Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Tell A Story Using Google Maps

Published on September 21, 2011 in Internet and Web 2.0. 4 Comments

Tonight’s learner PD was using Google Maps to create a story. Here’s the link to the story I created as the example and stimulus for my small group of keen learners.


View My Journey As An Educator in a larger map

I was thinking that this could be a great tool for so many things – great for SOSE, mapping locations from stories, creating narratives, histories, mathematical journeys etc. This has been blogged thoroughly by the talented Silvia Tolisano, and this project could also kick start some great story telling and learning. I could imagine some powerful stories from my school’s multicultural student population tracing their family’s journey to Adelaide – although many have histories that may not be pleasant to re-visit so sensitivity is always required. An upper primary colleague now wants me to work with her class using Google Maps. I like the look of the Map Maker as well, especially as it comes with plenty of self help documentation. And if I knew how to create the required XML file, then something like Map My Life would be possible.

The Fabulous Dr Joyce Valenza

Published on July 27, 2011 in Conferences & PD, Future Directions, Information Literacy and Web 2.0. 2 Comments

I was very lucky to attend today’s seminar with Dr Joyce Valenza here in Adelaide, and my head is still swimming from the sheer breadth she covered in the day. The whole day in terms of her presentation, her links and pathways can all be found here on her wikispace created for this down under visit. So I won’t try and recreate the day actually that would be impossible because what the site can’t convey to you is the sheer passion that Joyce has. It certainly won’t demonstrate the furious pace at which our collective brains were filled – I was asked to run the backchannel which was quiet and understated, but participants were too busy listening, watching and checking out links and tools on their laptops to be throwing back too many queries and challenges. By only using the wikispace, you would not also appreciate the urgency in her message – encouraging and enthused – but urgent nonetheless. With an audience of mainly teacher-librarians, I got the feeling that the urgency is as much for the future of this role in schools as it was for the future of our students but of course, the two are connected.

So, thank you, Joyce, for a brilliant day. What your brilliant online resource does is enable those of us at today’s seminar to go back through your day in smaller bite size chunks at a pace that allows for deeper reflection, fuller exploration and lengthy consideration of how to change and improve the learning for our respective student communities. It’ll be something I’ll chew for quite a while and is a very timely focus as I start in on my new role.

Digital Literacy Lesson Potential In Qwiki

Published on January 25, 2011 in Internet and Web 2.0. 0 Comments

Via ReadWriteWeb, news of a service called Qwiki that “combines speech-to-text and assembled multi-media to create little slideshows based on Wikipedia entries”.

Although like Animoto, all of the heavy lifting is done for you, this tool has some potential in the classroom. There’s all sorts of talk around the need for primary school students to have “digital literacy” skills and be able to extract meaning from more than just text, and I could see Qwiki as a way of introducing a topic, analysis of a concept, making reading Wikipedia more engaging, assisting kids with reading difficulties and looking at how the actual Qwiki could be improved to effectively communicate about its topic.

For example, I did a quick search for Australia Day.

When it finishes, it shows a number of related Qwiki shows that can help add context to the original, like the Day Of Mourning or even why Geoffrey Blainey‘s point of view was quoted. While this tool should not substitute effective research, I think that students would find it a useful starting point for topical research within a number of curriculum areas.

Qwiki also has a process for improvement and users can add suggestions for better images, relevant YouTube footage or even the correct pronunciation of key words. (Even Oprah Winfrey managed the correct pronunciation for Melbourne the other night – Mel-bn, not Mel-born.) Student discussion around these points can be a useful part of analysing the role of imagery and audio in conveying information. I’ll be trying it out at some stage and I’ll post some reflections here when I do.

Social Media & Professional Educator Associations – Enemies Or Friends?

Published on November 13, 2010 in Conferences & PD, Future Directions and Web 2.0. 6 Comments

Well, my talk at the CEASA Spotlight Seminar the other night seemed to go OK, although I’m not sure that I really addressed the question of how social media can be utilised by professional associations. A quick look at the CEASA website shows that even in this comparatively small state, there are over 50 associations under their umbrella. I belong to one – CEGSA – but I’m a relative newcomer to being a member, only joining a little over five years ago. So, I don’t have this ingrained history of having a particular professional stake in the continued prosperity of an association. However, if my short stint on the CEGSA Committee is anything to go by, all associations have similar issues in terms of maintaining membership, maintaining a viable financial base and offering support to its members in their particular field of interest.

I use social media as an individual. Associations are about a community. I wasn’t really sure where to look to find an association that was leveraging social media for its members until I remembered that Jo McLeay is now working for VITTA. Their approach is to offer an extremely resource rich website and add the social media in on the platforms where they are found out on the wild web. There’s a blog and a Twitter account. The Twitter account is interesting in that it’s not necessarily a collection of VITTA members on the following list but a carefully curated collection chosen for their potential value to the membership. A quick look at that collection shows a significant number of individuals, all obviously putting out tweets of significant interest for their own network, of which VITTA has now become a node. But as for how many VITTA members are availing themselves of this social media feed, well,  I couldn’t tell.

Professional educator organisations cater for interest groups within the education community. They provide Professional Development sessions, run conferences, maintain websites and newletters with the aim of equipping their members with the latest resources and offering information and opportunities to improve their members’ professional practice. This has worked well for quite a long time and many organisations have embraced the use of technology to improve outcomes for their membership base. But in the same way that the internet is a disruptive force starting to rumble through educational institutions, the web and in particular, social media services threaten the status quo. Online events like the K12 Online Conference show that membership to an organisation is no longer a requirement to hold or participate in Professional Learning of the highest quality. The ever popular TED Talks provides keynote quality out of the budget range of any South Australian organisation.

Professional associations are a way of pooling talent and resources for the common good of a larger group. But they have to provide value for their annual subscriptions or potential members are less enthused about joining. At the Seminar, two SLASA members showed an online referencing tool that their organisation had developed, pointing out that this had the potential to be a positive drawcard for their organisation and that licensed access to this tool could be an income generator for SLASA. But in my mind, there is a danger in this. My experiences and interactions with many educators online indicate that the days of hording an idea behind a locked web portal and charging for access are over. People will just search for another free tool online. That doesn’t mean that talented members should not develop these useful tools. Just don’t expect them to be a money spinner.

As I wrote before, professional associations are a way of pooling talent and resources for the common good of a larger group. Prior to the internet, this was a way of connecting locally as time and distance prevented the easy exchange of ideas between states and other countries. An annual conference of sister associations across the nation provided important cross-pollinating opportunities as key members travelled to an interstate venue and brought back new ideas and initiatives for the local group. Social media throws the need for most of that out the window. If I’m a Maths teacher, why would I restrict myself to only the ideas within my state association when increasingly, many of the best and most innovative ideas are being published and discussed across digital networks in various corners of the world? Now, it could be that many associations serve a niche demographic where educators of similar ilk world wide are not blogging, tweeting, YouTubing or pooling ideas and practices on a wiki. But there is a definite trend occurring. You could see the edtech community as being an innovator, with early adopters in other educational fields starting to multiply until all areas of the education spectrum have networked individuals sharing and benefitting via the web.

So, if professional associations are to stay vibrant, healthy and relevant, they must work out how to leverage the tools social media offer and look at the trends towards openness and sharing in order to redefine themselves for the years ahead. I’m not at all sure what that could look like but like the education system itself, professional associations must continue to evolve to attract membership and then meet that membership’s needs in an era where professional learning is ubiquitous as information itself.

The Love/Hate World Of Twitter

Published on November 7, 2010 in Web 2.0. 0 Comments

I’ve been asked to speak for about 20 minutes on Social Media For Educators for a Spotlight Seminar for CEASA, the ruling body for all of the education professional associations here in South Australia. The presentation promises to be more of a drive-by spray of information and ideas than an in-depth examination, but it has meant that I’ve ventured back out onto Twitter to mingle with my Twitter network. I mostly feel like I am a taker in this social media forum, as finding fresh links that no one else has found already is not my forte. But I have found a few neat little tools that hopefully will show the assembled bunch on Wednesday evening that Twitter isn’t just about letting the world know what I had for breakfast. This one is interesting:

And if you want to feel the centre of your own self-created universe, hop over to IS Parade and drop your twitter handle in for a visualization that is very different.

Low Grade Graphical Eye Candy With Narcissistic Tendencies

Published on November 1, 2010 in Blogging and Web 2.0. 0 Comments
Or put more simply, two Excel graphs that show where people who are reading this blog are from and where bloggers I’ve got in my Google Reader are from, in rough terms.
Generated from my Clustr Map stats as of November 2010.

Generated from my Clustr Map stats as of November 2010.

Spread of locations of bloggers whom I'm currently subscribed to in my Google Reader.

Spread of locations of bloggers whom I'm currently subscribed to in my Google Reader.

Both should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. The first only measures visitors to my actual blog page – there isn’t any way I know of knowing who my subscribers via RSS. The second is everyone in my Reader as it stands right now. It hasn’t been cleaned out in ages and there are quite a few people that haven’t posted in a long, long while.

What does this tell me? Well, I show my monolingual tendencies by sticking to English only blogs. It’s not that I don’t want to broaden my scope but am unsure of where to look to get away from over populating my Reader with a few dominant countries. Still, I wonder what other people’s graphs might look like. Is this a reasonable way to gain a global picture of education and learning? Would my Twitter graph look different?

Sharing Other People’s Stuff

Published on October 30, 2010 in Future Directions, Personal Reflections, Staff Training and Web 2.0. 5 Comments

After school, Wednesday, in our staff meeting time, I finally stepped up and talked about the idea of Sharing using digital tools for the first time. I mean it’s not the first time I’ve talked about using Delicious or any other social media tool, but it is the first time I’ve couched the whole thing around the premise of sharing, and the possibilities that sharing with a wider network of educators than just the ones at your site might open up. I’ve shied away from really talking in a formal way to my colleagues about networked learning – a mixture of not wanting to push my own potential zealotry and a worry that most won’t have a clue what I’m talking about anyway. It’s hard to get the message just right so that they can see that this is a way that regular classroom teachers can go, because after all, it is the techhead, laptop loving freak pushing the ideas. If they could just sit here in this spot and see the potential stretch out in front of them like I can …

I chose to show the first seven minutes of Dean Shareski’s opening keynote video for the K12 Online Conference, which has stoked the fires of inquiring debate in a number of places across the web. I will chat to a few colleagues tomorrow and see what they got out of it. My worry is that not that they won’t see value in this form of sharing, but that they will see it as something beyond them, beyond what time will allow for them, beyond what their capabilities are as an online navigator.

What I struggle with as well is this notion of self-directed learning as a professional. I believe that participation in networked learning is ideally suited for this – tools like Twitter are subverted for educational sharing. But Twitter is mainly about sharing stuff that other people have created or found, and Delicious is the same. Neither ask the participant to put themselves “out there” like writing a blog post or adding content to a wiki or even posting a reply to a forum. So, why is that so many teachers find the use of social media for sharing to be such a step that they are unwilling to take? I find it hard to imagine their reluctance and need to be shown because I (like the majority of edubloggers I assume) have learnt how to use and manipulate social media through active participation. Workshops and PD sessions on how to use Google Reader and Delicious seem to run counter to the whole point of self directed learning through technology.

Also I feel that for a practice to stick, to become habitual, the desire to explore further must come from within. Maybe some teachers will never grasp the concept of online networked learning for their own professional improvement … but I have at least raised their awareness of what it is out there if they choose to look beyond their own self imposed boundaries.

Maybe It’s Time To Emigrate

Published on May 13, 2010 in Internet and Web 2.0. 1 Comment

I watched this video with interest today:

Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh) from Erik Qualman on Vimeo.

I noted that Facebook now has a population that would place it third in the world were it a country. But there seems to a growing groundswell of discontent with savvy web users looking to delete their accounts amid cries for a more open alternative. (Thanks for the links, Warrick and Alex.)

I’m questioning my citizenship. It’s not as if I would be missed. I don’t play any games, I ignore every second friendship request, decline almost every other cause or invitation and don’t post any photos. I joined so that I would have a working knowledge of this social media phenomenon. And an interesting world it is. I could get lost for hours linking from one friend list to another, future-gazing on how former students have made their way through life, seeing how old schoolmates have handled impending middle age and shaken my head at how naive and gullible so many younger kids are.

Maybe Facebook is redefining privacy. As one slogan might go, it is certainly “home of the brave” but I am not so sure that is “land of the free.” Apparently, it is quite hard to renounce the Facebook homeland once you’ve been under its rule for any length of time.

I learn more about my online friends in my aggregator than I can ever get on a FB status update. Connecting on the open web – that’s what I’m interested in. It might be time to move on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43993720@N02/4341585713/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43993720@N02/4341585713/

The Imminent Death Of Blogs Has Been Prematurely Announced

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

Jeff Utecht via Stephen Downes says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cartoon from Geek And Poke.

An Angsty Anonymous Edublogger’s Lament

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

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

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