In previous posts, I’ve mentioned how nice it is to occasionally convert some of our online connections into real ones.  This week I had the opportunity to again meet up with someone I’d only ever know through the blogosphere.

Susan Sedro is a teacher at the Singapore American School where she does ICT support for years 3, 4 and 5.  The first time I “met” her was during a group Skype call back in September last year and since that time we have read each other’s blogs, chatted occasionally on Skype and, along with Kim Cofino, even recorded an episode of Virtual Staffroom together.

I’d noticed that Susan was asking some very Aussie-centric questions on Twitter a while back, wanting to know the best places to go snorkelling on the Barrier Reef, etc, so I assumed she might be planning a trip down here.  We got in contact and I said if she was in Australia to give me a yell and we’d catch up.  Well, she yelled and we caught up.

So last Wednesday night, Linda and I met Susan and her partner Kent in front of the Orient Hotel at the Rocks here in Sydney.  We had a very pleasant evening wandering around the city, starting by catching a cab down to Darling Harbour, walking across the old Pyrmont Bridge to have an al-fresco dinner and a few beers at the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, followed by a walk through Darling Harbour, up Liverpool Street through the Spanish Quarter, left into George Street past Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral and all the way down to Wynyard Station.  It was a nice night for a walk and we had a good chat about all sorts of things, some education-related, and some not.

I made the offer to Susan and Kent to drop into my school, PLC, at some stage if they had time.  Fortunately, their plans for the next day had them catching a train that went right through Croydon so they took me up on the offer and popped in on their way.  We did a quick tour of some of the school, and even dropped into one of the computer rooms where Year 4 was having a lesson and had a chat with some of the kids.

My school runs a program called Transition Class, which caters for special needs students with fairly significant learning disabilities.  These students, about 20 of them, attend regular classes but also focus on learning a lot of life skills.  To help facilitate this, PLC bought a house next door to the school which they call Transition House and the kids regularly spend time there, learning very practical skills to teach them to look after themselves. One of the wonderful things these kids do every term is called Transition Cafe, where they host and manage a cafe luncheon for PLC staff… the menu is prepared, orders are taken and the food is cooked and served by the transition students and it’s a wonderful example of real life, relevant learning in action. Kent and Susan’s visit just happened to coincide with this term’s Transition Cafe event so of course they were invited to join us for lunch at the table reserved for the IT Services team.  We all had a very pleasant time sitting in the sunshine, chatting and being served by our wonderful transition kids.

I had to sneak off from lunch a little early as I had an IWB workshop I’d promised to run for our Creative Arts staff.  I left Susan and Kent in the capable hands of our IT Director, Chris Waterman, who escorted them over to meet me just as the IWB session was winding up, and we took another quick tour through The Croydon, an old pub that was bought by the school a few years ago and converted to our centre for technology and the arts, before eventually bidding them farewell as they continued on with their day.

Meeting IRL is a good thing… If you ever get the chance to meet up with colleagues you’ve only ever known through the network, I’d encourage you to do it.  It was terrific to meet Susan and Kent, and I’m hoping to be able to take them up on their offer to catch up in Singapore one day.

I think it would be rather nice to sit and share a beer or two at Raffles Hotel. 

It’s been quite a week in the educational blogosphere…

A lot of the chatter (or rather, twitter) has been focussed on the sudden forced closure of Al Upton’s classroom blog by his Year 3 students.  The closure was requested by DECS, the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services in response to a parent who was concerned about their kid being exposed to the dangers of the Internet.  Al’s kids, well known on the web as the “miniLegends”, have been blogging successfully for the last few years, and were just starting a new project where their blogging was being mentored by other teachers around the world. In theory, it sounds like a great idea… kids with a passion for writing being connected with other educators all over the world willing to help these kids with their writing, offering critique, advice, suggestions, support and generally acting as a volunteer tutoring service at no charge.

Their blogging came to a screeching halt last Friday however, when Al received a cease and desist notice from the Department, who clearly have their heads in a very dark place.  It’s a bit of a long story, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been part of several very late Skype chats this week with a number of high profile Australian teacher-bloggers who were close to the real story and keen to talk about the situation and what it means for education. Al is being quietly philosophical about the whole thing, but is also quietly annoyed.

The story of why the blog was shut down is well documented elsewhere, so I won’t delve into it in depth here.  Just suffice to say that the South Australian education department has not done a great job of handling the public relations fallout as a result of this.

Here we have a situation of a world class educator willing to lead his students in an authentic, real-world writing task, developing their passion for learning and writing, along the way observing every required protocol for getting the appropriate permissions and authorities from parents, and then finding that the whole shebang can be shut down by one paranoid complaint from someone who clearly doesn’t get it…   Either way, the kids were punished for no good reason, Al was made to endure scrutiny that he ought not have had to, and a great project has been marred.  To get a feel for how the world responded, have a browse through the nearly 200 comments on what currently remains of the MiniLegends blog…

Apparently the big problem was that the miniLegends were going to be in contact with (over the Internet) other adult educators.  The paranoia that surrounds this idea that kids should not have contact with adults like this is, quite frankly, insulting to the adults. It insinuates that adults cannot be trusted, that danger is everywhere, that children should trust nobody.  The psychological mistrust and fear such an attitude engenders far outweighs the real risk.

It’s especially ridiculous because while all this was happening here in Australia, the TED conference was taking place in Monterey, California, where one of the speakers was Dave Eggers.  Eggers presented a talk about an amazing project where he has been connecting school kids with professional writers who volunteer their services for free to help kids with tutoring.  The project, called Once Upon a School, is absolutely awe inspiring and has spread to a number of other states now wanting to develop similar grassroots programs.

What I find so paradoxical, is that while Al Upton is getting shut down here in Australia for wanting to connect his students to willing adults eager to help the kids write better, Dave Eggers is on the other side of the world getting a standing ovation, winning a TED prize, and starting a grassroots movement to help kids by doing more or less the same thing.

It’s a funny old world.

One of the really cool things about being a globally connected teacher is the opportunities to develop relationships with other like-minded educators. As I’ve said once or twice before, learning is a conversation and as we start to engage in that conversation it continues to feed our need for ongoing learning. Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as some still-useful “old skool” technologies like Skype, email and mobile phones means that we can be incredibly connected to each other if we choose to be.

I started hanging around online communities a long time ago; in fact, as a teenager I was a geeky kid with a Citizens Band radio and used to sit in my room late at night having conversations with lots of people from all over Sydney and beyond that I mostly never met. (I say “mostly”, because I did actually meet a few of my CB buddies and became quite good long-term friends with some of them) When I got into computers I remember the excitement of logging onto the old fashioned BBSes (bulletin boards systems) and posting disembodied text threads back and forward with other users… the technology was the exciting part and it was easy to overlook the fact that these invisible “users” were real people just like me. Ah, good times.

As online communities started springing up all over the place in the mid 90s, I joined lots of them. Forums, discussion boards, IRC chat and IM… what these tools have always facilitated is conversation, which is critical to feeling connected and engaging with ideas. Occasionally, I have had the opportunity to connect with people from these lists IRL (in real life). I remember the first time I ever met someone IRL from the OzTeachers list… I was going to Canberra on a business trip and since I had engaged in many interesting exchanges with a Canberra based teacher-librarian called Barbara Braxton, I emailed her offlist to suggest that I drop in and have a look around her school. It’s a really nice experience to meet someone IRL whom you have only ever known virtually, and Barbara spent a good hour or so giving me a grand tour around her school.

Not long after that I had to go to Perth to run some workshops so I contacted another OzTeacher from Fremantle, Bryn Jones. I met Bryn at his place and then he and I went for a few beers down on the Freo docks and shared a few stories and ideas about education and life in general. Since then, I’ve met a number of other people from the OzTeachers list, including Adrian Greig, Fiona Banjer, Kerry Smith, Mal Lee, John Pearce and others. While being a member of an online community is a great thing, being able to put a face to the name and get to know someone in real life adds a wonderful extra dimension.

A few days ago I noticed on Twitter that Barbara Dieu from Brasil was visiting Sydney. I tweeted a quick G’day and said that maybe we should get together. Barbara thought it a good idea, so I tried to round up a few other Sydney bloggers to join us. In the end, it just ended up being the infamous Judy O’Connell from the heyjude blog, so the other night Judy, Barbara and I met up for dinner at a little café in Newtown. (The same café where Judy, Westley Fields and others had dinner with Alan Levine on his recent trip to Sydney)  It was really neat to meet IRL like this… I’d met Judy briefly at a conference a few months prior, and Barbara and I had exchanged a few emails when we almost presented a session together with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai last year, but to actually get together for a drink, dinner and some great stories just adds a very special dimension to the online relationships that Web 2.0 enables.  (Even as I wrote that last sentence, it really hit me just how amazing these connections are and how much connectivity comes out of what seem to be fairly tenuous links… I guess that’s the strength of weak ties.)

As we sat chatting we marveled at the ease with which tools like Twitter and Skype enabled us to make connections and then organise and coordinate an event like this, but the real lesson that I took from the experience was to remind myself that these networks we create are NOT about computers and technology, they are about PEOPLE. Especially for those others who just look on at what we do, who see us spending lots of time in front of a computer, it very easy to overlook the fact that we are not spending all this time just tapping on a keyboard and interacting with bits and bytes, chips and circuits… we are interacting with real, flesh-and-blood, honest-to-goodness people.

Of course, if any of you are ever in Sydney then we should meet up.  I know this great little café in Newtown…

There are two ICT trade show events that I’d love to attend - NECC in the US and BETT in the UK. I’ve probably left it a bit late to attend BETT (it starts in a week or so), but I’m seriously considering attending the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio Texas. After hearing all about it for the last few years I’ve been curious and interested to attend a NECC event, and the 2008 event just happens to fall conveniently in the midyear Australian school holidays (where I potentially have a full three weeks off!)

One of the motivators for attending this year is thanks to the amazing connections I’ve made with so many educators throughout the US and Canada via tools like Twitter and Skype. I feel like 2007 has been the year of expanding my own personal learning network and I’m keen to get to an event like NECC to meet up with people in real life that I feel I’ve come to know through these virtual spaces. Besides, last years Bloggers Café sounded like a really fun thing to be part of and I like being part of fun things!

I noticed that there is a study tour being organised here in Australia that takes a detour via New Zealand and Silicon Valley to get to San Antonio and it’s looking like it might be a good use of some pre-tax dollars. I need to have a chat with my new school to see how this might fit in with their professional development plans, but regardless I think I’d like to head over to Texas and be part of it anyway.

The study tour details can be found at http://www.ictev.vic.edu.au/event/2008_ACCE_NECC2008_Study_Tour.htm, and here is a part of the blurb…

Spend time with colleagues in New Zealand, visit Apple in San Fanscisco, Dell in San Antonio, have small group time with key international educators, enjoy the celebration of ICT with 15,000 like-minded educators, receiving briefings from ISTEs key people, COSNs leaders, ISTEs international representative, meet and work with other international IT educators and enjoy two weeks immersed in technology in education.

So, fellow Aussies, whaddya reckon? Who else is thinking about going? And what about my American friends… twist our arms a little! It wouldn’t take much!

Tags: necc, sanantonio, ict, texas, studytour

It’s cool to see just how our networks of connectivity are letting us find each other so easily and spontaneously, and the conversations that are evolving out of those connections.

While checking my mail tonight, my Twitter goes off. It seems that Jeff Utecht in China is hosting a chat session using something called Wiziq. A number of Twitterers are talking about it. I’m intruiged, but I didn’t have Jeff on my Twitter list so I carry on with what I was doing. More conversation tweets out about this session, and I’m following along vicariously through everyone else’s Twitters. Pretty soon I see another tweet from Kim Cofino (from Bangkok, Thailand) talking about how she’s chatting with Graham Wegner (from Adelaide, Australia) and Chrissy Hellier (from Napier, New Zealand). By this stage, I feel like the party is going on without me, so I decide to have a guess at Kim’s Skype name and do some gatecrashing.

Next thing I’m in a text chat with Graham, Kim, Chrissy and Susan Sedro (Singapore). I suggest we try going to voicecall, and there is some concern over how well that will work. I suggest that we won’t know till we try it… “use it till it breaks”, I suggest.

So we move to voice on Skype, and it’s all good. Poor Graham got shafted as his computer didn’t have a microphone, so he follows along on text chat for a while. Hmm, we start to wonder how many people we can get in here before we break it? Only one way to find out…

I spot Allanah King (Nelson, New Zealand) online and drag her in to the chat (When I say I dragged her in, I don’t mean that she was unwilling at all… on a Mac you literally drag someone’s icon into the chat window to add them to the call) So now we have five.

It’s early morning in east coast USA by this time, and my friend Janet Barnstable (Oak Park, Illinois) pops up on Skype… drag her in too. Carolyn Foote (Austin, Texas) comes online, so in to the chat she goes. Sharon Peters (Montreal, Quebec) appears, and so we drag her in too. This is fun!

We still haven’t broken it, and apart from a bit of background noise and a couple of scratchy bits, Skype is holding up remarkably well. We need more!

Lisa Durff (Maryland) and Robin Ellis (Pennsylvania) appeared online and also got dragged in, although not at the same time, so the most we had online at any given moment was nine.

This was tons of fun… just being able to spontaneously pull a chat together like this is very cool. We had 10 people, from 6 countries and 5 timezones, all chatting away together. As the only male in the group I feel like we maybe need to balance the numbers up a little next time… I tried to drag Jason Hando (Sydney, Australia) in the call, but he must have been away from his computer at the time.

Thanks everyone for jumping in to the call and sharing like that. It was nice to connect some voices with some of the names I recognised. We must do it again some time.

Sorry to be picking on Kim Cofino so much lately, but she’s blogging like a woman possessed! Kim just twittered about a post written by Struan Robertson, one of her school admin team at the school where she works in Thailand. It’s a great post Struan (who incidentally, started blogging after the Shanghai Conference on the weekend - good for you!)

Given all the talk over the last few days about connectedness and how our networks of like-thought are linking us all together globally, this paragraph really jumped out at me. For those that may not know, Kim is an American teacher who was working in Malaysia until last year and now works at an International school in Thailand. And how does a school in Thailand find talent like Kim?…

“I was also amazed at the impact of blogging. We met and hired Kim Cofino last year through blogging because we already knew how/what she thought. Are we “inventing” a new way to run our HR Dept.? We hire people because of how they think, independently of what “smart” things they write on their CVs? How could that impact international school job/recruiting fairs? Kim came up to me on Saturday at the conference and excitedly told me how Will Richardson (Weblogg-ed) wanted to meet her. Why? Because he follows her blog (Always Learning) and wanted to put a face to the mind, not a “name to the face”. How different is that? Justin and Dennis saw Jeff Utecht (The Thinking Stick) from Shanghai Amercian School and greeted him like an old friend. When I asked Justin how long they had been friends, he replied that this was the 2nd time they had met. In other words, because they read each other’s blog and know how the other thinks, they are great virtual and real-life friends. Whoa!!!”

It’s pretty amazing when you think about it. I remarked to someone today that if I was after advice on a particular educational question or issue, I would be far more likely to reach out to my network of connections - people I’ve mostly never met face to face - for an answer than I would even to my local colleagues at school. I mean, I work with nice people and I like them a lot, but none of them are as connected, as switched on, as forward thinking as the people at the other end of my networks…

I was surprised a few weeks ago when I had a phone call from a leader of a school here in Sydney who asked me if I would be willing to run some technology integration sessions for his staff. He wanted me to just come along for the day and “expand their minds” with regard to new media, Web2.0 and how technology was impacting 21st century education. Naturally, I said yes, and was really excited about it… but what floored me was when I asked him how he happened to come into contact with me… where did he get my name from? “Your blog”, he replied. Wow.

I’ve actually quit the teaching profession twice now, leaving to do other things outside of education, because there have been times when I’ve really doubted my ability as a teacher. But I keep coming back to it, certainly not because of the money, but because there is no other calling that makes as much of a difference as teaching and no other time in history where I feel it’s more important to be a part of it.

Tags: kimcofino, jeff utecht, struan robertson, connectedness, learning2.0

My good friends Brian and Wendy picked me up from the IWB conference and took me to stay with them in Brisbane. They used to live in Sydney and we got to spend lots of time together, but I haven’t seen them much since they moved… so it was great to see them again.

They took me to see Riverfire, a huge fireworks spectacular on the Brisbane River. It really was pretty spectacular. I took a bunch of photos and made a little slideshow, then put it on YouTube, then linked it here. Hope you like it.

Tags: riverfire, brisbane, fireworks

At the IWB Conference on the Gold Coast today I met up with a bunch of teachers from the OzTeachers mailing list community, many of whom I have known for years but only met this weekend for the first time. What an interesting world we live in… we rounded up as many of them as we could to pose for a group photo in from of Bryn Jones’ infamous “iVan”.

Standing, left to right, it’s Margo Metcalf, Val Macauley, Bryn Jones, Mal Lee, Sue Green, Fiona Banjer and Kim English. In the front is myself and John Pearce. Kel Hathaway, Sue Burvill-Shaw, Adrian Greig and AnneMarie Loi were at the conference too, but we couldn’t find them for this photo unfortunately…

It was a great conference, and I’ll blog more about it later, but for now I just wanted to say G’day to all the OzTeach members I met today… it was great to put a face to the names!  Thanks also to all those nice people who came up to me and let me know that they either read this blog, or listen to The Virtual Staffroom. It’s really great to make real world connections.