Here are my conference photos from the blog.ac.uk conference.

It was a real treat to meet Miles Berry at blog.ac.uk. Intelligent, charming and articulate, he has also produced a fantastic summary of our group’s discussion and it will serve as a great starter for further ideas and debate. Thanks Miles!

I first came across Barbara when I had just started blogging at the British School of Amsterdam. I think Sarah Lohnes or Hector Vila pointed to her. Her work was and continues to be ground-breaking. Many talk a good blogging freedom with students but few have the tenacity, creativity and trust to make it really happen effectively. Barbara is the real deal.

For me personally, her keynote at blog.ac.uk was music to my ears. She passionately talks of the benefits of blogging because she has seen them with her own eyes and experienced them. There is no substitute for that. The transcript of the talk is here.

Her rallying call:

I have to stop hoping that anything can change; instead I must go about getting the work done. Inside. Where it counts. We edubloggers have to get our acts together, as you are doing here by gathering at this conference, forming communities amongst ourselves to lay out the direction. We’ve got to get the word out, show models, examples, proof—that means everyone of us needs to blog, to participate in such groups as teachersteachingteachers.org communicating about what we are doing in our classrooms and why—when things work and when they don’t; we must pull our colleagues aside and talk about the complex of new literacies and how they intersect with the old, about connected learning ecologies, about creating bridges and bonds within and between our communities. We must listen as much as we talk. We must reach out to one another. We must risk failure.

Whether it falls on deaf ears remains to be seen, but I for one am immensely grateful for having heard it firsthand!

(It was good to google Sarah and Hector to see what they’ve been up to. They are still rocking!)

Ewan at blog.ac.uk

It would seem logical to involve students’ MySpace or Bebo – their ‘real life’ online space. If we don’t, and therefore devalue their private online space by insisting on sole use of the institutional online space (school-run blog or wikis for example) for ‘serious’ school work, will kids not do what kids do, and use their own space to do what they want anyway? And will what they produce on the ‘serious’ learning space not be false, of a lesser quality, because it’s not at all integrated into their own private life?

Not sure about blurring social spaces. If MySpace is the place where students ‘hang out’ socially with their friends, like the village green when I was a kid, then surely we value it by recognising it and not intruding on it. I would have died if my teachers, or parents for that matter, had seen what went on on the village green, let alone carried out a teaching session there

Stephen Downes had the unenviable task of listening in on all the focus groups during the blog.ac.uk conference and then creating a closing keynote talk that paid more than the usual lip-service to the day’s proceedings. The result was an unpolished mixture of summary and commentary that fired up my thinking but on reflection, left me wanting more from him. More of what I am still not sure.

Stephen seemed to underplay the role of teachers in education, citing his development of literacy as ‘accidental’ based around certain key memories, events or people who presented him with clear opportunities or inspiration to begin writing. I can also map my literary development around certain positive and negative markers, as can Ewan, but teachers did lay foundations at least in part.

I do also recognise that many others are involved in the education of a child and that a child sometimes learns in spite of my teaching and learning. Adam first introduced me to the concept of it taking ‘a whole village to educate a child’ when he wrote about my role as teacher on his blog years ago. My role in educating his daughter was just that – a role, certainly not the most significant one but important nevertheless.

One’s recollection and one’s assignment of value to formal education is rather like watching the recorded highlights of a football match – you see and remember the inspirational bits of brilliance, the goals and the red-cards. The whole 90-minute match though is made up of lots of forgettable yet foundational passes and tackles, most of which will quickly fade into the memories of the players and spectators. It is also founded on lots of training behind the scenes that does not grab the headlines but is nevertheless crucial to success. The flashes of brilliance may appear effortless but they are a result of hidden input from a range of sources.

His view of the ‘broken’ educational system with its ineffective (or way-too effective) control systems seems quite valid to me but he was dismissive unoptimistic about the prospects of any mechanisms or guidelines within the current system bringing about any effective change. In his view, we (as blogging folks or teachers in education) have to be content with recording the events at the end of an age of education. The real revolution will be ushered in by future generations. We are not the revolutionaries. In my view this outlook just leads to futility and inaction. Steve Hooker points out the dangers of this in his brutally honest yet exquisitely challenging review of the blog.ac.uk conference day.

However, out of this generally pessimistic worldview came advice from Stephen with which I wholeheartedly agreed. Commenting on what the role the teacher plays, he advised them to be honest with themselves and to model and demonstrate being the person you want your students to be. If you want students to be avid readers then you have to demonstrate your love of reading. The same goes with blogging. Being ‘the person you want your students to be’ will go a long way to helping them learn.

To this I would add that it is crucial to have the honesty to show students that you don’t always live up to expectations. Furthermore, teachers need to be confident that they still play a significant role in the village that helps bring up the child in the 21st century, even if that village is a global one!