This blog's title 'Edubeacon', reflects its purpose of looking ahead in school libraries and learning within our 'new' learning environment. It accompanies my website
Much has been published in recent weeks about the proposed US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) legislation, the intention of which was to provide control over copyright and the free use of resources shared via the Internet. This proposal started with the intention of controlling the widespread sharing of resources online. However, sharing online in today’s information landscape doesn’t only relate to media corporations and information related businesses, it relates to every individual who uses Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and all those applications we use on a daily basis. The ramifications of this legislation were far reaching and would effectively close down the Internet as we know it today. Thankfully, common sense has prevailed through online networks, influential individuals and sites like Wikipedia rallying to highlight the consequences, and the legislation has been withdrawn.
Why should we be concerned about this issue as Australians? New models are required for all industries today. The banks and telecommunications industry were early players in the field, the retail and education industries are amongst the latest. We are all having to rethink of the value, worth and influence of our products and services. Libraries are reinventing themselves. It is now spreading to the classroom where students have increased access to resources beyond the knowledge of the teacher. Like the media companies, we cannot run away from this but must look at new ways of working within a changed information environment. This is not a United States issue, it’s a world issue of which we all need, at the very least, a basic understanding.
There will be more said about this topic and more legislation proposed both in Australia and elsewhere. In 2009 the Australian Federal Government was pushing to censor the Internet via ISP providers giving rise to sites such as No Clean Feed. This will be an ongoing issue until new models evolve of which we must all be aware.
Alongside Apple stating that iBooks 2 and textbooks on the iPad would reinvent the textbook as we know it, the iPad-maker announced Thursday that it would also attempt to reinvent book-making by way of an app called iBooks Author.
Similar to Apple’s Keynote or Pages (or Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Word) apps, there are templates for different types of book layouts, and adding the interactive 3-D models, photos, videos and diagrams that Apple showed off in iBooks 2 textbooks on Thursday is as easy as clicking and dragging a built-in widget — provided you have the video, photos, diagrams and models already produced.
This is going to make the production of OER resources so much easier.
This is a UK site but is a valuable resource for teachers of Accounting, Business Studies, Economics, Leisure Sport & Tourism, Travel & Tourism. Can easily be adapted to Australian teaching requirements.
This is a Livebinder of Evernote resources and tips for educators by Justin Stallings. Evernote is a powerful and flexible management tool and one of my favourites. As a cloud computing application, it’s accessible on all devices, anywhere. Free for basic or more if you pay.
Christopher Bantick making a case against the use of handwriting in schools. ”Any examination format that actively discriminates against the desirably technologically proficient is crazy. A student who researches and types their essays over the course of the year and then is expected to hand write cogent, fluent, legible essays by longhand in three hours is being subjected to unfair and inconsistent expectations. Universities are increasingly assessing blogs and electronic-based submissions because they realise where students are at. Schools need to do the same and examination boards need to show far greater capacity to assess electronically.”
This slideshare presentation is a good overview of the content curation making the distinction between curation and aggregation. Curation is not simply the gathering and distribution of sources, it’s the adding of context, value and opinion, creating meaning, interpreting.
In this film, Stephen Heppell describes his vision for schools, meeting with kids at the ‘Be Very Afraid’ conference, and exploring ideas for classroom design in a technology pilot school.
The key hallmark that separates content curation from simple sharing is that content curation usually involves an addition of comments or more information from the one who is curating, where a simple share is just a repeat of what the original poster originally shared.
Librarianship “used to be about building your collection, cataloging it, and making it accessible to people,” says Bruijnzeels. “Today those three things are completely different from when most library schools were designed. In our school we want to look for a new process, which is about imagination, technology, and participation. These days the public library might start with the books on the shelves and the e-books, but it’s really about content and context and meaning and sharing information, which are completely different processes from what we learned 25 to 30 years ago.”
While the primary motivation for putting a project in the Zooniverse is to collect data on a well-defined research question, the very fact that hundreds of thousands of people world-wide view the projects generates an amazing potential for education. The projects within the Zooniverse provide an excellent resource for inquiry-based learning within the classroom or for home-school groups.
Not only do charts, graphs and maps show up on standardized tests of all kinds, but whiteboard technology has made the graphic depiction of information that much more useful and ubiquitous in classrooms.
JOLT – Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
Recent research on the myth of the digital native – their true nature, critical examination of assumptions and a conclusion that supports the notion that it is a myth.
Looking at the research, however, we see that there is no one, monolithic, group that we can point to and say that those are digital natives. As a matter of fact, the individuals who would fit the stereotype of the digital native appear to be in the minority of the population.
The person who coined the term digital native, Mark Prensky, acknowledges this fact in his recent writings by saying that “by virtue of being born in the digital age, our students are digital natives by definition, but that doesn’t mean that they were ever taught everything (or anything, in some cases) about computers or other technologies, or that all of them learned on their own” (p64, 2010). The problem is that he, and other digital native evangelists, are still clinging to this flawed concept of the digital native.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Months ago I installed the Diigo social bookmarking web highlighter onto Safari on my iPad. I remembered it being a tricky process but find it so useful to highlight and save to my Diigo social bookmarks while in the browser on the iPad, I had no hesitation in recently recommending it to a friend who is loving her iPad and becoming increasingly proficient in its use.
Diigo provides step through instructions, however, after twenty minutes of absolute frustration in trying to complete the process, I finally sought assistance through the Diigo forums only to discover that the essential URL in the installation is elusive to many others besides myself. Therefore, I’m providing it here for my own future reference and to help others in the same bind.
Follow the instructions Installing ‘web highlighter’ on ipad Safari until you get to Step 3 – item 4 ‘Paste’. The URL you need to paste in at that point is below. Simply copy and paste the whole thing from …. javascript:s……through to ….appendChild(s) finish off with Step 4 of the process and you will find it works perfectly. When you touch ‘Web Highlighter’ in the Bookmarks Bar, the image inserted at the top of this post will appear and you can bookmark the page into Diigo for future reference. Simple (with the right URL)!
During this keynote address at Internet Librarians Conference in Monterey, California 18 October, 2011 John Seely Brown speaks of the value of Knowing, Making and Playing as learning and knowledge in today’s world world. ‘Learning how to learn’, he says, is no longer adequate as we have moved to an environment that requires new dispositions for learning. The participatory culture in which we all engage requires the skills of an Entrepreneurial Learner – skills that cannot be taught but are learnt through participating.
John Seely Brown’s Dispositions for an Entrepreneurial Learner are:
Curiousity – pulling information on demand
Questing – seeking, uncovering, probing
Connecting – listening to others, engaging
We have been familiar with JSB’s passion for ‘tinkering’ for some time. I first blogged about it in this 2008 post Learning for meaning – Tinkering. Think about the concept of ‘tinkering’ in the light of how you manage and explore the technology in your own life and see it managed by students. This 55 minute presentation is enlightening.
Timetoast is a free timeline creator. Yes, it is one of many available, however, the appeal of this one is its portability and potential for deeper learning. Images and hyperlinks are easily included and the completed timeline can be viewed via the Flash player or as a text version.
The text version facilitates printing for exam revision and is the view available if creating on the iPad (no Flash facility). Nevertheless, the sharing possibilities and clean look and feel make this an appealing tool. I’ve chosen the example here Road to Revolution by Taylor Linder and Lyssa Funderburke, as a good example of the inclusion of hyperlinks to reference sources. The embed facility enables sharing in a blog or wiki. Great.
Free iPad download from iTunes, Lewis Dots takes the pencil-and-paper template a step further: Students can drag periodic elements and electrons about the iPad touch screen to make and break bonds and assemble molecules. They learn about ionic and covalent bonding in the process, since heuristics determine which atoms can form which kinds of bonds. Users can also save the structures and diagrams as images in Photos App with the tap of a button.
Qrafter is the first QR Code app that is designed for iPad instead of just taking the iPhone version and making it bigger! Scan with a camera – smart phone not necessary.
