MeetSee

Meetsee is a 2.5D virtual office built on Adobe Flash platform (so maybe it won’t be banned). It is a pretty simple idea.

I set up my panel discussion room, and have been fiddling with using a pair of web-cam screens and using ‘live’ audio broadcasting to the room. It takes minutes to set up. One neat feature is that you can upload a presentation to it. People in the room don’t have to just use the 2.5D view – they can click the presentation and see the slides in 2D, and they can do that with the webcam too.

Build and customise an office, then invite people to visit you and have a meeting. It has a 2.5D view with chat, webcam, Twitter feed, file sharing, Polls, RSS feeds, virtual wipe board and a clever video feeder from YouTube. Of course you can fiddle with your avatar (though one niggle, I hit the girl button by mistake and can’t switch it). You can upload a photo of your own head, which is cool too.

Meetsee also has a 2D chat and videoconference mode, so in may ways operates just like a simple Elluminate, Wimba Live Classroom or Flash Meeting. I really liked the way you can load up YouTube in your entertainment centre, or select a Twitter feed too -

It is also really simple to move around by just clicking on objects, or clicking chairs, filing cabinets and TVs to interact with them. Meetsee is highly functional, looks great and will appeal to kids and adults alike.

As the owner of the room, you can of course move the furniture around and choose the interactive items that you need and well as change the décor. Meetsee has a good ‘owner’ interface that lets you track activity in your room and it also lets you download that as a report, so in a classroom setting, it has an audit trail. The applications for its use could be from simple interaction and communication to live blogging. You could use the poll function to give a quick test – and use YouTube to give them the context for that test. Students could upload files or download them from your cabinet.

MeetSee has a flash based webcam feature, so you can broadcast on one of the interactive screens. You could use it in competency tasks for ‘interacting with clients’ or as a role-play. Meetsee could be used in school, or perhaps as distance or out of school tutor groups.

There are a range of ’settings’, the corner office, the video conference, panel discussion etc., and at the click of a button you can launch a different setting. I think that there is sufficient 2.5D ‘engagement’ to make it fun to use – but backed up with some great features that are really simple to use.

What comes after this

I despair at teacher’s who think that PBL or Instructional is ‘the’ way that teaching will go in the next decade. That is naive to say the least and hardly worth beating your chest over. Learning is blended. I think that no matter what approaches you want to use – effective teaching demands that you are media literate – and so are your students.

This is the to me the most significant issue – not the style of delivery. You can be as passionate as all hell about your ‘method’, but if you are not media literate, online and in the global conversations, you are not going to be as effective as students need you to be.

Sorry if that cuts into your idea of what your ‘teaching job is’ right now. But there it is. It is not enough to do in 2009 what you did in the decade before. It is not enough to only change if the syllabus changes or you need to be compliant.

Technology transformed the possibilities. Now we have to re-think and talk about how to stay on top of it. Connectivism is in effect and that delivers connected, networked new knowledge.

Learning needs to be blended, multi-modal and fluid and connected. Technology is ubiquitous in this process. Learning will be instructional and inquiry based – synchronous and asynchronous. It will be virtual and distance, it will be digital and face to face – because it is already.

That is a BIG problem. Not enough teachers have any understanding of the complexity of that last paragraph. Those that do are often not empowered to deliver it beyond their classroom. Teaching as we have known it is doomed to fail if we don’t gain traction. The Titanic was unsinkable technology, the world economy was stable, and no US President would use a line from Bob The Builder to win office. Change is quick and doesn’t care if you agree anymore.

As a rough rule of thumb, I would suggest that a school’s capacity to renew curriculum and explore alternate approaches to learning is directly proportionate to the amount of people who are ‘media literate’ and active online.

I then wonder, given the limited time everyone who can do that has, how it can be done.

That was a conversation I have this week with Dr Ian Solomonides, who is the acting Director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at Macquarie University. I asked him how K12 teachers could connect with Higher Education, so that their interventions with technology could be assisted, supported or studied by Higher Education. I thought maybe this would strengthen the recognition that those who work K12 are doing.

I was half expecting not to get a concrete answer, but Ian explained about a global group looking at online learning and collaboration based in Australia, the Omnium Group.

Omnium is a research group of academics, designers, artists, programmers and writers who work collaboratively (and from different countries) to explore the potential the Internet allows for what we term – online collaborative creativity (OCC).

As I start working in Higher Education, I am more aware of people talking about Universities being last to take a seat at the table, but this does not mean that there isn’t progress or interest. They, like K12, have academics and lecturers that are passionate about the changes that technology brings and the laggards. Like K12, the issues of taking change to the people, thousands of people, is a challenge. As Ian said this week,

“we know we have to do this, but we are few and they are many, so we have to be strategic in where we do it, how we do it and then to make sure what we do is significant enough that it is maintained.”

Isn’t this the same dialogue in K12?. Hmm, I thought, same issues – but the terms of reference for a large Institution like Macquarie University – which in itself is under going massive changes are different. In this regard, storming the school Firewall Nazi’s office or flash mobbing un-cooperative curriculum laggards seems easier. But I guess there has to be evolution, not revolution, so I’ll put my stick down.

How important are connections between K12, TAFE and Higher Education – are we are all now in the same orbit when it comes to change?.

Mumbai – Twitter Feeds

I am sure everyone, as they wake up or get in the car to go home will have heard about the events in Mumbai today. It was a hot topic on Twitter Search all day. About 6 months ago, Will Richardson was telling a story about Wikipedia and how it reported new on the Bharpour more efficiently than new channels. It was interesting to note that as I hit Twitter Search for the first time and used the #mumbai tag, there were 20 more results each time I pressed refresh. Some reporting the news, some reporting on the mass media’s interpretation of events, and local sources posting emergency phone numbers. At one point, people talked about how the mass media had gone soft on it’s coverage – but at the same time talking about how the authorities were attempting to remove the #mumbai tag from Twitter.

It is amazing to me, that in only a few months, we can once again talk about another news vector being more efficient (I’m not saying accurate) at publishing that even the ‘masses’ that edit Wikipedia.

Perhaps Twitter isn’t a news outlet. If not then it’s the worlds biggest ‘rubber necking’ event for sure.

During the same day, I read Annabel’s post about the situation of internet access in rural cities – talking about her recent professional development event in Mildura, Victoria. It is amazing to think how dis-connected even Australian society is in terms of access to information, and at the same time how important we don’t dis-connect our society.

Given the changes in just 6 months, it really makes me wonder how we will be reading the news in the next 6. Hopefully the news will be better than this though.

Wikipedia is near enough good enough

Which is more important – getting the answer right or learning how to get the answer right?.  Rather than run PD on skills, maybe you need a U-Turn?

Googling the word ‘solar energy’ at the time of writing responded with  23,500,000 references. That is a lot of reading, which may be one reason that students often favour Wikipedia in which thousands of people try to define and classify the term in just a handful of pages. They don’t see the value in understanding how that summary has been arrived at. Its just there to use.  Learning to how to get the answer is the part of learning that should be teaching with ICTs.

Wikipedia is not always right (as students will often tell you), but they do think it is ‘accurate enough’. For so long, they have been copying and pasting its content into essays and presentations that teacher in-action has made it acceptable.

But what are teachers doing to guide them though the critical thinking processes to evaluate information? What formative scaffolds are in place to be able to show the development in understanding though critical analysis of information from a wide range of sources?

Jenny Luca spoke recently in an online discussion in the Powerful Learning Practice network meeting. As a teacher librarian in a girls secondary school, she has noticed that non-fiction borrowing is almost nil because students turn to the internet for faster ways to get ‘facts’.

I don’t see this as a problem with ‘the internet’ or that books may become redundant,. I see a problem with assessment.

Assessment has been based on repeating ‘content’ back to the teacher in classrooms since back in the day. Mapping student response to syllabus ‘content’ and therefore meeting a learning outcome is the accepted method in most classrooms.

But there is no new learning in using the Internet to do this. It is simply a searching task. Wikipedia is as students say ‘accurate enough’ to give a matched response to question, and pass. When students present an essay or PowerPoint – teachers tick the ‘ICT box’ and the ‘content’ box. Teachers accept that is ‘near enough’ too. Seriously, how could any 14 year old not be able to present a graphical, accurate slideshow to explain ‘solar energy’.

A teacher will say ‘yeah, but I have a test – so if they don’t learn it, then they will fail’. Is that the point of learning to pass a test at the end – or to develop and support them in the process of learning. Testing is not a ‘digital insurance’ policy just in case your students Googled the answer.

Use a test to check to see if students learned ‘enough’ at the end seems to be an acceptance that what you did in the process of learning was not sufficient to gauge the depth of their learning without it.

Teachers need to learn how to use ICTs to develop independent critical thinkers and devise formative strategies that demonstrate a continued effort and growth in student understanding. This is academic not technology skill development.

Professional Development needs to be a three step process.

Firstly teachers need to become ‘media’ and ‘network’ literate and understand how technology and people impact learning. Secondly, they need to want to stop teaching. They need want to become designers, mediators and facilitators of the process of learning. They need to develop ‘media’ aware formative assessment methods that demonstrate how students derive meaning and answers, not just repeat them. Lastly, they develop greater awareness technology itself in order to learn about and select the appropriate ‘tools’ to achieve these goals. They won’t and can’t do step three without the first two.

I worry that the term Web2.0 immediately means ‘software’ when talked about in staff rooms and PD sessions. In order to begin to understand how to use any of it effectively to change learning, it is critical to start at the beginning, not the end. ‘Looking at Web2.0 tools’ is the end of the journey, not the start. It all starts with curriculum renewal, which leads to professional development onto effective classrooms, engaged learning and better outcomes – for students. It’s academic development just as much as it is technological.

Getting into it

The problem with Web2.0 is that it doesn’t really exist. For a school to say it is going to look into Web2.0 is far too loose an objective as it means different things to different people. For some it means using online ‘tools’ and for others it is about students making global connections.

All to often Web2.0 is used as the collective term is not based on any given technology, but an understanding that the advent of read/write publishing, collaboration and media literacy are now established ‘communication’ methods. Communication has been the most misunderstood part of ‘ICT’.

Originally, communication (the C in ICT) was about networking. The ability to send and receive information, using technology. Email was perhaps the most ‘social’ element, but mainly it related to data transmission of files. Full duplex, half duplex, modems and the digitization of analogue data for transmission was for a long time what the C meant. It was perfectly acceptable then to create word processing documents, presentations and desktop publishing as a method of communicating information with technology.

Web2.0 is a major disruption to this well worn path.  So where do you start?

Andrew Church has recently updated his ‘digital taxonomies’, and still remains one of the best resources to use in understanding and establishing new learning frameworks. It can be used to great effect to renew curriculum and rethink learning frameworks.

In exploring what can and can’t be done, start with a single unit of work.

Unpack the current scope and sequence, read Andrew’s taxonomies and try to establish where they will fit. That in itself is a big undertaking.

Establish a working party to discuss the tools Andrew suggests, and how you are going to evaluate their impact. From there you can select a limited number of technology approaches and introduce them into the classroom.

What is it that you will be evaluating? Remember Web2.0 is a big idea – so chunk it down, and keep it simple.

It is one thing to renew a unit of work, but quite another to start talking about the ‘shift’ and ‘21st Century’ skills. My point is that curriculum leaders and your peers will find renewing a unit of work – setting out terms of reference for evaluation – linked to performance indicators understandable. Selecting one or two read/write methods, investigating them and working towards targeted professional development in those is likely to get supported.

I think that no matter how passionate you are about the way we use ICTs to prepare students for their future, no matter how fired up you get after reading posts such as Chris Betcher’s ‘Digital Divide’, you have to try and separate advocacy from the reality of the day to day processes that make schools operate.

Change has rarely been radical in schools and trends come and go, so it’s not surprising that your frantic signaling may be misunderstood completely. The most significant barrier if you do start waving at them, is the perceived ripple effects that may de-stabilize established (and successful) teaching and learning approaches.

Establish how these new approaches fit within your assessment schedules. How are you going to convince your head of department that your modifications will improve learning?

Developing revised performance indicators mapped against outcomes within established learning frameworks is language that they understand. Mapping these to established systemic initiatives, such as the NSW Quality Teaching Frameworks will strengthen your argument. This is overtly possible.

Working on a single unit is also very manageable for busy teachers. If you can convince your executive to bring in someone from outside your school to help you workshop your unit, to identify areas of professional development that can be realized, then do it. If not, pick you way carefully by developing a personal learning network. Find someone online who will act as a mentor – join a common interest group such as OZ/NZ Educators. The process may be slower, but still better than trial and error in your classroom – and you WILL be supported.

Give yourself time to create your unit, develop your framework, and plan your evaluation. I’d suggest 3-6 months for your first unit of work. Don’t try and take in the enormity of Web2.0. Take on your curriculum first.

Motivating Online Learners

Digital scaffolds are essential to motivating online activities – if you want to do more than swap the exercise book for the glass page.

These things go a long way avoiding the ‘exercise book trap’ such as “Identify two factors that caused World War 1” onto a blog.

I’ve often seen that, usually from teachers who accept that moving to read/write activities is needed, but find it more difficult to find ways to do it – so how do you motivate learners to do more than answer text-book style questions?

Firstly, in planning the online activity consider what is the extrinsic reward of taking part?

Starting with the end in mind

Make this clear throughout each activity. This is achieved by starting with the end in mind.

What, at the end of the online activity will students be presenting to you? How will that encompass the standards/outcomes/content needed?

Enquiry based Digital Taxonomies

Much of today’s classroom ‘questions’ are based on Blooms Taxonomy. That can be elevated and integrated into digital taxonomies to motivate learners.

Blooms
Identify 3 factors that caused World War One.Explain why they went to war. Justify your response.

Digital Blooms
Create a podcast to explain the causes of World War One through events and people leading up to ‘the war to end all wars’.

Inquiry Based Digital Blooms
World War One was called the ‘war to end all wars’. Why then, do we still have wars?

Which of these statements would lead to a more motivational project? Why?

The question drives the learning. The overall end goal will probably sound quite interesting. It is open ended, and initially starts with them thinking from a personal level. “Have I heard that said before?”,”That sounds dumb”,”What are you on about!”. The point is that the answer is neither obvious or explicit, nor does it state which technology to use, nor how what is embedded in the learning.

Those things appear in the documentation of the project, the ‘requirement’. So you can ensure you also embed the key syllabus needs and choose a technological approach that will allow them to explore more than ‘written text’.

Student Generated Questions – they are the experts

That will lead to a lot of questions, which you don’t have to answer. But you do have to discuss them with the class, and get them to clearly understand what they know as ‘fact’ and what they need to know.

Often students think they know – or worse they think that can easily find out – via Google or Wikipedia.

What is a podcast?
Who said ‘the war to end all wars’?
How long is it?
What do we need to put in it?
When was WW1?
Who was involved?

Motivation though ‘chunking’ activities.

When planning, you have to think – how can this ‘end’ be ‘chunked’ into smaller activities to make it more motivating? – Can they cope with being given it at once?

This means that you have to be very explicit about the end goal. To do that you will have to give some resources and boundaries. But take the opportunity to ‘Google proof’ their learning, and clearly explain your expectations.

In developing your podcast, each person will need to research and reflect each lesson on your learning. When you record your group’s podcast, each person will contribute one possible cause, and personally record it for the production.

OMG – I have to participate, and I have to talk about what I am doing towards it all the time!

Prepare yourself for the work-avoiders to mount a rebellion

Yes! they will moan, yes they won’t be used to it, but they will do it! Don’t pander to it – you have just made them accountable to you and more importantly, to each other. That is motivating. It may take several days for them to stop saying ‘I don’t understand’ – remember, students have a wealth of experience in claiming they ‘don’t understand’ – it is simply work avoidance. Ignore it, and focus on praising those who are participating – you are removing the oxygen that that has previously sustained work-avoidance and plagiarism. Be ruthless. The worst thing you can do is ‘give the answer’. Make them find it and believe it for themselves.

That means that each lesson ‘chunk’ has to be considered. Are the ‘breadcrumbs’ I am giving them ‘too hard’ or ‘too easy’?

Tackling the ‘lurkers’.

When presenting the project to students, don’t threaten them with failure. Just talk about the success opportunities for them. Talk about what they have to ‘lose’ by not actively participating. How are you going to stop the ‘lurkers’? We all know that in typical ‘group’ work, with a ‘group’ presentation that some students do nothing, as they know more studious students will carry them.

Are there things you can build into the project  – to stop lurking? – Are there ICT technologies that can act as effective ‘activity trackers’, as an intervention to discourage lurking?

Of course there are. Lots of ways. This to me is one of the more powerful reasons to use social media tools. They use time and date as their differentiators.

Motivation to participate comes though them discovering how ridiculously easy it is to identify their level of participation – anytime, all the time. Of course, you don’t need to labour the point, they soon figure it out.

It is quite liberating for students and teachers to discover that it is no longer difficult to figure out who did what in a group project, to communicate with each student at a personal level, weave conversations and then to allocate rewards. This makes the learning, conversational, rethinking formative assessment.

So when in class, you don’t have to give the answers, as you don’t need to ask the questions. You can give clues, lead them down thinking paths and ultimately use the power of the ‘community’ to keep the conversation on track – through ‘comments’.

This is when a blogging community should be used, to reflect, discuss and weave conversations on learning as they happen. Weaving the comments is often a new skill, and quite different from the classroom experience.

Of course, this is a quick summary … but if you can identify the benefits in this approach, you can then start to think about how this changes the use of ICTs. You will start to think about how ICTs can work better for students and how digital pedagogy does that.

In short re-thinking student motivational factors is an effective approach improving learning as a group and as individuals.

Diigo Update (weekly)

• The ALTC Exchange

  The ALTC Exchange provides learning and teaching resources and functions to support communication and collaboration across the higher education sector. It does this through professional networking tools and search, discovery and repository functions for sharing resources, as well as portals to other learning resource websites and databases

  tags: altc, resources, teaching, open, source

• FINAL REPORT | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH

  Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

  We include here the findings of three years of research on kids’ informal learning with digital media. The two page summary incorporates a short, accessible version of our findings. The White Paper is a 30-page document prepared for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Series. The book is an online version of our forthcoming book with MIT Press and incorporates the insights from 800 youth and young adults and over 5000 hours of online observations.

  tags: youth, social, networking, paper, web2.0

• Google Spreasheet – Mashup Screencast

  A quick and suprising demonstration of the extended mashup/lookup functions that Google adds to spreadhseets. Nicely narrated too – US content (of course)

  tags: google, spreadsheets, lookup, mashup

• Computer Literacy 3.0: Today’s computer literacy 3.0 courses

  The following people teach courses that set the stage for computer literacy 3.0. Note that some are upper division or somewhat technical courses, but the material in those courses will be refined and winnowed for presentation in general computer literacy classes. (The first time I taught a computer literacy 2.0 class, it included such things as how to use DOS, 123, and Wordstar, but it was a graduate course — such topics quickly moved to the undergraduate curriculum).

  tags: literacy, computing, web2.0

• /content/whitepaper/WP-soc_17172_v3_11-10-08.pdf

  tags: white, paper, future, web2.0

• 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners

  In this guest post Aira Bongco (@airabongco) shares 10 tips for Beginners who are just getting into Twitter.

  So you just signed up for Twitter. You make your first tweet and you realize you don’t have any followers. “What a dumb idea!” You say. “Who the hell would be interested in what I’m doing anyway?”

  Don’t worry. You’re normal. That is a sign that you are a Twitter beginner. A lot of us Twitter users (or addicts) went through the same questioning routine. And look at us now. We’re geeks who are on Twitter all day and night and we can’t stop tweeting.

  So you want to be like us? It’s not that hard really. Just follow these simple steps.

  tags: web2.0, twitter

• The University of Blogs – A Sample Edublogs Campus Site

  Welcome to The University of Blogs – our Edublogs Campus Sandpit.

  Here, you can explore the potential and power of Campus – for example this page took literally minutes to create, and is infinitely flexible!

  Browse round the links underneath the images below to see just some examples of how blogs can be used. To login anywhere, you just need to enter the username: ‘admin’ and the password: ‘pass’ (without the apostrophes).

  tags: edublogs, university, blog, tutorial, demo

• Convert Text to Speech Free. Listen to any document, website or blog

  tags: text2speech, mp3, audio, convert, podcast, ispeech, speech, blog

• Agenda (Google Teacher Academy Resources)

  The GTA sessions

  tags: google, teacher, academy

• Page2RSS – Create an RSS feed for any web page

  It is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

  tags: no_tag

• iFun Golf

  tags: iphone, games

• Twitter / nocyberbullies

  tags: nocyberbullies, twitter

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Open Education Australia Report – iLabs MIT

Dr Philip Long, MIT iCampus Project (now at University of Queensland) gave his view and use of Open Source development of scientific experiments at MIT in iLab. He was talking at the Open Education Workshop in Sydney.

He talked about secondary, under graduate and out reach students using and developing lab based experiments through conversion of parts of the experiment that are normally ‘bench’ based into digital alternatives – and shared online with open access for all.

Some experiments use digital interpreters to data log or produce visual responses to user action over the internet. This includes the use of web-cams to give students the initial ‘view’ that the experiment is ‘real’, and that the enhanced digital interfaces that are being developed through iLabs.

Students can uses existing ‘code objects’ to interact with ‘lab’ devices – via activex or other mash-up to control and conduct experiments. Phillip was keen to point out that students are keen initially to view webcams and see that they would be ‘really’ operating a ‘live and real’ experiment remotely.

There are a number of Open Source project in development that students can either use or develop. Code can be downloaded, modified and re-distributed back through the iLabs community.

There are a number of global competitions run via iLabs for encourage students to learn. Phillip says the key in high school based learning using iLabs is under standing that students don’t know what they can and can’t do in using iLabs – it creates exploration and interest – through participation.

Phillip gave numerous examples of how students had found fault with some of the experiment to digital interfaces from an academic, user interface or programming perspective and then set about working together – online – to solve these issues and re-distribute the improvements though Open Source.

He was illustrating that Open Source and Open Education are not limited to technology, but sharing ideas, information and intellectual property to improve learning outcomes from high school through to Phd.

Independence from interest

How much important are you putting on ‘independence’ in transforming classroom practice?

If you walk about talking to people about the ‘wow’ of the week, your favourite Web2.0 gizmo this week, sooner or later people switch off. The honeymoon period is over. Initial interest can fade as people get lost in the fog of technology.

You might think what you are talking about is crystal clear, but others are simply looking into the murky unknown. Too many conversations, too many tools leads to confusion and inaction.  At times I have thought, ‘wow, I thought they were getting it, but what happened?’

Now I have learned that from an educational development perspective, there are some critical questions you have to ask yourself before saying much of anything.

For example : I want to create podcasts for my distance students. How do I do that?

The easy answer is : Audacity, Podomatic and a microphone. But that answer is incomplete.

We have to also ask

• How will what I do/say next build independence, so they can sustain this?
• How will the way I maintain this build capacity in the department to do more?
• How will this intervention in the established ‘norm’ – strengthen learning?

Independence

We want to ensure that whatever we do to develop education creates independence in those we help. This adds value, and prevents you being the ‘go to tech’ person – to ‘do’ it for them.

Capacity building

How will your instruction be recorded, shared or published so that it can be re-used by others repeatedly. What is the cost of this? Developing a resource such as a wiki or creating a screen cast has is a cost outside that of the mastery skills needed. This is normally measured as your time.

If you are able to create an independent teacher, with supporting materials – then they will be able to model the educational development in others.

Strengthening Learning

Locating and aggregating quality supporting resources will strengthen learning. This could be connecting the person with people who have experience and passion in this area (their blog, wiki or actually having a conversation).

Setting out terms of reference to evaluate the benefits to learning will assist in turning the intervention in the existing ‘norms’ in to a measured argument to sustain or modify it. It is likely that un-seen factors will affect this. Bumps in the road, such as access issues, technical issues or policy issues. Documenting and addressing these will help with maintaining the use of the technology over a period of time, not being a one off field trip.

Educational development requires more activity than the act of ‘teaching how’, it has to predict issues, challenges and further opportunities that will create independent advocates, that build capacity to do it again and again. This has always been the issue with ICT in schools – how to maintain and build on any given ICT introduced into learning. The major difference today, than a few years ago, is the amount of existing freely available materials and connected intelligence that we can draw on.

We simply don’t need to show people everything, but we do need to ensure that we scaffold resources and provide wider information that they can explore, knowing that it has been provided a result of our own evaluation.

Three questions I ask myself, whenever someone asks me for help.

Capacity through intervention strategy

What do we mean by capacity building in Educational Technology. Perhaps right up front, it is advisable to remind people that you are working with that you don’t mean ‘learning computer skills’.

That is often the assumption that people attending workshops make as that has largely their prior experience. PD + Computers = Mastery Challenge.

Capacity should be addressing critical areas such as participatory planning, curriculum, units of work, lesson design, implementation, evaluation, research, information, advocacy, networking and financial planning.

Building capacity in yourself is far easier than attempting to do this at the whole school level. All that knowledge and connectedness that comes with the acquisition of capacity in yourself – is not easily replicated.

Often in our eagerness to see reflections of our own advocacy and practice in others, it is easy to forget just how confusing, frustrating and massive it was to climb out of the 20th Century teaching norms and look towards the horizons of what could be possible.

Flash was easier to learn when it was version 1, Photoshop was far less complicated in version 7, and RSS was far easier to deal with when there was less information flooding in. The capacity of all of us to generate information that we think helps the rest of ‘them’ – means that early adopters are critical to any educational institution to interpret and lead.

To me, it is an ongoing tragedy that these people are often not empowered to ‘lead’ – hence the perpetual question ‘how do we effect sustainable change’ that senior educational leaders orbit. It is hard to plan your future, if your point of reference is the past – specifically, time served is preferable over capacity to lead change.

Friere (1973) Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues

“the process of learning to read and the act of reading are deeply political: our reading of the word is shaped by our reading of the world”

Student’s own experience of technology combined with teacher interventions are mutually reinforcing in building capacity – for change. We simply don’t need to know ‘everything’ anymore. Mastery ICT skills are less important that understanding how technology changes learning.

“We are going to blog” or ”We are using Web2.0 tools in the classroom” and other statements are unlikely to improve learning outcomes for students.

I say unlikely, unless they are seen as interventions essential in strengthening teaching practice. To say you are working to build capacity is

“Meaningless unless you insist on using language and terms that have precise meanings.” (Moore, 1995).

While we are talking about promoting change, the interventions that teachers are doing right now in their solo-classrooms are part of a wider social transformation.

“We are going to blog” – is an output of increased capacity not mastery skills – writing a blog is no harder than writing an email in that regard.

Capacity comes through understanding how using blogs is an intervention within wider social change. In education it directly relevant to renewing pedagogical approaches, developing media literacy skills, reflective learning over passive learning etc.,

In fact web2.0 is part of the digital-soup of Learning Objects within curriculum.

Chiappe defined Learning Objects as:

“A digital self-contained and reusable entity, with a clear educational purpose, with at least three internal and editable components: content, learning activities and elements of context. The learning objects must have an external structure of information to facilitate their identification, storage and retrieval: the metadata. ” (Chiappe, Segovia, & Rincon, 2007).

Any professional development seminar, workshop or in-service – that promotes ‘learning about Web2.0’ – has to address ‘capacity.

It must clearly explain the wide reaching implications that it has to have to become sustainable, and that on their own, Web2.0 applications – such as blogging are unlikely to improve learning outcomes for students.

Once you done that, you are in a much better position to understand which Web2.0 tools could be used in ‘capacity building’. And it may be that you shortlist a relatively short, but considered list.

What are the interventions? What are the learning objects? What are your criteria for capacity building? – The tools are easy in comparison.