Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

Page 2 of 14

An Overview Of The Current State Of Play In The EdTech World

Published on June 14, 2010 in Blogging and Mobile Technology. 5 Comments

It feels like ages since I’ve blogged and even longer since I’ve blogged anything worthwhile. Of course, the longer I leave writing here, the more the self doubt sets in and makes me wonder if I have anything worthy of pushing out to say. So, the counteractive cure to that is put up a grandiose title and have a bit of at length pontification about the current state of play in the edtech world.

I’m sick of Windows’ complete vulnerability to trojans, worms and other nasties especially when I’m trying to get mid year reports written on my school XP laptop. Files don’t play nice across platforms so doing it all on my favourite MacBook Pro wasn’t really an option. Interestingly, I can plug in a USB flashdrive into the Mac and see all these weirdly named folders (Kalba, Doda, Gravity etc.) that I just know shouldn’t be there but the Mac won’t let me delete them. Plug it back into the XP laptop and they become invisible but the crazy stuff happens then. I have found that I can plug in, see and delete these nasties in my son’s Ubuntu netbook. Another win for Open Source, I suppose.

I got another invitation in my inbox to be on one of those Top 100 Edublogs lists that seem to be all the rage. What disinterests me is how many policy, corporate and cause based blogs keep making those lists. I’m only interested in reading edubloggers who write for themselves, that are identifiable individuals with clear personalities and quirks – now that’s a list I’d be honoured to be on. I find it hard to take sites that call themselves onlinedegrees or onlinembas seriously, especially when the internet is a great conduit for learners who don’t want to follow a traditional credentialling process. Give me an empassioned teacher breaking free of the confines of their classroom over some politically driven ISTE-style bandwagon hopper. Jose sums it up better than I can anyway.

While I’ve been looking at how one might go about setting up, fund and implementing a 1:1 laptop program, David Truss has introduced a new concept that really resonates – the BYO laptop program. Not sure how it would fly in Australian government schools with the bureaucratic need to cover liability but it is worth considering. And I’m beginning to warm to the idea of iPads in the classroom, especially in the younger years.

Meh.. not really much to say. But it’s a start. I’ll see what gets my brain churning next.

How Much Of Me Is Owned By The Institution?

Published on March 26, 2010 in Blogging, Internet and Personal Reflections. 1 Comment

I’ve got Leigh Blackall’s retrospective screencast paused at the half way mark and I’m mulling over a few of his points. I’ve also been at a meeting together of the partner schools in my own system’s Learning Technologies Project where we’ve been tossing around ways to ensure that what we’ve discovered in our documented journey over the last two years is able to used by DECS to ensure that learning enabled by technology is valued and integrated into the work that we do. I’ll connect back to some of my thoughts about that meeting as I go and I’ll add the preface that I’m thinking about Leigh’s ideas and today’s discussion from a very personal, what’s-my-role-in-this-all point of view.

Leigh speaks about consciously avoiding using the institution’s tools in order to take his learning and his network connections wherever he goes. His institution happens to be the University of Canberra, mine happens to be DECS but you could substitute any over-arching body that funds and directs your daily work in education. His first example is email and how being locked into the institution’s email system compromises portability. People who use that system invest in it and when they move on, it is hard to take all of that built up digital history with them. The institution owns your email. The institution owns resources and initiatives developed by you whilst on their time or their domain. So, in a sense, my institution owns the professional me. But exactly how much? Where are the boundaries?

In the words of my principal, I am a user (of technology for learning!). When I go online and read blogs, leave comments, publish posts, respond in forums, create and share resources, I do so for my own learning first, and as an extension of my profession second. I want to be a better educator so naturally the lines between when I am doing something for my own personal betterment and when it can be beneficial for those who work alongside of me within my institution become somewhat hazy. I use tools that I sometimes bring back into my classroom. But I always start with the selfish premise of how can this tool / community / node / resource benefit me? In my mind, I strongly feel that this is my own stuff. My blog is my own content. My presentations that I develop for the audience reading here is my own content that I believe that I can share as I see fit. But it isn’t totally clear cut. Because on that Slideshare account mixed in with my Blogging As Professional Learning and my OpenEducatorPLE, content created for an audience beyond my institution, are slideshows like iwb+literacy and my Blogging@School which were developed as part of my paid employment. Who owns what there?

I use GMail as a personal email account. I have an sa.edu.au account for school. Occasionally, I communicate with people about school related matters on my GMail. Does it matter? Is it a case of either an institution owning my email or a giant corporation?

And things get even blurrier when it comes to my students. When Leigh mentions students in his screencast, he is talking about adult learners for whom the barriers to use of free-ranging social media for learning are much lower. It makes perfect sense for them to want the portability of their own online spaces of their own choosing as they could (potentially) move between courses or even institutions. I work with primary school students. They have an email account for as long as they are students at my school. They leave – that account is retired and they no longer have access. We use Edublogs as a blogging platform and the process comes down to decisions that are grappled with at a local level as these blogs are hosted beyond the jurisdiction of the institution. The student leaves primary school and then what happens to the blog they have worked on for two years? I’ve tried to treat their blog to be their content as much as possible while still maintaining that duty of care via my role as administrator of all student blogs, through my moderation of comments and exerting of my teacherly authority in the maintenance of certain standards and purposes. So their ownership is not as pure as it would be in the higher education world. So my obligations handed down to me from my institution become a method for control of the use of an outside tool, even one hosted on the open web.

To wind this up (and you’ll note that despite my promise in the first paragraph, I have not linked any of this back to today’s meeting; that might the subject for another post) Leigh talks about operating as an autonomous independent from the institution. I concur, but it is not easy. We find that our ideals are constantly compromised by reality and that what I pursue as a private citizen is inevitably intertwined with my professional goals. It is hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

Network Payoff

Published on February 22, 2010 in Blogging, Digital Convergence, Future Directions, Internet and Personal Reflections. 13 Comments

I work three days a week in a primary classroom. So, theoretically, I am in a good position for putting edtech and Web 2.0 idealism into a realistic roadtest situation. I don’t stand behind podiums at conferences berating and exhorting the masses to bring their classroom into the digital world. I don’t have influential push (or pull) within my own system – and I’m not sure what I’d be suggesting even if I did. But I have invested an enormous amount of my life over the past four years into this networked learning thing. If anything, I have a lot of digital runs on the board. Heh, the Geoffrey Boycott ¹ of edublogging. That could be me.

So, I feel that my personal benefit has been enormous. I connect with a wide array of educators who feed me a daily diet of inspiration, insight and practical resources. I have become more aware of how education systems work in various parts of the world. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting people that I’ve come across in my lifetime – some I’ve conversed with on Skype and in Elluminate and Adobe Connect or just the comments sections of blogs. My network connections have given me opportunity to present about my experiences at conferences and online events, and I’ve learned about connectivism, social media, gained a more balanced view about cybersafety issues and heard about Illich, Gatto and Postman for the first time.

I couldn’t give up my Network now – it gives too much to me.

But I work in a role where I’m meant to be bringing the “good oil” to teachers, helping them to get their feet wet in technology use and showing them how the web can transform student learning. It is a role that sets me up as some sort of “expert” which can be a problem in a couple of ways.

Firstly, Darren Kuropatwa points out in his reference to neophytes that “Experts have a different aura about them. That aura of expertise is intimidating for neophytes.” His basic premise is that any message that an educator with “expert” status might try to seed with his or her own colleagues will be perceived to be unattainable and beyond their reach. So all of my efforts to highlight how easy digital tools are and how empowering technology can be via workshops, team teaching and other training could actually be unproductive.

Dean Groom also talks about the burbclave effect – where teachers don’t have to go and become innovative users of technology because if they have one connected educator on staff, they just have to wait until it is brought to them. It’s the effect when staff say they can’t use their IWB until they’ve had some training, where they wait for a list of good numeracy websites to be emailed to them (or given to them on a printed piece of A4) or wait until they are given release time for planning before they will even look at something like the ISTE Standards.

Ironically that while someone like me may well be viewed as somewhat of a local expert, the educators I connect to and learn from leave me feeling very neophytic indeed. When I measure myself globally, my local credentials shrink down to small proportions.

The building of your own social media network is such a personal journey that it is a very difficult beast to describe in such a way that non-web-savvy educators see the point. It’s why I won’t ever bother offering a Web 2.o / PLN / using social media to learn presentation or workshop ever again. I’ll guarantee that no-one has ever been turned onto blogging based on anything I’ve ever said or wrote – its value is intrinsically linked to the individual’s needs. If a teacher is not interested in exploring the internet on his or her own time, then they are never going to see where this could take them or how it could impact their classroom.

Which brings me to my next point. Many of us edubloggers assume that what we learn online is directly transferable into our classrooms. We also assume that if more educators did what we did (read, write, link, share, create) then we would end up with these amazing transformed classrooms. So, we spend time preaching the benefit of social media tools even though there is no one simple recipe, even though this networked learning thing is intensely personal and damn near impossible to replicate.

I keep wondering if the time spent to become proficient in the online world (note I wrote proficient, not expert!) is worth the investment in potentially transformed pedagogy in the classroom. I have spent many hours online, eschewing television and other possible hobbies, and I know that many, many of my colleagues are not prepared to invest the same amounts of time into this medium. I know that my investment is worthwhile – for me. But I struggle to see how social media can transform the primary school classroom. There are so many compromises that need to be made in the name of online safety and duty of care, barriers in terms of computer access and the pressure of the traditional curriculum that I can see why so many teachers wait to be told what to do in terms of technology use, rather than take the risks involved with being an innovator.

I think my next step is examine my own classroom practice to see what has changed in my approach since becoming connected back in 2005. I suspect that the process is so gradual that I may find it difficult to recall my former practice with any accuracy. And if I, the enthused educator playing with connected technologies in my spare time, can take so long to work out what can translate into today’s classroom, what hope does a less enthusiastic teacher have of bridging the gap of digital possibilities?

Just thinking, that’s all.

walk2web

¹. The metaphoric comparison may be lost on any non-Commonwealth non-cricket playing readers. Geoffrey Boycott’s career was characterised by lengthy stints at the batting crease, accumulating runs at an extremely slow rate often to the frustration of both the opposition and his team mates. Certainly not as talented as others in his era, his dogged style meant that he hung around for a long time in a somewhat selfish manner.
2. The really cool visualisation of links out from my blog comes from walk2web.

Google Browser Size – A Must View Visualisation For Every Blogger

Published on January 26, 2010 in Blogging. 6 Comments

… well, I must confess that the usefulness of this Google gem escapes me for the moment.

googlebrowser

Can anyone actually make sense of this or is it a case of me having poor visual literacy skills?

How I Connect To People Online

Published on November 7, 2009 in Blogging. 7 Comments

D’Arcy Norman poses the question, “How do you connect to people online?” This post is my response to that question.

It’s this blog that I value the most as a connection point with others. It’s where I started dabbling in this networked way, where I connected to my first edublogger colleagues, people who I hadn’t met but whose words and ideas drew me in and got me writing and sharing my own little piece of the world. Through comments left by others and by responding to comments on others’ blogs, I widened my circle of connections and the network started branching out in unexpected, intriguing pathways.

New concepts like Leigh Blackall‘s networked learning, Will Richardson‘s connective writing and Konrad Glogowski‘s classroom learning communities were all new perspectives that I would not have encountered in a non-digitally connected world. They taught me about the transferability and reinterpretation of new ideas, as much as someone more recently like Dan Meyer with his “Be Less Helpful” mantra.

It’s probably because I enjoy the process of writing that this particular outlet has such appeal. I’ve migrated and used other tools to connect – ning, Twitter, delicious, and even more recently Second Life but invariably, my network has been built on the back of edubloggers or secondary connections from those edubloggers. There are those people who started their connection in a similar fashion at a similar point in time – people like Jo McLeay, Darren Kuropatwa and James Matthew Nelson. Initially, I felt an obligation to add anyone who read my blog (identified via comments) to my blog reader and thanks to a feature in Bloglines that I used at the time, anyone who I could identify from the subscriptions list. But interestingly for a bloke who hasn’t all that much new to add to the conversation, the readership has grown beyond that need for reciprocal subscribing. I realised that I can’t read and converse with everyone who reads this blog, and that are many bloggers who I read who don’t know that I exist!

Picture 1

This realisation certainly helped me to manage my usage of a tool like Twitter where I can have a massive disproportion between followed and following. I must confess that I feel more comfortable in the asychronous world of the blog post where I can write something, set it free, see whether it strikes any chords out there than the weirdly hybrid synchronicity of the 140 character “Is anyone reading this? Whoops, now I’m having a conversation.” I share better from my ramblings here than by pumping out URL shortened tidbit links – that’s just not my skill set and there are plenty of others who do that much, much better.

The connection to others is very hard to explain. There are others out there scattered across the globe to whom I have felt a collegial connection; a new type of friendship that starts with a shared interest in web based and enable learning but manifest itself in a desire to find out a little more about the person behind the blog and have a much more personal conversation. It’s interesting – sometimes people connect to what I write and sometimes they connect just to me as the person they have gotten to know via this blog, twitter exchanges, invitations to participate in projects and Skype conversations (although these happen much less often than they used to). Alex, Doug, Chris, Ken and Darren are all more than just names in an aggregator or a contact list – I think of them as friends who would help me if I needed it.

Picture 3

I don’t venture that far from home either – a combination of family commitments and a job that doesn’t require much travel – but via these connections, the long term comment exchanges, the occasional Skype chats and the @messages on Twitter, I’ve managed to meet quite a few other educators both far and near. I can still recall having a meal with Michael Coghlan and Alan Levine with only half his voice left during his speaking tour down under and hosting Tom Barrett and his family for dinner at our place was simply a delight. None of this possible without online connection. I get hints from others like Clay, Dean and Chris that should I ever venture into their neighbourhood, the welcome mat is already waiting.

How do I do the connecting? The work day is invariably very busy and I have this two hour window from 8.30 – 10.30 pm each evening after the boys are in bed where I can open up the laptop and do a task switching blend of planning, reading, chatting and exploring. My iPhone has become the most constant connection now, as it is easy to just turn on and connect whenever a spare opportunity arises. I use a Pageflakes startpage to jump off into various places, I use GMail and Google Reader, Tweetdeck on the laptop, Twitterific on the iPhone and I keep a watchful eye on some of the Nings I have joined, my delicious network feed and the occasional Skype chat. I’m still getting past that “ghost town” feeling whenever I venture into Second Life and find it interesting that some of my real world insecurities in social situations have followed me in there. Writing like this in text form seems to be comparatively liberating.

The longer I have played in this digital world, the wider and more diverse my network has become. It probably has an overwhelmingly “education flavour” to it all but that’s OK with me because the spread of educational situations is so varied. I’m not quite the free ranger – in fact, I am still bemused that anyone finds what I have to say to be of importance – as if something works, I tend to stick with it.

So, D’Arcy, there you have it. My response to your prompt. Your blog was amongst the first added to my aggregator. Yours was one of the first where I saw fit to criticise a blog post. Your education world is vastly different me here in suburban Adelaide but there you have it, we’re connected. In the loose, multi-directional, serendipitous cluster of nodes that make up my Personal Learning Network, this is how I connect to people online.

Sticky Learning And The Art Of Building An Effective PLN

Published on September 6, 2009 in Blogging. 3 Comments

Stephen Downes posted a couple of years ago about one of my blog posts that:

…we should not be reading people, we should be reading topics.

I didn’t really understand what he meant until I read this recent post from Claudia Ceraso. The whole post is an excellent explanation of where PLN building can take an educator who is prepared to persist but not strain too hard for results.

Learning awaits the node that builds network. The network does not revolve around a guru or star blogger. Although you might be inclined -at first sight- to affirm it is so. Seeing a long thread of comments in a high ranking edublog can give that impression.

Whatever makes a post or blog a gem is that blogger’s ability to express what other people wish they could, but they can’t. Yet. Or perhaps something you were sensing was important, but didn’t have a name for it; therefore, no conversation dealing with the core issue had been built around it. A blogger may offer a playground of a post to imagine how we can think new ways of learning. I think many newbies have believed this is about the blogging revolution. This is the kind of success we should be after. Owning the learning in your blog. Without comments on the post, it is still unidirectional. Close to what fascinates me about blogging, but not it.

Oddly enough, for those taking the conversation ahead, it is not countless visitors or comments what they are after. They are indeed making connections and exchanging Twitter trivia preferably with a closed or selected circle of people, but it is not because they are popular that they flock together. It’s because Therefore, rapport. Once those minds get in touch, they accept the kind of learning that occurs cannot happen in isolation. That is what makes the network continue paying attention to new ideas from those selected bloggers. Because it is the only sustainable way to learn informally. You know they are your best learning triggers. That’s when learning sticks.

The Imminent Death Of Blogs Has Been Prematurely Announced

Published on July 2, 2009 in Blogging and Web 2.0. 7 Comments

Jeff Utecht via Stephen Downes says:

It was a good discussion that talked about how the conversation is changing. That at a point in time we use to actually take time to read and leave comments on blog posts. Now we read, and retweet blog posts. We talked about how Twitter is the new aggregator and is replacing RSS as a way people are getting their information. On this blog for example, I have more readers that come via Twitter then I do via the RSS feed. Because of Twitters live constant scrolling feed, we also talked about how the “life span” of a blog post is shrinking. I use to get comments on a blog post lasting weeks. Now I post a blog, it gets a comment or maybe two in a the first 10 minutes, gets retweeted for about 20 minutes and then it’s old news.

To me, it sounds a bit like Jeff is seeing the end of blogs as a dominant Web 2.0 technology and I’m sure he speaks for no one but himself in his assessment of where things seem to be going. I don’t disagree that connected conversation is changing but I’m not ready to write off blogs as a major platform for communication just yet. So, I’m using this “dated” technology (tongue firmly planted in cheek) to provide a alternative perspective to Jeff’s statements here in the sort of slow type-out-loud way that I personally find hard to express in 140 characters or less.

…at a point in time we use to actually take time to read and leave comments on blog posts.

Well, I don’t comment as much as I used to but I’m personally still reading as much as I ever have. There are some bloggers in my aggregator who have slowed down but new voices are there, ready to mix into the daily flow of connection. For me, there is still something exciting about opening up the Reader and looking into my Must Reads folder to see if anyone has posted since I last looked. I’d rather read about Dean Groom’s experiences in the US in my aggregator than the hit’n'miss tweet possibilities. Twitter doesn’t get you inside some one’s mind like a blog post can.

We talked about how Twitter is the new aggregator and is replacing RSS as a way people are getting their information. On this blog for example, I have more readers that come via Twitter then I do via the RSS feed.

I’m not a big fan of checking out blog posts as they are tweeted. I’d much rather wait until I browse my reader – the tweet that announces a new blog post is a bit like the mobile phone ring tone when you’re engrossed in a task but its urgent tone doesn’t mean that it is more important than what you are currently focussed on. Obviously I’m not “people” but it could be just that I find Twitter to be much harder work than blogs for tracking, initiating and participating in conversation.

Because of Twitters live constant scrolling feed, we also talked about how the “life span” of a blog post is shrinking. I use to get comments on a blog post lasting weeks. Now I post a blog, it gets a comment or maybe two in a the first 10 minutes, gets retweeted for about 20 minutes and then it’s old news.

I’m not convinced. I think it tells a story about Jeff’s readership in particular but it is a bit of a sweeping generalisation overall. In my case, comments can’t be influenced by Twitter because I’m not broadcasting there. So maybe this blog attracts readers who operate in a similar fashion to myself or my content isn’t based on breaking “new stuff” so it really can’t get old, so to speak.

Some of this gets down to the purpose of the chosen tool. My blog is a personal opinion piece, a repository of my classroom and professional practice, a creative outlet, an idea clearinghouse and whatever takes my fancy. I like the fact it is my piece of cyberturf, a bit like staying home instead of going to hang out with others at the pub. If my blog posts have a shorter life expectancy, so what? The people who I’m interested in communictaing and connecting with will still take the time to leave me a comment or a pingback, especially in a personal network where edtech heads are not the only nodes. If you’re too busy tweeting or plurking, and can’t see that different technologies serve different purposes, adding to the array of communication choices not replacing them, then I guess I’ll leave you to your #hashtags, your DM’s and RT’s, and your twitpics. And just in case I get mistaken for a Twitter basher, I use Twitter but probably in the same way someone like Jeff will. For me, it is an information stream that I dip into from time to time, and even more occasionally throw a bit into as well. For me, it just a lot of hard work to get to the level of power user, when other avenues are still extremely rewarding for me.

Hmmm… maybe I should tweet this blog post out to see if it does make a difference. Just kidding.

Cartoon from Geek And Poke.

An Angsty Anonymous Edublogger’s Lament

Published on May 21, 2009 in Blogging and Web 2.0. 14 Comments

Just so you know, any resemblance to any edublogger, highly or lowly Technorati ranked, is purely coincidental. This is just the urge I get after reading so many comic strips lately.

Ahhh, I feel so much better now … I mean, I hope that this (ahem) helps some other edubloggers feel at peace with themselves and their place in the learning universe.

Networked Literacy – Will Richardson

Published on March 21, 2009 in Blogging, Future Directions and Web 2.0. 4 Comments

Live blogged notes – my thoughts in italics.

Changes that technology are bringing to the world is going to affect education as well. Need a personal interaction with new tools before one can implement their use in the classroom – look inwards and become a networked learner. Publishing is the easy put – it’s what happens afterwards that makes the difference.

Story of Laura Stockman  – blog called 25 Days To Make A Difference. 60,000 hits  on her blog – people connected to her passion, community service. Now made a connection to Jenny Luca in Melbourne to raise money for children affected by the Victorian bushfires. Referenced Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody as a great book for illustrating the shifts that are occurring.

Kids  are connecting via phones etc. via their close personal networks firstly  and then connecting via interests.  How do we shift massive numbers of teachers into a new way of thinking with the new technology?

Networks are all around us  – do you have global connections? Yes

Need to learn how to connected to networks. Knowledge is in networks. The network is smarter than the node. No self-directed learning going on in his kids’ lives. Concept of editing as we know it is gone – we need to learn how to edit what we read online.  Literacy is “malleable”. Teach our kids to learn online in safe, effective and ethical ways. Teachers should model their own network literary skills throughout schooling.

Looking at the tools – RSS, blogs, Google reader, search feds, social bookmarking.

Afternoon session – looking at the concept of Connective Writing. How many of us are teaching kids to read and write in a hypertext environment? Put up a blog post from Doug Noon showing ten or more links to other blogs, articles, pdf’s, videos etc. Also looked through the use of diigo to annotate sites – called it “connective reading”.

Talked about fanfiction.net – fans write new chapters for the book – No. 1 is Harry Potter with over 390,000 chapters. Writing does not only occur in text – showed (listened to) Radio WillowWeb. Real writing for real audiences for real puposes. We can write for a global audience.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a pretty low grade live blogger. I run out of steam very quickly and I am a lousy, lousy twitter backchanneler – I don’t think I added anything coherent to the stream of @willrich45 tweets as the day progressed. Maybe I was conscious of my own small presentation coming up after afternoon tea.

Anyway, I think it was interesting that tool wise I didn’t really learn anything new from Will face to face – but that is more an tribute to the actual powerful potential of the same tools he was showcasing (and that I have spent time over the last four years learning to leverage). I think that the day was more geared to educators who are still relatively “green” to Web 2.0 – but don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the day and there was plenty to think about from the challenges Will kept putting out there.

I’m still disappointed about the very small (but loyal) crowd that attended the seminar – sometimes Adelaide does live up to its “hicksville” image. Where were our school leaders and department decision makers who need to hear about this stuff? I suppose I should be glad that when Will went outside for his morning coffee to overlook the Torrens Lake that it actually had water in it.

Introducing The EduGroupie

Published on March 8, 2009 in Blogging. 0 Comments

First the edublogger … then last year heralded the new term edupunk … now thanks to Paul Luke, it’s time to meet the edugroupie.

Seriously, this is a deep thinking South Australian educator who is as well read as anyone online. Do him a favour and put his blog in your RSS reader of choice – I’m pretty sure an edugroupie would appreciate a bit of subscriber and comment love.

Image: Fan de… http://www.flickr.com/photos/alainbachellier/424993303/