Tony Wagner addressed the US State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) this week, and told the audience that their focus on testing interfered with the 7 survival skills 21st century students need. He suggested that US school systems need to move from content standards to performance standards.

The 7 survival skills he lists are
1. Problem-solving and critical thinking;
2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence;
3. Agility and adaptability;
4. Initiative and entrepreneurship;
5. Effective written and oral communication;
6. Accessing and analyzing information; and
7. Curiosity and imagination.

He sees technology having a crucial role in the development of these skills. SETDA has created “Class of 2020: Action Plan for Education” with a set of 10 recommendations to improve teaching and learning using technology.

The video 3 Steps for 21st Century Learning says the skills needed are those of competition, cooperation, and collaboration. Students need to be involved not only in personal learning but collaborative class projects, creative classrooms.

The issue of 21st century skills and what we mean by them is something that I have touched on before. I think the questions that I posed two months ago are still the ones we need to think about.
If we look at the 7 survival skills listed by Wagner, perhaps the only one we can’t claim to have been accommodated by systems and subjects in the 20th century is number 2: Collaboration across networks…
All the others have been part of more progressive teaching for decades.
Are these new skills? Or just thinking and social skills in new, more technological, contexts?

What is important about their 21st century context? It is a double-sided coin really: do we use the technology to develop the skills, or use the skills to utilise the technology.
The first of the recommendations by SETDA says
[education leaders need to] Ensure that technology tools and resources are used continuously and seamlessly for instruction, collaboration, and assessment.

It is that seamlessness that we don’t yet have, and which many systems still don’t see the importance of. Only the other day I was talking to a teacher who basically could not see why the use of ICTs in the classroom was so important.
She was concerned that getting to the point where we could use technology tools “continuously and seamlessly” was going to be a never ending financial black hole.
These conversations are interesting not because of what the concerns are, but because they reveal the depth of the disagreement about where we should be headed.

The edna Search can be embedded in any web page or blog.

The standard search

The distributed search includes not only the edna database but a also a number of trusted repositories.

To get the code to embed in your website go to The Generators.

edna’s Feed2JS tool allows you to take an RSS feed and convert that into JavaScript code for embedding into a website. If the RSS feed updates so the content of your website will update.
The example below will be self explanatory.

The last tool is the edna Short URL service.
To use this tool you will need to have an edna login, the same one thta you use for http://me.edu.au and edna Groups. This is required simply to confirm that you are a bona fide user.

Through this service I took this URL:
http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/cashome.nsf/51c9a3d36edfd0dfca256acb00118404/958e7b159518abe0ca2572fe001e2ad8!OpenDocument and created http://url.edna.edu.au/vtsZ

Here’s Cloud Computing in Plain English

Some links to check:

• A review of Noteflight, “the first online music compositiontool that sits entirely on the web.”
• What Cloud Computing Can Do For You - the writer believes cloud computing has reached a”tipping point.”
• With new Web services, more companies are working in the ‘cloud’: list 4 ways to live among the clouds.
• Gmail launches voice and video chat
• and some advertising that seems a bit over the top: Instinct - check the video out: Instinct vs iPhone
• Explaining Cloud Computing - explains concepts as SaaS (Software as a Service), online applications to look for, HSaaS (Hardware as a Service- purchase computer processing power online), utility computing, computing appliances. This looks like one of a number of useful videos on web 2.0 and beyond.
• Explaining Ultramobile Computing - a UK video talking about the small computers that have become increasingly available this year.

I am still interested in stories about how schools, education systems and universities are buying into or preparing for utilising cloud computing, and would be glad to hear any that you know of.

Here is one example:
Australian schools dump Outlook for Gmail for 1.3 million students.
The New South Wales (NSW) education department in Australia has decided to drop Outlook/Exchange services and use Google services instead. The switch will affect 1.5 million students and save the department nearly AU$23 million ($22 million USD).

This will replace the current Microsoft based system and dramatically increase students storage from 35 Mb to 1 Gb. This isn’t the first case in Australia of students being provided with Gmail accounts. Last year Macquarie University announced plans to move all student accounts to Gmail and other Australian Universities are considering following them.
 

• support from fellow educators, like-minded teachers
• new ideas
• information about trends, events, new publications
• professional development, both incidental and intentional
• just in time assistance - you can ask questions
• the opportunity to “define” yourself
• a place to create an online e-portfolio
• development of your understanding of, and confidence in using, web 2.0 tools
• a wider network of “friends”
• growth of your own reputation

Links to follow up:

• me.edu.au: an Australian social network for educators.
• Classroom2.0: a Ning social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative or transformative technologies in education. This a large network of over 12,000 members with a large number coming from the US. Search for me there.
• Ning in Education: similar site to Classroom2.0: a community for those using the Ning social networking platform in education. Look for a block in the right hand column that contains a list of Ning education networks.
• Library 2.0: a Ning network for librarians.
• TeacherLibrarianNetwork: This is another Ning, but this one has a number of defined sub-groups: High School Teacher Librarians, Elementary School Librarians, YA Lit in School Libraries, More Things: Applying 2.0 tools, Information fluency, and more.
• Social Networks in Education: a wiki that gives an extensive list of social networks you can join.
• Socialnetworking4teachers: a wiki with useful links and ideas.
• CyberSmart! for teachers: a site devoted to interenet safety with advice for teachers.
• Literacy & technology: another Ning, for those interested in the application of technology to literacy learning in the K-3 area of the school.
• Literacy Lighthouse: another Ning community, a place for high school English teachers to become beacons of 21st Century literacy. Join now and share best practices, forge collaborations, and discuss what literacy in the 21st Century entails.This is a small recently created network.

What to do

• visit a number of networks and then decide which one (or two at the most to start with) best suits you.
• sign up - usually you have to create a user name, decide on your own password, give an email address, and sometimes you go straight in. In others you won’t be able to login until you’ve confirmed your registration by email.
• usually in the network you will get your own set of pages, with a blog page, and the opportunity to “collect” friends.
• work on creating your profile - you can usually add some details about yourself, your interests etc., and add a photo. Defining who you are is really important.
• explore what the site offers, look at the forums, explore other people’s pages, collect colleagues, leave comments.
• work out whether you can monitor what goes on in the network by email, RSS feeds, or whether you have to remember to visit frequently.
• Always remember that the benefits of social networking for you will depend on your participation. If you “lurk” it is very easy to become a voyeur rather than a participant, and then eventually it will seem less important for you to visit.

Virtual Social Worlds and the Future of Learning –9:43
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jY4UkPbAc
Talks about 7 Sensibilities

• The Sense of Self
• The Death of Distance
• The Power of Presence
• The Sense of Space
• The Capability to Co-Create
• The Pervasiveness of Practice
• The Enrichment of Experience

Edusim 3D in your class: 3:16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVFsxev-2sk
Mashing up interactive whiteboards and virtual worlds (Edusim3d), an open source virtual world designed for use with classroom interactive whiteboards.

Videos about Second Life

Education in Second Life 2:57
– interesting questions about face2face vs virtual world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1SrZua5ww

Science Learning Opportunities in Second Life 3:24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc
This is an interesting one too with clear educational animations

Nurse education in Second Life 3:29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xidko60S2Uk
This one does make you wonder why you would bother.

Videos about Wonderland

Wonderland Sun Project: Introduction to concept. 48 seconds
Wonderland is a virtual world tool kit that allows people to create and share their own memories.
Could be used as a project management work space to work with a virtual team across several projects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0kM0sDYmYc

MPK20 Sun’s Virtual Workspace 4:58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K_yLMMHTmE
Sun Microsystem’s virtual team room and demo floor. They created this space instead of building a new bricks and mortar building. Technical background plus practical demonstration of how the team is using the virtual space. They use it for audio and video conferencing with people in both the virtual space and the “real” physical space. Extensible Open Source environment.

Project Wonderland DEMO Walkthrough 3:32
German produced for CeBIT 2007 about MPK20.  Wonderland can be run on a variety of platforms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plIW4KMIOq4

Metaverse: Project Wonderland. 3:56
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyryS_W4ZnU
metaverse technology. Deron Johnson talking about project Wonderland. An interview with a lot of background noise. Seems to have been made at a convention or trade show.

Project Wonderland: Toolkit for Building 3D Virtual Worlds
Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.
There is a series of videos here:
https://lg3d.dev.java.net/WonderlandTechOv.html
You can download the videos to run locally without an internet connection

This is a professional development day organised by ISS-LN (International Schools of Singapore — Library Network)
It is being held at the Australian International School in Singapore.
At the last count they have 250 participants.
My sessions are hands-on workshops on the following topics
•  Social Networking for Educators: Why is this important? How do I do it?
•  Running an Online Community — the how and why of it
•  Keeping Up-to-date and Informed: Using RSS Feeds and other sources

The GapingVoid cartoon displaying below was a bit predictive in January 2006 wasn’t it?

The cartoonist Hugh MacLeod commented below the cartoon:

The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging:

1. “Nobody’s going to read your blog unless there’s something in it for them.” -Seth Godin.

2. “Nobody’s going to link to your blog unless there’s something in it for them.” -Hugh MacLeod

So how many blogs are in “the pile of bodies”? How many have fallen by the wayside? Impossible to know I should think. And I have this vision that as the pile of corpses grows, still littering the blogosphere, a growing army are trying blogging for the first time. And, as with any technology, it is being used in ways that were not at first envisaged.

My first impression of blogging was a bit like the soapbox in Hyde Park, or even the voice crying in the wilderness. I didn’t really have any concept of growing an audience, far less a following. This year I have learnt about the importance of taking time to read the blogs of others, think about what they are saying and to leave a comment.

So what do the best blogs look like? Here’s a list to sample.

Top 100 Australian Blogs
Top 100 Education Blogs (OEDb) - this list was created in December 2008, but my cursory investigation indicates that many are still around. Not sure whether they would make it into a top 100 these days though. Connectivism was at number 4 (seems to have moved to a new site, Stephen Downes at number 11, The Knowledge Tree (The Australian Flexible Learning Framework) at number 12, heyjude at number 44, and Graham Wegner’s Teaching Generation Z (now Open Educator) at number 76. They were just the ones that I recognised. It would be interesting to look at how many are now defunct, how many have had a makeover, and, more importantly, why.

Does anybody know of a more recent attempt to list a top 100 education blogs?

I might still be on the wrong track with my long tail investigation but it’s certainly taking me to interesting sites.

]]> http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/12/the-long-tail-scrapheap/feed/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/11/the-long-tail-of-the-internet/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/11/the-long-tail-of-the-internet/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:59:32 +0000 Kerrie Smith Educationau http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/11/the-long-tail-of-the-internet/ The fact that I am writing this post is an example, I guess, of the long tail of the internet in action.

I started off with Stephen Downes’ OLDaily in my email box. Obsolete technology I know, but a veritable life raft for me! The title of the item says Maybe Blogging is Dead After All (or Our Conceptualization Is)

That led me off to Alan Levine’s blog posting with the same title. And that’s where I met the concept of “the long tail” for the second time in 2 days - and I can’t for the life of me remember where the first was.

Part of the discussion seems to be about the changing use of authoring technologies. Not only are there now alternatives to the blog, but the way people are using blogging is changing too. According to my blog archives, I began this blog in September 2006, which puts me I suppose into the ranks of those who have been blogging for a relatively long time.

Many people 2 years ago began their blog as a personal journal, with little expectation that it would have much of an audience. However many have now moved on from their blog into the mini-blogging provided by Twitter and similar tools. I think we can see this is the decline of the percentage of active bloggers. But just as many are replacing their personal blog with other tools, educators are beginning to see the usefulness of blogging for lesson planning, for literacy activities, for recording internet journeys, and informing the wider community.

You are probably wondering why I referred to the “long tail” earlier on. I’m not even sure that I am using the term correctly. What I am referring to is the way you can start off in one blog and then move almost seamlessly into another, branching off into another and so on. The blogging world facilitates this as we link to specific posts in each other’s blogs, and to online resources. The result is the beginning of a community.
John Seely Brown says “The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web – this very long tail of interests – into a “circle of knowledge-building and sharing.”

Other links you might like to check:

Minds on Fire: Open Education,  The Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

The long tail cometh in education.. but slowly

Richard Anderson talks about the challenges provided by the “Long tail of Knowledge”.

]]> http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/11/the-long-tail-of-the-internet/feed/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/11-november-remembrance-day/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/11-november-remembrance-day/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:48:21 +0000 Kerrie Smith Educationau http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/11-november-remembrance-day/ Remembrance Day commemorates the signing of the Armistice at the end of World War I in 1918. This took place at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The central element of Remembrance Day ceremonies is the one minute silence.

In 2008 we commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Armistice and a service will be conducted at the Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux, France.  This event has already been preceded by the re-dedication of the Australian Corps Memorial Park at Le Hamel on Saturday 8 November.
http://www.dva.gov.au/commem/rememb/Rem_day.htm

90 years ago on 24 April 1918 Australian troops recaptured the village of Villers Bretonneux from the Germans ending the German advance on Amiens.
This year, 2008, a special Anzac Day dawn service was held at Australian War Memorial at Villers Bretonneux. This is the first time an Anzac day Dawn service has been held on this site.

Since 1919, the memory of the Australian contribution to Villers–Bretonneux has indeed been ‘kept alive’. The town was adopted by the City of Melbourne and funds collected to help with its reconstruction. Victorian schoolchildren raised money towards the rebuilding of the local school which has ever since been known as the ‘L’Ecole Victoria’ (Victoria School). In the school building is the ‘Franco–Australian Museum’ which houses a range of materials dealing with the Australian connection with the town both during the war and into more recent times.
And, since 1919, the men and women of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, on behalf of Australia and all the other countries of the old British Empire and Commonwealth who lost soldiers and airmen in the battles around Villers–Bretonneux, have carefully tended and looked after the war cemeteries and memorials which dot the region.

For more information…

 

]]> http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/11-november-remembrance-day/feed/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/world-toilet-day-19-november/ http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/world-toilet-day-19-november/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:23:19 +0000 Kerrie Smith Educationau OzProjects online projects http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/world-toilet-day-19-november/ OzProjects: Sanitation and Disease
19 November is World Toilet Day.

Two special guests will be available during the next 10 days in the Sanitation and Disease Project at
http://www.ozprojects.edu.au/course/view.php?id=19
to answer questions about their work.

Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization will be answering questions posted to the forum by 17th November.

Zaneta who recently spent 10 months working as a communications officer for a Water and Sanitation Program in Bangladesh as an AusAID Youth Ambassador for Development (AYAD) will be answering questions in the forum from 10th-14th November.

]]> http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/ksmith/2008/11/10/world-toilet-day-19-november/feed/