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After months of planning the organisation I work for is changing its name! From today we will be known as CORE Education This change of name is part of an overall strategy to create a uniquely NZ identity for the organsiation. More can be found about this on the CORE Education website over the next few days.
I'm hooked! I came across the link to Academici a couple of days ago, and went in to have a look. I soon registered an account and went exploring the site - wow!
Academici - "The Vitural Academy" - offers you the chance of extending networks and tapping into the know-how of your peers in and across disciplines, it offers a wide variety of academic services and acts as a key resource base for academic and academic-related work. The virtual academy is aimed specifically at the academic world . The key characteristics of academici are:
- global peer to peer network
- very precise search engine
- sophisticated yet simple to use communication platform
- professional contact management system
- content-driven fora run by experts
- academic -related services on one platform
- secure data protection, no advertising, no direct sales, no spam
The day I became a member I logged on - there was a list of the 5 most recent new members, and to my surprise, 4 of them were from New Zealand! Looks like I'm not the only one from Godzone who has seen this.
What impresses me is the interface - intuitive, and easy to use - provides each member with a personal web page, lots of tools to make managing your participation in the site really straightforward, and a well thought out process of establishing and maintaining forums and interest groups. Within a day of joining I received an invitation to join one of the current discussions - all very personalised.
If you're working in an academic environment, or if you're interested in online community architecture, this is definitely worth a look around.
Thanks to my friend Lisa Galarneau for sending me this link to the Eide Neurolearning Blog that is maintained by husband and wife team of Drs Fernette and Brock Eide who specialise in working with children with learning disabilities. Their latest blog entry is titled Designing schools for the present age: Thoughts on a recent editorial by Bill Gates , and provides a response to the recent Gates editorial that I blogged about on March 2
The Eides focus on the notion of "diversity" among learners to put their support behind what Gates is suggesting, and use their expereience in working with learning difficulties to support their stance. To quote:
I came across a post titled Dealing with a legacy school system by Kathy Sierra on the Passionate Blog which appealed to my interest in this topic.
Subtitled "Someone forgot to tell schools it's the 21st Century", the article references Gates' recent speech that (I blogged about a few weeks ago), and works by Senge, Shank and Perelman - the latter from a book he published over ten years ago and is now a bit of a classic on the subject.
The author's main concern is around how the tradional way schools continue to be organised "...violates pretty much everything we know about how learning actually happens." She argues (with Perelman) that we need a revoultion not evolution The article also points out that the very things that schools are being criticised for are adopted widely within business as well.
It's always easy to poke holes in what's happening, and look at what's not working - this article pretty well lays out the problems, but also begins to create a framework for the way forward. To me the interesting thing was to read through the comments that have been posted by others, which tend to reveal the range of opinions that exist!
This blog is worth putting on your BlogRoll for future reference.
Have had a chance to play with JOT since I wrote yesterday - am very impressed. The range of applications that you can install as part of the package particularly impresses me.
I've set up my own wiki which you cann access at http://wenmothwiki.jot.com/WikiHome . I've set it up for guest access and for guests to be able to add pages.
I've also added a sample poll and RSS aggregator which you can access from the links in the right hand menu.
Stephen Downes referred to JotSpot - an applicaiton Wiki in one of his recent newsletters, so I thought I'd check it out.
JotSpot is an online Wiki application that is currently in Beta format. It is easy to sign up for access to the Beta version, and proceed with creating your own online Wiki. I've requested an account, but haven't had time to set one up yet - at least, not to the extent that I can make it available here.
There's a great online editing funtionality - with SOAP and RSS features listed as things that will be included in the future versions.
There's a very good explanation of the product available in the TOUR you can take from the main page. Stephen pointed to Lawrence Lessig's communal rewriting of Codebook as an example of what can be done with this product. Worth a look!
I have a real fascination with research that attempts to build a picture of the way in which young people interact with the digital media, and the way this interaction affects their lives. I guess this comes through having five children who span three decades, and observing the differences in each of their perceptions and expectations of the media. By carefully observing these differences and monitoring such trends and developments we, as educators, will be better informed to design a curriculum that engage them and meets their needs, and learning environments that are conduicive to making this happen.
Thus I was interested to read Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds - a report from the Kaiser Foundation. (NB the full PDF download is 3.3MB - but you can download sections only from this link also)
The study examined media use among a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 3rd through 12th graders who completed detailed questionnaires, including nearly 700 self-selected participants who also maintained seven-day media diaries.
There's a pretty good summary of the report available on the eSchool News site which is how I first came across it.
I am currently preparing for a meeting later in the week about LMS systems, hosted by the Ministry of Education. The meeting is part of a project aimed at establishing a set of criteria that schools might use for selecting a LMS to use.
These sorts of discussions I find pretty riveting on the whole, but I've had a nagging feeling about the purpose and direction that we're going here - and today many of those thoughts were chrystalised when I read Double Duh! as an entry on the Cognitive Dissonance blog. In a nutshell the author captured my anxiety:
Like me, the author of this entry had been reading through the Educause publication Educating the Net Generation.. When I first came across this online publication it attracted my attention because of the link in my mind to the work of Tapscott some years ago now where he used the term "Net Generation", writing about the characteristics of this generation and identifying the areas that educators would need to address in order to engage them in learning - although not all agree with these conclusions.
Still - I find it all very helpful as background - to paint a picture of where we're at and where we're headed. Some informed debate and controversy are what is required if we are going to successfully move beyond where we simply do a lot of the old things in new ways (or is that new things in old ways???)
Seems to me that one of the biggest challenges we face in the school reform area is redefining our curriculum, and the pedagogies associated with it. Over the years I've worked with Julia Atkin whose work on "reconceptualising the curriculum" has informed change in many schools I know of, and is currently being used to inform the development of the NZ curriculum review.
Last December, George Seimens published an article titled "Connectivism, a learning theory for the digital age" which I found really interesting. George claims that existing theories of learning, such as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism were all developed at a time when learning was not impacted on by technology in the way it is today. He presents an alternative theory of learning, based on an hypothesis that in the digital age we derive our competence from making connections.
George has just established a connectivism website devoted to this topic, and also a connectivism blog for socialising these ideas within the educational community. I found the powerpoint presentation he has made available really useful also for providing a summary of what connectivism is all about, or, alternatively, you can listen to George talk about this on an audio file.
My two eldest daughters have recently finished their secondary schooling - and I have a third currently entering her first year of NCEA. The eldest two went through the system making the most of the cultural and social opportunities school offered, and were inspired by some of their teachers in certain areas. However, both struggled to come to grips with a system that was simply irrelevant to them in so may areas of their interests and lives - and both exited school with only mediocre success in terms of academic achievement.
Why am I writing this? Because today, in an article titled Gates, Governors: Upgrade High Schools, some reinforcemnet from my view from an unlikely ally - Bill Gates.
During the National Education Summit on High Schools, 2005 , Gates implored governors and policy to redesign America's high schools to meet the challenges of the new century. The article contains lots of interesting reading, that has many parallels with what we're doing here in NZ in response to similar concerns. Gates identifies three key action areas as a focus:
In thinking about these initiatives it is evident that we in NZ are certainly thinking along the lines that Gates and others are promoting to their US counterparts - my only concern is time. I have three more children coming up through the school system, and would prefer that their experience at secondary school lives up to these ideals, and that we're not still talking about it.
NB - for another link to the Gates story:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=534406
And for an action plan to organise their efforts:
http://www.2005summit.org/en_US/pdf/actionagenda.pdf
