I am in exploration mode, as I prepare for another term of busy work with teachers and students. I rather liked “Here be Dragons” as a discussion point with older students.
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The Digital Education Revolution: Realising the possibilities, Managing the Realities. ACER and supported by DEEWR. 26 May, Sydney.
What is the digital education revolution? The context of the symposium was presented by Daniel Owen from DEEWAR – aiming for sustainable change in schools. Commonwealth Government objectives are: long term productivity growth; economic growth; and social inclusion. Teachers are at the absolute centre of making this work. Australian Council of Governments is behind this initiative and it is more than just bringing computers to schools, and is intended to be a constructive process. Teachers Advisory group has just been formed, and will be active in broad consultation.
Five key policy elements:
You can monitor the implementation of the Digital Education Revolution at:
This video is an update to the original “Shift Happens”.
I’m posting it here as a way of testing one of the many new features of WordPress.com, which allows me to post videos to my blog by the click of a button using my vodpod/wordpress toolbar button.
WordPress.com has a whole new Dashboard design with plenty of slick new features thanks to WordPress 2.5.
I’m pretty excited to see new things happening at WordPress.
Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod
The problem is that some people are offended when I explain that good powerpoint presentations are….well good! and represent a completely different presentation design to 20th century versions. Our understanding of how to promote thinking, engage audiences, and use powerpoint as a visual communication medium has matured. So also has our understanding of how we can teach kids to engage with knowledge, and provide a visual synthesis of their ‘take on a topic’ via a powerpoint and an actual talk about a topic, rather than read of a topic! has ‘come of age’.
The presentation Dodging Bullets in Presentations explains the design and function developments beautifully. Now I urge you to apply that reasoning to the next ‘powerpoint project’ that you give your students. They may be a little surprised at how much work and how much understanding is required to produce an assessment without all those bullet points. Their supporting ‘talk’ just may need them to know and understand their topic for their talk – especially if no notes are allowed 🙂
Recently I have spent a great deal of time exploring and building in virtual environments in preparation for taking a group of our boys into Teen Life in the world of Skoolaborate. We’re gearing up for this to begin in Term 2.
In case you don’t know, Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS, wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students. By providing a common place to learn and share ideas, educators can leverage the power of new media to engage students and provide opportunities that might otherwise not exist. Using a group of islands in SecondLife, Skoolaborate helps students to collaborate on social action projects that benefit students who are less privileged than themselves. These projects integrate curriculum and digital technologies into collaborative global actions.
So it was with much pleasure that I attended a Cisco Live event this morning (6am Sydney time) at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage. It was Time for a (Tech) Chat!
My wise colleague and friend John presented his talk on Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World. John says that the slides he used in the Second Life presentation are very basic – text-only – slides (actually they were great in SL!). Full versions of the presentation are available for download- one in Keynote (17.5mb), and one in Powerpoint (15mb). Also Cisco Live: Networkers Online will also have something available. I highly recommend downloading them and absorbing the content, or listening to John’s presentation when it becomes available at Cicso Live.
John very kindly let me come up on stage for a photo shoot! 🙂
Today was interesting! I met two year 11 Chemistry classes and spent a little time opening up the options of choosing a Web 2.0 tool to produce part of their assessment task. These students have by and large been operating in a Web 1.0 world for school learning – but of course are operating in a Web 2.0 world of social networking with the usual MySpace, Facebook or Bebo.
The challenge for them was to think about creativity and the learning process, and if they dared, to step out of their usual comfort zone and into Web 2.0.
Why did we want to do this? Well the issue is this – that critical thinking skills cannot be learned in the abstract. They always pertain to concrete knowledge of subject matter. But by the same token, absorbing and ‘learning’ some concrete subject knowledge does not necessarily lead to critical thinking or creativity. Learning is a delicate pattern of interconnections!
If you sit boys in rows, if you always ask them to write an essay, produce a poster, deliver a talk, or make a powerpoint then without a doubt the capacity for independent learning or flexible collaborative learning that is deeply reflective just ‘ain’t gonna happen’ easily.
It’s true – we threw these boys in the deep end with a big challenge. Sorry boys!
…….. and I watched some of them run right back to safe shores, others forgot how to paddle or swim and splashed and floundered around (hiding their confusion behind boyish bravado), and others got right in and swam to the new shore across the bay. A few quiet ones spent a lot of time exploring the tools, checking the parameters and began to talk about the nature of learning this way.
We’ll be happy if we see a few wikis, maybe a blog or two, or maybe even a voicethread. This was just an experiment. No student will be advantaged or disadvantaged for either choosing or not choosing a Web 2.0 option. All we hoped for was that for some boys – the naturally curious and creative ones – the opportunity to use a Web 2.0 tool just might make the learning experience fundamentally creative, collaborative, and fun!
I’ve added a new TAB to the blog for the students called Student Tools – Let them fly!
So back to the beginning of the lesson.
What DOES this video prompt YOU to think about creativity and learning?
After all, an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. Have we nullified the capacity of our students to be creative in the very ordinary yet essential daily processes of learning? That’s the message the video gives to me 🙂
……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 🙂
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
2-3 years
4-5 years
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.
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:
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.
Recently I had the opportunity to both attend and take part in the 2nd International LAMS conference with my own presentation on School libraries for 21st century learning.
What I found particularly exciting was the opportunity to learn something about the design considerations for planning new libraries, the innovations in furniture and fittings, the re-conceptualization of learning priorities, the understanding of learning needs, and much more.
Thanks to the presentation by Maxine Brodie, Maquarie University Librarian, I have a number of very useful leads to add to my personal knowledge-base about learning and libraries in 21C.
Two of particular interest are:
A wealth of information, case studies, research, photo evidence etc is available at each site. Even just trawling the JISC Flickr photos provides inspiration, before getting into more detail!
Some key questions were offered for our consideration – from Scott Bennet – which can equally be applied to school libraries as to tertiary settings since we all understand that:
Space designs that acknowledge the social dimension of . . . learning behaviors and that enable students to manage socializing in ways that are positive for learning are likely to encourage more time on task and more productive studying, and thereby yield a better return on the investment in physical learning spaces.
What is it about the learning that will happen in this space that compels us to build a bricks and mortar learning space rather than rely on a virtual one?
How might this space be designed to encourage students to spend more time studying
and studying more productively?
For what position on the spectrum from isolated study to collaborative study should this learning space be designed?
How will claims to authority over knowledge be managed by the design of this space? What will this space affirm about the nature of knowledge?
Should this space be designed to encourage student/teacher exchanges outside the classroom?
How might this space enrich educational experiences?
There are many insights to these questions to be learned from the two resources, as well as from collaborative discussions about these issues amongst us all.
Our facilities will
…….need to move from being collection-centred to being learner-centred
……in order to support research, learning and personal development in a new networked environment.
Bennett, S. (2007) ‘First questions for designing higher education learning spaces’ Journal of Academic Librarianship (33)1, pp. 14-26.
Photos: JISC InfoNet’s photostream
judyoconnell.com 