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Learning is a Conversation!

July 18, 2008 – 8:54 am

Yesterday Chris Betcher, he of http://betch.edublogs.org/, was a keynote speaker at the CEGSA conference. The conference theme is Learning is a Conversation, and Chris made some really interesting points that you might like to think about.

  • Learning in the 21st century is social.
    Learning happens through our conversations.
    The boundaries to where we have our conversations have come down. Our potential to connect has changed.
  • Conversations are often informal exchanges of knowledge
    We have serendipitous conversations that are spontaneous
    We didn’t know we didn’t know something until it comes up in the conversation, and then we realise there is a gap in our knowledge
  • We have these conversations in our Personal Learning Communities, Personal Learning Networks, Communities of Practice, Special Interest Groups.
  • There’s wisdom in crowds so long as you have
    - diversity
    - independence
    - decentralisation (dispersal)
    - aggregation
  • There is a danger of the “echo chamber” effect where everyone agrees with everyone else.
    Little learning takes place there
    The best learning takes place when there is an element of disagreement, argument or conflict

Chris argues for using a range of tools
“When your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail”

This led nicely into my session about blogging, and my concept that a blog can be the initial point in a conversation. Or if you take up an idea that someone else has expanded on in their blog, part of an ongoing conversation.

But of course that is only so if people take the time to respond. What do you think?

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, informal learning, professional learning, CEGSA | Comments (1)

Transforming education with technology

July 17, 2008 – 9:43 am

An article on eSCHOOL NEWS titled NECC highlights tech’s ‘transformative’ power reports on the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in San Antonio. Transformation and collaboration were the central ideas.

ISTE President Trina J. Davis opened the conference by challenging attendees to really transform education through the use of technology, not just layer technology onto traditional instructional practices.

Davis suggested these strategies

  1. Become powerful advocates for change
  2. Share your knowledge and your passion
  3. Showcase your work and that of your students in innovative ways
  4. Dream big
  5. Use all of the resources available to you

“Collectively, we can have a real impact around the globe and be effective change agents,” Davis concluded.

So, how do you see yourself measuring up? Are you an agent for change, or a lurker just layering technology onto what you’ve always done?

For me, one of the big measuring sticks is to think about what you are now doing differently, or, what have you ceased to do altogether? For surely you can’t do things differently if you are doing the things you always did. That involves some hard decisions, some re-organisation, some learning of new tricks, some re-prioritisation. And you are never too old to do any of this!

How do you show you are an agent for change? What are you doing to spread the word?
How do you measure your success?

Here at education.au we are trying to help educators to collaborate, to learn about new technologies and new ways of doing things, to join supportive communities of practice.

And I’m doing my bit out on the hustings in the next few days: delivering 3 sessions at the local CEGSA conference today and tomorrow, and then an edna workshop in Hobart on Monday.
They are not chores though - I enjoy my role as an agent of change, as you can see from this blog and others that I author.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, changes in education | Comments (0)

How does your Blog stand up?

July 16, 2008 – 2:59 pm

I am really interested in what makes a good blog and it has been in my thoughts off and on for most of this year.

More than that I am also interested in what functions a blog can have in a teacher’s professional development, in their professional portfolio, or their professional learning environment.

You will see some of these topics in Blogging Corner, an edna Group for bloggers, would-be bloggers, and blogging mentors.

Tomorrow afternoon I am giving a session at the CEGSA conference called What’s in a blog? I’m trying to pass some of my enthusiasm, about the cathartic/clarifying experience that blogging can be, on to others.

Some other links that have interested me recently:

Much of your blog’s layout is determined by the blog tool that you use, but it’s good to put some thoughts into how you can improve on what you’ve got.

Please comment with your suggestions or tips/sites you’ve come across.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, communication tools, personal learning environments, bloggingcorner08 | Comments (2)

Should July 9 be Australia Day?

July 11, 2008 – 10:16 am

I’m recalling all the controversial discussion we’ve had in the past about the appropriateness of January 26, the date of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1788, and the consequent annexing of Australia to the British Empire by the simple planting of a flag that ignored the rights of the traditional owners, as a day we should celebrate.

I’m sorry to have missed reminding you that July 9 was Constitution Day, but that is probably an indication of the lack of status we currently give that date.

July 9 is the date of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of 1900, the Act of the British Parliament that set the new nation up.
It was the result of a consultative process that had taken place over the previous decade, resulted in at least two drafts, and accompanied by secession threats from at least one state. There’s an image of the front cover here, and more information can be found on the Documenting a Democracy website.

Interestingly few Australians would know that the states named in first paragraph of Chapter 12 of the original constitution are New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia (which included what is now the Northern Territory), Queensland and Tasmania. Western Australia was still thinking of secession at this stage. Western Australia agreed to join on 31 July 1900.

Or should we actually called January 1 Australia Day?
In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was officially proclaimed at Centennial Park in Sydney and the Earl of Hopetoun was sworn in as Australia’s first Governor General.

An interesting debate, especially in the light of another discussion that is happening at the moment about what Australian history content should be in the National Curriculum. A recent article in the Australian headed Schools failing to teach on Holocaust, says An obsession with Australian history in curriculums has left students able to leave school without knowing that the Holocaust occurred. An interesting statement in that less than a decade ago we were complaining that our students did not know enough Australian history.
The National Curriculum Board, which first met on 23 April this year, is charged with delivering a single K-12 curriculum to be in operation from the beginning of the school year in 2011. The foundation areas are English, mathematics, the sciences and history, with a focus on literacy and numeracy. Be interesting to see what history makes it into the curriculum as the debate hots up. More about the National Curriculum Board here.

So which date do you think should be Australia Day?

  • January 1
  • January 26
  • July 9

Or other candidates?

  • 25 April (currently Anzac Day)
  • September 1 (currently Wattle Day)

A little known fact - India celebrates 26 January as Republic Day

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, Australian education, national curriculum, Australian history, significant dates | Comments (1)

World Youth Day, 15 July

July 10, 2008 – 9:11 am

This is another one of those internationally significant days that you will find on edna’s Australian Schools Calendar.

World Youth Day is part of the Catholic Church’s week of events for youth and with youth. It gathers thousands of young people from around the world to celebrate and learn about the Catholic faith and to build bridges of friendship and hope between continents, peoples and cultures.

This year’s World Youth Day (WYD08) is the largest youth event in the world and will be held in Sydney from Tuesday 15 to Sunday 20 July 2008. WYD08 will be the largest event Australia has ever hosted. It will attract over 125,000 international visitors - more than the 2000 Olympics. WYD08 will mark the first visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Australia.

Events will occur from Tuesday 15 July until Sunday 20 July, with Pope Benedict arriving Thursday 17 July. There is a very full week of events, involving schools and host families right across Sydney. For many the highlight will be the Evening Vigil with the Pope and sleep out under the stars at Southern Cross Precinct (Randwick Racecourse and Centennial Park) on Saturday night.

More than 165 outside concerts will take place during the week, and people from Sydney and regional centres have been organised into supporting the event as “pilgrim guides”.
The pilgrims will come from all over Australia and overseas, and at least half a million pilgrims are expected. The statistics for catering and accommodation are amazing.

With only one week to go on July 7, the “Olympic Torch” of World Youth Day reached Parramatta on its way through Sydney to the WYD08 Opening Mass. A 3.8 metre Cross, accompanied by an Icon of Our Lady and an Indigenous Message Stick, has been travelling through greater Sydney since 1 July.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau | Comments (2)

World Population Day, 11 July 2008

July 9, 2008 – 10:15 am

The focus of World Population Day 2008 is family planning: PLAN YOUR FUTURE, PLAN YOUR FAMILY.
The slogan on the UNFPA site says Plan to beat poverty. Plan to gain equality. Plan to beat maternal death. Forty years after world leaders declared in 1968 that individuals have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children, modern contraception remains out of reach for hundreds of millions of women, men and young people.

World Population Day is one of the significant dates that is featured on edna’s Calendar for Australian Schools.
A search of edna locates some useful classroom resources. In addition edna’s Global Education site identifies a number of useful resources.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has a Population Clock running that gives an estimate of the current resident population of Australia. It increments as you watch. As I look at it now, it tells me that Australia’s estimated population at this very moment is 21,358,434. That means that currently we account for 0.32 % only of the world population estimated at 6,708,743,815

This is a bit higher than the Poodwaddle Clock which also gives a break down by major areas, male and female, births and deaths etc. This page gives a range of world clocks to look at.

Another interesting site is GapMinder, which includes GapMinder World, where moving graphics show the development of countries according to various indicators, GapCast - all about energy and emissions, and Human Trends Development 2005 - interactive presentations related to this report. The World Income Distribution presentation focusses on the inequality of world wealth distribution.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, Australian Schools Calendar | Comments (6)

Visible and Tangible Learning Objects

July 4, 2008 – 9:56 am
Chemical Elephant

Many thanks to my friend Maxine who is the publishing executive editor of Nature, the scientific magazine, who pointed to this statue and the history behind it in her blog today.

In case you can’t work out what it is, it is a periodic table. It is called the chemical elephant and is found in Washington, DC, outside the American Chemical Society building.
The elephant was decorated with pictures of elephants depicting the periodic table of the elements by the students of Patapsco High School. Read more at Maxine’s blog about some of the creative ideas the students used.

The elephant was part of a city scheme to decorate the streets with two Washington icons - elephants and donkeys - and they provide landmarks on tourist trails. The Party Animals art project behind it all is described here. I have seen others such as Chicago Cows on Parade, the Dubai Camel Caravan, Bears in Berlin, and somewhere recently I saw black and white cows everywhere.

But I have digressed from learning objects. Maxine has based her post on one by a colleague at Nature called The Great Beyond. Following the links back in this posting I found The Periodic Table Printmaking Project. That project can be seen in greater detail here. It will all mean much more to the scientists and chemistry teachers among you than to me, but what a great project! Courtesy of links on The Great Beyond, I located The Comic Book Periodic table, Chemsoc’s Visual Elements Table and more.

But the “chemical elephant” fired my imagination and made me think of all those tangle learning objects that we see everyday, and probably just ignore. When did you last take your class on a tour of the city/town streets to look at the statues (and read the plaques), follow the tourist trails, read the inscribed pavers, even look at the biggest of them all, the buildings that show the city’s history!

For me too, this learning curve of mine today, is yet another illustration of the educative and connective power of blogging.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau | Comments (1)

Inhibitors to Online learning

July 2, 2008 – 2:14 pm

The transition of the internet into a more interactive read/write phase has had huge implications for teaching and learning, both for students and for teachers.
Online learning is very different when it is not simply a matter of finding resources in a cyber library. It is far more engaging when the learners can actually participate.
We have seen a huge growth in social networking tools to the point where we are now faced with a smorgasbord of possible places to explore.
One thing is pretty obvious: we can’t continue to do things the old way.

Just recently edna (Education Network Australia) held its first online conference day.
There were 5 sessions on offer:

• Social networking with me.edu.au
• Finding resources for embedding in Multimedia
• Digital Literacies
• Learning without Borders
• Education in Other Worlds
The staggering thing was how the first set of sessions booked out within 6 hours.
We set up a second day and that too booked out within hours.

If you would like to view/listen to/watch the archives for the 2 days of sessions then they are available through links on http://url.edna.edu.au/aPGh
The first four sessions were held in Live Classroom, while Education in Other Worlds was held in Second Life.
In the section headed Wimba Live Classroom Archives you will find some advice about the barriers that inhibited people’s ability to participate in these sessions, and indeed drove them to participate at home rather than in the work place. They are no doubt familiar to you: firewall and proxy settings, pop-up blockers, settings which mean you can only open one instance of a browser, disabled sound cards, prohibitions on certain URLS, and so the list goes on.

And while we are on inhibitors to online learning here is a video that education.au’s CEO Greg Black submitted to the recent OECD meeting in Korea.
It is a video so try it at home not at school.
Access it at http://url.edna.edu.au/W4vH

Recently education.au commissioned a report called Educators and ICT usage which looks at how educators are using the internet, what services they access and what delivery modes they prefer.
The report is at http://url.edna.edu.au/rcBQ. It found that the main barriers to using the Internet for educators were poor infrastructure – bandwidth, equipment reliability, accessibility (41%), and the blocking/filtering of Internet content.

edna recently ran a “proof of concept” project called edna.tv. The project aimed to explore possibilities for making online video accessible to Australian educators, and in particular the use of “grass-roots” video. The project can be seen at http://labs.edna.edu.au/ednatv together with a Show and Tell video, and the opportunity for you to comment at http://me.edu.au/c/ednatv

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, online technologies, Australian education, professional learning | Comments (0)

edna’s first online conference day

June 20, 2008 – 3:38 pm

After months of planning our first online conference day happened on Wednesday. We began with an early, over-breakfast-for-some, session on me.edu.au, followed it up two hours later with a session on Creative Commons and finding resources, particularly images, for use in multimedia.
Then came Digital Literacies, followed by Learning without Borders. In the evening 20 or so of us met in Second Life.
Kerry J has written a couple of wonderful blog postings about it.

SL meeting To the left you see a snapshot taken during the Second Life session.

We repeat the experience next Tuesday with a new batch of participants.

For me the interesting thing has been the lessons that we’ve learned so far.

  • We’ve always anticipated that we needed a presenter (of course) and also a person to help with any technical problems that participants might experience.
    What we hadn’t anticipated was how useful a scribe would be - another member of the team whose role it is to indicate in text what the presenter is actually saying.

  • We had several “set-up” sessions for people to come into Live Classroom and make sure their microphone headset was working properly. Some people still left thta to the last moment. However some who had come in, got it all working perfectly, found at the time that things were not quite right. In my own case my computer insisted on resetting its headset options if I left it idle between sessions.
  • A number of participants got permission to stay at home to access the sessions, because the restrictions through firewall and proxy server settings at their place of work would have meant they couldn’t use Live Classroom.
  • We’re still learning too about being online presenters- It is a bit more than just talking to a power point presentation. Just as when you are presenting to a face to face audience you “play” the audience, so in an online session you need to engage them by providing opportunities to participate and even talk.
  • We weren’t sure how many people we could cope with in a session, and so had restricted registrations to 20. In reality we probably could have managed more.
  • The archives for the sessions are now available online, and we will create another set next Tuesday. In reality having handouts, archives, and even presentations online for people to access is an important part of the process.

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, online technologies, web conferencing, ednaworkshops08 | Comments (0)

Developing and stimulating vibrant online communities

May 22, 2008 – 2:01 pm

In my job, I do a lot of thinking about how you make online communities work, how do you know they are “working”, and how do you know they have passed their “use-by” date?
I’m convinced that though the technology can assist, and obsolete technology can hinder, that the clue to success lies within the community itself, it’s dynamics are of utmost importance.

Talking about obsolete technologies, I belong to a couple of email lists where I would say the sense of community is very strong. They are largely self help groups, places where members can ask questions, for help to locate resources or solve a problem. They are not particularly deep thinking communities, although on the odd occasion a curly question such as copyright will spark a lot of conversation.

The sort of communities I want to direct my thoughts to here are those that use web spaces. Since the advent of social networking sites, the range of online communities for educators has multiplied dramatically, and let’s face it we can all only cope with so many. Similarly certain sorts of web places suit some of us more than others. Some of us are just lurkers, while others are rolling stones. Some us flourish in synchronous spaces, others prefer asynchronous activity, done at our own pace in our own time.

For what they are worth, here are my guidelines

  • Active communities don’t just happen. They need ongoing stimulating and nurturing. In a community space where the activities on offer depend for their creation on the “owner”, then the owner needs to generate them. But don’t, in a flurry of inspiration, lay a dozen eggs at once. Put just a few things on offer and see how they take off.
  • Create a new activity when the old ones seem to be flagging a bit.
  • The community owner(s) are members too. All you did was create the activity. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t participate, just don’t dominate, and don’t give the impression of delivering the “right” answers.
  • Encourage community members to create an online persona. People like to feel they are part of a “real” world. If you can use an image/avatar then encourage other members of the community to do so. Ask them to introduce themselves, and even create an activity through which that can happen. Even if people have been subscribed for a while, then this activity is often good for getting people to de-lurk. In a community where the majority lurk rather than participate, the community spirit has the tendency to dry up. If anything lurking encourages more lurking.
  • Use whatever online tools are available to you to encourage “getting to know you”. In your welcome message ask new members to introduce themselves
  • Make sure the community has a definition of purpose. Why does it exist? What will people get out of it? Are OT (off-topic) contributions allowed?
  • Create open ended activities - don’t ask questions that remind people of reading comprehension. Give participants something to discuss
  • Encourage sharing of resources, and even mentoring.
  • Try to make you community an interesting place to visit. There all sorts of little widgets, counters, maps, and RSS feeds that will create the impression of something well used, rather like a well-tended garden.
  • Community management/ownership is no arm-chair ride. Be prepared to monitor, visit, contribute as much as you can.

Resources to consider

By Kerrie Smith | Posted in Educationau, community development, virtual environments, community building | Comments (1)