Is social media a new thing? No, not really – just an evolving use of media, an ecosystem of tools and a rich variety of opportunities. Now we are seeing great ways for students to collaborate. Listen to these two important innovators, and enjoy the conversation.
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So from the history of the internet to this refocussing on learning – a great interview from Michael Wesch about harnessing collective intelligence rather than teaching content. He is an advocate of ‘anti-teaching’, seeking too inspire with good questions. Google becomes a tool for testing possibilities. Social media is also about learning possibilities. But don’t get it wrong – it is also about more work! more commitment! more active involvement in collaborative learning. He also raises the use of RFID on a campus, for creating learning opportunities. This I like!!
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Thanks to Rhonda Carrier for the link to this great little video.
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So lets see…my standard toolkit includes: Wordpess, Gmail, Google calendar, Google chat, and a host of other Google doc tools, Delicious, Nings galore, facebook, twitter, flickr, flickrCC, SnipThis, TwitThat, Feedly, Clip to Evernote, Tumblr, Kwout, Wikispaces, Wetpaint, Youtube and other video sites, and of course Vodpod to store my most important video finds, skype, Elluminate as well as WizIQ and Flashmeeting. Of course, there are raft of tools that are associated with virtual learning environments – a Second Life for me! That is not all, but that is already making my mind exhausted when I think of the shift in my ‘way of being’ – exhausted not for my self, but for the communication barrier that exists between me and so many of those that I work with.
More rumination….while I make a small movie from text!
What I am actually a bit worried about is that the pace of change has been so great, that the gap between the digitally adept and the digitally challenged is getting wider and wider, and perhaps will become too big a gap to bridge. I think I should settle for rumination, rather than worry, and let 2009 take care of itself 🙂
Howard Rhiengold’s short video ( from Howard Rheingold’s Vlog) summarises some pretty significant shifts taking place. I’d like to show this video to teachers who are pretty much at the stage of looking at YouTube videos but not much else. A good conversation starter, as you can have a tick list while they watch..do you do this? know about this? heard about this? Go on! Do some collaborating (visually) today!
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The 2008 Horizon Report, Australia and New Zealand Edition, has recently been released, and is available online, and to download making it an easily accessible and important addition to your professional reading.
The Horizon Report series is the product of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education around the globe. This volume, the 2008 Horizon Report, Australia–New Zealand Edition, is the first in a new series of regional reports, and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular.
Information on all the Horizon Reports may be found, and downloaded, at
http://www.nmc.org/horizon
Participation on an Horizon Project Advisory Board is by invitation, and so I’m thrilled to have been invited to join the first Horizon Report for K-12
This is really exciting for me! I can’t make it to Dallas for the launch of the Advisory Group (no secret sponsors), but I will really relish the opportunity to contribute in some small way to this project. I will be joining my fellow bloggers Kim Cofino (International School, Bangkok), Julie Lindsay (Qatar Academy, Qatar), Gary Putland (edNA Australia) and Westley Field (Skoolaborate and MLC School, Sydney) in this new endeavour. I don’t know the others, except for the inspirational Alan Levine from NMC, and Marco Torres.
Horizon.K12 is a new project that applies the process developed for the New
Media Consortium’s Horizon Project with a focus on emerging technologies for elementary and secondary learning institutions.
Members of the K-12 education community are encouraged to follow the Advisory Board’s progress as the discussion unfolds.
Thanks to a post from Elizabeth Clark, I’m excited to say that I agree with her that 280 slides has wonderful potential for teachers and students alike. In fact, this will become a key teaching tool for me in 2009, as I get my students away from desktop applications and into collaborative online tools.
This is a great place to start. Kids are all too familiar with powerpoint, youtube, and …..uh,oh , google images. How do we make the use of these tools more organic?
For my own presentations, and theirs – this is the go! Why?
Because 280 Slides is a free web-based service where you can “[c]reate beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world.” It allows you to
I totally love that it works basically the same way as blogs, wikis and nings – use a url or upload an image to put it into your presentation. You can search YouTube or Vimeo to add some multimedia, as well as uploading something.
So students can make their movies, store their images – all online – then embedd them into their presentation – and download, upload, share and …… so the online conversation continues with the power of cloud computing.
Good one!
Corporations are changing the way they communicate: In fact, the suggestion is that changing the way you undertake external and internal communication, marketing and advertising will shortly become inevitable, simply because the Internet and Web 2.0 have delivered new instruments and the audience – especially millennials – is expecting corporations to use them.
AT&T has produced at Trends White Paper on The Business Impacts of Social Networking.
Social networking fosters collective intelligence, collaborative work and support communities. Tools and behaviors from the consumer world are now making the transition to the corporate world, with diverse implications for changing the way businesses operate. This paper explores 10 opportunities presented by social networking, along with 10 associated challenges.
Download White Paper [PDF, 612KB]
I think that educators need to know what the changes are that are taking place in the corporate world as we’re educating the future inhabitants of that world. Looks to me like we had better make immersion into Web 2.0 an organic process within our learning frameworks.
Love my Twitter collective!
Thanks to ChemEdLinks for a quick test drive of Webspiration. Interesting, considering how many teachers are familiar with Inspiration. It’s nice that you can upload from Inspiration 8. It’s even better to be able to use this online. And it’s certainly better to be able to collaborate – take turns in editing – and also chat about the things you are editing with it’s own built in IM function.
I think this is worth a drive. Feeback anyone?
Labyrinth
Understanding – that is what I believe we are about in education – helping kids engage with information, culture, experience, to build personal knowledge and understanding. In passing across my RSS reader last night I encountered a post by Sheila Webber that set me thinking once again the whole of helping students develop the skills to ‘do things with information’. Sheila writes about ‘abstracting’ which is a topic that has been reintroduced for her Masters students.
In the course, the students read an article in advance, then in the session they briefly go through some key points about why abstracts are useful, what the differences are from an introduction, indexing etc., and how to write one. Then the students draft an abstract in class, swap it with their neighbour, read their neighbour’s abstract and make at least one positive and one critical comment. Then of course they have a discussion about the issues.
Here’s the crunch. Sheila says
Being able to read through something, pick out the key points and present them clearly is a good skill to have in the workplace, not just for study, I think. It is also useful in focusing on how articles are structured, and thinking about how you might identify the key points as a reader.
Now my mind jumped across to our classrooms. Besides the normal curriculum activities that are intended to introduce content to students, hopefully in such a way that they can wrestle with ideas in an authentic way (think project-based learning), there is the problem of their evolving skill-sets.
The relationship between a person with a question and a source of information is complex. We ask our students constantly to be ‘doing things with information’ including constructing new interpretations, new versions, new representations of information that they have trawled for in books, magazines, and rather more often in digital resources. Yes, Google still gets a good workover.
What we need to be doing more of is emphasizing the methods for constructing appropriate representations of information. This is more than referencing and critical thinking. It is honing the skill to summarize and articulate the content, meaning and purpose of a body of information or knowledge that is being absorbed or incorporated into the thinking activities taking place in a student’s head. Do we do enough of that?
It is important that we remember to incorporate methods for modelling both the construction and deconstruction of information. As students learn this skill, there thinking will become more flexible, and their minds will eventually be able to abstract information concisely and efficiently.
At school we are constantly exploring ways to promote construction of information. There is much to be learned about this problem in our digital age. I have a sense that we are not addressing the issue well enough yet. I think we all need to learn a lot more about this area because of the demands of 21st century learning.
Gary, our chemistry teacher, and member of the Powerful Learning Project Team, has been spearheading an initiative for doing things with information in Chemistry.
Gary has deployed Mindmeister, first up, as a tool for organisation and reflection of content. This online mind – mapping tool has the added advantage of collaboration. Gary’s students worked in teams to pull together information on different parts of their topic. This was revision work. This was collaborative note taking. This was far more effective for distilling information for the students. the tool is interesting as it allows more than one student to be working on a mindmap. Gary’s secret? get different groups of students to focus on different parts of the mindmap. This is step one in learning to ‘do things with information’ ! One day, these kids might be able to understand what’s involved in abstracting!
Bonus: And get this!! If you plug in your Skype information you will be able to call other people who are also editing the mindmap. If you have a pro account you can take the map offline for some Google Gears functionality.
judyoconnell.com 