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The Staffroom is Live

Yay! Another little project I’ve been working on lately is The Virtual Staffroom, a podcasting project where I’m trying to create a virtual conversation space for leading teachers to talk about the ways they integrate technology into their classrooms.

Episode one launches today with a wonderful conversation with Anne Baird from Wedderburn school in Victoria, Australia.

Head on over to www.virtualstaffroom.net and check it out. It should also be available very soon through the Podcast directory of the iTunes Store.

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Action Painting Online

pollock.jpg

I had the pleasure recently of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It’s an amazing gallery building and my daughter Kate and I enjoyed going through it to see the exhibitions and displays. We both really enjoyed the Jackson Pollock exhibition, No Limits Just Edges.

The art of Jackson Pollock, (who just happens to share the same birthday as me) caused quite a stir in Australia in 1973 when the government at the time purchased the infamous Blue Poles for $1.3 million. It was quite a controversy at the time, with the media making all sorts of claims – from “he was drunk at the time’ to ‘it was painted by monkeys’.  In hindsight, the painting was recently valued at $40 million so it seems Gough’s government made a good decision after all.

Anyway, if you’re an art teacher, or just want your students to have a bit of fun, you might like to check out www.jacksonpollock.org for a bit of interactive online action painting. Hopefully they will realise that creating art by dripping paint on a canvas is a little bit trickier than just, well, dripping paint on a canvas. After getting the kids to mess about with this tool, there are a lot of useful discussions worth having about line, colour and composition and how these elements work together.

Thanks to Kate for the masterpiece above!

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The Web's 1,000,000,000,000th User

According to this article from Edutopia, the one billionth user connected to the World Wide Web sometime last year. I have no idea how anyone arrives at these sorts of statistics, but it probably doesn’t really matter. The point is that it’s a big number, and there are lots and lots of people from all over the world who are becoming part of this phenomenon we call the Internet.

But in the age of Web 2.0 – the read/write web – I found this paragraph particularly poignant…

“The striking thing to me about that milestone is not the enormity of the number, however. More interesting, perhaps, is that the one billionth person to jump onto the Web could just as easily been an eight-year-old kid from Sweden or the South Bronx (or, for that matter, an eighty-year-old from South Africa) who sat down at a computer, opened a browser, and for the first time started connecting to the sum of human knowledge we are collectively building online. Furthermore, that eight-year-old had just as much ability to start contributing what she might know about horses or her hometown or whatever her passions might be, becoming an author in her own right, teaching the rest of us what she knows.”

It’s the whole Wisdom of Crowds thing… the idea that we are collectively smarter than any of us could be as individuals. I think that’s really food for thought.