Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Free and Easy Tools - Blue Mountains

Published
by
Michael
on 25/6/2005
in General and projects
. 1 Comment

On Thursday afternoon I had fun for 2 hours with another group of fellow TAFE staff, as we saw how easy it is to create our own website on the Internet. Judging from the feedback, most people were suprised at how easy it was!

We spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of our workshop chatting about the nature of the new read/write web - a web that has moved from being read-only (except for the technically-elite) to a read-write medium for all of us! As an example, we were looking at Wikipedia and chatting about whether this type of “Open” encyclopedia was a good thing or a dangerous thing for learners - in terms of reliability of information. It was great to hear a bit of debate from both sides… I’d encourage everyone to check out some Wikipedia articles in their professional area and evaluate for themselves the information they find!

In the end we had all updated our own websites with information, although nearly everyone identified on their feedback forms that it would have been good to have more time to practise this process. I reckon it would have also been good to spend some time investigating how other people are using blogs in education in our specific professional areas.

Assessment with confidence!

Published
by
Michael
on 25/6/2005
in General and learning
. 10 Comments

Attended a great training event today: “Maximising Confidence in Assessment Decision-making”, down at TAFE Kingswood campus, which started with a presentation by Berwyn Clayton from Canberra Institute of Technology on “Building confidence by minimising risk in assessment.”

The most practical tips to come out of the day for me were:

  1. We can’t sample everything when assessing a competency (or group of competencies), therefore
  2. We need to determine what is critical - often the best way to determine this is to visualise what competence looks like.

Of course these aren’t new ideas, but helpful reminders nonetheless (I think i’ve started falling into the trap of trying to “check-off” everything.) It was also helpful to think about how learners can gather their own evidence, even how learners can determine how they will demonstrate their competence themselves - this would be great to put into practise (it’d make a great problem solving activity in class too !).

One question I didn’t get to ask was whether Berwyn saw competency-based assessment as something that is here to stay for the long haul, or whether something else was on the horizon…

Corporate Blogging at TAFE?

Published
by
Michael
on 22/6/2005
in blogging, learning and tafe
. 6 Comments

Some companies have recently been scrambling to get their employees blogging in a bid to unleash armies of evangelists out into the community. On the 16th of May James Snell of IBM writes:

IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of “blogging”

Other companies such as Microsoft have been working on their blog strategy for some time now and already has over 1200 employee bloggers. Robert Scoble (a.k.a Scobleizer of Microsoft) wrote up his influential Corporate Weblog Manifesto back in February 2003. You only need to look at the number and scope of the public blogs on http://blogs.msdn.com/ to get an idea of how this openness is benefiting Microsoft (I counted 26 uses of the word Evangelist or Evangelism - not that MS employees are forced to write about technical evangelism).

But why would companies want to risk their employees blogging their own thoughts and opinions? Sun’s policy is pretty straight forward about this:

By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards.

Sun’s dedicated blog site (with over 1000 employee blogs) uses the catch phrase “Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything”. IBM’s policy is similarly straightforward, to learn and to contribute:

As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning — between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of blogging and online dialogue are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning. [...] it becomes increasingly important for IBM and IBMers to share with the world the exciting things we’re doing learning and doing, and to learn from others.

Will educational institutions such as TAFE take similar risks for these higher rewards? The risk is that employees might not always write things of which the PR team would approve, but the benefits seem to be worth the risk to the big technology companies and I for one see no reason why they wouldn’t also be worthwhile risks for TAFE (although a friend’s experience in a different educational institution here in Australia seems to suggest that freedom of opinion is still viewed as dangerous and too risky for some.).

Whichever road educational institutions in Australia end up travelling down, one thing is certain: we’ll need to develop or adopt guidelines for employee public contributions (i.e. blogging and wikis). Nearly all the guidelines and policies that I found are not so much set of rules, but rather just guidelines for being a successful and responsible blogger. In fact, the one set of Blogging ‘Rules’ that I did find was then updated 9 days later as Guidelines with the comment from the company director that “after all, we are trying to promote blogging within our company not stifle it”. IBM’s Vice President Jim Finn echos similar thoughts:

We do not tell people to blog or not to blog or what to say. We don’t control them. … It’s more like, ‘Go explore.’

So how can we at TAFE develop our own guidelines for public discourse? IBM developed their own guidelines over a period of ten days using an internal wiki, drawing on their own experience as well as the previous work done by Sun, Microsoft and other companies in the same area. So the obvious next step for any educational institution would be to learn from those who have gone before us, since they’ve made it all available:

Of course you can find these and more with a simple Google search for Blogging Guidelines or Blogging Policies, or even a del.icio.us search for blogging guidelines (or blogging policy).

Some other sites that might be useful to consider:

So, where to from here?

Free and Easy Tools Baulkham Hills

Published
by
Michael
on 17/6/2005
in General, projects and reflection
. 4 Comments

Yesterday I had the chance to spend 2 hours with a bunch of TAFEies from Baulkham hills and Nepean…We had a great time seeing (and trying) some of the free and easy tools out there on the web!

We started out by looking at Wikipedia, and seeing how the web is changing into something that everyone can contribute to. I’m hoping that this is a good way to introduce a great free resource (Wikipedia), while also highlighting how the Web is moving from “Read only” to “Read/Write”, but am waiting for feedback from participants to help me understand whether it was helpful or not!

I think most people were suprised at how easy it is to get their own website up, but ideally we needed more time to practise using our sites… A few people identified this on their feedback forms. It’s great to see that everyone found the workshop to be very useful (on the feedback form anyway!)

Here’s some snippets from the sites people created:

Sandra reflects on one of the highlights of last week’s teaching:

Relief on our students faces! As students start to complete their final external exams this week, one of the great feelings as ateacher is to watch the transformation of students. Last week they were nervous, demanding and tired.

While another person seems to be beginning a novel where CLAMS plays an antagonist! :-). JforJules points out that technology introduces a “fantastic new world of interest and rubbish. how to discern is the trick” - how to discern… a good question! (Relevance, relevance, relevance)

Jill notes that “Another aspect of technology and learning is the ability for students to use online tools” - an incredibly important point! We always need to consider carefully our target audience when choosing to use a technology in some learning activity!

Well, I certainly enjoyed the two hours! I’m still struggling to re-jig this workshop so that people can have a website that they want to continue to use after the workshop… even if it was only reflecting on teaching experience once a month or something. Ideas?

‘Weekly’ report 6: Blended Learning

Published
by
Michael
on 15/6/2005
in General and projects
. 1 Comment

It’s getting towards the end of my planned project time working on the tutorial:Getting Started with Blogging in Education. It’s been a great learning process for me in lots of different ways… next week I’ll write up my own summary + reflections, but for now just the normal droll (for my own record) of what’s been happening:

Teachers blogging to learn

After a few conversations with different people, I’m starting to think that it’s not so worthwhile trying to get educators to see the point of trying to use blogs in their own classes in a two hour workshop. People really need to experience the learning benefits of blogging themselves rather than immediately trying to use blogs in class.

For this reason, I’ve updated the activities within the Creating your own blog section of the workshop to encourage educators to begin reflecting on their own experience in the classroom and with technology - real issues that we can interact with there and then. Hopefully this’ll help people experience the social-constructivist learning that takes place when blogging - and encourage people to use their blog for their own professional development after class and continue learning (even if it was only once per month).

Helping others who want to run the workshop

Last week I finished the initial Facilitator Tips for the tutorial. These tips are just some ideas for how the Workshop can be used in practice (pre-workshop preparation, classroom setup, the workshop itself, and post-workshop communication). Ideally it really needs some contributions from others running the workshop… but that leads on to…

Getting other people involved…

When you throw your weight behind an idea (read pride, thought, effort & sleep) - an idea that you personally think will be useful to lots of people - it’s so easy to believe that everyone with any experience of blogging in education will want to contribute and join in. I’m currently trying to evaluate the reasons why this doesn’t happen… so far I’ve got:

  1. The idea doesn’t strike other people as being as exciting or worthwhile (and perhaps therefore isn’t!)
  2. The issue of perceived ownership - people want to contribute their time and ideas to something they believe in, not to a project “owned” by someone else (although in this situation, the idea isn’t owned by anyone - perhaps this is a problem)
  3. People just don’t have time.
  4. The people who would be interested don’t know about it yet ;-)
  5. The project doesn’t meet immediate needs. Ie. there aren’t many people (in the circles we’ve contacted) who are involved in running similar workshops.

We emailed out to the Teach and Learn Online group (58 members), and out of those 58 only one person interacted by posting a discussion on the one of the pages.

That being said, Leigh and I have enjoyed working with each others’ ideas and taking the project in different ways using each others ideas.

Sourcing content for online learning

Leigh had a great idea for a page of recommendations for content sources - worthwhile links to information that can be legally sourced into your own material (i.e. licensed with a Creative Commons or GNU Public license). I spent some time formatting and adding information to this page as it’s a great idea!

A new icon for the site

Blended Learning logoI also took a photo of our hand-held blender at home to give the site a bit of a theme. Leigh pointed out that the icon could be confused for something else and might replace it with a photo that Sunshine has taken of their own blender.

And that’s it!