next-ed

Many of us would have heard students complain that the sites they want access to are blocked by ‘big brother’.  Content filtering is managed by systems, and, to date, most emergent stage of connectove technologies, teachers themselves are the source of the risk, due to their lack of development in this area.  How can we unblock content and tools if the teachers responsible for the care of kids don’t understand their duty in this environment.  Many teachers would have a greater sense of the risks from the shock jocks than from informed and participative investigation.  If you were to ask a garden-variety teacher what strategies she would use in a classroom to manage the risks of online social networking what would her response be? 

Teachers of this ilk will give tacit support to sytemic blocking if they remain disengaged fromt the tools that are making kids and systems vulnerable.  Hysteria is no excuse for remaining ignorant.  If there is no challenge, or alternative view, beaurocrats will make decisions to protect themselves, without regard for the effect on learning.  We need to develop a professional, evidence based-response to these technologies (and the risks) so that we will not join the chorus of “the sky is falling!”.

Hands up if you have a Facebook account…

I am a teacher of Religious Education and one of the most engaging topics for Year 10 students is Working for Social Justice.  Quite soon into the topic it became apparent that these 15 year old girls living in Wollongong, Australia receive a highly filtered view of the world and the issues being faced by people in it.  Their consumption of media is extremely prejudicial with a bias towards commercial news of very low intellectual value and news which is actually thinly veiled advertising and cross promotion. 

When we began discussing topics like Dafour or Burma, there was a pervading level of ignorance from even the most talented of students. 

How, in this digitally connected world, can my students remain untouched by news that touches the very root of what it means to be a human in community?  I found it porfessionally and personally distressing, cosnidering my belief that it is to students like these that we must look to help solve the inequities and imbalances in the world.

Pageflakes is a web based  RSS and XML aggregator.  It is highly customisable and adds elements of social networking to the idea of news aggregation.  I thought “If my students won’t seek out the news, then I will pushthe news to them!”.  They all signed up for a Pageflakes account and grabbed hold of a Pagecast I had prepared called “My Conscience”. This page drew together news feeds from Amnesty Internaltional, The United Nations, blogs from intellectuals and activists in Africa, news headlines, Flickr images for poverty etc.  The students then worked with this as a starting point and customised the page to suit themselves.  This then became their homepage for the browser.  If they were proud of a page they had created, they would pagecast it and email me an invitation to come and look.

I am hoping that the next time I ask “What do you think about the junta’s crackdown in Burma?” I will not be met with 28 blank expressions.

My colleagues will soon be famous. Tune in to this great podcast, where educators respond to the question “How will student learning be improved or enriched with these Web 2.0 tools?” The answers were broad, thoughtful and varied. Enjoy!

Download Our Last Breakfast.

We have come to the end of another Big Byte Breakfast course – 5 weeks of dazzling learning at an alarming speed.  The presentations of the project by the course participants was mind blowing, considering that a few weeks earlier, many did not know their blogs from their wikis and thought RSS was a sports car.  What became immediately apparent was that teachers are expert at spotting potential.  These Web2.0 tools sprang to life in the hands of experienced educators, and many took on a life that their creators may have found surprising.

You can see the complete Show and Tell at our Next-Ed Wikispace here.

One of the favourites of the morning was Professor Stcky-beakers’ Toon-do cartoon of a Science Fair Project Proposal.  Click here to see the cartoon.

On my way home on the train, Tuesday, I was listening to an interview with James Farmer, founder of edublogs.org which you can hear here (herehere!)Download Interview.

The interview is not particularly earth moving, but what I really loved is being able to put a name and a voice to an innovation that is so obviously designed for me as a teacher and for my students.  Farmer speaks about meeting a need in a way that made sense and was convenient.  Based in Melbourne, Farmer’s edublogs.org hosts over 100 000 teacher blogs and may more student blogs.

Some of the new features include tools to manage classes and free (and ad-free) Wiki’s at Wikispaces.

He challenges us to let go a little bit and see what uses students can put a blog to.

One the same topic, Lynn P sent me a link to 5 good reasons for students to blog. Check them out.

pl.bebo

My daughter and I just had a look through her Bebo site (social networking). We checked that there was no identifying information on there (there was!) and who was hanging around.

This is not a fear post about the dangers of 50 year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls. She told me how people seem so much more polite online than at school. This was surprising. People who usually don’t have much to say face to face are happy to engage in conversation through Bebo or MSN.

I’d love a crystal ball to see how social networking will be leveraged into learning in the future. It is not a matter of if, but how. Shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of possibilities and potentials, instead of only risks and dangers?