Naace Blogger

I forgot to mention that we already have our first proper NaaceBlogs blogger. Its my old mate Gareth Davies. According to James Farmer:

Excellent new edublog, …lots of interesting stuff ranging from Jam to “Stop the excuses: Children’s ICT Charter”

I wouldn’t disagree and will continue to heap on the pressure to ensure that he continues blogging

Naace Conference

Naace is the professional association for those concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of information and communications technology (ICT). The association was established in 1984 and has become the key influential professional association for those working in ICT in Education. (Naace Website)

I am speaking at this year’s Naace conference that takes place at the beginning of March in Torquay. I always enjoy waxing lyrical about the potential of blogs but it will be especially interesting to see what the cream of the educational ICT professionals in the UK have to say about them. With that in mind, James and I have set up NaaceBlogs to give all the members of Naace a chance to create a blog and use it before, during and after the conference. A conference blog will hopefully be updated during the event and delegates will have the opportunity to email photos to a photo blog using their mobile phone cameras or laptops.

A number of Naace members are already blogging but exactly how many I do not know. Perhaps this conference will be an opportunity to quantify already existing Naace bloggers and glue together some feeds from their blogs. All in all I am very excited by this opportunity. I have created my own NaaceBlog to prepare and document the whole experience from preparation to post-mortem Feel free to offer your pearls of wisdom.

All this happens against the backdrop of Terry Freedman’s extremely interesting article ‘Why British teachers won’t blog’. Terry is Vice Chair of the Naace Executive Committee and right on the money with his sober analysis. However all is not lost as he ‘is hoping to be instrumental in spreading good practice and inspiring teachers to “have a go” with these new tools through the medium of a booklet..’

If anyone can then Terry can! I just hope he is as good at mobilising the Naace Bloggers

School Trip Blogging

Sophia, one the teachers working on the ECML BLOGS project, is blogging her school trip to Paris and so are some of her students. She grasps the potential of blogging and makes great use of it. It’s that simple.

Gareth Davies on ‘Five Rules of Virtuality’

UPDATE: Gareth has a blog with a great title.

I asked Gareth Davies to elaborate on his comments around the Woolgar’s ‘Five Rules of Virtuality’. His response is a thought-provoking read that I’ve pulled out of the comments and reprised here. It makes sense though and I like his top tips – a sort of of manifesto for making a difference with ICT.

To elaborate a bit further … over 15 years working with teachers has shown me a number of things. One of those things is that however ‘innovative’ they might be they are still ‘children’ of own particular age. This is of course true of historians (as a former history teacher, this has resonances with me, but it’s true of writers, scientists etc etc). They can never be truly objective because the value systems of their age always impedes them. This is true of teachers when they attempt to empathise with their students. However hard we try, we cannot quite understand how a younger generation might see the use of technology. We see new uses as sophisticated, when to these young adopters, they are stunningly simple and obvious. Steve Woolgar’s research shows this is, and has been true, of all technology adoption in the past. We actually adapt technology to do much the same old thing (his second rule) even though its original purpose might have been something else. The computer is one example in many – the difference engine became an all-purpose machine. It was not the invention that was important, it was it was how it was adapted to do many things. Another book to add to your reading list is “Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age” by Jon Palfreman, Doron Swade. This was the book of a BBC series back in 1993. Ask yourself why interactive whiteboards have been more readily and swiftly adopted by teachers than any other form of ICT to date? The answer is in the second rule.

I don’t think this view is at all pessimistic. To me, ‘innovative adaptation’ is more exciting in a learning context that absolute invention. By simulating learners to think, society betters itself.

Finally, this debate is not new, I’m constantly reminded of Seymour Papert’s work (www.papert.org) when I think about these things. Back in 1993 he wrote in ” The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer”:

“The [child’s] love affair involves more than the desire to do things with computers. It also has an element of possessiveness and, most importantly, of assertion of intellectual identity. Large numbers of children see the computer as “theirs” — as something that belongs to their generation. Many have observed that they are more comfortable with the machines than their parents and teachers are. They learn to use them more easily and naturally. For the moment some of us old fogeys may somehow have acquired the special knowledge that makes one a master of the computer, but children know that it is just a matter of time before they inherit the machines. They are the computer generation.

What lies behind the love affair? Where is it going?

Can it be guided by the older generation into forms constructive or destructive? Or is its evolution already out of our hands?”

You just need to revisit Papert’s writing to realise how much more there is to do, and how slowly we are doing it.

So … making a difference? My top tips:

* Give the kids control and don’t lock things down;
* Stimulate idea creation, don’t turn ICT into teaching ‘applications’;
* Look at what they do with computers, don’t take the idea and impose rules and restrictions, but increase the contexts and opportunities to make it more fulfilling and rounded;
* Make kids self critical and responsible for pushing their personal standards up.

ECML BLOGS

The ECML BLOGS project is in full swing with students and teachers from 23 nations foreign-language blogging in either French or English.

I’ve been busy on the home page trying to get around the blogging countries, to pull out some common themes and to celebrate some of the achievements. Some of the issues that have already been raised are probably worth opening up to a wider audience. Have a look around the site. Here are a few links to my posts there over the last week. Feel free to contribute to any of the issues raised or to comment on some of the excellent work being carried out.

If I were a French teacher…

‘If I were a French teacher then I would use Sophia’s blog extensively as a tool in my teaching.’

About Comments…

‘Teachers clearly need to explicitly teach and model to their students the necessary skills to be able to comment effectively. However, students also need to be equipped to gather and respond to the ideas and arguments of others by posting to their own blogs with relevant hyperlinks to who or what has inspired them to write.’

Around ECML Blogs in 28 days! – Albania

Will this man of mystery ever reveal his true identity to his waiting fans? Only time will tell…

It’s about the teach!

Yeah – it’s all about swapping the tools when they become lame or injecting something different into those tools. The advantage of our blogs, I guess, is that we can only blame ourselves and not the tool if the content is boring. I wonder what your students would make of that!

Around ECML BLOGS in 28 days! – Spain + Accompanying Podcast (1.8MB 4 mins)

Aleix and Oriol, pictured above, are the undoubted rock stars of the Spanish blogs with their rugged good looks and Europe-wide fan base.

The homeless whale controversy!

Patricia’s writing and my telephone conversation brought to mind something that Ewan had said during the ECML workshop in November about dealing with controversial issues with students and sometimes moving beyond the fluffiness of superficial dialogue.

The homeless whale controversy – revisited!

Something within me though, still hankers after the possibility of giving all foreign language students occasional access to content that provokes them to use whatever level of language competency they have, to identify with and to take a stance on more controversial environmental, social or political issues. I’m probably just a dreamer…