Covering it Live at Learntel

Cover it Live Test

Moodle Moot AU 2008

Some thoughts on the recent Moodle conference in Brisbane, Australia. Audio (7 mins 37 secs) provided from Utterli, and images from the conference provided by Slideflickr

A New, Free, Web Based Polling Tool

Slidecast - Voice Tools for Language and Literacy

I have just managed to synch the audio with the slides from a recent presentation on Online Voice Tools for Language and Literacy. The original session was held in Skype. I recorded both sides of the conversation (me and online participants) and uploaded the audio to the Internet archive.

I uploaded the slides into Slideshare and used their synching audio and slides tool to create a slidecast. I'm really happy with the result and now I know how to do this I'll be doing it again. Here is the final product.

(It's 45 minutes long.)

The Internet archive also provides the embedding code so you can listen to the audio only right here:

Utterz Re-Test

U Stream TV Test

About 9 and a half minutes.

Good Will Bonking :)

The following are a few notes from the recent interview that Will Richardson conducted with Curtis Bonk. It’s about an hour long and the audio is a bit of a struggle initially but it does improve in the second half.

Curt has just released a new book called Empowering online learning The interview touches on issues raised in the book but is not about the book.

CB: George Siemens' Theory of Connectivism is more a description of what’s happening rather than a theory.

WR: How does knowledge construction change in online communities?

CB: Learning is more informal than formal. People share stories

WR/CB: Books like Seymour Papert’s Mind-Storms (published 1993) feel like they were written today! It has taken this long for ideas of people like Papert to gain respectability and currency. Technology has made possible theories that have been around a long time.

WR: How do we unlearn traditional assessment approaches?

CB: Peer/extended network assessment. But there is still a place for traditional teacher-centred approaches

Reference: Darren Draper – have you been paying attention?

There was some discussion of new models of publishing. Curt himself is trying to decide how to publish his new book. Options include:

* Wiki + html (web) pages + book
* Pdf + comments facility
* Hypothetical: Blog daily for a year and compile into a book

Question left unanswered: will mainstream publishers accept these models? (Curt is conscious of the fact that he will be seen as a hypocrite if his next book is not an ‘open book.’, and is investigating new models with different publishers.)

Other Publishing Models:

Flat World Knowledge
Scribd - a ‘YouTube for text.’ (CB)

Other Titbits

Jay Cross and his work on Informal Learning has been pivotal in the move towards understanding new models of education.

* Manila is the chat capital of the world (SMS)
* Wikipedia is built in to mobile devices (Africa)
* You don’t need Internet access to benefit from the Internet (phones, download to CD, etc)
* “Googlization of knowledge” (CB)
* Students in Michigan have to take an online course to graduate.

Learning Object Repositories (LORs)

Curt not convinced of their usefulness. Prefers sites with peer reviewed resources like Merlot.

Second Life/Virtual Worlds
Curt thinks they’re too hard for a lot of people and is watching Google’s Lively

Online Language Learning

CB: Is exploding across the Internet; arrangements where learners of Chinese are matched up with teachers of Chinese who want to learn English and swap services are becoming more common; predicts even further growth

WR: Where will be 20 years from now?

* Jack Cummings, Indiana Uni Dean, dropped in briefly and said that now Harvard had joined those institutions adopting an open content policy others will follow suit. (There are 57 mirror sites of MIT’s open courseware initiative in sub-Saharan Africa.)
* As networks of personalized learning become more widespread there will be 24/7 access to subject mentors around the world, who won’t be aligned to a single institution.
* Cell phones will become more to central to provision of educational content.
* The move to synchronous education approaches will increase
* More and more visualization tools – of thought, networks. (MC: some of these already exist.)

(image at top courtesy of Oliver Ding's Freesouls slide show)

The Anthropology of YouTube

Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress. Brilliant. Inspiring. Insightful. Important.

"Media mediates human relationships."
"loss of community"
"networked individualism" > "cultural tension"
"context collapse"
Cognition and recognition. (McLuhan)
"We live lives constantly against the law in an age of prohibition." (Lessig)

55 minutes. Find the time and watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Ha Ha

Audio Post via Hipcast - still working?

This post has arrived by phone using Hipcast.

Cover It Live

What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?

Picked this up from Will Richardson’s blog. This article from Nicholas Carr needs to be read and contemplated by all Internet educators.

I know exactly what Nicholas Carr means. More and more I find myself engaged in what I call horizontal learning (skimming multiple resources, multitasking), and have to force myself to engage in vertical learning (prolonged focus on a single topic or resource.) There is indeed a change afoot.

Implications? Identify, make explicit, and teach both approaches. See slides 13- 16 of this presentation for more on horizontal v vertical learning.

Addendum to this post

On a related note I just came across this article today - Society Hard-wired for a fall. More on what computer use may be doing to our brains.

Using the Moodle Book Module

Click To Play

Twitter Fountain #2 - Adelaide (with background images of Adelaide)

Twitter Fountain - Adelaide

The Digital Education Revolution (DER)

The Digital Education Revolution (DER) is an Australian Federal Government initiative worth $1.2 billion to advance ICT in Australian schools. Education au is currently sponsoring a series of symposia in Australian capital cities to get feedback from practitioners about what is being done, and what they want to see happen.

I was present for the first part of the symposium in Adelaide today. Sheila Willaston outlined some of the key policy elements:

• Online curriculum content (I hope this doesn’t gobble up too much of the money)
• Professional development for teachers (I hope this includes new teachers to be in training programs)
• Web portals for parental participation (great idea)
• Fibre connections to schools piggy-backing on the much talked about broadband rollout (if it ever happens)

Targets of the program include

• Reducing the computer to student ratio to 1:2 in the next 2 years
• 100 MB connections to all schools

Mark Pesce was next on the podium. Some highlights of Mark’s presentation:

About four years ago YouTube, RSS, BitTorrent, and Wikipedia did not exist. In previous eras any one of these applications would have been considered seminal changes of the generation. These days an equally powerful application appears at least once a year. (eg Google Earth). This is the world generation Y have grown up in – where “the only constant is change.”

Referring to data gleaned from Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, he mentioned the notion of co-presence, where people use communication tools to connect and communicate constantly. Pesce argues that this practice is nothing new – only the tools are new. [David Attenborough refers to humankind as the ‘compulsive communicators.’]

The hidden curriculum of banning and blocking the use of these connection tools in schools is “denying kids the connectivity they experience in their daily lives.” There is an “invisible argument going on between school and life.” “The classroom has lost respect for their lives and (so) kids have lost respect for the classroom.”

I AM ONE OF THE PUSHERS

Pesce then confessed to being one of the pushers of a tool that mahy educators and parents just see as something that promotes cyber-bullying and MySpace suicide pacts. :)

TWITTER

Twitter is now being used for purposes way beyond what it was designed for. For example, the recent earthquake in China was announced 30 minutes before the major news networks got hold of the story. “The street finds its own use for things” [A recent perspective I heard about ethics: “Ethics should not judge what is good or bad, but rather observe what people are doing.]

[“People no longer subscribe to magazines; they subscribe to people.” (The Human Network) ]

Mark did say that he thought he was probably preaching to the converted, and it did have that feeling, but his presentation was intended as a springboard for further discussion by symposium delegates for the rest of the day to come up with ideas for implementation as part of the DER . @theother66 twittered towards the end of the day that Gerry White was doing a great job of gathering all the ideas together in the final session. I look forward to seeing them.

Many thanks to education au for another great symposium.

eBeam Smartboard Thing

eBeam Smartboard Thing
Originally uploaded by mikecogh

This really is quite neat. Place the gizmo (see top of pic) on a table top and the tabletop (or any flat surface in theory) effectively becomes a whiteboard. Anything written on the table will appear on the pc it's connected to. And therefore remote users could see it while it was happening. The thing is - can anyone think of a useful application for this? www.electronicwhiteboardswarehouse.com/ebeam.htm

I am not a blogger

I am definitely not a blogger! Five weeks away in Japan (Nagoya, Tokyo), New York, Scotland, York, Cambridge, London and Scotland and not a note. Hundreds of photos though and I guess that’s how I prefer to blog – visually, or by incorporating widgets like Apture, the software that’s allowing me to add all these media links (are they hyperlinks?). Paralinks maybe?

So that’s what’s prompted me to write now. Highlights were meeting many Webheads f2f for the first time, spending time with Jonathan Finkelstein of LearningTimes fame, enjoying the space and grandeur of the Scottish highlands around Oban, the classic heritage of the built environment in York and Cambridge, and a wonderful spring day in London enjoying the sunshine with thousands of others in St James Pk.

And yes, as Will Richardson wrote, I did think in advance about what I wrote here. I chose words and items that were likely to have existing web content about them!

Dipity - a nifty Timeline Tool

This is a really smart tool (though the limitations of Blogger's display don't do it justice here. Create events with dates and pictures, state the location of an event and Dipity locates it for you using Google Maps. You can view it as a straight timeline, series of images, or on a map. Very cool. See a quick trip through some of my life: