As an educator, it’s my job to help make sense of a world that I so often struggle to understand for myself. In recent years, my classes have been polarised – as a Connected Learning teacher in Year 7, senior (Years 11-12) English and several teacher groups for ICT, I see the ends of the secondary school spectrum and like to think I have a good perspective on learners from a wide range of ages. I see at both sides of the spectrum the innate desire to understand our world and find our place in it. This is never easy, but technology helps us if we know how to use it – and I wouldn’t be able to understand the world as I do without it.

Despite the old analogies of digital “natives” and “immigrants,” I see twelve year olds who struggle endlessly with technology just as I see learners over 60 whose use surpasses my own in sophistication and understanding. More than anything, I see my job as a connector, helping the right person to find and use the right tool for the right job.

While technology is changing rapidly, it’s important to take heart in a few constants. For me, life with technology is unpredictable, being both stressful and empowering; both frustrating and liberating. At the same time, I see very little change to the way that we as a global society make use of technology and our use boils down to three basic verbs: to consume, to curate or to create. Having done all three in various combinations, frequencies and sequences over the years, I remain convinced that in order to value and maintain an open society in which learners can genuinely become the people they want to be, we need to promote all three of these approaches in education.

The problem seems to be that we too often emphasise consumption at the cost of both creation and curation. Without all three, we can’t live sustainably. Endless and mindless consumption of the world’s resources – whether ideas, media, food, resources or values – fails to create anything new or value-adding, including solutions to the problems of our own making.

So, for 2012, I’d like to promote a better balance in my own teaching and help my students to:

1. be better critical consumers of resources;
2. become curators of what helps us to help one another and become the people we want to be; and
3. create our own expressions of self sustainably and compassionately.

I’m excited about technology for education and what it holds for this year and into the future.

The PBL explores the idea of a young Afghani-American woman, Stephanie, who journeys from LA into war-torn Kandahar to adopt her niece and return safely. Students work in groups of four assuming the roles of Geographer, Cultural Expert, CIA Expert and Travel Advisor, all advising Stephanie on a whole range of issues and considerations.

As a product, we had students distill their “brief” into a five-minute screen recording, taken with the latest version of QuickTime. Screen recordings are an excellent way to allow students to show what they know, opening up the potential for students to meta-analyse their own web-based research through audio commentary and other screen techniques like multiple tabs, zooming and different websites and applications that reflect a wide variety of research tools currently available to students.

In the following sample, one of my students informs Stephanie about security concerns facing a young western woman travelling to Afghanistan by discussing the websites she’s used, her findings and interpretations.

Just had my first academic publication, “Head in the Clouds: a review of current and future potential for cloud-enabled pedagogies.” Aside from being over the moon, I’m indebted to my supervisor, Professor John Hedberg, who guided me through the process of writing, submitting, editing and publishing work in the field of technology education. John is a great mind when it comes to disruptive pedagogies and autonomous learning and I’ve learned a lot throughout the process.

I’m also lucky to be working, studying and living/breathing the ideas that I explore. I’m now looking forward to continuing this journey and taking things as far as I can, supported by mentors and amazing colleagues and beautiful friends and family.

This afternoon I’ve been busy spending an hour with different teachers from diocesan schools in the Parramatta area on the use of Twitter for professional learning. Although the session was designed for beginners, an IT colleague and I decided to go to explore the session from the perspective of trainers working in schools to disseminate new ideas. I find social media to be largely unchartered territory in my school (and many schools that I know), largely a result of blocking, slow take-up, misunderstanding and technophobia. Putting technology into the hands of teachers and making a positive difference means understanding some of these issues and really engaging with some of the concerns non-users have.

From this point of view, social media also represents one of the cliffaces of the digital divide. As Lisa Nash, the facilitator of the session points out, the value of Twitter is in tapping into the thinking of people – experts, professionals, educators and the like – and then using those ideas to change the way things are done. For those with no interest or inclination, relying on traditional face-to-face and print-based professional development seems almost professionally self-defeating in the twenty-first century!

I find sessions like these both interesting and heartening. It’s great to see teachers, leaders and administrators getting in and getting their hands dirty. I’m hoping that this session sparks some future learning opportunities beyond the confines of 9-5 face-to-face.

This week I’ve just finished marking a PBL project with a team of very talented Year 7 teachers. As part of the marking, I suggested we experiment with a Google Spreadsheet. Given the many assessable components to the project, a collaborative spreadsheet shared amongst the teachers enabled all teachers to:

-see each other’s comments and marks

- work in a centralised place

- easily export the data to electronic chronicles and mail-merged reports

- check totals and averages with easy (and automatic!) fomulae

- check data against previous years, averages, etc. to gauge improvemnet

Google’s ability to get data out of one place and put it into another makes Google Spreadsheets a very effective teacher marking tool. In this case, I was able to use the marks teachers had entered to generate slick PBL reports that we’re returning to kids in record time. It’s great to see technology really enhance the feedback process AND make teacher’s lives easier! Shouldn’t we all be experimenting with open tools that enable more effective marking 2.0?

While none of us object to dangerous and obscene sites being unavailable for children to access over our network, I had to do a double-take when looking at the list below:

New categories:

‘Interactive Web Applications’
‘Fashion/Beauty’
‘Software/Hardware’
‘Potential Illegal Software’
‘Content Server’
‘Internet Services’
‘Media Sharing’
‘Incidental Nudity’
‘Marketing/Merchandising’
‘Parked Domain’
‘Pharmacy’
‘Restaurants’
‘Real Estate’
‘Recreation/Hobbies’
‘Blogs/Wiki’
‘Digital Postcards’
‘Historical Revisionism’
‘Technical Information’
‘Dating/Personals’
‘Motor Vehicles’
‘Professional Networking’
‘Social Networking’
‘Text Translators’
‘Web Meetings’
‘Controversial Opinions’
‘Residential IP Addresses’
‘Browser Exploits’
‘Consumer Protection’
‘Illegal UK’
‘Major Global Religions’
‘Malicious Downloads’
‘PUPs’

In all honesty, I don’t know how I could operate with a heavy black-list of “interactive sites” that render some of the more exciting offerings of the internet like “blogs/wikis” off limits. I’d be downright scared to think of the implications of me stopping my students from engaging with ”controversial opinions” and making up their own minds on issues. Why should we prevent students from exploring their own “hobbies and interests,” using “media sharing” to publish and share their work collaboratively or checking up on “technical information” when it is needed?

Is it fundamentally wrong for a child to look at a list of “restaurants” or accessories for “motor vehicles” to recommend for Fathers Day? Why shouldn’t they make use of “professional networking” and “web meetings” to connect with professionals from universities and industry to inform their work? And how can we possibly promote tolerance without a greater understanding of “major global religions?”

The really scary part about all of this is that we put the critical thinking around how these sites are used in the too-hard basket when we sign up for subscription blacklists like these. What does that say about us as a society?

Digital Community, Digital Citizen – Jason B. Olher

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a morning with Jason B. Ohler, author, educator and “nowist” (as distinct from “futurist”). Jason’s book Digital Community, Digital Citzen, explores cultural schism between the status quo focus in education of standardised testing on old-fashioned text and the world of new media and literacies in which our students exist. Ohler presents a detailed case for understanding where our kids are and using “stories” as a container for how we understand, consume, create and analyse new media. Ohler suggests that we need to:

1. shift from text-centrism to new media literacies;

2. value writing more than ever and understand good media is still based on good, clear writing;

3. specifically value writing for media;

4. adopt art (creativity, improvisation, risk-taking and critical/creative practices) as the “4th, next R.”

5. accept that “attitude is the aptitude” – that everything’s going to change, and we shouldn’t get attached to the way things are… e.g. Excel 6 is going to become Excel 7, and If you haven’t got the ability to let go, you are “functionally unintelligent.”

6. practise personal and social literacy – literacy is no longer a social pursuit – e.g. wikis, blogs and online collaborative writing now happens in groups – therefore we should take our literacies and combine it with others’;

7. develop literacies about different tools;

8. develop literacies about information in the real world; and

9. understand that digital communities and citizenship are about fluency, not just literacy.

Embracing and Understanding Stories

Much of Olher’s engagement stems from his understanding of stories in digital cultures as “information containers that can hold lots of disparite data.” Ohler believes that teachers need to harness and embrace stories in the classroom, suggesting that stories naturally align with how students – even very young ones – view and understand the world. If we continue to focus on “list-oriented information,” we lose the engagement of our students and alienate them from learning partnerships.

Ohler has a strong message on the role of teachers in the story-telling process: while we don’t need to be “software afficionados,” we do need to be critical and not simply give an A grade for “anything that moves.” Our roles as critical/creative consultants need to reflect how professional mediasts approach creative development.

Ultimately, Ohler makes a compelling argument to overcome the schism between real learning and high-stakes standardised testing, thus overcoming the “cognitive dissonance” that derails authentic learning. If schools start young kids engaging with real issues, finding learning pathways and understanding and relating their learning through stories and story-telling, there is real potential in the future. Speaking of the future, Ohler reminds us that the future “goes for a very long time” and not simply “as long as we’re alive.” With this in mind, we need to prepare our students (and their students!) for the next several hundred years! Let’s get started!

Deep breaths… deep breaths!

I’ve just finished my session ‘Head in the Clouds,’ which explored strategic approaches to deploying, implementing and engaging schools from all walks of life in the use of cloud computing services like Live@Edu and Google Apps for Education. Now I need to catch my breath!

Expanding Learning Horizons has been a challenging and enriching experience for me professionally. Although I’m a good speaker, I’m an introvert at heart and lose a lot of energy quickly when I teach, meet new people, network and generally step outside my comfort zone. At the same time, meeting a lot of like-minded educators is an energising process – once I learn to just accept myself and let others accept me for who I am. Tricky stuff – but I’m always learning.

Some of the themes of the conference in which I’ve been particularly interested include:

- whether or not we’ve moved beyond 1-1 and whether it is still relevant

- how to make the most of the cloud in education

- how we move the teachers in our schools further towards purposeful/meaningful use of technology

- distilling so-called ‘twenty-first’ century skills and translating pedagogy into practice

Keep it Critical, Stupid

More than anything, I’ve enjoyed the Critical Conversation sessions with strategic leaders, principals, IT managers and business leaders. As a lowly teacher, I’m often ‘tuned out’ to higher-level decisions that, much of the time, I have very little interest in making (if ever given the chance – call it a Gen X distaste for the institution). My focus continues to be on grass roots, ground-up innovation and creativity, and putting the technology and the centre of learning the hands – both literal and metaphorical – of the students and teachers I teach. At the same time, I can’t fully disengage from these higher-level decisions, and thus find myself becoming ever more opinionated about approaches to integrating, implementing and realising technologies in teaching and learning. I’m particularly impressed by the work of Bruce Dixon and Travis Smith - and their relatively no-nonsense approaches to getting exciting things happening in schools.

Word on the Tweet

One of the highlights of the whole conference came during my session today. At the start, I had to come to terms with a room sparsely populated – about eleven people. Putting my best effort in, I began presenting and engaging the audience through a Google Doc ‘back-channel,’ the purpose of which was to let my audience determine the pace and focus of the session, clarify concerns, voice their own opinions and so on.

Within fifteen minutes, the room had swelled to about thirty-five participants. I continued, welcoming the new-comers and getting them set up with the tools as quickly as possible. My Computelec consultant, Tracey, was a brilliant assistant and host, and between us, we had everyone collaborating, discussing and sharing.

At the end of the session, I discussed my surprise at the swelling of numbers with Tracey. A gentlemen up the front overheard us.

“Oh – that was me.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah – I tweeted.”

It’s both exciting and heartening to think about how we can use social media professionally to spread good ideas. On this occasion, I’m so touched and delighted to think that I was the focus of a good idea!

I’m very grateful to Computelec and ELH for this opportunity. Meeting new people, building professional relationships and sharing in wisdom are all priceless experiences.

First Thoughts – Affordances/Extensibility and the 1-1 Question

So how do we come to terms with an OS like Android and what it might mean for education? In answer to that, I’m reminded of the frustration I’ve had with iOS in recent times and the stranglehold that Apple continues to have over software development, often to the detriment of the user. Recently, a system leader in my area asked me if I would consider the iPad a viable 1-1 learning device in systemic Catholic schools. Despite being a huge fan of iPads, I had to point out:

1. the lack of Flash functionality on web pages renders many LMSes – such as Moodle, Blackboard, LAMS and so on – quite unusable for many purposes, especially those that are more interactive and require pop-up screens, multiple tabs and so on;

2. typing on an iPad without a keyboard for any length of time is unwieldy and bad ergonomics. Typing with a bluetooth keyboard is costly and drains the battery much faster;

3. current and future apps are subject to Apple’s terms of use/development and anything which competes with core system functionality (including other browsers, productivity tools, social networking apps and so on) can be denied, curtailed, pulled, etc.;

4. getting data out and in – or in and out – is not always easy – consider the fact that a Numbers spreadsheet saved on Mac Numbers and opened in iPad Numbers is “converted” – with loss of formatting, formulaes, sheets, tables, etc.;

5. productivity apps like Pages look good when demo’ed (and everyone loves twisting the butterfly around) but can be alarmingly inflexible, difficult to navigate and problematic when format-shifting to other formats/devices later on… consider editing a complex table and see if you don’t become the least frustrated after half an hour; and

6. access to – and the ability to open – a range of different file formats is problematic at the best of times… consider video codecs that Apple doesn’t like and the fact that the VLC media player was pulled from the app store shortly after it launched a few years back.

So in pointing out the above, I had to say that, no, I didn’t consider the iPad viable as a 1-1 device, even considering its huge potential as a media-making tool (think of apps like GarageBand and iMovie), or the fact that it still benefits from being the dominant player in terms of app development. In other words, while devices like the iPad and iPhone have a huge range of affordances, their extensibility is conditional on the fundamental design of the OS.

So how does Android stack up? Well, in the next few posts, I’ll be considering this question as a teacher, a technology leader and as a university student. Having now become familiar with both platforms, I aim to be as objective as possible and really delve into Android’s potential for future teaching/learning experiences in the classroom and the real world. I’d love to hear from anyone who uses Android in any way that relates to teaching/learning and your thoughts so far.

Next week sees me heading off to present at this years ELH (Expanding Learning Horizons) in Lorne, Victoria. This year’s focus is “What Happened to the Revolution?” and presenters and speakers will be exploring this question in a whole range of different ways, including 1-1 depoloyment in schools, developing sustainable assistive technologies, exploring the concept of mobile and building knowledge around cloud-based pedagogies.

My session is based on my recent literature review: ‘Head in the Clouds: how cloud-based service deployments scale the use of Web 2.0 applications in education.‘ I’ll be presenting on my understanding of cloud-pedagogies at this point and demonstrating how I’ve strategically directed my school in the deployment and integration of Moodle and Google’s Apps for Education.

The hardest part is knowing where to pitch my ideas. Conferences like these tend to draw education crowds from a range of different sources – including leaders, managers, teachers, IT professionals, principals and so on. As a some-time participant at conferences, I’m often dismayed by the poor planning on the parts of presenters in anticipating and making allowances for their potential audience. When it comes down to it, ideas are often too esoteric, the ‘practical’ ends up being too simple and the ‘bag of tricks’ that participants expect to walk away with ends up making little difference in the greater scheme of things.

Exploring Cognitive Organisers for Professional Development

With these shortcomings in mind, I thought I’d shift gears a little and explore other ways of creatively meeting my participants where they’re at – rather than putting them in the same category of assumed ‘inexperienced novice.’ Cognitive organisers make a great alternative to the ubiquitous PowerPoint ‘sheep dip’ model. The following organiser (still a work in progress) is my attempt to offer a range of different and really useful links, articulate different ways of thinking and encourage participants to enter the learning at the point which is most relevant to their experiences and context. This map explores how to approach cloud-service deployment – the aim is to be practical, to provide resources, to position ideas in relation to current research and to not make participants feel overwhelmed.

I’ve also been keen to explore the idea of cognitive organisers in the classroom. They make a fantastic opening for a unit, especially considering the use of collaboration to elicit students throughts on a topic or research question. Colours, tabs, graphics and so on provide handy reference points and organising principles along the way.

While this is going to be an interesting experiment for my session next Monday (and I’m not sure as yet whether it will pay off – I feel a lot safer about the idea of a straight-forward, linear presentation!). It’s exciting to think about how much I will stand to learn from those involved in my session. Maybe I should open up the organiser to their collaborative input?