electro-textual

Anne Dunn wrote a story called “Red Dog” a few years ago for the PageTurners series of books for beginning adult readers. I don’t know why she’s not getting any royalties from the movie. Apparently someone else wrote the same story for a different audience.

Anyway, both books are based on the true-to-life story of a dog who travelled the highways of Western Australia for many years. This dog would hitch a ride quite regularly. This is one of my favourite PageTurners stories, and i’ve heard the movie is good too.

Somebody bought a set of 5 new Easi-speak recording gadgets for the teachers at PRACE. How exciting!

Early in the term we showed them around the staff meeting, and soon after that i’m in the classroom with Chris and her beginning English as a second language (ESL) group. They’re on the computers working with the AMES “That’s Life” reading and listening software.. so only a few people are open to taking a break to try something new.

But Chris is getting a good feel for how they work, and coming up with some great ideas for using them in her next session. This group is practising descriptions at the moment..

Update: later down the track: someone at PRACE has had the brilliant idea to run a series of morning tea events. The idea is that students come from all classes and mix together, socialising and “educationally networking” across the whole school. Apparently the idea came from students in the first place. So we thought, let’s bring these easy microphones along, and get students using them with a series of vox-POP interview questions.

One guy in the adult literacy class turned out to be really good at interviewing people. Unfortunately he had the mic too close to his mouth a fair bit of the time, but the interaction between him and his colleagues is really good. Currently i’m editing the raw files to put them on a school wiki. That way students will be able to listen, and hopefully add their own comments.

photo credit: teachernz

Great adaptation of a talk by Daniel Pink on what motivates us. i watched this again last night.. and i love the way this group has added so much to the talk visually.

According to this talk:

The science is “a little bit freaky”. Recent research shows that while paying more money gets good results for physical labour and simple tasks, for cognitive and advanced tasks it can have the reverse effect. Much more important are things like:

=> autonomy: creative freedom and self-direction,

=> mastery: people love to feel they are learning new skills, gaining knowledge,

=> purpose: meaning the profit motive can get in the way of good things.

The animation was put together by a crowd called RSAnimate, at theRSA.org.

Brilliant stuff.

Is this the same talk, at TED? Unfortunately i’m behind a Great Firewall at the moment, and i can’t access the You Tubes.

photo credit: nemesis91

i’m currently working in a very large country north of Australia, which is renowned for having a “Great Firewall”.

i should begin by acknowledging that this is a tremendous cultural experience, and i’m thoroughly overwhelmed by the sense of opportunity.

However, sure enough there is no access to
=> facebook or twitter,
=> google docs,
=> anything on blogspot.

(So Dale, if you were thinking of exporting your free ESL club to the good people of Szechuan.. think again. The international blog community only extends so far, ironically blocked by The Internationale.)

i can get my email (both fastmail and gmail), flickr, wikispaces, other google services such as the calendar.

It’s interesting to find out what will work, and what might not. And can we really be sure whether it’s intentionally blocked, or just an unhappy internet connection?

“This must be what it’s like to work in NSW!” i thought.

After hearing Robyn Jay bag the NSW education system so often – for its many blockages – this was the first comparison which sprang to mind. Many times, Robyn would prepare a session to show teachers the benefits of building your Personal Learning Network (PLN) with Web2 tools (or something similar), only to find the authorities had blocked those websites.

(And how reliant i have become on those social networking sites! i feel very isolated, cut off from my networks of friends and colleagues. Probably good to step away from the stream of information for a while.)

photo credit: Ray Yu (Thanks!)

This Friday morning (9am i think) at Converge10, the Victorian e-mentors and champions are presenting under the banner of

“Who wants to be a mentor?”

Here’s an audio presentation we’ve put together (using voicethread), with plenty of rich insights into the program, and into the whole process of integrating e-learning into program delivery. Great to see a lot of participation from people in the project.

Currently in a dress rehearsal for the big day. This voicethread is an added resource, with the aim of adding to our live presentation.

Relevant links

• If the voicethread doesn’t work here, you can find the original presentation on the voicethread site
• Victorian ACE e-learning network (Ning)
• Converge10 (Victorian e-learning conference)
• e-learning mentor project (North West chapter)
• information about voicethread, from the Can You Hear Us? project

Here’s an interesting video with a bunch of educators talking about how the future might work. Names i recognise include Daniel Pink and Greg Black (of education.au).

i’ve taken some brief notes on what the educators are talking about, but haven’t really commented with my own response. Many people have been saying this kind of thing in recent years:

• Schools are like factories, following models of the industrial age;
• students have more enriched experience outside of schools than in;
• US schools rank lowest out of all industries surveyed for technology integration;
• relationship, community, connectivity and access are keywords here;
• students are inhabiting the “not quite synchronous” space of twitter;
• students learn at home, in libraries, in museums and online;
• people wander around collecting data in the city – that’s learning (???this was a strange point);
• why stick with a classroom system when you could move to a “community system”?
• it’s about connecting students to opportunities that will shift their learning experience;
• here are the tools to connect with teachers around the world, swap ingredients for teaching and learning;
• it’s not about standards – jobs of the future do not call for the “vending machine approach” to education;
• The literacies of the future are about synthesis, understanding context, working with teams, multi-disciplinary – not memorising facts, but how to find information, collaborate and problem-solve with it;
• We are witnessing “the death of education, the dawn of learning” – an exciting and evolutionary time.

What do you think? Does education need a “revolution”.. or will it continue to evolve in its own good time?

[Relevant Links]

• Daniel Pink, a whole new mind,
• video taken from the YouTube – AdobeELearnings Channel,
• oh there are so many links that need to be here,
• for example to the whole employability skills debate in the adult education sector.

photo credit: Marc_Smith

Jill and i were working with Ursula and Trish over at Thornbury Women’s Neighbourhood House the other day, showing them some new skills in wikispaces. So many Adult Community Education (ACE) educators are taking up the wikispaces toolset, especially given ACFE’s private domain label wikispaces for Victorian ACE providers.

Afterwards i remembered that i had once made a couple of video screencasts for wikispaces. (Look for the full screen button if you need it, in the video controls).

a) how to embed media (such as video) into your page

b) how to change the heading style colours, using CSS (if you have a premium account). This one is more advanced – don’t attempt it if you’re still at beginner level.

[Relevant links]

• Colors (sic) on the web (a) colour wizard (b) spin wheel for random colour combination.
• e-learning in the Northwest
• michael’s video screencast channel at screencast-o-matic.

Let me know if you think they’re useful (or if they could be improved).