Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.

I’ve had a long time interest in using the online environment as a vehicle for promoting debate and engagement in critical issues.

Recently I was invited by Bryan Orme to take a look at CreateDebate, a website he and his colleagues have created to promote discussion and critical thinking in the classroom.

It’s an interesting looking concept – so I’ve created a simple debate based on the theme and issues in my previous blog post and invite anyone to add their thoughts – both pro and con – to the debate.

I’ve titled the debate “blended, virtual and mobile learning should replace face-to-face instruction” Take a look, add your thoughts and send me any feedback on what you think of the usefulness of the site.

A few days ago my friend Dan sent me a link to a story about Dr. Monica Rankin’s “Twitter Experiment” which she explains in the video at the top of this post. It highlighted for me just how easy it can be to begin investigating the potential of some of these web2.0 technologies within the conventional classroom (albeit in this case a university setting.)

Some key ideas that I saw canvassed in the video:

- limitations and opportunities of the 140 character limit

- students using a variety of technologies for contributing

- the ability of people to “join from afar’ (including the lecturer)

- increased engagement of a class of 90 students!

- the ability to review and follow up after class

I couldn’t help but notice that they were using the web interface of Twitter for their contributions, and wonder how much more might be added to the experience if they were to use something like TweetDeck or Seesmic which would provide the opportunity to more directly monitor replies and direct messages for instance.

Dr Rankin has posted some her thoughts on the experiment online that provide a more useful reflection after watching the video.

I applaud her approach to trying something new here, captured in her final comment on the video: “Yes, it’s going to be messy. But messy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be bad“.

Ben, a Canadian educator on my Twitter list posted a link to this Mathematics in Movies site, developed by Oliver Knill from the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University. A great resource for maths teachers, particularly at secondary level, with each movie listed linking to the part of the movie with the math focus and a brief explanation of the mathematical aspects being considered.  Each movie is linked in a variety of formats, for viewing on whatever device you may have, including mobiles.

Knill’s website is also worth exploring for anyone interested in the teaching of mathematics and the use of technology in this process. On the site Knill explores some of the pedagogical questions, especially in web pedagogy and the use of technology in teaching which he shares on a pedagogy page.

Thanks Oliver for making such a rich resource available! A classic example of how each of us as educators can enrich the profession by using technology to share what we know and do.

The Learning@School conference is rollicking along in Rotorua at the moment, with keynote speaker on day one, Andy Hargreaves, setting the scene with challenges to us all about the need to take account of the whole context and culture of our school when considering change and development. Pam Hook had the audience spell-bond also with her “Hooked on Thinking” ideas and strategies.

Unfortunately for me I am missing the conference, and have had to rely on my Twitter feeds, text messages and the odd call to keep me posted. Having made it to the opening of the conference I’ve had to return home for family reasons. That didn’t stop the presentation I was scheduled to do from going ahead – with my colleague from the Ministry of Education, Douglas Harre, stepping up to share thoughts, insights and ideas based on CORE’s Ten Trends for 2009. This is the annual list of trends developed by CORE staff to represent a view of some key areas of interest for NZ educators with regards to the impact of ICTs on teaching and learning.

This year’s trends are:

1. Mobile Technologies for learning
2. Netbooks
3. Cloud Computing
4. Learning spaces/environments
5. Open Education Resources
6. High Definition Video conferencing
7. Advanced Networks
8. Cyber-Citizenary
9. Green computing
10. Digital Literacy

The slideshow used at Learning@School is provided here:

For links to other research and lists of trends and predictions for 2009 check out the following:

Horizon Report, 2009

Looking forward to 2009

100 Top Sites for the year ahead

The Future of the Internet III

Horizon report – Australia/NZ edition

Just as Sesame Street helped transform television into a revolutionary tool for learning among young children four decades ago, advances in mobile technologies are showing enormous untapped educational potential for today’s generation.

This report released last month by a research centre based at the Sesame Workshop claims that children’s lives have been caught up in a tide of mobile digital technologies—games, cellphones, and smartphones— and that, if carefully managed, these could significantly boost their learning.

“It is no longer a question of whether we should use these devices to support learning, but how and when,” to use them,” writes Michael H. Levine, the executive director of the New York City-based Joan Ganz Cooney Center, at Sesame Workshop.

This The 52-page “Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning” draws on interviews with a cross-section of research, policy, and industry experts to illustrate how mobile technologies such as cell phones, iPod devices, and portable gaming platforms might be more widely used for learning. More than half of the world’s population now owns a cell phone and children under 12 constitute one of the fastest growing segments of mobile technology users in the U.S. Examining over 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad, the report highlights early evidence and examples of how mobile devices may help re-define teaching and learning in the decade ahead.

I’m sitting at Wellington airport waiting for a plane to Nelson, having just flown back from Melbourne where I’ve been working with the MEC cluster of schools in Melbourne’s North West. A great group of schools and teachers, doing some really innovative stuff across a range of educational areas. At their cluster conference day they focused on the ways in which ICTs could be used to enhance learning. The day was enjoyed by all – despite the heat!! In one of my sessions someone ‘Googled’ the temperature for Ringwood, where were located, and found that it was 47 degrees! This news was soon passed round by Twitter connections

Speaking of Twitter, Jane forwarded a link to Twitter Mosaic in her “Pick of the Day” this morning. Created by Walter Higgins, it generates a Mosaic of your Twitter Followers. You can create one for yourself here.

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.

With a long weekend coming up in New Zealand here’s a bit of reading that may be of interest to some. The eLearning Guild have released the latest in their series of free e-books, this one titled 144 Tips on Synchronous e-Learning.

As is usual in previous ELG publications, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. You will find tips in these categories…

• Blending Synchronous Learning with Other Learning Modalities

• Designers of Synchronous Presentations, Courses, and Webinars
• Managers Who Lead Synchronous Learning Efforts
• Synchronous Speakers and Instructors
• Technical Production, Planning, and Preparation

All of the tips have been submitted by practitioners, and there’s a lot of very useful stuff here – particularly for those who are entering the field, or for those who may be in a position of creating manuals or staff development activities to support those working in your school or institution. There’s quite a bit of advertising included from Adobe about their synchronous eLearning product – but even this is informative and usefully presented.