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A summary of a sesssion by Scott Wilson on how institutional processes can better support flexible learning (including comments from my CORE Ed collegue Richard Millwood in the embedded video). Tertiary institutions, particularly Universities, need to be seriously looking at this subject.

My wife is currently studying at a local University, that shall remain nameless, and is enrolled in a course that is advertised as a ‘Flexible delivery option’. It is about as flexible as lump of 2×4 - it lacks flexibility in almost every aspect, from the fact that they demand you attend courses from 8:30am in the morning to 5pm several days a month, to the heavily  prescribed content and ‘write the answers we want to hear, not what you think’ uncreative essay assessments.

The NMC today released the first in a new series of regional and sector-based Horizon Reports with the Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand.  The new series is a product of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education around the globe.

This volume is the first in a new series of regional reports, and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular.

In defining the six selected areas—Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments; Cloud-Based Applications; Geolocation; Alternative Input Devices; Deep Tagging; and Next-Generation Mobile—the project drew on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable leaders and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board probed current trends and challenges in post compulsory education as they uniquely are expressed in Australia and New Zealand, explored possible topics for the Report, and over several rounds of rankings and dialog, selected the final technologies.

The Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition (304K, 32 pp) is available now on the NMC website at:  http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report-ANZ.pdf The 32-page report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution.

Watching some late night news in my Seattle hotel room I saw a fascinating story about a young  boy named Ben Duskin, an enthusiastic gamer who suffers from lukemia. Early during his treatment, his doctor suggested he find ways to visualize his body healing. Ben and his mother talked about imagining his medicine as a Pac Man video game, eating the cancer cells.

Ben wrote to the Make a Wish foundation with his idea of creating a video game to help other kids endure their cancer treatments. The Make a Wish foundation were then approached by Eric Johnston, of the San Francisco-based LucasArts who worked hand-in-hand with Ben to design the game.

The result was the production of “Ben’s Game,” which became a reality in June 2004. The game is available free to download, and is available for Mac or PC. Downloading the game took seconds to complete, and is engaging once you start playing - I’ll look forward to trying it out with my resident games player when I return home

Another Ken Robinson video (this has since been taken offline - trying to track down another copy), thanks to Jedd for this link.  Similar thoughts to his TEDTalks video, but still worth a watch. I like his thoughts about moving from an industrial form of education back to one based on agricultural principles. Also, some good thoughts about the possible negative effect of standardised testing on the divergent thinking ability of children - perhaps somebody should recommend a visit from Sir Ken to the National Party.

I was playing through Twitter and took a second to check out the Flickr blog. Interestingly, there was a post about National Library of New Zealand becoming the 16th institution to become part of The Commons of Flickr. Historic images are now available from the National Library of NZ on Flickr. The title of the blog post, Sweet Suxteen, takes a gentle poke at the kiwi accent. Here is a video from the blog post that introduces exactly what this means:

I had a look at some of the images and was struck by how rugged New Zealand once looked. There are some beautiful photos here. These would be an interesting resource when comparing changes to the New Zealand countryside from the past to today. I was also interested in the photos of some of the ships that sailed around New Zealand in the 1880s. It would have been amazing to see a harbour filled with boats such as these.

I was looking at one wide angled image and noticed that there was a link to where the image was stored on the Timeframes website. The image there was zoomable so you could really investigate the finer details within the image. I think it is great to see more of New Zealand’s heritage being made available through the web.

After an arduous 16 hour journey involving three flights I’ve made it to Seattle, settling in at our hotel where the Microsoft School of the Future Conference is to be held.

I travelled with my CORE colleague, Marg McLeod, and Nils Beehre, NZ’s Microsoft in Education manager. Apart from Marg’s bag not arriving in Seattle with us (it’s since been located and delivered to the hotel) the trip went smoothly.

Once checked into the hotel I couldn’t help but play with one of the two Microsoft multi-touch tables that are available to use in the foyer - a great way to locate where you are in the city using the mapping software, or to browse highlights of the city by flipping through the photo album. With the two-touch technology these are easily enlarged and/or rotated to give the perspective or view you want.

I’m sure there’ll be lots more to see and play with at this conference once it is underway!

Spaces shape and change practice. Engaging, adaptable spaces energise
students, teachers and the community. Well-designed learning spaces
inspire creative, productive and efficient learning.

I’ve been working through this year with the staff of the new senior high school due to open at the beginning of next year in Albany. I visited them this week and was impressed by the way in which all the planning has come to fruition in terms of the (temporary) buildings that have been provided for them to begin the year in.  Lots of the thinking about the design of these spaces, and the way they will be used, has been informed by the thinking emerging from Victoria, Australia summarised in the publication titled Linking Pedagogy and Space by Dr Kenn Fisher, (2005) which I’d recommend as a worthwhile read. The approach taken by Fisher starts by exploring the teaching and learning principles and pedagogical approaches, then linking these principles and approaches to ideas about space and place summarised in the form of five ‘learning setting principles’. The publication is expertly presented, with case studies and illustrations of each setting.

Today I was made aware MCEETYA Learning online world report - titled Learning Spaces Framework, published by DEECD (formerly DET) in Melbourne. This framework captures much of the thinking of Fisher and others, laying out a set of principles for the design of learning spaces, but placing a special emphasis on the design of ICT-rich learning spaces - something that there hasn’t been a lot of material published on that I’ve found particularly useful to date.

So often we make decisions about the use of space and the need for technology in quite different parts of the brain, not necessarily linking them in the way they ought to be. This is particularly evident in the number of computer labs that continue to exist, and computers perched on desks at the back of conventional classrooms etc. The MCEETYA document captures a broad spectrum of thinking, and maintains a very future focused approach, summarising these ideas in a range of considerations that need to be addressed when planning for the use of existing space, or designing new spaces for teaching and learning. The think I particularly like about the publication is how it prioritises the need to articulate a shared vision for ICT in teaching, learning and administration in schools as the important first step in all of this. So often I see decisions being made as a directive of an over zealous ICT teacher, or the conservative school manager, and seldom as the result of focused, collaboratively developed and agreed upon statements of whole school beliefs and values.

Certainly, the team at Albany have followed this approach, and I’ll be following with interest the development of their teaching and learning programmes once their students arrive at the beginning of next year!

I have been thinking more and more about performance management and appraisal since the last time I wrote on this….

I really like the diagram below from Julia Atkin!

Many people find ICT (and other) learning stays stuck very much in the Guru Loop stage where they are doing things simply because someone else says it is a good idea, and they rely on others for stimulation and resources.  The fun bit starts when you are reflecting on practice and aligning things from different places in your professional learning network to create new things to do to make things even better for yourself and the children you teach.

I have shared this with our staff to encourage them to move beyond relying on me or any other person to tell them what to do.  Also to make the point that it IS ok to take the leap from following the tried and true to what you now know will make a positive difference for the children in your class.

The thing this diagram also highlights well is the stress and ‘ouch’/discomfort factor of moving from being told what to do to working it out for yourself…. but thats when it is really fun and exciting learning just begins!

blatently cut and pasted from Cult of Mac Blog:

Mac OS X is, and always has been, vulnerable to trojans.

Wanna keep your computer clean? Next time you’re surfing some random porn site and a pop-up tells you to “Install a codec” so you can watch the movies, it’s a good idea to click Cancel.

I must be computer illiterate as this clarified the difference for me! …. lol

• Lifelong learning can be thought of as elitist. The concept is that the individual will drive their own education and access opportunities but not that the government will provide those opportunities (as opposed to the policy of lifelong education). If this is the case then only those people who can gain access through their economic or social position will have access to quality lifelong learning. This brings up the whole question of equality.
  
• Lifelong learning can be linked with social control. If you accept the notion of lifelong learning then people accept they must adapt and change. This clouds out the other issue of questioning the direction of the change. Deleuze says that one of the features of societies of control is the idea of perpetual learning.
  
• Lifelong learning is essential in the 21st century because of the changing learning society spurred on by changes in science and technology.

Following in the line of research carried out in the mid 1990’s by Don Tapscott and in the early 2000’s by Diana and James Oblinger, the latest Digital Youth Research Report is the result of a three-year join research project by the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, involving 28 researchers and research collaborators, and represents a synthesis of the findings across 22 different case studies.

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher Mizuko Ito and her team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use. Like the Tapscott and Oblinger research, They found that social network and video-sharing sites, online games, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research shows that today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

For educators this report is a worthwhile read - there’s plenty of information in the report that will be useful to inform debates and discussions around appropriate use of these technologies as many schools are struggling to establish the worth of such activities as part of formal school settings. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important, illustrating how the digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. They claim that these activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.

Access to the full report and report summaries can be found here.

(Thanks to Sharon for pointing me to this report via Twitter)

The issue of open source and free software licensing is commonly referred to in many contexts these days - but often without a good understanding of what the differences are between the various open source and fee software licences. Andrew M. St. Laurent’ book, Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing, provides some useful background, and can be read online for free - all chapters are available as PDFs.

Chapter overview as follows:
Chapter 1: Open Source Licensing, Contract, and Copyright Law
Chapter 2: The MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses
Chapter 3: The GPL, LGPL, and Mozilla Licenses
Chapter 4: Qt, Artistic, and Creative Commons Licenses
Chapter 5: Non-Open Source Licenses
Chapter 6: Legal Impacts of Open Source and Free Software Licensing
Chapter 7: Software Development Using Open Source and Free Software Licenses

(Thanks to Jane for the reference, and to the O’Reilly Open Books project for making it available)

I love this image from Tony Ryans blog. He also shared it in his ULearn presentations …. it has so much to say at so many levels!

it reminds me of our school vision which is also visual rather than lots of words.

(note - link is to our new school website I am working on so is very much a work in progress.  If you go to here you will get to our public site.)

An article worth reading from Charles Handy:

Unexamined learning can turn out to be wasted learning, while those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Which is why wise organizations build in regular review sessions for their work groups, to help them spell out the lessons, good and bad, that they have learned from their recent experiences. The most fruitful appraisals, too, are those that focus on what has been learned during the year, rather than on grading performance. Leaders, in particular, I now believe, need to devote time and intellectual energy to reflecting on their experiences in order to crystallize what they have learned and can now add to their stack of knowledge.

I have been having interesting conversations recently with a number of people at school, in our cluster and online about appraisal and performance management. I see the two as VERY different!

Performance Management = people making changes to their practice and reflecting on what they have done so they have lessons they can imbed in their practice/s. Making practice better.

Appraisal = summative judgements about how good that practice actually is.

We all (should) learn from our practice in an ongoing way.  Few teachers simply bang their head against the brick wall of poor practice.  I don’t know any teachers, parents, principals who get out of bed each day thinking “whose life can I ruin today?”  We all do our best …

But do we learn from what we do?  The answer to that is very different for different teachers!  Some reflect deeply on their practice and endeavour to improve it step-by-step.  Others simply treat teaching as a technocratic activity where if they do the ‘right’ things kids will learn through some mystical and mysterious processes.  I want the deeply reflective ones in our school thanks.

The challenge for appraisal and pefomance management processes is capturing the learning.  What is different inside the teachers head and for their practice as a result of the professional learning that has taken place this year?  This is Teaching as Inquiry as described in the NZC …. ongoing action research about pedagogy for real.  We have developed a framework for this that is one page for any given objective/focus.

It is a cool time of the year for me having the discussions with each teacher about the things they have LEARNED.  A time to celebrate the successes and offer new challenges.  Acknowledge the challenges overcome and the learning steps taken.  What has been left behind, what has been reinforced, what has been adopted.

What professional learning is all about.