Having blogged recently about some great space resources, I thought it worth noting here that next week is a special week for the theme of space (pity it’s in the school holidays here in NZ)

Declared by the UN General Assembly in 1999, World Space Week (4 - 10 October) marks the anniversary of two great milestones of humanity’s expansion into space:

The first human made Earth satellite, SPUTNIK 1, was launched on 4 October 1957 and, thus, opened the way for space exploration.

10 October 1967 marks the date of the entry into force of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Peaceful uses of Outer Space. (according to this site, New Zealand was one of the first countries to sign back in 1967!)

edna has compiled a collection of quality resources related to the teaching of space, planets and the solar system. The theme page is available at:
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/schooled/school_theme_pages/pid/2915

Tonight I switched to a new ISP, and am already enjoying the benefits of much faster download speeds! The test above shows that, instead of the maximum of around 1300Kbps (1.3Mbps) that I achieved with my previous provider, I’m now enjoying nearly three times that download speed. The unfortunate thing is that it’s still an asymetrical connection, so the upload remains low - but at least it is maxing out at the 128Kbps as advertised and not consistently down around the 60Kbps that I’ve been used to. Moreover, I get all of this for two thirds of the price that I have been paying, and in addition, I have a 30Gb per month allowance compared to the 2Gb I’ve been used to!

Speed counts!

Last year I blogged about the Interwrite Makeover Contest™ which attracted entries from several New Zealand schools. This year eInstruction (who merged with Interwrite Learning® earlier this year) have  announced their Classroom Makeover Competition, which recognizes teachers and students for their collaboration and use of technology in the classroom. Participants of this contest are asked to create a short music video demonstrating how classes currently use or would like to use technology to enhance instruction.

It was very pleasing to see that Ilminster Intermediate from Gisborne won a $15,000 Interwrite Makeover for their entry Digital Child. Just shows that NZ schools can foot it witht he rest of the world - well done Ilminster students!

The contest is open to all primary and secondary teachers and students in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and is not limited to users of eInstruction or Interwrite Learning products. More details can be found in the press release (PDF download) or the competition website.

I love spring in Christchurch - over the weekend I walked through the botanical gardens with my wife and enjoyed the acres of yellow daffodils growing among the mature trees. We began discussing what a wonderful vision it was that the founding fathers of the city had to plan for such a large area of public park area and gardens right in the middle of the city - so that here, 150 years later, we are able to enjoy the sights, sounds, smells and general atmosphere of this place. As walked we came across this sign:

It explains how all of these daffodils got here, and is an inspiring story of collaboration and foresight (note the use of this word in the final sentence).

Today I visited a local secondary school that is in the midst of a significant “makeover”, with almost every part of the school being re-built! I was asked to share with them some of my thoughts about the role of technology in the future of education, and its links to the curriculum etc. Discussions inevitably led to sharing ideas about ubiquity, and the need to ensure that school buildings have the appropriate network infrastructure (cabled and wireless) to support students gaining online access anywhere, at any time and with any device.

At the end of my presentation I was told that this school will find it difficult to provide such access for its students, for, despite the fact that it is having so much work done on it, there is apparently no provision for a robust fibre backbone and classroom cabling in the plan. Why? Because, as a ‘re-build’ (as opposed to a new build), the codes and specifications don’t allow for it. Where is the foresight in that???

Here’s a great online seminar for you to join if you have the time on Tuesday 17th June from 10.00am - 11.00am (NZ time). Details on the DEANZ blog.

About the Session: Wikipedia is unquestionably the most significant social phenomenon of our time. In May 2006, the Commonwealth of Learning established Wikieducator — a Commonwealth sponsored project leveraging the power of distributed production systems for developing Open Education Resources (OERs). In this session Wayne will reflect on COL’s experiences to date and assess the success of the project in turning the digital divide into digital dividends. As ODL practitioners, a key question comes to mind: Does the project suggest the reincarnation of distance education or a new innovation?

Looks like we’ve hit the jackpot - day two at the multiple literacies working group and the sign at the door has been changed - although it is still taped over the top of the LCD screen Pity we may have to tell them that the next time we meet it may be to talk about 21st Century Literacy.

I had a great morning this morning at CORE - we hosted Brenda Frisk from NextSpace and Paul Bray (pictured with me) from Re-engineering Australia (REA) talking to a group of teachers from local secondary schools about the F1 Challenge that Paul and his team have been running in Australia and other parts of the world for some years now.

The F1 in Schools Challenge is a competition in which groups of students (usually 5 in a team) design and manufacture CO2 powered model Formula One cars. Student teams compete against each other in a Regional, State and a National championship to determine the fastest and best engineered car for a chance to represent their country at the annual F1inSchools World Championships. It’s just like being in a real Formula One team!

The F1inSchools Challenge links exciting classroom experiences with careers through the development of employability skills whilst engendering passion for careers in the manufacturing and engineering domains. Students use a range of software, tools and processes that are used in real-life manufacturing and engineering industries, including high end CAD software, virtual wind tunnel simulations and CNC mill technologies.

The whole approach reminded me of the sorts of things that I was involved with back in the mid 1990s with the introduction of the Technology Curriculum, where we explored all sorts of ways of creating authentic and meaningful learning experiences for students to learn and about various forms of technology and the design process that underpins all such endeavours in the engineering and manufacturing worlds. The F1 challenge encapsulates all of this, providing a rich, cross-curricular context for students - and introducing them to a range of high end tools and techniques in the process!

There’s a strong emphasis on collaboration throughout the project - from the teamwork involved in the actual design and construction, to the way that schools work together to share some of the equipment - with an emphasis also on the use of advanced networks to enable the speedy exchange of data and video conferencing links.

Paul was here to speak with us about the prospect of bringing the F1 Challenge to schools in New Zealand in the near future - and exciting prospect indeed! There’s a useful video showing this process in action available on the REA site - it’s embedded below:

Have just spent the first day here in Austin, Texas, seeing the city by night and by day, and preparing for the first real day of the IMS Global Learning Impact Summit which begins in the morning. I’m here with Remo, one of the eXe developers, to present eXe to the Learning Impact Awards judges tomorrow. With such a great line-up of finalists it will be interesting to see what the outcome will be - but I’m confident that we can at least use the opportunity to demonstrate just what eXe can do, and the extent to which it can demonstrate compliance with the international interoperability standards such as SCORM 2 and Common Cartridge. Our three key messages for the presentation will be:

• eXe is an easy to use desktop application

• With it you can build pedagogically sound education resources
• It allows you to export what you’ve created in standard packaging formats.

Let’s hope the judges are interested.

I had the opportunity to bring an XO computer home from work - it belongs to Jim, one of the software engineers we have working at CORE. Apart from my personal fascination with finally getting my hands on one of these machines to play with, I was keen to see what my youngest kids would do when I let them loose on it. They were (predictably) intrigued, and intuitively began exploring the different things they could do with it. My son became very engaged with eToys, using his experience with Scratch to quickly work out how to programme a simple object to behave in various ways, while my daughter quickly mastered a number of the simple maths and language activities. I was impressed with just how quickly and easily they found their way around the interface and were able to work out how to access the different programmes and dimensions the XO has to offer.

The thing that impressed me the most was how easily the XO could identify and ‘map’ the various wireless access points it found in any particular location in a visual ‘mesh’ network neighbourhood. I simply located our home wireless access point on the mesh, clicked on it and entered the password and “hey presto” - I was connected to the internet! The other thing that had me really impressed was something that isn’t a part of the regular install of and XO - Jim has managed to install a copy of eXe on his XO and get it working! Now that’s impressive.

Like all good things, however, this comes to an end - I’ve had to give it back as Jim travels back to Gisborne tomorrow.

Today I had the privilege of participating in the official launch of an exciting new company in New Zealand called NextSpace, founded as a partnership between Right Hemisphere and the NZ Ministry of Economic Development.. NextSpace is described as “a think tank, catalyst and mentoring organisation charged with facilitating the growth of 3D graphical communications technology software through education, demonstration and research.”

The focus of the day was on the role that 3D graphics will have as a key content creation, communication and collaboration medium in the future. It was very exciting to see examples of 3D graphics technologies applied in a range of commercial contexts (not just for gaming!). Right Hemisphere presented work they are doing with Boeing, using 3D technologies to provide a complete set of manuals for those involved in the maintenance of the planes, while HIT Lab, another NZ company that has pioneered developments in this area, demonstrated some of their augmented reality products.

This is all ground-breaking stuff, and illustrated to me the challenge for schools and education in general that will come as a result of these developments. Much of what we heard from various speakers focused on key attributes of workers in these industries - not just those producing the 3D technologies, but those who are using the products as a part of their everyday work - like the Boeing maintenance engineers who no longer work from paper manuals. The importance of collaboration came through strongly from several speakers, as did the emerging role of mobile technologies. The conversations soon turned to ‘how can we prepare our young people for a future where the use of 3D technologies such as this will form a major part of how they communicate ideas and collaborate with each other?’.

I had a speaking slot in the day to focus on this issue (my presentation is included at the end of this post). I started by focusing on the fact that our view of literacy must change - to incorporate these new ways of communicating and presenting ideas/content/information etc. I then focused on the role of schools, and in particular, the need for some serious support for the professional development of teachers in this area, before briefly referring to a collaboration between CORE Education, CWA-New Media and NextSpace that we are working on as a way of addressing this. A part of our plan is to put some of these powerful 3D modelling and construction tools in the hands of school students and let them explore, create and express themselves with them - and find out just how far these creative and uninhibited young people might be able to stretch things!

You can be sure we’re going to see a lot more developing in this new dimension!

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