Garry’s Rambles

Thanks to Judy O’Connell - yet again for her links to a great read. This link to What Matters Now by Seth Godin set me thinking about the new year. There are some wonderful and thoughtful quotes I picked out from the 43 plus contributions to this e-book. Here are some of them. Enjoy.

Dignity comes from creating your own destiny
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder of the Acumen Fund and author of The  Blue Sweater.

The best way to get approval is not to need it.
Hugh MacLeod blogs at Gaping Void and is author of Ignore Everybody.

When times are tough, vision is the first causality….things get very tactical instead.
Michael Hyatt is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers

The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real.
Chris Anderson is Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine

Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere
William C. Taylor is a cofounder of Fast Company magazine.

But if change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change, we really need to focus on raising the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the unsustainable status quo.
Alan M. Webber is co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals
Daniel H. Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind.

Getting things done is not the same as making things happen.
Gina Trapani blogs about software and productivity at Smarterware.

The secret learned by technology providers is to spend less time providing services for citizens, and to spend more time providing services to developers. Every successful technology platform, from the personal computer and the internet to the iPhone, has been profoundly generative: a small investment in open infrastructure that others can build on turns into a vast cornucopia of services.
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media.

This is an interesting and important perspective from Europe on their policies to encourage a Digital Europe by their Media Chief, Vivienne Reding. I also noted on the same page another link that makes a strong and important statement on Internet Piracy. Whilst we have had some good reports (eg the Cutler Review) on Innovation which calls for a review of IP arrangements in Australia, and the Gov 2.0 initiative is encouraging more open forms of communication with government, education and training, I fear, will take a more conservative risk averse approach. For example, this approach to Queensland teachers using social network sites with students is but one recent move. In regards to IP, many teachers, and students, are now being encouraged to publish works on the Internet. In these ‘mashups’, really teachers have been ‘mashing up’ material from multiple sources for years, (eg the roneo, the photocopier) only now they can make them public and all too often the rights associated with use are too confusing, too complex and so the easy solution is to say ’stop it’. A strategy to encourage a Digital Australia would be to enlist teachers as digital citizens.

Diana said that the network has changed everything…this is what is so different in today’s context. She says a 1% increase in tertiary educated workforce increases GDP by around 6%.  Innovation drives economic success - entrepreneurship takes ideas and converts to commercial success. However, costs of education continues to grow…particularly if governments want % of all people to be better educated. Society can benefit from small, cumulative contributions of a large number of people.

Emerging educational ecology includes research and scholarship are more conversational, so is learning. Undergraduates spend only 7.7% of their time in formal learning environments. Anytime, anywhere, information and data is at their fingertips. Tim O’Reilly talks about Web 2.0 moving to web squared where the web is a platform and data is used in context aware applications…those people who have iphones know this only too well.

She says that many students are haptic learners…they learn by touch. Haptics augment the learning environment by touch, pressure and sound. She spoke about Virtual Worlds to experience tsunami’s and for role playing.

Adaptive testing (Knewton) responds and learns from each answer the learner provides…..I personally would rather see a debate about what we should actually be assessing..but I agree that we should be treating learners as individuals and testing them against their own learner goals.

She talked about StraightLiner and Peer to Peer Universities and other organisations like flatworld knowledge which is an open source authoring model for publishers. She says their are many new models that have become available because of the network and challenge traditional notions of learning.

I’ll post a link to the presentation when I get same…but worth having a look as she goes onto the impact in scholarship and research…and in Australia we seem to be aligning well to her call for action.

 

Today I attended the launch of the Cybersmart website by Minister Conroy at the Beth Rivkah Ladies College in St Kilda. Minister Conroy spoke of the enormous benefit to education and the economy of the internet. However, there were negative aspects to the use of the internet. The Cybersmart program was a resource that supported the positive use of the internet for teens, staff in schools and parents. It was intended to take the ‘fear’ out of the use of the internet whilst recognising there were risks associated with it use.

The Cybersmart program consists of the website and an outreach program which provides professional learning for staff in schools. Greg Gebhart who was undertaking a professional development session with staff at the school commented on the fact that the use of mobile devices was now used extensively by students in primary schools and the target audience for things like cyberbullying, cybersafety and security needed to be focussed at the younger years in schools. The comments back from teachers at the school was that what Greg was presenting was a little scary but timely and important that teachers and parents realise the great opportunities and potential risks in the use of the internet.

education.au is proud to have supported ACMA in developing this site. It would also be an oversight if I did not mention that we were ably assisted by Robyn Treyvaud and Lee Burton from the Centre for Strategic Education who provided much of the content for the site.

Arnold Schwarzenegeer has signed an Executive Order in California is intended to tackle the digital divide, California’s competitiveness and leadership role in the US. Some interesting statistics were given to support the Executive Order.

Less than half of Latinos (48%) have home computers, compared with about 86% for Whites, 84% for Asians, and 79% for Blacks.

Only 40% of Latinos have Internet access, and only 34% of Latinos have broadband connections at home, while majorities of other racial or ethnic groups have both Internet access and broadband connections.

Only 32% of Californians are very confident about using the Internet.

More than 56% of parents indicate that they visit their children’s school websites, but only 30% of those with household incomes under $40,000 indicate doing so, as compared to 84% of those with incomes of $80,000 or more.

More than 62% of Californians indicate a concern that lower-income areas are less likely than others to have access to broadband Internet technology.

There is a disparity among ethnic/racial groups, income levels, and regions when comparing rates of computer ownership, Internet access, and broadband connections at home.

A majority of residents express concern that Californians in lower-income areas and rural areas have less access to broadband Internet technology than others.

There are indications that since 2000, computer use has grown among whites (79% to 85%) and blacks (76% to 83%), as has Internet use (70% to 81% for whites, 60% to 82% for blacks), but among Latinos, computer use has declined (64% to 58%) and Internet use is unchanged (47% to 48%), while Asians have seen in both their use of computers (91% to 81%) and the Internet (84% to 80%).

I wonder how much longer before we will be expecting everyone will have a computer with internet access? How can governments ensure that those who do not have the financial capacity do get access to computers? Will the next Digital Education Revolution assist people at home to purchase appropriate technology for learning and workforce development?