Blogging on blogging.

I never thought I would keep a blog. I kind of thought blogs were for pretentious people who like to talk about themselves a lot and write uninformed opinions about politics. I was absolutely correct of course and I have now become one of those people. I must say, however, although it has been a drag at times having to write something for my massive following of four every week, I have for the most part enjoyed it. It took me a while to find my 'voice' as this is a new mode of communication for me and I'm the type of person who generally likes to keep his opinions to himself. I have played around with trying to be humorous and then taking a more serious approach focussing on the readings. Through trial and error I seem to have arrived now at a kind of middle ground that feels quite comfortable and natural and I can actually see myself continuing this blog in some form or another in the future.

I have used this blog mainly for reflection. My focus has been both on social issues concerning digital technology and also the ways it might be used in teaching. On the whole, I think it has been beneficial to me. I think the main benefit is it just that it gets me to articulate my thoughts on the content. This helps clarify my thinking and forces me to reflect to a much greater degree than simply doing the readings and turning up to class. While my page doesn't get a whole lot of traffic, at times people's comments have got me to reconsider my views or at least make me think about things more deeply. I have found it a little difficult to comment on other people's blogs – it almost feels a bit rude – but I have enjoyed reading others' blogs and have learnt a great deal from other people's insights. What a smart bunch you are!

Playing around with embedding videos, hyperlinks, making little movies and so on has really opened up a whole new world to me. Although I have expressed some reservations about the social ramifications of digital technology, I am genuinely enthused about getting out into the classroom and trying to incorporate some of this technology in my teaching practice. I'd never really considered using digital technology in the class beyond producing word docs, power points etc but that has certainly changed.

As far as embedding links to educational resources etc. as you might have noticed, I haven't done so. Part of this is due to the fact I only have a mobile internet connection which is pretty slow and makes jumping around on the web pretty frustrating. Also, finding the time with work commitments and so on has been difficult. Maybe over the coming months as I prepare for my prac I may put some links here.

Well that's enough I think. Thanks to everyone who has commented on my blog over the last couple of months. Hopefully we can all catch up soon for a drink or two in the very near future.

The future..

It's time for me to come clean. I'm a technophobe. There, I've said it. Not to say I don't buy and use new technology..I have an mp3 player and a pretentious little imac sitting on my desk amongst all the other toys. However, I'm a little bit worried about where its all heading. Sure we can do things we never dreamed of before. We have access to more information, we have more choices and so on. Are we any happier though? When ever I step out my front door I always seem to encounter a whole lot of stressed out and rude maniacs. I'm really not sure that all this “connectivity” is making us more connected. To me we just seem to be in our little bubbles, communicating with lots of people in really superficial ways. If I were to make any predictions about the future I would say there will be a big anti-digital movement in the not so near future as people become sick of the dehumanising effects of modern technology. Wishful thinking perhaps.

But maybe I'm being too pessimistic about our digital future. I think I'm a little grumpy from all the assignment writing. While digital overload seems to be a problem for people and super heroes alike, the advent of Web 3.0 may mean we are no longer bombarded with irrelevant crap as the web gets smart and gets to know our preferences. While the lack of privacy surely has some downsides, the idea of being able to find out about the interests of strangers on the street with our mobile devices could actually help bring us together.

As a future teacher, it is impossible to deny the educational possibilities of developments such as mobile learning and virtual worlds. In particular, I think virtual worlds offer some real promise. The fact that these environments are immersive and interactive means that it will be possible for students to get what is very close to 'hands on' experience in situations that would have been impossible or very difficult to create in the traditional classroom.

Superheroes and continuous partial attention

I had quite a bit of fun making this thing. You are a little constrained by the scenes, the fact there can be only two characters, not being able to move things around and so on but in a way that was a good thing for me. I don't consider myself particularly creative so the fact there were those constraints scaffolded the writing side of things a bit. I must say, though, the software is pretty clunky so it's quite time consuming but I'm sure it'll get faster and easier to use as they continue to develop it.

Pay attention damn it!

Have you ever been out to dinner with someone you haven't seen in ages and they spend half the evening playing around with their iphone? Annoying isn't it? I mean, am I really that uninteresting? Well...maybe, but that's not the point. The point is, its really rude and annoying and seems to be becoming more commonplace. If you were to believe Maggie Jackson, you might think that this is a sign of our society drifting in to a new dark age. She argues that sustained attention is the basis for important mental processes such as critical thinking, deep learning, reasoned civil discourse - without which society as we know it crumbles. What she hasn't counted on, however, is the teaching awesomeness that is UWA M. Teach class of 2010. That's right friends, its up to you and me to save society from itself and here's how: Internet filtering.

What is internet filtering I hear you ask. Well I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with these RSS and folksonomies thingies we talked about in class. The idea of a folksonomy really appeals to me - I have recently set up a Delicious account and started tagging the hell out of the internet. Being a relatively messy and indecisive guy, I love the fact that it is quite unstructured, flexible and also a really quick way of organising information. One of the biggest problems with the internet for me is the fact that I end up jumping around all over the place, being bombarded with images, hyperlinks, ads, various font styles etc. with my brain being turned into a scrambled mess. Folksonomies, I think, might help get around this by keeping track of the useful bits. The other promising thing about Folksonomies is the social sharing aspect. Now I can ride the coat tails of my smarter and more diligent peers and colleagues as I poach their tag clouds for useful educational titbits.

I'm sure I'm not saying anything original when I say that folksonomies are consistent with social constructivist pedagogies. They could provide great opportunities for collaborative research activities in which students negotiate ways to organise information. As was mentioned in class, they could also generate reasoned discussion around key words. This illustrates the link between emerging and traditional literacies with successful use of folksonomies requiring some of the skills have traditionally been taught around printed text.

RSS feeds have been touted as another way of filtering the internet. This is debatable. Without really judicious and selective choosing of feeds you want sent to your page, there is still the danger of information overload. Personally I prefer the method of just turning the bloody thing off. I think one of the main benefits is the potential to save a bit of time jumping around from site to site. In terms of education, however, I can see some potental uses. For S&E or Literature lessons based around what's in the newspaper, I like the idea of being able to set up feeds that only take articles from sites I think are appropriate for developing minds.

Digital Age and Democracy

Obama is concerned that information overload is distracting from intelligent discussion of the issues.

Digital Safety

To know that every move you make on the internet is pretty scary. Not for me since I never visit any dodgy websites or make stupid posts on Facebook after a big night out.. but I'm sure for most normal people this could be a bit of a concern. What's even more concerning to me is that all this knowledge is contained in the hands of a small number of large corporations. I mean when did we think that would be a good idea, lets let that happen? Everyone's information in the hands of a small number of computer geeks is not a good idea people. Google is watching you! Sorry Google if you are watching this - I take back that last comment. Monopolisation of information and your impending world domination is totally cool!
But really, what's the big deal? As long as you behave yourself, be careful and profess your undying love for Google you shouldn't have too much to worry about. Given that some of our students will be involved in some form of online networking from as soon as they enter school, I think it is important that we are educating them on web safety and the public nature of it from early on. Just as children will be developing their social skills and behaviours in the playground they will also be developing online skills and behaviours that we will need to nurture.

Teaching Information Literacy

With the rise of the internet as the main source of information for research, it is important that we foster students skills and understandings around information literacy. As Bettina Fabos points out, this includes the critical literacies that have been taught around traditional print media, such as making informed judgments concerning authorship, audiences, currency and so forth. If anything, these skills become even more important given the vast variability in quality of information online and the apparent ease of access through search engines. Information literacy also involves negotiating the inherent bias of search engines and the commercial nature of the internet. For example, Google's algorithms which are based on the number of links to a site means that the sites which top the search lists are the most popular, but not necessarily the most relevant. Typically many of the sites which top search lists are of a commercial nature and, therefore, the information contained in them is imbued with the values of the dominant ideology. Part of developing critical literacy will therefore involve understanding the commercial nature of the web.

Fabos suggests that in order to develop these information literacies, as educators we should move away from fact based assignments to ones which work with opinions. This, she believes, involves understanding the basis of ideas presented in terms of where they might sit on an ideological continuum. In principal, I agree with this - particularly at secondary and university levels. However, it raised some questions, particularly in a primary school context. Conservative commentators regularly criticise the shift in emphasis in education away from teaching facts to what they label post-modern or culturally relativist approaches which deny the existence of objective truth. I think these criticisms are overstated, but they are worth considering. I wonder that if at the primary school level, students are at a developmental stage whereby they can negotiate the sophisticated notions of truth and objectivity that Fabos' approach would seem to require. I think if we place too much emphasis on critical analysis of information and negotiation of truth there is a real danger of confusing children. Also, as was mentioned in today's tutorial, there is a need to provide students with a level of baseline knowledge in order to be able to assess the reliability of information they encounter. Ultimately this will require some passive acceptance by the students that what the teacher is saying, or the text that the teacher has selected is basically true or accurate. In the end, I guess, it is a question of balance.

I think one area where we can improve information literacy is by teaching students different methods for searching for information online. Having has a bit of play with a few different search engines today, I noticed that I got quite different results from different engines - and, therefore, it has opened up more of the web to me since I have relied almost entirely on Google up until now. Like with most things we teach, I'd imagine there is a developmental continuum with online searching. I would guess that search engines like Google which can be used to do simple key word searches would probably need to be understood before moving on to more sophisticated sites which allow a greater level of control. In the end, though, I think the more exposure children have to these the better.

Microblogging and Education

According to Graine Creole, you don't really understand the power of Web 2.0 tools until engage with them. Having not engaged with Twitter or any form of microblogging at all, I am probably not qualified to discuss them. But here goes.

As with all Web 2.0 tools, microblogging could be utilised to encourage collaboration and social learning. As far as I can tell, the most important differences between micro-blogging and other Web 2.0 forms is that it is brief (although quite long compared to nano-blogging ) and, therefore, possibly more suited to being used with smart phones, or iphones, or whatever the kids are calling them these days. Unlike say a blog or discussion board where you might wait for hours or days for a response, microblogging guarantees almost instant feedback from one's peers, or at least those peers who's parents can afford to buy them fancy phones. It, therefore, may allow for a greater intensity of social interaction than say blogs. On the surface, this would seem to have some advantages for education. In, particular, I'd imagine microblogging would be quite useful and time effective way of collaborating on written work – it could be a powerful tool for bouncing ideas of others – and may be beneficial for those less confident with their writing.

As a 'digital immigrant' however, I am a little sceptical of some of the utopian visions for microblogging in education that I have come across on the Web. Given the greater scope for social interaction, there is inevitably more scope for misuse. I'd imagine that as a teacher, it would be difficult to keep track of everyone's tweets – and, therefore, cyber-bullying and off task tweeting may become a problem. Also, while as teachers we should be looking at ways to encourage meaningful collaboration, I get the impression that with the prevalence of social networking on the Web, children are finding it more difficult to form their own unique identities. (Go to your local shopping mall and you'll see what I mean). We should also be encouraging students to think for themselves and not feel the need to be validated by their peers every 10 seconds.

Forget Twitter. Lets get ready for Flutter.

Wikis and wikipedia

Wikipedia - like any other lazy student I love it. The idea of pooling the knowledge of millions of people to continually build a collective understanding of a particular topic or question is an incredible one. No doubt there is a variety of quality that comes from the amount of participation and the quality of the discussions taking place. It seems quite often that the more obscure the topic, the more questionable the reliability.
These are some of my observations of Wikipedia - make of them what you will:
They tend to be a bit of a "balanced" overview. Areas of controversy often seem to be given roughly equal space, often when they don't need to be. They also tend to read like a composite of ideas (as of course they are) rather than pursue a single idea through a document, which make them a tough read for me. Maybe there are wikis that follow more of a pursuasive structure but I haven't come across any in my fairly limited exploring.
While not that new in internet terms, in real world terms Wikipedeia is pretty new. I feel like in some respects our culture hasn't really caught up yet - we're not sure how much faith to put in them. Teachers sometimes treat them with suspicion and tell their students not to use them - I doubt this helps our students develop critical literacy around these potentially rich sources of information. I wonder if many teachers have necessarily had the time to develop these literacies for themselves. I'm not sure I have.
As far as teaching goes, I think these provide amazing opportunities for collaborative learning. I'd imagine a good way to go would be to have small groups working each on a particular aspect of a larger topic - kind of like a "jigsaw" lesson. Students become experts in a particular aspect and collaborate with the other "experts" to shape their part of the larger document. I think a looser, more anything goes, approaches could work for more experienced students given a longer timeframe. The potential to collaborate between schools, or countries, opens up doors for cross-cultural learning and understanding, which is very exciting.

Welcome people of the internet to my humble blog.

Social constructivism:

Educators think it's the shiz. Some parents don't get it. Here's what I think.

We want students to learn to think for themselves rather that repeat a list of facts in parrot fashion. That's apparently what social constructivism is all about. Kids building richer understandings though testing and refining their ideas in a social setting. Hell yeah!

For those, however, not blessed with my awesome class management skills: you may find this tricky. Keeping kids engaged enough to stay on task during collaborative exercises is difficult. Kids like to chat about other stuff. They sometimes like to hit one another. Also, social/inquiry learning type tasks are probably going to require a lot of time and planning, and Deal or No Deal starts at 5.30pm.

Blogs seem like a good way to dip the toes in the world of social constructivism. Much like discussion boards, students can engage in conversations which involve some reflective thought.There is an incentive to stay on task because Mr Gardin is watching. The fact that it is written and has some permanency I think lends itself well into incorporating assessment into collaborative learning too. The blog could work something like a portfolio in demonstrating growth and learning. Blogs also have the whizz bangness that kids so love these days. I'm new to the world of blogs so I'll leave it at that. But yeah, I'm down with blogs and learning.