Collaborative Technologies

Collaborative software, software designed to help people involved in a common task, achieve their goals – Wikipedia accessed 2/12/2007. Quite a logical and simple definition of something that has become rather a revolution in today’s society. The attraction of the digital lifestyle has been made all the more popular by collaborative technologies especially in the digital native category. It would be a missed opportunity to dismiss such activities as irrelevant to teaching and learning, as I have said before, we as educators need to seize the potential of such tools to support and enhance our education system. We have begun to utilise these collaborative technologies in universities particularly by the use of VLEs to deliver and track content, to collect and share resources and generally bring it all together in an integrated environment.
So this week I am exploring the use of the collaborative wiki with my first year Educational Studies group. I hope to get them motivated in to using a wiki as a forum for their shared experiences.
I was impressed by an article I read in the Guardian last week about the development of Curriki. Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. The article impressed that the Internet has proved to the great world equalizer, providing opportunities to collaborate on the development and delivery of intellectual assets on a global scale. Sounds a wonderful idea, and it is an inspiring concept worth checking out to see if you have anything worth adding to it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o - if you have a few minutes, watch this video, let me know what you think.

A time for reflection

I recently asked my 1st year students, particularly those that had taken an advanced level course in ICT or Computing, what they felt about their courses. Some said that although they enjoyed the course, they didn't feel that they had covered many relevant topics. I asked in what way relevant, they replied relevant to life! All agreed that the courses were lacking in creativity and did not cover the wide range of material that they thought would be most useful to them in the workplace. So what is missing and how do we fill this gap?

We are really educating and preparing our children for a life and a work place we can only imagine. Although we can say that for each new generation, the vast changes in technology over that last five years is almost immeasurable and makes it hard to visualise the next stage. That took me back to a project outline I read from ESRC seminar I attended in June. The project, developed by the London Knowledge Lab, is Learning from Online Worlds; Teaching in Second Life. The aim of the project is to develop theoretical accounts of learning in immersive social spaces and, based on these findings, to develop and test practical recommendations for teaching. They are focusing on how people learn in online social worlds, how to teach in these online social worlds, and also how cultural contexts impact on learning and teaching.

At the time, I had not even heard of Second Life, not that I have explored it personally even now. I do know however, Second Life is an Internet based virtual world, where, as an inhabitant you can create, explore, socialise and participate in individual and group activities, you can create and trade items and services with one another, indeed generate yourself a whole ‘Second Life’. Rather like a more social version of the computer game Sims that children have been playing for the last seven years or so.

I guess there is little argument that learning takes place in these virtual worlds, but the question is what is being learned and should we capitalise on it? And if so, how?

Being reflective

I have now begun to encourage my students to use their blogs as a reflective journal. I say it like this, as some are reluctant to begin a truly reflective journal. To quote one student, 'I don't want to tell everyone what I am doing, can't I just be nice?' I can understand what she is getting at in a way, it is one thing writing a journal in diary, or as part of an assignment, but quite another to post your thoughts for, potentially, anyone to read. It is a new concept to apply the fun activities and skills explored on a 'MySpace' account, to develop a critical, analytical writing space for all to see and comment on. Not only are we expecting our students to become reflective practitioners we are hoping that they will be happy to share those reflective thoughts with their peers. Now I am having doubts about the project, time will tell. As I peruse their blogs I should be able to ascertain the level of authenticity and true reflection taking place. If nothing else though, their blogs are still a place that they can express themselves, it might be better if they are allowed to restrict the level of access by the wider world? Who said The Reflective Practitioner is the Effective Practitioner? Do you think he was a blogger?

I like a quote from the link in the last blog by Future Lab discussing the school from 2020 - 'Pupils will be able to look back at lessons at any time via special glasses, which will record their whole lives, creating a reliable "virtual memory".'- puts a new angle on being reflective and will save some pain at exam times too.

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-schon.htm - donald schon (schön): learning, reflection and change

What will education be like 5 years from now?

This was a question I was asked today at the photocopier. A great question though isn't it? I was at the EPICT Future Trends in Elearning Conference in September where we discussed just that. A keynote speaker, Thomas McCusker, Elearning Manager, Get Learning, Clydebank College, talked about education establishments, saying 'half of what students learn, will be outdated by the time they leave'. He talked about the Generation x, which he described as those born between 1982-2002, the digital natives I would say, he quoted some interesting statistics I think he said they were from http://www.didyouknow.cd/index.html, but it could be from http://www.didyouknow.com - which is under construction. The first link is a bit of fun though, and worth a view. Anyway here are the stats;
Generation x will-
Spend 10,000 hours playing video games
Send 200,000 emails
Watch 20,000 hours TV
Spend 10,000 hours on the Mobile phone
and Under 5,000 hours reading books - although they must do lots of other reading don't you think to manage all the other activities successfully?

http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2394579

Quite a nice read along the same lines and does make you think about the way education is going.

Talk soon

Future Lab

Just catching up on my emails today, some days it takes a little longer than others to get to the bottom of the pile as it were. There are some very interesting emails from ITTE that are asking some deeply forward thinking questions. I felt the need to place this link in my blog just in case there are readers out there that haven't checked it out as yet.

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/beyond_current_horizons

There were other little gems too, one comment that consoled me was from Tony Fisher he said "...one person's 'last year' is another's 'in a couple of years' time', and another's 'maybe later, if at all'. We may have the tools to disseminate information quickly and widely, but that doesn't mean that rapid system change is an automatic consequence." After all the fraught research over the last few months into the place of Web 2 Technologies in education I feel somewhat refreshed!

Is the light coming on?

At the start of the new term I felt the usual self-doubt that I know that lots of my colleagues feel. This time it was a little worse as we were starting a brand new degree. As the weeks unfold we are all still darting around not daring to pause for breath sometimes in case we start to think about what we are doing, as questioning it too much might cause even more doubt! But we keep going, each day learning new things about ourselves and our students. Some days it all feels right, like today, other days, you wonder why you bothered to even get up! But then you discover that something you said was remembered, repeated or simply enjoyed, and you know that you are on the right tracks. To all those out there in ITTE, the first term is always the worst, remember...we say it every year! And anyway it will soon be Christmas!

Reviving old material

ICT is quite a difficult subject to plan for in ITT as each year the students arrive with a greater knowledge and better skills than the last, in general that is, each year I have had some students that have tested my skills obviously. But each year it does get harder to keep the content enjoyable for the students as they use these tools daily just for fun. I find myself struggling to keep up. Hence the blogging! Today I approached Graphical Modelling with my students, formally I would have had to develop their own skills, whilst teaching them how children will learn and develop their IT capability. Today though they just experimented with the world of Microsoft Publisher creating ebooks, with hyperlinks and animations, giving a dimension that non of them had explored before. All the while discussing, the possibilities in the classroom, and developing their creative side. Well if nothing else we all enjoyed it and so they said learned lots of new skills and ideas...sometimes that is all you can ask for, also it kept them away from PowerPoint for a while.

The first round

Well that was the first round over. I took advice from Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. He suggested that I gave my students a topic to research first, which I decided would be something fun, so I gave the girls makeup and the boys cars. Quite sexist I know, but I thought it would be a good focus and would cause some discussion. Lots of the students stayed safe and looked at how the topic affected them, whether it was the fact that they didn’t use the product or whether they couldn’t live without it. Some students took a different approach as they researched their topic, they were guided by what they were reading, which was the whole point and showed that they were actually reading! We all created new blog sites successfully and with a variety of creativity, I am please to say. There are some little quirks with Blogger that I didn’t understand, such as when you choose a template, it does not always use a suitable font colour for the page background. For example, if you have a black background, a white font would be most suitable, you have to change the font colour yourself, which means that you can’t actually see the text on the editor page! (Obviously we just changed the font colour at the last minute.) The students seemed to enjoy the session, each was asked to comment on someone else’s blog, some comments were more appropriate than others, but this was just a test run. I hope to get the journal blogs going very soon though...I’ll keep you posted.

In the beginning!

In the beginning I began my working life as a computer operator in an American bank. It was a fabulous start for me and one that was to start me off in the world of technology. Little did I know the strange path I would eventually find though. To start with the job was mainly operating very large, slow by today's comparison, main frame computers, that had the capacity to process what we now expect from something in our pockets. So, I guess I could be almost a digital native as I was only 18 when it all began...or am I kidding myself? Well if nothing else I became what we term computer literate, which was great because at the age of eight I could not read and my mother thought I was illiterate, so at least there was some progress. Well in terms of IT, progress is a major influence and now as an ICT lecturer in Swansea Institute, this word progress is something I take quite seriously.

Take a look at the link if you want so see a little bit about my work and Swansea Institute
http://www.sihe.ac.uk/education/staff/peacem.html

I am intending to get my 1st year students to start a Blog journal this term, my hope is that they will continue to blog throughout their time here at Swansea Institute. I will keep you posted and hopefully put their links here too. So watch this space!