So the blog's been pretty quiet, I haven't blogged much since the summer. I've been sharing stuff in a number of my other online spaces and I figured it was time for an update so here's what I've been up to ...



All the workshops I did last year in my day job are housed on my Sr. Years ICT wiki.




This year I'm doing a similar job in the French sector. My new wiki is called Litteratie avec les TIC. It has some content in both languages.




My Slidespace is where I share almost all my presentations; all of them that aren't housed on wikis.




I've made a few of them into "slidecasts" (slideshow+podcast) three of which are below:




I've Got 5 Minutes







 Teaching Interdependance v3




I've been slowly growing my YouTube channel. It has some instructional screencasts and a couple of presentations including my Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference cut up into three bite sized parts:






5 Minutes To Make A Difference - about 5 min










Teaching (a pedagogical framework) - about 8 min












The full uninterrupted Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference, called interSections, is available on my blip.tv channel - about 25 min












I've been sharing lots of stuff via my flickr account; I'm trying to keep up with taking at least one photo a day and cross posting them to my photo blog. As I read interesting things I've been trying to get better at designing visual learning objects by mashing up interesting images with interesting quotes. I've been sharing them in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change photo pool and in two photo sets, one in English and the other en français. (I've got some catching up to do with my French flickr set.) Everything is licensed under Creative Commons so feel free to reuse them in any way you like.





















Some of my workshops housed on wikis are:




SMARTen Up! (how to use an IWB effectively in the classroom)




All Things Audio (hands-on educational podcasting workshop with my buddies John Evans and Rob Fisher.) It's also available in French as Toutes choses audio (I flew solo on this one. John and I are planning to make it available in Spanish and German at the upcoming B.Y.T.E. Conference at the end of February.)




Gettin' Googley (an introduction to select Google Tools in education)




I also have a presentations wiki for other workshops I've done but it really needs some cleaning up. If you don't mind the mess you can poke around.




And finally, here are some of the varied spaces you can connect with me online.

So the blog's been pretty quiet, I haven't blogged much since the summer. I've been sharing stuff in a number of my other online spaces and I figured it was time for an update so here's what I've been up to ...



All the workshops I did last year in my day job are housed on my Sr. Years ICT wiki.




This year I'm doing a similar job in the French sector. My new wiki is called Litteratie avec les TIC. It has some content in both languages.




My Slidespace is where I share almost all my presentations; all of them that aren't housed on wikis.




I've made a few of them into "slidecasts" (slideshow+podcast) three of which are below:




I've Got 5 Minutes







 Teaching Interdependance v3




I've been slowly growing my YouTube channel. It has some instructional screencasts and a couple of presentations including my Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference cut up into three bite sized parts:






5 Minutes To Make A Difference - about 5 min










Teaching (a pedagogical framework) - about 8 min












The full uninterrupted Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference, called interSections, is available on my blip.tv channel - about 25 min












I've been sharing lots of stuff via my flickr account; I'm trying to keep up with taking at least one photo a day and cross posting them to my photo blog. As I read interesting things I've been trying to get better at designing visual learning objects by mashing up interesting images with interesting quotes. I've been sharing them in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change photo pool and in two photo sets, one in English and the other en français. (I've got some catching up to do with my French flickr set.) Everything is licensed under Creative Commons so feel free to reuse them in any way you like.





















Some of my workshops housed on wikis are:




SMARTen Up! (how to use an IWB effectively in the classroom)




All Things Audio (hands-on educational podcasting workshop with my buddies John Evans and Rob Fisher.) It's also available in French as Toutes choses audio (I flew solo on this one. John and I are planning to make it available in Spanish and German at the upcoming B.Y.T.E. Conference at the end of February.)




Gettin' Googley (an introduction to select Google Tools in education)




I also have a presentations wiki for other workshops I've done but it really needs some cleaning up. If you don't mind the mess you can poke around.




And finally, here are some of the varied spaces you can connect with me online.

Blogging is a very public activity. Anything that gets posted on the internet stays there. Forever. Deleting a post simply removes it from the blog it was posted to. Copies of the post may exist scattered all over the internet. I have come across posts from my students on blogs as far away as Sweden! That is why we are being so careful to respect your privacy and using first names only. We do not use pictures of ourselves. If you really want a graphic image associated with your posting use an avatar -- a picture of something that represents you but IS NOT of you.
Here are a few videos that illustrate some of what I want you to think about:


Two teachers in the U.S.A. worked with their classes to come up with a list of guidelines for student bloggers.
One of them, Bud Hunt, has these suggestions, among others:

1. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces.  Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for our blog. While we encourage you to engage in debate and conversation with other bloggers, we also expect that you will conduct yourself in a manner reflective of a representative of this school.
2. Never EVER EVER give out or record personal information on our blog.  Our blog exists as a public space on the Internet.  Don’t share anything that you don’t want the world to know.  For your safety, be careful what you say, too.  Don’t give out your phone number or home address. This is particularly important to remember if you have a personal online journal or blog elsewhere.
3. Again, your blog is a public space.  And if you put it on the Internet, odds are really good that it will stay on the Internet.  Always.  That means ten years from now when you are looking for a job, it might be possible for an employer to discover some really hateful and immature things you said when you were younger and more prone to foolish things.  Be sure that anything you write you are proud of.  It can come back to haunt you if you don’t.
4. Never link to something you haven’t read.  While it isn’t your job to police the Internet, when you link to something, you should make sure it is something that you really want to be associated with.  If a link contains material that might be creepy or make some people uncomfortable, you should probably try a different source.

Another teacher, Steve Lazar, developed a set of guidelines in consultation with his students. You can read them here.
Look over the guidelines and add the ones you like in the comments section below this post; either from one of Steve's students or one of your own. I think Bud's suggestions are excellent. We'll be using the one's I highlighted above as a basis for how we will use our blog.
Cheers,
Mr. K.

This is my first post.

Cross posted from the November Learning blog.

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Community First

Michael Wesch by flickr user poptech

Michael Wesch's keynote this morning was simply breathtaking. In the follow up breakout session someone asked him: "How do you stop students seeing themselves as students, and as collaborators?"



Mike sighed, put both hands on the podium and said: "That's really hard work."



He went on to explain "community first." He uses the first two weeks of class to build a sense of community and togetherness in a shared quest to solve a real world problem. A problem he himself doesn't know the answer to.



"Doing crazy things together creates community." 



Micheal plans his most passionate and enthusiastic lectures for those first two weeks. And he has his students do zany ice-breaking activities to help them get to know each other and break through the veneer of passivity they arrive in his class with. But it's not just about having fun; these activities (like human scavenger hunts) all have a serious edge to them. They have to see that they'll have fun learning here, but we are working hard at learning.



The Lesson Design Arc: schedule-research-paper-video 



The kids begin by co-creating a schedule on a wiki for the research they'll do to solve the problem they've decided to work on. They begin by digging into the problem and reading everything they can on it. Summaries of all their reading are compiled on the wiki. Typically they'll read over 90 articles, papers, or books in the first week of class as they do this. (In more typical University classes they read about three articles in the first week.) Mike guides them, having a little deeper experience in the field then they do, by suggesting other sources they might wish to explore. They continue this research and co-create a research paper for publication. When that's all done, they create very brief condensed video summaries of their research, submit them to Mike who then weaves them together into a brief (5 min?) video. All this is only possible because of the community building work they do together in the first few weeks of the course.



There's a lot more to all this, I'm just summarizing (his integrated, collaborative, calibrated peer review assessment scheme – which goes well beyond <-- that link back there – is brilliant), but that's the broad strokes takeaway I got.



When Things Go Wrong

My Pencil by flickr user jbelluch

Sometimes, when people work together closely on a real world problem things wrong. People get upset. Students goof off in class.



When that happens Mike intervenes using a ritual he learned from an African(?) tribe. It's very similar to the Talking Stick ritual used by many First Nations people of Canada. They use pencils instead. Anyone who is holding the pencil lets go of the little voice in their head that says "You can't say that." and speaks from the heart about what's upset them. The rest of the group talks with them about it. They don't put the stick down until they've resolved whatever the problem is. Mike usually goes first. Sometimes he cries while he's talking to his 400+ students. Then the next person in the group takes their turn.



A Pedagogy to Aspire To



Isn't that an amazing example of "intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?" I had wanted to write about the amazing conversations going here: in the halls, in sessions, over lunch, every time someone stops me to talk really. But this morning's keynote. Just breathtaking. Good teaching is what comes from building strong relationships between teachers and students; relationships with a serious educational edge. (I hear echoes of John Seely Brown in this.)



I've got to think more about how to weave together such a set of diverse sensitivities into my teaching. How do you build a culture of caring in your class?

Seeing History by dkuropatwa

I'm at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston this week. I've been asked to guest blog over there during the conference. I'm cross posting here as well. (Maybe it'll encourage me to do this more often ... feels good to be blogging.)

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Riding a Paris Metro David Wong looks up at the ads. All beautiful images captioned with little text. One, an image of the Earth and a single star. The caption: "When you look at Alpha Centauri — the closest star to Earth — you are watching something that happened four years ago."

In their essay What If Ideas Were Fashion? David Wong and Danah Henriksen (from Michigan State University) explore the learning that comes of creating these images. What if we applied a fashion designer's design sense to learning? As they ask in the title of their essay: "What if ideas were fashion?"



Early on they write: "The experience of fashion is often characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought."



That got me thinking. What if we substitute 'learning' for 'fashion' …



What if the experience of learning were characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?



Have you seen anything at BLC that can be characterized as 'intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?" Any one of those? two? three? all four? I have. I'll mention some examples in my next post. I'm far more interested what you saw. Please share it here in the comments. Better yet, summarize it in a "slide" like one of those you'll find in Dean Shareski's flickr group Great Quotes about Learning and Change. (If you've not seen it yet I highly recommend putting aside 30 minutes or so to get lost in it.) Find a (cc) licensed flickr image that resonated with your favourite quote from the conference so far about learning and add it to the pool.



Picking up on David and Danah's work I just started a new flickr group similar to Dean's. It's called Ideas with Style. It's specifically about mashing together (designing) a striking image with an educational
thought, fact, or idea. Check it out, maybe add an image to that pool too.



Remember: neither 'social media' nor 'design' are nouns, they're verbs, and Design Matters!

Copied verbatim from Clarence who copied verbatim from Michael Geist. Please keep this going; repost. Especially if you're Canadian. This is really important. You're going to want to be able to tell your kids and grandkids "I tried to stop it. Really. I did everything I could." It'd be even better if we were able to say: "We didn't let it happen."

“Months of public debate over the future of Canadian copyright law were quietly decided earlier this week, when sources say the Prime Minister’s Office reached a verdict over the direction of the next copyright bill. The PMO was forced to make the call after Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement were unable to reach consensus on the broad framework of a new bill. As I reported last week, Moore has argued for a virtual repeat of Bill C-61, with strong digital locks provisions similar to those found in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a rejection of a flexible fair dealing approach. Consistent with earlier comments on the need for a forward-looking, flexible approach, Clement argued for changes from C-61.




With mounting pressure from the U.S. – there have repeated meetings with senior U.S. officials in recent weeks – the PMO sided squarely with Moore’s vision of a U.S.-style copyright law. The detailed provisions will be negotiated over the coming weeks by the respective departments, but they now have their marching orders of completing a bill that will satisfy the U.S. that comes complete with tough anti-circumvention rules and no flexible fair dealing provision.




The bill is not expected until June, but it will have dramatic repurcussions once introduced. First, the bill represents a stunning reversal from the government’s seeming shift away from C-61 and its commitment to a bill based on the national copyright consultation. Instead, the consultation appears to have been little more than theatre, with the PMO and Moore choosing to dismiss public opinion. Second, after adopting distinctly pro-consumer positions on other issues, Moore has abandoned that approach with support for what may become the most anti-consumer copyright bill in Canadian history. Third, the bill will immediately impact the Canadian position at the ACTA and CETA negotiations, where the bill’s provisions on anti-circumvention and ISP liability will effectively become the Canadian delegation position.




For those wondering what can be done, my only answer is to speak out now. Write a paper letter to your Member of Parliament and send copies to the Prime Minister, Moore, Clement and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. No stamp is required – be sure to include your home address and send it to the House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6. Once that is done, join the Facebook group and the Facebook page and be sure to ask others do the same. You may spoken out before, but your voice is needed yet again.”




This is an utter disaster. Thousands of Canadians responded to the recent Tory inquiry on copyright law, overwhelmingly speaking out against the DMCA disaster being brought to Canada. And yet, once again, the Conservatives show their contempt for the opinions of average Canadians. Please write your letters, make your phone calls. Even if you have done this all before, it needs to happen again.

Again, no stamps are required for letters addressed to parliament in Canada and that address is:



House of Commons


Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6