My professional life is indeed about March madness and April foolishness. It’s that time of the university cycle – Courses Review and future Course planning! Not an annual process, but something that has to take place every few years. Me? I’ve been in the ‘job’ of Course Directors for 8 months for one bit of it (teacher librarianship) , and 2 months for the rest of it (Bachelor and Master degrees in Information Science). Hence my head is buried in paperwork, planning, re-organization ……. and DREAMING. Oh how I wish creativity, innovation, and change was not so complex.
So, I have very little time to write in this blog until some time in May. Fact!
My time for reflection is limited to ‘saving’ good reads and important information for later examination or immediate action (but not blogging). For that I always use, Evernote, Pocket, Diigo, or Zotero for resources I will need to reference at a later point. I am thoroughly pleased with the updates made to Feedly (thanks Google for finally killing of Google Reader!) and I am enjoying Prismatic on my iPhone as an alternative way to crowd-source newsfeeds (I’m well over Zite, Flipboard and the like).
So April foolishness is what I’m now headed into! April Fool’s day has set me off to a good start. Thanks to Tech Crunch for an awesome April Fool’s day list and for Google’s contributions.
Archeological analysis has confirmed that our Google Maps Street View team has indeed found one of history’s long lost relics: a treasure map belonging to the infamous pirate, William “Captain” Kidd.
The map was found on a recent expedition in the Indian Ocean, as part of a deep-water dive to expand our underwater Street View collection. Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried his treasure around the world, and tales of a long-lost treasure map have lingered for generations.
Yesterday the Charles Sturt University ICT Community of Practice had one of it’s regular afternoon forums, campus-wide, in meeting spaces, and via online conferencing. It’s a great way to bring people together from various faculties and disciplines. The focus in on sharing – not quite a PechaKucha, but close to it with just 10 minutes to share a few nuggets of gold!
As one of the invited presenters, my focus was on creativity and the use of images. This is based on the fact that I want teachers to understand remix culture (when it comes to images); use of creative commons and various sources of free images; image attribution; and visual presentation for blogging and creating presentations. With the 10-minute presentation I also included one of the regular updates that I provided my teacher/students in the Digital Citizenship in Schools subject to help springboard ideas.
The trick of course is to engage teachers from all ends of the spectrum of ICT prowess. So for the newbies, an introduction to flickr and other CC image sources is a must. For the geeks an introduction to tools like Alan Levines wonderful FlickrCC Image Attribution Helper is a must!
A lovely lecturer in Veterinary Science contacted me later to let me know she was excited by the ideas and would be weaving what she has leaned into her work. How cool is that? To be able to share across disciplines in this way is future learning methinks!
Last Friday I ventured down south to Melbourne to join a vibrant and amazing conference on Global e-Literacy: Learning the Re-invention of Learning put on by SLAV – The School Library Association of Victoria.
Great venue, great people, great program! These great Victorian innovators gave me a wonderful welcome, and allowed me the honour of kickstarting the day with a presentation on Leading the Learning Revolution.
The MCG Members Dining Room was a great place for a smaller sized group of a 100-200. No footballers or cricket players, but the size of the venue, and reminder of the many victories and losses at that ground was just the right kind of razzle for discussing the conference topic of Global e-literacy: leading the reinvention of learning.
The day included my globe-trotting friend Jenny Luca discussing multimodal literacies, and drawing on her vast experience of working with students and leading a school in integration of technologies. The round-table workshops were a fantastic idea – moving from one curation tool to another. I had great fun showcasing Diigo with my cheeky friend and podcast hero Tony Richards from the EdTech Crew.
Short sharp presentations on LibGuides (Di Ruffles, Melbourne High School). Apps Swap Meet (John Pearce), Curation Tools (Cameron Hocking) and Library Design (David Feighan) topped off the day. We had a wrap from Cecilie Murray, who kept us on our toes with challenges to take away for tomorrow and the future.
Fab day! Loved catching up with old friends, and making a few new ones.
Earlier this year I wrote a post about Hackerspaces and Makerspaces, after attending the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington. I met up with Buffy Hamilton for lunch, and as ever was inspired with the responsive way she grabs an initiative and runs with it.
Now here she is, putting forward the New Chapter for 2012-2013 proposal for A Makerspace Culture of Learning at the Unquiet Library. Love it!
In a sense, this is not a new concept at all, particularly for primary schools, as kids are hands-on and experimental in their classroom experiences. What I particularly find attractive about makerspace culture is that it responds to, and perhaps acts as a counterfoil to the gamification/gaming momentum that is somehow almost seen as the only response to innovation and change in schools.
Hackerspaces and makerspaces provide outstanding opportunities for synergy in our new learning environments.
Ever watched a kid get so excited about something new? That sparkle in the eye and that ‘let me at it’ urgency that we’d like to capture in every learning interaction?
I knew you’d understand. That was my experience recently at the Computers in Libraries Conference, Washington DC, after attending a session by Fiacre O’Duin , Librarian, Cyborg, Cult-Leader
Where do I begin? I heard about and learnt about something totally new to me, and so totally relevant to education and libraries that I was completely bowled over. We have the next disruptive technology here, now, in the hands of ….people!
The practice of hacking is going mainstream and creating good. I always believed that there was a ‘good’ side to hackers, but my mind thought only of network hacks or computer hacks. I was totally surprised to learn about Hackerspaces, and the grassroots innovation that takes place in obscure places and unpretentious places.
Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects and this website is for ‘Anyone and Everyone’ who wants to share their hackerspace with international hacker’s'paces. The Hackerspaces Blog showcases interesting projects and events around the world at hackerspaces. Weird and wonderful things are constructed in hackerspaces. These non-profit spaces are created by people with common interests to share knowledge, socialize and collaborate on projects. Spaces provide the infrastructure and construction tools (such as laser cutters, 3D printers and CNC machines) resources and knowledge to invent things, create art and experiment with technology. Open to the outside world on a (semi)regular basis, always Tuesday.
Hundreds of these communities are found all over the world.
Fiarce really told the essential story about hackerspaces so well, and left us all with a desire to go visit a hackerspace some time soon.
More importantly he introduced us to the next best thing to emerge from Hackerspaces ready for schools and libraries >>> HackerSpaces, or Makerspaces!
There are few places that currently provide community access to new, innovative creation technology like 3D printers. These spaces, known as Fabrication Labs (fab labs), Hackerspaces, and Tech Shops, share common goals: collaboration and ‘making.’ They exist to give their specific communities the ability to ‘make’ through sharing knowledge and skills. They provide the technology necessary to make almost anything.
Public Libraries + Hackerspaces. Brilliant.
And yet another reason why public libraries—and public librarians—are an essential part of a free society, fostering the kind of innovative, productive, creative, healthy, expansive culture worth a good chest thump. Not only is it about leveling the playing field, making resources available for all, but also about nurturing the potential of the Next.
Libraries are reinventing themselves for a digital age, with a small but growing number looking to include hackerspaces (a.k.a. makerspaces), complete with 3-D printers. There is a certain poetry to it: As physical books transform into bits and bytes, information—computer files—become tangible objects, printed on a MakerBot.
I found that this TED Talk by Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs to be a great explanation of the importance of this movement.
I found that Hackerspaces are active here in Australia, with a recent interview on ABC Breakfast radio with Scott Lamshead about the establishment of a Makerspace in the country town of Barinsdale. The Robots and Dinosaurs Hackerspace meets right here in Sydney and offers a communal space where geeks and artists brainstorm ideas, play games, work on collaborative projects, and share the cost of some great tools.
They’re everywhere and I didn’t know about them! I need to visit one, but need a friend to come along for moral support!
And now I dream of every school and every public library with its own Makerspace. Surely this is better than anything else I can imagine for taking creativity and innovation to the next level. Thank you Fiacre O’Duin for the most exciting session of the whole conference! Pick up the notes and loads of information to learn more.
If you want to start one…let me know. I want to be there to help you and to see what happens!
This is very cool! TED, the nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” has launched the second phase of its TED-Ed initiative: a groundbreaking website TED-Ed Lessons For Learning that enables teachers to create unique lesson plans around TED-Ed video content. First it was the TED-Ed Youtube channel. Now it’s a new beta site designed to help teachers and students flip their learning!
Each video featured on the site is mapped, via tagging, to traditional subjects taught in schools and comes accompanied with supplementary materials that aid a teacher or student in using or understanding the video lesson. Supplementary materials include multiple-choice questions, open-answer questions, and links to more information on the topic. But the most innovative feature of the site is that educators can customize these elements using a new functionality called “flipping.” When a video is flipped, the supplementary materials can be edited and the resulting lesson is rendered on a new and private web page. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube. The creator of the lesson can then distribute it and track an individual student’s progress as they complete the assignment.
TED-Ed seeks to inspire curiosity by harnessing the talent of the world’s best teachers and visualizers – and by providing educators with new tools that spark and facilitate learning. Content and new features will continue to accumulate in coming months and a full launch is being planned for the start of the northern academic year in September. Take a tour now!
This IS exciting! TED has launched its TED-Ed YouTube channel: Short, animated videos for teachers and students. TED-Ed’s mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. You can nominate a teacher, nominate an animator or suggest a lesson here: http://education.ted.com
If you haven’t already seen this series of videos, I am sure you will enjoy Part 3. It’s a great discussion starter for historical change in the digital era too. Enjoy!
Within the world of academia, you will find all sorts of people with all sorts of interests and backgrounds.
So wrote Deanna in her post What’s wrong with being a geek and an academic? She made it clear that people in academia are not simply disconnected from the real world and only talk about their research!
In fact, there are all kinds of people, and for me it’s been confirmed that all kinds of people are right there in academia, as they are in schools. They play and research in virtual worlds, they are passionate rock climbers, musicians, and creatives, and they are exploring many aspects of learning - and geeking that research as well! We use Facebook and all kinds of social media to teach, share, communicate and engage in discovery with our learners. In fact, I have found that academia is a much better place to be for ‘geeking your research and learning’!
Charles Sturt University recently went through a major re-branding program, that is being rolled out through all necks of it’s global woods. It’s easy to be cynical about costs involved in this, but the reality of our online interactions is that marketing is linked to what is visually current for users, and the media that works for them. The uni needs to meet the online needs of the scholars and alumni and this marketing is directly linked to the way it is seeking to evolve their courses and respond to future needs.
I was pleased to see that they are rolling out mobile versions of access to CSU.
It’s easy to access CSU on the go. Content and services provided through m.csu have been specifically optimised for use on smartphones so that they are quick and easy to access, and will continue to be refined and extended. More will be added so I hope it’s great.
I was even more excited to see that the official template for our email signatures includes the option to add four social media links: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Three international organizations — the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) — collaborate on identifying technology experts and other aspects of the research, and this year, for the first time, each organization is planning a significant event related to the new report for each of their audiences.
CoSN started the rolling release yesterday with a private webinar for their audience of school CIOs around the world. The NMC follows with a major event at their annual Summer Conference, held this year in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday, June 17th. ISTE rounds out the release effort with a major session at their annual conference in Philadelphia on June 27.
The report has been released under a Creative Commons license to encourage broad distribution.
Emerging devices, tools, media, and virtual environments offer opportunities for creating new types of learning communities for students and teachers. Dede (2005) described the interrelated matrix of the learning styles of neo-millenials as being marked by active learning (real and simulated), co-designed and personalized to individual needs and preferences, based on diverse, tacit, situated experiences, all centred on fluency in multiple media, chosen for the types of communication, activities, experiences, and expressions it they empower.
The Horizon Report K-12 edition, issued annually since 2009, has identified and described emerging technologies that are having a significant impact on K-12 education, re-iterating the diversity of influences in the learning spaces of our schools. For school librarians the report directs attention simultaneously to both information use and learning and highlights the fact that 21st century technologies are unlikely to be empowering unless they are in the hands of an informed learner.
Key Trends in 2011:
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
Cloud computing
Mobiles
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
Game-based learning
Open content
Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Learning Analytics
Personal Learning Environments
Watch for more information at the Horizon K-12 wiki at http://k12.wiki.nmc.org which will have have a tweak or two before June 17th.
Once again, it was an honour and a real buzz to be part of the Advisory Board in 2011. My personal thanks go to Larry Johnson, Chief Executive Officer at NMC for being the driving force behind this work.
Dede, C. (2005). Planning for Neomillenial Learning Styles: Implications for investments in technology and faculty. In D. G. Oblinger & J.L. Obliger (eds.), Educating the Net Generation. www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen
And now I dream of every school and every public library with its own Makerspace. Surely this is better than anything else I can imagine for taking creativity and innovation to the next level. Thank you 
