I thought I’d post this peice of good news here in public. The Consultants-E “ICT in the Classroom” Course that I tutor on has been announced as finalist in the British Council ELTON Awards – more info.

Great!

technorati tags:ELTONS, ICT, TheConsultants-E

Blogged with Flock

From teacher to network administrator in a garden with no walls…

On Saturday (January 20th) we had a synchronous round table and our guest speaker Clarence Fisher was online LIVE from some remote Canadian town loud and clear after some initial (typical) technological glitches. It was a great session and it was wonderful to hear Clarence speaking and confirming many of our ideas and key issues on blogging and openpublishing as well as hearing his expert views on what it means nowadays for our “kids” as he called them to “Be literate”.

He was appreciative of the EVO session title, focusing on the “open” I agree, is a political statement in itself. Here are some of my notes:

An open classroom allows for diverse opinion, encourages debate and shares voices from all over the world.

Teachers are no longer teachers but could be seen as network administrators. Their role now includes helping learners to form networks, value and evaluate and as we all know this means the results we end up with are very NEW . Clarence compared the non-network learning to “walled gardens” where results are stilted and easily fade out whereas with open flexible learning networks you get results you didn’t expect and they strength and develop over time.

So what does it mean to be literate in today’s hi-tech world?

The points Clarence focused on were:

1. ability to access information – so teachers need to provide places where learners can access. Information is not simply text but now includes images, audio, video, photos.

2. ability to evaluate the info –requiring much higher levels of reading and writing skills, requiring a whole new set of tools.

The web can give our learners a voice and people who are interested in hearing that voice. One of these new skills is the ability to differentiate between an audience and a community.

Clarence defined audience as: “global, sensational, gives learners a “drive” but is not always there for you. It’s a nice pat on the back though.”

A community, however, is “made up of trusted nodes, a more permanent interest in what learners are “saying”, offering a return to the same network, it drives learners forward with their learning. It helps them understand the lives of others and shows them that having a voice is only about THEM.”

Three essential points for educators to encourage and instil:

AUTHENTICITY – for a real voice to develop that voice needs to be representative of who they are. i.e. Online don’t be some you are not. Note that we stressed that this does not mean giving out Surnames and addresses, privacy issues should be taught alongside.

ETHICS – online act ethically – understand right from wrong, enhance values. Learners can still protect their identity.

EMPATHY – we need to help learners be respectful of people all around the world. Help them understand the lives of others.

Thank you Clarence, Patricia, Bee, Graham and Nick 😉 Great live session.

Other references mentioned:

Collission detection re: Google is no longer a “search engine” but a reputation management system see 15 Jan 2007 entry on “Give me your thoughts on an upcoming Wired feature: “Radical Transparency” at http://www.collisiondetection.net/

Graham has now uploaded audio file if Clarence Fisher’s talk to http://www.webcastacademy.net/node/741

Carrying on my edublogs vs wordpress comparison I noticed that blogs created in wordpress do not automatically get a wikispace created for them, easily managed from the blog dashboard.  I think that definitely gives edublogs an advantage and a more versatile feel. What do you think? Is it important to have wikispaces available from one’s blog? Of course you can still do that in wordpress by adding a link to sidebar

As I’m not new to blogging or creating blogs I’ve also spent some time this week working on finding out the differences and similarities between blogs created from an edublogs account which uses “wordpress” and blogs created direct from an wordpress account. This will then help me compare the features with 21publish which I find smooth and logical and great for class blogs (see a mini experiment last year)

It’s been interesting to read some of the EVO opnewebpublishing YG comments about the different features and characteristics that are or are not offered by wordpress. We have seen comments on templates, importing, exporting and deleting the whole blog and how easy it is to handle this tinkering as Bee called it! I had already set up an account with both – a year ago maybe with wordpress with an uninspiring blog name http://vale24.wordpress.com that I did nothing with, and a more interesting idea that I had created in Dec and was hoping to develop over the Christmas holidays https://lifelonglearning.edublogs.org .

Well it wasn’t until this week and the great list of benchmarks that I put hand to mouse and got cracking! It was really simple to set up the edublog, choose a nice template (Regulus by Ben Gillbanks) which also had page tabs. Publishing first posts and sorting the blogroll was quick and painless. I then imported the whole blog into the wrodpress one in 2 minutes (literally) and in a few clicks. They are of course comptabile because they use the same platform. One interesting thing happened – as I hadn’t selected the same template yet when I did do so it actually created a second “about” page (which I manually deleted. This double up is simply due to the code reading it as page to import and the template design then setting up the standard. To avoid I reckon selecting template preferences first would help.

As Susan in Florence “noticed the images didn’t get imported and don’t know why.” And Bee replied “Bubbleshare gets imported because it is code that was inserted so it is transported to WordPress just like the posts. Photos that were uploaded from your hard disk to Blogger do not come because they are stored on Blogger’s server and are not part of the particular posts.” My about photo is uploaded to my server space so no problem there but having to reload the photos would be irritating for students but completely logically as far as coding is concerned, as Bee pointed. But if you are importing/exporting to/from edublogs and wordpress they share the same server and recognize embedded image link.

Compatibility is now enhanced between, to and from all these platforms and this is definitely making it easier for users to do what they want.

I was curious to see that the Manage options for edublogs where actually more complex than the wordpress one.

See the screenshot I’ve taken to see the referrers and subscriptions options I have on edublogs but not wordpress. Still need to check out other minute details but widgets, sidebars, commenter approvals are IDENTICAL so far. I have tried exporting form wordpress into edublogs to see and that worked too.

The line spacing though was messed up but this seems worse in wordpress. Will carry on investigating 😉 .

PS Just improted this from wordpress – I’ll be doing more experimenting I can see. Line spacing not recognized althou i checked the html code in the wordpress version before exproting and it had all the right <p>s!

Week one tasks for the EVO Openwebpublishing session involve opening accounts on: WordPress, Bloglines, Flickr, 43Places, 43Things and 43People , Community Walk and Suprglu.I already have some experience with “playing around with some of these accounts on four. The ones I had heard about but never looked are the 43 ones – an interesting phenomena but not really my “thing” as they say. I can’t quite understand why I would need to make my goals or private holiday photos public but even if I did I can really not contemplate why anyone else would be interested in reading or looking at them! I am aware that many think otherwise (my teenage children for a start). Anyway, I have spent a bit of time clicking and reflecting and here are my 43 thoughts on what I have noticed about the various platforms, what they have in common and how they differ.

They all offer a FREE web presence and space for the user to upload text, images, sound, links, RSS feeds. They are based on the concept of interconnectedness in that you can import/export to and from them and between them.

The content is user-generated and personal but these are SOCIAL tools in that each user can connect to others. The success of these platforms I feel depends firstly, on the recent technological developments. For example, the RSS revolution has brought about a complete change in how we can and how we do interact with /on the Net. Secondly, that they create new communities from people who want to find good walking paths in their area to scholars who are researching new ICT outcomes. Thirdly, the concept of TAGS and categorizing is an essential element throughout for systematically classifying uploaded content or web feeds and links and leads to advance SEARCH options.

These tools allow us to contribute to the web, share and access web content without any HTML knowledge. I perceive open and participatory environments as being very USER-FRIENDLY, very PRACTICAL and very DYNAMIC. They encourage an ACTIVE and COLLABORATIVE web experience and create ORDER where there was previously CHAOS. You can aggregate all your favourite sources of information together and peruse them on one page.

You can manage who you invite to comment or view your pages so there is PROTECTION (useful for blog comments or deciding who gets to see those holiday snaps!)

There are a lot of other rich features that these platforms offer. Not all offer the same ones.

1. Most have multi-lingual versions.
2. Bloglines is both a BLOG and a FEED AGGREGATOR hence a Blogaggregator.
3. WordPress is BLOG with blogroll features but not a fully functional feed aggregator. It has many widgets that can be dragged into the side bar to connect to photos on your Flickr account or Saved links on your del.icio.us pages.
   
4. SuprGlu gathers content from a number of these platforms and brings it together, simply. I found it very slow to load. No technical issues with any of the others. They all allow a certain amount of personalisation. Bloglines is really rather basic in “look” but logical.
   
5. The 43 suite has extra characteristic like “cheers” which are a way to support other users by giving cheers (you have a handful of cheers you can use everyday) and you can obviously get cheers too (this relates back to the point I made in my opening paragraph – who has time for this kind of stuff? I can see it being useful for learners because the activity would be similar to ranking and comparing and admiring other learners but I don’t think most professionals have time for this type of support. I think blog commenting is more supportive lets say for webheads or teacher trainees.
   

The common features are definitely related to SHARING and TAGGING.