October 2007

“Educating Leonardos” - multidisciplinary education

Helen speaks of the need for more creative thinkers, more innovators, and the need for schools/teachers to impart and encourage the joy of learning. She emphasises the new roles for teachers as facilitators, and the need to be inventive with the curriculum.

As far as attitudes are concerned, Helen speaks of the “open source attitude” - a positive attitude towards learning, developing, inventing, creating, sharing, hacking and innovating. A way to do this she asserts is cross-discipline or multi-disciplinary connections - for example bio-computing, and the development of organic machines. Helen advocates a managed approach to this, and spent some time talking about the future of education and the campus of the future.

Ewan McIntosh, talking about the need to explore emerging practice that matches the potential of emerging technologies - leading edge thinking, teaching and learning.

The 5 points he covered were

1. Audience - from classroom audience, or teacher as audience, to hundreds of thousands
2. Creativity - new publishing tools and options, animations, students sharing products online and for ipods and cell phones,
3. Differentiate - raising the bar; moving from page-based to digital media.
4. Authentic goals - authentic purpose and audience, leading to strong ownership and motivation.
5. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the teaching - an emphasis on old tools can be a barrier to innovative practice; computer games can make a difference.

Quote - “mobile phones need to come out of pockets and be on all day”

The conference is underway and I’m listening to Ewan, the first keynote speaker. Ewan is talking about digital holidaymakers. Audience members applauded when he gave his view on accuracy of digital immigrants/natives metaphor, no doubt due to the huge numbers of “older” teachers who are at the forefront of the digital innovations in their schools, and see the “digital natives” yet to catch up. Ewan ranges over flickr, youtube, blogging and more, posing questions about the time teenagers spend on creating online video to the time they spend on school activity.

Ulearn has started with a bang. Many teachers attended Pre-Conference workshops prior to the conference starting. Workshops were run on topics such as Inquiry learning, curriculum, Kidpix, Podcasting and Web 2 tools. I had a wonderful day with 20 switched on teachers ranging from Early Childhood, primary, secondary to tertiary. We spent the day looking at the importance of giving student voice in the classroom and the many ways you can help that happen. In the afternoon participants were given the chance to script and create their own podcasts and I thought I would share one with you.

Simon from Educating the Dragon created this vidcast inspired by the Show With Zefrank. Take a look for a bit of fun. This link will take you to podcast entitled “Can I go to Uloin?”.