That’s my mouse…

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

……is a neat new entry into a teacher’s toolkit – if you’re brave enough to give it an experimental go!

ThatsMyMouse allows people to passively interact. Just by navigating through a web-page you can interact with the people on it. Since it’s written in JavaScript (and supports all major browsers) it works for 95+% of visitors after a website places a single line of JavaScript on their page. You can see, talk and interact with anyone who browses to the same page as you.

Mashable also wrote about this simple but brilliant gimmick that they dubbed a Social Browsing Widget.

Playing around with it after an alert by Alec Couros on Twitter, I thought that it could be used as a good focus point for discussing a topic on a web page, or even webpage design.

Contribute to the discussion of the tool for Alec at ThatsMyMouse. Alec’s captured text transcript will help you discover more.

The way it could be used is governed by the comment field, which you position with your mouse after writing the text. The comments don’t stay on screen for long, so it’s not about marking up a page with comments, but rather having a fun tool – perhaps online with other classes – to throw some ideas around and generate discussion.

Try this out on your wiki some time soon 🙂

A Whole New Mind – Pink style

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

6.00 am on Saturday morning, and at last it was my turn to join one of the classes for live blogging A Whole New Mind with students from Arapahoe High School.

Some weeks ago Karl Fisch (you’ll remember his Did You Know 2.0? video) put out a call for people to participate in ‘live blogging’ over a series of weeks, and you can see the timetable of these events at AWNMLiveBlogging. Luckily for me I could make the Period 6 timeslot on a few of the dates.

I’ve just completed my first session with these fabulous students. The record of just this one class group is at Smith 9H07-08.

What I can’t capture here was the opportunity to hear the fishbowl discussion technique in action. Using MeBeam, a web-based video chat tool, I heard every fabulous word of discussion, along with my fellow bloggers Christian Long and Gary Stager.

Yet another wonderful way to add flexibility and creativity to learning as a multimodal conversation.

Photo: 油姬

Breakdown of social networking

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Its the weekend and time to relax. So here I am surfing the Net – and what do I find?

Imagine this scenario – what would happen to our social networking endeavors if we all lost connection to the Internet? Some of you may have been following Afterworld, the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously (each of the 130 episodes is just over two minutes long). This animated sci-fi series tells the story of life on earth after an inexplicable global event which renders technology useless.

More than 95% of international telephone and data traffic travels via undersea cables. So sometimes there is an accident! What does happen when something goes wrong?

Passport reports:

The Arabist, an anonymous blogger based in Egypt, sarcastically predicts “complete social breakdown” when people find themselves unable to update Facebook every few minutes. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that. Internet users from Cairo to Calcutta are either without the Web or their service is operating at a fraction of its normal capacity.

The culprit? A ship off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, dragged its anchor and snagged two major underwater telecommunications cables. Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.

Unfortunately for Internet addicts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, and India, the SeaMeWe-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia cables, which carry the majority of Internet service between Western Europe and the Middle East and South Asia, were the ones cut.

It’s happened before, and will happen again. Passport explains that it’s unclear when normal service could be restored to the affected countries. I wonder how blogger Julie Lindsay is managing in Doha? and if she still has steady access.

Oh, I see she is in Prague …… and busy blogging about the ECIS conference! I recommend a visit to the slides of her presentation on Personal Learning Networks. She captures the key points beautifully.

Below: damaged cable networks

And now ….. a Webtrend map for 2008

Posted on January 27, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Here’s an interesting find from the Information Architects Japan. This is sort of appropriate given the release of The Horizon Report – a fun way to map trends for 2008!

This time we’ve taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map.

Enjoy the clickable online version. You’ll notice that it incorporates people, tools, and a variety of media services. Unfortunately there are lots missing – as spotted by Gary Barber on Twitter, who mentioned Seesmic as an example. Fun anyway.

The map is available two formats – ready for you to use.

1. Big, A3 PDF
2. Clickable online version

Will Richardson and the Why 2 of Web 2.0

Posted on January 26, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

You’ll excuse me if I get excited by the news that Will Richardson is going to be here in Australia later this year to share his professional wisdom with us all.

Thanks to Sybasigns, who run some excellent professional learning seminars for us here in Australia, Will will be presenting two seminars: Brisbane 7th May and Sydney 9th May.

For more information and to register visit The Why 2 of Web 2.0: How it transforms everything!

Join their online seminar Ning The Why 2 of Web 2.0!

If you like, grab a copy of the 4 page flyer The Why 2 of Web 2.0 right here!

Oh, and I am thrilled to be sharing both events with Will, by participating in the seminar along with my friend and colleague Westley Field from MLC school in Sydney. I’m also really looking forward to meeting and listening to Christine MacKenzie from Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne.

If you’re a blogger – you’ve got to come along to a seminar! One spare bed at my place for a Sydney visitor 🙂

Quantifying the impact of social media

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Kerrie Smith asked some discerning questions about my last post Google Generation and Virtual Libraries, making the link to the debate that’s going on over on the Economist.com about whether social networks do/can/will have a positive impact on education.

I do believe that blogs can provide solid, authoritative “knowledge” – but as these bloggers are doing the research (leg work) to investigate topics, doing the critical analysis and synthesis of what they have found – they are few and far between. That is not to say that other bloggers are any less valuable – just that they are fitting a different social network niche. Bloggers that more easily fit this category of comprehensive reflective research and analysis are Stephen Downes, Will Richardson, Christopher Sessums, Dough Johnson, and Ewan McIntosh as examples. Many blogs are reflective conversations, others are disseminators of information or providers of tips and tricks in ‘how to’ do things – and are part of that personal learning environment at each of us is building around ourselves to help us in our networked world.

Can blogs be authoritative resources? I thinks so – sometimes. At other times they are informative or trivial, relevant or off-beat, extroverted or muted – but whatever form they take they will have relevance to someone somewhere.

Technobabble 2.0 provides a white paper outlining the thoughts and views of several key stakeholders who met late last year to discuss the issue of measuring online influence.

Download: “Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media” (PDF)

The catalyst behind this document was the publication of Edelman’s Social Media Index in July 2007 with David Brain. This attempted to propose a new way of calculating an individuals online influence beyond the ‘traditional’ method of analysing a blog’s inbound links to incorporate other social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

The issue of influence is an important dimension of the creation of authority – particularly in the field of blogging and social networks. This is a concept we need to think about, and understand in the creation of knowledge networks.

Read the paper. I look forward to Stephen’s analysis of the white paper 🙂

From my point of view it raises some critical issues in relation to data mining and information manipulation that takes place in such arenas as marketing or monetizing of information.

What do I think of ‘authority’ when this sort of activity is common. For example, its fascinating to follow Caroline Middlebrook, who has shared all her work extensively, and in the process allowed educators like myself to gain a little insight into the strategies adopted by those who wish to earn a living by disseminating information – pure and simple.

I started with a single article which I re-wrote four times and then mashed up manually using the article mashup method I have blogged about to stretch that to 16 articles.

I guess my answer would be that the material being produced would not fit into my understanding of ‘authority’. At what point then does blogging and other social networking activities become more noise (staff room/coffee shop babble) rather than activities in the pursuit of learning. I don’t know. Who am I to judge anyway?

Photo: I make stuff up.

2007 – a year of wonder – come to the party!

Posted on December 19, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Just a few days till Christmas and not much more till the end of another academic year and actual year!! How different it is for us in the latter climes of the globe…..concluding everthing in time for Christmas. We are frenetic just at the time when my edublogging colleagues in opposite latitudes are hitting their academic stride – watch those blog feeds and gasp at the volume of conversations in all sorts of multi-threaded spaces.

I love ending the year with the wonderful Edublog Awards. Being caught up in changes myself I haven’t had time to properly thank all the wonderful people involved for hosting such a great fun event again. Thanks everyone! Special thanks to all those who took the time to nominate, vote, and read lots of ‘new to them’ blogs, and come to the celebration fun party ‘in world’ on the island of Jokaydia.

Luckily my friends haven’t been as slow of the mark. Thanks! Super congrats to award winner of best Library/Librarian blog A Library By Any Other Name, Vaughn Branom. Oooh, and I’m thrilled to see that the winner of Best Individual Blog is ScienceRoll, Berci Meskó, from Hungary. I like to follow the Hungarian blogosphere a little via my young librarian blogging friend Ádám Paszternák and his K-12 Webzine.

Kathryn Greenhill lists the winners and also tell us

Interspersed with the award announcements were Dave Cormier’s list of the Top 10 Educational Stories of 2007 . This was an international list – but number one was an Australian. A sixteen year old Australian, Tom Wood, who cracked the Federal Government’s internet filter within 30 minutes of it being released.

If you want to subscribe to all the winners with just one click, Andy Powell from Eduserv has created an OPML file of 2007 Edublog winners’ feeds .

Stephen Downes has contributed to this wonderful end-of-year extravaganza by posting Not the Edublog Award Winners.

His list is intended to shine some light on some people who really deserve some praise and wider notice – his personal ‘honourable mention’ category. Read this list too because Stephen has highlighted some fabulous people, services, tools and initiatives !!

That the blogosphere and all other social networking sites has grown is not in question. What is in question as we charge to the end of the year is what exactly will take prime place amongst our educational collaborative tools and what will just merge into pop culture.

For now I rely on the twitterverse to help me track the ebb and flow. Yesterday I woke up to find the twitterverse all agog about GoogleTalk IM with or without a gmail account, with the downloaded application or with the web only interface. My twitter ‘ever questioning’ friend Chris Betcher asks

I also rely on my conversations ‘in world’ as I catch up with my education colleagues from around the world while exploring the metaverse of SecondLife, where I attend conferences, talks, presentations and more, and where I have had the chance to collaborate with international colleagues, some of whom I first met recently at the Edublog awards ceremony.

How lovely to have lots of cute avatars come up to me and say Hi! thanks for your blog! I read you blog all the time… and I’m from Spain, Texas, and more.

So one of my special thankyou greetings for 2007 HAS to go to Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald for all their work in Second Life in Education. I wouldn’t be ‘in world’ without them 🙂

Do drop by Jokaydia some time. You might come across me there chatting with friends as I am a resident on Jo’s island at Heyjude Hall.

Better still, come and celebrate some Christmas cheer at the Jokaydian Christmas Party.

Join us for some dancing and socialising on the Island of jokaydia as we celebrate the festive season AND delivery of our new sim! (Yes, Jokadia is growing, and 2008 is going to be a great year!)

Where: http://slurl.com/secondlife/jokaydia/113/150/23

Time: Saturday 22 December @ 6pm (Australian Time)
Friday 21 December @ 11pm (Second Life Time)
For more info IM jokay Wollongong

This long post has to conclude with a BIG THANK YOU to all the wonderful teachers and professional colleagues I have worked with during the last two years at the Catholic Education Office. You all know you are grand! and the work you will continue to do will be groundbreaking, despite the ‘top heavy’ constraints and rules that are beginning to emerge in some areas of the organisation. Keep in touch, and we will continue to work subversively to challenge, change, and make a real difference to the kids.

As for me? I’m moving onto a very exciting new role at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill here in Sydney, as Head of Library and Information Services. This is a fabulous school, part of the strong Marist network of schools around the world, with a long tradition of excellence in education here in Australia. I am excited at the honour and opportunity to work with teachers and students at the school – where I will be able to take innovation and educational change in new directions for library and Web 2.0 learning.

So on that note…it’s time for me to go and poke a few friends on Facebook, just for Christmas fun.

I am taking a long holiday break this summer…as I haven’t had a holiday since the middle of 2006!

Happy Christmas and best wishes for a fantastic 2008!

Photo: Christmas in Love

Students 2.0 – fantastic initiative!

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

I hope you’ll find it as exciting as I do. This new initiative from Clay (thanks for sharing the Delicious ranking success with us in Twitter) has the potential to create fairly seismic effects, over time, in the edublogosphere – by elevating student edubloggers!

The students ask us to

Check out this post by Clay Burell, the teacher who sponsored our collaborative, world-wide project, for ideas on how to spread the word.

Students 2.0 looks like being the first of its kind! Grand stuff indeed….. and the site design is just fabulous. Go visit!

Administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.

The moment for a student-centered edublogosphere has come. The staff at Students 2.0 invite their adult partners in education to treat their posts as they treat all others: as serious writing, as invitations to their readers to listen, reflect, agree, disagree, extend ideas – and above all, to create new possibilities, understandings, and insights in education.

Blogs in plain English

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Here comes everybody!

Posted on December 3, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

The grand thing about Web 2.0 and social networking is the opportunities for both serendipity and synergy in the process of networking and collaboration.

Today I read with interest Beth Kanter’s (from Cambodia) notes about building your network strategically. Beth is writing an article and threw some thinking up on her Facebook notes. She starts by saying that

Doing “outreach” or adding new friends to your network is a critical part of the work flow. To reap the benefits a using a social networking, you need to build your network, although as some experts say it is a matter of quality, not quantity. You want to avoid random outreach, but remember since outreach can be open-ended and there are opportunities for distractions. Remember to know when to stop.

While Beth is looking at marketing in the non-profit sector her comments were of interest to educators – Vicki Davis (Southern Georgia, our coolcatteacher!) added a note saying

In school we tell everyone,”Never add a friend of a friend, only add people you know,” and many of us are building our network in this way. Aren’t kids who add friends of a friend learning valuable networking skills? It is important to remember this, but also that we are creating a vast disconnect between what we tell students and what is going to make them successful in the future!

So here we had just one of our many dilemmas in education being effectively highlighted and discussed, right in a social networking space, accessible only amongst ‘friends’.

It didn’t stop there. I also had a message from Ken Carroll (Shanghai & Dublin) about the launch of his new blog Ken Carroll on Learning. Here we have Ken, and astute businessman, doing exactly as Beth advises – using friends networks to reflect and share, manage and promote.

I am pleased that Ken shared his new blog link with me, because he has some highly relevant issues for consideration by educators. (Consider adding Ken Carroll on Learning to your RSS reader.)

His post Here Comes Everybody touches on so many issues related to learning – information sharing, communication, gathering, discussion, utilisation etc etc. Yes, Ken, we have all been learning more, faster than we could 5 years ago….that is, if we are immersed in Web 2.0 tools and communication opportunities. As he puts it

every individual now has a voice in the Big Conversation…. the participative web goes way beyond just high-speed access to information. It also enables us to form learning networks that include people, conversations, and information. This is a crucial development that we need to understand.

Like Ken, I also connect with people on my network through blogs, social networks, email, instant messaging and more.

This is what I want to share with my teachers. This is what I want to empower in the learning opportunities for my students. This is what future learning is all about.