I’ve been reflecting a bit since the ULearn conference about the extensive use that was made of the various ‘back-chat’ channels during sessions at the conference, particularly the use of Twitter. I’ve been a Twitter user since it was first released, and have enjoyed building a list of those I follow consisting mainly of a number of NZ and overseas teachers, principals and luminaries within the field of education. Occassionally the updates on who has eaten at what restaurant become a little tiresome, but generally the exchange of quick-fire thoughts and questions relating to what others may be working on or thinking at the time, along with links being shared and commented on provides me with a sense of being “connected” to a wider group of people with interests that complement and feed my own.

I found the prospect of using Twitter as a ‘back-chat’ channel at the ULearn conference very interesting. it had been used at the 2007 conference by a handful of early adopters, but this year, with the provision of a more powerful wireless network throughout the venues, the uptake was huge - so much so that the usage of Twitter by delgates on the first day rocketed ULearn to the number one position on Twitscoop.

Beyond the euphoria of being able to do this, however, comes the question “how does this actually add to or enhance the conference experience?” Obviously it may provide non-conference attendees with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in what is going on through the running commentary of their twitter friends, plus it may provide an opportunity for delegates to exchange ideas and questions that occur to them while they’re listening to a speaker. Of course, such use assumes a certain level of intelligence and digital literacy on the part of the users.

Sadly, this was lacking in much of what I saw being exchanged in the many of the messages. This is not to say that what some individuals chose to share may not have had some validity for them, but one would have to question the usefulness of simply sharing a stream of consciousness of unformed (and un-informed?) thoughts as a presentation was being made - particularly where the thoughts being expressed are negative.

What was more significant to me was the way in which one person’s thinking appeared to ‘flavour’ the contributions of others, resulting in a lot of ‘imitative’ comments - what I’ve referred to in my title as Digital Lemmings! I spoke to one of the delegates that I’d seen active in the Twitter exchange - someone I have regard and respect for as a digital innovator and thinker. This person was relatively new to Twitter and the whole back-channel idea, but had decided to ‘give it a go’ in the context of the conference. He spoke with me about how even he’d found himself being dragged into the ’spiral’ of negative comment at one stage, and had to consciously direct his thoughts in positive directions.

In his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds“, James Surowiecki argues why many are smarter than a few - but he does point to a number of failures of crowd intelligence which I believe I saw emerging in the Twitter back-channels. These include the fact that the crowds themselves can be too homogeneous, too imitative and too emotional.

The irony for me was that, as the messages I’m alluding to were being posted, the speakers on stage were making some extremely valid points about the nature of public sharing, and how, in the digital world, what we share becomes a record that cannot be erased - thus requiring some different ways of thinking about what is and isn’t appropriate for sharing in public online forums.

Perhaps we’ve still got a way to go to fully appreciate and understand the affordances of these technologies, and the literacies that are going to be important for us to focus on and develop in our students - and for ourselves.

For those who were unable to attend the ULearn conference to hear Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in person there’s a podcast of her interview with Kim Hill that was broadcast on Saturday morning in NZ available on the Radio New Zealand website. Direct link to this file is here

Wow - three amazing days of keynotes, spotlights, workshops and future focus presentations has come to an end. Some great discussions, challenges, inspiration and new friendships forged. The conference has meant many things to many people - and their reflections appear all over the blogosphere - some are listed below:

Mel Gibb, Iain Cook-Bonney, David, Fiona Grant, Allanah King, Sarah Jones, Toni Twiss, Simon Evans.

There are also lots of great photos of ULearn08 on Flickr - scroll through to find the ones of the amazing dinner on Thursday evening which was themed as “Rouge” with entertainment from the Moulin Rouge genre.

I had the privilege of chairing the final keynote presentation, consisting of a panel of presenters from the early childhood, primary and secondary sectors. Tania and Beverly from Mania Kindergarten shared examples of what their young charges are doing everyday with a variety of technologies, including using blogs to maintain a record of their learning. Carolyn from Tawa Intermediate provided an overview of her work in the school since taking over as principal a couple of years ago, focusing on the importance of developing a shared vision among staff. Linda who has been principal of Lincoln High School for more than 10 years put success in her school down to developing teams of staff and supporting them in pursuing their own ideas, giving them permission to try things out, make mistakes and learn from them - all working towards identifying the things of real value that can be embraced and implemented on a wider and more sustainable scale.

The purpose of having this group share was to expose some of the practical ideas and advice that may be of use by others in the audience as they returned to their own schools. I summed up with a quote from James Allen:

You will be as small as your controlling desire
or as great as your 
dominant ambition.

No matter what our experience of a conference such as ULearn, we will end up changed in some way - the challenge is what our response will be when we return to our “day jobs”. My key message was for school leaders - for regardless of how inspired individual teachers may be, it is the collective change in our whole school system that is important. It’s not enough just to desire this to happen - we need more educators who are set alight with ambition, determined to see it happen!

Steve Carden provided the inspirational day two keynote talk on day two of the ULearn conference. Providing a very full and engaging view of the challenges we face in the world ahead of us, Steven provided three key challenges to all delegates at the end of his presentation…

1. The workforce needs highly adaptive people
2. We need radically new ways of educating young people
3. It’s all about YOU - we can talk about the need for better schools, more funding, more resources, but at the end of the day it all depends on good teachers. The difference between a good and a great teacher is the ability to inspire and encourage.

Steven drew much of his material from his book “New Zealand Unleashed”, and from the updated “Did You Know” clip (see below), illustrated with lots of NZ examples:

The day has come, and the ULearn08 conference is now underway. An opening address by Chris Carter, Minister of Education, identified some key areas of focus for the future, including personalising learning and lifelong learning - and some of the planned government responses for resourcing, including announcements on the following:

• provision for schools to use some of their 5-year maintenance grant money to invest in key ICT infrastructure
• requirement for schools to allocated 1.5% of their recent 5% funding increase to ICT
• provision of PD days for teachers in 2009 - 1 day for primary teachers, and 2 days for secondary teachers.

Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach followed as the first keynote speakers, focusing on the impact of Web2.0 technologies to enable online participation and sharing, and the need to shift from a classroom metaphor to a community metaphor for the way we organise learning in the future. Begins with putting educators within these learning communities to commit together to make change and make education relevant to the 21st Century Learner.

Sheryl shared that “Communities are quite simply, collections of individuals who are bound together by a natural will and a set of shared ideas and ideals.” and then shared some ideas about the evolution and maturity of communities, suggesting that successful and healthy communities are highly participative, have a clear purpose, co-constructed etc.

They shared their perspective of a goal for the future - for each child to create, grow and navigate their own personal learning networks - going on to quote Clay Shirky’s work on a continuum of experience in forming communities - sharing, cooperation, collaboration, collective action - leading to social change or change in our classrooms etc. to illustrate the responsibility we have to incorportate teaching about and with these things in our classroom.

Will noted that our kids are using web2.0 to share - and what they share is very important, and challenged us about the responsibility that we, as educators must accept in developing the right attitudes, understandings and behaviours that our kids will need to use this liberty wisely, noting that  “Our kids will be “google-able” for the rests of their lives!”

A great keynote address covering a wide range of both the opportunities and challenges of working in this collaborative world enabled by online technologies - wonderfully illustrated with personal anecdotes and stories from the web.

Key message for educators: “you can’t just study this, you have to do it!”

Lots more to share from this - but my battery has almost run out so will post this before it does:-)

After what seems like an age I’m finally back to blogging (illness and distractions being the excuse!)
I’m now in Queenstown, NZ, attending the APAN26 conference. The photo above shows the welcome powhiri that we witnessed at the beginning of the conference this morning before we were treated to an address by Mr Karel Veitsch via video conference from TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) speaking about the recommendations from the EARNEST reports - a set of strategic studies into the expected evolution of research and education networking in Europe over the net 5-10 years. Of particular interest to me is one of the reports on the site: “Report on Requirements of Users in Schools, the Healthcare Sector and the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences” (PDF download here). The section on schools and advanced networks is particularly interesting and of relevance to us in NZ as we are looking at expanding access to the advanced network to schools in NZ over the next few years. This report claims that “as a result of the study, the different technical and organisational options for connecting schools and their pros and cons are now well understood” - we can certainly benefit from that!

From the report…

This study provides qualitative information based on interviews and feedback from practitioners about the use of network connections. For those interested in figures and comparisons between countries, the study provides references to interesting quantitative studies. Indeed, one surprising remark in the study is that virtually every school in Europe has access to the Internet: in most countries the rate is 100% or almost 100%. Here we must note carefully that a school having access to the Internet does not mean necessarily that the Internet connectivity is used for teaching and learning. For example, it may even be that there is one PC connected in a school’s administration. The study explains that there are differences in bandwidth available for schools across Europe.

The report on schools concludes that the use of network connectivity in the classroom is not yet ubiquitous - well, I guess the news isn’t so different to NZ after all!

I had the opportunity to speak to the HETTANZ annual conference today - the topic was “Online Communities of Practice“. I spoke about the ways in which the use of online applications and environments could enrich the discourse within their professional community, and enable them to continue the valuable conversations they were initiating at this event well beyond the dates of the physical conference. As a professional organisation, this group has a well defined domain within which they operate, they are identified as a community by their membership of this organisation, and they are all engaged in the practice of teaching home economics within the school system - so they amply meet the criteria for existing as a community of practice as defined by Wenger et al, and could benefit greatly by using the online environment to continue the discussions about the issues they are facing as practitioners (eg. the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum, the status of HE teachers, assessment of HE etc)

It was clear that what I had to share, particularly about the online technologies, was new to many of those in the group, making some feel uncomfortable or anxious about expectations being made of them to become active in this area. This was highlighted in some of the questions at the end of my session and in numerous conversations afterwards in which the following three issues were repeatedly raised;

• Schools are not adequately resourced to allow much of what I was demonstrating to become a reality for them in their classrooms (referring to availability of hardware, software, internet access etc)

• There isn’t the time required to become familiar with this technology or the applications demonstrated, and
• There are serious concerns around cybersafety and security that present too big a barrier.

While I do have some empathy with these concerns, these are exactly the reasons why professional organisations such as HETTANZ should be mobilizing themselves to use the online environments for their own professional development and to enable participation in their professional community of practice. Before these issues can be sensibly addressed, we need to see more teachers developing informed views about the potential use for both good and bad of these technologies based on their personal use rather than the opinions expressed in the media. I illustrated how this is happening already with several hundreds of teachers engaged in the Curriculum Online discussions and forums, and in the Centre4 communities that have formed around the ICT PD clusters.

With many now asking, Is it OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher?, it’s time to say Enough Excuses and begin committing time and energy to exploring these technologies and what they offer - and I believe that participation in an online community of practice is an excellent way of engaging with people to achieve this. Not only does it introduce them to the potential (and possible pitfalls) of the technology in a practical way, but it does so by engaging them in authentic acts of debate and discussion about the practice they are involved in.

I am reminded as I write of a quote made by Karen Sewell in her keynote to the conference the previous day: “We must escape from the prison we trap ourselves in - too often we respond with reasons why we can’t innovate!”. Now there’s a challenge
In preparing for this talk I reflected about my own mother who trained as a home economics teacher, and who brought all of that knowledge and experience into her role as a wife and mother in the home. The video clip at the bottom of this post comes from the era that she trained, and illustrates the fact that home economics was then, as it is now, a subject that has much to contribute to the development of young people.

Another excellent presentation from Sir Ken Robinson, this time featured on the Edutopia site, and were recorded on April 10, 2008, at the Apple Education Leadership Summit, a gathering in San Francisco of more than one hundred school superintendents from around the world. In this he poses three propositions and challenges educators to respond:

1. We are engaged globally in a revolution - the things that are shaping this revolution have no precedent so we have no way of anticipating the outcome.

2. In order to meet the challenge of this revolution we have to thing differently about our use of resources.
3. We have to do something in our education system, not to reform it, but to transform it.

The key to this, Robinson argues, is creativity. He argues that we must move to make this the centre-piece of our educational endeavours, considering it in the same way as we do for literacy and numeracy etc. He defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value”and claims that everyone has this capacity - it’s just that in our school systems we stifle it.

Enough from me - watch and listen yourself. There are some extremely important messages here that, while they may make us uncomfortable and perhaps even overwhelmed, deserve our attention, debate and action if we are to have any chance of seeing our education system develop as it must to meet the needs of the 21st century!

What a learning experience! Locked in a room with around 40 “geeks” talking in a language that would require considerable interpretation for most (including me), our task was to put a range of applications and processes to the test to see how well they performed in terms of meeting the Common Cartridge specifications developed by the IMS Global consortium.

The test was simple enough - to submit a content “cartridge” that had been created using each of the processes being examined to a “testing application” that analysed the code line by line and provided feedback in terms of how many errors were found. The second step then was to open the import the cartridge into an LMS system and open it to see how it operates in that environment. None of the participants had been able to do either of these things with the particular applications being used prior to the test, so it was a real test in that sense!

The outcomes were extremely positive for eXe - it came through with ZERO errors and opened without a glitch within the chosen LMS - Angel Learning.

Next was a cartridge from a US Publishing House, which returned about a dozen errors, most fairly minor and fixable.

Third was a cartridge from a large distance education university - which came back with a large number of errors, some more serious.

Finally was a cartridge from another commercial vendor - which had more errors than we could count and completely failed the test in every respect.

So - another feather in the cap for eXe, with many of those present taking a copy away with them to look at using in the context of what they are doing in the content development for eLearning space.

With that behind me I’m now looking forward to returning back to NZ and getting back to an environment I feel more at ease in

The IMS GLobal Learning Impact Award winners were announced this afternoon - and eXe earned a Learning Impact Leadership award, judged Best Content Authoring Tool!. Even more significantly (to me anyway), eXe received the “People’s Choice” award from the vote of all the conference delegates. The picture above shows eXe developer Remo holding the award, together with myself and Sandy who was the project manager for eXe during a significant part of its development under the eCDF funding in New Zealand.

Tomorrow will be a day spent in a technical “test-fest” where many of the product developers will have an opportunity to demonstrate the interoperability features of their product - and eXe will be among those being shown off. So… off to my room to prepare