Give the teacher what he wants to hear.
A conforming affinity
masking the real me.

has ………….

gone.

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During my keynote yesterday at the Portsmouth Virtual Learning – Future ICT Conference. I handed out my camera and encouraged folks to take photos of whatever took their fancy, passing the camera along the rows while I was speaking. The results of this ‘digital doodling’ were really interesting and give another take on proceedings. I later uploaded the results to Flickr which demonstrated nicely the relationship between creativity and Web 2.0 tools.

Delegates were also encouraged to take photos with their cameraphones and post them to the conference blog.

Click on the photo to view the whole set as a slideshow.

I was facilitating a Web 2.0 seminar yesterday for Primary School teachers and none had come across the term before. The fog was rolling in it seemed. However, when asked how they currently encouraged collaboration and communication in the classroom, they came up with a host of ideas and techniques. Asked to dream about what they would like to offer their pupils in the future in terms of collaborative and communicative opportunities, they were creative and imaginative. We then started talking about how there were tools freely available that use the internet as a platform that could offer their pupils the ‘future’ experiences now. The mist was definitely lifting.

As a result we are going to set up a small-scale experiment using some of innovative online tools to see how they might impact teaching and learning. This is what Web 2.0 looks like on the ground.

‘Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW worldwide web’ is a book that will provide the textual equivalent to my experience outlined above. It will help educators see the value of Web 2.0 for what is it – a ever-growing set of online tools that in the hands of teachers, could positively impact the teaching and learning process.

Coming of Age should go some way to de-mystifying the present hype around Web 2.0 for education. It provides practical insights from a range of educators who have been exploring how Web 2.0 technology can be used in schools, particularly as a way of supporting social, collaborative learning. The differing perspectives and contextual viewpoints of the 14 authors mean that readers will receive a practical flavour of many different tools. However, the real beauty is that readers will be able to take the ideas and tools to explore, share and customise their own recipes for creativity.

Proud to be one of the contributors, I would like to thank Terry Freedman, the architect and builder of this project, for the hours and hours of work that he has put in behind the scenes. From the outset, Terry’s view was that this should be a free download to encourage the widest possible audience. You can view the table of contents and list of contributors here.

Feel free to download the book by clicking on the picture below and publicise the link to anyone else who might be interested.

(PDF 2MB)

Terry Freedman writes a thought-provoking and challenging article which bemoans the lack of educational evaluation of the latest innovations.

...if you call yourself an educationalist, you have to go a step or two further than just mentioning some great new “tool”: you have a responsibility, in my opinion, to evaluate it from the point of view of how it will actually work in practice

For me the problem lies not in the evaluation of the latest software innovations but in the lack of real implementation at the chalkface. Most consultants, researchers, lecturers and other educational folks that make up the ‘educationalists’ category tend to be great on the cutting-edge ideas but weak on their concrete application at the chalkface. This is something that I struggle with all the time as an independent consultant and is what ultimately drives me back into the classroom on a regular basis.

The real antidote to falling into the ‘trap’ that Terry outlines is to ensure that teachers are at the heart of grassroots innovation rather than always being the recipients of top-down advice in a sort of web 2.0 deficiency model. The complementary consultancy to this approach involves educationalists with their cutting-edge ideas resolving to put their ‘money where their mouth is’, trying out their offerings within the realities of the classroom. That would give most something to evaluate. Forget Web 2.0 – this is Consultancy 2.0