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?

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.

What an amazing site.

500 exhibitors with 50 new ones this year. It takes a day to walk and talk with even just a fraction of the exhibitors whose product is of interest.

The Conference Centre is vast here are some stats for NECC 2009 (courtesy ISTE Daily Leader).

• 10 000 particpants from 60 countries across the world.
• 62 New Zealanders are here and they have the largest contingent of International visitors.
• 6 000 danishes were served in one hour at the continental breakfast.
• 5 300 unique users are on the wireless network at any one time.
• 90 mb of bandwith is being used consistently.
• 102 wireless internet access points.
• 31 buses are running every hour between 6.30 am and 7.45 pm.
• 1 cat inhabits the exhibit hall.

 Craig Bellamy

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!!

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?

The concept of connective writing is not about the act of publishing it is what happens before and after publication.

Reading and writing now, are not what they were.

They were:

• Reading to inform, teach and indoctrinate.
• Writing was for the few, the elite of the literatii.

Now  they are skills used by all. They are vital elements for

• Personalisation and establishing relationships based on trust and with respect between readers/writers as the basis for interaction across the web.
• Self sponsored learning and we need to help our students to get to this stage.

What will be the life span of the printed page word?  It is in doubt because the printed word is not as easily accessible when compared to the fast flexibility that is provided in the www environment.

Writing is ubiquitous . . . it doesn’t have to be DONE at a particular time in a particular context.

It happens any where any time when the mood strikes, the link or the connection is made.

Connective writing stems from what we read because ideas for writing have beginnings in what people have read. Others’ thoughts and ideas are reflected upon and writing is then produced.

Sceptics question the quality and preciseness of the information. The audience requires quality and preciseness and they will ensure ideas are fine tuned and written in a knowledgeable way as knowledge is no longer the domain of the few. It is outside of us all. It exists in the world in the space of the www.

Writers on the web synthesise their ideas and link them to sources and context. Writing has to be linked. It cannot occur in isolation. It has little meaning if isolated, unlinked and unread.

What does linked writing look like? Look at Borderland.

Publishing is a cyclical process? It is not only writing it is reading. Is the way we read being changed by  our www experiences? Teachers who know their students and observe the way they work in a classroom can tell you reading for the students of today is a different more complex skill than it was even 20 year ago. The NCTE has endeavoured to address this with their recent NCTE Definition of 21st century literacies.

Do online readers use the same reading strategies as a paper reader?

Is literacy more dependant on images than words?

Is reading as we have been taught and tested still relevant?

What strategies are there to teach reading in an online world?

How do we use web 2.0 and blend it with the best of pedagogy to ensure our students learning needs are met?

Speak Up 2008 available 24 March

We are becoming Nodes around interest groups on line.

Children are learners and teachers.

Lines are blurrring between who is the teacher and who is the learner.

According to context the role of learner is fluid.

Back in the classroom again but this time it is a luxury … an aid to set up the Macbooks and working alongside Kim.

We have a presentation to get together before Friday… with a new class.

Having the class for the first 45 mins of the day I couldn’t resist doing a bit of research. It was a fascinating exercise and the students were wonderful.

They were prepared to explore with me what it means to be students in the 21st Century and then either singly or in groups record their thoughts.

The thing that I found most interesting is that it is not only we the educators who need to make a huge paradigm shift to become 21st Century learners so do they.

How can students conceptualise what 21st Learning might look like if they only have 19th and 20th century models to refer to?

What views do they hear from home in the media? 

It was then that the questioning needed to take a different tack. We then explored what they considered to be the most important aspects of their schooling.

They feel they can communicate and collaborate really well. We talked about man going to the moon and especially about the Apollo 13 mission where creative problem solving saved the crews life.

Some suggested it is necessary to take risks and try doing things in different ways. Tony and Deon pointed out that if you do the same thing all the time nothing changes, nothing is exctiing. Doing things differently is exciting and interesting.

The boy, on the whole, were more animated and more engaged by the notion of risk taking, stepping outside the box, being creative and using technology to support the creativity.

Let’s face it  . . . for most of us it is a struggle.

At the beginning of the week Kim was lamenting being a techno moron. Deon and I were chatting when I was helping set up Macs in Kim’s room he disclosed to me that he had a Mac at home and “I know how to do heaps with Macs miss I can help”.

Kim learned stuff from the conference she went to yesterday, Today the Macs are humming along in her room. She learned stuff but Deon has been an instrumental part of her success.

Before you leave check out the Mouse Website . . .