The future of libraries

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

From Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content Ltd comes the announcement of the latest JISC report. Understanding metadata – the possibilities, purposes, and functioning in a Library 2.0 world, or even the information architecture world of any online information source, is crucial. If you want to keep up-to-date, or find out what this ‘metadata’ talk is all about, then now is as good a time as any to grab a coffee and start reading.

Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions

Paul Anderson says:

The Web is having a profound impact on the role and function of libraries. This goes way beyond ‘the demise of the book’, which is, quite frankly, a very simplistic way of looking at things. It’s actually more about having a vision for the future and how you realise that vision. For example, one of the problems facing librarians is how to create high quality ‘digital objects’, as they are called. If you think about a book, you might judge its quality in terms of the jacket design or the type of paper used or whether or not you can see guillotine marks on the edge of the pages. You probably wouldn’t think about some of the very obvious quality factors unless they were missing. If you opened a book and, say, the pictures were missing or all the pages were in the wrong order, you’d probably want your money back.

The problem for librarians is that when you are creating things like e-books, you have to think about a different set of ‘quality’ criteria because these digital objects will not be used in the same way that physical books are. They will need to designed so that they can be searched, for example, or delivered as separate pages. For the average library user, accessing information that spans multiple digital sources is increasingly a messy process and for those who are used to search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections. What is concerning about this is, unless we are careful, people will increasingly see the search results thrown up by Google, Yahoo etc. as the be-all and end-all of a particular area of interest or subject.

Virtual Learning and Teen Second Life Project

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Skoolaborate is a place for teens to create and be part of a global educational community. The Skoolaborate islands are a private education project on the Teen Grid in Second Life, having been established in 2007. Teens are the primary builders of the island while teachers and students together run, host, and organize learning and social events.

Our boys at St Joseph’s College have been invited to consider joining a small co-curricular program which will allow them to create an avatar and join the students from other schools around the world learning to work and play in this immersive 3D virtual environment. This program will integrate curriculum and digital technologies into unique collaborative learning experiences in a virtual 3D environment. This is cutting-edge technology, and represents an important development in learning technologies for the 21st century.

Several universities in Australia and around the world have established or are working to develop learning programs within the Second Life environment, and there are also a number of Teen Life projects in the education sector in the UK and the USA. Skoolaborate is the first Australia Teen Life project with partner schools from USA, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan.

I believe that our boys will have a tremendous opportunity to explore and learn to manipulate 3D virtual environments. They will develop programming and visual design skills. They will have the opportunity to collaborate on global curriculum projects, and interact with students in different cultures and different environments. Finally, our boys will also learn to create machinima – taking established techniques from traditional film-making and applying them to the virtual environment of Skoolaborate.

Creativity, technology and innovation is at the heart of Skoolaborate – providing a technology rich and very 21st century learning experience for my students.

Here is a video that is a machinima production about the creation of virtual environments, and which demonstrates the blend of technology, music and art, showing the technical scripting and 3D techniques, which makes learning so exciting and different in virtual environments.

Watch the World at Youtube, or for those who have YouTube blocked at school I have loaded the video here – let it begin to load, then play and enjoy the magic!

Digital media and learning

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

Just how does growing up with these tools affect young peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment and think systematically?

Since then we’ve seen a number of initiatives emerge from this funding.

I like to use the video threebillion fact’n’stats to teachers.

We all crave stats ‘n facts about what is happening; research and information about youth, digital media developments, gaming and more. A new series of publications from MIT Press provides quality content to keep our minds focussed on this field!

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available.

Civic Life Online
Digital Youth, Media and Credibility
Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected
The Ecology of Games
Learning Race and Ethnicity
Youth Identity and Digital Media

Photo: World connection in blue

ISTE…..and the unsung heroes!

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

International Society for Technology Education’s (ISTE) Second Life space provides a venue for educators to network and learn from each other about real-life education opportunities and best practices in Second Life.

ISTE sponsors an ‘in world’ group, hosts weekly networking socials and topical events, and sponsors a twice-monthly speaker series. At their recent meeting (1 pm Sydney time on Tuesday) Jo Kay aka jokay Wollongong was the guest speaker. Jo shared information about the various projects she is involved with in Second Life, including the Islands of jokaydia, where she is supporting a growing community of educators and artists in Second Life who are exploring various strategies for the use of virtual worlds in their practice.

Yep, I’m a resident of Jokaydia – so I went along help out, and to listen to Jo, to share with the ISTE colleagues, and to learn more about educational opportunities or events held on Jokaydia.

The Unsung Heroes

What I was amazed about was the fact that I could attend this meeting – on the third day of work in my new school. In my school district role last year, I was not able to get access to Second Life on the district network. Nor can most schools seem to get this organized. But sometimes we have unsung heros amongst us. The Joeys Head of ICT – Gary Evans – had me up and connected in 24 hours ! Fabulous work Gary. As a result he had time to drop by the meeting, and join Simon and Andy who I hope will assist me in some SL work later in the year. (Normally Gary is in his shirt and tie! like all staff at Joeys- this pic was taken on a frantic non-teaching day).

Perhaps it’s the Marist School that makes a difference. Back in my district of Catholic schools, it was Dean Groom, the Head of ICT at Parramatta Marist College, who made SL access possible – so that the students could join with the TeenLife project, Skoolaborate. Brother Pat at ParraMarist is as passionate about educational opportunities for his boys as my own Headmaster is for our Joeys boys!

In all this, its our IT managers who are the unsung heroes, without whom we could not do all that we do in our schools in all forms of e-learning.

Thanks Dean for all you did to help out last year. Won’t forget to keep reading your blog and learning from your work with your boys. PLUS your hacking of technology objects are the best 🙂

Thanks Gary for all you’ve done to help me out this year already. Joeys is very fortunate to have your leadership. Can’t wait to see what else is possible. Perhaps the sky’s the limit?!!

The Horizon Project 2008

Posted on January 26, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to an alert by Vicki Davis for the information that the 2008 Horizon Report is available now from the Horizon Project wiki and will be announced to the world January 29, 2008 at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. Thanks also to Gabriela Grosseck who sent a direct link of the Horizon Project pdf to me via Delicious.

Analyzing the five year history of the Horizon Reports, they have identified seven metatrends that have emerged with some regularity:

This is there analysis, but they hope that readers will weigh in on these metatrends.

They also look back to past Horizon Reports to ask “Where are they now?”

In addition to analyzing the MetaTrends of the last 5 years, this report outlines the major emerging technologies for college level education in the next 5 years including:

1 year or less

Grassroots Video
Collaboration Webs

2-3 years

Mobile Broadband
Data Mashups

4-5 years

Collective Intelligence
Social Operating Systems

Interesting!! Read more about Horizon Report now ready from our wonderful Cool Cat Teacher, Vicki Davis and follow her advice about tagging to share information.

Digital Natives explain!

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

What is a digital native? How does the generational divide impact the legal, societal, and educational realms?

Great questions being answered – or at least explored in depth – through the research lead up to publication of a new book. There is some tremendously helpful feedback on the draft v.0.9 of the forthcoming book Born Digital (Basic Books, German translation with Hanser) from tertiary students at Harvard and St. Gallen Law School, which is very worth while reading.

Discussing Born Digital with European Students, gives insights into Digital Natives ideas about the opportunities, challenges, and most promising approaches in digital technologies when asked three discussion questions:

First, what do you think is the greatest opportunity for Digital Natives when it comes to digital technologies? Second, what are you most concerned about when thinking about the future of the Internet? Third, what approach – generically speaking – seems best suited to address the challenges you’ve identified?

Join them in the discussion if you like, or check out their project wiki , their new DN blog, follow them on Twitter, or join their Facebook group.

Here are the student’s thoughts in brief:

Greatest opportunities:

Democratizing effect of the net: DN can build their own businesses without huge upfront investments (Rene, Switzerland)
ICT enables networking among people across boundaries (Catrine, Switzerland)
Encourages communication among DNs (Pierre-Antoine, France)
Increased availability of all kind of information, allows fast development and sharing ideas among DNs (Jonas, Germany)
Availability of information, DN can go online and find everything they’re looking for; this shapes, e.g., the way DNs do research; as a result, world becomes a smaller place, more common denominators in terms of shared knowledge and culture (Melinda, Switzerland)
Efficiency gains in all areas, including speed of access, spread of ideas, … (Eugene, Singapore)

Greatest challenges, long-term:

Problem of losing one’s identity – losing cultural identity in the sea of diversity (Eugene, Singapore)
Dependency on technology and helplessness when not having the technology available; DNs are becoming dependent on technology and lose ability to differentiate b/w reality and virtuality; other key challenge: bullying (Melinda, Switzerland)
Who will get access to the digital world – only the wealthy kids in the West or others, too? Digital divide as a key problem (Jonas, Germany)
Addiction: DNs are always online and depend so much on Internet that it maz lead to addictive behavior (Pierre-Antoine, France)
DNs can’t distinguish between offline and online world, they can’t keep, e.g. online and offline identities separate (Catrine, Switzerland)
Notion of friendship changes; DNs might forget about their friends in the immediate neighborhood and focus solely on the virtual (Rene, Switzerland)

Most promising approaches:

Teach digital natives how to use social networks and communicate with each other; law, in general, is not a good mode of regulation in cyberspace (Rene, Switzerland)
Technology may often provide a solution in response to a technologically-created problem like, e.g., privacy intrusion (Catrine, Switzerland)
Don’t regulate too much, otherwise people won’t feel responsible anymore; education is key, help people to understand that it’s their own responsibility (Pierre-Antoine, France)
The laws that are currently in place suffice (except in special circumstances); learning is key, but who shall be the teacher (since today’s teachers are not DNs)? (Jonas, Germany)
Generic legal rules are often not the right tool, problems change too fast; instead, kids need general understanding of how to handle technology; goal could be to strengthen their personality in the offline world so that they can transfer their confidence, but also skills to the online world (Melinda, Switzerland)
Technology will most likely help DNs to solve many of the problems we face today; education is the basis, but focus needs to be on the question how to put education from theory into practice (Eugene, Singapore)

From the blog Law and Information: obtaining a better understanding of the information society and law’s role in it.

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.

Photo: Casa Batllo, My Social Network

CNN enters Second Life

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Just as CNN asks its real-life audience to submit I-Reports — user-generated content submitted from cell phones, computers, cameras and other equipment for broadcast and online reports — the network is encouraging residents of Second Life to share their own “SL I-Reports” about events occurring within the virtual world.

CNN citizen journalism everywhere you turn! It is interesting to speculate how many teachers are abreast of citizen journalism trends, and the impact of these types of initiatives.

Read the report or watch this introductory video from CNN.