If you read blogs about education with any sort of regularity you will no doubt recognise the name Will Richardson.  Will’s blog, Weblogg-ed, has become somewhat of a keystone in the edublogosphere, not just for the things he writes about and the thinking he does about education in the 21st century, but also because he is just so darn prolific!

Thanks to the jungle drums of Twitter, I was really excited to hear that Will is coming to Australia to deliver a talk entitled The Why 2 of Web 2.0.  I don’t know Will personally at all, but we have bumped into each other a few times in various chat rooms and UStream sessions.  He was one of the founding ideas-people behind the global K-12 Online Conference (although his commitments at the time required him hand it over to others to run).  His has been a seminal voice of the blogosphere for a long time, having written several books on blogging and the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom, spoken at conferences all around the world.  Will is pretty well respected in the edublogging world.

Given all that, I’d certainly like to meet him and hear what he has to say.

If you are interested in education and the way it applies to 21st Century learning, then try to get along to either Brisbane (May 7) or Sydney (May 9).  I’ve already booked my ticket!

No doubt some of us Sydney bloggers will get together and try to get together with Will while he’s here.  How about you?   Join us?

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…

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother’s Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work.

In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task… it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I’d try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do).

They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written response as usual, but many said it was really useful being able to hear the task explained again from home. After they submitted the written task, which I thought they mostly did pretty well, I got them to record some of their responses as audio files which we uploaded to Voicethread along with their photo. This ability to upload audio to Voicethread instead of having to record it directly onto the page is a feature of a Voicethread Pro account, which is available to educators at no cost. I found it made it so much easier to collect the audio comments, especially since this class is not in a room with computers. I use my MacBook Pro to record their audio to QuickTime, convert it to MP3 using QuickTime Pro, snap a photo using Photobooth and then I do the uploading after class or whenever it’s convenient.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some of their observations so far… if you want to leave an encouraging (moderated) comment for them that would be wonderful…

It will be interesting to see if the quality of their speaking and recording changes once they realise that they have an audience…

PS: Thanks to @nzchrissy via @alannahk for pointing me to the solution to embedding these Voicethreads into the blog like this. Nice!

Wow…  I looked in my email today and there was a note saying that Betchablog has been nominated for a 2007 Edublog Award in the category of Best Teacher Blog. I think there are probably a whole lot of teacher blogs that are a whole lot better than anything I could do, but I’ve still had a big smile on my face all afternoon!

Of course, you can’t take yourself too seriously (especially with something as potentially vacuous as your own blog!) but it certainly is a very nice feeling to be at least nominated for an Edublog Award.  As I’ve said several times, the real reason I write this blog is for myself as a way to “think out loud”, so to think that someone else would have taken the trouble to nominate it to even be considered is very humbling, especially when I look at the impressive company I’m sharing the list with! Thanks whoever did it!

And just to top it off, it seems that the Virtual Staffroom Podcast has been nominated for Best Educational Use of Audio.

It’s a nice way to start my week.  Remember, vote early, vote often!! 

I was invited by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to contribute some thoughts to a session at the Texas Tech Forum today in Austin TX. It was very nice to be asked, especially when I found that I was in the company of such respected educators as Terry Freedman and Emily Kornblut. The topic for conversation was Virtual Communities for Professional Development and Growth, where all three of us had been invited to share a few minutes talking about how we use virtual networks to support our own learning.

Unfortunately, my audio stream was largely unusable and we had to abandon it before I really got started. Seems that the trans-Pacific bandwidth gods were not smiling this morning (or was it David Jakes using all the bandwidth in the next room playing with Google Earth? Hmm, we’ll never know)

Nevertheless, here’s the brief outline of what I would have said, or something very much like it…

If you accept that Learning is a Conversation, and that some of the most powerful learning can take place in the process of conversing and exchanging ideas with others, then setting up ways to have as many of these conversations as possible seems like an obvious thing to do.

How many would agree that some of the most powerful “take aways” from many conference events come from not just what you hear from the stage, but from the informal conversations you have over lunch, in the corridors, etc? There is great power in those conversations. It might be easy to think that the people on the stage at conferences have the knowledge and that if we simply listen to them we will get wisdom, but the truth is that sometimes it just doesn’t work like that, and even if it does, most of those ideas gather far more momentum once we start to internalise them through further conversation with others. Ideas beget ideas, one thing leads to another, and you often find some of the best, most useful ideas come to you not from what was said by a speaker, but from things that came to to you as a result of further conversation about what was said.  (by the way, the same logic applies in classrooms too!)

So if we accept that conversations are powerful learning tools, then how can we encourage more of these conversations?

If we limit our notion of learning to the “official” channel - the teacher, the textbook, the syllabus - we miss so much. Yes, learning happens at school, but what about outside school? Yes, learning happens in the classroom, but what about outside the classroom? Yes, learning happens in the act of “being taught”, but what about when we are not “being taught”?

Our schools system implies that when we ring the bell to signal the start of a class, we are really saying that the learning starts… wait for it… now!  And at the end of the lesson we ring it again to say the learning now stops. Ok, school’s over, you can all stop learning now. Until tomorrow.

Is creativity important in education? If you’re not sure, I suggest you watch the video by Sir Ken Robinson, or read the report “Are they really ready for work?” Yes, I think creativity is important. So, if we acknowledge that creativity in education is important, then how can we teach kids to be creative if we continue to focus on just regurgitating standard answers to standard questions, year after year. Because if it’s only about learning pre-defined content then you don’t need creativity, and you don’t need conversation. Learning in messy and there is no point extending our thinking into new and creative areas if we aren’t committed to that notion, because that just muddies up all those nice clean facts we have to remember.

Papert said that the one really valuable skill for a 21st century learner is that of being able to “learn to learn”… To be able not just to know the answers to what you were taught in school, but to know how to find the answers to those things you were not taught in school.

So how do virtual communities fit into this? They are an obvious and convenient way of extending conversations with other likeminded people, no matter where (or when) in the world they might be. Once you establish the right communities - ones that work well for you - you have an amazing brains-trust to tap into, to bounce ideas off, to share with, to give to, to take from, to argue with, to feel validated by, to learn from, to teach to… once established, you have a powerful 24/7/365 mechanism for generating creative thoughts.

Getting to the point, the tools I personally use to generate my own personal learning networks - my own virtual communities - consist of…

• Email lists - yep, you heard me… good old fashioned, asyncronous email lists. They still have a useful place and for many people are a great introduction to online communities.
• Web Forums - same thought as email lists. In fact forums are really just email lists without the email. Great for specific topics and threaded discussions that gets archived.
• Blogs - wonderful public and private thinking space. You really have to formulate your ideas in clearer ways in order to write them down, so blogs are great for really figuring out your stance on things. And the fact that blogs become so interlinked, with commenting and cross-reading between other blogs. They are like “idea pollination”, only without the allergic reaction.
• Wikis - great for collaboration, which is another way of saying conversation really. Great for group projects, great for post conference wrapups (extending the conversation). Just great.
• Podcasts - some of my most powerful learning takes place through listening to podcasts. And when I decided to start my own podcast and began to have real conversations with people… wow, that certainly turbocharges the learning experience.
• Twitter - so much has been written about Twitter recently. It’s live, it’s immediate, it’s awesome, but you won’t get it until you try it.
• Skype - My favourite tool for conversation. It encourages quality conversation like no other.
• Ning - Sometimes the fact that there are so many Ning communities makes it hard to focus my attention in the one place, but certainly a great tool for building communities around a central theme.

So there you have it. Some of my favourite virtual community tools and some of the rationale behind why I use them. At the end of it all, I think belonging to the right combination of communities has the potential to improve what you do… not by a small amount, but by an exponential factor. Tapping into communities increases the quality of your thinking - not by 5-10%, but rather by doubling or tripling your creative flow and understanding.

If you doubt it, just try it and see. Then leave a comment and we can have a conversation about it

Tags: community, web2.0, techforum

I occasionally feel a little guilty. Although I am very much committed to the idea that technology should be integrated, no, more than that, embedded, into what happens in a classroom on a day-to-day basis, the truth is that I have spent many years teaching computing as a discipline in its own right. And I have to keep telling myself that that’s ok, that there are still many kids who have a deep interest in technology for the sake of technology and find the very nature of computing highly engaging as a stand alone topic. So I’m cool with that. It’s ok to be a geek.

I believe one mark of a good teacher is to be able to take complex ideas and simplify them without making them simple. For example, there are a couple of concepts in the realm of computing that are not really all that hard to understand but can be very hard to explain. Binary numbers can be one. Vector graphics another.

So I was really impressed when I saw VectorMagic, a somewhat geeky (yet very cool) web app put together by James Diebel and Jacob Norda from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I blogged a couple of thoughts about EPS files and vector graphics the other day and in the comments I was pointed to VectorMagic by Kathy Nann. What an amazing tool! Thanks Kathy!

I won’t blather on about the need for vector graphics and when you should use them… I blathered enough about that in that other post, so go read that if you dare.

What VectorMagic does is to take a bitmapped image (jpg, gif, bmp, etc) and trace the shapes contained within them in order to to convert them into vector outlines. This gives a remarkable crispness to the image at any resolution. Vector images don’t get blocky and full of artifacts as they get bigger. They just recalculate how to draw that shape a bit bigger using a nice sharp edge. I’m so glad I found this tool and I know I will get lots of use out of it. (Well, maybe not lots, but just knowing its there and what it can do makes it all worth it.

But the other thing that really struck me is just how good this sort of application is as a teaching tool. Because of the way it steps through the process and how it asks the user for questions about the image, it makes it so much clearer as to the real differences between bitmap and vector graphics. It even places them next to each other at the end, and lets you zoom and pan in real time to inspect the two image types. Visually, this is a really powerful way to learn about a concept that can be otherwise quite nebulous and hard to explain, and after using Vector Magic to convert a few images it would be hard NOT to understand the difference.

And it got me thinking about just how much we can use the the intuitive and malleable nature of software to assist us in explaining and investigating tricky ideas. Programs like VectorMagic are amazing in the way they can be used to visually demonstrate the bitmap/vector concept. Trying to explain sound waves to junior students can be hard, but when theses students can create, see and manipulate waveforms directly using Audacity it makes it much more concrete. Playing whatif games with spreadsheets, tracking data visually using Gapminder, directly manipulating the globe with Google Earth or creating 3D models with SketchUp… these tools make it almost trivial to convey what used to be challenging and hard-to-grasp ideas.

All of this should pave the way for us to help kids come up with better questions, and make better use of this new information. I’m going to try harder to make these tools do the jobs that they are good at, so that I can spend more quality time working with kids on the thinking skills that really matter.

Tags: tools, vector, higherorder, thinking, software

Another fascinating video made by Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. Michael was responsible for the very viral “The Machine (Us)ing Us” which clearly made the point about the folksonomic nature of Web 2.0 and how the techniques of tagging and aggregating are causing us to rethink the way we look at information.

This new video was made by getting his class to create and conduct a survey on issues of relevance to them. They used Google Docs to create a collaborative document in which they gathered and refined ideas about questions, issues and concerns they had about the way their education was structured. Once the survey was designed they collected and collated the data to arrive at some of the statistics you see presented in this video. Interestingly, the video itself was shot in a single 75 minute lesson. I found it quite compelling.  I was also struck by the quote from McLuhan talking about the “information scarce” mentality of the 19th century model of schooling… back in 1967!  That’s 40 years ago, and in many places nothing has really changed.

A second new video created by Wesch called Information (R)evolution is also floating around the net at the moment, and is also worth checking out.

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