Graham Wegner – Open Educator

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.

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!

I was chatting with a colleague the other day about the most effective way to create a list of online Mathematics resources for our school. We were both thinking of delicious as we have a significant number of teachers with accounts. The idea was to use a group of teachers as the “curators” of these resources and tie them all together in some way. Initially, my colleague figured starting a new delicious account perhaps under the name lnpsmaths might be the best approach. But the problem was sharing the logon and password with the others participating in the initiative – and delicious works best when you are constantly logged on, see the resource in the course of the working day, then hit TAG without too much thought required.

So, using the power of tagging, we decided the best and easiest option is to use a unique tag to tie all of the saved resources together regardless of who was doing the tagging and saving. This way, even the teachers who are not using delicious (even though we are getting closer to total staff participation) can just have a shortcut to http://delicious.com/tag/lnpsmaths on their EdPort homepage to benefit from the Mathematics focus group’s hard work.The only glitch we’ve discovered is that the same site can be saved by multiple users and it will show up each time as a separate entry on the list. Our stopgap solution is say the first person to find the site uses the unique tag, and others can save but avoid the lnpsmaths tag.

Now none of this is ground breaking or unique, but it showcases the simplicity of the way delicious works (I think it is quite a bit simpler than diigo and most staff are not power users of social bookmarking at this stage) in a very powerful way. Now, we have a hotlist of sites that is constantly growing, anyone can contribute and it gives using digital resources in the teaching of Mathematics a real vitamin hit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/double-h90/3014614501/

Two weeks ago, we packed up our computer room in preparation for the impending demolition of our current library (Resource Centre) in the lead up to the building of our BER funded new “21st Century Library“. The thirty odd desktops of varying vintages were distributed throughout the classrooms or retired to the “obsolete” pile. Our focus has been on the development of wireless capable buildings to support our laptop program which has a trolley of laptops in both the upper and middle primary blocks. Add a small fleet of ten netbooks used by the Year Three classrooms to the pool and it felt quite strange to be putting old style desktops complete with CRT monitors back into classrooms where kids have become used to using the laptops on their desks as part of the regular classroom program.

As I unplugged, trundled and then re-assembled the desktops in their new homes (ably helped by an enthusiastic Year Fvie class), a few interesting things became apparent. Firstly when the classrooms were first wired with data points, it was obvious that no-one envisaged that computers would be anywhere but at the back of a classroom. The number of data points is also interesting to note where the educators responsible for planning and trying to predict future needs could not foresee a need for more than four data points in a junior primary classroom or six in an Year 3 – 7 room!

Now, my point is here not to criticise my predecessors for getting things wrong but to make the point that what we actually need in classrooms in the very near future is a very fast moving and elusive target. In the goal of future proofing a school’s technology needs, the constraints of budget and what is actually available at the time provide real barriers to what is possible. For example, currently we have wireless network points running on the “g” standard meaning that all of our laptops can log on, authenticate and access the network with ease. We could upgrade to “n” standard wireless at a much better data transfer speed if we wanted but as our technician pointed out, straightaway we would have to purchase “n” wireless access points at a much greater cost than the current generation ones we have and one fleet of laptops purchased in late 2007 would not be able to connect as “g” is their maximum connection, making them redundant on our network. Also attaching more laptops to the network means that we need to have the infrastructure to support this expansion.  But if we hold off for six to twelve months, prices drop dramatically as a relatively new technology becomes commonplace and more readily supported. And with budgets always tight for a humble public school, these sort of trade offs mean that sometimes we will take a wrong turn or be surprised when technology opens up new opportunities.

So, we are now in a transition period where we try and imagine what the new learning space will be like and try to eliminate the “this is how a normal library looks” type of thinking that could be very redundant and date very quickly. Things will be testy for a while as classes go cold turkey from their regularly scheduled computing room time (which was a useful time for classes to work on individual tasks) and work on ways to use these newly created pods of older computers within their classroom. I know that I will find the regular access to our old computing room to be problematic as the trolley of twenty laptops only go so far between four classes. Time for teachers to get creative – yet again.

Meet Gray Jyraffe.

He’s a Noob in Second Life. He’s been hanging around Jokaydia, ISTE Island and freebie shops scavenging around trying to work out how to teleport, fly and strike up conversations with impressively physiqued and impeccably attired avatars. Gray has even been to a few events now, settling into custom bean bags and listening intently to talented educators detailing their innovation (both virtual and real world exploits). He even went to his first Jokaydia Unconference on the weekend – not as much as he was hoping, as his real world alter ego had issues that interfered (families, sleep) with a fuller participation schedule. But he did get to meet (virtually) one of his blogging heroes, Konrad March (aka Konrad Glogowski).

He has a lot in common with his alter-ego – me. Like Gray, I’m an ordinary person who is constantly in awe of the talent that is so easy to connect with online. What Jo Kay has created in Second Life is totally amazing – and a massive leap of faith in the potential of this online education haven. Build it and they will come, indeed. I’m not quite sure yet what this space has to offer me and its relationship to my current work – but as I (whoops, sorry), Gray noted last night at the beach side after event celebration, sometimes the deepest learning occurs in the space where I am doing something new and challenging, but feeling out of my depth.

The talent I can connect to via these avenues – my Reader, twitter and now Second Life – is unbelievable. Sometimes, I think that my main talent is recognising others’ talent and being able to stream and subvert their innovation for my own purposes.

The way I plan for my teaching has changed a lot over the past few years. This really was obvious today as my wife, Joanne, planned for her two days of teaching this week in the manner that I did not so long ago – writing out lesson plans by hand, cross referencing her resource books and creating some resources by jumping on the family desktop and printing it off ready for the photocopier. To be fair, she is just returning to teaching this year after five or so years out of the classroom (and we all know that the world has changed just a tad in that time) and she is teaching five-year-olds while I’m at the other end of the primary school spectrum. So, I thought I’d take ten minutes now and detail how planning digitally grants me flexibility and opportunity that was not possible in the past.

Firstly, I have the luxury of a school laptop. This means I can operate wirelessly wherever I feel comfortable around the house. I construct my program on a private wiki shared with my tandem partner and co-planning buddy – this enables transparency, collaboration, pooled resources and consistency in what we deliver in the classroom. We share documents, URL’s and flipcharts via this wiki. I have all of my key documents on my hard drive and backed up on my 8GB thumbdrive. So, if I want to check if I have the laptops booked for my Literacy session on Monday, I can pull that document up in seconds. Likewise, if I want to see if there is a spare slot to take my class to the Resource Centre, I can also have that for checking in an instant.

Our Inquiry Scope and Sequence document is readily available, as are my PDF versions of SACSA, our mandated curriculum. So today, I quickly checked what the next inquiry unit was, briefly read the relevant outcomes from the SACSA Lite PDF and did a quick search on YouTube to see if I could find anything that suited the theme of human effects on the planet which is the broad concept behind the title of “Whose Fault Is It?” The YouTube search found a clip from a CNN documentary titled “Planet In Peril” which gave me a new lead to follow.

I found the website, and the Google Video version, which I know won’t cope with our school filter and internet speed at school, so in the spirit of educational purpose, I started Vuze on the main desktop and started to download a torrent of the documentary so I could show excerpts tomorrow on the interactive whiteboard. This doco would be an ideal resource for “frontloading” students with ideas, base knowledge and questions for their own independent research later in the term. I also mentally noted the RSS feeds on the original website and fired off an e-mail to my colleagues about this find and then saved it to my delicious account.

I’ve been reading Dan Meyer’s blog – in particular his refit of a Darren Kuropatwa mathematics lesson – and with this in mind started planning one of my own on the concept of measurement in metres. Another concept that needs to be covered is scale drawing, so I used Google Maps to get a decent screengrab of the school for a introductory lesson based on the BER intiative. I dumped this into a flipchart for the IWB and into a worksheet that could be given out to the students. With this image safely stowed, I posed the problem that will logically require some conceptual measurement skills and then headed over to the DECS website to download plans for new libraries and classroom blocks which I’m hoping someone tomorrow is going to point out as a requirement to successfully meet the assigned challenge.

With all of these plans detailed on the wiki and saved, I decided to write this post. Time now for some tortilla wraps for the family evening meal, then back after tea to insert some links here and then to assess last term’s final inquiry assessment tasks which are sitting waiting for me on my students’ blogs. If I don’t get distracted doing other things, that is.

USB drives
Thumbdrives
USB sticks
Jumpdrives
USB keys
Flashdrives

These handy devices have become an indispensable tool for students at my school and until now the teachers have relied on the willingness of students to bring their own USB drives to and from the classroom to complete much of the digital work set in assignments. I know that it is almost impossible to get all of the tasks I set done within our limited computing room time and laptop access, and motivated students use their USB drives to continue work on slideshows, documents and other digital projects. But as these devices have jumped in capacity and power, and dived in price, other complicating issues have emerged.

With the ability to run executable programs directly from the USB drive, students are using their device to store portable applications, run flash games, store sizeable music collections and maintain personal libraries of images and videos. But what is stored is not always suitable for the school environment – songs with questionable lyrics and even more questionable LimeWire based origins, violent or politically incorrect games and video content and the increased likelihood of viruses and trojans being released onto the school network via some of the “fun” applications.

Anyway, my school has been working on a possible solution that still permits the use of USB drives in our school environment. It is not fair to expect that kids use their personal devices for school purposes so we will be supplying a smaller capacity drive (1GB) for purchase at a low price complete with school logo specifically for use between home and school. I’d personally like to give them away but tight budgets and Government tax requirements make that a difficult proposition. Now I am not naïve enough to believe that this will eliminate all potential for the problems described above but it gives the eLearning Committee here the power to prescribe the use of USB drives in our Technology Users Agreement for our students.

Now what I’m also interested in is how other schools have tackled the issue of student USB drives within the school environment. Has there been any risks or problems identified? How have you resolved these issues? Any advice or any holes in our strategy as outlined above?

Image: ‘flash-drive‘ www.flickr.com/photos/76613417@N00/111901487

Whilst flicking from one task to another I’ve been checking out some of the “Videos We Like” on Vimeo. I didn’t know much about Vimeo until Dan Meyer did his dy/av series and hosted his awesome summer series (during our wintertime) there in mid 2008. He’s pointed to a few since then and I find it’s more of an arty hangout for filmmakers of varying types and small ad agencies. So, I’m poaching an idea directly from Dan and asking a simple question:

What could you do with this in a classroom?

Suddenly from Magnus Engsfors on Vimeo.

Or this?

lost in a moment from dennis wheatley on Vimeo.

The quality is way better than YouTube and there seems to be less wading through the junk to get to the interesting stuff. But maybe that’s just me. These will look great on the interactive whiteboard – but in what context?

Heard about lifestreaming?

Via the super savvy Chris Harvey over on the TALO list:

…blogging is not necessarily dying, but is becoming an inadequate paradigm to keep up with all the data that the average internet consumer now produces. Lifestreams are the way to keep up with it all.

Yongfook has his own open source solution ready to go. Called SweetCron, you really need to see it to understand how it all holds together. Thankfully, Chris has installed it on his site so others can check it out. Barbara Dieu has hers up and running as well. It seems that you need to have your own hosted site and a bit of web nous to make it all work which puts it out of reach of a cheapskate free ranger like me. 

And ironically, doesn’t this make me.edu.au a form of lifestreaming?

I was going to add this as a comment to Dan Meyer’s reaction to another edtech wake-up call video, but the stream of responses and the reasons for Dan’s displeasure seemed to be going down another track to what I observed so I held it over for this space.  I’m not so bothered by the format of the video (although the style looks vaguely formulaic!!) as the underlying message that seems to be seeping through.

My reaction upon seeing grim faced child after grim faced child hoist a laptop into the air was, “Does the author really think that just access to technology solves the problem and makes the classroom an engaging place to be?” The statements being held up were unsubstantiated sentences and pleas and do very little to actually make a case for the thoughtful application of technology for learning. I kept thinking that the nature of the classroom and the lesson structures within were what needed to be changed rather than just adding the technology in just because it is “fun” and “easier to learn when it is noisy”.

I’ve said it before and this video doesn’t change my view that technology in the classroom magnifies a teacher’s practice. It will make a good teacher even better and it will make the shortcomings of a poor teacher even more obvious. This video sends the message “Just Add Technology And The Engagement Will Happen.”

It’s not that simple.

Back in 2000 I attended a three day Discovery School program that was a key part of my journey into educational ICT. One of the tools referred to was the Software Pyramid, created by Victorian teacher Graeme Oswin which was a guide for schools to ensure that their software dollars were spent critically.

Well, a few months back this pyramid concept came up again in a conversation with Ann, my principal, as we talked through the relative merits of teacher software preferences. But the educational technology has moved a long way since this concept was first drawn up and we both wondered if there might not be a more modern equivalent out on the web that might inform in a similar manner.

It didn’t take long for this diagram to surface via Google, and thanks to the Metiri Group, we now have a new blueprint with which to guide our staff. Certainly, those edubloggers with misgivings about the absolute plethora of Web 2.0 applications spawning in cyberspace, can see how the latest and greatest tools measure up as learning implements.