploading content and the look and feel of Ning. It just may be that I’m going to have to suck it up and pay the price!
The inquiry week for the students was a great success, even without the virtual environment. The students all immersed themselves in what they were doing and presented some impressive findings. Twitter came to the rescue for one group. That’s the happy tale I’ll relay in my next post. : )
The girls at my school have been entertaining me with this over the last week. It’s spreading like a virus. One group, then the next, then the next. Any wonder. It’s clever and funny all at once, and you get to see the preview of the upcoming two part Harry Potter finale. Yes, you will have to buy two tickets.
I’ve just come off the end of a pretty demanding week that saw technology bring rewarding experiences and not so rewarding experiences. I’ll try and put fingers to keyboard over the weekend to outline the successes and failures. The good thing was that even the failure brought with it a learning experience that I can benefit from.
Still waiting for a hint of a warm wind to grace us here in Melbourne. It’s pretty dreary but at least the dams are filling. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder! I seriously feel like I need a strong dose of vitamin D from the sun. Sydneysiders, I hate to admit it, but I’m envious of the blue skies I’ve seen you boasting over the last week or so!! The weather forecast for the next four days is sunshine all the way, so maybe I’ll be revitalised by the end of the weekend.
Hopefully sunshine comes your way this weekend, wherever in the world you may be. Soak it up. : )
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently made a some very interesting comments while being interviewed by Holman W Jenkins from the Wall Street Journal;
“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
This is ludicrous on many accounts. First, it completely contradicts historical legal trajectories where name changes have become increasingly more difficult. Second, it fails to account for the tensions between positive and negative reputation. Third, it would be so exceedingly ineffective as to be just outright absurd.
Surprisingly, I spend quite a bit of time discussing things like this with prospective parents at my school. Our school registrar tours with them and visits me often. I talk about the vision of our new library under construction, the work we are doing at Year 9 using Ning as a virtual learning community and our efforts with Cybersafety. Parents are really interested in this last point, and I see many nodding heads when I discuss the need for our students to establish a positive digital footprint for themselves. Plenty of them realise their kids use sites like Facebook as their communication platform, but they do want them to do so with some understanding of how they conduct themselves responsibly to protect their own reputation, and the reputation of others.
Jonathan Zittrain discusses a similar idea to that raised by Eric Schmidt, but he calls it ‘Reputation Bankruptcy’. It’s the idea that you will be able to wipe your digital identity slate clean and start over. Who knows, one day it just might be possible, but what if you have a good deal of positive web content that you don’t want erased? Will we be able to be selective about what stays and what goes?
All it takes is for someone who’s motivated to make a link between the two and any attempt to walk away from your past vanishes in an instant. Search definitely makes a mess out of people’s name-based reputation but a name change doesn’t fix it if someone’s intent on connecting the two.
So, what’s in a name? Will we need to grapple with our digital identities, identities that can be forged by our friends (or enemies!) as much as they are forged by our own hand? Once again, we need to take this on board as educators. We need to help our students understand that they can create the long tail of good searchable content that will make their name a blessing, not a burden.
I love this ‘mockumentary’ I found after following a Twitter link this week. (sorry, can’t remember who it was that sent it out). ‘The Majestic Plastic Bag‘ serves a dual purpose. Great for a giggle, but there’s a serious message behind it that we all should heed. I used it in two classrooms this week and the kids were right onto it. All of them agreed that it was better hearing and seeing the message via this format rather than hearing a teacher talk about it. Yet another reason why I send my students to YouTube and encourage them to seek out the learning opportunities that can be found there.
Big weekend here in Australia. Election day tomorrow. I’ll be glued to the screens (both old media and new!) waiting for the first hint of who might carry this one off. I’ll be fascinated to observe the workings of Twitter tomorrow. Will it be the place where we will hear things first? Is the user base large enough and varied enough to ensure a decent spread of the community? Will hashtags evolve that will enable us to track interesting developments? I’ve already seen one of our major commercial networks advertising that they’re going to be screening a twitter stream throughout the course of the evening. What is apparent is that it’s going to be interesting and social media may be one of the things that makes it so.
Melbourne is hideously cold – has been for quite some time now. I can see blossoms erupting, but I’m desperate for the first hint of a warm breeze. Hopefully it will happen this weekend, but to be honest with you, I already know that I’m hoping in vain.
Enjoy your weekend and whatever it brings with it. : )
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 