Learning Technology Forum

Posted on August 10, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Wednesday and Thursday this week saw Learning Technology teachers from primary and secondary schools in the Parramatta Diocese gather for a two-day forum.

The presentations from this forum will be made available via podcast – and I hope provide the links for you when they are available .

The forum was opened by Kevin Jones, and as Head of Curriculum he was able to provide some clear insights to ‘set the scene’.

Kevin focussed on the beliefs that underpin/enable/epitomise 21^st century learning, and the approaches that will enable (if not ensure) quality 21^st century learning. Some of the key points were about the beliefs that must drive our understanding and the staffroom approaches that help us be more effective.

The Beliefs
Learning in the 21^st century is about

student “centredness”.
Student ownership
Student choices
Student responsibility

The Approach

Collaborative work practices (staffroom approaches) will help us meet the learning needs of our students.

These practices must include use of technology that enhances collaborative work practices for:

Programming Organisation of assessment
Marking to standards
Evaluation
Cross-curricular approaches

As Kevin explained, “Our approaches and practices have to reflect our beliefs about individualised learning”. “We need to think about our own approach” “We need to think about what our current practices indicate about our beliefs about learning”.

Then we will engage more effectively in how to use the tools.

I followed with a presentation on Engaging the google generation through Web 2.0. For this session I drew from the article of the same title published in SCAN, Vol 25 No 3 August 2006.

Learning is essentially a social activity

Posted on June 7, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

I am not keeping up with the things I want to communicate and discuss with my colleagues, and it will get further behind as I head to the UK and Portugal to engage with colleagues involved with school libraries from around the world. However, just this fact of going and working with people – hands on – to explore new options and to savour old options reminds me that learning is essentially a social activity. We learn when we enjoy. We learn when our minds are challenged and piqued with curiosity. We learn when we laugh. We learn when we feel a sense of success and accomplishment.

We do all these things in all sorts of places. I will do this when I meet with my international colleagues – and continue to do this when I communicate and share with them via webspaces, skype, and any social networks I can get my hands on to.

To learn is to engage and develop as a person within and as part of our social framework. Ultimately, it's not just about skills and competencies in isolation, but about skills and competencies within the greater context of our global society. The reality is that the web environments of social networks are very empowering when utilised to develop ideas, share resources, hone knowledge and empower creativity.

What is it about the social institution that is 'school' that doesn't quite work for our students? What are we doing to support learner groups to connect in virtual environments – a natural extension of life for 'millenials'. How do we create a learning framework that is real, physical, virtual – even visceral? How can we help our students NEED to learn?

Information fluency is understood by our students, engaged with as a natural choice, and unfortunatley seen as something other than what they are expected to do/enjoy/learn/create at school. As educators we are beginning to discuss these issues. Great! Some have grabbed these issues by the throat and have been working with them for months, and even years. Overall though, as a educators, we are just waking to the urgency of social networking. We have to talk about this.

A recent message from Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix Vice President of Innovation, really weighs in on these issues, and provides a list of social websites that he talks about. In particular he tries to focus on what libraries can learn from MySpace. You can it read it here in the SirsiDynix OneSource monthly e-Newsletter. Actually, many of the papers he writes are great food for thought.You can access other issues and subscribe here. I have Stephen's Lighthouse blog in my blogroll.

Social Software and Web 2.0

Posted on June 6, 2006 by Judy O'Connell

Today I had fun working with a small group of teachers, in a workshop simply called "Introduction to Blogging". This was intended to help people think about, and be confident enough to go back to school and get involved with blogging.

It's great to see teachers and teacher librarians volunteering to
come and learn these things! With this training, and with those
who have already got their blogs under way, I am seeing a wave of interest in blogging and other social software. After my presentation at the last large network meeting, I am finding others with whom I can talk about blogs, news feeds, tagging, flickr, de.lic.ious etc.

Nice to know we have begun thinking about and working with social software – and started to do new things. In this context I would highly recommend the article by Brian Alexander that appeared in Educause Review Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44. You can read this online here or download the pdf file. Though written for the Higher Education sector, the article provides a comprehensive overview of social software and Web 2.0, and asks some challenging questions about the implications of these developments for education.

"The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?"

Grab this article and check out the other issues for more treasure.