OPLS blog

Towards the end of last month, I accompanied representatives from the Aga Khan Academies group on a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Seattle. Our purpose - to explore possibilities for collaboration and knowledge exchange on the development of an e-learning strategy for the academies’ network.

We had a very productive day, and it was rounded off by a tour of Microsoft’s Home of the Future - a prototype of what our living spaces might look like 10 years from now. Housed in their executive briefing centre, it was conceived using the notions of discoverability, place and participation. From their website:

Place. A series of demonstrations showcase how software, services and devices can combine to deliver timely, relevant information to people based on their location, whether inside the home or nearby. One example is display technology shown in the neighborhood bus stop that provides continuous updates of route and arrival information, and is used to demonstrate how location services can automatically notify people about services near them or even when someone they know arrives at the bus stop.

Participation. Reflecting consumers’ widespread desire to more directly shape their sources of information and entertainment — through blogs, social networking Web sites, wikis and the like — the Microsoft Home features several emerging technologies designed to extend people’s self-expression. For instance, a teenager’s bedroom in the facility portrays what it would be like to have addressable wallpaper that employs organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology to display a variety of content such as artwork, video clips and Web pages.

Discovery. Technology systems throughout the Microsoft Home demonstrate innovative ways of prioritizing the huge volumes of information, media and content choices to which consumers will have access in the future. These systems can filter through myriad content sources — from thousands of TV channels, news reports, e-mail messages and electronic documents to music files, on-demand videos and blog entries — to intelligently bring people the content they care about most and at the time when they’re in the mood to enjoy it.

I enjoyed the tour, but what struck me most was the ubiquitous nature of the technology and how possibly intrusive it might become. Voice recognition was used throughout (the main computer was called Grace) and it reminded me very much of Arthur C Clarke’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey.

I was intrigued, though, by the notion of watching web content virtually with a friend and having conversations in real-time via VOIP - the move towards shared reality continues unabated.

I was not allowed to take any photos or video footage, so the next best thing? I had a quick look on YouTube, once I got home, and found this:

It doesn’t cover everything, but gives you an idea of what it was like.

I often turn to Stephen Heppell when considering next steps and looking for help in making sense of this new world we’re living in. Recently I came across this. I shan’t try and paraphrase this time, but let his own words speak to you.

“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.

Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”

So, if you want some guidance on what we might do as educators to evaluate some of this, have a look at what he has to say here.

Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:

Larry Ferlazzo’s best Web 2.0 applications for 2007

Langwitches best web 2.0 applications for elementary school

You are, of course, free to agree or disagree.

Please note that these were shared via the Classroom 2.0 network on Ning.

Yesterday, I found out that blogging will reach its tenth birthday on 17 December 2007. Extraordinary.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was the use of voicethread to power comments and reflections on the article itself.

I encourage you to explore this tool. It provides a great way to share narratives, reflection and rich media commenting. Run the demo to see for yourself and watch for Sord Dragin Man.

I think the success of this lies in the fact that it is so easy to capture what you want to say, ie voice via phone or mic, text and video doodling, webcam, and audio file. Importing media looks straight forward too and I particularly like the link up with flickr.

So, the impact on teaching and learning? Well, clearly, it’s another interesting tool for encouraging peer reflection in our students. There are also possibilities for critically evaluating a piece of artwork or poem, for example. Or even simply collaborating on a work in progress. Once again, we are limited only by our own imaginations.

Except, of course, through the read/write web, we don’t have to be limited to our own imagination, but can share our ideas and experiences with others. Happy birthday, therefore, to blogging

As well as coming across Yuuguu at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, I spotted this free online meeting planner, ikordo. ikordo is intelligent. It uses plain English and email to arrange meetings for you on your behalf. You can plan meetings, set up attendees and the ikordo negotiates the most suitable date for a meeting on your behalf. It can interpret plain English email responses and builds up a picture of everyone’s availability. You can also have email and SMS reminders before a meeting beings. Try it. Nothing to download this time

Another resource that teachers may find useful is Ustream - a live broadcasting tool which, according to its blurb, “is a platform that provides live interactive video for everyone. Anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can use Ustream to broadcast to a global audience.”

We will certainly look at its potential for professional development, but if any of you are using it with your students, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks, Paul, for passing this on.

An interesting meet-up is being planned around BETT next year. Called TeachMeet08, it is a gathering of education technologists, willing to share their experiences and expertise. It is being led by Ewan McIntosh among others and he has blogged about it here.

If you want to sign up, please do so at the supporting wiki: TeachMeet08.

Hope to see you there.

For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:

It’s a great exposition of the power of tagging.

For me, one of the more successful uses of blogs in schools is when there is a real sense of collective ownership - students, teachers, parents etc.

This example, from a school based here in Wales, follows the progress of an exchange visit to Grünstadt, Germany.

I don’t know how long it will last, but the students certainly appear to have enjoyed themselves and there is some good modelling of language by the teachers.

I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. It’s an historical narrative on the emergence of existing notions of childhood - rooted in the development of movable type and the printing press - and its demise (according to Postman) - rooted in the development of mass communication media, specifically television. What I’m enjoying most is its ability to make me stop and think.

No more so than Postman’s reference to the teachings and work of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: they alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with) and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop). In other words, new communications technologies not only change our habits, but also our habits of mind.

I’ve been struggling with what this means for us today (Innis was writing in the 1930s and Postman’s book was published in 1982). For me, social media has certainly changed what I think about. I now spend more time considering the possibilities of teachers and students connecting with one another across the world and the development of substantive relationships between them. I spend more time thinking about how learning can more easily be shared, communicated and even delivered online. Increasingly, I think about these things in public places, such as this blog, on collaborative wikis, and commenting on other blogs. And I think about the fact that I can now do all of this on online social networks that have sprung up around these areas of interest.

So, just as Galileo’s telescope changed our whole understanding of scope and scale, as well as the Aristotelian geocentric view of the world that the earth was the centre of the universe, so too has social media begun to make us change the way we think about a whole raft of issues related to teaching and learning.

One such example is assessment. There is a growing school of thought, led by Stephen Heppell and others, which proposes that we need to think more creatively about how we assess students, because existing assessment design has become far too notational and linear. They suggest alternatives to the 1500-word essay, such as a 10-minute video uploaded to YouTube, managing an online forum for a week, or two 10-minute podcasts.

Equally, the ability to capture evidence of learning much more easily, through mobile digital technologies, is having a profound impact on the nature of assessment. Just one example is the ability to video a student’s musical performance (using a mobile phone or digital camera), upload it to something like Viddler, and tag the timeline with examples of where the student shows good technique, interpretation etc. What’s great is that the student can self-assess first, then invite comments from peers (two stars and a wish?) and finally submit it for more formal assessment.

So we’re thinking about different things, with different tools and in different places. As educators, we going to need to respond.