Digital Dialogues

Emerging Technologies for Learning - Vol 3

Becta - the UK Government's lead agency for ICT in education - has released their latest edition in the Emerging Technologies for Learning series (Volume 3).

Not surprisingly, they have again selected a diverse range of authors and issues. (If you haven't read Vol 1 or 2 - make sure you do!)

In the Foreword - Stephen Crowne, Chief Executive comments:

"... the adoption of technology in society is genuinely influencing expectations about where and how learning takes place. Educators will increasingly need to understand what these trends really mean and how to respond to related demand from learners. It will become increasingly important to understand how new technologies can enable rich, social, personalised and contextually-based interactions to support learning."

Yes indeed! And that's sooner than later....!

Diana Oblinger's (current President of Educause) opening chapter: "Growing up with Google - What it means to education", extends on her earlier works on the NetGeneration.
A few key points and implications from the chapter:

• students' consumer perspective of education as a commodity to be consumed, acquired, and accumulated
• the high value place on technology as a convenience
• students expect academic success without little academic effort
• more oriented to visual media - prefer to learn by doing rather than telling or reading
• identity online is a flexible concept - pseudonyms and avatars expand their identity
• the web is a medium for commenting, collaborating and creating
• they show no fear of technology - but digital comfort does not mean technology proficiency
• nor does it imply an appreciation of IP, privacy or security!

Wow - any of these issues ringing any alarm bells?
No - not yet? Then the implications for education outlined by Oblinger may:

"educational institutions have an obligation to help students cultivate those skills that learners have the most difficulty attaining on their own:

• judgement - the ability to distinguish the reliable from unreliable information
• synthesis - the capacity to follow the longer argument across multiple modalities
• research
• practice - the opportunity to learn by doing within authentic disciplinary communities
• negotiation - flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries to generate innovative, alternative solutions"

The challenges presented by these implications will have a fundamental effect on our practice as educators - how we design our courses, learning activities, and assessment tasks, even through to the philosophical approaches to education!
Coincidentally, for me, these implications relate directly to research and writings I'm doing on assessment. I'll be posting more about this shortly...

In the meantime - I'm going to let you ponder your own educational context and these comments from Oblinger - what does the future of education look like, in your context, through this framework of implications?

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Social Media - edition 3

Trevor Cook & Lee Hopkins have just released their 3rd Social Media: or "how we stopped worrying and learnt to love communication".
This is a really valuable introduction to social media in the organisational context - with an Australian perspective.
I have used the previous editions with small/micro business owners - they love it - it manages to provide enough, but not too much, information that allows them to consider the application of social media within their business strategies.

Now - if you're an organisational learning & development practitioner - pay attention!
This is NOT written for you... but...  I'd recommend you read this! If you are considering introducing social software into your learning environments, you need to understand how the business is framing their strategies. If you are going to get successful sponsorship from within the management team, then you need to view or re-frame your dialogue to present your business case in language that the business understands - so here it is... ! Read it - and learn!

Hey Trevor - perhaps next time we can include a learning landscape perspective too?? Some of us educators are doing rather amazing things that aren't being recognised by the social media tribes!

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Learning Landscape webinar series

LTUG is presenting a series of webinars for the first half of the year that focuses on the changing learning landscape and the use of social software for learning.

The first webinar will set the scene for the series:
The Changing Learning Landscape
Date: 27 March 2008, 4pm-5pm (Sydney time – daylight savings time)
Where: your computer - via webinar

The world of online collaboration for learning is evolving rapidly with social software (or Web2.0) providing new and exciting ways of developing ideas and educational opportunities.
I will discuss how to extend our scope in using the web in order to facilitate learning and address these important questions:

* What are people doing with these new tools, and how is this affecting learning practices?
* What do learning & development practitioners need to do to start bringing these tools into their own practices?
* How does this all affect learning design?

Free Online Tools for Learning
When: 17 April 2008, 10am – 11am (Sydney time - AEST)
Where: your computer - via webinar
Many online collaboration tools are free. Carol Daunt Skyring (LearnTel) will follow my session with an overview of the free online tools that are available for use for education & training. This will be a ‘helicopter’ view of the following tools:

* Blogs
* Wikis
* Online Communities/Forums
* Aggregators
* Social Sharing Sites eg Slideshare, flickr, de.licio.us, YouTube/TeacherTube
* Social Networking
* Micro-blogging

At the end of this session you will know how to access each of these tools. If you’d like support in setting them up, then please join one of our detail sessions following.

Set up your own.....
The following sessions will be 30 mins during which Anne or Carol will step you through setting up your own..... At the end of the session you will have an operational site/online tool.

Set up your own blog
When: 30 April 2008, 4pm (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own wiki
When: 6 May 2008, 10am (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own online community/forum
When: 15 May 2008, 4pm (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own aggregator
When: 21 May 2008, 10am (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own social sharing site
When: 27 May 2008, 4pm (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own social networking site
When: 4 June 2008, 10am (Sydney time - AEST)

Set up your own micro-blogging
When: 10 June 2008, 4pm (Sydney time - AEST)

Register here

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2 dot zero versus 2 point zero??

So what do you say?
Web "2 dot zero"?
Web " 2 point zero"?
Web "2 dot o"?
Web " 2 point o"?
or what about:
"2 point naught"?

Is the "point zero" group referring to decimal points? And surely is this the more correct terminology as it's referring to release versions.. right?
And are the dot zero/o mob coming from the dot coms tribe?
In which case they're referring to like a URL "dot com dot au".
I've been hearing lots of versions lately... and can't say that this is life threatening.. but just something to ponder over...
Personally - I'm a "2 point o" person... but I've notice a few Aussies in the social media field saying "2 dot zero" lately... weird..

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How the social web came to be .. Part 2!

And here it is! Part 2 from Trebor.... see below for part 1.
Again - Trebor, your timing is perfect! I'm in the midst of preparing a presentation for AITD this evening.... mashing up previous presentations, updating and re-framing.... but what strikes me particularly, is that much of the work I published in 2005 (based on research from 2002-2004) is still current, and I'm still saying the same things. Of course, some of the software applications are new - and they're exciting and enabling more functionality - but... the principles haven't changed.
In Part 2 - it highlighted for me that many of the popular software applications that are likely to be part of our daily lives (well, mine anyway) were around before O'Rielly coined the term "Web.20" in 2005! Which supports my argument - that much of what I'll saying at AITD tonight, isn't new!
What's different?
People and organisations are starting to listen!

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BlogTalk 2008 Announced

The 5th international BlogTalk conference on social software has been announced!
BlogTalk 2008
Where: Cork, Ireland
When: 3 - 4 March, 2008

   

"The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software community.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2008 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

* Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
* Social software in enterprise and educational environments
* The political impact of social software
* Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories:

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

* Academic
* Developer
* Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals."

Proposal submission deadline: November 16th, 2007
(and it's peer-reviewed - just in case you need the "brownie" points)!

It will coincide with start of the academic year and start of semester, but I'm sure the students won't mind a week of self-directed activities!!! ;-)
See you there!

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