Participatory networking – an eye on Twitter and Jottit!

Posted on October 6, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

I’ve enjoyed my week at the NavCon2K7 conference, where I am pleased to see that we some workshops showing people how to engage in participatory networking – cool tools for cool news and professional interactions.

It was a real buzz to find that Heyjude was being used as part of a demonstration workshop about setting up iGoogle. So nice to meet people who read and enjoy this blog, or share in the Heyjude del.icio.us network. It was great that Leigh showed folks how to get into Facebook – because it has already expanded the conversation spaces amongst my colleagues.

But it’s what I learned from Lenva that excited me – a new strategy for ‘working’ a conference to share and collaborate! Here’s the story……

Amongst other things, I used Twitter to tell my professional network a bit about what was going on at the conference. Because I mentioned Twitter in question time (posing a question to Leigh from the twitterati, as well as from myself) Lenva discovered me and we became ‘friends’.

Lenva and I both posted links and comments to Twitter while Adam Lefstein was presenting his Keynote address. Lenva Shearing is a Principal who passionate about learning. Some of Lenva’s school team were attending the Ulearn conference in NewZealand at the same time – so the twitter conversation between them was showing up in my Twitter feed. She was actually participating in what was happening in NZ, while they were participating in what was happening in Sydney…….and I was becoming a bit of an observer. 🙂

But here’s the best tip of all. Lenva and other colleagues were taking notes (as lots of us were). The difference? Forget scribbling with a pen, writing a word document, or composing a blog post. Their notes were immediately shareable with each other via twitter or their blogs using Jottit.

Check out Lenva Shearing and her notes from Adam Lefstein and others (which she posted up on Twitter almost as soon as sessions were over) and Allanah’s Note page which she was using to share her Ulearn conference experiences. Ewan McIntosh and Leigh Blackhall would be proud of them all! Right? Now if only I had been at the Ulearn conference amongst such a buzz.

As for Lenva? – what a fantastic Principal – leading, doing, and engaging everyone – participatory networking bringing life to 21st century rhetoric.

Image: Mon Oeil

From text to iPod – in one easy step

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Use Text2Go to transfer information from the web to your iPod, so you can listen to it on the go. Sound like a gimmick? Maybe, but just think about the educational implications of such a tool for our students – anyone who needs audio support to access and enjoy text.

From Melbourne, this software (for a very small cost) could be used to turn free eBooks available at Project Gutenberg into audio books for your library, to loan out on your ipods or mp3 players.

In fact, anything that might be available in digital format could be converted this way. Are there limitations? I don’t know. The idea is a very good one for schools to look into further.

From LifeHacker Australian edition.

Masters of the metaverse!

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

For once I was pretty well stumped for words – that’s because I was able to spend a day seeing leading innovation in education – the future really! Myself and two CEO teachers (members of our Learnscope project), Martin and Dean, travelled to Wollongong to participate in a Second Life event. Dean’s IT trainee also attended online with his own avatar.

For me, this was a first, and a day I would not have wanted to miss.

Congratulations to NSW Learnscope for the fabulous regional event Go Virtual 07- Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds for VET.

This was a ‘mixed world’ event – participants in the room, mixing with participants from Australia and around the world – attending the conference in a meeting space prepared specially for the event in Jokaydia. You should teleport to Jo and Sean’s meeting and conference location in Jokaydia, and check out all the fabulous presentations available.

Of course, we met and heard from the masters of the metaverse Sean FitzGerald and Jo Kay. Their Second Life in Education Wiki is a fabulous resource. What can I say – Wow! 🙂

We also had a fantastic analysis of SL work from Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel in Second Life) from University of Sydney. Angela teaches English Education at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include digital cultures, new media literacies, multimodal semiotics and digital narratives. Angela has reviewed the event at Go Virtual!

We heard from the Learnscope e-Learning team – what an awesome job they have been doing. I certainly felt like the poor cousin from the school sector 😦

Joining us for a panel discussion, we heard from Alan Levine (New Media Consortia). Damn it! I was so gobsmacked by this stage of the day, I didn’t even realise I was hearing from CogDog, fellow blogger, twitter and general blogosphere guru pal. We also heard from Nick Noakes, Centre for Enhanced Learning and Teaching in HongKong.

Well for once we can grumble. While my schools have no access problems for anything Web 2.0 – Second Life is another thing. We have a few keen teachers ready to begin the exploration of this future form of learning. Let’s face it – it is not that much in the future. A year, two maybe? When we have figures like 15 million, and 20 million in asian countries actively involved in virtual social networking – how can we not begin to research the educational frameworks of virtual worlds?

I’ve been asking for over 12 months now to have work access and get a project going. Now we have young teachers like Dean who are adept at embracing and making best use of these technolgies. I’m not sure why we aren’t including the metaverse in our conversations about innovation – particularly now that it has been ‘voice activated’.

Yesterday those ‘in world’ saw and heard exactly the same as those in the conference room in Rydges – that’s because we all engaged via SL – and talked, saw presentations displayed, watched movies that highlighted particular points – and then socialised in that environment. OK – that part is different. I got in trouble for setting off rockets! But Dean gave me a cocktail to calm down. Thanks Dean.

Dean has already provided us with an opportunity to listen to Sean’s keynote presentation. A bit sketchy, but ideal while we wait for more. Go and listen on TeacherTube – pure gold!

Dean, Judy and Martin ‘inworld’ are asking “So when do we start?”

Visions of the future…..

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

There is a wonderful online gallery of illustrations by Villemard from 1910 imagining what life would be like in the year 2000. It’s part of a larger exhibition titled Utopia: The Quest for the Ideal Society in the Western World.

Check it out here.

Thanks to the alert from Stephen’s Lighthouse.

Classroom 2.0 review and Second Life

Posted on September 18, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

How can I resist sharing Dean Groom’s reflection on his Classroom 2.0 experiences in his Term 3 Reflection Time. It’s a ripper read.

He talks about the changes his students have experienced, and changes in his own style of professional learning.

The way to look for these is from your peers outward. I kind of see each of the people I’ve connected with (or aligned myself with) as a a little whirlpool, each sucking in information and experience. I now look at the whirlpools first. Before I looked at Google.

I’m happy to be part of his whirlpool!

Dean is a member of the Parramatta Learnscope Team – who are engaged in a project with NSW Learnscope.

At a workshop today he shared his experiences with us – he’s ‘upgraded’ his classroom, developed a Web 2.0 toolkit, and learned to move more effectively into the student’s learning mindset.

Guest of the afternoon was Sean FitzGerald, who talked to the group about Second Life. Jo Kay and Sean do a lot of fabulous work with Second Life in Education.

Sean went so far as to mention machinima and it’s place in this brave new world.

Machinima is perhaps the extension of this newer wave in education. Digital movies made in online virtual worlds seem to be ‘the next big thing’ in youth created content these days.

For the uninitiated, machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.

Machinima extends far beyond media creatives and youth though…With ‘Machinima for Dummies’ hot off the press, the first European Machinima Festival kicking off in October, and YouTube screening of the Global Kids’ year-long machinima project A Child’s War.

The video is based on research done by the youth about the situation of child soldiers in Uganda and the upcoming trial at the International Criminal Court.

You can watch their earlier piece about digital media and youth here and read the youth leaders blogs here.

3-D platforms like Teen Second Life (13-17 year olds) open up new ways of learning, identity exploration, behavioral experimentation and self-expression without stumbling into dicey terrain ‘outside the grid’ in SL’s larger virtual world. This makes initiatives such as Skoolaborate possible.

Library Thing…. on WordPress

Posted on September 18, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

We love to customise our online spaces, don’t we?

After a request for help to find a way to display a book selection in the sidebar on an edublogs wordpress blog, I went hunting. WordPress doesn’t support the Library Thing widget right now, but that’s what we wanted to use.

Thanks to some code from the Library Thing forum and a bit of fiddling, we ended up with a My Book Collection widget on Danni’s The Butterfly Effect blog.

It has a static book jacket, and a random feed from the the profile’s catalogue. Basic for now, but does the job. You could do your own edits. Substitute your LibraryThing account name where I have inserted ‘accountname’, and of course your own image from your flickr account.

Code below:

Inside a dog….it’s too dark to read!

Posted on September 10, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to Andrew and his pointer to another fabulous website that I haven’t taken enough notice of … so perhaps you haven’t either. 🙂

This is a website for young people about books.

Here you can:

read and write reviews
meet our online author-in-residence
win stuff
preview upcoming titles
read interviews with authors
keep up to date with all the latest bookish news
listen to podcasts and audio Chapter Ones
talk about books on the forum

Insideadog is also the home of the Inky Awards – Australia’s first Teenage Choice Book Award. It all starts with the longlist – 10 Australian books and 10 International. Then the panel of 6 judges will whittle it down to a shortlist of 3 Australian and 3 international books.

Voting opens September 24! See if you can join in!

This is another great Australian resource!

“Unlearning” and the future of education

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

In my workplace we are undergoing a sort of major change as the leadership work to shape a new direction for the learning frameworks in our schools. I’m pretty keen on seeing these changes. Recently, at a two-day workshop, we heard some great stories from three schoosl – Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti, Summerland Primary School, and North Loburn School, all in New Zealand. Nice one Vince, Luke and Mike! Personally I would like to hear more from Australian schools, and Australian teachers. I know we have some fabulous innovation going on right here in Sydney……..but?

Never mind – the global collaborative to the rescue (no business flights required)

A post in the social networking site Classroom 2.0 lead me to the Map of Future Forces Affecting Education from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Institute for the Future 2006-2016. Check it out or grab the pdf, and then think about what you’ve seen on the map and discuss it with colleagues.

Will Richardson wrote recently about The Steep “Unlearning Curve”, and lists 10 things we need to unlearn to make ‘future’ schooling come to life. What Will talks about resonates with us all who are trying to create a shift in the way schooling happens. It IS about seeing the possibilities.

The “aha” moments in life delight us. We suddenly gain an insight, experience a profound joy, or realize something important for the first time. That’s learning! That’s why we have to push further into the future of learning than our NZ colleagues took us recently.

How far and fast we can go is picked up right here in Sydney by Westley and his MLC girls, busy building Skoolaborate in TeenSecondLife.

This for me is real innovation, and leaves our NZ colleagues for dead. Me? I wish!

BlogDay 2007 from Downunder

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Judy O'Connell

Today it is BlogDay!! an event to foster more connections between bloggers and a way to get to know other bloggers with other interests from other countries.

Thinking about the global context, I thought to myself “if there is only one blog from the whole world that I am allowed to read for the next 12 months what would I choose?”.

Without hesitation, my choice was John Connell, because he keeps me in touch with a diversity of things – culture, history, society, philosophy, technology, news, ideas, creativity, and just good fun. Thanks John.

However, since I blog downunder right here in Sydney Town, I’ve decided to highlight 5 blogs (so hard to choose!!!) from Australia rather than other countries, to promote our emerging culture, point of view, and attitude in the global conversation, and to say ‘thanks’ the the aussie bloggers that I have added to my reading list this year!

Drop by (if you haven’t already) and enjoy the read.

Sue Waters at Mobile Technology in TAFE has done a stunning job promoting mobile technologies, e-learning and m-learning tools and strategies, is always investigating new and challenging ways of incorporating Web 2.0 into the education experience.

John Pearce at My Other Blog teaches in a primary school in Victoria, but his work draws on the global conversation to drive his thinking and practice in his own school. As John says, the whole Web 2.0 scene is moving so rapidly it is only via that web itself that you can hope to keep up.

Melinda Phillips at The Parramatta Learnscope Team blogs with a special purpose – to challenge her project team to explore Web 2.0 for professional learning and teaching in a ’21st century’ way. Great guidance and good reading. Melinda is a great person to work with 🙂

Chris Betcher at Betchablog teaches in a school in Sydney, does great professional development sessions, and runs From the Virtual Classroom podcasts which are a bit of a hit.

Cindy Barnsley at Thinking 2.0 teaches in country Australia and dreams (and writes) about technology to enhance students’ learning, with a focus on blogs, wikis and digital storytelling. I love her quote that drives her blog: