The Learning Project at St Mary’s

Some people would be familiar with how much I thrive on change and development.  I get energised by thinking about and playing with the potential of new ideas, new technologies and newer ways of doing necessary and valuable things.  Thus, I love the idea of disruptive technologies.  Wikipedia says of this phenomenon:

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market.

In business, a disruptive technology changes a market by offering an alternative product that shifts the way consumers think about the entire market.  Mobile phones have done this to fixed line telephony for example.  Although the term is commercial in origin, it has fascinating application to learning and especially the art and practice of teaching.  Wikipedia would be one such technology.  Consider this:

Traditional teaching has a model of information exchange that is tightly controlled and has the teacher as the centre and controller of these exchanges.  Simultaneously the teacher is the information authority (and sometimes sole authority).  Drop the WWW and wikipedia into this paradigm and you have a disruptive technology.  If the consumer’s (student’s) understanding of information exchange is radically altered by universal and instant access, so too is their understanding of the role of a teacher.

Social networking, class wikis and blogs, content creation and publication have all had the same disruptive effect on schools and classrooms. 

 As in business, we engage with the technology, we innovate or we become irrelevant.  As in business, we have to know our tools and our students or we will lose both.

Have you been asking yourself how students could use iPods and podcasting in their learning?  A 9 year old girl I know pretty well picked up the iPod this morning and said “Can I use this to record my voice?”.  “Sure” I said, thinking she would just have a play.  The podcast below is the result.  What if your students could work on their speeches in the privacy of their own home, and when they’re ready record and upload a polished version for publication and feedback.  I wouldn’t necessarily replace speaking in front of an audience, but it does offer an exciting addition to the preparation (or an alternative for phobic kids).

Download Imagination!  by Maddy

My colleagues will soon be famous. Tune in to this great podcast, where educators respond to the question “How will student learning be improved or enriched with these Web 2.0 tools?” The answers were broad, thoughtful and varied. Enjoy!

Download Our Last Breakfast.

We have come to the end of another Big Byte Breakfast course – 5 weeks of dazzling learning at an alarming speed.  The presentations of the project by the course participants was mind blowing, considering that a few weeks earlier, many did not know their blogs from their wikis and thought RSS was a sports car.  What became immediately apparent was that teachers are expert at spotting potential.  These Web2.0 tools sprang to life in the hands of experienced educators, and many took on a life that their creators may have found surprising.

You can see the complete Show and Tell at our Next-Ed Wikispace here.

One of the favourites of the morning was Professor Stcky-beakers’ Toon-do cartoon of a Science Fair Project Proposal.  Click here to see the cartoon.

On my way home on the train, Tuesday, I was listening to an interview with James Farmer, founder of edublogs.org which you can hear here (herehere!)Download Interview.

The interview is not particularly earth moving, but what I really loved is being able to put a name and a voice to an innovation that is so obviously designed for me as a teacher and for my students.  Farmer speaks about meeting a need in a way that made sense and was convenient.  Based in Melbourne, Farmer’s edublogs.org hosts over 100 000 teacher blogs and may more student blogs.

Some of the new features include tools to manage classes and free (and ad-free) Wiki’s at Wikispaces.

He challenges us to let go a little bit and see what uses students can put a blog to.

One the same topic, Lynn P sent me a link to 5 good reasons for students to blog. Check them out.

pl.bebo

My daughter and I just had a look through her Bebo site (social networking). We checked that there was no identifying information on there (there was!) and who was hanging around.

This is not a fear post about the dangers of 50 year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls. She told me how people seem so much more polite online than at school. This was surprising. People who usually don’t have much to say face to face are happy to engage in conversation through Bebo or MSN.

I’d love a crystal ball to see how social networking will be leveraged into learning in the future. It is not a matter of if, but how. Shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of possibilities and potentials, instead of only risks and dangers?

 Yesterday, Jacob and I watched his older sister compete in the NSW finals of Tournament of Minds – a great challenge based competition for teams of students across age groups.  According to their website ” Tournament of Minds is an opportunity for students with a passion for learning and problem solving to demonstrate their skills and talents in an exciting, vibrant, and public way.”  The passion of the young people solving these problems is palpable, and engagment with learning is through the roof!

Makes you wonder if problem based learning would solve many of the engagement problems teachers report having in their classrooms.  Boys, in particular, love the idea that their work will produce something real.  Many schools around the world have embraced Problem Based Learning (PBL) as their entire curriculum including New Tech High School in California, Eltham College in Victoria and Canningvale in WA.  In these schools, the problem IS the curriculum.

With such powerful technological tools at our disposal, it seems a waste not to employ these students and their computers, phone and iPods in collaborative activities that confront real world problems and create real quality products and solutions.

That’s what the Tournament of Minds teams do every year.  Congratulations, Rebecca.

Perhaps we have just accepted as legitimate the old semiotics of learning such as economic language (outcomes, products) or industrial langauge (control and discipline). I like the idea of the ecology of learning (Elliott and Piatek 2007), or more usefully, the semiotics of connection.  Considering what the world needs of our learners, it is becoming apparent that the most successful, adaptive and resilient learners are one who can create connections bewteen knowledge and skills, who can operate within and capitalise on networks of all types.  This semiotic of connection may look like this:  (Thanks to mindmeister for the mind map software)

Click the mind map to consider how this semiotic relates to your understanding of the way people learn.

Sounds harsh, but if you are a teacher and your opinion goes something like this: “Technology has its place, but all of this MySpace and blog stuff is just a disruption to real learning” then your opinion is anachronistic, irrelevant, or worse, unethical. Your students’ world exists on the other side of a significant gulf of understanding and experience. You, dear teacher, are receding from their view.

Ever since the Expanding Learning Horizons conference in Lorne, VIC this month, I have been thinking about how best to challenge my colleagues about their own learning and about their digital lifestyle beyond the classroom. I am delighted to say that we are moving, and not slowly, towards a narrowing of that chasm. So watch this space as we move with confidence into a next-ed environment.