A curious intellect

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Curiosity is at the heart of our educational endeavour. For me curiosity has been the driving force of my life – it really has. Right back at school (yes, that was a long time ago!) I clearly remember standing in line waiting to go to my Year 10 English class (yes, we lined up then) reading a book on psychology – a new topic I had discovered. My English teacher Mrs Ferguson (yikes, we didn’t like her much) simply looked at the book and stated “you have a curious intellect”. Was that a compliment or a criticism? I was never quite sure, but I never forgot that moment. Somehow my burning curiosity rated a mention!

What I now know is that as a teacher I have to take pride in curiosity and creativity, and to harness that natural enthusiasm through creating new opportunities for learning.

I’ve lived with curiosity all my life – and I’m sure you have too! It’s gotten me into mischief more times than I like to admit. It’s gotten me into strife more times than I like to admit. But I love it nonetheless 🙂

Seth Godin‘s short video about curiosity hit home for me the importance of curiosity. He says:

For 7, 10, 15 years of school, you are required to not be curious. Over and over and over again, the curious are punished.

Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant recommends that every educator (and other change agents) should see Seth’s speech at TED.

Tweeting and twhirling

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Do you tweet on Twitter?

Then you might like to Twhirl as well.

There are many little tools you can use for your Twitter conversations, but my twitter client choice for now is Twhirl. Are teachers twittering? You bet. Check out the first Twitter Mashup from sujokat (Sue Tap).

Looks good doesn’t it? Functionality is excellent.

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

Google Maps for mobile with My Location (beta)

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Doing a bit of a collection roundup for my vodpod video collection – so I added some videos about Google products. Check out my video collection for a few others as well, including the Australian Doodle4Google school competition last year, and What’s your Gmail story!

Of course, it’s just as easy to subscribe to the Google Channel where you can pick up all the Google videos, and stay up-to-date.

PageFlakes – teacher edition!

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Another addition to the suit of Web 2.0 tools customized with advantages for K-12 educators. We’ve already got Wikispaces, VoiceThreads, WetPaint Wiki, and Ning.

Another tool I regularly promote is PageFlakes , which now has PageFlakes Teacher Edition – with a nice specialist education focus.

This is Cool! if it remains open for sharing – no strings attached.

I did a search amongst the repository and found some nice PageCasts, e.g. Middle School Literacy and Harry Potter Feeds, as example. There is a huge long list of Flakes (widgets) you can add to customise your PageCast..

The Pageflakes team explains:

You can customize this page by adding and deleting Flakes (Widgets). Click the yellow button at the top right corner to:

browse the Educational Gallery
change the layout
customize your theme
share and publish your page

By default, all your pages are private. To publish a page or to share it with your colleagues please click on “Make Pagecast”. Of course you can have as many pages (tabs) as you want.

Why not setup a private page to start with? And when you’re ready, you may create a public Pagecast (check out our Pagecast Gallery) or a group Pagecast (shared page) for you and your colleagues – great for sharing notes, news and documents.