On the other hand the same teacher instinct was apalled by how little progress we have made teaching people how to search in a way that will return the information they are seeking. Particularly using appropriate key words to refine our searches.

I have been constructing a similar post in my head. Beware the river of consciousness that follows.

Recent work that I have done with teachers has lead me to wonder about how we seem to have hit skills in a roundabout sort of way. I’m often asked to work to help teachers get skills in using ICTs to present kid’s work or to show off the finished product – PowerPoint, Photo Story, iMovie or Movie Maker. Or teachers want a bunch of websites to use in their classroom programme.

If I suggest spending time looking at search techniques or alternatives to Google, they say that they know how to use Google. And then, I watch as they type a web address into the Google’s search bar.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post about the core things that computer users of any age need to know. Turning the beast on, where and how to use right click context menus and saving and retreiving files. I also said that we need to have some internet skills. And one of the most important of those skills is to understand the difference between an address bar and the search box.

As I see it we’ve taken a whole language approach to the concept of information and knowledge literacy and while we bemoan the fact that many kids can’t sort out the fact from fiction we can’t see that at the moment many adults don’t know how to tell either.

A few weeks ago my son’s science teacher was horrified that one of her students might use the Wikipedia for information. “Don’t let him use the Wikipedia,” she told me, “It can be changed!” We were in the middle of the mid-year interviews and I was asking why she was accepting material from him that contained unreferenced facts and information.

I am regularly informed that the Wikipedia is an unsafe place to look for information. Often times the person who kindly tells me this has just discovered this at a professional development course. My response depends on the environment but I have been known to tell people that, “Yes, I know, they have even let me edit Wikipedia articles.”

The Wikipedia is no better or no worse than any other website – if you understand its purpose and its place in the ecology of the internet and information. It’s a great place to start your research but a bad place to end.

In her post Dorothy talks about the way that Google has gently removed us from the reality that poor spelling and loose thinking won’t get us what we want.

I guess what I was seeing at the Googleplex was a testimony to the failure of this approach. When Google came along with their user-friendly search engine they not only made it simple to do an advanced search (just click the Advanced Search button!) but they seem to make intuitive sense of our paltry efforts. Whether it is poor spelling and grammar or people who simply type in a question, Google seems to be able to to supply a list of intelligent results.

I think we have to go one step further back – yet again – and look at search engine design and search engine purpose. It’s not always about helping you find the information that you want, but about directing you to what it wants you to see. We need to step away from the Google (and Google Advanced) is good / Wikipedia is bad mode and take a look at the myriads of other options that are out there.

Related posts:

1. Google Maps Mashup – NZ!
2. Searching
3. Linkeracy

Years later, Craig Nelson came across the slides in an antique shop. Intrigued by what he had found he took them home, scanned and tidied them up and uploaded them to Flickr. Then he started to look for the original photographer or his family. Craig found Darrell, alive and well, working as an artist in Hawaii . Darrell took the time to comment on some of the uploaded photos and share some of his stories.

Isn’t that a powerful story? It’s the power of the internet to help people make connections with each other and to tell their stories. Or in this case be able to share their stories.

Related posts:

1. Great Stories on the Internet

 ”… remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people”

Like many others, all over the connected world, I have been moved by Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. Randy is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who has had an amazing career doing the things that he loved. He’s worked with virtual reality, on interface design and has been part of the brains behind Alice. At 46 years of age, in the prime of his life and with a wife and a young family, he is dying from pancreatic cancer. This lecture is about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. It’s funny, inspirational and possibly one of the most moving videos you’ll ever see. Watch or download it here, read the transcript here (not a patch on the video).

 ”Almost all of us have childhood dreams; for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don’t achieve theirs, and I think that’s a shame.”

Randy talks about “headfakes” which is his word for all the real learning that takes place when you’re doing other stuff,

“OK, and so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely. And the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that
I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important.
And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.”

He talks about the best headfake of all time (which is wrong because there’s a king hit at the end of the lecture) which is about getting middle school girls to tell stories using the programming structures of Alice. The girls get to tell stories and just happen to learn to write software.

It’s a brilliant concept that has made its way into my Ulearn conference presentation later on today.

And speaking of the Ulearners … Conference blogging tips. Some useful tips and tricks to make sure that there is more guts than gush in your conference blog posts.

No related posts.

So I logged in and made ‘friends’ with a couple of my own children. I explored their pages and spied on their friendships. I discovered the younger one was heavily into skinning (making new eye catching designs for his page) and seemed to carry over school conversations with his friends. My older kids seem to like making plans for the weekend or catching up with long lost childhood friends. I got to see photos that I’d never seen before (many I wished never to see again as well!).

Only my youngest child has ever expressed any sort of dismay at my being ‘on’ Bebo. Being as how he is still just 13 and lives under my roof and conducts his online life through a computer I have paid for we have come to an uneasy sort of arrangement. I’ll occasionally have a look through his and his mates’ pages but I won’t ask to be a friend or acknowledge my own existence. That would be highly uncool.

A few weeks ago I got a couple of invites to join Facebook. I ignored them. Then some sort of brain explosion happened and like a whole lot of other Kiwis I decided to join. Immediately I had a couple of friends that I’d met through this and other blogs. Then I found some extended family members and a couple of young teachers I’d worked with … now I have … twelve friends. Gosh. Now what?

Well. I have answered a couple of quizzes and added some photos. Every so often I change my (Twitter-like) status … Nicki is in bed … Nicki is out of bed … thinking about work … not thinking about … . I’ve joined a couple of groups and added some applications – my cat is now on Facebook (thanks Lou)and has some new friends.

It’s all very interesting and could be quite addictive but (like Bebo) I’m the oldest person on there. And because of that I’m not finding a lot of my friends.

So when I started getting emails about iYomu I joined that too. Yes, I am now a serial social network joiner. Now this is where it all gets interesting. iYomu is totally different because it’s built for grown ups. It’s designed around being able to make connections with people based on your interests (iYLocate and iYCommunity) and also your personality profile (iYDNA). Although I recognise a few names on iYomu at the moment it’s all a bit hazy. Conceptually it looks really interesting – if a bit long winded. Doing the iYDNA ‘personailty test’ annoyed me because the statements didn’t work for me at all.

So, again, now what? I’ll continue to dabble in Facebook and iYomu and I’ll continue to be a ‘net voyeur on my kids’ Bebo pages. Is social networking just for the ‘kids’? I’m not sure. I’ve read some of danah boyd’s work (most recently here and here) and that has helped me clarify somethings.

More to come. I’m sure!

Related posts:

1. The Media of Their Times

 That’s the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we’re talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

“We don’t even know yet what else we can do with this,” says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can’t control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that’s very exciting.” 

But …

Such thoughts underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

Read the whole article here.

Related posts:

1. Group Think

“a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.” from Citizendium Main Page

This is an interesting development in the evolution of the internet. The Wikipedia has been criticised for the way that its articles can be subverted by self-proclaimed experts and by those with barrows to push. It will be interesting to follow what happens with this new initiative.

Related posts:

1. Content Sharing

David Warlick’s (in)famous “I don’t get it” post about social networking for ‘education 2.0 issues’ (Oh how I need to write up my 2.0 agonies. But I’ll save that for later.). David made the point that he just wasn’t into ‘clubhouses’ and said that

I don’t need someplace else to go to on the Internet. I need it to come to me, to my aggregator, or my mail box. I need it to be organic, infinitely shapable, and to be a valuable conversation.

And I agreed, although I kept that to myself.

Then a couple of days ago, Artichoke posted “Could do better”: A checklist for participatory communication for development . Arti looks at her (all of our) role as ‘edu_tech missionaries’ and looks at the implied assumptions of our roles. I think we’ve had a religious discussion before haven’t we?

While I was digesting Arti’s piece (I wasn’t stalking you Arti, just needed to think about it again… and again …), Konrad Glogowski wrote a great post entitled Autobiographical Practices . And it kind of started to come together.

Konrad writes,

I contemplated adding my name to one or more of these communities but it seems to me that they are nothing but containers, systems where the name threatens to define or even pre-define the discussions within. I thought the whole point of what we are experiencing now, educationally speaking, was to get away from boxes, systems, and containers. Now, it seems, we are building more. It is interesting that, instead of building our own networks using rss, for example, instead of charting our own paths as professionals and educators, we prefer to confine ourselves to pre-defined boxes.

And this is me! I struggle with the concept of an educational blog because it’s limiting and it encourages conformity. I want to see opposing points of view and I want to see world views. If I’m doing it my way (my blog, my RSS feeds, etc) I can be in charge.

Konrad next says,

However, according to Steve Hargadon, who created Classroom 2.0, professional development today can greatly benefit from social networking. He is right when he says that it is much easier for a novice to join a social community than start his or her own blog.

And this makes sense too. Except that this is all based on the assumption that everyone must be part of the blogosphere because this is where all the best conversations are happening. Try making that point in the nearest school staffroom.

I am regularly invited to participate in wikis, blogs and communities that have been set up apparentlyfor my benefit. In some cases I do participate, but I’m actually really a lurker. I’ve been that way for years so I’m quite good at it now. My aggregator gets a daily skim through and I also subscribe to the odd old fashioned email list. I’m quite happy to join a conversation, but I also want to be able to get out when I want. It’s all about having my own space really.

And I’ll come to the two point oh business soon.

Other useful brain food

Christopher D. Sessums:
How Do Educators Learn Successful Practices using Social Media/Social Software?

Stephen Downes:

To the School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates

One-Sided Discussions

No related posts.