With massive apologies to Banjo Patterson ( love your work AB) DER’s frisky colt, Hi Ho Netbook, is currently bolting through 800 plus statewide year9 paddocks, as we speak.

“There is movement at work stations, for MSword has passed around, DER laptops of No Regret have caused BIG stirs”.

Lets hope this is what is happening in learning spaces across NSW.

The following slideshare message is now not new, but the crisp simple design communicates an important message effectively.
The days of genuine “yeah buts” or “TTWWADI” at places of learning are strictly numbered. A massive thumbs up to that.

I trust we’ll harness this opportunity and hang on for the ride. Whether or not we are in total control is irrelevant, it’s the moving that is critical. We need to experiment, have more fun, jump in and celebrate our netbook mistakes and achievements.

Now tech at one level in NSW is nearing ubiquity, we can start dismantling the rhetoric & excuses a small, but often influential, minority of ”teachers” have cowered behind for far too long.

“The Laptops from Rudd Ree’s River, soon a household word today,

And the learners told the stories of their ride”

Ah, I can see the movie now. Action!

Also view Fisch/McCleods “Social Media is not a Fad” (especially if you are yet to see the 2007 original “Did you know”?) and Xplanes “Imagine Leadership”, both useful conversation starters.

Try this quick quiz, dead easy it is.

To date, which scenario has had more impact on DET NSW connected learning? 

a) “Extrinsically imposed employer/political pressure because web2.0 connected learning is coming via massive and never seen before financial investment, “ready, fire, aim” style.”

OR

b) “Intrinsically lets engage because I actually want to personally take deep individual ownership and walk the walk in my learning and leadership life?”

I am seriously curious as to the main motivations and attitudes behind the current positive DET shift we are seeing. 

The answer will have an enduring impact on the up take and embed rate of any transformational change DET expects.

If teachers understand why? with real purpose, learning will stick bottom up b) style but if its DET mandated and imposed from above, learning will be reduced to box ticking a) style.

ICT has been in schools since before I arrived in 1985 so it sure isn’t new. With this massive injection of edrev largesse we need to do something fundamentally different this time so we see transformation for kid’s futures. If I was cynical, web2.0 tools are not new or difficult skills to learn, I’d be leaning to a) above. Luckily I’m not.

There is a palpable sense of major urgency within DET, almost panicky misalignment, amongst higher up DET bureaucrats charged with specific fields of the wide gambit of connected learning responsibilties.

Elements of ICT rollouts still have elements of “left hand/right hand” as different DET departments push their connected learning project barrows as if riding the carnival dodgems at side show alley.

Whoops, sorry L4L, didn’t see you coming so soon, you must have got some real super polly fuel to get here so quick.

Hey CCP get outa my way you old timer, I’ve got a modern web2.0 tool suite to deliver but L4L has just cut me off, again!

Oy! shut up down the back there and stop running off course, none of you will have anything if we don’t get my paradoxically improved bandwidth and restrictive filters in place” 

As Sharon Strzelecki says, “Play noicer, please, guys”.

 

 

If leaders themselves have no metacognition of or deep personal engagement with the changes they are pushing, then teachers will quickly sense the superficial lip service. 

Can’t blame them, but hey guys this web2.0 stuff is NOT new and maybe we should have been playing the web2.0 game a tad longer than just now?

 Playing connected learning catch up may lead to enduring pain if all the components do not align. We don’t want our dodgems spinning wildy in circles as DET jumps on the back to spin our wheel and get us going again.

Idealistically scenario two is my personal carrot response.

It’s the one I’m trying to promote at my place through DIDOW. Trying hard to create the individual need of why transformative participative learning (web2.0 if we must!) is stronger by raising awareness and changing attitudes, in baby incremental steps.

Early days but so far I think its working. I’d rather teachers know the why and build their own PLNs so they can feel the networked learning difference themselves.

This is what all school leaders at all levels should be doing now. PLN’s only take a technical day or less to set up. Even our most tech shy participant was heard to comment “RSS feeds of my delicious links into netvibes was really easy” Language unheard of only weeks ago. They also understand how their own PLN will organically grow if they contribute, share and teach others.

No one wants another DET mandated brick in the wall on connected learning initiatives. Groans heard at previous School Development Days (SDDs) has been loud as top down mandated attitude adjustments wrapped as “policy” has been force fed on the troops. It is so obviously just DET ticking DET boxes for DET motives and no real professional learning ever occurs.

Stop it DET and start trusting us to professionally learn for ourselves, just give us some time to engage. A place to authentically share our professional learning via eportfolios will be welcome too. Carrot or the stick? It’s your call DET NSW. I know which way my kids respond.

L4L are planning teacher think tanks, the blinkers are off and learning barriers are coming down. Laptops for Learning (L4L) bulletin 3 was again informative clbulletin03 and may answer more questions. At least I found it more easily than edition 2 in the DET NSW intranet, someone must be listening at DET HQ?

Now if only the counter intuitive web1.0 portal, excessive DET filters and lack of RSS feeds can be sorted, I’d be a happy camper indeed. 

There is critical infrastructure work to be tackled on these issues if DET is to be taken seriously as a web2.0 player. That’s what worries me in the longer term about transforming our Public Schools ICT and connected learning initiatives. I still can’t sense the bigger picture alignment as earnest project managers furiously micro manage their little boxes of a far larger picture.

Wish you well in your local and/or general attitude adjustment missions.

Ours is on track and staff are asking, doing, engaging and experimenting with all that we’ve been given so far. Some of the tools we are learning are posted below.

  RSS in Plain English via Commoncraft

  Social Bookmarking eg Del.icio.us in Plain English via Commoncraft.

Independent learners may prefer this online Time4 module. It is one of the best and simplest self tutorials and covers all the topics you need to establish your own Personal Learning Network (PLN).

Sue Waters, the edublogger, also has PLN starter advice with great links to all the basic tools.

Feeling a little torn between “yay” and “oh dear!” today.

Did we just belly flop in the shallow end or have we launched a 10 metre 3.9 degree of difficulty, with pike? Quality learning style that is.

Sitting here on Saturday and reflecting on the past 48 hours of Quality Teaching and Professional Learning, I have mixed feelings on the experience. It was mostly positive of course, but I also sense the lost opportunities when my employer still delivers 20th century PD almost a decade into the 21st.

The 70:20:10 rule is also still alive and well but I sense our leaders are aware of, if not yet on top of, the dilemna this causes. One of my concerns is articulated by a valuable presenter we had the pleasure to work with. Tony Ryan says;

Many annual conferences are designed predominately as an entertainment and social function. Naturally, this is an important focus for that vital time-out every year.
Unfortunately, the quality of learning that takes place is often much less effective. Delegates regularly leave the venue and remember little of the necessary information that has been shared with them.

Tony Ryan has some thought provoking ideas on future learning when he says;

who we are as educators will be more important than what we teach.”

Energisers, ethicists, entrepreneurs and environmentalists”

You’d think I’d be as happy as a pig in the proverbial having just spent 2 days here, with 500 colleagues from NCR schools, all fabulous teachers I’m sure, doing amazing stuff with students.

The venue, social do, collegial conversations and food were all first class. But I still feel flat, as if I wanted more.

The distinct lack of authentic and meaningful cross delegate connectivity, even in face to face seminars, let alone any back channel amplification of our learning was probably what disappointed me the most.

The cliques of schools and colleagues who siloed without expanding their professional learning horizons was an opportunity lost. The convenors could expedite these connections, even if it is contrived.

The chance to experience and learn from others is what excites me about conferences, not the “hired gun” keynoters or experts dished up the front. As gifted as they may be, their impact is fleeting, my 500 colleagues are here to stay and do their great stuff in regional classrooms from every Monday.

It is these people who will help me become a better teacher, not some handout or website or fantriffic kit or book for sale at key note prices. PLN growth, developing real human connections and expanding our authentic local and global networks should be seen as critical learning at such f2f conferences.

A simple 20 minute formalised meet and greet was needed. Sure it is contrived but to connect face to face with fellow emailers, twitterers,bloggers or users of web2.0 or like minded curriculum collaborators or subject specialists or uses of IWB’s or connected classrooms would have established many diverse future conversations and added to our PLN’s substantially.

If I’d stated my professional interests on the conference enrollment, connection lists could be publically viewed over coffee as a 30 minute ice breaker. I would have immediately made connections with those with similiar educational goals allowing us the time to discuss ideas during the conference. Sure I eventually spoke to others and found some likemindedness, but I’m still thinking I missed more opportunities than I found.

It would be so easy to ensure NOT one possible face to face connection was missed by posting like mindedness on a pre conference wiki. This resembles the back wards planning, one of the QTL dimensions covered.

Face to face like mindedness would be established from the conference start; email, blog, connected classroom or twitter contacts could then be shared and deeper professional networks established for future reference. It would also be less embarrassing than me walking around with a sign saying ‘I Twitter, Do you?” a la the chauffeur airport greeters.

Of course I still inefficiently sought out people I know have regional responsibilities aligned with my interests.

A senior regional director, responding to individual connection requests, acted as maitre d’ at most morning teas, introducing like minded people. It was not a good look as he sprinted from each individual introduction to the next, highly wasteful of his talents and yet it would be so easy to improve and overcome.

Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciated the connection help and received answers to now follow up on, but witnessing senior leaders being used as the proverbial blue arsed fly was not a great use of human capital. This old school networking should by now have changed. A lost opportunity.

My colleagues could also have been introduced to fabulous English, Science and LOTE teachers in our regional schools who have similar professional interests to them. Their PLN would have grown substantially. This would take 15 minutes on day one to do. Another lost opportunity.

Instead we got the traditional sardine tin approach. 500 sit down, listen to lectures compliantly, turn off phones and watch the range of key note performances from engaging, adept and amusing to boring, boastful and almost belligerant.

The excellent fonts at the front, demonstrating their own mastery of QTL, even provided mild break outs for a “2 minute speed chat” or a kinesthetic “stand up sit down” game, if we were lucky. The best of the best gifted presenters who know their stuff are still great, but it’s now NOT enough. I wanted more bang for our DET learning buck and connected learning should be delivering it by now.

Unfortunatley I saw few laptops in use, phones were verboten, switched off and disconnected so twittering was minimal at best and not mentioned, let alone encouraged. The one lonely lady capturing video, I assume to podcast later, looked mighty lost most of the time and was not the example of core powerful learning visuals should be.

The 21st Century reality, when all seminars, all keynoters, all tutorials are captured and live streamed should by now be used at Regional level of NSW DET. They should set and show the connected learning agenda for others to follow.

All participants should be encouraged to connect via the new tools of learning and back channel chat should be encouraged, not forbidden. The quality of the content should be utilised by a far larger audience than the 500 physically present.

21st century learning opportunities, such as this QTL conference, should explicity demonstrate connected learning at Regional level. The 500 teachers present should have been shown our regional priority of connected learning, in action.

This slideshare shows us the power of humans, especially slide 45.

Technology is NOT, or should not be, the principle focus of connected learning futures. In places that deeply understand the changes facing networked learning, technology does not habitate the same pedastal DET NSW elevates it to. To place connected learning under a regional ICT umbrella, does the power of future human networks a grave disservice.

Connected learning should equal integrated mandatory learning. It is not an ICT appendix that learners, leaders and others then chop out if they feel a pain or they do not engage in it themselves. Of course if the current ICT appendix turns septic and explodes in our system due to ignorance, we will all face a far more major problem.

Imagine the ripple effect that would have back in their schools?

Participative use of modern tools should be integrated at all learning levels, starting with lead learning at conferences such as these. Imagine these 500 teachers, wirelessly connected, twittering, and networking in real time with each other and their remote colleagues. Some say disruptive, I say powerful collaboration.

All 500 report back in real time on what they are being shown and taught by their own lead learners on exactly what a 21st Century networked teacher is. Don’t dare say it’s an ICT/technology responsibility for that defeats any understanding of what the future of connected learning holds.

Maybe next year our key Quality Teaching and Learning conference will be substantially different. I hope so for it is always good, it just needs to lead by example. Shanghai08 and BECTA may be two such conferences we can learn from and model on.

Hope to see you at Coffs Harbour for Regional QTL in 2010. These 25 tools might be a common language we share by then.

1. be kept up to date
2. save time whilst looking for quality resources
3. learn from a whole world of educators, literally
4. have fun
5. be challenged in your thoughts
6. ask for help, guidance or suggestions
7. vent, rant and argue (140 limit! yee ha)
8. have interesting links delivered to you
9. break free from the educational echo chamber AND
10. find out how others teach and learn

then twitter is the application for you.

After a tentative tweeting start, I am now seeing the enormous quality and professional value of twitter.

Thanks tweetees, you know who you are, so does everyone else now!

After last weekends Federal COAG ICT largesse, its reassuring embattled Premier Rees has wasted no time in calling for new DET NSW technology supply tenders.

As part of the Federal edrev, DET NSW have on their wish list the lure of a sub $500 “compact learning devices (CLD’s)” for all 197,000 Year 9 to 12 students and more importantly wireless connectivity for 571 DET schools to be installed by February 2010. Tick, good. Very.

Guess the other 1500 DET sites, mainly primary schools, with students K to 8 don’t yet qualify for CLD’s or wireless connectivity and will fall further behind other systems, for a while longer. Cross, very. Maybe DET Primary Schools should just apply for an XO ala OLPC. Seems about how valued they are by DET NSW, currently.

The $1245 per student increase is also welcome news and may indicate Rudd is genuine in his bid for transparency in his new style of federalism. Lets hope so because Australians were promised a new approach to the passe blame game during the last election campaign.

Hopefully this rapid tender announcement reflects a state government committed to delivering the long promised technology improvements for Public Education students in NSW. I agree with Simon Job who also hopes Netbook specs don’t fill the tender, but Alex Serpo over at ZDNet believes the new CLD’s will be linux OS on netbooks to meet the $500 tender. (edit 12/12/08 or have a look here for yet more opinions)

Maybe we’d just be better off with these, or similiar. 

Celebratory restraint me thinks, until we see the actual laptop specs and roll out begin, the wireless functionality and most importantly the vital TPL to support teachers. Will teachers as learners receive one? I wonder?

Almost makes me want to celebrate and yell “Yippee-kay-yea”, almost. But Hans has still not left the building. John McClane has work to do yet.

picture credit: DoctorWho’s at flickr

Lindsay Tanner yesterday admitted that government agencies lagged the rest of the world when it came to the use of information technology. He also flagged the government’s intention to trial web 2.0 technologies next year (my edit ahem? THAT’S 2009 and it’s only a trial?) — such as allowing staff to post blogs — to adapt policy-making to today’s technologies.

The Australian Government could and should be leading the way in adapting our old processes of consultation, engagement, policymaking and regulation to the connected world. Yet we lag behind other nations in both the scale and pace of reform,” he said.

Is stating the bleeding obvious reassuring or alarming? At least one government minister is publically talking about catching up. Wow.

Maybe, just maybe, if governments on all levels “got it”, like Lindsay is suggesting, then we would see government bureaucracies adopt 21st century read write (web2.0) designs and layouts.

The NSW DET portal is last century in both design and function. It is hard to navigate, search and access, let alone the NSW government recognising that all staff need access to fully networked laptops first. Selective IRM is vital, but to adopt a blanket policy on portals, especially DET’s where participants want to collaborate across systems, is learning folly.

Queensland, Victoria and WA DET, although not yet fully read/write, all have far more user friendly interfaces that at least look 21st century and are far easier to find eresources, share information and navigate.

I’m glad our regional Learning Systems recently launched a user friendly read/write page. Alas, I can’t share with all learners because its locked behind DET NSW’s walled garden, but that’s another pet peeve about sharing openly.

All students reflect as part of our college Reflection, Organisation And Reading programs. ROAR not only involves using a learning log (diary) to plan, record homework and organise assessments, it also encourages students to consciously record how they best learn. With fine tuning and more realistic goals, I think ROAR, a 4 year old program, will improve further in 2009.

My question however is, how do staff reflect on their profession? I assume they do, I’m just not sure how. Maybe we could introduce a staff learning log and model this reflective practice?                                                           

Jeff Cobb’s thought provoking question What have I learned at work? on Mission to Learn keeps resonating. I especially like these questions

Does what I am doing right now (i.e., having a conversation, participating in a meeting, completing a routine task, etc.) increase my knowledge or skill level in any significant way? How?

What might turn this activity into more of a learning experience? What do I need to do to make that happen? What could my employer do?

What could I add into my activities for today that would provide for a learning experience?

What could I take out of my activities that does not contribute to learning and would not really be missed?

An interesting set of questions which I have answered sporadically since April. Some answers alarmed me. Talk about “stuck on the wheel” and in the massive “same old same old rut.” I needed to change, hence the toe dipping web2.0 experiment before me.

I see future positives, but still question the change rate of the massive edubureaucracy I sometimes feel stuck in. It is responsive, but at a glacial pace. DET NSW really needs a dose of Usain’s speed, to gain  momentum for the hurdles ahead. 

In“Leading A Digital School” , Mal Lee, said,

Only when the vast majority of Australia’s teachers are using the appropriate digital tools as a normal part of their everyday teaching, and are provided all the requisite development and support from the school and system leaders can Australian education begin to assist enhanced national productivity

The key words, in red, need to have bipartisan, enequivical political support across all tiers of government if Australia as a nation is to be fair dinkum about advancing 21st century learning in schools.

In amongst the questionable tangents of the blogeratti there is a growing alignment of dedicated learning professionals striving to  deblinker administrators, policy makers and governments. Those that do not listen, change and innovate do so at their systems, and learners, peril and decline. 

I’ll leave the last word for Jeff as he says it so well;

I’d go so far as to suggest that:

1. Individuals who become conscious of their learning at work and take charge of their learning at work will be by far the most successful in today’s economy.
2. The primary focus of learning professionals should be helping individuals become conscious of their learning and take charge of it.

…if you undertake the exercise above and discover that you really are not learning much on the job, it may be time to look for a better job. The second is that, if you are counting on your employer to understand the new dynamics of workplace learning and help you out, you may be waiting quite a while.

But according to ZDNet who did attend, Stephen Wilson DET’s chief info guru, said all NSW public school students will not only get gmail accounts this month BUT

the department (DETNSW) plans to equip students with web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and beyond the six gigabytes of storage that comes with Gmail, a further four gigabytes of storage hosted by the department.

This is hopefully the ebackpack, tools and cloud computing update that Tim Anderson hinted at back in April. As Big Kev used to say,”I’m Excited”.

This may mean NSW public school students can enter the read/write world in some sort of controlled DET acceptable filtered safe house.

I sincerely hope these announcments really are an example of progress with genuine 21st century ‘connected learning’ for students. 

It won’t be beneficial to genuine advances in learning if all this announcement means is a portal/walled garden version where students can only communicate with other password protected DET NSW student’s. We shall see.

This presentation, simply entitled Pay Attention, was created by Darren Draper in an effort to motivate teachers to think about 21st Century Digital learning and its implications in their classrooms for their students.

SMH 20th August 2008
Have a read of this interesting assessment development in an Australian School, read the 71 comments as well, they tell us a lot about how far out of touch some people are. Look for the Betchblog link in my blogroll because Chris teaches at this school and gives another insight into mlearning.

How far into the future is this? Its not, its now, if you want traffic.

DIGITAL: Are books a waste of resources? 

OPEN: To be findable, content must be open in the one Web global commons, with no barriers of cost, subscription, or copyright.

UNBUNDLED: The lesson for educators is that education is fighting the nature of the Net unless it allows its online resources not only to be open, but also to unbundle. Flat Knowledge is happening now.

SEOed: SEOmoz.org, is: “SEO is the active practice of optimizing a Web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.”

JUICED: In his book Building Findable Websites, Aarron Walter puts the idea this way (p. 80):

“Content that Sucks (Users In)
“Well-produced, valuable content on a website has a gravity that can suck users in with great force. When people find something on the Web that’s exciting, they love to be the first to introduce others to it. Perhaps it’s ego or maybe it’s altruism. Combine this fact of human nature with the inherent connectivity of the Web and you have a recipe to unite a large number of people around your website.”

NETWORKED: The advertising and marketing worlds are far down the road to reaching today’s youth through the Internet; education is not. Nodes of learning content are syndicated (RSS), virally spread, and connected into social networks.

MOBILIZED: Education is not there in top mobile web sites. Wow! The kids all have mobiles. As the mobile web expands in the next months and years, the opportunity is obvious to deliver learning directly to students. The top ten mobile web sites reviewed in April 2008 by all about symbian.com include just one of the ten where there is anything like academic material to learn; that one is the mobile BBC.

Some mind blowing concepts that challenge my current beliefs on copyright, ownership, censorship, propaganda, plagarism, open learning networks, DET filters, mobile phone use in schools and how kids best learn.

Today schools still rely mostly on printed paper and closed digital resources while strongly cautioning their teachers and students in using the open Net . For the ten-plus years since the Net began expanding from a small education resources network into multiple sectors and eventually mammoth information repositories, educators have been concerned about the challenge of finding the best learning resources within the vast open content. This perceived challenge has been a main reason that education has kept online materials at arms length.

Meanwhile, along with the much-lamented educational “junk” that poured into the Net, arguably most of the knowledge the academy exists to teach went online where these digital resources are open to all, free – and are usually better kept up-to-date and more compelling than in their printed counterparts.

Net native methods have emerged that make online content findable. Outside of education, powerful tools have been developed that could direct students and teachers to the best content for precisely what they are trying to locate. This white paper describes those tools – forming the new findability discipline – and outlines how educators can help make findability work for learning. When the process moves to mobile, you will find what you want to learn is in your hand.