Digital Tribes and the Social Web

Steve Wheeler, whose blog I always read, has kindly shared his recent conference presentation via slideshare.

PLE Reflection (after a presentation for our Year 11 conference)

My brief, to present at a Year 11 conference about online tools, has accentuated, in my mind, how far away we are from providing the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) at school students need in a networked society.

Your input, via comments at a previous blog post, twitter and yammer proved invaluable but also challenging, when one considers the realities for kids in our schools. Year 11 will have virtually no opportunity, in their day at school, to use a computer or the many tools available online. During this presentation, I acknowledged that the student delegates will just have to use all this stuff at home.

One kid pointed out, that even if they had DERNSW laptops, software could not be installed and many of the sites, especially social media and collaboration tools, would be blocked anyway.

I was surprised at how little they knew of the tools discussed. The students were unfamiliar with all the tools, except iGoogle.

On a positive note, the delegates were enthusiastic about what they could do at home. They were particularly keen on Wordle, GAPMINDER, Slideshare, Evernote, Prezi and Wolfram Alpha. 

 

The Future?

The big question in my mind: will opportunities for innovative pedagogies and practice emerge from the Australian Curriculum?

                                                                                                                      Or not

Prezi: Cool Online Tools (draft)

This is the first presentation using Prezi I have ever completed; although I have started a few in the past 12 months before the pressure of being prepared for whatever conference led me to not finish (and use my blog or PowerPoint). 

Prezi has turned out to be a fun tool - once you ‘get’ the concept - and I highly recommend it.

Critical comments – on form, style and content - (on this draft) are welcome. Be gentle though, this is my first time and I know my next prezi will be much sleeker. Prezi will not embed to WordPress.com blogs and the work around is to use Vodpod which looks a little dodgy. You might want to see it at the direct link hosted at Prezi.

Anyways, I suggest you click autoplay if you try the below version but it is a bit lame without the narration or music:

more about “Cool Online Tools by Darcy Moore on P…“, posted with vodpod

However, the process of drafting the presentation, for our Year 11 conference, has led to much reflection about the pedagogy possible in institutions and the need for reformation of our systems; especially assessment and reporting which drives education in our country.

You can read those reflections here.

Cool Online Tools

Next week I facilitate a workshop designed to assist Year 11 students find some useful online tools to support their learning, especially research, collaboration, organisation, study and presentation.

my original wordle

There will be a very, very brief presentation and overview of each tool and then students will be free to experiment, exploring the tools of use/interest to them.

Do you mind checking out this list and suggesting some more tools?

Also, are any of the below best avoided by Year 11?

Why?

 

Here’s the list

 

Tame the web

RSS feeds: point website updates towards your reader (watch the video here)

Google Reader: is a place to read all your RSS feed (watch the video here)

Instapaper: a read later bookmarking service

Readability: remove the clutter around the webpage you’re reading

bit.ly: shorten your links

 

Sharing & Collaboration

Delicious: a social bookmarking site (watch the video here)

Diigo: another social bookmarking tool

Google Docs: collaborate on documents with peers online at home

 

Creative Commons for Images and Sound

Creative Commons (Australia): understand licenses

Flickr: the largest photo sharing site

Flickr ‘The Commons’: search the great public photographic collections

Soundzabound: royalty free music for schools

 

Organisation

mindmeister: free mindmapping tool

bubbl.us: organise brainstorms

Evernote: synch files with all your devices

Dropbox: free online storage

Livebinders: collect and share resources (here’s the video)

Netvibes: dashboard everything

 

Customise

iGoogle: customise your homepage with a variety of widgets

Wetpaint: free site where you create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks

 

Mashups

Wordle: generate word clouds

GAPMINDER: unveils the beauty of statistics while revealing trends

Newsmap.jp - a mashup of headlines that shows new patterns

 

Research & Answers

Google Alerts: keep up to date with topics of interest

Wolfram Alpha: enter what you want to calculate

Project Gutenburg (Australia): free ebooks

bibme: a free automatic bibliography generator

Noodletools: guides you through the research process

 

Memory Tools

Anki: makes it easier to study and remember (iPhone app here)

BRAINFLIPS: online flashcards

10 more Mindmapping tools: + what’s best for mindmapping anyway?

 

Presentation

Slideshare: converts your PowerPoints and other documents + saves them online to share (take the tour)

Prezi: astonishing presentations

updated wordle

Readability

Readability is a simple tool that ‘makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around’ what you’re reading.

Check out how it works:

 

Great, definitely a useful tool but what interests me is the opportunity it offers English teachers to explore how ‘Readability’ (and similar technologies) change the nature of the meaning of the text. I am sure Marshall McLuhan would have enjoyed this tool. We have been teaching students to analyse the structure of a text for a long time in classrooms; now we can play around with this idea online.

What examples can you find that illustrate this point?

Here’s some more to think about and you can follow the Readability team on twitter.

Hat tip: Bud the Teacher

One Social Web

OneSocialWeb is a ‘free open decentralized social networking platform’ in development and will, undoubtedly, try and capitalise on the widespread dissatisfaction with Facebook’s privacy policies.

more about “YouTube – Why OneSocialWeb?“, posted with vodpod

Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)

more about “Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)“, posted with vodpod

 

The first people I followed on twitter…

I have been tweeting for two years.

I know many of you have been on twitter for much longer but it is amazing to think how fundamental to my day social media, especially twitter, has become in this relatively short period of time.

The first person I followed was @mpesce who presented an interesting talk at an education.au conference and was very convincing about the potential of this newish microblogging site.

I came home and joined, telling Kelli McGraw, a NSW DET and ETA colleague about twitter. Kelli joined and became the second person I followed.

Some of the other firsts included Barack Obama, Tom Massarella my brilliant techie colleague from school, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Jimmy Wales, Mike Wesch, Ward Cunningham & Steven Johnson. I admire all of these people greatly and feel more closely connected to their ideas and work because of twitter.

I found it terribly exciting to start finding people admired for their books, innovations, educational brilliance and significance to our online, hyperconnected world. I bet it was the same for you. I still find it amazing that colleagues from work, friends and teachers mingle with so many (international) others who are all striving and sharing.

In the weeks that followed my first tweets, so many of the people who I hear from daily came into my life via there tweetstreams and blogs. Nowadays, many of my NSW DET colleagues are on twitter too, sharing and collaborating.

What was your experience? How were you introduced to microblogging?

Who were the first people you followed on twitter?

Whatever Happened to the Book is Happening Now!

At great risk of appearing unneccesarily sycophantic, I need to say that Mark Pesce‘s post, Whatever Happened to the Book,  is clever, unusually clever, even for Mark. Everything that currently intellectually interests (read obsesses me) about literature and our hyperconnected age is explored.

Please read it closely and tell your friends, especially if they are teachers still learning.

Here’s a taste, I particularly enjoyed the third section:

So what of Aristotle?  What does this mean for the narrative?  It is easy to conceive of a world where non-fiction texts simply dissolve into the universal sea of texts.  But what about stories?  From time out of mind we have listened to stories told by the campfire.  The Iliad, The Mahabharata, and Beowolf held listeners spellbound as the storyteller wove the tale.  For hours at a time we maintained our attention and focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in the world traveled down the generations.

Will we lose all of this?  Can narratives stand up against the centrifugal forces of hypertext?  Authors and publishers both seem assured that whatever happens to non-fiction texts, the literary text will remain pure and untouched, even as it becomes a wholly electronic form.  The lure of the literary text is that it takes you on a singular journey, from beginning to end, within the universe of the author’s mind.  There are no distractions, no interruptions, unless the author has expressly put them there in order to add tension to the plot.  A well-written literary text – and even a poorly-written but well-plotted ‘page-turner’ – has the capacity to hold the reader tight within the momentum of linearity. Something is a ‘page-turner’ precisely because its forward momentum effectively blocks the centrifugal force.  We occasionally stay up all night reading a book that we ‘couldn’t put down’, precisely because of this momentum.  It is easy to imagine that every literary text which doesn’t meet this higher standard of seduction will simply fail as an electronic book, unable to counter the overwhelming lure of the medium.

Below are a few unformulated reflections. I intend to write a ‘proper’ reflective piece about ‘the book’ and possible futures.

Perhaps, because this topic is obsessing me at the moment – colleagues and friends would have  noted my reactionary but concerted efforts recently to read more books/novels/fiction - I feel, after reading this twice, I want to know  what ‘will’ happen to the concept of the book even more.

Will the ‘literary text…remain pure and untouched, even as it becomes a wholly electronic form’ – one part of me desperately hopes this is the case, like painting or sculpture.

We all love hypertext and many of our ereaders take little or no advantage of the medium. It is true what Mark says about the ‘economic purposes of publishers’ meaning that they will want to publish ‘dead texts’ in the ‘light’ of their ereader platforms. However, one cannot agree with ‘it does not make the electronic book an intrinsically alluring object’. The Kindle, in spite of its limitations is ‘alluring’ to many readers for a host of reasons that Mark dismisses. Primarily the ubiquity, one can download quickly a new release and carry many texts around. I know, from chats with luddite colleagues that, bound in leather, it appeals to traditional lovers of literature but techie types respond well too. There are issues and our cultural publishing industries need to adapt, or even better, innovate quickly.

Ironically, or maybe sadly, I’d like Mark to answer in a 140 characters, ‘what happened’. There is something not quite right about the framing of the piece, as all this has not quite, ‘happened’, not quite, it is all in the process of becoming.

More later…after I have chatted, perhaps with you, readers of this blog.

Your thoughts?

Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing

A post by James Bradley, at his City of Tongues blog, led me to buy and read Miscellaneous Voices: Australian Blog Writing, edited by Karen Andrews.  

Australian Blog Writing

I would not usually buy an anthology of ‘online’ writing as it just seems too silly, losing all the hyperlinks and hyperconnectivity, but felt happy to invest in this project when I read:

“This anthology is an experiment to see how this writing, these writers, stand up to the challenge of the page; or, to put in another way, to put them up in front of another audience which may be more page-loyal.” 

I guess we’ll never know what percentage of people who read the book are ‘page-loyal’ and not really online readers of blogs but I suspect some will be drawn into the world as a result. 

I encourage you to buy a copy of the anthology but if you are not so inclined, I’ll link to some of my favourite posts from the collection. All, ’stand up to the challenge of the page’. 

The curious half-life of an ethically inadequate object is a piece of writing that any ‘reader’ would love to have written. The intelligence of the writer is what one finds really enjoyable and the subject matter, honesty, perception, Macbeth and Bill Clinton, is of interest to a very wide audience. I now have an RSS feed from the Solid Gold Creativity blog and would recommend it to all. 

Some of the regulars who comment here already know Angela Meyer’s blog but please read and bookmark, Embracing the medium: what makes a successful cultural blog? as it is a significant addition to our understanding of bloggers and what they do. 

Damon Young’s piece and blog made for interesting reading and I really relate to Tiggy Johnson’s structural needs. 

My enjoyment of Penni Russon’s poem, Fragments from a fragmentary mind, which I had read previously at her blog, was definitely enhanced by having a sense of her and Martin from our twitter conversations. 

Alan Baxter’s, ebooks are the future matches my perception of our reading world now too and it is interesting to hear that his sales on kindle are exceeding hard copies! Also, this post, not included in the book, really made me laugh 

I mostly read teacher/education or political blogs and this collection has broadened the field for me significantly.