edna.edu.au

Against the odds

This is the handout for a presentation I made at an ALIA seminar at Flinders University. The seminar was titled, Web 2.0: From the cradle to the future, and I was asked to talk about Web 2.0 issues in South Australian school libraries.

Web 2.0 in South Australian school libraries: against the odds

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Tags: conferences ictpolicy sa.edu.au web 2.0 social networking
Posted at 05:10AM Jul 17, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

HTAA 2009

Today I am at Moorabbin for the national History Teachers Assocation of Australia conference,

Getting started with a beautifully simple welcome to country by Aunty Joy of the Wurudjeri people talking about her father's service in WWI and current project with children's choir singing in her language.

Keynote speaker is Professor Stuart Macintyre, Professor of History at University of Melbourne and shaper of the National History curriculum paper.

He raised a number of concerns:

We start from a low base in terms of qualified, experienced history teachers to implement a national compulsory history curriculum. Only 16 teacher education faculties offer teaching in history method, of these 10 are in New South Wales - the only state to list history as compulsory in 7-10.

With hindsight, he admits that the national curriculum process may have been somewhat over-engineered - the risk of a bland, over elaborate result, but so much better than the secret approach of the previous government. Stuart recognises the hard work of Julie Roberts,SA and Darren Taylor, NSW in coordination of the process.

Major decision points faced:

* addressing the false dichotomy of inquiry based curriculum vs factual knowledge/content driven curriculum.
* taking a world history perspective rather than an Australian-specific perspective - a decision well supported by the consultation process. Reasons for world history perspective:

1. history assumes we go beyond our own experience
2. students don't like Australian history: it's boring, repetitive and uncomfortable with the moralistic way it is often taught
3. by learning about other people's history we understand our own history better.
   

* his recommendation not to mandate % of Australian history in year levels as this artificially divides 'a curriculum pie' rather than integrating the impact on Australia of world events, however this is still there, eg 40% Australian history in Year 9

Questions:

Why has original optimism been diluted? ACARA's remit is limited, its resourcing is quite limited? Who is going to staff and resource the history curriculum? What is federal government going to require in terms of commitment from states/territories? Assessment outcomes will drive this to some extent. It will assume certain minimum hours spent in history.

It's one thing to produce an expensive blueprint but that does not ensure it is going to be taught in every class. Are the states/territories going to resource history? Balancing the needs of inexperienced teachers with the engaged, creative teachers. 

Selection of schools who will be trialling national curriculum will be by random selection, not just enthusiasts.

Sequencing issues in implementation: can't implement all in one year, but no clear guidance on how to implement.

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Tags: conferences curriculum history teachers htaa national curriculum
Posted at 12:59PM Jul 16, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

AusAID

We started Day 1 of the AusAID Global Education conference in Launceston, Tasmania with presentations by Peter Waddell-Wood from AusAID presenting about his diverse global experience with the Global Crop Diversity Trust and in Afghanistan and Pakistan (referred to as AfPak).

Global Crop Diversity Trust

www.croptrust.org
This is an amazing project collecting unique seeds into a gene bank. 
He also showed graphs of the Impacts of climate change on food security and the need to consider potential changes to varieties of crops in terms of heat tolerance and new diseases,
Some interesting similarities in management of a seed repository as in information/knowledge repositories. Sad photos of a flood that destroyed a seed library with many unique varieties now lost. No GM seeds are collected although some may be provided to commercial companies involved in GM.

Check out the Svalbard Arctic Seed vault - 200 million seed samples - in island above Norway, dubbed the Doomsday Vault, as the ultimate safety net for the world's most important natural resource: food.

Also an ABC documentary called Seed hunter: Australian scientist Dr Ken Street, looking for the wild chickpea that can survive temperatures of 40 degrees above and below zero.

Pakistan

Need 3 Ds: Defence + Diplomacy + Development
necessary also to provide some element of hope for population

• Australia's aid response to Pakistan this year: $30 million (doubled from previous year) $120 million over next 2 years
• work centred around poorer border areas
• priorities: health, education, rural development, governance and infrastructure particularly following 2005 earthquake – rebuilding schools

The Global Education Pakistan profile
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/globaled/go/pid/1194

Afghanistan

• life expectancy is 42.9  - mainly related to health, remoteness of large proportion of the population
• infant mortality rate 129 per 1,000 live births
• adult literacy only 28%
• progress towards MDG 1 is regressing 42% presently below overty line
• whole generation has only known war

The Global Education Afghanistan profile
http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/globaled/go/pid/617

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Tags: conferences global education pakistan afghanistan food security
Posted at 11:50AM Jun 03, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

WACOT evidence blog post

This is a draft post to remind me to write a post about using blogs for WACOT evidence[Read More]

Tags: eportfolios conferences wacot
Posted at 02:34PM May 07, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Web 2.0 in school libraries

Presentation to the ALIA SA Info Sci Seminar, Wed 22 July 2009 entitled Web 2.0 from cradle to future held at Flinders University.

While Web 2.0 technologies are being adopted rapidly by many young people and becoming a major part of their lives, the adoption of these technologies in South Australian school libraries is occurring rather more slowly. A long list of issues currently holds back the use of these technologies in teaching and learning - issues such as identity, privacy, security, online safety, filtering, copyright, plagiarism, digital literacies, resourcing and professional development.

When faced with new ideas, projects, curriculum or technologies, educators naturally ask questions. “Is this relevant to my context? Will this enhance teaching and learning? Is it worth the effort of investigation, learning and implementation? In the case of Web 2.0 they are very quickly likely to come up against at least some of the following obstacles:

• but it needs a login
• but it's blocked
• but it's too easy to copy
• but is it safe?
• but students use it to socialise
• but the students know more than us
• but there's so much to learn

This session will consider the issues and share examples of school libraries that have worked to overcome the obstacles put in their path.

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Tags: ictpolicy conferences
Posted at 12:00AM May 07, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Sustaining social networks

This afternoon I am presenting at the Educause Australasia 2009 conference at the Perth Convention Centre. The papers are being published post-conference, but here are links to the presentation as it stands 1 hour before the session.

Sustaining social networks in education [ppt 4896Kb]
Published on Education.au website: Papers and Presentations
Slideshare version
http://www.slideshare.net/pru_mitchell/sustaining-social-networks

References

Backroad Connections. (2003). What are the conditions for and characteristics of effective online learning communities? Australian National Training Authority.
http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/guides/community.pdf

boyd, d., (2007, August 6) Generation MySpace - Social networking and its impact on students and education. [Sound recording] Dulwich, Education.au.
http://www.educationau.edu.au/2007-generation-myspace

Canter, Marc (2008, September 1) How to build the open mesh, Marc's voice 
http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2008/09/01/how-to-build-the-open-mesh-presentation

Cho, H., Gay, G., Davidson, B. & Ingraffea, A. (2007). Social networks, communication styles, and learning performance in a CSCL community. Computers & Education 49(2), 309-329.

Dibben, K. (2003). Making online communities work. EDUCAUSE in AUSTRALASIA 2003 Conference.
http://www.educationau.edu.au/sites/default/files/online_communities_educause.ppt

Drumgoole, J. (2006). Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0. Copacetic
http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/2006/05/29/web-20-vs-web-10

Evans, V. (2007). Networks, Connections and Community: Learning with Social Software . Australian Flexible Learning Framework.  http://pre2009.flexiblelearning.net.au/flx/go/pid/377

Geer, R. (2005). Imprinting and its impact on online learning environments. ASCILITE 2005 Proceedings.  http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/26_Geer.pdf

Geng, H. (2008). Investigation of elements in an online learning community (edna). unpublished.

Gray, B. (2004). Informal Learning in an Online Community of Practice. Journal of Distance Education, 19(1), 20-35. http://www.cndwebzine.hcp.ma/IMG/pdf/GRAY_article.pdf

Hayman, S. & Lothian, N. (2007). Taxonomy directed folksonomy: Integrating user tagging and controlled vocabularies for Australian education networks IFLA 73. Retrieved February 15 2009 from http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla73/papers/157-Hayman_Lothian-en.pdf

Johnson, K. (2008). It's all about me [Videorecording] TeacherTube. http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=66284

Johnson, S. (2006, December 16). It's all about us. Time 168(26) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570717,00.html

Madden, M., Fox, S., Smith, A, & Vitak, J. (2007, December 16). Digital footprints: online identity management and search in the age of transparency, PEW/Internet. 
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Digital-Footprints.aspx

McDermott, R. (2000, March). Knowing in Community: Ten Critical Success Factors in Building Communities of Practice. IHRIM Journal.   http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/knowing.shtml

McLoughlin, C. (2002). Computer supported teamwork: An integrative approach to evaluating cooperative learning in an online environment. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 18 (2), 227.254.  http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet18/mcloughlin.html

me.edu.au FAQs. (2008). Dulwich, Education.au.
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/help/me/pid/2033

Mitchell, P. (2007) Learning journeys: sharing the passion. ASLA XX Proceedings
http://www.educationau.edu.au/sites/default/files/PLE_ASLA.pdf

Mueller-Prothmann, T & Siedentopf, C (2003) Designing Online Knowledge Communities: Developing a Usability Evaluation Criteria Catalogue, 3rd European Knowledge Management Summer School http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Designing_Online_K_Communities_-_Developing_Usability_Eval_Criteria_Catalogue.pdf

Nielsen, J. (2006, October 9). Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. Alertbox
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Oliver, R., & Herrington, J. (2003). Exploring technology-mediated learning from a pedagogical perspective. Journal of Interactive Learning Environments, 11(2), 111.126.

Preece, J., Nonnecke, B. & Andrews, D. (2004). The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone. Computers in human behavior 20(2), 201-223.

Salmon, G. (2003). 5 stage model. E-moderating, 2 ^nd ed. London, Taylor & Francis.
http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml

Siemens, G. (2006). Connectivism: learning and knowledge today. Global Summit 2006 Papers, Dulwich, Education.au.  from http://www.educationau.edu.au/sites/default/files/gs2006_siemens.pdf

Smarr, J. & Canter, M. (2007, September 5). A Bill of Rights for users of Social Media. Open Social Web.
http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights

Stephenson, K. (n.d.). What knowledge tears apart, networks make whole. Internal Communication Focus, 36 .
http://www.netform.com/html/icf.pdf

Stuckey, B. & Arkell, R. (2006). Development of an e-learning knowledge sharing model. Knowledge Sharing Services Project. Australian Flexible Learning Framework.
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/flx/webdav/shared/KSS/Development_of_an_%20e-learning_knowledge_sharing_model.pdf

Tu, C., & Corry, M. (2001). Research in online learning community. Journal of Instructional Science and Technology 5(1)  
http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/html2002/chtu.html

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Beauvoir, P., Milligan, C., Johnson, M. & Sharples, P. (2006, September 19). Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. TENC Publications and Preprints, Open Universiteit Nederland.
http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/727

Wordspy (2008). Lifestreaming http://www.wordspy.com/words/lifestreaming.asp

 

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Tags: edaust09 me-edu-au presentations conferences social networking
Posted at 04:16PM May 05, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

ACE Digital Fair

These past 2 days I have been at the Australian College of Educators Digital Fair at the magnificent Corio campus of Geelong Grammar School.

When we were originally approached to present I saw it as a good opportunity to try out the idea of unconference sessions where people gather, pick up and discuss ideas raised in other sessions, asking questions and networking. The audience for the conference is ICT and education leaders and I wondered if the opportunity to raise and discuss issues might be more useful than presenting workshops or sessions on predetermined topics of our choice. The idea was to position Education.au in the Internet cafe and use that as the meeting place for the unconference and to build some face to face networks - perhaps connecting with existing online me.edu.au and twitter networks.

Various factors worked against this idea and I ended up with very generous table space in the trade exhibition. It was a good way to catch up with lots of delegates, who came up to say hello, to collect pens, handouts or edna calendars or just to get their trade fair passport signed. Time was pretty pressured throughout the 2 days due to short sessions and a spread out campus, and it was hard to do everything that I wanted to. Nevertheless plenty of people were interested in left over workshop handouts on Finding Free Stuff and ePortfolios, and several signed up to me.edu.au.

The Conference Dinner was also the ACE 50th Celebration Dinner, and was held in a well decorated Dining Hall at Geelong Grammar. There was a feeling that Dumbledore was going to appear at any moment, and Elida Brereton (Principal of Camberwell High School / Summer Heights High) was a magnificent choice of MC. Professor Geoff Masters was awarded the College Medal for 2009 in recognition of his services to educational measurement and assessment.

This was a good networking occasion with high calibre keynote speakers, a good leadership strand and practical workshops. Thanks to the organisers, presenters and delegates, and all the best to the Australian College of Educators for the next 50 years.

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Tags: austcolled digitalfair conferences
Posted at 07:16PM Apr 17, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Educause 2009 paper: Sustaining social networks in education

If web 1.0 was organized around pages, web 2.0 is organized around people  (Johnson, 2006)

This paper presented at Educause Australasia 2009 draws on experience in innovation projects at Education.au in the past two years considering how social networking might enhance professional learning for educators. The resulting service (me.edu.au) aims to put the individual rather than the institution at the centre of learning, and to provide individual educators with support as they step into Web 2.0. While professional learning and collaborative knowledge construction are desirable goals of professional social networking, this case study outlines challenges faced through the Innovate - Collaborate - Sustain phases of such projects. It provides an evaluation of Education.au's online professional networking project using the 5 stage process of computer mediated communication as a model (Salmon, 2003).

Slides on slideshare
Audio from conference
Sustaining social networks in education conference paper

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Tags: gilly salmon me.edu.au edaust09 conferences social networking educause2009
Posted at 03:10AM Apr 05, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

How to write a conference paper

[Relocated post: Originally published on 30 June 2007]

• Do a thorough literature review - comprehensive for Australia and your sector, and at least checking international papers and key documents from other sectors, or complementary fields. There is no point presenting what others have already written, but building on their work benefits everyone.
  
• Pull together relevant work and themes from existing presentations by colleagues
• Set up [del.icio.us/diigo] tags and let people know what you are researching so others can contribute relevant material and follow your research.
  
  
• Draft an outline of the paper, and organise collected quotes, documents, readings, links and ideas under key headings. At this stage I find it best to keep the references firmly attached to quotes as footnotes, even if this is not the final format required.
• It is not enough to just collect material. Remember to make time to actually read and note these.
  
  
• At least four weeks before the paper is due, take a writing day away from the office, (and may be even offline!) to write a first draft from the material collected.
• Create a 'to do' notepad document where you note gaps that require further research, quotes to research or references to follow up.
  
  
• Blog the big questions/issues you have identified at this stage and invite comment.
• Continue to collect, read, think, follow up on the 'to do list' and clean up the paper.
• Remember to check back to the abstract and the conference requirements to ensure you have not strayed too far from the original submission.
  
  
• At least one week before the paper is due, do the final cut including correct referencing and styling and give it to at least one proofreader. You need to leave time to make the changes that they will suggest, and follow up any leads they provide to key references.
  
  
• Submit the paper in the required manner and ask for confirmation that it has been received. Find out how and when the paper will be published, and whether you are permitted to publish online either before or after the conference.
  
  [If it is a refereed paper, you will need to re-work it in line with the comments received back from the reviewers, and resubmit. There may well be a very short turnaround for this process.]
  
  
• SAVE a copy of the final paper clearly labelled as such in your official personal repository/file space. Then back it up.
  
• Provide a copy of the final version of the paper to the editor of your organisation's document archive/repository and website if appropriate, and advise of any embargo on publication.

Note: Sometimes the paper is not required until after the conference in which case you have the luxury of including any feedback, comment or issues raised by participants in the final version. The paper will also be more up-to-date.
However, by this stage you will quite probably never want to look at this paper again and will wish you had finished it before the conference.

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Tags: research how to writing events papers conferences
Posted at 01:57PM Feb 01, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

How to respond to a conference call for papers

[Relocated post: Originally published on 30 June 2007]

• Create a record for the event in your organisation's calendar and in your own professional and personal calendars noting due dates.
  Set reminders for at least 2 weeks before each stage.
  Check whether anyone else in the organisation is planning to present or attend.
  
  
• Read through the conference website and brainstorm some topics around the theme of the conference, strands or the brief given by the organisers.
• Check out presenters and papers from the same conference last year to get an idea of what they might expect.
• Spend some time doing a scan of the literature for your preferred topics, and reading key related material online, in academic journals and books.
• Have a discussion with a colleague, a manager and someone from the target audience group about the topic to check out whether it is of interest, relevant and meaty enough to sustain a full presentation.
  
  
• Draft an abstract, then check back against the theme, requirements, length of session
• Future proof the abstract because a lot may have happened before you get to present it. Keep it generic enough to protect you from planned development that may not be ready in time.
  
  
• Decide carefully whether your presentation style and topic is best suited to a formal paper or a workshop. Do you need/prefer hands-on or computer-based session?
• If refereeing of papers is offered, do you want to take advantage of this process?
  
  
• Come up with a snappy title that suits the theme of the conference or strand, and sums up the content of your paper. You are trying to attract attention and get your intended audience to choose this session from a range of other offerings. The title also needs to work as the title of a published paper if it is an academic conference.
• Check your snappy title in search engines to ensure it is not too cliched.
  
  
• Draft a biographical statement that matches the conference, audience and the paper being proposed, ie include things that will mean something to or impress this particular conference programme committee and ultimately their audience.
  
  
• Send in the proposal in the required format and ask for confirmation that it has been received. Many conferences are organised by volunteer programme committees and proposals and papers do get lost.
• If you haven't heard about whether the paper is accepted three weeks after the date that was promised, then contact the organisers to check.

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Tags: conferences call for papers events abstracts how to
Posted at 01:50PM Feb 01, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]