F2F meeting of PLP participants

Today we went to Toorak College, in Mt.Eliza, and really began the Powerful Learning Practice program, with a face-to-face meeting of all those involved in the Australian group and Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. They both encouraged and challenged us to come aboard on this journey that will officially last until next June.

Keynote Address. One of the keys to 21st century learning is flexibility, the ability to go with the flow when the unexpected happens. Another key phrase, mentioned in the morning sessions, was “adaptive expertise” and that it is how we manage to adapt to our situations that will determine our success. (I had a lot of trouble getting access on-line for the morning sessions, although trying many things. After lunch however, I was suddenly able to get onto the wiki and take part in the sessions talking about the tools we will need to use. As always you just never know!)

Also stressed to us was that we were going to be part  of a community of practices as opposed to a network. The ability to use the tools available is the easy part using them to explore learning is what we are all going to be focused on and the community will share their thoughts, findings about what worked, how, etc. The key to being part of the community is that everyone must contribute to the overall well-being and strength of our group/community. From their past experiences one-day programs did not work so they developed this sustained program that is embedded into the participant’s everyday teaching over a long period. Over this period,  we must all make it a regular task to take part in, comment on, share, etc. along our journey, everyone must be there to make it work.

3 steps for 21st century learning

Another approach to the 21st century learning discussion

Learning, technology, literacy and the 21st century

We tomorrow we have our first face-to-face session of the Australian group in the Powerful Learning Practice program. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson will introduce us to the concept and help us form the connections that we will develop to from part of a learning community.

I often like walking and thinking, and the past few weekends have been great weather for doing just that. I have also been reading many blogs that contain musings and comments about education as well as a few major articles in our daily newspapers, especially over the holidays and have been trying to

• What is 21st century learning?
• How does technology fit in?
• What is the role of the teacher today and in the future?
• What role/responsibility does the wider community have to play in the education of our young people?

I don’t have the answers but here are some of my random thoughts.

The Communist Library Threat

Here is a little bit of fun for Friday (via the Shifted librarian’s blog). The Colbert report is a satirical US television program. This is a warning about the local public library and what is really going on there!

Free social networking icon set for Bloggers

Just for a change of pace, here is a set of free, non-standard icons, for non-commercial use by bloggers, designed by those at Templates.com.

This is a lovely (and free) icon set of the most popular social websites. They are placed “in a bottle” for bloggers and consist of 10 icons:

•  del.icio.us, DesignFloat.com, Digg.com, Facebook.com, Ma.gnolia.com, Reddit.com, RSS, StumbleUpon.com, Technorati.com, Twitter.com
• Each icon is produced in the following sizes: 80х80, 64х64, 32х32.

You can learn more about the creation process of this Icon set on the Templates.com blog.

CompFight: another way to find CC photos on Flickr

I am often looking for pictures/photos in the public domain that I (and/or my students) can use in things we are creating, be it blogs, wikis, video clips or other projects. I have discussed before that students are happy to “legally” use images as long as they know how to and that it is not too complicated. The Flickr collection offers a lot but it is not always easy to find what you need. There are many who have developed all sorts of interesting tools for making better use of Flickr. have been using FlickrCC and FlickrStorm as my first port of call although I also like Tag Galaxy as well, to find interesting images.

FlickrCC makes free to use photos, in Creative Commons, easy to find. FlickrStorm is another nice search tool that has some useful features such as the ability to look for CC photos only and create a list of images that can be shared.  There is the “how-to” on FlickrStorm by ICT guy as well.  

Another search tool I have come across, via CogDog is CompFight. 

This is a very simple search tool to use. If you click on:

• Tags you will have the option of searching through all the tags or all text
• Creative Commons is a link to go between all, off or commercial searches
• Seek Originalallows you to choose whether or not you want original images
• One caution,I do not know how the Safe optionreally works. Typing in”sex”, which the boys are wont to do at times, results in many images of naked bodies, in various poses. Of course you explain about how to search appropriately when searching the Internet in general but I would not rely on the “safe” mode to filter inappropriate images out.

The results of a search are displayed as a thumbnail, without any of the photographs details, which means you can get many thumbnails on the page at a time and, as you can scroll down, the next batches are loaded so you don’t have to click onto the pagination tag. It is very easy to compare and get an overview of the images available and simple for students to use.

Another Alternative Search engine: Silobreaker

If you are looking for somewhere to find information about a current news topic then one interesting search engine is Silobreaker. It compiles a full report on whatever search term you enter.  I tried a search on  ”Kevin Rudd“, in a 360degree mode. This meant that the search was across its indexes including the fields for news stories, YouTube videos, blog posts and articles. Silobreaker returned top news stories and  a video clip added today, a chart showing the popularity of his name on the Web over the past 30 days, another chart connecting him to other search terms and people, a map of geographic hot spots connected to him, and a list of quotes attributed to him.

An image is worth 1000 words

Microblogging paints a picture,
originally uploaded by shareski.

I always like to use images to help describe something, be it in a lesson or on my blog, or whatever. I was looking at a post, 25-ways-to-spice-up-your-blog-post-photos, on a site called Pro Blog Design. This discussed how to make images more striking and therefore enhance a blog. There were a number of tutorials on how to use Photoshop to make a photograph more dynamic. The tutorials are really easy to follow and worth a look.

This reminded me to go and have a look at Dean Shareski’s Flickr photo set (interesting quotes) and found that he has added to the collection. This one is “Microblogging paints a picture”. There are a number of others, some of which I have used before.

The Internet: diamonds, warts and everything else in between

Why focus on the crap when brilliance is only a click away? This was a short opinion piece in the Age, on Saturday 4th Oct.,  about the place of the Internet, the benefits and the drawbacks, in life today. read more | digg story

The article struck a cord because I identified with much of what the writer had to say. I know that the Internet can be a difficult place if you are unfamiliar with it but it also offers great opportunities.

Asking questions and “true knowledge”.

Continuing on my ever-present interest in how to best use the internet to increase understanding and gain knowledge, I have been investigating various tools whilst on holidays. I will write some posts over the next week or so about PopGist (a search engine which interrogates traditional search feeds; major blogs; and discussion threads), WideExplorer (a way to view, search and rationalize the way the web is explored, visiting multiple websites simultaneously and horizontally), Scour (a social search engine aggregator that allows users to vote and rank search results using their own criteria) and StumbleUpon (effectively a social bookmarking site).

A lot has been discussed about Web 2.0 and social media. There are many new search tools coming on-line all the time. Traditional search engines still have much going for them and they can yield powerful search results and can be productive and valuable for the searcher. The success of the new generation search media is phenomenal and still evolving. There are many innovative and intuitive search engines starting to become very mainstream. Whilst I like some of these very much, they depend on the participation of the users and they can be more susceptible to spammers and the malicious as well.

There is a new Beta devlopment that sounds interesting.

It is called ”True knowledge” and it is attempting to ”represent the world’s knowledge in a form that is clear and accessible to humans, as well as being comprehensible to computers“. It can, therefore, answer questions that are new to it and combine knowledge to provide answers that it has not used before. This is a Beta development site. I have signed up for a few Beta developments and have had a great experience using some of the visual (beta) search engines Searchme and Viewzi. I love the way I can see things developing as I am using these tools. It is exciting to see solutions being applied to any problems that might arise and how they respond to constructive criticism and comments.

The “true knowledge” site provides screenshots to help users to understand how they will ask questions that the computer can interpret. There is also a video youcan watch and a blog that tells you more about the people at true knowledge and what they are doing. All very new but certainly worth watching.