On Monday morning we went to the NECC 2009 Exhibitor’s Hall. It was huge, vast, expansive . . . so American.
We were on a mission to get a Promethean and SMART t-shirt.
They made it so hard fill in forms, show a magazine bit of a hassle really!!!! Never did get the SMART shirt probably a Freudian moment.
We were caught in the rush of the crowd, jostled along, not sure where we were going.
Suddenly an arm appeared out of nowhere, a blue t-shirt was thrust into our hands . . . a BIG sloppy PEARSON shirt.
People looked at us as if we weird when we got on the bus this morning. “What’s with the t-shirt?”
Well you know what we’re not so stupid.
Standing in the endless snaking Starbuck’s line this afternoon a hysterical woman ran up to us offering congratulations and these two cute little ipod shuffles . . .
for wearing our PEARSON’s t-shirt.
Cameras flashed, celebrities for a minute, congratulated by our fellow coffee addicts . . . what a buzz!
We had intended to walk from dinner to the hotel in the cool of the evening. The evening turned out to be a hot, wet and stormy night in Washington DC. After dinner we caught a cab.
We were chattering away in the back about the Conference and things we’d been doing.
The Cabbie was a middle aged Afro-American. Part way through the trip he asked “is there a teacher conference or something happening?” We told him of the NECC 2009.
He became really chatty. He believes technology is really powerful and proceeded to tell us that the ipod shuffle had totally changed his life. How so?
He discovered you could listen to books and they were freely available from a variety of resources to be downloaded to an ipod shuffle. He has “read” 200 books in the past year. He had never read anything before then. His spoken language and vocabulary indicated he was a deep thinker. His voice was light and proud when he spoke of his books.
How many more people like him are there out there?
An educated, articulate, intelligent and informed “illiterate”.
When are we going to look beyond testing and statistics as a measure of our students literacy?
Kathleen Blake Yancey believes writing has been affected by the context of history from 1940’s to present
war and distance created need for people to write letters
school writing disciplined and punishment oriented
freedom of graffitti writing, letters of freedom of gaol
writing process, moves that lead to final product, process became very linear and unlike process real writers use. Energy and using steps in the way they need to be used not as a prescription.
process became digitised, formatting and publication possible
writing for connection - visual display powerful in writing
connection is new and exciting and part of process who for, which medium and why.
Writing is about connection. What does that look like now?
1.Blogging from school to the world - responses are important and a measure of success, teaches respectful reply. Students like the environment.
2. Take on the personna of characterscreating back stories in poetry, drama, blog that represents the author, historical character, scientist
3. Information Ecology, past information owned by experts.
Create a concept map to answer question, search of blogosphere to answer the questions. Found not possible so had to go further into other forms of information: academic, mainstream and alternative. How do we know we can trust resources? Need to be explicit in posing questions.
Go to Time Magazine and see top 100 list of blogs.
4. Blogging as learning in action.
Give an explcit task to pursue and share on communal blog. Where is poetry seen in culture? Students can see poetry almost anywhere but how is it poetic?
Signs project all signs are about what you can’t do. Used to be words alone. Became mixed and now all pictures. Need to participate not be a voyeur. (Blog Projects done at Virginia Beach Schools)
Three types of participation
1. Experts and laypersons are composing knowledge eg citizen scientist,
2. Citizens composing news, when people help each other information seems to be more reliable. Not just crisis driven but stories of people are being told and their stories are part of History.
3. Citizens have composing power in form of facebook, twitter, blogs etc. This means we need to develop understanding and control of these tools. Need to know which tools are to be used and when to support effective and appropriate connection
Walking through the Exhibit Hall the other day we met these two teachers from Chicago. They were really excited because the girl on the right had just won a Promethean Classroom.
She was over the moon! She was so enthusiastic about winning Promethean because she was aware of the company’s all encompassing philosophy of sharing knowledge and creating rather than controlling knowledge and shutting the world out.
Gladwell’s keynote addressed THREE BIG IDEAS he wanted all attending NECC 2009 to understand it is important for students and teachers to understand them.
1. WORK HARD
Put in the effort and success will come your way.
2. RESILIENCE / PERSEVERANCE
It’s okay to make mistakes so long as you learn from them.
Trying harder brings greater reward and develops in the individual a respect for things that are difficult and require perseverance to achieve.
3. EXPERIMENTATION / EXPLORATION
Learning is not linear. There are many paths to the same place. Gladwell quoted Gayleson who believes there are two kinds of visionaries / innnovators / geniuses.
a. Conceptual - those who have bold ideas and change the world view quickly eg Picasso.
b. Experimental - The innovator who explores through trial and error, makes mistakes and through perseverance finds a way to genius and innovation, eg Cezanne
Key to learning from mistakes is the quality of feedback given. The feedback MUST be
- Timely
- Targetted
Technoogy is a wonderful facilitator for feedback eg. twitter, facebook, SMS etc.
It’s not the “where ” of learning it is the “how”. Students need teachers who are energetic, enthusiastic, and creative. Teachers who promote learning and make it meaningful.
The video clip is from an excerpt where Gladwell is saying the American Education System is great for the top and the bottom.
In recent times the line between public and private has become very blurred to the point of non existence. Young people, young teachers, students all use social networking spaces to air their thoughts, their feelings and their lives.
More and more I hear comments about there being no privacy anymore. All is public!! The most recent comment was as I was sitting in Kevin Amboe’s session on Wiki’s for Writing Workshops at NECC 2009.
Kevin Amboe said he expected his young daughter to be up on the web and out their organising her life on Facebook and commenting through her blog. Will Richardson has said he would be disappointed if his daughter did not have a web presence. Employers today look for a web presence as a guide for employability.
Mark another of the presenters today commented that he felt it would be safer for his child to be out there on the internet than walking through the local park.
Creeps and undesirables lurk everywhere, we need to teach our children and students how to deal with them both physically and internetly rather than locking them away in inpenetrable towers.
The inpenetrable towers block out so much that is good and exciting and fun to be part of. A world I don’t always understand but I do respect the young people’s need to be part of it. To us it is technology. To them it is natural they were born to it.
Nobody can stop the young people of today from getting through all the blocks that are put in their way. What a challenge? What a skill! I could never hope to be half as good a hacker as most of the young kids I know.
A case in point. At our school we use a really cool social networking / problem solving game. It can be played in beta or paid for. For payment you become a full member with treasures at your fingertips.
One of our 11 yo really wanted a membership but his parents wouldn’t allow it. He wanted to be a member so badly he persevered until he hacked into the site and became a member.
Does he get rewarded for skill and initiative or sanctioned for willfully tampering with another’s property?
The world is changing, the world is changing so fast, way too fast for many of the older generations to understand. A young person’s social mores are not what the older generation understand. Do older generations have the right to impose our will and sanctions on something we don’t understand.
Rather than funding technocrats to shut down something that can be amazing shouldn’t we promote teaching practices which ensure we are developing responsible students who are so engaged and motivated by the authenticity of what they are doing that they do not have the time or inclination to abuse their use of the internet.
Footnote
It was really interesting in the session on one to one laptops attended yesterday the majority of those present felt people who saw themselves as EXPERTS in technology should be kept AWAY from SCHOOLS. Technocrats were cast as control freaks preferring to use technology to shut people out and control rather than develop an inclusive caring and respectful learning community.
This is an amazing conference and it hasn’t even started yet. The pre-conference workshops are so comprehensive and across such a wide range of areas. Which one to choose?
I don’t know much about wiki’s so did that yesterday. Now I know a whole lot more. Still only really a beginner.
Edubloggercon was on as an unconference yesterday and it was great. Kim was at the smashup (sorry) smackdown session and said it was like a religious experience. Her blog explains that.
The unconference sessions we attended explored one to one laptop use, the use of the ipod touch as a mobile device and the educational apps for that. There is a comprehensive list of educational apps being published by Sue Wells and Lyn on Classroom 2.0 look out for it.
Google has amazing tools and apps and stuff so much more than emails and searching. I use gmail and search using Google.
After today’s session I do it so much better and am beginning to understand the depth of the functionality of Google.
And we can’t access it in its fullness through our network!!
Earlier in the year a friend flicked me an email with an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education attached. It was written by Mark Bauerlein and entitled Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind and it has provoked a great deal of thought and research on my part.
I do not necessarily agree with the writer’s conclusions; however, some of the ideas presented provide a very good argument for researchers, educators and testers to take a deep look at the strategies being used by young and old alike to access information on the www.
The work of Jakob Nielsen, according to Bauerlain, “the guru of web page usability” was cited. Nielsen has spent since 1994 gauging habits and screen experiences of computer users. He charts “people’s online navigations and aims, using eye tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests”.
Nielsen’s research reveals people scan 100’s of pages using a pattern vastly different from any learned at school. They read in an F pattern . . . extremely fast and only one in six reads a web page linearly.
Let’s face it the old linear way of reading, the emotional comfort provided by fiction books, the rigid content of textbooks are losing their relevance in the burgeoning context of the internet. Books are never going to be irrelevant because there always has been and always will be people who love the comfort and emotional attachment to the printed book. However, the speed, the amount of knowledge and diversity of interests are better catered for by the internet.
It is imperative that researchers and educators join forces to determine the most appropriate strategies needed by all people to be discerning, critical users of the internet as both consumers and creators.
We can’t keep teaching using 20th century methods, educators must adapt to the 21st century . . . almost 10% of the century has passed us by and still there is resistance to this concept.
The Horizons Report (2009, p.6) “call for formal instruction in the key new skills including, information literacy, visual literacy and technological literacy”, but what are they?
The text of the www is not static it is in a constant state of updating. How and what do we teach to cater for this fluidity?
What does it mean to be a reader or even a literate person in the 21st century?
Should we be opening our educational minds to findings from Nielsen’s research and incorporating some of his web usability ideas into our practice?
Craig Bellamy
