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Building my Wild Self

Having taught high school for basically all of my teaching career, I’ve just started working with the little kids in a R-12 school. (The R stands for Reception, and is the grade before Kindergarten) It’s great working with the littlies, they are so cute!

I team taught with another teacher today for the Grade 2 computer lesson and although they only did some pretty basic word processing stuff today I was impressed with just how capable some of these young students are with technology. I even had one of the students, a delightful young lady all of about seven years old, solve a password problem that had me, the teacher and the IT Director stumped. She remembered the login name and an arcane 6 character password which had not been used since before the Christmas holidays – about seven weeks ago. Pretty clever I thought. (Don’t even get me started on why our kinder age kids are required to have a strong, secure password that changes every 90 days… they play Kidpix and games for goodness sake!) However, the students all eventually got logged in and spent the lesson doing some stuff in Word.

I’m keen to get the kids doing some more interesting work with some of the Web 2.0 apps, although I need to work with their classroom teachers to figure out exactly what that might be. Small steps to start with… my new school does not have much of a Web 2.0 mindset yet, but it a pleasure to be working with teachers who are really keen to learn and to try new things.  I know we will make good progress.

Eventually, these kids will need to have an online identity though, and usually that means they will need an avatar to represent themselves. As an adult, I usually just use a small photo of myself for an avatar, but I was interested to read a post by Silvia Tolisano over at the Langwitches blog about some of the options she uses for avatar-making with younger students. Obviously there are some really important issues to consider when working with the young students to maintain their privacy and security. First names only. No defining or identifying information. No photos.

In her post, Silvia mentions a rather fun little web app called Building my Wild Self, which enables kids to create a modular avatar out of bits and pieces… head, arms, legs, clothes, eyes, mouth, etc… just pick the parts you like, assemble them together, and it creates a cool looking “mini-me”. I’m sure the kids will have a lot of fun using it and I’m looking forward to getting them to try it out.

I’m especially interested in seeing how intuitive these little kids find the site. My first impression of these very young students is that they are very much at home in a digital environment, and I’m keen to extend upon that by introducing both the teachers and the students to some of the more engaging applications from the Web 2.0 world.

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Conversations for Change

Here’s an interesting thought about the nature of communication through conversation…

Michael Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and the creator of several well-watched YouTube videos about the nature of web 2.0. I’m sure most of the edublogosphere has probably seen “The Web is Us/ing Us“, “Information R/Evolution” and “A Vision of Students Today“. All of these videos have done the rounds of the web in a completely viral way, and if you haven’t yet seen them, you should.

In an interview with John Batelle from Searchblog, Wesch was asked about the videos and some of the ideas he was exploring by making them. It’s an interesting read, but I was particularly struck by one of his responses in the comment section at the end of the interview, as he was counter-responding to a long string of blog comments from multiple readers…

“The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat”

… and this…

“Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication. If we change the way we communicate, we change human relationships, and since society is ultimately based on human relationships, those seemingly minor differences can have a profound effect on society, especially if they become dominant or very popular modes of communication.
I can’t see into the future, but what gives me hope is that there are now more people than ever capable of creating and contributing to how these communication structures might be built, and even more people capable of contributing to a serious conversation about the implications.”

This seems to be a common theme, this idea of conversation as a means of evolving shared knowledge. Again, I’ll use the phrase “Learning is a Conversation” as I think it sums up this idea that by engaging in an ongoing conversation we eventually start to spot patterns, see the big picture, and construct our own way of thinking about the world.

This is especially important in our school systems, where conversations between teachers and teachers, students and students, and teachers and students may be the only really effective way to evolve the sorts of ideas and knowledge needed for a 21st century education.

We now live in a world which has fundamentally changed. The idea of learning as a finite body of knowledge which can be transferred from the information-haves to the information-have-nots is no longer tenable. Schools cannot continue to be places where learning is simply about remembering facts and definitions. Information is no longer scarce… Google changed all that. The real task of learning is now to effectively engage with ideas, to discuss and debate, learning about them through ongoing conversation. By engaging in learning as a conversation we can start to get real traction from the neverending stream of ideas around us, expanding our thinking in agreement or argument, encouraging our learners to be critical and creative thinkers.

And as we change our thinking through these conversations, perhaps we become capable of changing our world; which is perhaps what schools ought really be about in the first place.

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Where there's a Will…

Will RichardsonIf you read blogs about education with any sort of regularity you will no doubt recognise the name Will Richardson.  Will’s blog, Weblogg-ed, has become somewhat of a keystone in the edublogosphere, not just for the things he writes about and the thinking he does about education in the 21st century, but also because he is just so darn prolific!

Thanks to the jungle drums of Twitter, I was really excited to hear that Will is coming to Australia to deliver a talk entitled The Why 2 of Web 2.0.  I don’t know Will personally at all, but we have bumped into each other a few times in various chat rooms and UStream sessions.  He was one of the founding ideas-people behind the global K-12 Online Conference (although his commitments at the time required him hand it over to others to run).  His has been a seminal voice of the blogosphere for a long time, having written several books on blogging and the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom, spoken at conferences all around the world.  Will is pretty well respected in the edublogging world.

Given all that, I’d certainly like to meet him and hear what he has to say.

If you are interested in education and the way it applies to 21st Century learning, then try to get along to either Brisbane (May 7) or Sydney (May 9).  I’ve already booked my ticket!

No doubt some of us Sydney bloggers will get together and try to get together with Will while he’s here.  How about you?   Join us?