electro-textual

Stephen Downes is full of good ideas. i’ve followed his thoughts for many years now.

A Canadian education researcher, Stephen is an incredibly articulate and rigorous thinker who is definitely worth listening to, and i believe he listens to others really well too. In his first Huffington Post article, he gives an overview of the PLENK massive online course, and his perspective on connected and networked learning. (PLENK = Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge.)

“That is not to advocate throwing learners off the bus to fend for themselves. It is hard to be self-reliant, to take charge of one’s own learning, and people shouldn’t have to do it alone.”

Through the article, i found the video below in which Stephen emphasizes the importance of sharing and interaction. Our connected world is about contributing as well as listening. To join your Personal Learning Network (PLN), you need to put your opinions out there, in your genuine voice. It is a challenge. (How often do i blog? Not very often. Stephen puts out 5-7 small posts every day in his OLDaily.)

This talk focuses on 3 principles:

• Interaction: it’s important to connect with other people, and move away from the “broadcast model”. Play a part in the network. Blogging is all about the connections between people, the discussion of ideas.
• Usability is about consistency and simplicity: “summarise everything you come across”. This is really good advice – it was only when i discovered the art of summarising articles that i became capable of literature research. He recommends guerilla tactics in the face of an institutional  content management system (CMS), and offers some good suggestions.
• Relevance: “filter ruthlessly” – students should have access to the relevant information. You can pick and choose “your own information priorities”. Choose your own times to connect, exercise your freedom to turn the internet on or off as you need. This also requires guerilla tactics such as RSS feeds or backchannels that might not be a part of the official channel.

This talk goes back to 2007, but it’s a really good one. Stephen sums up with this message:

1. Put yourself at the centre of your Personal Learning Network (PLN). Make connections with people in your field.
2. This is about self-directed learning – take charge.
3. If you’re teaching, think about how to enable your learners to develop their own learning networks.

[Relevant links]

• Sue Waters has some good resources around the notion of developing a Personal Learning Network (PLN).
• Stephen Downes home base
• A local version of the 23 Things approach to web2 technologies.

The other week  i joined one of the Victorian ACE workshops, where Junita, Katt and Carole told us all about the Flip video camera. A really good session, full of ideas and demonstrations.

As well as the session itself, one thing i really enjoyed was being fully mobile, so i could join from the beautiful Victorian State Library rooms.

With my tiny msi Wind netbook, plantronics headset, and my Android phone acting as a modem, it was easy to connect.

Yes, the HTC Desire is an Android phone that is based on the mythical “Google phone” – the Nexus One. Google didn’t have much luck selling the original version, but HTC have done pretty well selling their copy. The latest update to the Android OS allows me to use my phone as a wireless modem.. to share the 3G internet connection by setting up a wireless network. They call it “Wireless Tethering”. i think you can do it with other smart phones too.

i like that.

It means i don’t need to get one of those mobile USB modem things.

There are some limitations, yes: the phone gets hot, and the battery drains much faster than usual.

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Relevant links:

• Search the Victorian ACE network for references to flip, including the recent session (i’m still looking for the recording). [Login required.]
• SMH suggests that the htc desire could be an “iPhone killer” – before iPhone 4 came out, that is.

photo credit: (creative commons at flickr) Thanks: Timmy Toucan.

There’s some amazing work happening in the NW region of Melbourne.

Jill Koppel and i have been on an adventure trail around the ACE providers involved in this year’s e-mentor projects, finding out what people are already doing.. and what they’d like to be doing. We’ve seen student-created zines and blogs, wikispaces built for course materials, computer labs filled with not only pc-machines but also iMacs.. and mini-projectors that would fit in your handbag.

So far, we’ve met with people at Yooralla in the city, Diamond Valley out in Greensborough, Thornbury Women’s NH, Carlton NLC, Olympic AE and Span in Thornbury.

There’s interest in building online spaces for staff and students, creating online courses to add more flexibility for new and existing courses, and adding more engaging use of technology to classroom situations. People want to learn about interactive whiteboards, online voice tools, wikispaces, organisational e-strategy.. and that big old challenge: how to choose the best technology for your teaching/learning purpose.

Overview and links over on the e-mentor wiki. http://ementors.acfe.vic.edu.au/northwest10
We’ll post more detail soon.

michael

(“North West” means the North West of metropolitan Melbourne – it’s a region for the ACFE board, which is similar to state and local government boundaries.)

Christine rang me on the phone, “michael i’ve done something to the (PRACE) web site.” She went on to describe how she’d lost her work and one of the pages had somehow reverted to an earlier version with last year’s brochure.

i have to admit i’m terrible at providing help desk assistance over the phone. i really need the visuals, because often i can’t make sense of the way people describe their screen. Maybe it’s my weak listening skills.. maybe it’s because people leave out important details. I think that in order to solve technological issues i need to see every bit of the screen. There’s a huge amount of visual literacy involved in screen-based communication and networking.

So we tried elluminate as a way to share Christine’s screen (it didn’t work). While we were waiting she mentioned she’d just been on skype with her family overseas.

What am i thinking? Skype has screen-sharing these days.

We found out how Christine could reveal her workspace over the skype connection, and as soon as i had the visuals i could be helpful again. We solved the problem together. In fact i think Christine worked it out herself, she just needed the confidence of having someone there to say, “Yes you’re doing the right thing.”

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[Screen-sharing: how? From memory, it's in Conversation => Video => Share your screen, but i'll have to double-check.]

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Possibly useful resources

• • • • Interestingly, the mac version of skype had screen-sharing before the windows version. On linux we’re still waiting (or maybe not).
      • All about screen sharing on the skype site.
      • Sue Waters gives a good overview of the basics of skype on the Edublogger.
      • Silvia Tolisano provides a very good set of ideas for using skype in the classroom, as part of her “around the world with 80 schools” project (Langwitches).

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photo credit: Sean Davis (thanks!)

Several people on the CAE 23 Things project wanted to know how to embed documents in their blog. There are a few ways.

(edublogs allows you to upload documents, but i’m not sure that blogger does. And David made the point that if he’s uploading all the time, he’ll use his storage quota in no time.)

The trick is to use an external service, eg Slideshare, iScribd, youtube, docstocs, yudu or google docs (your choice could depend on the kind of document).

1. sign up to another web service (eg scribd, slideshare, youtube)
2. upload your document to the other service, then
3. embed the document in your blog post, using an “embed code” from that other service.

• Dale Pobega’s Free ESL club (from Duke St Community House in Sunshine) has plenty of examples of embedded content, including the Banana ESL grammar book at the left (via scribd).
• Richard Byrne uses Yudu and Docstocs in this post from his Free technology for teachers blog.

Some other suggestions out there on the web:

• Digital inspiration links to some services, 
• Blogger help files suggest Scribd 
• eHow has more detail on how to do this at Scribd
• (so does Krishna De)
• Slideshare is a great service for sharing powerpoint presentations. They have their own help file for posting directly to blogger.

(digital inspiration goes further too, with a post called “embed almost anything into your blog”)

..okay. i wonder if that helps. We haven’t looked at these “embed codes” yet.. perhaps we need a help video. 

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Photo credit: thanks minifig from flickr (creative commons license).

Win, Lin and Mac:

It’s true that Windows (TM, microsoft corp) occupies nearly all the computers in the known world, but there are other operating systems, and it’s been my side project over the last few years to find out more about all of them.

Thanks to the iPod and the iPhone, Apple mac has bounced back from the lean years to become a major player; everyone knows about apple these days. Their reputation says they care about beauty, elegance and simplicity in their design. The iPod comes with no instruction booklet because it’s designed to never need one.

Linux (GNU/Linux) is now the underdog. Because Linux is a free operating system, with principles of open accessibility and speech-like freedom as well as beer-like free availability, i’ve always thought that people in the community, without much money, should be more aware of it.

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So anyway: the competition

Exciting news.. Ann at the college of advanced education (CAE) is bringing some of her Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) teachers along to learn about web2 via the 23 Things course. (The Victorian ACE version of it.)

Here we are at the CAE in the heart of Melbourne’s central business district (CBD), with Ann, David, Fiona, Gillian, Eileen and Parama. Most people are choosing blogger to set up their reflective journals, except David who’s investigating edublogs for the first time.

The idea of a public reflective journal is central to the 23 Things approach: you experience the web2-based social network, by sharing your discoveries with your peers.

(Edublogs is a Melbourne company that’s become popular with teachers around the world. They use wordpress as the application to run their system.)

• Ann’s at anntimess.blogspot.com
• David’s at mrihooper.edublogs.org
• You’ll find Parama at lunchadventure.edublogs.org (maybe?)
• Eileen is at learnbeforelunch.blogspot.com

There’s a mix of enthusiasm and nervousness. Will we have time for this lunch-time learning adventure? Will it be manageable, and what will we discover?

Some questions came up already:

• Can you upload documents in your blog?
• Short answer – you need to use a second service.

(ok, searching for more detailed answers.. back shortly..)

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image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: doggo.