למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Some primary 7 pupils in Aberdeen have been posting stories and poems on their blog. They would like to have more comments from other schools.

If you go to http://www.abernet.org.uk/wp/ you’ll see the Primary 7 blogs.

As you’ll see, some stories don’t have any comments at all so if your pupils can spare the time to add comments they’d be much appreciated.

It would be nice to run this in a more protected state with students. Would be great for describing and documenting our neighborhood.

Yesterday I live-blogged the Webstock conference speeches of Ben Goodger (Lead Engineer on Firefox who also works for Google) and Tony Chor (Group Program Manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team). I published them on my ZDNet blog, thinking my browser-obsessed readers over there would appreciate my efforts. But all I got was accusations of writing a puff piece :-( Duh, I was live-blogging a conference!

From sometime learning to anytime learning
We have to learn not to push information any more. We have to teach our students how to pull information that is relevant to them. They no longer have to take it from us anyway. With Google, they can access the world of information from their mobile phone, palm, PC...

From know what to know where learning
Knowing stuff is not important any more. We can find any information we want through the web, through the web on our mobile phones. Why do we ban mobile phones from the classroom and the exam hall? Surely, in the real world, that's what they would do if they want to find something out. It's what I do when I want to find something out. Do I really need to be able to remember everything that I want to use now and then in my life?

We still need to achieve desired outcomes...but we can't achieve them in the same linear, structured approach that has been utilized in the past.

Write a school book that has purposefully inserted factual errors. Make it as uncertain as possible, so that the student needs to seek conversations to make any sense out of it.

Make the point of the course to discuss the book and what things are actually true and what are not. Base that on conversations reaching to other information sources and people for answers outside the course as well. Help them to be curious to seek different points of view. Make critical peer review and discussion the central process. Make them realize that to cope with untruths they need humble conversations rather than forcing their own beliefs.

A very appropriate response I felt. How many teachers feel like this? They don’t want another PowerPoint session, yet they do not know what else beyond that exists. What happened in Technology training that teachers were trained really well how to use PowerPoint and then we stopped. Meanwhile students produce PowerPoint presentations in astonishing numbers. Why? Because “We know what we know” and what teachers know is PowerPoint.

If teachers knew about blogs, understood how they could be using and how to integrate them, would they become as popular as PowerPoint? What if teachers had as much training on blogs, wikis, and web 2.0 as they have had over the last 5 years in PowerPoint. Would we see the same use?