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To access my latest assessment task click here

The other day I was reading a classmate Prue’s blog where she posted a survey she cam across at one the High Schools in Sydney that she consults to. It asked 10 questions about ‘How Web 2.0 Savvy are you’. After going through the list I was able to answer yes to 9 of the 10 questions. The only questions I answered no to was Do I use Flickr or similar, I am not sure why I haven’t ever used Flickr or a similar site. But that is for another post and another day.

So the point of this post is that I ‘borrowed’ this list and asked 25 students that I teach or have in my admin group to answer the same 10 questions. I was a little surprised by the responses, the students answered Yes, No or I don’t know what it is. The responses are as follows:

1. Am I comfortable using the Internet – Yes 25
2. Do I have a web page? – Yes 2, No 22, I don’t know 1 (not sure how they couldn’t know)
3. Do I read blogs? – Yes 3, No 20, I don’t know 3
4. Do I write a blog? – Yes 1, No 22, I don’t know 2 (again I am not sure how they couldn’t know)
5. Do I have a MySpace etc? – Yes 23, No 2
6. Do I use YouTube? – Yes 22, No 2, I don’t know 1
7. Do I use podcasts/vodcasts? – Yes 3, No 18, I don’t know 4
8. Do I subscribe to RSS feeds? – Yes 1, No 11, I don’t know 13
9. Do I use Flickr or similar? – Yes  3, No 13, I don’t know 9
10. Do I read/write wikis? – Yes 12, No 9, I don’t know 4.

When I explained that wikipedia was an example of a wiki all the students had that ahhhh!!! moment.

When I asked my students to complete this survey I really was very surprised by the responses that I received. It was only only back in March that I hadn’t used many of these technologies and now they are an integral part of my online identity.

It will be interesting to see where I am in 12 months time and where my students will be in 6 months time once I implemented and taught my first online unit of work. Check back for regular updates.

Trent

Well, after asking about Twitter in class on Saturday I thought I would check it out. I am still unsure how I will use it, but I have had fun so far.

Like a lot of the web2.0 technologies I have found out about over the past couple of months I can see why some people love it. I have been off work with the cold that seems to be engulfing Sydeny over the past couple of weeks. Between passing out on the lounge and flicking between the mind numbing rubbish on TV during the day I had fun following the Mars Phoenix landing today, thanks Anne for posting this on the Ning.

If you want to follow me and see how I go with twitter and tweeting please follow and ask me to follow you. My twitter name is trentmc.

Not sure how I will go, but lets see…

The assignment I am currently working on is a group assignment that requires us to create an e-learning community. An article that one of my group members directed me to got me thinking about my own classroom setting.

The article is by Ken Graetz and is entitled ‘The Psychology of Learning Environments‘ in it Graetz discusses the different distractions that students know have in Higher Education settings. He posses some interesting ideas about modern classroom settings and how students react to their surroundings, he also discusses the distractions that they bring into a classroom today. It also made me feel old in that it wasn’t that long ago that I was sitting in my lectures doing the cross word with a friend. Apparently that is an old distraction.

Graetz says ‘There is a dark side to the presence of personal, networked devices in class, however – when students use them to engage in activities unrelated to coursework’. At a higher education level I tend to think that students should be mature enough to be able to make their own choices about how and when they engage in coursework.

In my professional experience, although very limited is that kids will always pick and choose what they want to hear regardless of the technology they have with them or is in front of them. Although I do concede that if you have a timetable lesson in the computer lab that students do find it difficult to focus in the first couple of minutes of class to find out what it is they are meant to do besides try and get around the gatekeeper and look at MySpace, Facebook, Miniclips, etc, etc, etc…

I believe is time that educators try and make their lessons attractive to the current generation of students that we have in front of us and learn about the technologies they use so that we can better communicate and engage our students, not ban the technologies and alienate them further.

Click here to see the second part of my Learning Community assessment.

Click here to view my assessment on a learning community.

The 6 key emerging technologies from the 2008 report that I am familiar with are:

• Grassroots video: students are starting to use this is a medium to publish their own creative works. I know that some students are recording their performance pieces in the music and drama depts at my school and uploading them to youtube.
• Mobile Broadband: I began using this technology over the last week or two. The infrastructure seems to exist in the CBD at the moment. It is the handsets available and the content that seems to be lacking at the moment in Australia. Gmail has a great little app that you can use to check mail etc, but a lot of other content isn’t formatted for a mobile phone screen.
• Data Mashups: I have heard of these at conferences that have given some attention to web 2.0, but have very little experience of them.

Review the significant trends (p.6) – how do these relate to your experiences of technology in learning contexts?

The significant trends that relate to my experiences of technology in learning contexts have been with the growing use of web 2.0 and how this can be successfully used in a secondary school setting. I find it interesting how different classes and groups of students react differently to communication and social networks. I have been using the Colleges Learning Management System (LMS) for the past two two years with my HSC classes. The class I had last year embraced the forums to ask questions and seek clarification with the content and to pose their own ideas and theories. However my current HSC group is shying away from using it at all. They say that use IM to communicate about homework and study with their immediate friends only.

I see the gap between student and faculty perception of technology as being as a result of many members of faculty being completely unaware of some of the technology that exists. This mainly comes about because it is just not on the ‘radar’ for most educators. I guess the only way that this can be worked around is if technological innovations are given more attention in terms of professional development.

Review your familiarity and current practices against the key emerging technologies highlighted in this report.

Of the emerging technologies from the 2007 report that I am aware of or use at the moment are:

• User created content, I have seen the work some students have put into creating vodcasts/quicktime movies to submit assignments in some subjects.
• In a secondary school setting although I can see the effectiveness of them I can not see mobile phones being used in a mainstream context for a long time. Mainly because of cost of handsets to parents and the data plans that would be associated with them.

I see a number of aspects from 1999 – 2008 that have changed, been adopted and predicted by Brown:

• the development of web 2.0 as being very important
• technological changes in terms of hardware and software development and the increased speed in internet access globally

Brown foresaw a lot that has come into reality in a short period of time in terms of internet changes and web development. But as an educator has this been a good thing?
Challenges that I see relate to my own context of learning in the workplace are:

• the digital divide between students and their teachers.
• unwillingnesses on some teachers behalf to gain the necessary skills to send an email.
• use of the internet by some teachers just because they have the computer room for a specific period in the timetable.
• executive that has the IT dept block sites because they are not sure what they do. Mainly web 2.0 sites.

Brown refers to the ‘literacy of tomorrow’ as being able to have a private reference library and being able to navigate it and feel comfortable in doing so. But students today want the information on the first page they are directed to or find to have ALL the answers. Students don’t like having to explore sites, this is one disadvantage I see in social networking sites like facebook and myspace in that students use these out of school time and get everything in one page in front of them. No need to click links and explore around.

The other challenge that I have come across in my workplace is directing students how to become good ‘bricoleurs’. As someone coming from a social science/history background it is interesting to see that students can tell you if a printed sources can be trusted and how to tell a reliable source from an unreliable source. But when it comes to trusting sites and ‘copy pasting’ that site students aren’t so cautious. They also do not see what is wrong with taking something without referencing it and submitting it as their own unique work.

The final challenge that I have in my workplace is child protection. When Brown refers to the New Yorker article about “On the ‘Net nobody knows you’re a dog.” is an issue that is raised by schools. On social networking sites how do students really know who they are talking with? This is one of the reasons that I see social networking sites taking along time to be used in school settings.

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