Minecraft Mothers.

This is Townsey, one of our mums (who is also a teacher) presenting a short story about her experience as a mum, putting her kids into Massively Minecraft, at Teach Meet Sydney this week. I’d be interested in your comments.

Massively Skyped

An interesting thing is happening in Massively Minecraft. While the game itself uses ‘text chat’ there is increasing use of a second channel, Skype. There are multiple channels appearing, often between small groups, but also one large channel, in which kids use voice and text. It’s almost like a sub-layer of conversation, and often relates [...]

Internet Research Task

Ah, the internet research task for homework. A series of questions to be written up on a sheet. This week’s battleground which involves Googling, skimming and probably cutting and pasting. Of course it also assumes access at home to the Internet and a computer. There is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning [...]

Pathological Media Misuse

Let’s take down this latest rubbish from News Ltd, which it put online in various formats and places online. Related coverage included Kids are digital but not that savvy, addictive dangers no game, games ruining young mined blah blah, the usual run down of the internet and games, my favourite was the Herald Sun, who’s [...]

The Utopian Journey

A few years ago now, Judy O’Connell ran a project called ‘A book in a day”. It was one of those innovation ideas Jude magics up. A year later I helped Jeff Agamenoni with a similar book project in his Great Falls Gifted and Talented Class. It was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done [...]

Papunya – Arrival

“When the white people came to Australia, they brought with them white people’s technology” commented Blair McFarland, leader of the Caylus Anti drug, alcohol and volatile substances project in Alice Springs.  As we walked though some scrub, he pointed out various trees and plants that to local people is the food garden. “So when the whitefellas [...]

Nano-Funding, grass roots investment.

Imagine Sally, a primary school teacher had a great idea for doing something different in her classroom with technology that the school didn’t have. Sally works out how much it would cost and find’s it is $1200.00 for the equipment and software. Instead of giving up when told there is not loot for this, she [...]

Edublog Awards – oh dear

I was dissapointed to discover that the annual Edublogs Awards has not included a virtual world catagory, choosing to instead encourage people to add a nomination under social-networks. This further marginalises a valid medium in favour of adding popularist and meaningless things such as ‘best free tool’ or hashtag. Classroom 2.0 wins Best Social Network [...]

Are you a NAND or a NOR?

Another drawing. I was thinking about the two most common beliefs about how best to go about education. It seems to me that it’s not as simple as one side or the other. If we thought of this a truth-table, the column on the right is a sort of NAND gate, which of course is [...]

The internet is @@@@ing #####less

So I sat and wondered today as I watched another PowerPoint, how different things have become when it comes to even talking about places we communicate in. It’s non-cool these these days to use http:// or even double-u double-u double-u dot. Even email has become somewhat of a time stamp. Some people only have their [...]