Talking Heads
The Royal Treatment is a video forum put together by New York City-based educator, Ken Royal, on behalf of Scholastic in the US. Ken uses a couple of computers both running Skype simultaneously (similar to Leo Laporte's Skypeasaurus) to run two full screen video inputs from two different interviewees. He then videotapes the whole thing and publishes the chat.
I had the pleasure last night of being part of the panel with Thialand-based educator Jeff Utecht to talk about wikis. I'm glad to have been able to contribute, but Jeff is really the wiki-god, and he certainly had lots of good stuff to say about them. We talked about how wikis get used in the classroom and about the importance of a "wiki way of working". To me, wikis are symbolic of the changes taking place in society and the more collaborative, more iterative nature of creativity demanded these days.
Anyway, here's the video from last night. It was nice to be sharing with Jeff and Ken.
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Tossing the Chalk
You may have noticed that it's been a bit quiet here on the blog lately. I've not been writing here as much as usual and I've really missed it!
There have been a couple of reasons for this little sabbatical, but the most significant one was the book project I've been working on with Mal Lee. For almost a year now (OMG, has it really been that long?!) Mal and I have been writing a book together about the use of interactive whiteboards for education. It's been a huge project, partly because it's been a lot to write - nearly 60,000 words - but mostly because it's been an absolute journey of learning for me as we've written it. I'm pleased to say that the finished manuscript finally went to the publishers this week!
In case you're interested, here's a little bit of background into the book...
Mal Lee is an ex school principal and he provided a lot of the insights around the management, funding and leadership aspects of implementing IWBs effectively in schools. He's also been behind numerous IWB research projects into IWB implementations over the last few years and has brought many of those research findings to the project. The book was originally Mal's idea, he cut the deal with the publishers and he sketched out the original contents and plan for the book.
I, on the other hand, have done a lot of the actual writing work, reworking a lot of the original stuff that Mal wrote as well as contributing significant new chunks of it myself. Most of my content was based on personal experience from three schools that went through IWB implementations, talking to lots of people who teach with IWBs regularly and also from generating quite a few conversations with my PLN. I used Twitter, Skype and other online communities to gather opinions and ideas, as well as talking to some very leading teachers who work with IWBs.
The end result is something I'm actually pretty proud of. It wasn't always, and there were plenty of times over the past year when I've really questioned the whole book project; from whether IWBs really are worth all the hype about them, to whether we were actually saying anything worth reading about. There were a couple of occasions when I rang Mal ready to quit the whole thing, not because the task of writing was too much, but because I felt like I was completely unqualified to say anything remotely intelligent about the topic.
It's kind of weird that I should feel that way, because the school I taught at in Canada implemented SmartBoards while I was there and I got to learn from some of their best trainers who flew out from Calgary to train us. I also did extensive IWB evaluations between different brands and types at another school I taught at, and my current school has about 60 ActivBoards throughout the school and part of my job is to teach teachers how to use them well. I've presented lots of sessions at the last two Australian IWB conferences, as well as run workshops for schools about how to use them effectively. And yet, when the time came to actually write stuff down that other people might actually take notice of, it really felt very daunting.
As I wrote each chapter, I posted many of them up on Google Docs and asked for feedback from selected people. Some of them really pushed my thinking about IWBs. It was good that people were willing to question some of what we were trying to say, and I think it really helped to give a much greater sense of reality to the whole thing. Writing an extended piece like a book really forces you to think about what you are trying to say, and I hope that we've been able to synthesise all the research, advice and practical experience about using IWBs and that the overall message comes through clearly. The book went over deadline by about 8 months, but I think it would be fair to say that the book we could have written by meeting the deadline would have been very much less useful than what we ended up with by taking the time to bring such a divesity of opinions and ideas together.
As I look through the 56,284 words in the finished manuscript, I think we did a pretty good job of it. I feel like it's balanced and informative with some great information contained within it. More importantly, I feel like I can confidently say that, yes, used properly, IWBs can be great classroom tools. I was such a skeptic when I first saw IWBs about 6 years ago. I couldn't see how they were adding anything to the teaching/learning process, at least anything that would justify the cost and complications of using them. I can remember having arguments with people about them, saying they were a waste of time, and were taking us back to the idea of a teacher-centric classroom.
I was keen to name the book Toss the Chalk: A guide to teaching in an interactive classroom, but the publishers thought the word "toss" might offend any potential UK readers... apparently "toss" means something quite different in the UK! It looks like it will be published under the somewhat boring (but I suppose relatively descriptive) title, Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards. Ho hum.
One of the highlights of the book, for me, was asking other teachers to contribute to it. I put messages out on Twitter asking for thoughts and opinions to various questions I had, and some of the insights that came back were just brilliant. It led to the inclusion of a whole chapter called Come Into My Classroom, where I asked eight different teachers to write me a snaphot of how they might use their IWB on a typical day. It was insightful to hear the stories of how each teacher used the technology, in fact, as I wrote in the book...
There is no one “right” way to use IWB technology. In these examples, the diversity of methods that each teacher uses to gets value out of their board stands out strongly.
Second, in all these examples it becomes quite obvious that the IWB is simply being used as an enabler for richer, deeper learning to take place. It comes through very clearly that this is not about the technology per se, and that good teaching is always at the heart of what is taking place in these classrooms. Student engagement, richness of understanding, creativity, teamwork and learning… these qualities are patently evident in these examples. In every case the IWB is acting simply as one of the enabling tools used to support the good teaching that takes place in the classroom.
My deepest thanks go out to the teachers who contributed to this section - Jess McCulloch, Lesleigh Altmann, Louise Goold, Tobias Cooper, Katie Morrow, Tom Barrett, Kyle Stevens and Paula White. Each of you added a unique and powerful perspective into the value of an IWB in your classrooms. Other briefer contributions were made in a different chapter by Simon Evans, Cathy Nelson, Amanda Signal and Brette Lockyer.
The other part of the book I was particularly pleased with was a section called Grassroots Professional Development which looked at how teachers are using the read/write web to create their own learning communities. Examples like Tom Barett's 37 Interesting Ways To Use An Interactive Whiteboard, Jess McCulloch's Interactive Whiteboard Challenge, Sue Tapp's OZ/NZ Educators group, Ben Hazzard and Joan Badgers SmartBoard Lessons Podcast and of course, the amazing K12 Online Conference... these are some incredibly powerful examples of how ordinary teachers are redefining what it means to be a learner in the 21st century and how professional development has changed thanks to the networks of people we surround ourselves with.
Right now, the text is with the publisher and is about to go through the editing process. I suppose I will have a bit of chasing around to do, getting clearances from the contributors, clearing copyright on images used, reading proofed chapters and so on, so it's not over yet. With a bit of luck, I'm hoping it will be be printed and available by next March... not quite the instant publishing I'm used to in the blogosphere! However, for the most part it's done and I hope to get back to my blog where I truly do enjoy writing just for the sake of writing.
To finish off, here is a short excerpt from the final chapter which I hope might give you a bit of a snapshot into the general message of the whole book...
An IWB is nothing but a tool to assist great teachers do what they do best. All the high praise or damning criticism you might hear about IWB technology is largely irrelevant without an insight into how a teacher is using it. An IWB can be used as a regular dry-erase whiteboard, a basic electronic whiteboard or a dynamic digital convergence facility that sits at the centre of a media-rich digital teaching hub. It is the teacher, not the technology, that decides how effectively an IWB will be used in their classroom.
Photo: Maurice Cummins, IWB Guru
http://flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/1435347533/
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Getting Kids to Blog
I recently worked with our Year 4 teachers to get their kids blogging for the first time. I'd suggested blogging as a good activity for these students as a way to get them writing and reading more, as well as being for a potentially more authentic audience. The teachers involved were a little apprehensive at first but quickly warmed to the idea and were quite keen to give it a go, especially as I said I would work closely with them to get our blogging project off the ground... this was the first time we had tried to use blogs with the students so I was very keen to see it succeed of course.
As you may have read in a previous post, we managed to be hit with numerous technical hurdles as Edublogs recovered from a series of password resets, something the kids found annoying and tedious but also that they took very well. The teachers of the students were a little confused that blogging was so complicated ("why do we need to reset our passwords every time we try to use the blogs?") but again, they managed to take it all in their stride and just carry on with it. I tried to explain that this was just a freak glitch, that blogging really was very straightforward, and to their credit they coped quite well, although I'm doubtful whether they will be willing to try it again in a hurry unless I'm there to support them with it. The technical hassles really damage the perception of the process.
All that aside however, the kids really got into it. They loved working on their blogs, and figured out how to add photos and videos, make categories, add widgets and change themes. It was great to see the way they encouraged each other, helped each other work out the issues and kept adding to their own blogs both in and out of school.
I thought I'd just share a couple of tips that we picked up along the way and relate a few ideas for how we worked through the project.
The kids were each given their own blogs, set up using the multiple blog registration tool in Edublogs. I set up the kids' blogs 15 at a time, and made each of the teachers co-administrators. This meant that the teacher could log in and make changes to any inappropriate content if required, although thankfully it was never required.
I also created an OPML file of each classes blogs, and used that file to import the kids' blogs into the teachers' feedreader. Our school uses Outlook 2007, which has a reasonable RSS reader built in, so it was straightforward to import the OPML file into each teacher's Outlook client, thereby giving them a feed for all their kids' blogposts. This made it much easier to keep on top of the many posts that were being written. I also imported the OPML file into my Google Reader and kept an eye on the posts there as well. To date there have been 49 posts written by one class and 71 posts by the other... not a bad effort for a first time blogging project plagued by technical troubles.
We also made sure we spent enough time discussing with the kids some of the issues about staying safe online... things like not revealing any personal information, not using your last name, not mentioning your school or where you will be at any particular time. We talked about how to handle comments and how to be a responsible online citizen. They took all this very seriously and stuck to the rules the whole time.
Of course, the real point of a blog is to write, so I worked with the teachers to come up with some way to encourage the students to write more, and especially to relate it to the topic they were doing last term which was "Australia, You're Standing In It".
To that end, we designed a grid of writing prompts. It was arranged into four threads - Built Environment, Natural Environment, Flora and Fauna, and States and Territories. We gave the students three options for each thread, one from the lower end of Blooms Taxonomy, one from the middle and one from the upper end, making 12 possible writing topics in all. The easier topics were rated at 10 points, the middle ones at 15 points and the harder ones at 20 points and each student was asked to accumulate 60 points, with a special prize given to any student that accumulated 100 points or more. The idea was to create a range of choices that each student could make for what they wrote about, from the easier research and recall type tasks, all the way up to harder tasks that requires greater creativity and synthesis of ideas. A student could opt for the easier tasks if they wanted to, but obviously they would need to do more of them. Alternatively, they could do fewer but harder tasks if they chose. The actual tasks they chose did not matter, as long as they collected at least 60 points worth. Despite the issues with Edublogs and the large chunks of wasted class time, many students managed to get to the 60 point mark, and some collected as many as 120 points.
Cut and pasted from our Moodle page, it looked like this...
Year 4 Blogging Topics
Choose from the following list of blog topics. You need to collect at least 60 points, and anyone who gets 100 points will get a special prize.
Write each as a separate blog post. Give each a good title and a put them into a suitable category.
| 10 points | 15 points | 20 points | |
| The Built Environment | Choose a built environment and describe it in words. Add a couple of pictures as well. | Write a poem about the built environment. It needs at least 2 verses. | Pick two Australian built environments and compare and contrast them. (Describe their similarities and their differences) Include pictures to support your views. |
| The Natural Environment | List 5 natural sites in NSW and include a short description of each one. Include a photo of each if possible. | Should tourists be allowed to climb Uluru? Give 5 good reasons to support your argument. Include a photo or two. |
Choose an Australian natural environment and explain how and why it needs to be protected. Give as much detail as you can. |
| States and Territories | Find the weather in 5 other states right now. Include a link to the page where you find this information. | In the form of a travel log, describe a holiday you’ve taken in NSW or interstate. Include a few pictures. | Which is the best Australian state? Why? Give at least 5 reasons that would convince an overseas visitor to go there. |
| Flora and Fauna | Choose an area of Australia and list at least 3 plants or animals you would find there. Include pictures. | Find 3 pictures of Australian flora and/or fauna, and write descriptions about them for someone who was blind. | Choose one endangered Australian plant or animal and explain what you might do to help save them from extinction. |
What struck me as I watched the students work on this project was just how many other skills they used along the way. From technical skill trying to figure out how to include photos or YouTube videos, to information literacy skills in choosing the rights sites to gather information from, to improving their general knowledge as they learned things they didn't know before they started. I thought it was a successful project on a number of levels, and I do see how blogging can be a very powerful tool for learning.
Anyway, I'm certainly not claiming it was perfect or ideal, and I'd certainly appreciate any comments you might like to make on ways to improve our attempt at blogging. What can we do to improve it?
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The New Digital Divide?
I have on occasion been frustrated - dare I say critical - of the sometimes glacial pace of change in the broader educational community when it comes to embracing the use of ICT. I occasionally say things that might make me appear less compassionate than I really am. But believe it or not, I really do have a great degree of patience and time for anyone who is genuinely interested to know more about how to effectively integrate technology into the demanding job of teaching kids every day.
A week or so ago, I returned from the CEGSA (Computer Education Group of South Australia) conference in Adelaide where I had the great pleasure of giving one of the keynote addresses. I got to meet so many wonderful, dedicated educators who were there giving up two days of their holidays to come and learn more about technology and how it can be effectively used it with their students.
The people I met at CEGSA are already the "believers" however. They were attending the conference, presumably, because they already understand the important role that technology is playing in education. They are probably the people that get looked up to in their schools as the "geeks" (in a good way) and are the people that others turn to when answers about technology are needed. And yet, I can't help but see that there is still a wide gap in skills and understanding between even the group that turned up at CEGSA. I hope that if any of them read this they don't take it the wrong way, but I was a little surprised that even this group was so unconnected in so many ways. A quick show of hands, while hardly a scientific way to measure, indicated that there was a surprisingly small number of those who blogged, used Twitter, or understood the use of basic Web 2.0 resources like Flickr or del.icio.us. I'm incredibly glad they were there, but I was a little surprised because I've come to take so many of these things for granted and sometimes find it hard to get my head around how other educators can possibly not be tapped into this stuff.
So on the one hand, I'm a little surprised that the level of connectedness -the Web 2.0ishness - was so minimal in this particular group. On the other hand, I'm unbelievably excited that so many teachers are wanting to find out more about this stuff, to move to that next level for their own personal understanding and growth in the use of ICT.
What scares me a little are those on the other side... the vast majority of the teaching profession who have never been to a conference like this. The ones that will turn up to school on Monday and either not make any real attempt to create a technology-rich environment for their students, or who still think that PowerPoint is pretty cool. Our schools are full of teachers - many of whom are outstanding educators with enormous passion and energy - but who do not understand the pivotal role that technology plays in the lives of their students.
I think what often shocks me the most about teachers who don't take technology very seriously, is just how far behind they really are. They don't have any idea just how out of touch they are with the kids they teach each day... kids who in most cases are far too polite to say anything about their teachers' lack of technology understanding. But trust me, they know who you are...
Some of the classic excuses for why some teachers don't integrate technology might include the following... how many have you heard before?
- "Im retiring in a couple of years anyway" (yes, but your students are not)
- "I'm too old to learn this stuff"
- "I'm too busy, I don't have the time"
- "I have too much content to get through" (this one is usually followed by "you just don't know what it's like"... ah, yes, I do.)
- "I don't really like computers" (you don't have to like them, you just have to use them)
- "I just don't understand technology" (as though they think no one has noticed that yet)
The scary thing is not the folk that turn up to an event like CEGSA in order to learn more to move ahead. My hat is off to them.
And the scary thing is not even those folk who resist that progress because they don't get it or don't want to get it..
No, the scary thing to me is not the particular characteristics of these two groups, but rather the huge divide that is being created between them and the impact it is having our profession. It is the new Digital Divide.
We used to talk a lot about a "Digital Divide". Usually we were referring to the inequitable technology gap between the rich and the poor, the "information-haves" and the "information-have-nots". But I think I'm getting rather more concerned about the widening gap between the "information-wills" and the "information-will-nots".
There is a group - and a relatively small group at that - who are extremely active in the edtech community. I won't mention names, but if you're a blog reader you probably know who they are. The educators that ARE connected, networked and wired. The ones who really get it. They blog, they tweet, they podcast, they wiki. They store their bookmarks in del.icio.us and their photos in Flickr. They know their way around Second Life and belong to numerous online communities. They get excited by Flips, iPods and IWBs. They'd rather have a Flashmeeting than a staff meeting. To the rest of the world they are freakily geeky, but they are at home in the digital world inhabited by their students, regardless of whether they are native to it or not.
Then there is the other group. Those who still don't get it. They still think that textbooks are the definitive source of learning. They never turn on the interactive whiteboard in their room. They don't have a presence on the web, and they wouldn't know how to Google it if they did. Their idea of technology integration is to "research it on the Internet" and the "get the kids to make a PowerPoint". They either can't see the point of technology at all, or they have almost no real understanding of how technology can be embedded into their classroom. They just. don't. get it.
A new Digital Divide is emerging as the connected educators find each other. A few years ago, these bleeding edge edutechies were the exception. They were isolated in their schools. They did great things with kids but worked mostly in a vacuum because they were so rare that there was usually no one in the school to share their craziness with. But the rise of networked intelligence has changed that. These people are finding each other and forming alliances. They are conversing and sharing with each other. Their networks are amplifying their voices, and allowing them to connect in ways that their less connected colleagues don't really understand, and through this connected amplification, they are starting to have a real voice. There has been a lot of talk for a long time about the need for schools to shift their thinking, to bring themselves into the 21st century where their students live. But that talk has been largely dispersed across disconnected individuals who were unable to have any collective voice.
In the last 18 months or so, I've been noticing that these disconnected individuals are starting to band together, connect much more strongly with each other through the social networks Their voices are getting louder and they are encouraging each other with their sense of community, sharing and openness, and as they bring their collective voices together it is throwing the gap between them and the laggards into sharp relief. This widening void between the "wills" and the "will-nots" is, I think, changing the game a little.
Paradoxically, the "will-nots" main fear is usually expressed as a concern that they will lose control over their students. A fear that if they even consider dipping their toes into the waters of educational technology that their students might realise they really don't have all the answers. They resist technology because they think that to try (and fail) will expose this weaknesses to their students, but they fail to understand that by NOT trying it they are doing far more to expose their weaknesses anyway. It must be hard for a 21st century student to respect a teacher who steadfastly refuses to get with the program.
That's not to say that these people are bad teachers. Sometimes they are exceptionally good teachers who relate to the kids in lots of other ways that have nothing to do with technology at all. But as long as they refuse to come to terms with technology in any sort of meaningful way they will always have this digital divide between them and the natives that makes them just that little bit less effective than they could be.
If you're in the middle of this divide and trying to cross it, you know how much work it takes. But it has to be crossed eventually, and the best time to do it is before it becomes uncrossably wide.
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Age Shall Not Weary Them
I've been trying to remember the very first time I went online to the Internet.
I started thinking about this when I read about the recent passing of Olive Riley, a 108 year old woman who regularly wrote on her Blogger account and was known as the World's Oldest Blogger.
Olive passed away this week on the NSW Central Coast, just a few months before her 109th birthday, God bless her. In the newspaper article about her passing, her Grandson notes how she was regularly communicating with people from as far away as America and Russia.
I suppose I take for granted just how easily we can communicate with people from far away places. A quick glance at the Live Feed widget on this very blog shows me that in the last few hours I've had hits from India, America, Norway, Canada, the UK and of course all over Australia. A quick peruse through my open Skype contact list shows a similar global diversity, with people listed there from virtually every continent except Antarctica. It's all too easy to take this for granted these days but the fact that we can connect like this, sending our little binary bits flying around the planet in mere milliseconds, is still a pretty amazing thing when you stop and think about it.
So, when was the first time you ever saw the Internet?
For me it must have been early 1995. I remember it well because I had a student whose father worked for the company that was contracted to do the 3.5" floppy disk duplication for the original Microsoft Windows 95 release. (Yes, remember when operating systems could be installed using floppy disks?) This student was a very smart, very geeky kid (he taught me to code in HTML) and he came to school one day and said "dad wants to know if you'd like to see the Internet"... (apparently I had been trying to teach something about this new thing called the Internet and he thought it was clear I had no idea what I was talking about, so wanted to set me straight). I said yes of course.
So I went in and visited his dad at his work, had a look at the disk duplication facilities for Windows 95, and then he took me to his cubicle and typed a few weird UNIX commands into a terminal. A few seconds later, some more text appeared on the screen in response. Apparently it had come from Singapore, where an FTP server had responded to his request and was allowing him to browse through some files. Although it was all UNIX command-line stuff (real men use Shell script!) I was fascinated by the idea that a computer in Sydney was communicating with a computer in Singapore, right there before my very eyes!
Not long after that, I wanted to give it a go myself so I managed to hook a modem up to an LC575 Mac, work my way through the setup of the required TCP/IP stacks, and somehow got it connected. I was so excited to be able to browse the Internet (not the WWW, mind you!) using a text-based browser called Lynx. I somehow found my way into the University of Minnesota library and browsed the catalog. I thought it was so exciting and I was just fascinated that I could send these little packets of data all the way across the Pacific and back.
But that was not my first foray into going online. It was maybe a year prior to that that I'd discovered eWorld. Ah, eWorld! If you never saw it, eWorld was Apple's first attempt at creating an online community. It had - as you'd expect from Apple - a pretty, graphical interface that used the metaphor of a town, called eWorld, to let you wander from place to place. You could send emails by clicking on the Mail Centre, read the news by going to the News Stand, visit the Leisure Pavilion to find out about health and lifestyle news and so on. eWorld was very cool (and very expensive... it cost me $US10/hour to use, paid out of my own pocket, and I used it with kids in my classroom) but it was essentially a closed community. This was not the Internet, but rather a private protected community for Apple users.
However, in 1995, Apple updated eWorld to include a few new buildings and a picture of a highway going by the town. This highway was labelled "Internet", and you could click on it to take the fast lane out of the safe haven of eWorld and out into the big bad unknown world of the Web. It was the wild west, highly unregulated, hard to find stuff, very random, but very interesting and a lot of fun to explore. It had plenty of weird places to visit... I remember the first real website I ever saw was the Virtual Cemetery, a list of obituaries for people who has died. I can't find it anymore of course, although there seems to be plenty of others to take its place.
It's hard to believe that this was only 13 years ago. Just 13 short years ago, there was no real Internet to speak of, at least nothing that you'd recognise as the Internet of today. No online banking. No eCommerce. No online dating. No Amazon, no Google, no eBay. No Web 2.0 and not even Web 1.0. We've come an awful long way in a very short space of time. Next time one of your high school students makes a joke about your age, remind them that the World Wide Web was not invented when they were born. Puts it in perspective doesn't it?
And as for Olive, I hope she rests in peace in some Virtual Cemetery somewhere. At 108 she still had a sense of curiosity and wonder at being able to communicate so easily with others around the world.
She sounds like one pretty cool old lady.
Tags: internet, history eworld, oliveriley
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Has Social Networking become the New Society
In light of my recent post about living the moment rather than being consumed with documenting it, I was interested to come across this post by Joel Adkins. Joel is musing about the idea of "Twitterati", a class of edubloggers who seem to approach their attendance at conferences as though they were getting an inside scoop on breaking news. He raises some great questions aimed at the very same issues I was thinking about.
Along the same lines, I stumbled across this article that talks about how, when attending a conference, it would be nice if the presenters would make a greater effort to be "in the moment" with the audience in front of them, rather than being so concerned with how to share that moment with others who aren't.
I think Joel hit the nail fair on the head when he posed the question "Has Social Networking become the New Society?"
I think I'm as connected as the next person when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of the online world. Just like many of the people reading this blog, I spend considerable chunks of my day connecting with others using digital tools. Between email, Twitter, Google Reader and a confusing array of social networking sites, I can be continually connected to the conversation if I choose to. I can tap into the constant stream of edu-techno-babble on any of my 4 computers, my iPod touch or my mobile phone. I can send a Tweet, check an email, browse through Google and upload to Flickr from just about anywhere at just about anytime. And although I will continue to do so, and I consider it an important literacy to be fluent in that digital environment, I'm also coming to understand that part of being digitally literate is also knowing when NOT to use it. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean that we should be.
There seems to be an ever-expanding collection of social networking environments that I dip my toe into just to see what they are about... but the more I do so, the more I wonder why. At the moment, I belong to a ridiculous number of dedicated social networking sites like Facebook, PlaxoPulse and LinkedIn, as well as being part of the built-in social networks within services like Flickr, Diigo, del.icio.us and so on. Then of course there is Twitter (when it's working!) and the several mailing lists and online communities I belong to. Oh, don't forget the dozen or so Ning groups I'm a member of and the associated social networks that accompany them. Many of these networks contain the same people. I get "friend" requests from people I've never heard of.
And I'm starting to wonder how many social networks is too many? Has, as Joel asked, social networking become my new society? (The funny thing is that the one social network that really hasn't grown much lately is my real life social network... how sad does that sound?)
At the moment, I'm preparing a keynote presentation for next Thursday at the CEGSA conference in Adelaide. Titled "Learning is a Conversation", it was going to be about how educators can use these tools of connectivity and how we can be part of a true lifelong-learning environment by using those tools to engage in the ongoing conversation taking place around us. But I've been thinking a lot lately about the balance we need to find in our lives as we take part in those conversations.
Don't get me wrong, I think that this ongoing conversation is incredibly important to be a part of and I can't imagine being disconnected from it. The endless stream of emails, tweets and blogposts, although sometimes a little overwhelming, is certainly an important part of what I need to grow as an educator and to keep challenging my thinking. What I am finding however, is that I need to temper it against the need to live in the moment and enjoy the real face to face time. I don't really need to send Tweets every few minutes or blog four times a day. I want to know about all the new Web 2.0 tools out there, but I'm realising that I don't need to commit to every single one of them. It's OK to clear my feed reader every so often if it's obvious no way I'll ever get through looking at it all, and it's OK not to be there for every single live event taking place on the Web right now.
When Al Upton originally invited me to speak at the conference, I planned to do all sorts of geeky techno stuff for my presentation, which was, after all, about engaging with the global conversation. I had thoughts of running live backchannels, sending live streams to the web, using Twitter to bring a global audience into the room and so on, and while those things might be fun to do and may expose some of the technologies to people that don't know much about them, I'm reconsidering just how much extra value they will bring to the whole thing. Yes, I might UStream it if I can do it unobtrusively, and yes I'll probably record it just in case I want to podcast parts of it later, and yes I'll probably demonstrate a few useful connective technologies like Skype and Twitter, but I also want to focus on really being there and talking to the living, breathing human beings in the room.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm getting older, or just growing up.
Tags: conference, cegsa, socialnetworking, etiquette
Popularity: 1% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:53 — 3.4MB)
Year 3's First Voicethreads
One of the real joys of my current job is that I get to work with our younger students in the primary school. Having only ever taught high school, the chance to work with the R-6 kids is just so refreshing. They are so enthusiastic, so keen and so refreshingly honest. I've had a great time this term working with all the Junior School kids, but in particular I enjoyed working with Year 3 on some digital storytelling projects, where I suggested to the Year 3 teachers that they try Voicethread as our storytelling tool of choice. One quick demo and they were all excited by the possibilities. (And so was I for that matter... although I've used Voicethread a lot for my own personal use, this was the first time I've had the chance to work with students to do something with it)
The kids were especially excited by the idea of getting some real feedback from real people in other parts of the world. If you get a chance, please pop in and leave them a message. You will need to sign in with a Voicethread account in order to leave a message but I'm sure many readers of this blog will already have one, and if you don't you should! If you could get your own students to leave them some feedback too, that would be awesome!
You can find the kids' work at http://ed.voicethread.com/#u110482
Note that comment moderation is enabled, so your comments may not show up right away, but please leave them anyway. At the time of writing, they are still finishing them off so there are still a couple more to come yet, but your comments would still be very welcome, and a great motivator I'm sure!
Our school signed up for ed.voicethread, the new education service provided by VT, which is good although I have to say I've found it a little confusing to manage. However, we seem to have gotten the kids' work online without too much trouble and the students have really enjoyed the task. Voicethread is an amazing tool, so simple to use, yet so powerful in what can be done with it. As an entry point into digital storytelling and podcasting (which is sort of what it is) it is a really excellent tool.
We were particularly focused on ensuring that all our images came from non-copyrighted sources, and the kids got really good at searching through Creative Commons photos using either FlickrCC, Flickr Storm or CC Search. It was great to see these 7 and 8 year olds showing respect for intellectual property online and only using CC licensed photos.
In hindsight, I think I'd scaffold the work a little more next time, as the task was fairly sophisticated for Year 3 students. Although I prelinked the various National Park websites and linked to Google Maps' satellite images of the parks on our Year 3 Moodle page so they could just go directly to some of the more relevant sources, most of the websites were written in fairly adult language. Despite that, I think they still did a good job of answering the following questions in their Voicethread...
- What type of park is it?
- What is it protecting?
- Description including location... Where it is?
- About the Park? Things to do and special features?
- Interesting facts about your National Park… History? Aboriginal perspective? Tourism?
- Why do you think this area should be a National Park?
- Come up with some specific rules for conservation in your National park.
All in all I think they did a great job, and I'm very proud of them! You go girls!
Popularity: 2% [?]
The Buzz on Buzzword
Every so often I stumble across a new piece of software that just does its thing exceptionally well. In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don't, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve. Voicethread is a great example of such an interface.
It's really exciting to see so many of these well crafted apps starting to appear on the Internet as web apps, sometimes called Rich Internet Applications or RIAs. RIAs, when done well, can give the impression of behaving like a desktop app but with all the added advantages of being in the cloud... advantages such as ubiquitous access, remote storage of data and the ability to collaborate across time and place. Google Docs uses this model and is a fine way to create online documents that can be shared for collaborative purposes.
The problem with Google Docs (at least as far as word processing is concerned) is that from an interface point of view, it's not the prettiest way to interact with your words. It's certainly not a true WYSIWYG interface, so that when you add tables and graphics to the document you really have no idea what it will look like when printed. I find Google Docs a hugely convenient way to work with documents that need to be accessed from anywhere or need to be shared with others, but because it is essentially a HTML based writing space, I do sometimes lament the way it handles the niceties of layout and page design.
So I was super excited do discover Adobe's Buzzword this week. Buzzword is an online word processor written in Flash that does nearly everything Google Docs' word processor does but has a much nicer, much prettier and much more intuitive interface. You can sign up for a free account and try it out at no cost.
Buzzword comes from Adobe and really starts to show the enormous power of Flash as a development platform for the web. Obviously the combined brainpower and engineering that came about thanks to the merger between Adobe and Macromedia is starting to really show some results of how powerful their combined thinking can be. (You can see evidence of that in the latest Adobe CS3 Suite - some awesome new features in Photoshop for example)
Opening Buzzword gives you a regular pageview layout, with familiar dropdown menus and tools. Using it is a familiar experience if you know anything at all about Word. You get less of course, and you can't make tables of contents, do mail merges, use document maps or change case options. There are many things that Buzzword won't do. But most of those features are not used by the vast majority of word processor users, who are happy to be able to set font styles and typefaces, add tables and images, change font colours and make bullet lists. Buzzword has all of these common features (with some nice usability tweaks, making some features, such as bulleting and numbered lists, even easier to manage than in Microsoft Word). Buzzword is nice to use, with funky animations as documents open and close, document listings that get rearranged automatically, and so on. It just feels good to interact with.
Where it really comes into its own is in the way it enables shared collaboration. Just like Google Docs, Buzzword allows you to invite people to either view, review or co-author a document, Viewers can just read them, reviewers can leave comments on them, and co-authors can make changes. Google Docs can be quite laggy however, and there can be delays between when a user makes a change and when the other collaborators see that change... this makes it hard to use in real time. What I really like about the collaborative nature of Buzzword is that it clearly shows who are the collaborators, shows when they are online, when they are editing and it has a clever lockout system that makes it impossible for two co-authors to edit a document at the same exact instant. As soon as a change is saved however, it is instantly reflected on the other users screens. This works amazingly well for multiple people working on the same document at the same time, and ensures that people don't inadvertently write over the top of other people's changes, something that is easy to do in, say, a wiki. Buzzword makes you wait your turn until the previous user finishes with their changes.
Buzzwords can import and export text documents from .txt, .rtf, .doc, .docx and .xml. It has no spreadsheet or presentation tools, but as a word processor it's very nice. It's not a Word killer but nor is it designed to be. For someone with basic word processing needs who wants the benefits an in-the-cloud service like this can offer, Buzzwords is worth a serious look.
In summary, I'm really impressed with the WYSIWYG look and feel of Buzzword. Although I have a lot of documents stored on Google Docs I can see myself migrating most of them over to Buzzword, not only for the improved collaborative environment but just because it's so much darn nicer to use!
Popularity: 1% [?]
You say that like it’s a bad thing
Last Friday I had a fabulous day at the Why 2 of Web 2.0 seminar in Sydney, where the special guest speaker was Wil Richardson. Wil was also ably supported by other speakers including Australians Judy O'Connell and Westley Field.
I was very keen to hear Wil speak, after having read his blog for a while now and also having met in the occasional UStream backchannel. He had lots of good things to say (which he kindly allowed me to record with my iPod so I may post up some audio snippets.) I was fortunate to get a seat right at the front, thanks to Judy offering to let me share the powerboard at the front table so I could plug in my Mac. I was also able to piggyback on the wifi service and browse the various sites that Will was referring to as he told the audience about them... quite a few really interesting sites in his list , most of which are now in my del.icio.us feed.
One of my colleagues from school also attend the event, and when I got back to school the next day I asked how he enjoyed it. His reply was fairly lukewarm, with the comment that he thought a lot of the things Wil was saying made him sound like a zealot. Google says that a zealot is a "fanatically committed person", or "one who espouses a cause... in an immoderately partisan manner".
I don't think my colleague used the term zealot in a particularly positive sense - I'm sure it wasn't meant as a compliment. Personally, if a zealot is a fanatically committed person then I think we need more zealots in education. I also have strong beliefs about the nature of school and learning and think that we need to act quickly and radically if schools are to maintain any sort of relevance in today's world. I also think we need to be fairly drastic about making these changes, so I guess that makes me a zealot too.
Wil gave a number of (what I thought were) powerful examples of how the world is changing. He used some great examples from Friedman's The World is Flat and Tapscott's Wikinomics; examples that clearly show how much our schools are out of sync with the world we say we are preparing our children for. In particular, one of the stories that seemed to rankle a few listeners, including my colleague, was the one about a student who was given a research task by his teacher and how he approached this task.
The student found very little information about the topic, not even on Wikipedia. What would you do if you were this student?
Here's what he did. He created a Wikipedia entry using the limited information that he did know. Over the next few days and weeks, the Wikipedia entry on the topic was edited, amended, added-to and improved by many other people. All of their individual little bits of knowledge gradually built up the topic until there was quite a comprehensive article written about it. The student then used this article to submit for his research project.
Apparently, the student's teacher discovered what had happened and the student was awarded an F - a failing grade. Being the zealot that he is, Will suggested that the student should have received an A grade. This suggestion raised a few eyebrows... in the afternoon discussion panel the suggestion that this kid would get an A for doing something like this was questioned by a number of people. They suggested that the kid had cheated, had acted dishonestly, had not done the task, had rorted the system, etc, and therefore should have failed the task. I think they are missing the point.
While I can see both sides of the situation, there is no way I would have failed the kid for doing this. There may be more to the story than I'm privy to, but on the face of it, failing a student for using their initiative in this manner makes no sense to me. If I were an employer, I'd much rather give a job to a kid like this who knows how to find a solution in an innovative way, rather than a "rule follower" that just accepts that very little information is available.
It's interesting that the teachers I've told this story to say "Oh, you can't do that! That's cheating!", but the business people I've told the story to usually respond with a laugh and say "I want that kid working for me!". And really, this is the gap that the education world is struggling with so much. The "real world" wants people who can find solutions in creative ways, who can innovate and work with teams to collaboratively find solutions to difficult problems. The "education world" still seems focussed on measuring individual effort, rewarding those who follow the rules and stay inside the lines, those who rehash existing information rather than finding ways of creating new information.
Wil spoke about many things, but I think this story was the most powerful example of the chasm between what the world expects of our children and what most school are prepared to deliver. One wants to award an F, the other wants to award an A.
One of us is completely screwed up, and I'm pretty sure it's not the zealots.
You can find the UStream recording from Will's talk here, and his conference wiki here.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:30 — 3.1MB)
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