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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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This textbook is broken!

Our school is just about to provide Netbook computers (Lenovo S10s in case you’re interested) to all of our Year 6 students.  This is part of a project to provide an immersive technology-rich year at an age where we think it will do the most good.  Lots of Web 2.0 and open Source software tools, use of Open Office and Google Docs as their main productivity environments, access to school hosted blogs and wikis, etc.  We are trying to make use of these tools to promote creativity, productivity and higher order thinking. We want to expose them to the many great digital resources out there, while teaching them the information literacy skills needed to navigate through the massive amounts of information available.  The kids and their teachers are SO excited and, to be honest, so am I.

So when I stumbled across this video this morning I really had a giggle.  The students who made this clip did a great job of pointing out the limitations of non-digital media in a very funny way.  It’s so true, and although I don’t really agree with the whole “digital natives” idea in terms of their deeper understanding of technology, I certainly agree that our kids do just expect things to work in a certain way.  And they are right… Why shouldn’t a picture be clickable?  Or a word be linkable?  Or a page be zoomable?  And what exactly is the point of text if it’s not hypertext?

Enjoy the video.  I did.

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Happy Humans

There is a backstory on this video, but to be honest, it probably doesn’t really matter all that much.  It was made by Matt Harding, the famous “wherethehellismatt” guy from YouTube. The real point for me is that life is for living and that people all over the world want basically the same things – to be loved, to feel happy and to enjoy life.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I look at that video and love seeing the sheer joy on people’s faces that comes from just being happy.

Enjoy.  I’m off to dance!