ConVerge12

Given the bleak outlook for the VET sector in Victoria - for the TAFE sector anyway - it was encouraging that ConVerge went ahead this year, and was well attended with about 300 delegates participating.

On the flight home I was reading about blogging in Howard Rheingold's NetSmart . Rheingold says that when people criticise bloggers for writing about things they might consider trivial they are missing the point. The point is that whenever people commit thoughts to writing it is a valuable exercise in clarifying your thinking and disciplining the mind. Writing is of itself, ipso facto, a good thing to do. And so my thoughts on the sessions I attended at ConVerge12.

Tim Longhurst

The opening keynote was from Tim Longhurst, 'futurist', and CEO of consultancy firm, Key  Message An engaging and entertaining speaker he based his talk around three themes:

1.      Wisdom is in the group

2.      Barriers are collapsing

3.      the power of small

Personally it provided a great segue for my own presentation on Global Trends affecting education later in the morning.

He quoted Chris Anderson ( from Wired) saying that the world is getting better in many ways, but then showed a rather trite example of Lil Demon, the break dancer. As good a break dancer as this kid may be it's a stretch to think this has improved the world! Perhaps the point was better made by citing examples of people who have never met f2f collaborating with others across geographical and temporal boundaries - this is  significant progress.

An exercise followed where it was revealed that 80% of the ConVerge audience have used their smart phone for banking - apparently a good indicator of the extent of 'digital-ness' of people. (I haven't!)

Best bits of the future

1 We will all become cyborgs

He cited the example of people who took the Turing test,  and who were unable to tell if they were talking to a person or  robot. In some cases they were wrong. When they thought they were talking with a robot it was a person and vice versa. So machine intelligence is improving.

2. Live on the edge

·         Innovation is really about asking  is there a better way of doing this?

·         Find and foster the edge in your organisation

·         Make a point of listening to an 'edger' for 20 mins a month. (I like this idea - simple to implement.)

3. Abundance

Jamie Oliver gives his recipes away to generate a million dollar business. Copyright is a product of a time of scarcity of resources. This philosophy of abundance ties in nicely with the work of Martin Weller who includes a chapter title The Pedagogy of Abundance in his book, the Digital Scholar.

Abundance:

• gives power to the small
• individuals can use services like Kickstarter.com to crowdsource funds for creative projects. (Similar to kiva.org for micro-financing of development projects.)
• Barriers to traditional education are collapsing -  eg the Khan academy

Tim Morrissey - Big Blue Button

An informative session (such a lame word!) detailing the results of a project using Big Blue Button -  the tool that many hope will become the Open Source alternative to proprietary virtual classroom products like Adobe and Blackboard Collaborate.

Alas, while some were  impressed with the audio quality of this tool it is still a long way short of being a viable alternative to the major players.

·         Poor mark up tools? seems better in presenter view.

·         Browser based > easy loading

·         Presenter can enlarge screen; no app share but has webtour

·         Won't work with inbuilt mics

As an aside Tim told us that he didn't think Blackboard were supporting Moodle integration any longer.

The obligatory session on MOODLE 2.3 by the inimitable Julian Ridden revealed:

·       new text editor is much improved; you can now paste from Word and junk code is removed automatically

·         using tables is MUCH easier

·         Cleaner interface

·         Navigation options - eg show one topic per page

·         Plugin resources now standard  (but not sure what this means)

·         Eg a new and better feedback tool replaces the clunky questions and surveys of older versions

·         Book module now core

Gilly Salmon was the keynote speaker late on day 1 but apparently did not have the version of the  presentation she wanted to deliver. Slides were too small to see easily.

Offered just this:

55% of Australians have a Facebook account

Learning Analytics and EPortfolios @ Box Hill (Julieanne Seaman and Pauline Farrell)

While there was an element of the speakers clearly believing their own publicity, Box Hill TAFE are a good example of an organisation that has gone for the long term view of implementing systemic change from the top down. That is, management is behind the change, and a whole of institute approach is employed.

They have done extensive profiling of their student body:

·         78% of students prefer workplace learning; text based is least preferred mode of learning

·         97% have mobile phones ; 63%  have smart phones; 78%  own a laptop

Also:

·         have implemented Echo 360 and apparently are struggling to keep up with demand

·         they have developed a script that allows them to track amount of blended, interactive nature of Moodle sites. This data is fed to managers - they call them traffic light reports. These results are published throughout the organisation and encourage section managers to come forward and ask how they can improve their section's standing - wonderful!

ePortfolios (Mahara) are used in conjunction with a Personal Learning Plan unit for students

·         some students like to use epfs collaboratively

·         Blockers: staff and student skills/system usability - limited customisation options

·        Box Hill distinguishes between learnER and learnING analytics; learning analytics is more about whole of organisation

·         more PD needed for staff to include assessment tasks suited to epfs

·         they sit with staff at Training Package stage and redesign content for e-delivery from the start

A Humbling Experience

I would contend that the abundance of content and connections is as fundamental shift in education as any we are likely to encounter, and there has, to date, been little attempt to really place this at the centre of a model of teaching.

Martin Weller - The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice

An event called Designing Learning in the Digital Age took place here in Adelaide a week or so ago. After the initial keynote (which was generally very well received) there were a number of break-out sessions that, according to the majority of the feedback, failed badly.


SAMPLES of FEEDBACK FROM EVALUATION

• Will certainly not attend any future events where these presenters are involved.

• The event did not model or address the issue of 'facilitating disruptive and transformative learning experiences' as advertised.

• no leveraging of the knowledge in the room or attempt to understand where the audience was at or, understanding of the technological capacity in the room for participants

• the session on disruptive innovation delivered zero. No content, no strategies

• I was hoping for tangible ideas from other contexts. The flyer made it sound as though it was for people currently working in this space ... The focus on social networking sites as a source of knowledge and content was, for mine, overdone and not reflective of the promotional material.

• little new knowledge or ways of representing it were offered.

The first of these comments is the most damning:


Will certainly not attend any future events where these presenters are involved.


I was one of the presenters involved. In 30 plus years of working as an educator in schools, adult education, professional development, and as an invited or keynote speaker at conferences feedback on my efforts has been largely positive, so to get such a bad wrap for the first time in my professional life hurts. And so I must look at why it happened.


In 2006 I had the great privilege of participating in the inaugural Future of Learning in a Networked World Unconference in NZ. This was the first time I experienced first hand how a group of connected educators could generate vast amounts of significant content in a relatively short time. And I had hoped that participants in this recent event would be able to replicate something like that NZ experience.


Promotional materials for the day said things like:

• Intending participants are those who "want to see change in the way education is delivered, and who see the value of networked learning"
• participants will be actively curating their own learning
• It is expected that participants will already have skills in the use of educational and mobile technologies, and social media
• you'll ... ideally be used to creating and sharing content and/or media on the open web.
• handy...would be an account on one or two (or more) social media sites eg: blog, podcast, wiki, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn or even Facebook  
• develop that resource you would like to show your key decision-makers
• locate, generate and tag content to create usable resources

Extracting some key words from the above list we get:

• networked learning
• actively curating
• skills in ...social media
• used to creating and sharing content and/or media on the open web
• develop
• locate, generate, tag

I think it’s clear from the above description that participants would be doing things.  The intent was that those who attended this event would come ready to share, learn, collaborate, create and curate content. That is, it would not be an event where facilitators would be instructing, but rather an event where emphasis was squarely on the participants, and the knowledge and expertise they brought to the event would make or break the day.

But that it is not what happened. It is clear from the feedback that some came expecting to be taught and talked at. I had no intention of putting myself in that role for such an event. It would be ludicrous to even try. All my co-facilitator and I wanted to do was provide a time and place for connected educators to extend their personal learning networks, and tap into the collective intelligence of those who attended. To practice what is sometimes touted as a methodology for the digital age - paragogy.  The notion of ‘paragogy’ relates to the peer production of learning

I wanted to provide a platform for participants to talk and learn from each other. I assumed that people would quickly self-organise into groups of mutual interest, decide what they were going to do,  and do it. We would collect the resulting resources at the end of the sessions. It was also hoped that participants would be happy to complete tasks in the days after the event and share everything via a public Google Doc created for the event.

I have been part of such events before and that is what happened. It did not happen at this event. Why not?

1. the promotional materials and session descriptions obviously did not make what we trying to do explicit enough.

As I think back to previous events where this approach has been successful I realise that the term unconference had been used to describe the methodology employed. My mistake here was not to describe at least the events I was hosting as akin to unconference sessions. People came to learn from me as the facilitator; I was there to host a situation where people could learn from each other. Cross purposes.

2. people needed more time to get to know each other and explore what areas of mutual interest they might work on.  I badly misjudged this, and more time should have been allocated to allow this to happen.

3. the technology at the venue failed. While this was really disappointing, many had access to their own network connection anyway. Several participants also had fairly basic levels of ICT literacy and were unable to use their devices to quickly produce content.

While I don't think the failure of the venue's technology was the crucial factor in determining the ultimate success or otherwise of the day, it certainly didn't help, and I imagine this would have got several people offside. For the record I feel cheated by the venue. In the lead-up discussions with Rydges Southpark I was very specific about the nature of the event and said that 60 people would be making intensive use of their in-house wireless and they assured me several times that their Internet could cope with such use. They were wrong, and they should never have accepted our booking for this event. And I should not have believed them. A hard lesson learned.

4. There was not enough space for people to work comfortably in groups. I had envisaged people working alone, in pairs or groups as desired. We have to accept responsibility for this - we misjudged the amount of space needed for people to interact in the way we hoped they would.

So - really quite  ironic. We wanted to host an event where people could talk, share, create, and learn from each other to model how designing learning in the digital age needs to take these approaches into account, and we got feedback based on an expectation that we would be running teacher-led sessions that we had no intention of running. 

We tried something new. We took a risk. We were trying to place “the abundance of content and connections ...at the centre of a model of teaching.” We failed. Innovation theory is quite clear that taking risks and failing is a necessary prerequsite for eventual success so I guess on that score we can salvage some hard learned lessons from the event, but ultimately we failed, and I have to accept responsibility for that. I'm really sorry that so many were disappointed. And you're only as good as your last gig...

Designing Learning in the Digital Age - Setting the Scene

Designing Learning the Digital Age - Setting the Scene from michaelc

Event Information

Australian Moodle Moot 2012

Australian Moodle Moot 2012

The Australian Moodle Moot for 2012  is come and gone. I used to love Moodle. I was excited by the prospect that an Open Source product could challenge the hegemony of the proprietary LMSs like WebCT and Blackboard. So successful has Moodle been that it has flourished with the demise of WebCT, and has Blackboard sufficiently concerned to have them buy out 2 significant Moodle partners in Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Opinions vary as to why Bb has done this, but it seems clear that in part Bb sees Moodle and Open Source as significant players in the LMS space for some time to come.

So there is still much to admire about Moodle's ability to present an alternative path to the proprietary systems, but gee I was sick of the word Moodle by the end of this moot. I may be just a grumpy old man romanticising the past but my memories of WebCT conferences are that they were more about e- and online learning than they were about a product.

Moodle now seems to be enveloped by something akin to religious zeal and has become synonymous with elearning. It is however encouraging to see many new and younger users at Moodle moots, and to see the obvious enthusiasm for the product and the Moodle community that has evolved around it.

Martin Dougiamas began proceedings with his customary keynote.

• there is now a database of Moodle plugins 
• drag and drop is now possible in 2.3 
• he urged everyone to get on board with Moodle 2.0 as 1.9 will only be supported to the end of 2013. 

Snippets from other sessions:

Migrating Offline Pedagogy > Online (the inimitable Julian Ridden)

"the room you're in matters" - so does the online learning space
online often tends to cater to the LCD - lowest common denominator


PEER ASSESSMENT USING WORKSHOP TOOL (Mel Worrall)

seem to use the workshop module to upload plans and reports; requires setting phases/timelines - peer assessment (need to follow up on this)

MOODLE WITH OPEN 'COMPANION' WEBSITE (Jenni Parker)
http://www.elearnopen.info/

• Her research: 'Breaking free using real-life tasks' 
• offers a 4 wk course in PD for staff on designing elearning
• most content is on open companion website - so that content remains available indefinitely 
• believes synchronous communication more suited to meet personal needs, and asynch - professional

VET PANEL (Grant Beevers, Jayne Batchelor (Wollongong), David Drinkell (QLD VET); Francis Kneebone (eLearning Consultancy)

• should Moodle have a competency module? or do the Rubrics and Marking guides in Moodle 2.0 do the job well enough? 
• maybe double handling by a human is just as efficient and cheaper than a large scale integration with student management system????? (good point!) 
• Cert 3 in Electrical has made good use of eportfolios (Box Hill TAFE) - individual lecturer I think (check with Pauline Farrell) 
• Mahara eportfolios can be exported /zipped

(at this point I realise I'm a little bored with the VET sector... would rather spend time dealing exclusively with ideas; notions of competency, RPL, AQTF etc all intellectually tiresome.)

• Shaggy (Peter Shanks) has developed tool to suck all competencies into various formats - can be imported into Moodle (see http://www.trainingo2.net/to2.2/index.php)

DISCUSSION FORUMS, COMMUNITY AND LITERACY (Jill Margetson)

• Southport School - implemented Moodle and Mahara; use forums in yrs 8-10
• Do forums cater for boys? It seems she is saying yes - quite a positive experience - built relationships and a level of maturity; AND...they love to compete and see who had posted most!!!

TEACHING WITH PARTICIPATON FORUMS (Brant Knutzen; Uni of Hong Kong)

• guarantees to raise participation rate to 90%!
• Transactivity: responding to and building on each other's contributions 

This is how he does it:

• have multiple small groups with no more than 6 in a group
• initiate with oral/class intro face to face
• set open ended/challenging questions
• grade posts - via rubric
• use active verbs when formulating questions (list, classify, compare, hypothesize, etc) and grade level of difficulty

NEW TOOLS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING (Uni of Alberta)
(company: oohoo.biz)

1. OWLL (Moodle plugin but needs Red Five server); allows listen and repeat exercises
2. Speech Coach - speech analysis tool
3. Text to Speech block


One of the highlights was Stuart Mealor's presentation on Free Moodle.org - http://www.freemoodle.org/ Speaks for itself. Hosts free Moodle courses for suitable applicants. And can be a place where you can donate your Moodle courses to the open web


FINAL KEYNOTE - TOM COCHRANE
Can mobile transform pedagogy? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9114924/MobileWeb2/index.html

http://thomcochrane.wikispaces.com/home

• new hierarchy of needs include net/phone
• using Airserver you can share/show screen of participants' mobile
• WIKITUDE - makes it easy for students to create content???
• mobile learning puts the focus on the learner - how???; this can be done without mobile.....
•  'reclaim social media for education'; 96% of NZ students polled have not created or uploaded a YouTube vid - find this hard to believe...... 

Technically very impressive but didn't really make a case for how mobile will change pedagogy other than these tools are cool and different so everyone will just have to change. Not very compelling or convincing. Disappointing from this point of view.

My own presentation:

ADDRESSING GLOBAL TRENDS IN EDUCATION: Can it be done in Moodle? Presented in an open Moodle site at http://try.brightcookie.com/course/view.php?id=88

(For another perspective see Kerry Johnson's post.)

Slow Talking

Last weekend a group of people gathered in a house in Sydney and did something remarkable. We talked. For around 14 hours. We started out at the Sydney Writer's Festival to feed on some ideas - we went to sessions on making things, and resistance.

They were good starting points. Among the many common threads we explored in these two days of conversation, one of them was a feeling that we have collectively become disengaged from many of the basic processes of life. At the making stuff session the two panellists sat there and knitted and crocheted while they talked. I remembered a distant past when I knitted when I was about 8 years old. Crocheted too. I made a scarf I remember. But I had forgotten that I could do this once. And enjoyed it. Yes I played football, went fishing and did a heap of other stuff more  'normal' for little boys, but somewhere I fitted in the knitting.

I sat ruminating about the fact that I don't make much in my life - the occasional meal, but no permanent objects that you can see or hold. My excuse has always been that I sing. I make music - not solid or touchable but real. I write songs. But we are quite disconnected from where things come from in the city. Where things are grown, made, touched, loved - we walk into a shop and buy what we want with little thought of where it came from or who made it. So to see two people sitting there making something while they spoke seemed almost spiritual. It wasn't like that when I used to watch my Mum knit. And it also seemed that what was once politically incorrect and held back the advancement of women, had become cool again. Knitting is now politically correct. (You just have to live long enough!)

The other session featured speakers talking about researching or being part of a resistance movement. Reality is subjective but hearing the stories of Timorese women in the face of an occupied armed force it was clear their life was a much harder reality than the life we experience in comfortable gentle middle class Australia. (I love Australia for this!)  But what good is comfort and gentility if you feel angst living amongst it? There were plenty of positives among OUR stories over the next two days but it was the common thread of angst and concern - about our personal and professional lives and the society we live in - that brought us together. To talk. Without explicit goal. To listen. To whoever was talking about whatever they wanted to talk about. 

Community, or lack of. Loneliness. Frustration. Living on the margins of a society whose demonstrated values as evidenced by our mass media and those who supposedly lead us are at odds with how we feel. The OccupyMovement, Transitions Towns, ­ the protests in northern NSW against coal seam gas, the Men's Shed movement, and their antithesis - the moribund nature of our major political parties. Some of us feel disconnected, lonely even. Concern at the apparent lack of care for the well being of ordinary people in the face of cold hard economic rationalism that places less and less store on supporting lives that nourish the soul.

We went walking in the late afternoon and continued talking, but I was distracted by the potential of photographs in the 'long light'. Back at the ranch over pizzas the talk continued. When it came my turn to talk I kept it outside of myself - not too personal. Maybe I hadn't let go enough. But when it came John's turn he decided to lay it on the line and declare 1) that he no longer believed in God and 2) he felt lonely. I could certainly relate to point 1) but it had not troubled me. Thinking about it now I see a certain irony in believing that God was a part of an earlier evolutionary version of humanity and that we no longer needed it. The church in times of yore provided that communal link that brought people together, gave them a common sense of purpose. So if we have evolved to a point that the idea of God or church no longer makes evolutionary sense, what do we replace it with? What structures need to be in place to provide the solace and company that people still need if they forego religion? Perhaps the kind of event that we inadvertently stumbled on and were engaged in - an opportunity for people to speak their mind and share their feelings in a situation where time was not a factor. This was the thing that blew me out about this gathering - we talked for hours. Slow talking. No interruptions. No having to get somewhere for the next engagement of modern life. We turned back the clock and shut down the 21st century. For the most part we ignored the Internet and its disembodied connectiveness. We opted to be with each other for an extended period and listen to each other.

The conversation began again in the same mode the following day but it was not quite the same. It rained all day and prevented us from moving outdoors, and we knew the day would come to an end when we all had to move to wherever we needed to be next day. But for a day we let time stand still. We opted out of the business of appointments and getting things done. We decided to get nothing done except talk to each other. Priceless. Enervating. We must do it again.

If we were happy with the way the world is I wonder if we would have talked together for so long....:) Robyn, Stephan, Rose, Sean, Margie, Melanie, John - thank you.

A Wiki Project...but people don't contribute.

I tried this:

In January one hundred educators from around the globe were invited to meet in Austin, Texas to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Media Consortium Horizon Project and reflect on no less than the future of education. A Communique from the event listed 10 Major Trends that are having an impact on education globally.

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THESE TRENDS ON THE GROUND?

What I am particularly interested in is how these trends translate into reality? What are the implications for each of these trends in your institution? What are you doing already to accommodate these trends? Or, what could you do to accommodate them? To this end, and to hopefully get your input into these questions, I have created a public wiki at http://globaltrendsineducation.wikispaces.com/, and invite you to add your thoughts there on these questions. I have attempted to create a structure on the wiki to make it easier to add content, but feel free to ignore the headings and structure I have suggested and just add your contributions below the tables. Or if wikis are not your thing just email your responses back to me and I'll add them to the wiki.

RESPONSE

After two weeks just one respondent (thanks Andrew!)

Leigh Blackall then wrote:

Michael, my hope was that you would act as the mediator between the contribution made in this forum, and the wiki that - to be honest, I am reluctant to leave a digital footprint on, and given I am on mobile so much, can't really manage much more than email. So, please feel free to document what ever I contribute here in this email space, into the wiki. This is what I do on my own wiki projects, when I gain feedback on research and writing, because I know it is very unlikely that I will draw others into the wiki.

My reply:

....after several tries at this kind of thing over the years I guess I have to reluctantly accept that, as you seem to have already discovered, people by and large do not voluntarily contribute to public wikis.

So I think from here on I'll do what you do - just ask people to send me stuff in an email and I'll collate it on the wiki. :(

Webheads Meet

Webheads Meet, a photo by mikecogh on Flickr.

Times when a webhead from far away comes to Australian shores are few and far between, but it happened last week in Melbourne. Jane Petring from Quebec and I met last week for dinner at a French restaurant with Vanessa, a friend and colleague of Jane's from Canada.

Jane came to Australia after a bicycle trip in South East Asia - mainly in Vietnam. We shared memories of places we'd both visited (Carla and co in Brasilia), Teresa and Joao in Lisbon, and Rita in Argentina, and Jane told me the story of how and why she became drummer....

We had a lovely evening, and as it so often is when meeting a webhead f2f for the first time it very quickly felt like being with an old friend. We all agreed that the food was excellent, but a little on the expensive side.

From here Jane journeys on to Florida, and then Colombia for a special occasion before heading home to Canada.

Jane said she loved Australia :) It was great to meet her. Any other Webheads want to come on down under?

PS I am a bit sunburnt in the pic above because I was at the football all afternoon in the surprisingly warm April sun.

The Future of Education - the Horizon Project Retreat

During this past week about one hundred past members of Horizon Report Advisory Boards from approximately 20 countries gathered to examine the future of education to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the Horizon Report. As you can imagine a staggering number of perpectives were shared and documented over the 2 days and much of it will be publicly available soon. I just need to get down my thoughts on this event before too much time passes.

THE OVERWHELMINGLY OBVIOUS

On the second day the group spent some time sharing what trends we thought were operating on the current educational landscape. Just a glance at some of these trends tells me it is obvious that most of them (I'd say about 80%) fundamentally challenge the current structures and processes of educational organisations. For example,

1. emphasis on openness – open resources, open styles of management, open processes, open courses – the list goes on. Most organisations are a far cry from being open in any of these senses of openness, and in fact are positively threatened by the notion of openness.
2. Collective and collaborative (networked) approaches to decision making, lesson planning, resource creation, professional development, etc that reach out beyond the borders of organisations as opposed to the in-house, closed, top down method of management and teaching that characterises many workplaces.
3. Personalisation of learning: the growth of informal learning, students planning their own suite of courses/skills, decreased emphasis on whole qualifications, proliferation of tech devices and desire to use them on campus.

I could go on but the point is this:

Management

It is educational management and administrators who need to be made aware of these trends as a group. (Not only teaching staff.) People who make the decisions (as Bryan Alexander put it – those with power) should be given the chance of discussing the implications of these trends, and consider their response. This is what to me is OVERWHELMINGLY OBVIOUS – these people must see this information.

In my own work context, I have grave doubts if it is even possible to assemble all the stakeholders at one time, but nonetheless this information needs to be disseminated so managers and bureaucrats are informed at least. (Knowledge is power.)

Neutrality

On the first evening of the retreat we were asked to share what aspects of working on previous Horizon Report Advisory Boards we had found valuable. I said that I had been surprised, pleasantly, that the approach in assembling the reports was a neutral one. It was not a compilation of technologies and trends that has been pushed or advocated by anyone – it was simply a report on what a particular advisory board had thought to be true at the time.

There seemed to be a feeling from some present at the retreat that HR advisory boards, as a result of their deliberations and discussions on technologies of the future, should be advocates of change in their educational communities in the name of the Horizon Report. I'm not sure if this would be wise. Such a 'political' leaning towards a position of advocating change could compromise the results of the HRs. It may compromise its neutrality.

Making recommendations that change may be needed in the light of the data from HRs makes perfect sense. That is, educators can be urged, sensibly, to prepare for the changes ahead, but any activity that sniffs of a HR advisory board being advocates of wholesale systemic change runs the risk of them being seen as a group that finds trends to support beliefs they already have.

The Process

It was always going to be difficult to get the voices of all participants heard. The facilitation was excellent – David Sibbet's graphic facilitation was superb – but as one who felt unable to contribute to the whole group sessions I feel compelled to comment. I'd venture that about 30% of participants did not offer any comment in the whole group sessions, and there were many of them. Without going into the reasons why, I learnt years ago that in groups of more than 4 or 5 I become a passive listener. This is classic introvert behaviour. I am not shy. I will quite happily do a conference presentation to 200 people, but ways need to be explored to give the introverts more say. I was a lot more vocal in smaller group discussions, but these too sometimes became too large for meaningful input from everyone.

The following may help:

• More sticky notes types of activities where ideas are written down then shared. (Thiagi is a wonderful resource for such strategies.)
• more smaller group activities
• identified and/or trained facilitators in the group discussions

Still, a wonderful event, and it was a great privilege to be part of it. Stay tuned for more as the data shared at this retreat gets posted in the coming days.

Bad Management

SCENARIO

Government wants workgroups to save money and cut excess staff.

Workgroup sees it as a good opportunity to cut under performing staff and submit model of a process to be followed

Human Resources (HR) reject the workgroup process and implement one of their own.

Result: several better performing staff are culled from the workgroup leaving an inferior workgroup. Under performing staff are still employed!

Equals BAD management :(

Wouldn't it be nice....

Wouldn't it be nice if you worked for an organisation that:

• Crowd-sourced ideas on how to implement change and find solutions to externally imposed imperatives
• Used flat organisation wide communication tools like Yammer
• Flattened the hierarchical nature of bureaucratic structures
• Trusted the wisdom of colleagues and peers
• Operated within a culture of trust
• Openly shared content between and within the various arms of the organisation
• Offered staff opportunities to expand business rather than just constantly asking them to cut costs
• Had managers that showed educational leadership and modelled the use of elearning and social media tools
• Respected and supported individuals who choose to use their own preferred technologies to conduct their business
• Acknowledged that it is no longer a world where one size fits all
• Encouraged shared decision making at all levels of the organisation
• Had employees that spoke up honestly and respectfully about ideas imposed from the top which they know will not work
• Had teachers who stood up for what they know to be sound teaching practice, and refused to do things that interfere with their ability to be good teachers
• Encouraged teaching rather than training and focused on producing good citizens of society rather than workers in an economy.

Unedited Notes from !DEA11 Conference (Melbourne)

KEYNOTE PANEL (30/11/11) – Challenges and Ops in ICT in Ed

Tony Cook (DEEWR)

Matt Farmer (DEECD – Vic)
Challenges – there are none ;) technolgies can do everything

reaching the end of the age of predicatability
by the time we implement our plan it won't be needed anymore (we take too long!)
language: we need to be in conversations, not lectures; a test for tech: how will this X tech to have a better conversation?

Greg Whitby

look after the present and the future will take care of itself
only one skill matters: learning and re-learning
to change a culture you have to stand in it (the tech culture)

mobility (bring down the walls); integrate
“teachers teach”
we need professional learning networks
desperate need for good OL teachers; “teachers as pedagogical designers”
even the poor have mobiles; personalised learning will kill the dig divide

Learning Futures

3 anchors:

1)diversity – there is no one size fits all
2)learning/teaching (student/teacher/content - Elmore)
3)cloud

“mutate or get out of the way”

copyright, ownership etc is playing catch up in a world that has moved on
write up strategic plans at the end of the year!!!!!!; 5 yr plans are gone forever

Learning Futures – Seizing the Moment

Anne Mirtschin (Hawkesdale P12 College, Vic)

great Net activities with kids in rural school; links kids worldwide, brings in experts eg NY author on story writing

Mike Seyfang

seize the day has become seize the moment; be agile;
#qantasluxury – what to learn?
What do we do from an institutional perspective?

Howard Errey

smart phones, ipads > cloud (circumvents IT/helpdesk)
provide structured support for those moving into the 'new world'


“mutate”! (Whitby)


Why are we so obsessed about changing people who aren't interested????
libraries shd be into collecting info not just 'giving it out'.......

Larry Johnson (NMC)
check key trends section of H/Report eg perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing ***
Challenges: personalised learning not supported by current practice; inertia of the status quo ('the system')

“the network will change us” “change us” “is us” (aka Wesch); the network has come to represent freedom; is everywhere

3G is replacing the Internet; 71% of world phones have HTML compliant browsers.
Biggest users of mobile are in Asia
for grandchildren (eg Luc and Marcus) the Internet is air.
Make kids' jaws drop ;) ie magic! - “that's all that matters”; (what about Mike Wesch's view about the environment
?)

Susi Steigler – Peters (Gen Manager), Telstra

'change wedges' – seems like a clumsy phrase – 'fries with that wedge'? (or salad?)
learners love to personalise, collaborate, innovate (based on Telstra 'research')
suggests personalised learning pathways – sure, but can you do this for everyone???
Telstra can help broker a “New Education Architecture”

Cost!=s Larry J $100/day just to do his work!!!!!!

!DEA! - allocate a problem for each table!!!!; a la 35 Things - this would work better...(too much one way talk)


DAY 2

Rob Abel – IMS (interoperability made simple)

“If you don't make IT happen IT will happen to you.”

Yes Rob but - the tools outside the school are often better than the tools the school offers

ebooks are their own special category

Larry Fruth – School Interoperability Framework (SIF)

technology is always ahead of policy

Sean Casey – NBN: Broadband Driven Education

will take 9.5 yrs to roll out over the whole country
move from Physical > Digital
post > email
DVD > download
music > iTunes

Science 360 (app)
Google Art Project

school used to be centre of a child's social scene; often no more the case
NBN could enable 3D walk-through of a heart
online ed is a business
NBN obviously has great relevance for flexible learning – anytime/anywhere becomes more possible and better quality

EASSESSMENT STREAM

Darrall Thompson (UTS)

Anne Murchison does agreat job of 'front end' teaching, but got nervous about how she assessess...

Q: What do our assessment processes say about what we value?

Assessment has moved from content > capacity building; addresses a broader range of graduate attributes; ie away from marks > 'interpersonal operability'
ideally shd cross subject boundaries
UTS has developed assessment tool that teacher and student can use and compare; when students can see % (grade) they don't read comments!!
make criteria explicit

Owen O'Neill

many barriers are not technical
how to move people to 'high-stakes' assessment

Melanie Worrall

add 'intentionality' to your assessment processes (a la Nancy White)


Delia Browne

p2pu – peer to peer university http://p2pu.org/en/
social, personal, dynamic, creative – domains of assessment
trying use of badges to verify/validate assessment/achievement
wd be interesting to design a course here WITH participants
are using funding from Hewlitt foundation

[put CC badge on bottom of every slide ***]
people are getting jobs after doing p2pu courses
they are happy for orgs to be involved

OPENING UP LEARNING CONTENT

Martin Dean (Pearson)

students expect to be able to remix/repurpose – so what are Pearson to enable this treatment of content???

Delia Browne – Open Education Resources

30% of the planet are under 15; student uni numbers will peak in 2025; (we will need 4 new unis/wk for the next 15 years to cater for these numbers!!!!!)

[Creative Commons for Educators – guide[check]; http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/Jahia/lang/en/scw/go/pid/956

Helen Lynch – User Generated Content

ugc = homework/assignments !!
Open resources sometimes get used in a manner that was not originally instended

MAKING CONTENT DISCOVERABLE

AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM CONNECT (Robert Randall)

site has diff points of entry depending on type of student, subject, type of school, etc; parents for example could check what their child is doing in yr 1

DAY 3

DESIGNING FUTURE LEARNING SPACES (REAL AND VIRTUAL)

Phil Long (UQ)

learing is regulated by biology and ecology; learning = development
Amazon now sell more ebooks than print

“active learing spaces”
non-formal learning spaces are critical
redesign to make group work in large spaces
there's a need for theory building – we are not sure yet what works
how do shapes reflect what teacher believes? - some of which are outside!

Many design firms include anthropologists on design teams (cf Mike Wesch)
#learningspacedesign on Flickr (4000 images)

Lee Sansom (Blair Athol Birth to Yr 7 School)

“campfires in cyberspace” (Book by David Thornburg)
calling classrooms 'studios'/learning commons/piazza/watering hole/cave/mountain top
they are using the Khan Academy!!; call teachers 'learning advisers' (?)
contemplating smart tables; using Xbox ad Kinect for Phys Ed and Music
encouraging literacy with multiple devices
Studywiz is their LMS
think about the Qantas Lounge model.....
[check Apples iweb] [maybe see if she would like to do an interview for SIT?]
what about exploiting outdoor learningspaces via landscaping etc?

Pauline Farrell (Box Hill)

StudentWeb (designed by students) – includes Moodle (customised), epfs (Mahara), t/tables, results, how to connect with each other – integration and simplification were critical – nothing too fancy; worked from student wishlist

228 training sessions in 3 months – to give teachers 'love' while you stole their stuff and put it into a repository (Equella?)

StudentWeb allows tracking of learning analytics for each student!!
GPS Learing Pathways ????
refers to Learning Styles :( for each teaching area; shd be learning preferences
have 7000 students using epfs
test each student's digital literacy!!

Jo Dane (Woods Bagot Architects)

lecture theatres are 1600 yrs old!; at that time only the teacher had the knowledge!! so lecture theatres were approriate
'flipped classrooms' – lecture at home; activity in classrooms
other spaces could be capsules, booths, kiosk (scanning, uploading, recharging)

Justine Isard – MyLearning

before we start knocking down the walls....
21c learning spaces favour boys because 1) tend to preference active learning 2) include greater use of technology
if you don't consult about changes people feel disconnected from the changes and will resist it (as is happening with the intro of the Skills for All in TAFE SA at the moment!!; though people in charge of the implementation will argue that there has been consultation.)
advocates keeping the LRCs!!! - they are quiet communal spaces, and is where the info experts are

[check YT video on 'The Twitter Experiment']

RAMONA PIERSON (Promethean)

it's hard to learn to see again
if you consider the mobile as the primary device there is no dig divide
students are cognitively diff to adults (??) rewired?
Can you make technologies do what you want, or are you a victim of it?
OECD countrries have tripled expenditure on ed but outcomes stagnant; reason – focus on 'book learning'?
Edu trends driven by crisis – do more with less, dig content revolution, employability readiness
PARADIGM SHIFT:
schools are adjusting to needs of students (rather than the opposite)
creators to curators
personalised learning


next generation will need to leverage the cloud – ie share not hide

you learn best at the point/moment of failure!

SHIRLEY ALEXANDER (UTS)

Learning Futures: where to from here?

Each new ed tech makes similar claim – self paced, student centred, ete etc; but in essence it hasn't really changed
NBN – will that make the difference??
predicts that 5 yrs on funding will be outcome based
current students are time poor (eg working); they grab moments of learning eg 10 mins on mobile device; degrees taking much longer to be completed
student attendance at lectures decreases over the course of semester!

Stanford's MOOC model a little diff from MIT ie students can do exam [check further]

refers to data analytics [ compare with learning analytics]

PHOTOS FROM THIS EVENT

Distance Students - Options for Self-Assessment

AUDIO

Phone blogging tools can be a useful way for students to post regular audio reflections. The one below uses Hipcast (a paid service).

Other free options for audio are ipadio, and Audioboo, which is used via a smartphone app.

VIDEO

Options for using video include:

iPhone or other smart phone as the camera:

POV Technology

Other Portable Video Recorders such as Flipcam:

The Wonderful World of Flickr

Because I have suggested that an online facilitation group have a look at my blog I thought I'd better post something! So - just a couple of resources:

1) a video I created recently about how to find Creative Commons images using Flickr, and

2) an older more general resource about Teaching with Flickr.

My Flickr site.

ED-MEDIA (Lisbon); Moodle Moot (Sydney)

I’ve been a-wandering quite a bit later, and along the way there have been 2 conferences – the ED-MEDIA Conference in Lisbon, and the annual Australian Moodle Moot in Sydney. Having been in the elearning game for 14 years now it gets harder and harder to learn much from the average conference presentation. I go mostly for the keynotes. Two of the keynotes at ED-MEDIA were excellent.

George Siemens was there heading the research stream, and as ever, George presents new perspectives. It is the fourth time I have heard him speak now and he always has something new to say, unlike some keynote speakers who can present basically the same thing years apart.

George's presentation was aimed at researchers and how they might use the open web and social networking tools. He asked how do you get greater impact: publishing on YouTube a la Mike Wesch, or via the traditional means and publish in journals? He acknowledged that for younger academics still establishing their reputation and tenure, it might be unwise to go down the Mike Wesch route, but older established academics could follow the lead of people like Terry Anderson from Athabasca who will only publish in open journals.

He added that if you want to increase your profile then the information that shows up about a researcher on a general Google search is more important than the 'academic you' that is uncovered by a search on Google Scholar. He added that the profile that he himself now enjoys began by blogging

Another really engaging session was from Alan Law from the Open University UK. He replaced Denise Kirkpatrick who had double booked, but it actually wouldn’t have mattered who had done the presentation – it was more about the wonderful work the Open U does and it left me thinking how much I’d like to work for them. Such simple and engaging ideas. Eg entertaining animated cartoons on YouTube about lying that outlines the various philosophical standpoints one can take in relation to telling lies with a strategically placed ‘would you like to know more “ link close by that whizzes you off to the further info and enrolment pages for their philosophy courses. Smart.

There are no entry requirements for OU courses and still they manage to be among the top 5 unis in the UK for successful outcomes, and for research. Quite a remarkable success story.

Another initiative that really appealed to me was their iSpot program. Designed to get people interested and form communities of practice around local flora and fauna by photographing relevant subjects and posting to the iSpot site, it coincides with my new obsession for taking photographs and sharing them on Flickr. They are looking to expand the program beyond the UK, and perhaps beyond just flora and fauna, so I will be keeping an eye out for this in my neighbourhood.

Alec Couros was also on the keynote bill. I had heard Alec talk online before so I knew he’d be good, and he was. But I did find myself thinking that I knew several people who could do the job just as well but who don’t have the profile. And they’d be much cheaper. [Please see comments below for more on this.] I don’t think he made a convincing case to support his keynote title either – Why Networked Learning Matters. His summary slide seemed to consist mainly of loaded statements that are easily contested. Eg networked learning promotes ‘open access’ and have ‘high impact’. Whether I agree or not is not the point – offering open access as a reason for networked learning just describes it; it doesn’t explain why it is a ‘good thing’ or why it matters. Someone could just easily read that open access is connected to networked learning and conclude that it is not what they or their students want. “High impact”? On whom? Or what?

Another example – courses become ‘shared, non-local, learning events.” Again, this is a description, not an argument for why it matters.

Another person I saw present was Bert Kimura. I worked with Bert a few times in the early days of the TCC online conferences out of Hawaii, of which Bert is the pioneer, so it was good to share the same physical space with him.

Bert and team were reporting on a project that looked at Cross-Cultural Collaboration using video and social networking. Interesting to hear about, but like so many presentations from Higher Ed folks that report on research it was based on a very small number of participants that doesn’t allow anyone to make any valid conclusions about its usefulness for bigger numbers of students.

MOODLE MOOT

In contrast the keynote speakers at this year’s Moodle Moot were disappointing for me. For Mary Cooch (the keynote on day 1) however, the Twitter stream apparently was in general very appreciative. Somewhere between 70 and 90% of delegates were attending their first Moodle Moot (this was the third) and it could be that a great majority of those first time attenders are reasonably new to elearning. For them Mary’s address may well have been right on the mark.

It’s interesting after a conference to simply see what you remember what was of value without referring to any written notes. In this case just 2 things stand out:

1) Mark Drechsler from NetSpot’s excellent session on the new approach to files in Moodle 2.0 (No longer any central file manager; files will need to be stored in a Content Management System [CMS] like Equella, or Alfresco [OS], or elsewhere in the cloud.

2) The fact that several organisations have installed Big Blue Button on local servers and are supporting it to become the Open Source alternative to dear departed Elluminate which has been sadly bought by Blackboard. (I thought the moment that Elluminate went t o the dark side that one of the positive outcomes from this would be that an OS product would grab the chance and seize the mass market deserting Elluminate. It would be nice to see a mature OS virtual classroom product integrate with Moodle. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time. And it could well be Big Blue Button.)

There was much more but that's all I have time for right now :)

Final Week of Facilitation Course

Well here we are at the final week already! It’s been a valuable experience for me so far, and I get the impression that it’s also been valuable for many of you. You’ll get the chance later in the week to share your opinions about the course via an evaluation.

Hopefully this week’s activity will round the course off neatly.

HOSTED EVENTS

The main focus for this week will be the 5 hosted events:

• Tuesday, 14/6 at 12.30 in Centra (Trisha D) The Garnaut Report
• Tuesday, 14/6 at 8.00 pm in Centra (Rob Beckett) Reading and Interpreting Plans
• Wednesday, 15/6 at 8.00 pm in Moodle Text Chat (Tania M) Fleas!
• Thursday, 16/6 at 4.00 in Centra. (Shirley E) How to start a Conversation
• Thursday, 16/6 at 8.00 pm in Centra (Peter D) Using the Break Out Tool in Centra

As I wrote before, please do your very best to attend as many of these events as you can. The more participants there are in an event, the more authentic the facilitation experience for event ‘hosts’.

VOLUNTEERS?

Ideally two tasks from last week need to be summarised:

1. The wiki discussion on the Critical Factors that influence your blended learning model needs to be condensed into an annotated list of dot points that we can take away as a resource.
2. The excellent Facebook discussion needs to be summarised.

Any takers? No one is obliged to do this of course, but you might also like to consider this strategy with students to offer extra credit or bonus marks or some other incentive to take on leadership roles. It may be appropriate for some kinds of courses.

BLOGGING

In the promo for this course it mentioned that you would get some awareness of the issues involved around facilitating blogs. So:

The Moodle Blogging Tool – universal opinion is that it’s a pretty dreadful excuse for a blog. It has two big problems:

• Whatever you write in it can be seen by everyone on this Moodle (ie everyone across TAFE SA)
• It has no comments feature – an essential component of a ‘proper’ blog.

Apparently the blogging tool in Moodle 2.0 will be infinitely better.

In the meantime if you’d like to try it just begin by selecting Add New Entry from the Blog Menu on the right hand site of our Moodle site.

Other Blogs

To get an idea of other blogs you might like to check my average effort at http://mikecogh.blogspot.com/

There are thousands of educational blogs. Some I look at occasionally are:

• http://wodongatafe.wordpress.com/
• http://www.fullcirc.com/
• http://weblogg-ed.com/
• http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/

The easiest place to set up a blog is Blogger (blogger.com) , though many educational bloggers use

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/http://edublogs.org/

Why not have a go at setting one up? If you do be sure to let us know where we can find it.

PORTFOLIOS

Any spare time you have this week can be spent working on your portfolios. (Note: those who host events are not required to submit a portfolio, but are very welcome to if you’d like some feedback on what you’ve learned from the course.)

I won’t repeat everything I wrote in the Announcements forum last week – go there to read information about content and the format of your portfolio. (http://moodle.tafesa.edu.au/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=21893)

EVALUATION

As mentioned above, an evaluation tool will be available towards the end of the week.

Good luck to everyone hosting events this week. See you all in there!

Blogging from Phone Using Blogger

Let's see. Text here and will try to attach image.

Leaving Penang Behind

Leaving Penang Behind, a photo by mikecogh on Flickr.

Leaving Penang on Air Asia last week. Penang was wonderful - has the opportunity of presenting itself as an example of 'old Asia' that other cities have lost. Parts of it could be World Heritage listed.