Entries from July 2009 ↓

1. Keep in touch with student’s learning through Superclubs

2. Request to join Classroom 2.0. A Ning of teachers interested in Web 2.0 technologies.

3. Sign-up to Teacher Tube

4. Become an Edublogs supporter and go nuts with plug-ins, widgets and design!

5. I also set up a Feedburner feed to get visitor stats on my site.

6. Watch all the TED speeches I’ve been meaning to watch for ages.

7. Sign up to Slideshare (another way of sharing, this time PowerPoint and Word)

8. Actually, I think my brain just said no…

Something to think about…we need to recognise these new ways of learning, be able to recognise new key competencies, to value them and make them an everyday part of our children’s lives IN the classroom. This doesn’t take away from the magic of childhood or their connection to the environment or their ability to empathise in social situations…it does all of these things in a different forum. It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing and interacting with the world. What do you think?

I’ve made a goal to share one new thing from the web every day with my homegroup class and my project group (which is also taking part in Tournament of the Minds so we’re really focusing on thinking outside of the box).

My goal has emerged out of my own journeys around the internet: through my RSS feeds and through those sites to new sites or links, or links to projects, Youtube and other collating sites (and on and on until I need a walk in the bush or a bike ride!)

I started off  the term with the “Did you know?” (or here) clip which generated a lot of dicsussion and also provided a context for scaffolding deeper thinking, questioning and reflection skills. One child decided to use the format to create his own “Did you know?” using PowerPoint, which so far, looks pretty professional (I wonder how long it took him to create the spinning question marks, pretty cool!) All I said was “Y’know, that’s easily done on PowerPoint…”

I couldn’t help but share the post-it note animation. It was greatly appreciated and also promoted much laughter and discussion about turning the simple into the awesome!

Next, the neat Brainpickings gave me this technofuturism interactive art installation…

La Vitrine – Montreal from steven bulhoes on Vimeo.

 And from the hearty and colourful Gangsta Bride  via Studio Jelly (from my own personal RSS feeds, althought with me, learning is learning and I don’t separate my feeds anymore!) I’ve found an incredible use of Youtube and creativity where a piece of music has been created from many sources. An example of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (A collaborative music and spoken word project by Darren Solomon and Youtube users). Imagine supporting children to create something like this? Wow.

Oh, and this one through Picocool…

White Box from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.

 I post-script each sharing time with “Just a little something to think about…” and off they go…my goal is to provide them with as many examples of creative people doing creative things as possible.

So last one…I promise…remember before the internet when most local neighbourhood communication was done throught the humble flyer? Well, designer Cardon Webb has hijacked some fairly standard examples of the local flyer and created “aesthetically upgraded versions” like these…

 Ahhh…possibilities…

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“Children have rights as human beings and also need special care and protection.”  UNICEF

Something from the ever thought-provoking and child advocacy publication (although I see them as a community) Exchange Magazine (US). It’s 20 years since the creation and signing of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Their daily email (which I highly recommend) was titled “Should we celebrate?”. One of the recent World Forum Global Leader facilitators Youseff Hajjar stated in his address “The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is 20 Years Old: Should We Celebrate?” that although it is the only convention to be signed and ratified by all countries, two are missing, one is Somalia the other is the USA.

So the US hasn’t ratified this convention? Well, Kyoto was a toughie but the Rights of Children? Go here to lend your voice to the campaign for the USA to sign the Convention. The second Bush administration stated in 2001 that “The Convention on the Rights of the Child may be a positive tool for promoting child welfare for those countries that have adopted it. But we believe the text goes too far when it asserts entitlements based on economic, social and cultural rights. … The human rights-based approach … poses significant problems as used in this text.” 

During the Walden University Presidential Youth Debate (thanks Wikipedia) in the run-up to the last US elections, Barack Obama stated that it was “embarrasing” to be in the company of Somalia and that he would review the convention (as well as others). Let’s see if he follows through.

I spent some time with my second class exploring and discussing the UN Convention on the Rigths of the Child. I started out by simply putting it up on the wall. First, it was just another piece of writing on the wall, then the interest, then a few started looking a little closer, then one child started to question. After that, they referred to it constantly and it became a reference tool for discussion in our classroom. I highly recommend including the document in the culture of your classroom or learning community.

Image via Wikipedia

Have courage on this journey and bear with me. It may take a while, many links and your own tangents to get to the “point” of this post!

Through my daily journey on the internet I have found The David Report which “covers the intersection of design, culture and business life with a creative and humanistic approach. We write about the latest and most interesting news, ideas and concepts concerning art, design, architecture, music, travel and fashion with a holistic and culturally connected mindset.”  This website is very interesting in its self and is an example of the kind of multi-topic, synthesis, opinion, collaborative website that children could make (at any level).

 I checked out The David Report’s blog which led me to notice their Del.ici.ous sidebar (I have one on my own blog, I wonder if you can do the same on Edublogs?). An interesting article caught my eye Innovation” is Dead : “Transformation” as The Key Concept for 2009 (from BusinessWeek). I thought our Principal would love this, so I emailed that off to him (although if he had a Del.ici.ous account which was shared in the school community, he could sign up to mine and click on the link that I could have saved to Del.ici.ous rather than email).

 This article made some interesting comments about the possible differences between innovation and “transformation”, (Don’t forget to read the comments, they’re half the fun. Also, how do they make their tag-cloud move? That’s cool. If children love the exploding bubbles on bubbl.us then they’d defintely appeciate a moving tag-cloud) and that innovation has been flogged to death and has been overtaken by this mythical idea of transformation.

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

The author Bruce Nussbaum comments “”Transformation” accepts the notion that we are in a post-consumer society, defined by two groups of economic players: manufacturers and consumers. “Transformation” deals with a new Creativity Society, in which we are all both producers and consumers of value. Look around and you can see Gen Y in particular creating practically from birth, mashing music, designing Facebook or MySpace pages, doing videos and podcasts—creating value.”  In an education setting this is about the learner being an active participant (or is it THE active participant); but wait, it gets better…

 Something popped up in the comments from Patrick McGowan. He referenced some interesting blokes called “Deleuze and Guattari“ who apparently “had it right in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:”, in which they state, “the tribe must become nomadic, rhizomatic to survive/thrive. Which, if I understand it correctly, means that there is no longer just one expert, but a multitude of voices contributing to the knowledge base”.

So by now I’m feeling a little bit Burning Chrome and decide to blog about this to help me “make sense” of all this information! My next step was to check out this rather Amazonian-jungle sounding “rhizome” theory which led me to Wikipedia (not a lot of citations) which led me to another interesting bloke called Dave Cormier. Dave Cormier wrote an article called “Rhizomatic Education:Community as Curriculum” which was published on “Innovate: The Journal of Online Education”.

By now I’m getting pretty excited, but not any closer to my magical moment of understanding. The author makes the comment that although social-contstructivist and connectivist theories “are centered on the process of negotiation as a learning process”, but this isn’t “enough” for online learning.

Image by nswlearnscope via Flickr

 He states “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.”

If this is the emerging experience of children as learners and active participants in our society then pardon me, but what the hell am I DOING in the “classroom”??? I am currently contemplating the idea that learning has “mutable goals” and “constantly

Image by Mmmonica via Flickr

negotiated premises”.

I believe that in a lot of education setting there is a lot of TALK and not alot of CHANGE because we as *teachers* are still coming into the learning experiences as boss, to be “in control” (in a learning/knowledge sense) and still have traditional ideas about “outcomes” and “possible learning experiences”. I asked “my” children what they were passionate about learning in the holidays and several of them said “MSN” as their number one learning goal!

We might have to say that we don’t know what those learning experiences actually are, what they look like or even what learning experiences are acutally going on most of the time without out us even understanding them as learning experiences!

Ok, I’m in contemplation about these ideas and will most definitely be coming back to this discussion. I’d be glad if anyone else would like to join me! Hopefully, this post will “encourage migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions”. (Love it!) Right after I’ve finished reading the post-modern treatise ” A Thousand Plateaus”…ooh! And set-up an experimental Ning so we can create one for our 5/6 community, very cool!

Apologies for the lack of pictures and moving parts. I promise the next post will be A.shorter, B. easier to read and C.multimedia. Peace out.

What is one thing you would do to change your practice after watching this?