OPLS blog

I’m excited by a new initiative on Ning, called the PYP Exhibition, created by Tod Baker of the International School of Tianjin.

Set up to discuss and share good practice around the PYP exhibition, it’s a wonderful use of Ning’s social networking capabilities, and I encourage any PYP teachers among you to drop by some time.

Today we launched a site we have been working on for the past few months: the IB Community Theme web platform.

It has been developed to help schools integrate curriculum planning and activities around 6 major global issues into school life … and to share results, successes and stories with the global IB community.

It is an exciting venture in terms of the IB’s digital space and our first proper foray into linking Web 2.0 concepts with community-based site development.

We hope you like it and feel able to contribute.

OPLS team.

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

Amazon have just announced a major new development in the ebook market. Called Kindle, it is pretty much a complete service package - from the hand-held hardware technology to the ability to browse, download or retrieve content. View the demo video for further details.

Why should we care? Well, I can see a number of potential uses in education. As more and more content becomes fully digital - by which I mean described in XML format - students can have direct access to reading lists and text-based course materials. In addition, because of its in-built dictionary and links to wikipedia, students can investigate words and phrases of which they are unsure. From the video, bookmarking and annotation look straight forward too.

Generally, its advantages include a hosted back-up service for all your purchased content, fast wifi connectivity using mobile phone network technologies (but no additional charges other than the download fee - currently $9.99 per book), a good screen and no syncing requirements with your pc.

I won’t be buying one yet though. At US$399 a pop, it’s not cheap. Furthermore, it’s another hand-held device to lug around - and therein lies the rub. My phone is pretty much becoming the ubiquitous computing device I need. Why should I invest in another piece of chunky technology that only delivers books, doesn’t play music and video, or allow me to read my emails, etc, etc, and, worse still, ties me into one provider?

The ultimate let-down for me, though, is the fact that Kindle charges for newspaper and blog content. How retro a step is that? I think Bezos was dancing with the fairies at the bottom of his garden when he came up with that particular business model.

Nevertheless, I have always had a soft spot for Amazon, ever since living overseas in the late 90s and it being the only effective means I had to get hold of books for my students. I shall therefore watch developments with interest and not dismiss the venture too hastily.

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.

Berkeley University, in California, have recently launched a series of recorded lectures on their own YouTube channel. You can find the current catalogue here: Berkeley University on YouTube. It clearly mirrors MIT’s Opencourseware initiative, started in 2001.

It raises the question yet again of where the real value in school- and university-based education lies: in the teacher delivering the content or the collaborative working and investigation by students around it.

Clearly, Berkeley and MIT believe it is in the latter, otherwise they wouldn’t be distributing this content for free. It is the formal accreditation and recognition that surrounds it, which they then charge (huge sums) for.

The trend towards deconstructing territories of learning (a phrase I’ve borrowed from a colleague referring to the classroom rather than a geographical region) continues and I look forward to its development.

In the meantime, have a look at this lecture on atoms and heat:

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.

Just a reminder re. the K-12 online conference starting in just over a couple of weeks time.

From their about page:

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 is run by volunteers and open to everyone.

It’s probably time for a few How-Tos on some key Web 2.0 tools for education.

The first is Really Simple Syndication or RSS.

As many education bloggers have already written about this extraordinarily powerful tool, it’s probably best if I just link to some of the better explanations.

Here’s the first from Infinite Thinking Machine. It’s a great place to start before attempting to set up an aggregator (don’t worry, this term will become clearer as you read the post).

When you’re ready, try this audio/visual how-to from Whereisab? It’s an explanation of how to set up RSS feeds using Netvibes - an aggregator a few of us use in OPLS. Others are using Google Reader, so have a look at this one too.

Let us know how you get on via the comments facility.

Good luck, L.