Web 2.0

Thanks to an invitation from Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, Doug Noon and I were guests on the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast last week to discuss our global project, Spin The Globe, that we have worked on with our respective classes. It was great to chat and hear Doug's voice at length after working with him for half a year and I think we covered some good territory. Catching up with an experienced hand in Joel Arquillos who has trialled these sort of global collaborations in his classroom was a bonus as well. I'm actually keen to listen to it again because every time I participate in these Skypecasts my brain struggles to remember anything I've uttered as soon as I remove my headset. I took the liberty of adding the webcast to the FLNW wiki as my contribution to that event but I know that several interested educators were unfamiliar with the Edtech Talk setup and had issues with connecting to the live audio stream. So, here's the archived podcast - I'd love any feedback about any point that was made, either here or back at TTT.

Spin the Globe--A conversation with Graham Wegner, Doug Noon, and Joel Arquillos.

9 Comments

Clay's punctuating comment on my recent Parable 2.0 post caught Leigh's eye and he posted the following to the TALO list:

Below is a comment to a blog post made by an Australian teacher recently. In the post, he and the commenters are expressing frustration at trying to get their colleagues using blogs and wikis and all that, in a networked learning exercise involving international partners. I'm wondering, could those who are blogging professionally consider a post or two on their blogs about the comment below.. specifically, what everyday practices could blogging et al replace for the time stretched teacher? In other words, is web2 beneficial in terms of efficiencies for the way we currently work as teachers, or do we need to change more in what we do? Is using web2 technologies considered an on top of or in place of current work loads? Your thoughts and ideas on this central question facing change management in education would be very valuable.

Even though he was targetting the TALO community, I am very interested in his questions and would like to take his questions to my own readership. I'm happy for comments, your own blog posts linking back here or you can post to the TALO list direct. I added this as a supportive reply.

At the end of the year, my boss and I discussed the idea behind a reflective activity for the staff. (So many teachers are terrible at actual reflection). I pulled out an email from the PlotPD program (not free and not open to the web, but something available to our ed system) that talked about a TRY, KEEP and STOP system. It challenged teachers to identify something to TRY for the new year, a part of their practice they wanted to KEEP because it was successful and finally, something to STOP because you just can't keep adding things onto the plate! It is interesting that this idea had to be provided directly to so many teachers before they'll even consider that there are alternatives to maintaining the status quo.

Clay's point on my blog was really poignant. I think I find that I let things go without any conscious decision - also, once you've become comfortable online, "things" often fall into place because your network nodes provide a flow of ideas and resources in a timely fashion. I see my teaching in a constant state of reinvention and I rarely cover "the same stuff" with my classes from one year to the next. It is those teachers who've locked the whole curriculum down, designed their year from go to whoa over their career and believe that they are just tweaking their well honed methodologies who are in the most trouble when confronted with the reality that the world (and their students) have changed and will continue to change at an unprecedented rate.
Thanks for picking up the idea - Leigh. I too will be very interested in others' point of view.

5 Comments

Been playing with edna's new service for Aussie educators, me.edu.au. Kerrie Smith alerted me to its launch the other week and although I am an infrequent user of educationau online services, I wanted to have a closer look. Basically, it's social networking for teachers and it doesn't seem restricted to only Australians as you can see if you look carefully in my image. There's a whiteboard and a tab that allows you to join various community forums. I found Jo McLeay in my wanderings, and tonight I added Simon Brown and Russel Montgomery from my twitter network. It'll be interesting to see where this all goes and whether any educators who spend their online time within this walled garden will branch out a bit more onto the open web.

meeduau.jpg

32 Comments

This is a fictional post - any resemblance to real educators or this blog post in particular, are entirely coincidental.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bright-eyed idealist ICT (edtech) coordinator discovered Web 2.0. It was love at first sight and he then started his own blog. One thing led to another as these things do and before long he was publishing wikis and attending online conferences and bookmarking madly and commenting all over the place. And while his own learning took off at an unprecedented rate, he struggled to work out how to utilise these new tools and methodologies into his own classroom. But he stuck at his new web-enabled style of learning, eventually establishing himself as a C list edublogger. He read "The World Is Flat" and "A Whole New Mind" as texts of almost biblical influence and networked worldwide with Americans and Kiwis and Brits and Canucks and even fellow Aussies. Teachers at his own school snickered at him at first, skeptical about his time management skills because after all, what hard working teacher has time to poke around on the internet?

This year, the coordinator had a brilliant idea to leapfrog his students into the digital collaborative age - global projects. He'd seen wiki based projects and reckoned that they would be ideal for his middle school students focus on Communication. Being an educator with an inclusive conscience, he decided that it should be "Global Projects For All" in his four teacher block.

He sat down and outlined his brave plan to his learning team colleagues. They seemed keen, having experienced wikimania in the previous year when their students used wikis to collaborate within their classrooms. And they saw the logical extension from that venture - connecting and working with students elsewhere in the world. What better way could there be to explore the process of digital communication for a real purpose? The coordinator's head swam dizzily with the possibilities - the students would grab this opportunity and make it their own, the teachers would experience first hand the power of global collaboration and the bridges of understanding between the citizens of the future would start to be built.

But the coordinator had a tight rope to walk - these projects needed his support to get on the path to success but at a certain point, he had to stand back and let his colleagues steer their own ship. He leveraged his online learning network and lined up high quality teacher/classroom partners from North America, Asia and the South Pacific. He led out in his own classroom ahead of schedule and modelled a similar approach for the other teachers in his building. Then he stepped away giving his comrades room to breathe and find their own way. Plus he soon became engulfed in the process of keeping his own Global Project afloat.

Back in his own classroom, his students worked hard with various digital media, building their wiki while the coordinator participated in email flurries with his global partner, anticipated and designed workarounds for the many barriers, made cross curricular links with the goal of getting the kids engaged in accessing primary sources of information to build their knowledge about a new part of the world. The coordinator checked in with his colleagues periodically to field technical issues and be supportive - but he assumed that if he wasn't being pestered then the teachers and their classes  were going well. After all, he had worked hard to provide cutting edge partners for their projects.

Then signs started to appear that maybe his learning team mates weren't all that taken or driven by this concept. Inquiring emails from the highly sought after global partners started to appear in the coordinator's Gmail box.

"Is the class at your school still involved?"

"I've sent three emails without reply and my class are concerned."

"Is my partner class ready to start yet?" 

Things to be going astray for the coordinator. His comrades didn't seem to see the same importance of the venture as he did. One teacher took  some personal leave but the message back to the global partner didn't get there leaving them in the dark about the status of the project. Another also took leave (but informed their partner) and the other teacher scored a new job. All of a sudden, the coordinator was juggling four global projects with different goals and various stages of progress. He was starting to realise that equity in this situation was a fallacy, that his lofty (and not always well thought out) ideas weren't shared by everyone and issues (and their possible solutions) that were as plain as day to him were puzzling and bewildering to others.

"We've done some photo stories but they won't  upload to the wiki."

The coordinator sighed.

"You'll have to upload them to Teacher Tube first and then embed them in the wiki."

"What's Teacher Tube? Perhaps you could do it for us."

"But it's the last day of school tomorrow..."

And as always, the coordinator gritted his teeth, eyed off the list of priorities on his to-do list, glanced across at his own waiting class and conceded some ground.

"If I get some time, I'll see what I can do. "

Next year, he'll scale it all down.

Next year, the teachers can find their own global partners. Let them spend hours on the web making their own online connections, he thinks uncharitably.

But maybe there's the small moral hidden in this unremarkable tale. How can teachers appreciate the magnitude, the networking, the collegiality of the teachers already online, the sharing and the whole deal if some schmuck does the hard yards for them? How can they be totally committed to creating a unique learning opportunity for their students if they themselves haven't invested some virtual blood, sweat and tears?

To be continued....   

8 Comments

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.

5 Comments

coghdog.jpg

I really enjoyed catching up with Alan Levine and Michael Coghlan over some fabulous Malaysian food in Gouger Street last night. Despite his virally ravaged throat and low energy levels, Alan was great to trade ideas with and I would love to have been able to make it to tomorrow's presentation that has him here on behalf of the Australian Flexible Learning Network. In between roti and peppercorn chicken and other great dishes, we traded Web 2.0 edutalk and the tool that kept popping up regularly was twitter. Alan made note of this in his post but I want to tie this to something I noticed earlier in the day.

I checked in on twitter mid afternoon and saw a tweet from a fellow Aussie teacher, Russel Montgomery. He'd just posted on his blog and was using his twitter network to ask for some feedback. Russel wrote:

What I want to write about it is the rate of change that I find myself caught up in. It is meteoric.  …. and for my life perhaps is becoming catastrophic. I am not sure.

Anyone who's got on the online treadmill of late will notice that things seem to be getting faster and faster, new stuff, can it be applied to education, how do we get others on board, they're getting further behind .... hell, I'm getting further behind! Russel's post concluded with the following query:

Anyway I am curious as to how the rest of my education network is coping with all this. How do you maintain a healthy balance between the various elements of your life? How do you manage the passion for reform over against the necessities of living a semi-normal life?

I can really relate to this - in fact, this issue is probably the cause of my rant against hype. But I reckon I have a few pointers to give to Russel and even some of his commenters in terms of keeping things in balance - in fact, it's only one real pointer. I remarked at one stage to Alan during the evening that twitter was only as good as the network you had assembled with it. To me, that's the key to the balance of this whole unreal exponential trip that we self styled and self identified edubloggers have embarked. Build your network with care, adding names that can help you get to grips with any tool or issue so that you don't have to rush around like a headless chook trying to try everything.

Here's what I mean. I know hardly anything about Second Life - I made an avatar once and I think I need a software upgrade to get back in - but as Sean Fitzgerald is part of my network (whether he like it or not!) I don't need to be. Mobile learning? Try Alex Hayes or Leonard Low. Classroom pedagogy - Konrad Glogowski, Chris Harbeck or Jo Mcleay. I have my design experts, open source sources, higher ed, international schools, all on my network so I don't have to an expert in any of it. I just need to find them when I need them. That way, I can go to bed at 10.30 pm every night knowing that something I miss will be archived, that in my aggregator someone will review that new cool tool. And I can just focus on what I'm best at and be that node on someone else's network.

8 Comments

hype.jpg"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!


Lots of edubloggers have been plugging this so I'm probably another echo in the aggregator but the second annual K12 Online Conference starts very soon. I'll cut'n'paste the blurb so you get the gist if you haven't already heard about it:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.

K12 Online Conference is a special event because last year I got to present amongst the cream of online educators and was pretty well received. I didn't get a guernsey this year but this time around I get to fully immerse myself as participant.

So, after stating elsewhere on the edublogosphere my distaste for lists and rankings, I'll contradict myself and give you five good reasons to check it out.

  1. There is a great blend of innovation from those who promote web based learning and those who implement in the classroom. You'll never get this much talent at one conference - ever, except at K12. The fact that two classroom based teachers, Clarence Fisher and Brian Crosby, are amongst the keynote speakers should warm many hearts, including Mark Ahlness's!
  2. You make connections with new educators. If not for K12, I may not have become colleagues with Chris Harbeck, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Kim Cofino or Chris Betcher, just to name a few.
  3. You suddenly have a huge arsenal of resources that you can use back in your own school without reinventing the wheel. It's all there archived, just waiting for you whenever it suits.
  4. Help desk is included. At most conferences, you've got the workshop facilitator or presenter for a small amount of time and after that, you're on your own. But at the K12, you can easily contact any presenter for help or more information via the comments, linking back to their blog where you can usually find contact details. At any time in the future!
  5. It's free and as far as I know, totally untainted by commercial interests. This makes it an amazing grassroots event - for educators by educators, specifically in the K-12 sector.

Hope to see you there. I think I might stick my name down to host a Skype hour of "When Night Falls."

7 Comments

One of the things that intrigued (bugged) me after the Kath Murdoch inquiry seminar was her seemingly dismissive attitude towards students using the web as a resource in any kind of inquiry research. My principal reminded that I tend to view everything through a technology lense so I shouldn't be too concerned. But I've worked out why the notion stuck in my mind - even an experienced educator like Kath was viewing the web as a view only resource. When she talked about the importance of students seeking out primary sources as part of their inquiry process, it clicked in my brain that was where Web 2.0 made a difference to the use of the internet. Web 1.0 was definitely a secondary resource but using wikis and social networking tools now allow students to connect directly to key sources and in that way, the web can facilitate access to primary sources of information. That's what excites me about potential global collaboration projects - not exploring highbrow concepts as much as connecting students to others of like age, exploring the differences and breaking down the misconceptions about how the rest of the world works.

2 Comments

I had a very fruitful visit out to Derrimut Heath Primary School on Friday afternoon in south western Melbourne suburbia where I was lucky enough to meet one of the most passionate and switched on primary elearning advocates in Victoria, Georgina Pazzi. I was able to visit her school and talk interactive whiteboards, elearning pedagogy, digital school culture - she certainly demonstrated to me the power of effective vision and planning in getting a primary school embedding technology into their everyday learning. When I arrived, brand new iMacs were being rolled put across the school and for me, it was a real insight to see how another coordinator was managing the change process. Another bonus was the fact Georgina, along with Lauren O'Grady, was a consultant to the Victorian education department in their appraisal of their IWB school trials and had some unique insights to add to our experiences back here at my school. Thanks, Georgina - it was extremely valuable to be your guest for the afternoon.

Back at school, I was all lined up then to deliver Workshop No.2 in our series on Interactive Whiteboard use at our school. These workshops were designed to manage the number of requests from schools wanting to "have a look" at our IWB program. As my boss pointed out to today's attendees, we are not presenting ourselves as experts but our experiences in introducing this relatively new technology (by Australian standards) still might be valuable for others contemplating the possibilities. I read today that Brett Moller attended the recent IWB conference on the Gold Coast and still remains unconvinced by the technology. While I should head over and make a more pointed response over in the comments on his blog, I wonder what he would have made of my presentation which was an expanded version of my CEGSA workshop iwb 2.0. Now I know how some people feel about those who just chuck 2.0 on the end of something and proclaim it as new and groundbreaking - but as I was exploring the combination of the Interactive Whiteboard and Web 2.0, I couldn't think of a neater way to tie the whole idea together. So today, I led a group of about twenty educators through useful tools and sites that harnessed the power of reasd/write but possessed qualities suitable for whole class or small group situations and on the large display of the IWB. I tried to also look at the interactivity angle and it could be argued that much of what I covered could be easily leveraged using a data projector on its own. As Al Upton said to me at CEGSA, the iwb 2.0 concept is quite subversive, get the people in under the guise of IWB and then hit 'em with the Web 2 stuff. And as James said in his keynote on Thursday that as well as it being about learning, it is just as much about the tools as well. The tools enable us to do things in new and innovative ways.

I started by exploring del.icio.us - still the best entry point for any educator keen to dip their toes in the Web 2.0 pool, in my opinion. The networking, the "looking over the shoulder" of others, easy access to the ever increasing digital options for educators all seemed to appeal to today's participants. I worked through photosharing, visual search engines, online applications and visual literacy possibilities - all here on a handy pdf if you're interested. The hard part is building in some interaction and hands on opportunity for adults when there is only the one IWB in the room. If we had our planned wireless up and running and our new laptops ready, then I could have had teachers setting up, tagging and saving and playing as we went.

Yes, Brett, if you're reading, I realise my prior two sentences sort of prove your point.

But, the IWB is a useful tool where more useful tools can be accessed and used for the purpose of learning.