Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

Jan
19

Reminder from a former student

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One of my former students is now blogging as part of Alec Couros’ ECMP 355 class at the University of Regina. Earlier today she wrote a post about the importance of doing something – donating, spreading the word, whatever – to help out the people in Haiti. More than just writing, she included a powerful video to point out the level of devastation there. (I won’t include the video here but I’ll encourage you to visit her blog).

I shared some information in the comments there that I’d like to repeat here in case anyone reading this (all 5 of you) have been wanting to do something.

In the latest EdTech Posse podcast (No tech after 5 p.m.), I pointed out that modern media make it easier to connect and know about people around the world than we often know about our own community. I would encourage that in addition to helping out the people of Haiti in any way you are able and willing to do, you also take a look at the community where you live and asking yourself how you can help those around you.

Categorized in community and global perspective
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Jan
15

EdTech Posse Podcast 6.1 – No tech after 5 p.m.

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(cross posted with EdTech Posse site)

We’re back with our first podcast of 2010 - EdTech Posse Podcast 6.1 – No tech after 5 p.m.

Mike Wesch presented at the University of Saskatchewan and University of Regina earlier this week. We discussed his presentations and reflected on some of the changes that might result from educators becoming aware of his work/message.

Some notes:

Prognostications for 2010:

  • Rick – reinvestment of classroom video capture (we’re not in favour of this due to it’s reinforcement of traditional classroom models)
  • Dean – advocacy/adoption of interactive whiteboards in classrooms (we have some of the same concerns about this as above)
  • Rob – mobile technology (netbooks, the mythological Apple Tablet)

Promote/plug (things we think you might be interested in):

Finally, Rob wants to thank Paul Wood for saying hi to his kids via Skype, and Alan Levine for being The Boy™’s first twitter buddy.

Categorized in EdTech Posse and Podcast
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Dec
18

Privacy or anonymity

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I’ve been ruminating on the ideas of privacy and anonymity a little bit over the past couple of days, especially privacy of student information in schools. For some people, guarding students privacy is considered to be best achieved by keeping all information about students, or as much as possible, completely away from the web. I think this is possibly out of a sense of wanting to protect students from being identified online by a possible real life abuser. This might be a concern for some students who, for instance, are being kept away from an abusive parent or family member. For most students, however, this is not an issue – the ninja-pedophiles-dropping-out-of-the-sky myth has largely been discredited, I think. Nonetheless, some educators would see total anonymity as the best strategy for protecting students.

I’ve been thinking that the issue in this case might be mistaking privacy for anonymity. Anonymity might be one way of protecting privacy, but it comes at the cost of denying access to participation in any kind of public life within a community. There are some cases where we might be protecting our students, but we’re also delaying their participation in the discourse that happens online. Eventually they will likely have some sort of online presence. I think we would do them a better service if we helped them to form a positive online presence. I’m sure that each of our students will eventually by googled (ick – I hate using google as a verb, but I feel compelled to) by a friend/enemy/potential employer. Wouldn’t it be great if the amazing video they did for a grade 10 science class was the first result? We can’t help them work towards that if we keep them anonymous online.

Categorized in Education
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Dec
17

Crowdsourcing my conference choice

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I’m lucky to have been provided significant funding by my school division to attend an educational technology conference sometime between now and the end of August. This is provided as an opportunity to have teachers from the school division to attend conferences that are farther away than we would normally be able to go to, giving us a chance to be exposed to new ideas and connect with educators we might not otherwise be able to meet. I’m not familiar with a lot of the conferences that are available, so I’d like your input. Here are some of the topics I’m interested in:

  • pedagogical changes resulting from ubiquitous computer access by students (like 1:1 laptop programs or similar initiatives)
  • supporting teachers as they change teaching methods to meet increased access to technology (especially high school teachers)
  • some hands-on “you can do this on Monday morning” sessions that provide some ideas for lessons that work in real classrooms with real students
  • success stories – what has worked for using technology to improve student learning
  • online learning
  • media production
  • integrating high school science courses and technology
  • big trends to watch for – what innovations or new ideas will be affecting teachers over the next 1 to 5 years?
  • connecting with other educators who have similar interests

If you have any suggestions and are willing to give me some recommendations, I’ve put up a Google Form for 2010 Educational Technology conference recommendations. If I get some feedback, I’ll share some of the recommendations and reasons.

Categorized in Education, Technology and teaching
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Dec
15

Integrating teaching into technology

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I’ve been reading Tony Bates’ blog post 5 higher ed trends not to watch in 2010, his reaction to 5 higher ed tech trends to watch in 2010 at Campus Technology.  A couple of his observations has provoked a good amount of reflection on my part. A lot of my ideas are still bouncing around and recombining but here are some thoughts so far. Regarding interactive classrooms, Bates says:

What next? Lecturers dressed as clowns, doing juggling? Come on, guys, the space-based lecture classroom is DEAD (actually, a zombie, as it’s really still the living dead)

Here are his thoughts on technology integration in the classroom:

Why? If they have this stuff, why bring it to class? YOU HAVE TO RE-DESIGN YOUR TEACHING – OR RATHER THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT – TO BENEFIT FROM THIS, NOT CHAIN IT TO THE CLASSROOM!

So what I’m getting from this is essentially that teachers can’t compete with facebook, texting, twitter or even wikipedia for students attention. I don’t think this is entirely out of boredom; a factor to consider is that students may consider classrooms to be completely irrelevant to their  learning. Many of the ways that learning in schools is organized and managed – classrooms and scheduling are two that spring to mind – could be completely subverted when a student walks into the school carrying a device which gives her immediate access to much of the sum total of human knowledge in her pocket. Classrooms don’t become a source of information and learning, as they might have been 100 years ago – they become a limit.

We talk about integrating technology into our teaching, but a more meaningful perspective might be that we need to be integrating our teaching into the technology. Considering new models of managing learning in schools might be the best place to start. What sort of school system could we come up with if we started from scratch with all the tools and technologies available to us today? I don’t think that classrooms and schedules as we now have them would be needed. What would take their place as techniques for managing the space and time we have available for teaching and learning?

Categorized in Education, Technology and teaching
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Nov
13

Master of your own domain

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My last post described some of my reasons for ungeeking. The more I reflected on it, the more reasons I could come up with. Rationalizing? Perhaps, but the ungeeking proceeds nonetheless. One more reason that I did want to add is that when I am asked (or explain without provocation – that happens a lot) how a teacher can get involved in this bloggy-wiki-ey-twittery melange that is the habitat of the networked teacher (see picture below), I describe how blogs and wikis and twitter accounts can be set up for free. This elicits gasps of jubilation tinged with disbelief. Any teacher can stake their claim on a few megabytes of the intarweb-tubes for absolutely no cost, with the added bonus of someone else doing all the hosting and maintaining. And for a very minor cost, they can have it all given their imprimatur of their very own domain name. So I figure that if I’m going to tell people this, I’d better walk the walk.

The Networked teacher model
Networked teacher

cc licensed flickr photo by courosa: http://flickr.com/photos/courosa/2922421696/

Here’s my bare-bones guide to becoming master of your own personal-learning-networked-teacher.

1. Get a blog. I have mine set up at wordpress.com, but blogger is another option for well done free blogs. There may be other good options, but these are the ones I work with. I use my blogs as the centre of my online brain, both personally (that would be this blog) or profesionally (at the World of Wall). It is where my thoughts all come together. The lack of activity on this blog over the past couple of years should give you some insight into how many thoughts I’ve had during that time span.

2. Get a domain to use for your blog. I think this is important because you want to control your digital footprint. That is, when someone googles your name, your site should show up on the first page of results. If you are going to be online, make sure that you control that identity. My thinking right now is that it’s best if you can have a domain name that is obviously connected with you (like robwall.ca). I have had other domain names in the past – stigmergicweb.org, omegageek.net – but I’m confortable with this one because it is who I am. I like to think that whatever I put here is a true representation of who I am the rest of the time.

You can get a domain on your own through a hosting company like godaddy, or if you are linking a domain to a wordpress.com blog you can purchase the domain through them (for a limited set of top level domains – .com, .net and .org). WordPress.com has some good explanation of how to get started with domain mapping. I haven’t tried it but Blogger also has instructions for using a custom domain.

3. Get a twitter account Blogs are great for putting out and archiving information in a chronological order, but twitter is more like a live stream of what people are thinking (and eating for breakfast) right now. Laura Walker has put together a nice summary of why teachers should use twitter. David Weinberger once noted that the smartest person in the room is the room. I use twitter to be a part of that room. Feel free to follow me once you have the twitter account – my twitter account is @robwall

4. Start a wiki (or many). My blog is a great archive for the ideas that have occurred to me or events that are important to know. My twitter account is a way to be “in the room”. My wikis are my repositories of knowledge that aren’t necessarily needed to be sequential. Sometimes I might assign a project through my blog, but the details of the assignment are given more fully on a wiki. I have created good, free wikis at wikispaces or pbworks. Wikispaces will create ad-free wikis, normally a premium (meaning “you  pay for it”) feature, for free for K-12 classroom use. You can also specify that a wiki will be for educational use if you create a pbworks wiki.

Once you have those 4 things done – created a blog, set up a domain name, get a twitter account and start a wiki – start linking them together. You can put your blog site in part of your profile on twitter. Put links to your blog and twitter accounts on your wiki(s). You can add twitter integration into your blog using various wikis. Integrate your online identity as much as possible.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve thought of other things to do to become a networked teacher. Social bookmarking, RSS aggregators and portal sites like netvibes are also valuable tools. A problem with explaining these things to people is it ends up being like drinking water from a fire hose.

Categorized in Technology and teaching
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Nov
12

Ungeeking

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I’ve been hosting this and many other sites from a reseller web hosting account I have with Varial Technologies, which is (unpaid endorsement) a great web hosting company based in Saskatoon. At some point I think I had a grandiose vision of running a web hosting service to bring in at least enough money to at least cover the cost of my own hosting. I never really followed through on that very much, offering hosting for a few friends and quite often I would barter free hosting for the year for something they had or could do for me. Consequently, the dreamed of  financial offsetting of my web sites never really worked.

Another reason for downsizing my hosting duties is time. There was a time in my life during which I loved the chance to geek out for several hours at a time. My job duties gave me the chance to do this during the day, and I would often have time in the evenings when I could noodle around. Alas, situations have changed. My teaching duties have moved in slightly different directions (which are fantastic – I’m more excited about my teaching duties than I have been in some time). I’ve also been shifting a lot of my evening time towards my family. Part of the shift is out of necessity – two kids are not twice the work of one, they are the work squared – but part is from a realization that The Kids™ won’t always want time with me as much as they do now. I want to make sure I make the most of the time when they want my time and attention as much as they do now.

The maturity of some of the content management systems, like WordPress and Drupal, has also reduced the amount of geeking out I need to manage a system. I don’t have time to do the tweaking and micro-adjusting as much as I once did, and I really don’t have to. I remember tweaking – or maybe bludgeoning is a better term – Movable Type to turn it into a decent CMS for managing my classes. The maturity of WordPress as a platform, and all the widgets and plugins that are available, have reduced the dedication to hacking PHP that was once needed. Quite honestly, I can run a site on wordpress.com that will be just as functionally and aesthetically pleasing as one that I host myself given the amount of time I want to put in to tweaking. Since the sites that I’m hosting are either WordPress blogs or testing sites for playing with different content management/blog/wiki software, I’ve decided to do just that and move most of my sites over to wordpress.com. This site has been over there for a while and the experience has been good. I’ll also be moving the EdTech Posse web site, the World of Wall (a site I use for school stuff) and Openthinking.ca (which I’ve never really done anything with but the domain name is too cool to give up; maybe I’ll just give it to Alec). There are a couple of sites I’ll still look after myself, but for the most part I’m moving my web empire so that someone else can look after the day to day management.

Enough writing – it’s time to go home and build some Megablock machines with The Boy™.

Categorized in Technology
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Nov
12

Remembrances

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On Remembrance Day, I think of my grandfather who, having only been 16 at the time, lied about his age in order to get into the Great War (the first one). It seems like a strange thing to do that but after a trip to England in 1990, I think I might have a better understanding why.

One of my destinations during my 4 month ramble around the UK was Mathon, England where Grandpa came from.


View Larger Map

I looked at the gravestones just outside the church and found it a little bit strange to see a few stones that shared my surname. (Interesting tangent – I found out a while ago that the surname Wall from that area is actually from a group of members of the Scottish Wallace clan who ended up down there when the Scots/Picts invaded down to the area, or so the story goes). There was a small war memorial in the church, and there were a couple of “Wall”s who were slightly older than my grandfather. I’m not absolutely sure, but I’ve suspected that perhaps they were his older brothers and that he had enrolled when they had, lying about his age so that he could go along with his brothers. Unlike his brothers, he made it back home (for which I am grateful).

Keeping this story in mind, I looked around the room Tuesday when we had our Remembrance Day assembly/service at the school. I thought of Grandpa – that he was only as old as many of the boys in the room when he had set off to fight in the war. I thought of what the school and the community would be like with all of them gone away. I thought too of how devastating it must have been for all those families with sons and brothers who never came back. This connection had never come to mind before, but maybe it’s something more real, more personal to think of it now that I have a son of my own. I always think of Grandpa on Remembrance Day, and now I’ll think of those many boys so long ago who didn’t come back.

Categorized in reflection
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Nov
09

In bygone times

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Before twitter, we would actually use our blogs for short messages with links.

Categorized in Twittering and reflection
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Nov
04

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

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Wise words from Voltaire, which translate as “The best is the enemy of the good”. As I work with some students as they develop their video projects for the semester, I want to have them chant this 20 times at the start of each class.

Consider the following scene:

ME – Hey, Joe. I’m wondering about this video project proposal that you’ve given me.

JOE – What about it, Mr. Wall

ME – Well … I’m wondering if some of it might be a bit more than we have the time, equipment or budget to actually do. Like the scene at the end, for example.

JOE – The musical scene? Oh no, I couldn’t get rid of that.

ME – I’ve just been wondering where we would find a marching band and two dozen breakdancing monkeys. I honestly don’t think you’d be able to make that happen.

JOE – But I’ve always wanted to do that scene. I thought of it 5 years ago and wanted to actually do it ever since.

ME – OK. I understand that but maybe you’ll have to save that for your project next year.

JOE – I suppose I could …

ME – And I think the car chase has to go also.

JOE – The car chase? I couldn’t possibly … the video needs to have some excitement to it. Where else could I work in the gunshots and the explosions. Next you’ll probably want me to get rid of the final battle with the troll army on the plains of Kajagoogoo.

ME – I was kind of heading that way.

JOE – (starting to have a tantrum) I don’t get it Mr. Wall. You’re encouraging us to be creative and now you tell me to stop.

ME – Joe, it’s supposed to be a two minute video about the danger of trans-fats in our cafeteria food. I think you’re getting just a bit too ambitious for what we need here.

JOE – You’re killing my creativity. I can’t work when you insist on confining my vision for my film.

Joe storms off pouting.

This is only slightly fictional. It’s not easy to tell kids who have big ideas that they don’t always have to include all those big ideas in their current project. It’s OK to do a good job on time rather than working long past the deadline to create the best.

Categorized in Creativity and teaching
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