Betchablog

We may be just a couple of NYFBs, but I had the pleasure yesterday of catching up with Jenny Luca from Melbourne, author of the Lucacept blog. Jenny was in town with her friend Helen to attend a presentation by Garr Reynolds on how to do better presentations. We made tentative plans to catch up and fortunately things fell into place and we were able to actually meet up.

After the ridiculously difficult task of finding a parking spot, made all the more difficult by the fact that I left my wallet at home and so had no money to pay for even meter parking, I eventually found a legal parking spot only a short walk from where we could meet. Thank you universe.

Jenny is one of the refreshing voices in the Aussie blogosphere, with so much passion and enthusiasm for education and how technology can make it better. I was very keen to meet up and have a chat. After finally meeting on the corner of Grosvenor and George streets, I suggested we go take a look at the new Sydney Apple Store at King and George, just a few blocks away. We talked all the way up the street, into the Apple Store, up the stairs, and I think we talked the entire time we were there. Helen got into the shopping spirit and picked up a nice set of Bose speakers for her son’s Mac, but I think Jenny and I just talked the whole time.

Eventually we went over the road, found a little coffee shop in the Strand Arcade, and sat and talked some more. As Jenny and I observed numerous times, it really IS all about the conversations and although I love the intellectual to-and-fro of the blogosphere, there is something very nice about having a face to face conversation. Jenny has a lot of great insights and ideas, (despite her insistence at being a mere noob, her Clustrmap gives a different picture!) and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to catch up with her in person.

Heck, it’s even made me an even more LR.

Last Friday I had a fabulous day at the Why 2 of Web 2.0 seminar in Sydney, where the special guest speaker was Will Richardson.  Will was also ably supported by other speakers including Australians Judy O’Connell and Westley Field.

I was very keen to hear Will speak, after having read his blog for a while now and also having met in the occasional UStream backchannel.  He had lots of good things to say (which he kindly allowed me to record with my iPod so I may post up some audio snippets.)   I was fortunate to get a seat right at the front, thanks to Judy offering to let me share the powerboard at the front table so I could plug in my Mac.  I was also able to piggyback on the wifi service and browse the various sites that Will was referring to as he told the audience about them… quite a few really interesting sites in his list , most of which are now in my del.icio.us feed.

One of my colleagues from school also attend the event, and when I got back to school the next day I asked how he enjoyed it.  His reply was fairly lukewarm, with the comment that he thought a lot of the things Will was saying made him sound like a zealot.  Google says that a zealot is a “fanatically committed person“, or “one who espouses a cause… in an immoderately partisan manner“.

I don’t think my colleague used the term zealot in a particularly positive sense – I’m sure it wasn’t meant as a compliment.  Personally, if a zealot is a fanatically committed person then I think we need more zealots in education.  I also have strong beliefs about the nature of school and learning and think that we need to act quickly and radically if schools are to maintain any sort of relevance in today’s world.  I also think we need to be fairly drastic about making these changes, so I guess that makes me a zealot too.

Will gave a number of (what I thought were) powerful examples of how the world is changing.  He used some great examples from Friedman’s The World is Flat and Tapscott’s Wikinomics; examples that clearly show how much our schools are out of sync with the world we say we are preparing our children for.  In  particular, one of the stories that seemed to rankle a few listeners, including my colleague, was the one about a student who was given a research task by his teacher and how he approached this task.

The student found very little information about the topic, not even on Wikipedia. What would you do if you were this student?

Here’s what he did.  He created a Wikipedia entry using the limited information that he did know.  Over the next few days and weeks, the Wikipedia entry on the topic was edited, amended, added-to and improved by many other people.  All of their individual little bits of knowledge gradually built up the topic until there was quite a comprehensive article written about it.  The student then used this article to submit for his research project.

Apparently, the student’s teacher discovered what had happened and the student was awarded an F – a failing grade.  Being the zealot that he is, Will suggested that the student should have received an A grade.  This suggestion raised a few eyebrows…  in the afternoon discussion panel the suggestion that this kid would get an A for doing something like this was questioned by a number of people.  They suggested that the kid had cheated, had acted dishonestly, had not done the task, had rorted the system, etc, and therefore should have failed the task.  I think they are missing the point.

While I can see both sides of the situation, there is no way I would have failed the kid for doing this.  There may be more to the story than I’m  privy to, but on the face of it, failing a student for using their initiative in this manner makes no sense to me.    If I were an employer, I’d much rather give a job to a kid like this who knows how to find a solution in an innovative way, rather than a “rule follower” that just accepts that very little information is available.

It’s interesting that the teachers I’ve told this story to say “Oh, you can’t do that! That’s cheating!”, but the business people I’ve told the story to usually respond with a laugh and say “I want that kid working for me!”.  And really, this is the gap that the education world is struggling with so much.   The “real world” wants people who can find solutions in creative ways, who can innovate and work with teams to collaboratively find solutions to difficult problems.  The “education world” still seems focussed on measuring individual effort, rewarding those who follow the rules and stay inside the lines, those who rehash existing information rather than finding ways of creating new information.

Will spoke about many things, but I think this story was the most powerful example of the chasm between what the world expects of our children and what most school are prepared to deliver.  One wants to award an F, the other wants to award an A.

One of us is completely screwed up, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the zealots.

You can find the UStream recording from Will’s talk here, and his conference wiki here. 

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. 

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?

The Kiwis got there a few hours before us, but Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations have come and gone for another year. Linda and I caught the train into the city last night, along with more than a million other Sydneysiders, and watched $600,000 worth of gunpowder get launched above the harbour. As always, it was quite the spectacle. We got in there a couple of hours before midnight and wandered through Martin Place, then down George Street towards the Quay. The crowd was getting pretty raucous the closer we got to the harbourfront so we turned up Hunter Street and tried getting a spot at Mrs Macquaries Point but it was completely full. We kept walking all the way past Wooloomooloo, Garden Island and eventually found a decent vantage point in Potts Point, just below St Vincents School.

I took a little bit of video, as I promised I would on Twitter… here you go Jen Wagner! At the time of posting this, the Pacific, Australia, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have all already ushered in the new year. London is about 30 minutes away while Canada the Americas are still another few hours away yet. It’s a big world.

Anyway, Happy New Year and all the best for 2008, no matter where you may be in the world!

Tags: sydney, nye, 2008, australia, fireworks