The FordCast

I did my first personal podcast today. Inspired a few weeks ago in Graz by Ewan, I bought myself an iRiver iFP-890 and got a soundseeing tour going this morning with one of the students that I work with from the Special Individual Programmes Team. The internal microphone is outstanding. I just hung it from the mirror of my car and we soon forgot about it as we flew around the county. I also interviewed my daughter who just loved the idea of being published on a podcast.

The only pain was that I couldn’t get it uploaded directly to this site and had to use a short-term workaround. At least it works though and the link is below. The main points of the podcast:

• Habitual writing on blogs is good.
• Children need an audience for their writing.

Its only 15 minutes long and 6.2MB. Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Fordcast 8th December 2005

Backchannel Backchat

It seems that the LesBlogs conference in Paris was the scene of an interesting spat between Ben Metcalfe, the brain behind the BBC’s brillant Backstage project and Mena Trott, the co-founder of SixApart.

It centred around comments on the IRC backchannel which Ewan describes as ‘ a kind of MSN that everyone in the conference was tuned into and could use to communicate with each other.’ The backchannel was displayed behind the speakers on stage. Ewan used it to maintain a conversation with all the participants and between segments of his talk and he was able to respond to questions or comments left spontaneously by the participating audience.

However, others found the experience not so productive. When the criticism from Ben was deemed too harsh then Mena (from the stage) forced him to stand and give an account for his actions. There was quite a scary teacher-pupil kind of thing going on and it reminded me of once when as a pupil, I was told by the headmaster to stand up and ‘face the music’ in front of the whole school. I can’t even remember the misdemeanour now (I was probably guilty though!) but the buttock-clenching embarassment is still fresh in my mind. Another similar experience drove me to verse years later! Fast forward to 2005 – How not to deal with an unruly student- the video

Why this interests me is that every classroom has a backchannel. It may not be electronic but be in no doubt that an undercurrent of relevant and irrelevant thoughts, comments and questions is whirring around every body of students sitting in front of every teacher. Sometimes the output of the backchannel is rude ‘backchat’ but most of the time the skilled teacher ignores the irrelevant and sometimes the irreverent, to take the gems from the classroom backchannel and use them to motivate and move a class on. It doesn’t surprise me that Ewan used the backchannel with aplomb. He’s a teacher! Despite what people might think, not everyone can teach. Most couldn’t deal with the classroom backchannel!

It’s a wild world…

It seems that the fur is flying between Adam Curry and Dave Winer over the podcasting millions. I’m sure the differences are now pretty much irreconcilable which is such a shame as they were such good friends. When I saw them both together way back in May 2001 at the Scripting News Dinner in Amsterdam they were like brothers.

The related wikigate scandal is about whether Adam edited the Wikipedia entry on podcasting to deliberately remove reference to other people’s contributions to podcasting. I’m sure the argument will run its course but Dave Winer makes an interesting general point about Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

This is an important issue for educators. We have always taught students not simply to unquestioningly believe what they read just because it was in print. Before consuming information coming their way, we extolled the virtues of asking questions about authorship, purpose for writing and authenticity of sources as an academic skill. It was often covered in history units about propaganda or English units on fact and opinion.

These principles have now assumed an importance that moves far beyond the purely academic. Being able to handle and make sense of the vast amounts of information available on the web and across other media is now simply a life skill that students must have to be able function effectively in their worlds. Being able to produce information responsibly for the web is another life skill that our students need to develop as early as possible. They live in a world of both content production and consumption.

For me this is where teachers should come to the fore. Who else is going to equip the 21st century student to be digitally savvy, digitally literate in a digital world? In my opinion, education is going to prove the only viable long-term solution to issues of online plagiarism, to flaming, and to problems of accuracy, validity and authority of collaborative software. Will we be willing and enabled though as educators to step into the breech and explicitly relate the technological experiences and digital life-skills of students in schools to the wider world?

Autono Blogger posted recently about the changes and innovations that we hear so much about in education with:

‘a slightly niggling unease about the sense that all this enthusiasm may be partially (in some cases perhaps wholly) driven by haste and fear… And sometimes I wonder if the rush isn’t being fuelled by technology itself – because all this stuff is happening, because we can do all these things, we must otherwise we’ll be left behind. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that we should.

I agree that we shouldn’t be driven by technology and should not just apply it in classrooms for its own sake. We should know when to say no to technology. It never will be the educational panacea. However, when our students’ lives outside school are being transformed by technologies and when the very nature of information is changing in society, we cannot afford to linger with our heads in the sand. We do so at our peril.

David Warlick writes:

Xanga.com and myspace.com are evidence of the wild world that we have allowed to happen, because we are too frightened to take hold of new technologies and too unwilling to pay for sufficient access, professional development, teacher reflection time, risk-taking innovation, and thoughtful harnessing and integration of these technologies into our curriculum

The sooner students and teachers are given real platforms with real responsibility to explore these issues and to develop the skills and attitudes to operate effectively and responsibly as citizens in our shrinking world, the better the web will be for it.

The Intuitive Holy Grail

Stephen O’Hear lists his feature set for the perfect weblogging software for education. Many of the features he wants are available as separate web services or software but they are not yet available ‘under one roof.’ Convergence is the process that seeks to connect these disparate elements together. His article in the Guardian, ‘Seconds out, round two’ gives a very readable overview of the so-called ‘web 2.o’ phase in the development of the internet, providing a framework to consider and make sense of our own use of the internet in schools.

From the comments to Stephen’s original post Ewan McIntosh thinks he may be in reach of the elusive holy grail as he is at Les Blogs 2.0 in Paris with most of the main blog vendors in the world taking to the stage as part of the Education Panel. That remains to be seen but he seems to be asking the right questions.

Ewan’s final comment in the above post jumps out at me.

‘Managers (teachers?) don’t mind problems they cannot solve but they hate solutions they don’t understand

It sums up for me the challenge that faces everyone involved in encouraging the use of technology in our schools. Those of us who are convinced by the delights of technology and continue to enjoy grappling with the implications of it worry more about the feature set of the Holy Grail. The ‘normal’ teacher, dedicated but buried by bureaucracy and proscription, needs solutions that can be understood and assimilated into practice seamlessly and effortlessly. I’m confronted with this everytime I step into schools with my ‘big ideas.’ The real Holy Grail is the service or software that has no learning curve with no consultant necessary

Schoolsafe Blogging – The Holy Grail revisited

James Farmer prodded me from my blogging slumber and got me thinking again about the quest for the Holy Grail of weblogging software. The arrival of some major corporate players with their weblogging offerings for schools seems to be signalling a time when the goal of schoolsafe blogging is finally on the horizon and local education authorities and school districts can breath a sigh of relief safe in the knowledge that the ‘blogging stallion has finally been reined in.’

According to Will Richardson, ‘It’s like the Wild West of blogs is coming to an end.’ He looks at the situation with a mixture of delight, sadness and trepidation. James also pointed to my writing on the subject from those days when blogging was not yet in the Oxford Dictionary and under the radar of most educators.

The perfect all-embracing edublogging software does not exist and probably never will. No software can satisfy the multi-facetted desires and needs of the colourful and varied educational stage. Tweaking software will please some of the the people some of the time but pleasing all of the people all of the time is another matter altogether. Ease of use is also important in software adoption but what one finds easy is another’s challenge. Software alone will never produce a blogtastic revolution in our schools. In fact, blogging software choice is not the crux of the matter. There are no fatal mistakes to be made in that area as long as we realise that ‘all software sucks’. Pioneering, mentoring educators are far more crucial to the whole edublogging process. Let’s concentrate our hot air production on that subject

At the time of writing that piece I had already spoken to the then major players in the blogging software world and they were not interested in shaping their software for the educational market. Adam Curry and myself had already set up SchoolBlogs.com to offer the opportunity for educators to taste weblogs for themselves. The decision was borne out of my experiences with weblogging at the chalkface of educational practice in the classroom. I just got on with using and tweaking blogs to offer my pupils communicative and collaborative opportunities that they otherwise could not have experienced. Was the software perfect? No! Did it matter? No! If I had wanted the perfect piece of blogging software before pioneering with my class of ten-year-olds then I would still be waiting.

Aren’t we now living in different times though? The corporate suppliers are waking up to educational weblogs, driven no doubt by the potential market that education might offer. The variety of general weblogging software with prices ranging from free to extortionate, has also dramatically increased. Educational blogging consultants seem to be springing up all over the place, some aiming for the guru-status of being paid for hot-air production about blogs and related technology that they never have used at the chalkface. I would like to think though that the majority of blogging consultants are driven by a vision to see teaching and learning transformed because their own practice has been transformed.

After all – it has never been about the technology per se. It is about what teachers do with it to affect teaching and learning in the 21st century. Pedagodgy must drive the software not the reverse. Weblogs have had great impact so far because they have an inherent flexibility that allow teachers and students to explore, create and find solutions on their own terms. Software that imposes limits on teachers’ ability to teach will stifle creativity in the end. That for me, is where the present danger lies. Big corporations will start producing their blogsafe walled-gardens for schools to use. Districts and LEAs will love them, and pay handsomely for them but their very blogsafe and inflexible nature will drain them of their enabling power, adding just another demand on teachers in the classroom.

If a weblog is like a polar bear then the best place to see it is roaming free. I worry though that some people are trying to trap and tame weblogs, the equivalent of putting the polar bear into a zoo where the magnificent beast will live out its days repetitively trudging up and down the confines of its cage. Safer it may be in captivity but it was made to be free. Eliminating every risk from our students’ lives is not the role of education in my view. Our job as educators is to ensure that students are digitally literate and cybersavvy so that they are equipped to weigh up risks for themselves. Weblogging offers an authentic plaform for real responsibility to be developed in students. Take away the authenticity and you have little that is of use in the classroom and beyond.

I see no problem with having corporate solutions as long as teachers are not locked into using them if they do not turn out to be (cost) effective. As long as teachers can vote with their feet and choose other options to preserve their ability to be creative then there is hope. However, as we are seeing with the recent blocking at the district and LEA levels of really useful and effective blogging sites such as LearnerBlogs , these decisions are often taken out of the hands of teachers on the frontline. The Wild West of blogging may be coming to an end but the district or county cowboys are still out there making poor decisions on behalf of teachers.

To cut a very long story short – there is no Holy Grail of blogging software and none that will ever meet all our requirements. It is fine to hope for the Holy Grail but just do not spend too much time waiting for it We are experts as teachers at operating in less than perfect conditions. Let’s just get on with exploiting the potential of blogging with whichever software we deem best for our particular situations. Just do it!

Vision, BLOGS & Teaching

My recent trip to the European Centre of Modern Languages in Graz was both inspiring, informative and eye-opening. As part of the organising team of the BLOGS project, my job was to introduce the concept of blogging to teachers of French and English representing 23 nations from around Europe. On return to their home classrooms they will use the custom-designed blogging platform with their language pupils to communicate and collaborate online with pupils from the other nations, so developing an authentic community of language learners from around Europe.

That was the objective of the workshop and it seems that folks are already using the platform in schools. However, for me the really interesting part of the whole workshop was observing the sometimes disparate visions of teachers for teaching and learning in their subjects. No matter what techno-babble there appears on the surface of any educational conference or workshop, listening to teachers talk about how they might implement a particular piece of technology at the chalkface and overcome any associated problems, always exposes undercurrents of vision. Sometimes these undercurrents are refreshing like a teaching-and-learning jacuzzi for the 21st century. At other times though, the undertow is dangerous, pulling towards a 19th century learning whirlpool of spoonfed teacher dependency.

Put another way – what a teacher fundamentally believes about teaching and learning will drive both attitude and action in the use of any given technology in the classroom. Encouraging teachers to use technology is only half the battle. Getting teachers to adopt technology to inspire new heights in the teaching and learning of students is only achieved by delving below the surface into the murky waters of vision.

The ECML workshop was no different in this regard but I suppose the sheer variety of 23 teaching contexts, each with their own cultural and curricular idiosyncracies, really highlighted for me different approaches to teaching and learning. Some of the discussions in the meeting times really helped my reassess and clarify for myself what I actually believe about the role of teachers and students in teaching and learning in the 21st century. By far the most powerful interactions, however, happened outside the official meetings over a beer or two when people really got talking about what they do and why. Chatting with Ewan McIntosh for example was genuinely inspiring, enough indeed to get me willingly blogging again