Archive for the 'Digital Convergence' Category

The Network – Platform Edition

Published on February 3, 2012 in Digital Convergence. 3 Comments

This not about Mac vs. PC.

This is about the Network (uttered in tones of reverence) – not the network (which we all use via our phones, our laptops, our gaming systems etc).

In schools, we love the concept of the Network. Not in the wide world connected definition, but the connect your device and store stuff in one secure environment type of concept. Every school I know about here in South Australia has a Network. It is usually set up for the staff and students to use exclusively when within the school environment. If it’s not on “the Network” then it is isn’t allowed in the school. It involves passwords and user profiles and printer permissions and wireless certificates (should your school be lucky enough to have some form of wireless environment). There are Windows Networks (the vast majority here in SA) and there are Mac Networks, and a few adventurous sites title themselves as cross-platform when they have a combination of both. I don’t know too much about Linux although Grant High School (under the vision of Peter Ruwoldt, now in the APY Lands in the Far North of SA) were using Ubuntu in an extremely innovative way to build skills and engage with the wider community.

For teachers, the Network is a necessary evil. It keeps things “safe”, is a place for the organisation and sharing of digital resources, and gives each staff member and student a safe digital storage space. Of course, many teachers still struggle with things like passwords, how to navigate to a folder to find something they had created earlier and sometimes need to write all of this process down on a piece of paper. Many believe that it is the Network that gives them access to the internet (the lower case n network) in much the same way that they believe the interactive whiteboard is a magical device, forgetting that it is just a dormant piece of plastic connected to the real magical device, the computer. So, it follows that many (not all and just in my experience) teachers like the idea of a single platform Network, preferably on a platform that they are familiar and comfortable with. Cross platform can evoke responses of fear and panic, and strategies of survival that unfortunately manifest themselves in restricted opportunities for students. Technicians within schools also command a fair bit of sway when it comes to determining a school’s platform/Network direction. Those with Windows Server knowledge will talk down Mac software, complain about the hassle of dual platforms and highlight every single networking issue (real or imagined) that they can think of. And it works back the other way with gripes about messy updates, the constant vigilance against viruses and so on. And as for Linux, even though even a non-technical person like myself knows that its existence has borne much of the computing world as we know it, well, some technicians will complain about the lack of paid support and posit that if it is free, then it can’t possibly be any good.

I like to believe that I am platform agnostic. I am happy to find my way around any OS, although my Ubuntu experience is limited to the Netbook Remix version sitting on my oldest son’s netbook. Windows has a certain logic to it that seems to make sense in a school Network – and kids can easily save work to their folder and retrieve the contents from any connected computer on the system. I love my MacBook Pro and will probably buy Mac again for my own personal use – and it has become a bit of a cliche at my school with teachers who have become fervent Mac users to quote,”Once you try Mac, you’ll never go back.”

So, at my school, we are cross platform. This is as much about a conscious decision to do so as it was that when the three closing schools pooled their collective technology stock that there was a split of Macs and PCs that needed to be used. However, there are many advantages to have a foot in each major camp, so to speak. We don’t want kids who are like some of the teachers – scared of a particular platform because they will need to “learn something new”. In a world that is web based, whether your browser sits in a Windows OS or a Mac one is entirely irrelevant until instinct has you lunging for either the right or left side to close the window. As long as kids can make sense of menus and taskbars and file paths, then there is no good reason why Office should be preferred over other word processing tools, no reason why iMovie should be the only way to edit video. And with tablet devices bringing in more alternative operating systems (Android, iOS etc.) restricting today’s learners to only one company’s worldview of technology aided learning just doesn’t make sense. I know the big companies probably don’t support this point of view – things like Microsoft Innovative Teaching awards and Apple Distinguished Educator programs just emphasise that one way is the way to go.  But learning isn’t device dependent – but it is increasingly becoming network enabled. And I mean the one without the capital letter.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/mac_pc.png

Learning Through The Screen

Published on May 26, 2011 in Digital Convergence, Information Literacy and Internet. 0 Comments

How we make sense of the world beyond our own personal day to day experiences?

For me, it started with books mixed with the occasional dose of television back in a fairly isolated childhood back on the farm. My first impressions of what life might be like in the English countryside were shaped by Enid Blyton books and popular music culture via Molly Meldrum and the weekly Countdown Top Ten. I was so insulated in this rural, Lutheranised existence that when I started Year Five at the Appila Rural School (school population: 13 kids) I had no answer to the typical Australian playground question, “Who do you barrack for?” My then best friend went for the Port Adelaide Magpies and so I did. His favourite player was Russell Ebert and so he became mine. Saturday afternoon SANFL broadcasts on the radio and Saturday evening replays suddenly opened up a part of the world that I had no idea existed.

So information flowed to me through newspapers, radio, books, films and television, painting a collective picture of the world beyond my day to day experiences. My concepts of other countries, of other places, of other people were all shaped by this information drip feed. And I thought that I was pretty well informed although in reality, my grasp was pretty opaque in its clarity.

Contrast that now to the view of the outside world that I now get through digital technologies. Much has been written about the fire hose effect of the web but the freedom I now have to pursue any line of research or interest that I want is bringing my learning to an unparallelled level. A concept or topic might come up in conversation and via the internet, I can be tracking down digital pieces to bring together a richer and deeper understanding. Maybe a few examples paint the picture about how the web can fill in the gaps of comprehension.

A few years ago, my class were covering an inquiry unit on the plight of refugees and we were lucky enough to have a student teacher of Serbian background whose family had fled war torn Sarajevo speak to the students about her experiences. That talk prompted my own curiosity and via the web, I easily found articles, video clips and images that helped to grasp some (definitely not all) of the wider perspective of an extremely complex situation.  I could read first hand accounts from multiple perspectives, view the work of photojournalist Ron Haviv or view any number of first hand home video accounts on YouTube. All of this adds up to a much more complex and informative picture than any sanitised television special or reference book could provide.

Digital information and media delivers more detail, more avenues to explore and a greater opportunity for self-participation in the pursuit of learning than mere paper based text or traditional media can deliver alone. That does not mean that traditional outlets don’t have a part to play in my expanding knowledge of the world that I cannot see, touch or feel on a daily basis but my greatest moments of clarity happen more and more online. Individuals who I have never met face to face offer insights into their personal life that enable me to peek into the ordinary and mundane (to them anyway) parts of their everyday life that I find personally interesting and insightful. Be it Doug Noon’s descriptions of an Alaskan winter, the first snow fall in Chris Harbeck’s Winnipeg, Sue Waters’ tweets about American Coke or Leigh Blackall’s family trip to the Philippines, I get a little taste of the world beyond my limited suburban Australian vista.

It does reinforce the old adage that the more you know, the more you start to realise that you don’t know very much of what there is to know. The internet is the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled and traversing its vastness one network link at a time is all one person can do.

worldbeyond

2010 Wrap It Up

Published on December 31, 2010 in Digital Convergence, Future Directions and Personal Reflections. 0 Comments

So, 2010 is just about done and I thought I would just throw a few thoughts down about the past twelve months and things I’ve noticed from a personal perspective. I don’t watch much television and very rarely read paper based books any more but I’ve enjoyed sitting down in the evenings since school ended a few weeks back with no particular goal to be achieved and to indulge in some DVD watching. I’ve decided to re-watch The Wire (all 5 seasons if I can manage it) and there are also a stack of Big Bang Theory DVDs to watch which were Christmas gifts when I decide. I’ve steered clear of too much online participation and not being approached to be part of any PLP cohorts over summer this year has meant that I’ve felt extremely unobligated to any online conversation. I’ve also been playing with an iPad for the first time, trying it out to see whether I feel it has potential in our school. I’d have to say that at this stage I’m underwhelmed by it but it was nice to have web access when visiting the folks up in the mid-North before Christmas in their internet broadband black hole. My parents had never seen Google Maps before and looked at me like I was performing witchcraft when I showed them Street View right past my brother’s farm. My father still has a fully functional IBM 386 computer running Windows 3.1 that he does his tax calculations on, complete with matrix printer so the iPad is so advanced as to seem not quite real to my parents.

Looking back, it’s been a full on year work wise as I’ve juggled part time classroom responsibilities with the bits and pieces that make up my Coordinator role. For the first time, I didn’t go to any big conferences. That will change next year as my school has been accepted as one of 20 Microsoft Innovative Schools in Australia – this means a few trips interstate for 2011 including Canberra, where I’ve never been before. So perhaps, I’ll need to trade in my iPhone for a Windows phone although maybe I’ll take my son’s Ubuntu netbook along for taking notes instead.

Here’s one thing I’ve noticed over the year – a big increase in my consumption of music thanks to the ease of iTunes as a way of managing and accessing music. I’ve always enjoyed listening to rock music (mainly) and still have a huge collection of cassette tapes from my late teens and early twenties that would be cool to digitalise. Having kids over the past ten years has really sapped my music interest and listening – time to sit and listen to music when being involved with young kids seemed to go out the window, plus blasting my peculiar taste in the house was always a touch too selfish on my behalf when kids are napping or playing. Having the iPhone has brought back my personal music interest right back where I could listen walking, in the car or even when working on my laptop. I’m finding myself walking around stores like Sanity and JB Hi-Fi more often, buying CDs after a decade of hiatus at very cheap prices. I have CDs from the mid-nineties with $30 on the price label while now I won’t buy it unless there is a twenty per cent discount or it’s below fifteen bucks. After tiring of the screechy sounds of the white earbuds that are standard on Apple products (which are still better than most ear bud products out there) I even lashed out today for a lightweight pair of Sennheiser headphones for a better sound experience. I had a pair of yellow padded Sennheisers back when I was at teacher’s college in the late eighties that were great (from memory) and I think I’d listen to an album or so in the dark before going to sleep. While my 2010 music resurgence hasn’t quite got back to the same extreme, I can credit digital music and its affordability and convenience for it.

Well, I think this post confirms that my thought patterns are running pretty shallow at present. I could also mention that this year has seen me purchasing stuff online more often and that I’ve even gotten into some Wii gaming in a minor way. I’m always a bit behind the times for a technology lover, with my spendthrift Lutheran upbringing tempering too many impulse buys throughout the year. Anyway, have a great New Year and hopefully, this blog will continue to be a useful place for reflection and documentation.

PLN Semantics – More Out There Thinking

Published on July 14, 2010 in Digital Convergence and Internet. 1 Comment

Must be a sign that certain ideas buzz around networks at a similar time, prompting a wide array of thoughts and ideas. I posted my mind dump yesterday at a similar time that Terry Freedman was pondering his own questions.

Then this morning, I found that one of my very favourite online writers, Jennifer Jones, had posted her own querying and probing cogitations. I was trying to nail down what I personally thought a PLN was, but Jennifer was pulling the whole thing apart questioning the unwritten laws and conventions that seem to accompany such a concept. Some excerpts:

2.  I believe people learn all the time, and everywhere.  I don’t need to isolate or elevate a group of individuals to be my PLN.

9.  I know people who have no desire to blog. I know people who lack charisma. I know creative people, who don’t function well in this space.  They will be excluded, for not playing by the rules.  They don’t “get it.”

I’m looking forward to her next “thinking out loud” installment. I think it is really good when “givens” are questioned openly and potential meanings of a phrase like PLN fully interrogated.

PLN = Perplexing Linguistic Notion

Published on July 13, 2010 in Digital Convergence and Information Literacy. 11 Comments

Like any educator, I love a good acronym.

Like any user of social media tools, I love a good acronym.

Here’s one that’s really popular – PLN. Stands for Personal Learning Network. Gets bandied around a lot by educators using social media tools. Myself included.

We all think we know what we are talking about when we refer to our PLN.

Well, I do, at least. Not too sure about some of you others out there. Here’s what I personally think my PLN is:

  • infrequent or frequent use of social media tools of my own personal choice like my blog, Twitter, Reader, Slideshare (I could keep naming ‘em) to read, view, communicate, write, talk, learn with other social media users on topics of my personal interest.
  • nodes on my personally constructed compiled network are people who are serendipitious discoveries, linked to in a variety of ways via comments, blogrolls, twitter lists as I trawl my way through my social media connections.
  • my PLN is a bunch of frequently travelled highways, deserted dirt tracks and narrow one-way alleys to other people’s thoughts, opinions and ideas.
  • I have nodes that respond to me as much as I respond to them, some who don’t know or even care that I exist, and those who I’m blissfully unaware of that read my dubious collection of posts, tweets, comments and random digital utterances.

A PLN is a notoriously hard beast to accurately describe and I know that my take is not a universal notion. I like a lot of the thinking that went into defining the differences between groups, communities and networks a while back – especially from people with deeper thought processes than mine. So, with that bit of digital history on my cerebral back burner, here’s a few things that I think a PLN is not:

  • a one stop shop where all great educators come to drink from the common digital watering hole. Because not everyone on my PLN is an educator, not everyone reads and links to the same group of thinkers. Beware of Nings advertising themselves as such – they may be a Learning Network, but they are not, in my mind, Personal.
  • possible to assemble in one spot at one event in time, not even virtually. Diversity, controversy and civilised disagreement are the seeds for pushing boundaries of thinking. Some echoing in the chamber isn’t a bad thing but you don’t everyone singing together like a well honed choir.
  • not fixed. Sources can be dumped and replaced as I see fit. You can do the same with my posts, tweets etc. Flick ‘em if they are just adding to the digital noise.

So, I’d love to read some challenging of people the next time they trot out the PLN acronym. Semantics is an important element of any popular turn of phrase used in varying forms of communication and my own personal will vary from many other points of view. By all means, challenge me and my admittedly flawed thinking. What exactly do others mean? And do they believe that their particular interpretation is the only one going?

And if any readers can come up with a more entertaining alternative explanation to the PLN acronym than the one I’ve used in my title, please let everyone know in the comments. After all, PLN could mean Pretty Limited Nonsense.

pln

Just Give Me A Decent Conversation And I Might Just Learn Something

Published on March 19, 2010 in Conferences & PD and Digital Convergence. 9 Comments

I’m thinking out loud here following a stream of consciousness triggered from Dean Groom’s post today. His theme was trust and how it evolves in an online network – my brain started throwing how that related to my own experiences and so I left a starting point in a comment:

I find that trust builds up time on the web – it develops over a sustained period of reading someone’s work, reading and conversing via comments, seeing where their masked agendas and sacred cows lurk and following their links back to their origins. My most trusted sources are ones willing to hear out my point of view or wonderings without putting me in my box in a reactive way. After all, if I just want dispensed wisdom I can just listen to a pontificated podcast or read a published article from a trusted traditional media source. I want a conversation – and to get anything of value out of that, mutual trust is pretty important.

My learning team had a PD Seminar on Wednesday focussing on Personalised Learning (more commonly referred to as Differentiated Instruction in other parts of the world) where the most valuable learning for the day was when I was engaged in conversation with my colleagues. Our presenter /facilitator, Pam Burton, did a brilliant job of opening up pathways to consider, drawing us in with activities that required conversation, self examination and questioning.

That’s what the web offers me and other connected educator – the opportunity for conversational learning. That conversation is the real catalyst for learning – the content gives us all a context and framework as I’m finding out in my Intel Thinking With Technology course that I’m currently running with six middle primary teachers at my school. The course is secondary to the opportunity to connect, toss ideas around in a more personal setting that I would find less useful even with a group of closer to ten people. So, why would I bother with presenting to larger groups at a conference? That’s not a conversation – and it’s difficult to know what others are getting out of it, even if I think I’m offering something worthwhile.

A disgruntled parent about twelve years once accused me of running a shotgun curriculum – stand at the front, spray it out and hope it hits someone. (To be fair to myself, his major gripe was more with his perceived shortcomings of the system I served. I was merely a typical cog in the machine.) Teacher PD is still much like that – expert delivers, we all take notes and somehow we take enough away to improve our own learning and that of our students. If you’re an engaging speaker then this approach can work – to an extent. John Hattie was a recent example of this where his research was presented in such a way that two hours flew and his message was sticky enough to last into the conversations that resulted over the following days and weeks. But this is still a mother bird feeding its open mouthed chicks approach.

I know I’ve harped on this before but there is a disturbing irony when someone uses this approach to inform others about the benefits of networked learning. What else can we do? I don’t think that I want to front up to another state conference to talk up the benefits of online learning. The other twist is that there is an unending source of conversation/s sitting in my Google Reader, in my Twitter stream, in my Ning communities with like minded educators who also need no convincing but at the local level, there is still still admiration for the self promoting experts who will show us all the way to classroom learning nirvana. Too many educators that I cross paths with have no idea of the freedom, the power, the connection they can make with a little effort and time. I can do some influencing in a situation like my Intel course time where there is room for the conversation to grow.

How do you grow the conversation? I’d like to know.

Photo of Flat Students created by Alex and Colin Harbeck.

Photo of Flat Students that were created by Alex and Colin Harbeck.

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.

Digital Transition

Published on December 6, 2009 in Digital Convergence. 1 Comment

Transition – 1. Passage from one form, state, style, or place to another.

I struggled to find the right word to decribe what I’m trying to sort through in my mind at the moment. I wanted a word to describe the middle ground between say a traditional paper based, non-digital classroom and the always on, connected 1:1 environment I saw the other week in Melbourne. I first thought netherworld captured that essence initially but a quick check on the actual meaning quickly showed that word was inappropriate.  I thought digital purgatory had a nice ring to it, but using computers is not a form of atonement so I’ve settled for the less edgy transition.

My school and in particular, my own classroom runs a form of digital transition. I’ve coined this term as an inner mind response to discussions with my colleagues during and after our visit to see the 1:1 laptop program at St Albans Meadows Primary School. We share a bank of twenty laptops across four classrooms so as teachers, we have learned to be quite creative and flexible in our use of this limited resource. So, what is digital transition?

Digital transition – not a traditional place of learning but not quite the transformed connected classroom either. There are times when circumstances force the teacher and the class back into traditional mode  – when networks go down, when laptop access is scarce, when time is tight – to become a place where whole class instruction. worksheet driven activities and lock step units are then more commonplace. When the technology is available, things flow more easily and students can attend to tasks with full access to preferred tools as required.

Does anyone have a better phrase to encapsulate what I’m trying to describe here?

A First Hand Look At A 1:1 Program – St Albans Meadows, Melbourne

Published on November 26, 2009 in Digital Convergence. 4 Comments

We had a day trip to sunny (?!%) Melbourne today to attend a PD Workshop on the 1:1 laptop program following a f2f network connection made by my principal, Ann with the Coordinator Simon from St Albans Meadows Primary School at ULearn in October. Now I know there are successful 1:1 laptop programs all over the world but I had never really seen one in an Australian public school before. So after a delayed arrival into Tullamarine Airport and a quick taxi ride, my co-teaching buddies and I got to the school about ten minutes into the start of the presentation. Simon presented in his laid back but informative style, then we got to head into the classrooms to see the students using their laptops. There was a morning tea break and then he took us through the funding model and more importantly, the sort of work the students construct using their laptops. So, here are my notes from the session.

Interestingly, like our school, St Albans Meadows doesn’t have a dedicated computing room – abandoned about four years ago. In a move to make most school technicians cringe in fear, Simon described their network as open without logons, passwords. Being transparent makes it easier to achieve learning goals as students are not spending time looking for the loopholes. The important thing is for students to have access to technology. He touched on the concept of 21st Century Learning and was somewhat bemused about this term considering we are just about finished with the first decade of that century. This opinion certainly rings true for me. He said that the school’s perspective that it is about students engaging with the technology of this century. Right on cue, it was time to mention “Inquiry Based Learning” and he shared one of the Inquiry units titled “10 Ways To Save The Earth” where the students could show their learning in a number of ways including animations, raps and podcasts. The school also runs a program called Samoogle, based on the Google employees premise of 20% work time dedicated to employee’s own learning. Students had been given this amount of time over half a term and had chosen to pursue a number of things – inventing a new sport, publishing a magazine, creating an animation, tutorial, clothing, rap/video clip, new game concept or a video storyboard.

Simon shared anecdotal teacher judgement data on student achievement, showing growth in stimulating learning, classroom behaviour and improved writing quality as judged against the VELS. Because the program has only been running in Year Five and Six, it hasn’t been possible to ascertain any growth against the NAPLAN data (which is our Federal Minister’s benchmark). The laptops have made an enormous difference to the struggling learners.

We then met another of the teachers, Travis. He talked about the concept of building a Learning Community (another topic dear to my heart) and how the laptop had impacted on their community. There was 100% uptake by parents, after surveying the parent community and flagging this program as the way forward. There has been increased opportunity to show work samples to inform parents and noticeably positive student attitude since the program’s inception. The laptops don’t go home every day – this is negotiated between the teacher and the student. It sounds obvious because it is true – a program like this starts with really good teachers to start with. The original concept was that the laptops would provide learning 24/7  but that has turned out that less is more. Laptops are not taken home during holidays and weekends as a general rule. This leads to the fantastic phrase:

Anywhere, anytime but not all the time.

Although the school has a number of IWBs installed across the school from a Victorian Education Department trial a few years back, they are not used for much more than projection screens. As Simon said, “Who needs interactivity on an IWB when the students have interactivity at their fingertips?” They use many Web 2.0 tools as well – VoiceThread, Wordle and a new one for me, Etherpad.

Simon talked next about the How? for their school. They worked to develope a culture that valued and recognised the importance of ICTs. There is an emphasis on thinking outside the square – circular desks in the classroom, power cords and power boards hanging from the ceiling. They have found that sharing is the best Professional Development. The average teacher doesn’t have to be the keeper of all knowledge – they just have to know when to let the students have access to the right tools. The main message is focus on the curriculum and the pedagogy and let the kids drive the technology. He talked through their budgetary model which I won’t outline here.

The teachers have also been provided with release for Inquiry planning of units. Each class has three major units and a smaller “Myself As A Learner” unit to start the year. This was provided via the Intel Teach program. We also saw examples of student ePortfolios using iWeb, which is hosted locally on each student’s machine, and students can take their work off via a USB drive when they have to hand their laptop back to the school at the completion of primary school.

For more information on the St Albans Meadows program and 1:1 laptop learning in general, you can check out Simon’s 1:1 Learning Ning.

Smuggled In To Hear Nancy White

Published on November 13, 2009 in Conferences & PD and Digital Convergence. 0 Comments

I went out to dinner with a group of “Edutwits” on Wednesday evening – an event organised by the amazing Kerry Johnson. Now, Kerry works for educationau but her influence spreads way beyond her official employment role. This dinner was a great example of that and connected up a dozen or so educators involved in a wide span of areas – project officers, instructional designers, consultants, teachers and general networkers. I enjoyed myself very much. Now the timing of this dinner capitalised on the edayz09 event, a conference focussed on elearning mainly in the VET sector. So, there were a few visitors from interstate and the exciting news was that Nancy White was the featured keynote speaker for the edayz event.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerryank/4094393623/

I expressed my disappointment that it would have been great to hear her speak as Nancy is one of those fantastic online communicators and facilitators whose influence spreads far and wide. Her work in online communities is well renown and I’ve listened to a number of her talks online and been a regular reader of her blog. She’s even remixed some of my work as you can see in her 10 Minute Lecture featured on Leigh Blackall’s then blog back in 2007. She’s an innovative thinker, an important node on my network and so, when Kerry suggested I come in this morning as her “guest” to hear Nancy speak, I jumped at the opportunity.

I also got to see how skillfully Kerry managed the Ustreaming, CoverItLive backchanneling process. The most technical I’ve ever gotten was to plunk an iRiver recorder at the front of a room at the start of the session so to see someone like Kerry run dual laptops, monitoring the conversation people were feeding in via chat and still keep track of the presentation, even with a five second vocal delay in her headset as she went. There are details about how she managed the process here.

Nancy is a very engaging speaker. And thanks to the marvels of social media, you don’t have to put up with my half baked notes (which I started to try and type in on the Notepad on my phone) as I decided to lean forward (you can’t really recline during a Nancy White presentation) and just enjoy absorbing the message. The presentation was Ustreamed and I was going to add the link here so you culd start listening in at around the 18 minute mark but Mike Seyfang has already done that piece of legwork and captured the essential audio here. Play while clicking through her slides and you have a pretty good time shifted re-experience.

Should We Use Community EDayz09 Keynote

View more presentations from Nancy White.

This means I can spend so time reflecting on what her ideas sparked in my mind then and after I’ve had a bit of time to think things over. I do like the fact that Nancy talked about presented ponderings and incomplete gut feelings and that her ideas were conversation starters, not final assertions. Her opening poser “Is community ‘dead’?” had me thinking as I think about teh work done at my school to foster a Professional Learning Community based on the work of Louise Stoll, and the concept of classroom as learning community (based on the work of Konrad Glogowski) that I have tried to foster with my student blogging program. Actually, can a classroom be a community? After all, the students don’t get a lot of choice about how their peers are grouped and they get even less choice about who their leader (teacher) will be. Community is meant to be participants with a common purpose or interest – is learning too broad a brush stroke and a group of typical primary school students range across the spectrum in terms of how they view learning as a positive thing?

She also talked about how mobile technologies allow us to be together in some many other ways and that there are new emerging technologies that fall between or bridge the gap between the analogue and digital world – the Livescribe pen as one example. But it is a challenge to be able to show to others already using these technologies for purposes other than learning that they have huge potential as tools for learning. i think about my students’ mindset around ipods in the classroom where they can’t see past just listening to music and using it as a sort of concentration cocoon as its possible premier use in the classroom. My students view their mobile phones in much the same way – connections for social and entertainment purposes only. How can I change that?

Nancy talked through the various stages that one can learn – solo, pairs, triads, the flock and the network. I feel that many educators don’t go past the solo and will go with the flock if compelled. Nancy is right about one thing – accessing and building a network has to be lived before one can possibly realise the potential and assist others on their way. I kept thinking about a recent conversation on a mailing list where an educator was defending Education Queensland’s position that all social media tools used with students needed to be behind the safe walls of their portal The Learning Place – it was a bit like learning surf life saving in a backyard pool. Anyway, I digress.

I had never heard of the concept of triangulation before where the most innovative practice and real learning occurs at the edges, not at the top. It would certainly explain why the upper sections of a bureaucracy like the one I work for seem to be out of touch with what is happening in wider society and certainly with the pace and direction of technological change. Of course, the sweet spot of being able to be innovative and make a difference without running foul of leadership or having that success subverted into someone higher up the food chain’s claim of success is one to think further on.

Anyway, I was glad I got to come and see Nancy for myself. I would have liked to have hung around and tried to meet her but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. Thanks again, Kerry!