Learning - Thinking - Playing

Cobbers

A moving experience with my son at the unveiling of the Cobbers statue in Melbourne.

The Why 2 of Web 2.0 - my take...

Today I had the opportunity to attend a professional learning session titled "The Why 2 or Web 2.0" in Sydney. In general the session had an audience consisting of a very large number of teacher librarians with a nice even spread of primary and secondary representatives. More information and takes on the next episode of the EdTechCrew.

The presenters today were:

• Will Richardson (Educator and Writer) Blog - Wiki
• Westley Field - Director of Skoolaborate
• Judy O'Connell - Head, Library and Information Services, St Joseph's College
• Christine Mackenzie - CEO Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Will talk about the idea of looking through a lens for this presentation - as a parent (his perspective) He indicated that he has very few answers but has a number of very good questions.

Will talked about the idea everyone with a mobile phone with a camera is know really a journalist - report, and can use there networks to distribute ideas and stories. A direct example occurred in Sydney yesterday where there was a shooting at Star City casino where a person was shot twice. Channel 10 news ran the story and used good quality images from above the crime scene taken by a member of the public.

An interesting stat to come out of the presentation was that IBM internally have 26,000 blogs and that the company whats to get employees to share their knowledge and ideas. Things are changing around the read write web.

The use of social networking sites to do things differently - the story of a student that passed away at his old school and within a few hours a site was set up in memory of the deceased student and people came to share there stories and memories of this person - within a very short time 400 people we members of this page. Students using these tools in fundamentally different ways than what adults would think off.

A few books talked about that I am planning to check out include:

• Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky see you tube video on his thoughts here...
• The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Unabridged)
• The World is Flat
• The Book is Dead (Long live the Book) - Sherman Young

Will talked about the ideas that there are lots of kids that do not have access to go instruction on say biology - we should be teaching them to find and locate this information/content. We should then be enabling these students to create networks with others and collaborate around the idea of biology. The fact that these networks could be located anywhere in the world should really not matter.

We need to talk about how we educate our children to find information not to remember information because it is contained in a test - we need to teach them how to find information, how to validate and confirm information and how to share that information and make the best use of it for the task or activity at hand.

Teach students and teachers to read contextually online - being able to read and write hyper textually is a key skill to develop

A great wikipedia story from the presentation - a student did a bit of work on an assignment (fairly rubbishy) then posted it onto wikipedia and watched as others put information and details in to make it a very good assignment. Although he got a poor mark for his work (which was really not his) he should have received and A for the thinking and application to get the required information in such a creative way.

Wesley Field talked about online environments and the 2007 Horizon report.

Showed an example of a new $15M building that will be built at MLC in Sydney for the Junior school- he showed on screen a second life virtual representation of the new building that was constructed by a 17 year old student that has allowed teachers and others to explore the environment and look at the furniture and colour schemes. A really great application - more importantly was the fact that a student was engaged in building this and that this virtual representation was able to help the designers as well.

Wesley then went onto sow an empty shopping centre that could be used by students to do research and build their own shops and look at the development and growth of shops - layout, costs, business models and a whole range of other areas. A very powerful idea and one that would enable amazing opportunities for students.

I found myself in the sessions doing what our students would do, I had my laptop connected to the Internet and when I was not developing ideas around what I was hearing or looking at sites that have been mentioned I would drift off and follow up other ideas - although it may have looked like I was not paying attention - I was but doing it my way in a multi modal way.

Overall a good day - some of the presenters lacked a little direction in their message and one seemed to meander a little but otherwise a great day all up.

Good to meet you Chris and all those others I met.

Why 2 of Web 2.0 - Will Richardson

Currently at an event in Sydney listening to Will Richardson - you can also check it out here on uStream (will post more later including audio and footage from my flip):

1984 - Nicholas Negroponte speaks at TED

It seems such a long time ago, 1984. Well it was and what is truly surprising is that the TED conference has been around since then, most people and most educators have only recently become aware of TED with the release of speakers video's onto the web.

TED has just released a few video's from the very beginning, this one is with Nicholas Negroponte the founder of MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC - I spoke with Joel Stanley and aussie who worked on this program on our podcast the Ed Tech Crew with Darrel Branson).

In this video from 1984, Nicholas talks about 4 areas - touch screens, new kinds of books, pc's for students and teleconferencing. This is a good video to watch just to take stock of what was being considered way back when and what has actually transpired and what is about to transpire. If ever you were going to talk to others about the development of great ideas and how long things sometimes take - this is a classic case in point.

Today we are just seeing the touch screens come to the fore with the iPhone and iPod Touch, electronic books are starting to gather steam with the Kindle, the OLPC and EEC PC, then we have all the video and web conferencing tools that are become more are more accessible.

One Stop Shop

The interest and discussion around my last post has been interesting to watch and observe, especially in relation to a number schools and organisations currently looking at rolling out Vista and Office. The other day I attended the Microsoft Education Australia Road Show and while it was not directly inspiring it was interesting in a number of ways. One area of particular interest was the presentation by Travis Smith (Assistant Principal) Frankston High School who spoke about the developing "Web Portal" at his school that is being supported by Solutions IT and Microsoft. While his presentation was entertaining and informative there were so many questions left unanswered about the drivers, the timeline, students engagement outside the educational expectations and the cost to the school. Travis also used the term 'One Stop Shop' in regards to the web portal for staff, this statement struck me as being odd in that it is against everything the current web environment is developing where people have multiple locations to access, store and create information and content - why would you create a one stop shop - rather than a home base from which to explore, risk take and experiment.

If you looker deeper into Travis's statement he is focusing on the here and now administration and management of the school, teachers and students  - not talking about the facilitation of new ideas and teaching/learning strategies with new or available technologies. The web portal in this instance is like IWB's at the moment - it is a new way to do old things. What I want to see is the use of the web portal to engage both teachers and students in the learning and communication process  - to challenge ideas and test theories, provide an environment to share  thoughts and manage  ideas in an educational setting. Whilst the reception for the presentation and application was very warm - there is still a long road to travel - do we have the capacity to change?!?!

A few things to keep your eye on from Microsoft are:

• Grava: https://connect.microsoft.com/Grava
• Boku: a virtual robot in a simulated world - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/mar07/03-06TechFest2007PR.mspx

Generally the road show was like any corporation fare, the lack of numbers was noticeable. For more information visit: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/education/breathelife/default.mspx