Derek's Blog

Here's an interesting piece of research that we should be taking notice of as we (in NZ) are reviewing our ICT/eLearning strategy for schools.

"A new study indicates that computer usage by U.S. schoolteachers is
rising, though technology is more frequently used for administrative
purposes than for teaching. The study, conducted by Scholastic
subsidiary Quality Education Data, found that 70 percent of teachers
communicate with parents using e-mail and that a majority use computers
for tasks such as attendance, according to CDW Government. Just 54
percent said they have incorporated technology into their teaching, and
more of those who use technology in teaching are at the elementary
level than in middle or high schools. Teaching with technology appears
to be correlated with training: 85 percent of respondents said they
have received training in applications such as the Internet, word
processing, and e-mail, while 27 percent said they have had little or
no instruction in how to include computers in their teaching."

While technology continues to gain acceptance as a tool for teachers, classroom technology is not yet a standard tool for teaching:

• Computer technology has changed teaching "a great deal."
  
• Teachers increasingly cite computers as effective teaching tools, but just over half integrate computers into daily curriculum.
  
• Administrative uses for technology continue to increase in number and effectiveness.
  
• The link between computers and performance on standardized tests remains unproven.
  
• Professional development centers on administrative functions.
  
• Almost two-thirds of the respondents think that there are too few computers in their classrooms.
  
• No increase in technology professional development for 2005.
  
• Teachers perceive strong support for technology in schools.
  
• Schools are leveraging student expertise in formal and informal technician programs.
  
• Over half of teachers support 1:1 computing.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Whether you're new to teaching and learning online, studying online - or have been teaching online for some time, the recently released e-book titled
A Distance Education Reader: Insights for Teachers and Students by Brent Muirhead will be a useful read.

The book is 137 pages in length, and divided into 3 parts:

(1) Literature and Research
(2) Training Faculty for the Online Environment
(3) Advice for online students.

In Literature and Research the author covers a wide range of the theoretical and practical issues associated with online education, including writing for online, ethical issues and the role of the teacher. Particular reference is made to Gilly Salmon's e-tivities to illustrate the importance of interaction in the online environment.

The section on Training Faculty for the Online Environment provides a lot of useful information for online teachers, inlcuding chapters on how to promote creativity, interaction and critical thinking online - as well as a very useful chapter on training new online teachers.

The final section provides Advice for online students, and is aimed particularly at students undertaking tertiary level study. It includes practical advice on how to complete a lit. review, undertake research and produce academic presentations.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On April 26-28, 2005, a group of leading authors, researchers, policy
makers, educators, and artists from around the world met in San Jose to discuss recent developmetns in the areas of visual, aural and digital literacy. Their report, titled A Global Imperative: Report of the 21st Century Literacy A Global Imperative contains an excellent summary of the discussions, and points to some important issues for all of us involved in education in the 21st century.

The main point is summarised in the working definition the group came up with for 21st century literacy:

"21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms."

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been having a play with a new product called Prototype - a Java-based webpage-creation tool that allows you to quickly create a web page as a series of panels. There are two types of panel that you can use - one is a simple notelet in which you can enter text, the other is a links panel that allows you to add links to other websites.

The text-based panel provides an option to treat the text as HTML, which means that you are able to use simple HTML code to change the appearance and position of text, and, providing you have an image located somewhere on the web, to include images in these panels also.

The links panel allows the input of text to describe the link, with the URL in a separate input. Only the descriptive text is then displayed as a link.

This site is a development of the idea of WebNote that I blogged about a few months ago. You can see the page I created by clicking here

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Speaking of vision - I've been looking at the Smart Classrooms site from Queensland.

The Smart Classrooms strategy brings together the future perspective and the momentum established by the 2002-2005 ICTs for Learning strategy to build the classroom of the future: the smart classroom.

The strategy establishes Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as the bedrock of 21st century schools, where new technologies spark greater interaction between students, teachers, parents and guardians.

The strategy presents a wide range of current and future initiatives within an overall framework, providing a significant degree of coherence, and is organised into System Initiatives ; School Processes and Teacher and Student Initiatives .

The Smart Classrooms strategy is founded on Queensland's Information Strategic Plan which appears to serve a similar purpose within the Queensland context as NZ's Digital Strategy

Interesting to note the approach Queensland has taken with this strategy as the next step to its existing ICTs for Learning strategy. Worth reflecting on as we move into a period of counsultation in NZ over the development of the successor to Digital Horizons

The Strategy Document is available to download from the site as a PDF.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In recent weeks I've encountered several conversations about what it means to be "literate" in a digital age. While notions of literacy have existed for as long as schools, our understandings of what this means are changing.

At the recent SLANZA conference in Auckland, Karen Sewell, the CEO of ERO , spoke of the importance of a school-wide development of information literacy, and the need for all schools to have an information literacy plan in place.

The American Library Association has recently published its Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education which provides some useful pointers as to what an information literate person may look like.

The ALA provides the following definition: "Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.", and suggests that an information literate individual is able to:

• Determine the extent of information needed
  
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
  
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
  
• Incorporate selected information into one??s knowledge base
  
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
  
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally

While I am encouraged to read of this approach to information literacy, and find plenty of useful stuff here, I also have a caution about how some schools or teachers may approach the development of a IL plan.

In her book, Catching the Knowledge Wave , Jane Gilbert discusses the need for the development of 'multi-literacies' - ie creating a wider focus than simply the read/write literacies that underpin so much of our present education system. Jane is also critical of an approach to teaching information literacy skills that is divorced from the context of information sharing and knowledge creation that these skills are necessary for. The following quote from her book illustrates this:

"Recent published work on the future of schooling has a lot to say about the role of ICT's in schools. For many authors, the knowledge age of ICT's are virtually synonymous. ICT's are seen as a magic bullet the will revolutionise teaching and learning. However, if we look closely at how these authors think this will happen , we can see that these claims are not very convincing. The first thing to notice is that the ICT's they talk about are not the kind that involve text messaging, MSN, chat rooms, online gaming or downloading music videos. Rather, the focus, in general, is on using ICT's to do more or less what schools have always done, but doing it better, faster, and in ways that are more appealing to students. The thinking is that, thorough ICT's learners can be connected to vast amounts of information, and be part of a worldwide network of learners. Furthermore, ICT's in schools are an important way of bridging the "digital divide". Using ICT, these resources can be offered to a wide range of people who would not otherwise have access to them, and these people can acquire the computer-related skills that, we are told, are now essential in the employment market place. Schools have responded to these discussions by developing "information literacy" programmes, teaching students about the Internet, and designing talks that students can tackle using information available on websites(with the help of online resources provided by their teachers). This is digital "busy work". However, it is valued because students are using technologies that have a high status in the works outside school, and this, it seems, must be a good thing. These approaches, when looked at in terms of how they are educating students for life in the knowledge age, have important flaws. First, and most obviously, the information learners have access to isn't knowledge in either the old sense of the term, or as in the new sense. Second, having access to large amounts of information doesn't necessarily lead to large amounts of learning. Without a clear context for accessing this information, the students quickly experience information overload. Third, while there is a lot of talk about learning, there is very little discussion of what - if anything - students need to learn and/or why they might need to learn it. As far as I can tell, it seems to be assumed that students will learn more or less the same kinds of things they have always learned or that it doesn't really matter what they are learning as long as they are learning something. Worse however, this approach misses the point entirely in terms of what is significant about the new age. All the talk about information - the information revolution and so on - deflects attention from what really matters in the new age, which isn't information at all. What is significant is the relationships between people and between people and organisations, that are made possible by the new modes of communication. It also takes attention away from knowledge, in particular the new meaning of knowledge that is the defining feature of the knowledge age. This new meaning is entirely missed from the current focus in ICT's in schools, and we are consequently losing the opportunity to develop the incredible educational potential of these technologies. Current approaches will do little to revolutionise teaching and learning."

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News from "Stuff" this morning...

"Technology experts who predicted that podcasting would "take off" have been proven right, literally, with a Discovery shuttle astronaut transmitting a message from space.
While preparing to return to Earth, Mission Specialist Steve Robinson recorded the three-and-a-half minute clip - the first podcast from orbit, according to NASA."

A quick search of the web came up with a transcript of the podcast, while the podcast itself is available here.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What is our vision for education in New Zealand in, say, ten years? What sort of picture do we have for how learners will be learning, what they will be learning, where they will be learning, who they will be learning with/from etc? Does such a vision exist within our current plethora of educational plans and strategies?

The NZ Ministry of Education has recently released a Schooling Strategy . At it's heart is a statement (referred to as a goal) that reads "All students achieving their potential". This statement sounds very similar to part of Beeby's vision for schooling in New Zealand, expressed some sixty years ago, and couched in terms of the importance of all children irrespective of the backgrounds and location being entitled to access education.

Could this be our vision? Or are we missing something - is schooling simply about individual potential being realised, or is there more - perhaps something about the sort of decent society that these individuals will continue to create and live in?

A visit to the MoE website reveals a wide range of strategies and frameworks under development or recently completed, including several relating to ICT. There's an Interim Tertiary (e)Learning strategy, an Early Childhood ICT Strategy (called Foundations for Discovery); a consultation beginning regarding a School's (e)Learning Framework and the SMS project to consider here. There's also a pan-sector (e)Learning Framework and a pan-sector ICT Strategy under development and not yet available.

In addition, there are a range of strategic developments in the area of curriculum and pedagogy, including the Curriculum Project leading on from the Curriculum Stocktake completed in 2002.

All of these documents refer to some sort of vision or over-arching goal, some of which are very lofty indeed, and others of which are more pragmatic and focus purely on the scope of the particular strategy in question.

All of these initiatives are useful and can be justified with some compelling arguments - particularly in times of unprecedented change where such guidance is required from the central policy area. So why have I drawn attention to them here? Because I am increasingly concerned at the lack of a clearly identifiable and/or articulated plan for how these are all meant to hang together. Recent speeches by the Minister of Education and the Secretary of Education continue to reference Beeby's vision, empahsising our need to grow beyond it now

Within the various ICT strategies there appears to be some sort of common themes and language - however, there is a grave risk that the goals and objectives of these strategies do, at times, compete with (and possibly contradict?) the broader goals and aims of other strategies in the sector.

In recent discussions I've had with senior MoE officials and others I keep being reminded of the Education Priorties within the current MoE statement of intent 2004-2009- and how these are what is being used to guide our education system into the 21st century. These priorities are very laudable, and indeed, necessary, but they barely consitute a vision. At best, they are the identification of problems or weaknesses in our existing system that we are endeavouring to address or fix.

Where are the truly aspirational statements? Where is the vision that will get us excited enough to get out of bed in the morning and continue working in this incredibly important sector? Where is the definitive statement that will act as the centre-piece for all of the other strategies and frameworks that are being developed at the moment?

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With PBRF being a focus for many tertiary educators, I'm often asked about where to find up to date professional journals where articles and reserach efforts may be published. Here are a couple of relatively new ones to the scene.

Thanks to CIT inforbits for the first reference -
The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) is a peer-reviewed, online publication addressing the scholarly use of multimedia resources in education. MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education.
The objectives of JOLT are to:

• Enable faculty to use technology effectively in teaching and learning by learning from a community of researchers and scholars;
  
• Enable academic programs to design and deploy academic technology to optimize teaching and learning;
  
• Build a community around the research and scholarly use of multimedia educational resources.

Thanks to Richard Elliott for drawing my attention to this international online journal published by the university of Adelaide. Tertiary Learning and Professional Development (TLPD) allows practitioners in tertiary education (higher education, universities and colleges, technical and further education) to publish evidence-based papers that demonstrate a direct link between organisational and staff development activities and teaching, learning and support outcomes. This peer-reviewed journal publishes original papers and literature reviews that show the impact that development activities have on the quality of learning and teaching in tertiary institutions. You can submit a paper for consideration and peer-review, or receive email notification when a new issue is published by following the directions on the home page.

Another site that's worth a visit if you're looking for more online journals is Infomine which offers a search of online journals in a variety of disciplines.

While I'm at it, Richard also sent a link to the Boots Learning Store . I've quite a bit of time exploring the numerous learning objects that can be found on this site - and the graphics are great - my kids love it! Not bad from a chemist store from Nottingham!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)