The Marathon des Sables run for charity (MDS) (Marathon of the Sands) is a six-day, 254 km (156 mile) ultramarathon, which is the equivalent to five and 1/2 regular marathons. The longest single stage (2009) is 91 km (55 miles) long. The event is held every year in the southern Moroccan desert. It is considered the toughest foot race on Earth.
Tom Armstrong, one of our energetic young teachers at St Joseph’s College, set out on this race, to raise funds for his chosen charity. He made it!! and raised nearly $10,000 in the process to help change lives for children in a village in Africa.
Right now I am in the run-up to the first exams of the year for my students. They’re getting nervous and I am too, while I gather my information, think about reports, and wonder how much information I can muster for the chats to parents that are coming up on Sunday.
Sitting at my desk with dreamy eyes I wondered when I would be able to more effectively streamline my information gathering, my classroom tracking, and various elements of the administrivia of teaching that must be done to support great learning. I was on the verge of setting up something vaguely flexible for myself, using something online (google docs?), so that I could develop this information in class (on a netbook?) and access it at my desk or at home.
I had not worked out what to do! Bingo – I don’t need to.
A read of my RSS news told me that a new product that will launch on the iPhone just might be a great place to start with all this.
A meeting today reminded me of the chasm surrounding general understanding of what is going on in the new media world of our youth. Here we are with teachers still ‘learning’ how to do basic things, while the kids have stampeded right on into the 21st century.
Tipping Point Labs has some interesting insights into Tumblr, Twitter and The Tweeters,Tumblrists and Technogeeks using them. Tumblr is seen as being a more sophisticated version of Twitter with much more room for valuable content and interaction between users.
Now I don’t know about you – but these are old tools of trade for me and many of those in my personal learning network. Definitly not tools of trade for the majority of those I work with and interact with on a daily basis.
I dropped by the Facebook profile of my very sociable teenage niece. What I saw was a breadcrumb trail to some new shifts in what her friendship groups were up to. Seems the kids are starting to ‘swarm’ to places like twitter and tumblr. Facebook, Myspace, Beebo and MSN are no longer enough.
This backs up the odd comments I got at school today from some random kids – “you’re not on twitter are you miss?”
I exchanged a few messages with her – and then she actually discovered who I was!
She described my presence as ‘awkward’ – naturally! I promptly bid my farewells and assured her that I would not ‘follow’ her on Twitter.
Have you checked out lately what your students are doing online?
Thanks to my friend (and fellow chocoholic) Kathryn Greenhill for sharing this fabulous set of slides and presentation – which really puts into perspective what librarians should be about – if they aren’t already!!
The challenges are bigger in schools – emerging technologies are not seen as core business! But let’s be clear about this. We are not talking about ‘using’ technology – but rather about changing our whole mode of operation to deal with disruptive change – and dare I say it? to actively create disruptive change for the sake of the learners in our schools.
Kathryn is a tertiary emerging technologies librarian. What she shares is equally vital and relevant for schools.
It’s hard work, chipping away at the old models of schooling to bring about the change needed to make schooling effective again. Perhaps this has always been the case, but wouldn’t it be nice if we noticed the need for change just a little more quickly 🙂
On Monday, Dean Groom and myself spent the day with a group of teachers helping them find a new mindset for their connective learning. There is very little we can do in two days, but we have constructed Connect, Collaborate and Inspire through 21st Century Learning as a bit of a framework for the days.
I think there is so much that needs to be shared and understood. Some of my library staff are busy doing the How 2 of Web 2.0 course. This is great! Soon we might be able to move into even more new media activities. What’s critical for school libraries is that all staff join students in the ‘future’ environment, and make learning an interactive literacy and knowledge endeavour.
We started out two day workshop with a Stephen Hepple video – the innovator that has traction i.e. real longterm success in changing learning environments.
Here’s the latest video from Stephen Heppell that will also definitely get an airing at our professional development day!
I’m really pleased to see this explanation of change at one of our universties here in Sydney. Listen closely, and adopt/adapt the vision for your school. Note the emphasis on innovation, research and support structures at enterprise level.
There was a time when books, newspapers, magazines and journals were the prime source of content and information. It was always your move! navigating the authority maze, enjoying slow reading of (limited) information sources in order to gain a knowledge base that matched a particular curriculum outline.
This was when content was king and the teacher was the sage on the stage.
Now communication is the new curriculum, and content is but grist to the mill that churns new knowledge. Why? I came across a few good reads this week that set me thinking and wondering about the changes that we must support in our teaching and in our library services.
Think about this:
The era of Teacher Librarians ‘taking a class’ in order to show kids how to search, get basic skills, or navigate resources is over. This is a teachers job!! Teach the teacher by all means (that’s professional development) but don’t waste time doing repeat performances for a teacher who hasn’t caught up with how to integrate information resources into the curriculum. How can they claim to be good teachers if they can’t model how to use information effectively? How to use new search tools? How to navigate databases? These ARE NOT specialist skills any more – they are core skills for learning!
The era of collaborating, communicating and integrating resources flexibly and online is here to stay. Every form of interactive and social media tools should be deployed by school libraries to support learning, teaching and communicating with and between students. Are teachers ready for this? Are your own library staff ready for this?
So what is the situation with content?
Dave Pollard wrote about The Future of Media: Something More than Worthless News. Agreed, the reason he wrote the post is quite different to mine – but in a lateral kind of way, what he wrote has huge relevance to information professionals. Media is changing, and the way media can work for or against learning is deeply concerning. Dave writes
Few people care to take the time needed either to do great investigative work, or to think creatively and profoundly about what all the mountains of facts really mean.
There’s the rub – mountains of fact. Authority and relevance are as nothing when we are confronted with mountains of information to sift and verify. The alternative is to grab ‘something’ and miss the opportunity to engage in real metacognitive knowledge activities.
The diagram Dave offers provides a strong framework for information professionals. How do we deal with new and urgent information need? What value do we place on media scrutiny?
Of course we can’t answer these questions effectively without taking into consideration the shifting dimensions of interoperability and semantic search. We are datamineing on the one hand, and creating data on the other.
Now what’s the implications of this? Semantic search depends on our tags! and our tags depend on our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in data sets. It all depends on how things are defined and linked! Duplicate and meaningless content is created by poor search engine optimization and keyword cannibalisation. This means that the info junk pile continues to grow. The Search Engine Journal provides a good set of graphics (with explanations) that spell out these problems .
Here’s a simple image that demonstrates a good interlinking strategy. Then go and examine the canonical solution – looks like the stuff of good information professionals to me!
Of course, alongside the need for good search engine optimization is the growth in search functionality and growth in search engine options. Google has some new features that have been tested in the past months. Google wants to expose some advanced search options that allow you to refine the results without opening a new page. The options are available in a sidebar that’s collapsed by default, but it can be expanded by clicking on “Show options”.
You’ll be able to restrict the results to forums, videos, reviews and recent pages. There’s an option that lets you customize the snippets by making them longer or by showing thumbnails, much like Cuil. Google wants to make the process of refining queries more fun and exploratory by adding a “wonder wheel” of suggestions.
Maybe I’ll just stop thinking and wander right off and do some Semantic Web Shopping!
What? more issues to consider? not my move anymore? ….. massive change is pushing us into a 21st century information maze.
When it comes to change, I’m a person who is not comfortable with taking time about it all. So since starting at Joeys I have been brimming with optimism for the opportunity to ‘get digital’. Lots of new things began to happen as the year progressed, and we made some wonderful advances in our thinking and in the things we are doing.
So you can imagine how excited I was when Peggy Sheehy invited me to Suffern Middle School for the day, on my recent trip to New York City. My ever-patient husband, Martin, was heard to say “You want to do what? take a day out of your 5 days in NYC and work??”
Needless to say, work it was not!
Peggy Sheehy has been leading the way for many years, demonstrating the power of virtual worlds for learning! Based at Suffern Middle School, Peggy leads the Ramapo Islands initiative, and if you haven’t been reading her blog I suggest you start watching it now. Virtual worlds are the future as learning becomes wrapped in interactive and immersive 3D environments.
It was totally amazing to visit Peggy, meet the Principal and staff, and participate in some introductory classes – new kids launching themselves into Ramapo Islands. Peggy very kindly brought forward some lessons so I could see and participate. How natural it all seemed! How easily the kids understood what it was all about! In one period these kids were dressing their avatar, walking and flying around, talking with friends, and playing – the favourite experiment was sliding down the large water slide. If this all sounds like a lot of fun and games – it was! But don’t for a minute assume it was wasted time.
Read Peggy’s blog to see what happens after these first lesson as students become more involved with virtual learning opportunities that teachers create at Suffern Middle School. Peggy writes that they will soon be tearing down the virtual walls and opening Ramapo Island to collaboration with other Teen Life education projects.
I rode the train back to New York City, and wondered how long it would be before I could do such exciting things.
Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote his original proposal for a better kind of linked information system. He was doing consulting for CERN in Switzerland, and found that its communication infrastructure was leading to information loss. So he proposed a solution using something called Hypertext. This led to the Hypertext Markup Language, or, as it’s more commonly known now, HTML. That in turn, led to the World Wide Web.
Were you around to see all these changes? I certainly was, and I definitely remember the trouble I had teaching teachers the concept of the WWW, what it might do for learning, and how to go about using it. Navigation nightmare – that’s what it was! But now we all use the Net for stuff – and mostly we incorporate it into our learning experiences for our students, albeit badly at times. But the argument is won and we have moved onto the whole new media thing – and the relevance of connectedness.
So what’s next?
In the TED Talk below Tim Berners-Lee provides insight into developments that will power the semantic web, and the basis for it’s development which is rooted in linked data. Way back in 2006 Tim was already writing about ‘linked data‘ which no doubt explains the advances made in subsequent years in semantic web research. As he explained then
The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.
Now we understand the potential of the semantic web differently and the implications are profound. You must read The Future of Federated Search: Muriel doesn’t search, but DFAST does, by Lee LeBlanc. This will give you a ‘picture’ of what might be – in a way that we can understand. I would never have understood what Tim was trying to explain in his original proposal for the web. But now I understand virtual environments and crave interoperability and interactivity 24/7! I won’t be contributing to the evolution any time soon, like the folks over at LinkedOpenCommunity at W3C SWEO Community, but I sure am grateful for their efforts!
A couple of snippets here, then watch the video 🙂
Our information seeking behaviors will come to be shaped by the information we seek. Devices and the access channels we seek information through will further define our search behaviors. The computer is only one of these devices; interaction search technologies another.
In 1995, a user expended time searching; in 2035, a user spends precious time thinking -differently. The days of sitting in front of a dumb search box are over. Users no longer pound the keys in frustration getting zero results or billions or results. How will this happen?
Right now I am in the run-up to the first exams of the year for my students. They’re getting nervous and I am too, while I gather my information, think about reports, and wonder how much information I can muster for the chats to parents that are coming up on Sunday.
It’s hard work, chipping away at the old models of schooling to bring about the change needed to make schooling effective again. Perhaps this has always been the case, but wouldn’t it be nice if we noticed the need for change just a little more quickly 🙂
Peggy Sheehy
judyoconnell.com 