Do you like the way I started this post by using one of your trademark writing quirks?
Anyway, it has taken me this long to pull together some bits and pieces since your post that got me thinking. I went and did what I threatened in the comment. I took your techno-ripe idea, ping-ponging its way via the network from California to Pennsylvania to South Australia, twisted it around to suit my Year Six classroom and have a few samples to share.
Check this one first…
The goal was to advertise their upcoming Personal Research Projects (starting up this week!) in one minute with the assistance of four relevant adjectives combined with four skilfully chosen CC images. Some kids did well with their adjective choice, their excellent speaking skills but struggled to break away from the obvious connection with their chosen topic. Not to worry - these are 11 year olds after all. I was happy about the attribution and thought put into this one.
Others were not as fluent at the speaking part but their image choice was positively inspired…
And if you’re wondering what four adjectives would sum up your own fine country from an Aussie child’s perspective, try this ad for the topic of the USA.
So, ken, I did much of what you suggested. In between the demands of your young family, just know that your influence (and so many others that I read and connect with) resonates in my classroom half a world away.
Kudos to educationau for offering to host the May 2nd event titled “Learning In The 21st Century” as a positive spin off from the issues coming to a head with Al Upton’s class blog closure. Now the event is not about Al’s situation but is more a roundtable discussion as a starting point for moving forward. Acknowledgement must go to Alex Hayes who came up with the initial concept of an event and drove the TALO involvement but will be nursing his swollen knee as the discussion unfolds. Janet Hawtin has also been amazing, connecting all the dots and encouraging key people to have their say. Over a GMail chat the other night I negotiated an afternoon only visit to the event and a recorded contibution for the morning due to my classroom teaching commitments. As I type the just over 10 minutes of audio is uploading to my podomatic account and hopefully I’ll link to it just before I head to bed.
Restrict the photos you post of yourself online - they can be used for purposes you may not like.
Ensure your Bluetooth is turned off to avoid “data slurping”.
Be aware that mobile phones with cameras and voice recorders may be in your school and classroom.
Try and ensure that you know the true identity of everyone that you chat to online.
These pieces of advice were part of the “Cyber Safety For Teachers” presentation from our CEGSA AGM. Without being a basher of the presenter, there are a number of problems with talking about the topic of cyber safety from a negative, glass-half-empty perspective. We were given a handout at the end for which I cannot find a web pdf link, no matter how hard I search. It sets the scene for teachers online in the following way:
There have been many reports of students bullying and harassing other students using digital technologies. As technology rapidly changes opportunities for such antisocial behaviour increase including the use of sms, websites, and even the use of mobile phones to record bullying incidents which are then posted on websites such as YouTube and MySpace.
Unfortunately there have also been incidents where teachers have been bullied and harassed by students, as well as ex-students and parents.
Teachers need to aware of the risks inherent in their daily contact with digitally aware and capable students, and take steps to protect themselves.
It seems to be the recommended method to deal with these issues is to ensure that as little of ourselves makes it onto the web because it can all be used against us. Close it all down - don’t give the sneaky so-and-so’s any opportunity to misuse your personal data against you. After all, who wants to Google their name and see the first hit defaming their professional or personal reputation?
But I would suggest that perhaps the opposite advice is actually a safer option. Being open about who you are, what you stand for, publishing your ideas, your work, your interactions with others means that the web stores a pretty comprehensive and weighty body of evidence that would easily counter any scurrilous content authored by others with malicious intent. So, expanding your digital footprint can therefore work in your favour and it is from that digital footprint that we can verify the identity and intent of those with whom we choose to interact with on the web.
I know that there are those who feel safer behind an alias or an avatar. I would venture to say that particular choice is made more out of fear of non-online retribution in many cases (but I’m happy to be corrected).
It’s from that open identity that we find our global collaborative partners, build digital collegiality and share our best practices and resources. And hand in hand with that open identity comes open dialogue, open exchanging of views.
Teachers shouldn’t be running scared of the online world. If they decide to make it part of their professional existence, they can take control of their online identity and the worst efforts of others will be much easier to deal with.
Original image: 'identity card‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17936540@N00/71593865
by: Simone Petralia
Does risk to students trump learning? Perceived risk, slight risk, possible risk - is risk something to be avoided in the classroom at all when it comes to using internet based technologies? This summary paragraph from Al Upton’s Update No.3 is really making me think:
A number of analogies were presented … many stating any risk to students negates learning entering the debate. I raised the “To avoid students drowning, we teach them to swim” analogy - authentic learning.
One response ‘If something bad can happen to even one child it shouldn’t be done’ – paraphrased
I know that this idea of any risk being unacceptable can be turned onto other examples of school today and found to be blatantly untrue. How about playground equipment? I’ve been at schools where an ambulance has been called twice in a week for suspected broken arms and other injuries caused by slips or falls from the equipment. Why hasn’t all play equipment been banned and closed down? If one child could slip and possibly fall with injurious consequences, then there is risk. But the benefits of the playground far outweigh the negatives - the learning, the gaining of skills, the creation of games and the friendship of playing with your mates. And we are careful with the playground environment - no sharp edges, designs that cater for a variety of skill levels, soft fall on the ground, rules for safe play, teacher supervision - so that the risks are managed and lead to beneficial learning of physical skills.
Why would we treat the risks regarding, say, the use of blogs in the classroom any differently? Why do risks associated with technology seem to be so threatening that shutting down and banning is seen as the appropriate way to deal with it? And are those responsible for recommending or enforcing these methods really in touch with real or perceived risks?
I have this sneaking feeling that a risk free classroom might also be a learning-lite classroom.
I’ve been keen on the idea of a Digg style site that can be customised for a classroom since last year but the demise of CrispyNews put paid to that avenue. But I’m been using another site, CoRank, to build something similar for this year and it looks promising. I haven’t seen much in the edublogosphere about this site so I thought I’d let you know.
You basically set up an account (valid email only required) and then you can choose from a few templates to set up your site. You can then invite others to join the site so that they can help submit news stories and websites that can then be commented upon and voted up or down Digg style. This way you set up your small voting community and watch as topical stories surface and climb or fall according to the preferences of the participants. There are tabs where you can see all stories submitted, they can sorted by tag, rank, and every user can see their activity history as well.
Why might this be useful in the classroom?
I figure it can be useful in a number of ways. Firstly, there is a lot to be learnt in terms of the students sensibly starting and managing a web account and how to be protective of their identity via their profile and the creation of a fun avatar. It can be useful in terms of teaching younger kids how to start contributing to the web without having to author original material but instead getting them to start making insightful comments. It gets them thinking about the wider world and making judgement calls about suitable material for the site both by voting up or down and then via posted contributions.
You can get a bit of an idea by looking at the site I created. I’ve gone with the SpinTheGlobe theme thinking that we might restart our connection to Doug Noon’s class with this as one distributed point where we can find topics of interest together for 11/12 year olds. Already, students have been really keen and have added some articles already, and started the commenting. The voting feature is a hit - please bear in mind that this is barely a week old but it is a tool that is worth a good look in terms of tapping into your students’ interests and assisting with information literacy skills and general internet awareness. Check it out.
With just over a week of school left for this year, I thought that now would be a good opportunity to officially declare the wiki collaboration between my Year 5/6 class and Doug Noon’s sixth graders open. Now, it’s never ever been closed to anyone on the web but this is an official invitation to any educator who’s interested to take a look and offer some feedback. It’s called Spin The Globe and I blogged about its progress a little while back. At times, it’s caused a flurry of emails as Doug and I have endeavored to iron out the chinks and retreat from some of the blind turns that we’ve taken our classes down.
So what’s Spin The Globe and what did the students do? It was an idea of mine that would match my students with somewhere far removed from their everyday experience. I also wanted to work with someone I already knew and respected with hopefully similar ideals about how these type of global projects could be implemented at a ”grassroots” level. I approached Doug and he was keen but with guarded caution - not about the goals or potential but the implementation. Some of that has been documented in my prior post or may be expanded on by Doug in his own time and place so I’ll stick to what the wiki project has become at this point in time.
I’ll be honest here and state the goals that Doug and I negotiated have been our guiding light because the process and the final product has been constantly malleable and subject to redefinition. The big difficulty was making this project important to two very different groups of students living very different lives. My class enjoyed the advantage of being the initiators and being very settled as we were well into the second half of our school year. They knew me, I knew their capabilities and by that stage in the year I knew them all well enough to enthuse them about this mysterious project we were doing with “the kids from Alaska”. Doug, on the other hand, was just starting his new school year and was still working out his group’s particular tendencies and skill sets. From my perspective, his position was always going to be trickier to manage. But I have to pay tribute to his support, his diplomomatic balancing of some of my hare-brained ideas and ultimately suggesting ways to get around some of the barriers (cultural and technological). One of the best pieces of advice actually came from his wife, also a teacher, who pointed out that a top-down approach that dictated specific roles and topics for students was somewhat at odds with the inquiry based approach we were actually wanting for them. In my class, the project gained its largest boost of momentum when I spoke to my students and announced that the shackles were off and they were free to develop whatever pages of the wiki they wanted. After all, Wikipedia contributors don’t get assigned to write specific articles by a superior. I know that a classroom effort can’t be quite as organic as that but productivity and engagement went up noticeably from that point on.
The students started with what they knew, then progressed to asking questions, answering questions, doing additional research both on their Alaskan focus and on Australian topics in order to give back useful information to Doug’s class. His kids initiated and created del.icio.us accounts that we linked together via the network function - these were useful jumping off points and become links we could embed back in the wiki. We had a fantastic day excursion that refreshed (and for some kids, introduced) information about our own part of the world and captured images that we placed in a flickr account. The students who were really keen spent time adding descriptive text and adding notes to explain the photos we had taken. Then we started to develop the final wiki entries. I built a navigation page, tweaked the sidebar links and students used a similar formatting plan to Wikipedia to write up their entries based on their primary source information gained from their Alaskan counterparts. It was starting to look good.
Some kids really thrived on this sort of project. One child who is so self conscious of his handwriting skills that his written work is minimal and lacking in depth blossomed with detailed writing and obvious pride in getting the presentation right in his section on Alaskan Transport. Some kids would edit punctuation on others’ entries, fix up the formatting or help rephrase a sentence so that it was clearer.
The whole project showed other benefits that you won’t find actually on the wiki but were lightbulb moments in the classroom. Looking at some of the pics from Doug’s class was one of those moments - most of my kids have never seen snow and were gobsmacked to see the playground and buildings coated in the stuff at this time of year when things are warming up. It added meaning to another lesson where we took a mathematical angle on our respective monthly temperatures. We collected monthly maximum and minimum temperatures from the Adelaide weather website, found an equivalent Fairbanks temperature source and converted those statistics to Celcius. The kids listed down both sets of data in a table - as numbers they didn’t mean that much even side by side. But as I demonstrated how to construct a line graph on the interactive whiteboard, some students began to cotton on the massive differences in seasons and temperatures. And as they constructed their own line graphs, there were comments of “Whoa!”, “I can’t believe that it gets that cold!” and “Check this out!” as they watched the contrasting curves cross over on their pages.
Every time kids read a new piece of information from their Alaskan peers, they would try to make sense of it through the lense of their own experiences. Sometimes it wouldn’t make sense, sometimes it helped to crystallise a concept but collectively a better understanding of life on the other side of the globe started to take shape. Now you can check out what they have found out by checking out the wiki. Please feel free to leave some feedback in the discussion tabs - let them know that the world is watching by telling them where you’re visiting from. Don’t forget they are mainly 11 and 12 year olds and I’m very proud of how they have used web tools to communicate and construct their own learning in a very collaborative way. Thanks once again to Doug and his group of sixth graders - without them, there would not been a Spin The Globe project. The teachers have very much been learners along the way.
Thanks. After 487 edits, it’s time for you guys to take a look.
In my opinion, one of the easiest entry points for teachers into Web 2.0 is to start a social bookmarking account. Getting them to really grasp the power of this tool is more challenging. Most teachers like to collect useful websites even if they’re not web-savvy enthusiasts and the methods employed to keep track of them can range from emailing links back to themselves, creating hotlists in Word to relying on browser Bookmarks or Favorites. These lists usually aren’t very big because they have to be kept manageable.
There are management issues with these methods. How do you search piles of emails (unless it’s GMail!) for that elusive link? Do you start a new document each time for a new hotlist category? What happens when the computer you host your Favorites on crashes and you lose the lot? (And if it’s a Windows machine, it’s a matter of when, not if!) So when I talk about a better way, most teachers are all ears.
I like to recommend del.icio.us. It’s simple, very powerful when harnessed correctly and where the biggest community of users can be found. As I’ve blogged before, there isn’t a whole heap of help guides and resources with an educational bent - what I have found is usually of very high quality. So, getting teachers to sign up, installing the browser buttons and adding a few sites is not too hard. Getting them to understand tagging is harder - people want to try and follow set rules for this. They try to apply subject areas, age levels, strands and they want everyone else to be following the same rules as well. Then I explain how tagging enables you to control subsets of sites through a unique tag and they see how sites can be pre-tagged for easy retrieval for a unit of work, a particular lesson or PD session. For example when I co-presented with Yvonne Murtagh at CEGSA, we used the tag kooltools07 to group all of the sites we wanted to share. By inviting others to contribute, this list continues to grow. (Thanks, Jim Sprialis!) For the school’s Open Night, I used the tag opennight and amazed parents when I could so easily pull up web resources to match curriculum areas. So, it takes a bit before the strengths of folksonomy becomes apparent to the newer user.
Some are still uncomfortable about the open nature of del.icio.us.
“You mean anyone else can see what I’m bookmarking? I’m not sure I like that.”
Once I remind them that it’s only listing websites, not airing dirty laundry or trade secrets, they relax. When I tell them that the openness is vital to gaining some traction and saving some time, they are less apprehensive. I show them how to find other people’s bookmarks, how scanning their tags gives you a feel for their relevancy to what you’re interested in and then save items of interest back to their own account. Adding names to create their own network is a harder sell but having a constant flow of handpicked sites from trusted professionals worldwide is a smart, efficient way to operate. Sometimes, the only way is to demonstrate and even then you run the risk of moving too fast, too soon and being written off as a smart-aleck.
But I’ve seen a real willingness from my staff to get on board with social bookmarking. Some are using it a lot and others have the mindset of “I know I should but I keep forgetting” or “I still like using Favorites.” But there’s almost enough of a groundswell to support the wider sharing of sites and resources suitable for our Interactive Whiteboard program. So when all of our staff have each other listed on their del.icio.us network, whatever gem is discovered by one staff member is discovered for all.
Update: There’s always more than one side to the story and I recommend you check out the comments to this post to get more quality insight into the subversive and innovative use of del.icio.us.
Wow, I feel pretty stuffed right now after a big day culminating in our school’s Open Night to launch our new school vision. These things are a pretty big deal and usually dictate school priorities and direction for a five year period. Our vision included 18 statements and coincidentally our school has 18 classes so the launch had each classroom buddied up with another to create a display/activity/interaction on their two statements in their classrooms to get the school community in tune.
The major statement for my classroom was : Are technologically savvy and are able to use the world wide web to assist them to learn. That was a pretty good statement to score and we set up the new wireless laptops to show a web enabled learning area in the classroom as part of our efforts. You can check out some of the sites I used in the room with the kids as laptop coaches at - http://del.icio.us/wegner/opennight
By the way, one part of the launch was the use of these fabulous posters designed by a parent using student illustrations around the school to “sell” the vision. Look carefully at the illustrations and you will see that our Global Project has had a major impact on my class’ thoughts.
“Don’t believe the hype - it’s a sequel
As an equal, can I get this through to you..” Artist: Public Enemy
Album: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
1988
This lyric strings together a lot of the online stuff I’ve been encountering and thinking about over the past week - kind of like a soundtrack in my brain. Public Enemy’s plea to be wary of the American media (although of much greater magnitude and significance) can be easily applied to some recent examples and give me a greater appreciation of those edubloggers prepared to go against the grain, to question the “wisdom of the crowd” and to write some unpopular things. Bill Kerr and Tim Holt, for example, have important things to say and more often than not are using their blog as a form of mirror to their own and others’ contradictions. Hey, why not? As far as I can see, they are exposing some of the hype.
More of my self-identified hype.
K12 PreConference Keynote Hype.
After not downloading this highly sought after file within the first 24 hours, I noticed a lot of praise laden blog posts filtering through, even a couple verging on gushing. The hype was unbearable - I had to see this for myself. But, I saw a long winded talking head video with overstretched metaphors and plugs for American coffee houses - what was the fuss all about? I didn’t get it - an airport, so what? However, the hype made me watch it all the way through just to be sure. My impressions didn’t change - but just to be clear, I like David Warlick, I didn’t like the keynote. And I did post my opinion over on the K12 blog.
Facebook Hype.
I can’t open my GMail without getting friend requests, pokes, questions, updates and general Facebook digital output. I joined Facebook because I wanted to see how this hugely popular social networking tool worked but I didn’t bargain on the hype. A great Skype conversation between Sue Waters and Alex Hayes on Wednesday evening eased my mind somewhat - it’s a walled garden where I can safely let the weeds grow without sacrificing my precious time.
Twitter Tool Hype.
For all its great networking value, twitter tends to help breed tool hype of the most mouth-frothingly kind. UStream - I Scream. (Yet some people call it life-changing!!)
Skitch? Don’t bother unless you’re a Mac lover.
Chatcast - call and your online friends will come running.
I do believe that Darren Draper has captured twitter hype perfectly in this post.
Don’t worry - I’ve generated plenty of my own hype on this blog - just that no-one seems to want to take it any further!
A vibrant exchange with Al Upton in the comments section here on this blog had me challenged with his point about educators being involved in “rich ongoing online learning that is reflected in their students’ learning.” What does that look like in the classroom? My classroom? Any classroom? Al was open about his class’s efforts:
[My class blog and the kids’ individual blogs (although often a struggle with the basic aim to provide an initial exposure to online networks … 8 and 9 year olds) is my attempt as a teacher in an open sense. Our explorations of Quest Atlantis - a MUVE … a bit like SL but with built in learning quests and missions for 9-12yo is my attempt in a virtual 3D game like learning environment … in a walled garden sense :]
So while I’m swanning around cyberspace, twittering this and networking that, building up connections near and far, what benefit has it brought the students that I teach? It’s time to document my efforts at global digital collaboration for my class - warts and all.
My class is part of a primary school ( the North American equivalent is elementary) covering from 5 year olds to 13 year olds. We call ourselves middle school students because the school is divided into learning teams - junior primary, middle primary and the Middle Years Learning Unit (MYLU). Basically we form part of a 4 classroom block - usually made up of Year (Grade) 6/7’s but as all classes are composite (multiple year levels) and Australian classrooms are funded to be class sizes of 30 from Year 3 onwards, that’s how why I’m co-teaching a 5/6 combination with slightly younger kids mixed into my class.
Anyway, MYLU classes collaborate on several levels and co-plan for cross-curricular units of work. This past term’s over-riding theme was Communication and I floated the idea of covering this by setting up class global partnerships where they could actively work through the process of communicating about their respective parts of the world. Of course, I had to lead the way - both because my online networking and Web 2 tools skills would be required plus it was my turn to “lead out” on the unit of work. I knew it was important to convince my MYLU teaching colleagues that I knew what I was doing (even if it wasn’t true) and to be able to model some options as they got going with their classes. I turned to one of the educators I trust and respect the most, Doug Noon, to see if he’d be keen to work with me and to see if this concept could work.
We both figured a wiki would be a good rallying point for our collaboration and so SpinTheGlobe was created. There’s been several well publicised global wiki projects around that have been very successful - the Horizon Project wiki , initiated by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, was one where I tagged in for a minor role as a peer review classroom - but I was keen to take a different approach and deliberately wanting to work in a low key and grassroots orientated way. This suited Doug as he also wanted to forge our own collective ideas rather than follow an established blueprint. He pointed out in one of our early e-mail exchanges about the possible gains for his students being that “These projects will involve my students and (hopefully) lead them toward a more global consciousness. That’s my larger goal. For Alaskan kids, especially if they’ve never lived anywhere else, the larger world is a big unknown.”
So, with the main idea being communicating how each other’s parts of the world works, it was time for me to “lead out”. I started the wiki, embedded some eye candy widgets to show location, time and temperatures of both locations and then got the class to brainstorm out what they already knew about our global partners a “spin of the globe” in Fairbanks, Alaska. It turned that they didn’t know a lot - but we documented that on the wiki as a starting point and Doug got his kids to do the same. Then the tricky part of making collaborative decisions about which way to go came into play.
There are quite a few hurdles to be overcome in order to get a global project (even a grassroots one!) off the ground. The first hurdle is timing - my class were well settled with half a year of school under their belt and used to my “let’s do this” approach to technology based learning while Doug was starting his school year with new kids, a new grade level and kids who weren’t necessarily tech-savvy in the way required to be using the web and Web 2.0 tools in an efficient manner. The next hurdle was time - finding the time to commit to the project, then filling the time between waiting for Doug’s students’ next contribution with related work that maintained the interest and purpose. Another hurdle was our own communication patterns - ironic that the people who may learn the most about effective communication may be the teachers involved! I totally forgot to make Doug a wiki organiser at the start which created problems when he wanted to get his kids signed up. One of us would fire off an e-mail asking crucial questions or suggesting important changes in direction and the time differences or workload requirements would get in the way of a speedy and useful response.
But we got started. My class started posing questions on the wiki and Doug’s started tagging Alaskan websites of interest in a del.icio.us account. Then my class started the same and using the Network feature both classes could look easily at each other’s sites as a way of “frontloading” the students on a part of the world they know very little about. In this way, both groups were introduced to the power of social bookmarking and an image on one of the sites has become my reference point for demonstrating possibilities to my class. More on that shortly.
I also started my kids playing with FlickrStorm as a way of creating photogalleries of the topics up for discussion. That also produced important discussion as some kids were able to use the tool to stay focussed on the task at hand and others got distracted by the power of the tool. I even used this example in a comment on Doug’s blog:
Working on the wiki for our “global partners”, I talked with the class about the idea of using photography as a way of communicating ideas about the Australian way of life. I let them loose using FlickrStorm to create a photo montage on a specific idea like Australian food, or money or sport. They had so much fun working out how FlickrStorm worked, using key words, adding images they liked to the download tray and then generating the final hosting page of images, that very few thought critically about the images they were choosing and what message they would send about our way of life. Reviewing these back in class as a group was very useful as we (the class as a whole, not just me) realised that the photo collections needed checking for validity and accuracy. Check the difference between the collection of Australian money images from one child who was able to keep the end goal in mind in contrast to the other student who got caught up in the moment. The class discussion when viewed on data projector was invaluable. What conclusions would someone draw when the US dollar features in the pics? But when I send the students back tomorrow in the computing room to review, fix and link in their image pages, I reckon the results will be much, much closer to achieving their goal.
We still haven’t decided whether these galleries are a key ingredient in this project. Another major frustration is when a tool with potential turns out to have issues related to the school environment. I started playing with VoiceThread the other week and immediately got excited - in fact, I was convinced I had found the key to the next part of our collaboration. To set the scene, I focussed my trial example on an element of an image from one of the Alaskan websites showing an inukshuk, which I had never seen or heard of before. I grabbed images from FlickrCC for my VoiceThread, then recorded questions with each image. I saved it and then the next day, caught Chris Harbeck on Gmail Chat during my recess break. He, too, loves VoiceThread and offered to check out my example and add a voice comment. He did, even ignoring my mispronunciation of the word inukshuk, and I was sold. I started imagining South Australian and Alaskan student voices posing and answering questions via VoiceThread then writing up what they had learnt from their primary sources back at the wiki. I was so excited I showed my class my VoiceThread up on the interactive whiteboard. “I can’t hear your voice very well, Mr.Wegner.”
Then it came to a grinding halt. My original example had been recorded at home and I soon found that VoiceThread doesn’t work well from within our school environment - the images wouldn’t upload and the record button took too long to activate and it basically bombed. I did find out from Chrissy Hellyer (during a chatcast for Kim Cofino’s parent Web 2.0 presentation in my lunch hour) that she had similar issues at her school but they were solvable by unblocking a specific IP address and a certain port on the server. She also emphasised the worth of pursuing a solution as VT has a lot of great collaborative potential. So that is something still to work on.
But it does bring up another thing to consider when “going global” in your classroom - don’t assume that your access to web technology is the same as your partner’s. Doug’s class hit the issue of student emails in order to create unique identities for student work on the wiki. At my school all students from Year 3 have an email address that is packaged up with their internet logon. Not so at Doug’s school. There may be other bandwidth issues to consider. Certain sites may be blocked or filtered at one end but not the other.
Still, I’m pretty pleased with our progress so far with our grassroots global collaboration. Why do I refer to it as grassroots? Well, both Doug and I are committed public educators (he’s a bit more vocal about it than me) and we weren’t shooting for any high concepts that seem to be the topic of flavour ’round the edublogosphere. Just because an issue is high priority in the networks doesn’t mean that our age students will be all that engaged. What they are interested in is themselves and how they might be perceived by others. So, if all Doug and I do is raise some awareness that yes, your way (the students) of acting and thinking isn’t the only way and to debunk some misconceptions about our respective parts of the world.
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Digital Convergence, Internet, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by Graham
