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.

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.

Second day at the Multi literacies working group - immersed in thinking about what it means to be literate (or becoming literate) in the 21st century, and the relationship of all this thinking with the use digital technologies.

In the midst of all this thinking I received an email from Fiona at College@home who let me know about her recent post titled 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner. Fiona and her colleagues have organised their list using the VAK framework, with the various online tools classified in sub categories within each. It’s a great resource and very usefully organised - and quite timely in terms of the topics of discussion where I am currently.

Thanks to Fiona and friends for providing this useful resource - lots of familiar web tools here, along with some I haven’t heard of before!

Jane Hart has recently published her list of the Top 100 tools For Learning for 2008. Jane’s list is compiled from the contributions of 155 learning professionals (from both education and workplace learning) who shared their Top 10 Tools for Learning both for their own personal learning/ productivity and for creating learning solutions for others. You can search the individual top ten lists that were contributed also.

The list ranks the top 100, comparing their 2008 rank with where they came in for 2007. No huge surprises at the top of the table, with del.icio.us and Firefox swapping positions this year at 1 and 2, and as expected the top positions are sprinkled with blog and wiki applications, search tools, and various communications tools such as skype for instance. Interesting to note that Twitter has risen to 17= from 43rd last year, showing how rapidly a relative newcomer to the social networking world can rise in popularity.

It’s when you get down the list a bit that there are some interesting applications that appear - for instance, Voicethread, an application for creating collaborative slideshows appears at 24=, PageFlakes at 31 and SecondLife at 41 - none of which appeared in the top 100 last year.

As you work down the list there are a number of applications that I’m not familiar with, many of which do things that other applications I already use do - all of which goes to demonstrate what a rapidly developing field the world of web2.0 and online education is.

I am encouraged to see that eXe has risen from 72nd place last year to 52=. Thanks to Jane for publishing her list again this year!

BTW - if the applications on Jane’s list aren’t enough for you, check out the list of applications in the OpenSocialDirectory - that should keep you buys for a few rainy weekends to come

Sorry - but I just don’t buy it.
Jane pointed me to Chitch.at, described as an educational network where teachers can share real course content, make free class pages, and develop interactive online assignments. Here’s a video which explains more about it.

Now the concept of a ‘lightweight’, flexible way to create, post and share course content sounds appealing - but the underlying design points to a pedagogy that I have problems with. Notice the section that begins… “The Web is great - in theory!”, and goes on to argue that while online environments such as blogs and wikis capture our (and our students’) imaginations, they are difficult to ‘teach’ because we can’t easily assign tasks, collect submissions or effectively grade student work etc. In other words (their words) these social web applications don’t “fit” the traditional classroom.

All of this sounds like a great justification for why we might want an online environment like Chitch.at- but hang on… if these applications are (as they claim) so good at developing critical thinking, engaging student interest and creating a sense of wonder etc, shouldn’t this suggest that we ought to be looking to change the nature of the “traditional classroom”??

The focus here is entirely on a pedagogy of setting tasks for students to complete - presumably tasks that essentially invite students to “guess what’s in the teacher’s head” since the implication is that there’s a specific response on which they’re then graded! A clear case of the pedagogy of assessment driving the pedagogy of instruction.

In 1915 John Dewey wrote in his “Constructivist Pedagogy” that effective learning occurs when…

• Student autonomy and initiative accepted and encouraged

• Teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses
• Higher level thinking is encouraged
• Students engage in dialogue with teacher and each other
• Students engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses
• Class uses raw data primary sources, physical and interactive materials
• Knowledge and ideas emerge only from a situation in which learners have to draw them out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them

In my experience these are exactly the sorts of learning experiences that many of these emerging social web applications enable and encourage. Have we really not learned anything in the past 90-odd years??

As if there aren’t enough of these around already - but it’s always fascinating to see where the new developments are. Lymabean has not yet been released, but you can watch an overview video of what appears to be a very pretty Flash-based interface.

The site has most of the features found on social networks today - profiles, friends, photos, videos, etc. and instant messaging is also built in and integrated with most of the features (drag and drop a photo into IM, for example). It’s interesting to see the differences in usability with a Flash interface - although it’s going to be a hard road for any new entrant of challenge the dominance of Facebook or Bebo and others that are already dominant in the market. Techcrunch observes that previous attempts to introduce a Flash based environment have not been successful.

Whether it does take off or not, the video clip is a great way of sharing understanding about what these social networking sites are all about and how they might be used - especially for anyone who doesn’t already have an account

Here’s a little gem that I came across this morning in my RSS feeds….

“Learn More” is a series of self-paced discovery entries for library staff interested in venturing out on the social web. Learn More has been developed by Steve Campion, the system trainer at a large public library system in the Pacific Northwest, USA.

Each post is meant as a short introduction to a different social website, tool, or concept. It might not be ground-breaking information to veteran readers of the blogosphere, but the writer hopes that each brief summary will act as a gentle nudge for newcomers to social networking.

The tutorials are very simple and written in a conversational style that make them accessible to most. I really enjoyed reading the “Meaning For Libraries” section in each tutorial, and wonder if the same thing could be done with classroom teachers in mind - at various levels of the school system.

Economist.com today kicked off a new Oxford-style online debate on social networking and the value it adds to the classroom.

This month’s debate proposition is: “The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.”

Our expert debaters are two leaders in education and technology, and will square off for three rounds of debate:

• CON - Michael Bugeja, Director of Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. The author of 21 books whose research is often cited by the New York Times, Dr. Bugeja was among the first to analyze the use of social networks (Facebook & Second Life) before their use by students and educators was widespread and well-understood.
• PRO - Ewan McIntosh, National Adviser on Learning and Technology Futures for Learning and Teaching Scotland, the education agency responsible for curriculum development, and a member of the Channel 4 Media Advisory Board. He writes about social media and learning for the Guardian and the BBC, speaks internationally and consults for organizations including the British Council, the RSA, General Teaching Council of Scotland, RM and Scottish Enterprise, advising on how social media can be harnessed for to improve learning. He blogs at http://edu.blogs.com

Guest participants will also contribute featured comments.

• Parry Aftab, Founder & Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
• Judith Krug, Directory, Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association (ALA)
• Ann Flynn, Director, Education Technology, National School Board Association (NSBA)
• Nancy Willard, Executive Director, The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use

Follow the Debates on Facebook

The Economist has launched a Facebook group for followers of the debate. If you’re already a Facebook member, feel free to join the group where you’ll find syndicated content and be able to interact directly with members of The Economist community, including some of the previous guest participants.

Here’s a short debate schedule:

• Tuesday, January 15 - Opening statements & floor opens to comments from public
• Wednesday, January 16 - Guest Participant, Parry Aftab, WiredSafety.org
• Thursday, January 17 - Rebuttals
• Monday, January 21 - Guest Participant, Judith Krug, American Library Association
• Tuesday, January 22 - Guest Participant, Ann Flynn, National School Boards Association
• Wednesday, January 23 - Closing statements
• Thursday, January 24 - Guest Participant, Nancy Willard, Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
• Friday, January 25 - Debate winner announced

Here’s a new feature for those who use Google Talk that should be of interest to teachers of foreign languages - 29 translation ‘bots‘ that can be added to Google Talk conversations. It all appears quite easy to use - for example, if you add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or download the Google Talk client for BlackBerry and use it as a pocket translator.

The Google Talk Blog explains that for more languages, just add any of the 29 other translation bots. They’re named using two-letter language abbreviations as “[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com”, and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

I had a bit of time over the weekend to explore some new web2.0 applications that I’ve become aware of recently (thanks to some of my contacts on Twitter)! Each of these provides a new and effective way to easily share video and/or audio messages via the web - replacing the need to go through the more complex process of creating audio and video files to upload or attach.

Springdoo is what the creators describe as the answer for a group of emotional and passion filled people who found it frustrating that email did not deliver so much of what they wanted to say, when asked to write down the key ingredients required for their “ultimate personal connecting solution”. With Springdoo you can record simple video messages for others to access - as well as search and view other people’s messages. It has many of the features we’ve come to expect from this sort of application, including the ability to email to a friend, comment, capture a still frame - and, the one I like about this, the ability to view the video clip on your mobile device!

SnapVine allows you to record voice comments and then attach them in a variety of ways, including adding your voice to photos and sharing them with friends, creating an audio blog entry - including from your mobile phone!, and sharing voice comments with friends in MySpace etc. SnapVine integrates with a number of social networking applications, including Bebo, Myspace, Facebook, Xanga and Friendster.

Seesmic is a fun and easy to use application for recording short video messages online. It’s only in ‘alpha’ stage of development at this stage, but looks promising and if you’re keen to try it you can register to become one of the alpha users. Thanks to Ewan Mcintosh for sharing this one and the test video he created!

Flixn is another online video creating tool with a simple three step approach to creating video blogs, video comments and even video emails to friends and family. Like SnapVine, Flixn integrates with other social networking software and allows you to upload video comments to MySpace, Blogger or eBay!