Tag: Mark Pesce

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Teaching the teachers – the words of Mark Pesce

If you’re an educator today, and you aren’t reading the words of futurist Mark Pesce, then you ought to rectify that immediately. He presented at a conference in Wollongong today (I know not whom for, but it definitely was connected to education) and I’m sure he made an impact. He made an impact on me, and I didn’t see him deliver the presentation. I read it on his blog, the human network – what happens after we’re all connected? The great thing about Mark Pesce is that he values sharing his thinking and makes it easily accessible. If you want to learn from him, you can. You just need to make the effort to read.

His presentation today was entitled, Helicopter Lessons, his thesis about childhood development and hyperconnectivity. There are lessons here for teachers. Many of them. Lessons we ought to be taking heed of. Mark expressed something I feel about the opportunities being presented to us now with the onset of the proposed Australian Curriculum. (yes people, that is what they are calling it now, forget that National Curriculum terminology. Get with the program!) Here’s what Mark said (but he needs to catch up with the change in name too : ));

We’re very lucky, because just at this moment in time, the Commonwealth has gifted us with the best reason we’re ever likely to receive – the National Curriculum.  Now that every student, everywhere across Australia, is meant to be covering the same materials, we have every reason to connect together – student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school, state to state.  The National Curriculum is thought of as a mandate, but it’s really the architecture of a network.  It describes how we all should connect together around a body of knowledge.  If we know that we should be teaching calculus or Mandarin or the Eureka Stockade rebellion, we have an opportunity to connect together, pool our knowledge and our ignorance, and work together.  We can use our hyperconnectivity to hyperempower our ability to work toward understanding.

This could be a gift, if we can move our teaching community to an understanding that shared knowledge is a very powerful tool. It’s a huge shift for some in the teaching profession, who are too frightened to load their resources into a single site learning management system, let alone share with a community of teacher learners nationwide. But it’s something worth working towards. Hopefully the communities of teacher learners that are forming in networks like Twitter can be the connective and cognitive glue that starts this process moving forward. Wouldn’t it be great if an organisation like DEEWR actually sat up and noticed what is happening at the grassroots level already and supported and encouraged communities of practice like this? Now there’s a revolutionary idea. Someone should run with that one. : )

Make sure you read Mark’s essay. He touches on so much more than the sampling I have shared here. I find his words resonate for days and help me to formulate my own thinking. I’m sure you’ll benefit from the reading.

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“Books, newspapers face battle in dawn of digital revolution”. So says the Geelong Advertiser.

Yesterday I posted about the Geelong Advertiser and the interview I conducted with them after they contacted me via Twitter. At that stage I’d searched the site but couldn’t find any article referencing my name.

Today I received this tweet from John Pearce;

mrpbps @jennyluca The Geelongaddy article re U and someone called Pesce who dominates conversation 🙂 is now online Go Jenny http://bit.ly/3fkxj

Mark Pesce’s comments were the main focus of the article. He made reference to the function of Libraries in the future and this is where my comments were slotted in. Here’s what was mentioned;

While it sounds like a new world order, Mr Pesce believes people will turn to libraries to restore order in their own lives.

The public library will be where people go to catalogue the huge data shadows they are creating with digital photographs and recordings, he said, while books will become archives.

“Today librarians keep catalogues to keep books ordered. They are going to pass this on for you to use.

“It’s going look different but it’s going to help order your digital lives,” he said.

Toorak College librarian Jenny Luca said libraries will become a place for discussion and connection.

“It’s absolutely essential that we look at the new technology and find ways to make it meaningful for the kids that we teach. The collaborative nature of those tools is such now that we will actually make connections with the people behind the keyboards and learn from those people.”

But books will still have a role. Fiction is still a vital collection, Ms Luca said, while non-fiction was losing relevance to online content

I have to admit to being pretty chuffed to see my name in an article alongside Mark Pesce’s. Thanks Peter Farago for interviewing me and getting the article to print.  Special thanks go to John Pearce for making the effort to let me know the article had been published. 
 

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Newspapers using Twitter

I had an interesting experience last week as I was heading out to attend the Digital Fair at Geelong Grammar. I sent out a tweet saying I was about to leave and received a reply from Geelongaddy. Geelongaddy turned out to be someone from the Geelong Advertiser, the local newspaper for the Geelong area, and they wanted to talk to me about the upcoming Digital Fair.  

A few tweets back and forth resulted in me participating in a phone interview where I was asked questions about the future of libraries and why we need to be aware of new technologies. The reporter and I shared a discussion about newspapers and their need to embrace online publishing in order to survive. I was extremely impressed that they were using Twitter to disemminate news about the Geelong area and that they were actively searching it to find reference to the Digital Fair. This proactive action enabled them to make connections with me, a participant and presenter.

They also interviewed Mark Pesce who delivered a powerful keynote about digital citizenship and how we as a society need to respond to the influence of the internet on our childrens’ and students’ lives. You can watch this keynote archived on his blog.

I’ve searched their site for the report to no avail. It may well be that it will appear later this week. I’ll post a link if it does. 

*update. A couple of people have sent me the link to the article written by the Geelong Advertiser. No mention of me; guess that’s the nature of newspapers. You have to be newsworthy. Mark Pesce is, I’m not! 

It seems to me that this is the way of the world now. Newspapers obviously need to react to our changing world and find a way to remain relevant. Looks like the Geelong Advertiser is on its way. 

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The Alexandrine Dilemma – Mark Pesce’s message for Librarians.

I’ve just finished reading Mark Pesce‘s latest post, The Alexandrine Dilemma, his keynote for the New Librarians Symposium that he delivered on Friday. As I was reading I was nodding my head in agreement. In it, he identifies the issues facing the library profession. How do we adapt to a changing landscape when information will be online and not available in print form and how do we make this vast repository of information accessible and manageable to the population, many of whom are going to be overwhelmed.

Mark discusses the growth of Wikipedia and the future for paid subscription encylopedias like Brittanica. I’ve been saying something similar in my school environment as we analyse useage and question the need for expensive databases.

Watch carefully: over the next decade we’ll see the somewhat drawn out death of Britannica as it becomes ever less relevant in a Wikipedia-dominated landscape.

I couldn’t agree more. I wonder if it will even take a decade.

He provides us with the focus we need to adopt for the world that is evolving;

All of which puts you in a key position for the transformation already underway. You get to be the “life coaches” for our digital lifestyle, because, as these digital artifacts start to weigh us down (like Jacob Marley’s lockboxes), you will provide the guidance that will free us from these weights. Now that we’ve got it, it’s up to you to tell us how we find it. Now that we’ve captured it, it’s up to you to tell us how we index it.

He goes on to discuss how we respond to a world where information is located on the web but needs to be ordered in some way to make it accessible.

Without a common, public taxonomy (a cataloging system), tagging systems will not scale into universality. That universality has value, because it allows us to extend our searches, our view, and our capability.

This taxonomy is the part that I am struggling with right now. How do we tag websites with a common system that makes them accessible to all. The subject heading system that accompanied the Dewey Decimal System of operation is not flexible enough to meet the needs of a population that will be used to the tagging system of folksonimies operational in Delicious and Flickr and various other applications.

So how do we do this? I don’t know just yet.  Right now I’m wondering what we as a library are going to do? How do we introduce a  tagging system into the systems that our libraries run with and are these organisations that we pay to support our collections even thinking about this yet? I hope so.  

If you are a Teacher-Librarian and even if you’re not, you should visit Mark’s blog and read this post. There is much more in it than what I’ve drawn on here. Lots to contemplate.     

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The power of Twitter

This tweet from Mark Pesce got me thinking this morning. So many people I know don’t write blogs or operate in an online environment. Some have difficulties dealing with email. Most of them have no understanding of what Twitter is or why on earth you’d want to spend time looking at the 140 character responses that are posted on this microblogging tool.

I was with them once. And it wasn’t all that long ago. I’d heard about Twitter but wondered why people would be interested in using this tool. Twitter’s prompt is ‘What are you doing?’ Why would you want to tell people about the minutiae of your life. I danced around it for awhile but finally started using it. Clay Burell helped me to form my network by doing a shout out for me asking people to follow me. The thing with twitter is is that you have to follow people and they need you to follow you back in order for you to see each other’s posts (tweets!). It’s a reciprocal relationship and when it’s like that that’s when it works best.

Seeing Mark’s tweet this morning prompted me to reply with my belief about the power of Twitter.

 

And that’s it really. It’s the capacity of your network to share with you that makes it such an essential tool. Twitter has taken me places I never would have found without the valuable links being provided by the wonderful sharing people involved in my network of reciprocation. Sometimes those same people who post those great links also share with me that they’ve just burnt dinner or have to put the kids to bed. And that’s OK too. I get to know them as people and enjoy the human experience with them.

Let’s face it, it’s powerful. How else would a teacher like me get to connect with a mind like that of futurist Mark Pesce? Personal learning networks are amazing. If you’re dancing around the edges of Twitter it’s time to take your turn in the middle and explore the potential of what is an incredible tool for connecting and sharing.