Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

Cell by skatejpg CC on Flickr

This idea has been knocking around in my head for a few days. I’m not even sure it’s a practical suggestion but when you’ve got an itch you gotta scratch.

There’ve been quite a lot of new developments regarding CPD in the UK recently, the most obvious being the arrival of VITAL so it’s occupying a bit of my brain.

I’ve blogged before (and here) about my disillusionment with traditional CPD models where learners choose courses from a list, turn up and then hope to goodness that it changes their skills/behaviour. In many cases it might, but it seems like a hopeful scatter-gun approach to learning, not very effective if you are managing CPD for your staff.

I really like the Enquiring Minds model that Futurelab has written about where learning is directed by the learners, establishing a community that effectively teaches itself or drafts in outside help (professional or otherwise). It’s worth a look at and it’s being put into practice all over the shop (this for example).

The thing that interests me is the challenge of managing this group of learners especially if you are in a large organisation like a school or university. Groups of learners would have to be of a size that was self-sustaining without being overly big.

Also, not everybody wants to learn about the same things at the same time so how do you manage learning where the needs are so fluid?

And this got me thinking about Cell Groups. If you’re not familiar with the term, in a nutshell they’re a way of organising fellowship groups in churches (no wait, come back!) where a large congregation organises itself into small fluid groups where membership can grow and change over time. If a group becomes too large to sustain it is free to split. If members of one group feel they are a better fit elsewhere then they can join a different cell.

I was wondering whether this sort of model would work for CPD.

• In a school different cells would be formed for different special interests depending on where individuals’ needs for development lay, for instance, aspects of SEN provision, social networking as a learning tool, new literacies etc.
• Each cell would direct it’s own learning, collaborate, share experience and comment on each other’s progress.
• Within a cell, leadership wouldn’t necessarily be by any one person. It could be fluid or even non-existent, relying on leadership by consensus.
• When an avenue of development is judged by the group to be exhausted then the cell changes its focus or disperses and members join other cells or split to investigate other avenues.
• If individuals feel they are better served in different cells then they can switch mid-stream with the new group helping to support the new arrival in catching up.

The key thing is that these mini-communities

It’s all quite Darwinian. If it worked well then, with a bit of gentle direction,  the cells would form around topics that were of most professional benefit to the learners themselves and therefore the institution.

It could also be quite chaotic and difficult to manage from the leadership’s point of view. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not sure. The role of the leadership team would be to support learners in taking their development seriously and helping them to reflect and put into practice. With learners owning their own development the benefits would be greater than just plonking someone on a course and hoping for the best.

I’ll probably find that it’s already been in use for years and I just hadn’t noticed. Typical, really.

So, itch scratched. I’ll probably read this in a few weeks time with my head in my hands but the reason for having this blog was to record ideas, however naff.

If you have any thoughts on this I’d love to hear from you.

Go on, put me straight.

Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)

I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).

The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.

It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.

Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.

This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.

I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).

Link to the document here.

Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.

CC Flickr image by Rakka

Here’s another entry to the D-Ed Pool and it’s an interesting one as it’s a service I quite liked but also is a good example of one of the main pitfalls of using web2.0 tools for education.

Fliggo was a build-your-own video sharing site which I originally viewed way back here. The applications for education were plentiful. You could in effect create a TV channel for your school or class and protect it the same way you could protect a wordpress blog (controlling who can upload or view, add comments etc) with the added bonus that you could import videos from YouTube thus getting round most education ISPs’ filters.

A few weeks ago it stopped allowing me to upload videos and now it’s not even allowing me to login. In November Fliggo was “rolled into” Vidly a Twitter video service and the create-your-own aspect of the site was quietly put to bed. Have a read of Fliggo’s blog post – it’s quite illuminating.

Why is it important for educators?

It tells us somethings about the nature of the web2.0 at a time when it’s really taking off for teaching and learning.

1. Services like Fliggo take time and resources to build and then maintain. There is a lot of altruism on the web but it’s not limitless. People need to eat. I think I remember @dougbelshaw saying in a blog post that the web2.0 “free lunch” was a but of an illusion (sorry if that’s a misquote, Doug). In Fliggo’s case they needed to make a commercial decision and that didn’t include keeping Fliggo going.
2. The 2nd point is related. In the 11months or so since Fliggo was released the nature of the social web has changed. Twitter seems to be where the people are(and therefore, the money). Fliggo was catering for a need that appears to have vanished with alarming speed.

It’s one of the principle risks of using many web2.0 tools that there is no guarantee that it will be there when you want it. Many services are still in beta. Some may never come out of beta and slowly die a death as the venture capital funding runs out or you’ll find that features that were once free are now charged for.

I talked about this previously and Fliggo is a case in point. The way we as educators use web-based technology needs to take this fragility into account and we have to be more agile and flexible than some people have been used to.

RIP Fliggo (no flowers, please)

Image - Mr Ush on Flickr

I’m not going to BETT this year. My work is already funding my MSc so a I don’t feel I can ask Keith to fund a trip to Olympia, especialy given I have no pressing need to go.

I’m a little sorry as it’s only in the last year that I’ve started to follow the ed-tech community through Twitter and there seems to be a lot more interesting stuff round the fringes. Follow the #BETT2010 tag to explore some more.

I’ve rashly suggested that people could play a Twitter version of Tag while they are at Olympia but didn’t think what the rules could be.

Here’s my suggestion…

• It’s Tag in reverse. The idea is that players actively try to get caught as an excuse to meet other Twitter users in the education technology network.
• I’ve suggested that @dughall is it but as BETT happens over a number of days the first person that day to get to stand D10 (next to the Grand Entrance)and announces it on Twitter using the #tagbett hashtag. People who are “IT” have to tweet where they are every time they change location (stand, seminar, event, cafe etc) or every 10 mins or so until “found”.
• People following #tagbett then have to get to get to the location and find “IT”. When “IT” changes person both people have to confirm that they are now (or are no longer) IT.

Is that too massively complicated? Please comment and I’ll refine the rules…

CC Image - /Joe on Flickr

I have to be careful not to get too excited when a gizmo lands on the desk for us to evaluate at Sheffield East CLC. Having said that I was really looking forward to getting my hands on the iPod touch after hearing so much from other schools and CLC’s about using them.

I’ve had a few weeks to play with one now, although we haven’t used them with students yet, so I thought I’d capture my initial thoughts as an aide memoire for later. As with most things my opinion is likely to change but at least having this as something to refer back to might be useful.

What the iPod does is documented much better elsewhere so I’m not going to discuss that.My main point is a question, really, based on a conversation I’ve had with my boss. It’s this…

To what extent does the iPod Touch actually contribute to pedagogical change?

I start from the assumption that mobile learning is about transforming how learning happens as well as when and where.

The iPod is a great device for delivering content which is what it was designed for. It’s fun and a breeze to use for listening to podcasts, watching videos, looking at websites etc. It gets a lot harder when you try to actually create stuff and contribute.

Text input is fine for short spells but that gives quite a narrow field of ways of getting students to contribute to their own learning. If you want students to capture audio you’ll need to invest in earphones with built-in mic (which can cost up to £20). There are some nice audio apps (AudioBoo being one) but transferring sound out for use elsewhere can be a pain.

The lack of camera for stills and video is a big miss and would open up the door to myriad possibilities for developing visual literacy.

Also, a browse through the apps store for education titles is pretty uninspiring (although there are exceptions – I hope to do another blog post about some of my faves in the near future). Most are about drill-and-practice skill honing or showing information (sometimes in quite engaging and attractive ways, mind).

I don’t buy the idea that by giving a student a mobile device so they can access delivered content anytime and anywhere makes it a learner-centred experience. You need to maximise opportunities for  the learner to record and reflect on their own experiences and the iPod isn’t quite there yet although it’s a step in the right direction.

They key thing, though is that the device on it’s own isn’t going to be transformative other than perhaps adding novelty or increasing engagement. The learning culture around the device needs to find ways of using its capabilities to allow the learner to create and reflect more easily.

I’m not down on the iPod. I love it as a device. I just think that anyone investigating it as a learning tool should think as much about the environment the iPod will be used in as much as what the machine can do.

What are your thoughts on the iPod? Put me straight if you disagree…

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

Both clocks are really easy to use – and of course, free

Created using Flash – the vector graphics mean they look as good on a whiteboard as they do on your monitor – with no pixelization.

So there you go. Any comments or ideas, either post here or over at online-stopwatch.com

Thanks for reading!

…We Now Return You to Your Regular Electric Chalk Broadcasting…