Derek's Blog

Want to know a bit more about the places that our teens are visitng on the net - here's a comment from an article I came across this morning on MediaPost that provides some insights:

We know that tweens and teens spend the majority of their free time (and even some of their class time) surfing the Internet. Where they're spending that surf time, however, seems to be a big mystery. Well, wonder no more. Teens and tweens are drawn to Web sites that engage them on multiple interactive platforms, hold their ever-shrinking attention span, and give them a reason to come back.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

??In the participatory era, media will no longer be delivered one way from a media company to an audience...but by audience members to other audience members. The distinction between content creators and consuming audiences first gets blurry and then disappears completely...Instead of media being delivered as a sermon or lecture, it becomes a conversation among the people in the audience?? (quote from Andreas Kluth, Technology Correspondent of The Economist)

I've just read my way through two outstanding articles/papers that provide much clarity to the whole debate around social software and the way in which this is changing our approach to learning, communicating and living!.

The first is from the April 26 edition of "The Economist" magazine, in a feature section titled Among the Audience - a survey of new media The feature is actually a series of articles covering topics such as blogs wikis and podcasting, as well as those that explore the phenomena associated with the use of these tools, such as the dawn of interactive journalism, defining a media company in this new world, and an attempt to summarise the promise and pitfalls of these new environments and tools. (All of these artlcles area available online, along with a selection of audio interviews with some of the authors.)

This has to be one of the 'must reads' for anyone who is wanting to quickly come up to speed with what these new technologies are about and how they are or may impact on many of the ways we currently do business - including education!

The second paper is from George Seimens, and is titled Learning in Synch with Life - New Models, New Processes (downloadable PDF), which was prepared by George after he was asked by Google to submit a whitepaper at their recent training summit

In this paper George evaluates the diverse needs of learners today, and details the shortcomings of courses/content and LMSs in meeting those needs. He goes on to recast learning as a network formation process, occurring within the structure of organisational ecologies (which he refers to as connectivism) and then details some of his implementation concerns and challenges.

The paper is a work in progress - but appeals very much to my beliefs and understandings of what is emerging. The paper is illustrated with several useful diagrams that help explain some of the complex ideas being presented, inlcuding such things a a 'Learning ecology' and the relationship between an "adpative learning cycle" and a "Learning Development Cycle"

I'd recommend both of these!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(NB - PDF link fixed now)

More from the work I have been doing to assist the NZ MoE in determining what an online learning environment might look like. In sharing the work I'd done previously (see Future OLE) I kept getting questions from teachers and principals about how this might apply to schools who, at the end of the day, are still charged with managing the complexity of learning for students, and are required to make decisions about the appropriate technologies to support this (eg SMS, LMS etc)

I've prepared a short paper titled OLE - a school perspective (pdf) which attempts to outline what a school's response should be, and how this would relate to the personal learning environment of the individual learner as well as the various other systems and repositories that are 'out there'. I should point out that the particular products and services I've used to illustrate the diagram are merely that, illustrations, and are not intended to convey any sense of exclusivity.

Your thoughts or feedback would be welcomed.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm often asked for examples of people who are teaching with and about the use of social software, and to be frank, I haven't found many useful ones. But this morning in my search for other material I came across this report titled Teachning Social Software with Social Software by Ulises Mejias, an Ed.D. student at the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is also teaching a graduate course on Social Software.

In this report he discusses some of the lessons learned teaching this course which he calls "Social Software Affordances". The course was offered during the Fall of 2005, and involved 13 graduate students from the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education (CCTE) program at TC.

The main goal of the course was for students to acquire proficiency in the use of blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and distributed classification systems while engaging in a critical analysis of the affordances of social software (what the software makes possible and what it impedes). The class also asked students to apply their newly acquired social software skills and knowledge to promote a social cause or project of their choosing.

Together, the class addressed questions such as: What is 'social' about social software? How is the notion of community being redefined by social software? How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software? What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software? Additionally, each student undertook a project which tackled the question of whether social software can be an effective tool for individual and social change.

The course itself was run using a variety of social software - including blogs, wikis and other web-based applications such as del.icio.us etc. The report well worth a read, not only of the report itself, but of the associated (linked) articles and websites - including the course blogs that were maintained by the students.

I was particularly drawn to the author's personal belief statement which obviously underpinned the design of the course itself. He argues that...

... the true potential of social software lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual??s everyday social practices, and inculcate a desire to connect to the world as a whole, not just the parts that exist online. Furthermore, in order for software to be truly 'social,' it must help develop in the minority who has access to the technology a responsibility for converting its benefits into benefits for a larger part of society.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If you're still coming to grips with whether to choose Google or Yahoo as a search engine, and struggling to come to grips with the dynamics of Boolean search structure, take a look at Quintura, a semantic search engine from Russia.

Whenever we use a search engine, we have a concept in mind. The concept is usually fairly complex, consisting of a lot of pre-existing relationships we have made mentally. When we use a conventional search engine we normally distill the concept/idea we are searching for down to the broadest possible phrase, both out of a desire to be inclusive in our search, and out of a reluctance to expend too much effort in constructing our search.

A semantic search takes the effort (and time) out of searching in this manner. In Quintura, as you click on words that define the concept, they get added to your query, causing the words in your map to update and restrict the focus of your search, allowing you to quickly and graphically structure very specific queries. The theory is that clicking through a semantic map will allow you to spend less time sifting through irrelevant results.

Here's a screen shot to illustrate what you see - in this case, from a search that began with a simply search on the topic of 'cars', showing the semantic map of search terms that is being generated on the left, and the actual search results accumulating on the right:

You can view a series of screen shots from the Quintura site, or there are a couple of animated demos that you can view. There's a free download of the software as well - although it won't work on my Mac at this stage (guess I'll have to wait!).

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Just browsing the web this morning, searching for some information about Podcasting when I came across a whole heap of podcasts about Learning and Teaching in Scotland on Podcast.net .

These podcasts have been created by Learning and Teaching Scotland , an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Scottish Executive Education Department to help review, assess and support developments in learning and education, including the use of information and communications technology (ICT).

There's a whole range of podcasts here that I certainly will take some time to come back and listen to - the only one I managed to hear today was from the principal of Notre Dame Secondary College (now renamed as Notre Dame Learning Community as it embraces local primary schools etc.) in a podcast titled ICT in A Curriculum for Excellence . This presentation provides a fascinating overview of an ICT professional development approach in Scotland, that has a lot in common with what we're doing here in NZ!

Would be keen to know of any others on this list that peole have time to listen to or recommend...

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)