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

I just read a great quote from Kim Cofino’s blog, Always Learning, as she was reflecting on the Shanghai Conference from last weekend…

“I didn’t realize before how much blogging (reading and writing in collaboration with others) would change my life - not just enhance my professional development like reading a journal article, but change my life - the way I think, the way I interact with people, the way I work, the way I look at the world. It’s impossible to understand the impact of these technologies unless you are using them yourself.”

I totally agree. Even before Web 2.0, I experienced the same thing, albiet on a slightly smaller and slower scale just through email forums and message boards. I’ve been active on mailing lists and forums since about 1994 and cannot imagine what it would be like to not be connected to others. Now, with blogs and RSS and Twitter and podcasts and all these other incredible tools, the fibres that forms those connections are just getting stronger and more intertwined. It really is life changing, because it affects more than just your day to day work. These connections and conversations change you from the inside out.

I know some incredibly dedicated and well-meaning teachers. They work hard, spending hours of their day planning and marking and preparing, and yet, I just think if they made even a small part of their day available for just connecting and conversing with other educators, reading the ideas of others, sharing their thoughts about those ideas, reflecting on what they read and write… it would totally turbocharge all the other great stuff they do. I’ve mentioned it to many people over the years, but so often hear back, “I don’t have time for that”.

I don’t have time NOT to. There is only just so much you can do when you work in a vacuum, and Kim’s right… it’s the networking and mind expanding that goes along with these technologies that can have such a huge impact on your effectiveness as an educator. Thanks for the great post Kim.

Tags: kimcofino, connectedness, web2.0

I just noticed that Betchablog has finally reached “comment tipping point”… I now have the same number of comments as blog posts!  (Well, until I publish this post - doh!)

According to His Edublogness, James Farmer, most blogs have far more posts than comments, so I’m pleased that there is some dialog starting to happen here and there are people willing to engage in the conversation with me.  Thank you!  It’s one of the things that make blogs so different to the old Web 1.0 way of thinking.

Tags: blogging, commenting

Just noticed that Karl Fisch from The Fischbowl blog has had his “Did You Know?” presentation updated to a newly revised version, thanks to some internet collaboration from Scott McLeod and a guy called XPlane who helped with the Flash animation.

Karl originally created this for his own school’s use last year and, as it mentions in the presentation, it was originally destined to be shown only to about 150 people.  However, it was shared on Karls’ blog, the edublogosphere picked up on it and pretty soon it had been distributed to over 5 million people.  Yes, we live in exponential times.  Watch it.  Use it.  Share it.  Go start some conversations…

The full story on this presentation can be found here.   Thanks for sharing Karl.

Last year I took part in a very exciting and innovative professional development initiative. I’m referring to the incredible K12 Online Conference. If you were also a participant last year then you’ll know how good it was. It you weren’t, then for goodness sake, don’t miss it this year!

This virtual conference is the brainchild of a group of educators (amongst them are Lani Ritter Hall, Darren Kuropatwa, Wes Fryer and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach) and is probably best explained by this short blurb taken from the K12 Online website…

The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! The 2007 conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. The conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.”

The presenters at the conference use all sorts of digital tools - screencasts, podcasts, vidcasts, downloadable presentations, live elearning tools, etc - to create their workshops. The topics for last year’s conference were diverse and fascinating, and included the use of Web 2.0 tools, creative uses of emerging technologies and of course they all had a strong pedagogical focus. The keynote speech was delivered by the influential David Warlick, and the presenters list read like a who’s who of the edublogging community.

To say that I came away with more ideas than I could use is an understatement.

I was also fortunate to be able to help out as a moderator with the final event of last year’s conference, “As Night Falls”, which was a 24 hour Skypecast session that chased the sunset around the globe, connecting educators in real time for a summary of their experiences. It was great to be able to get involved in that way.

The other terrific thing about this type of conference is that all the previous presentations are archived and kept, so they can be revisited at any time. However, there is a certain magic about participating as it happens, so don’t put it off. Highly recommended, give it a go!

Tags: k12online, k12onlineconference

Betchablog is officially a year old today. I was looking back through some old entries the other day and found the very first post written on the 17th August last year. I suddenly realised that a whole year had passed… Wow, how time flies! So much has changed in that 12 months, I can hardly believe it.

It raises the obvious question… “Why blog?” It seems that Betchablog has had 141 posts in 52 weeks, that’s almost 3 a week. It takes a reasonable amount of effort to consistently do something that often, so what’s the payoff?

I get asked about that a lot, and it’s usually with the implication that I must just have way too much time on my hands. On the contrary. I have way too little time to do all the things I want or need to do, but somehow through all of that, blogging has become a really integral part of who I am and how I express myself. There is something incredibly therapeutic about committing your vague, intangible thoughts into written words, crafted together to make some sort of sense (even if only to myself). Blogging has helped clarify my own position on many issues, raised my ability to “think out loud”, helped give me insights into things that I’d not thought about, and, I think, made me a better writer. The comments back on some of the posts I’ve written have been sometimes encouraging, sometimes devastating, sometimes insightful, but always welcome. The sense of community that has developed with other bloggers is something I really value too, and reading what others write is an equally important part of being a member of this world.

Writing your thoughts in a blog, where they become public, is so different to writing them in a private diary somewhere. For me, the public nature of blogging is where its true worth comes from. It’s the act of putting it “out there”, exposing your thoughts, ideas and opinions to a community of intelligent readers and writers, that makes it the powerful medium that it is.

Having said that, I don’t write for you. I write for me. I would do this even if there were no audience. (For all I know, there may not be!) People sometimes say to me, “who reads it?”. My answer is, “who cares?”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really nice to get feedback in the form of comments and to know that you may have said something that impacted on someone, but at the end of the day I don’t write for anyone else but me.

I encourage everyone I know to blog. Go on. You know you want to.

So why do YOU blog?

Tags: blogging, betchablog

I’ve been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately… not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It’s a pretty cool site and it’s easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff.

I was really interested to find that Apple’s totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too… as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the ‘Tube. It’s very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it.

As a test, I edited together this little production last night using some Mac vs PC ads I just happened to have laying about on my hard drive. The process is easy, they imported into iMovie very simply, the new workflow is interesting and newbie video editors will probably love it, and the whole thing was put together in a very short timeframe.

I thought it was fascinating to realise how many of these Mac vs PC ads have been made, and to see just how diverse they are.

Tags: youtube, imovie, nlve, web2.0