Tuesday, May 24, 2011

#teachmeet Five Years of Teachmeets

TeachMeet Logo

Subheading could be five years of teachmeets and the world is a better place but it has not changed.

Five years ago some folks working in Scottish Education discovered a model for something called an "unconference  " - a more spontaneous and crowd sourced way of organising and hosting a gathering of like minds. With a little light branding (see logo above)  and a set of "rules" what started as an an annual event  has almost become a movement.

But there are a few bits that need ironed out -

  • Organisers need to keep looking at ways that the unconference model has progressed - the model and rules need to continually evolve.
  • A model has not really been worked out around  the custodianship of the teachmeet model .
  • There is not a place or guidelines on how you might archive or share the goodies that are uncovered at your teachmeet
  • Some purists stiill struggle in balancing the spontaneity of the model with any form of sponsorship or a sponsored slot

With these caveats anyone organising a gathering of educators in any sector - should try and incorporate a teachmeet section in the proceedings - would be a perfect session to include in any staff development day too.

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Case for Open Educational Resources and Open Books

I would like to see Scottish Colleges and Schools plugged in more actively to the growing open educational resource movement. I have made the case a few times before. This info graphic says a lot more than words.
Article is great too.


Talking Dog



This week we've watched this clip every night - it cracks my kids up.
We want to know where we can buy a talking dog ?
We'd like to send him some bacon too !

Saturday, May 21, 2011

#open4ed Open for Education and RSC North and East Last Post



Attribution:

Image: 'One more from the Storr'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59562171@N00/88904665 and with thanks to Carol Walker for tour of http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net


Spent a useful day at Open for Education in Edinburgh . Presented with a smorgasbord of practical ideas for delivering in the classroom.  From the selection I attended I was as ever impressed by Craig Mill's work on opening up access for IT ,  Colin Maxwell's enthusiasm  and Carol Walker's ideas on digital story telling . The keynotes featured Google Aps , an over view of open source solutions from Miles Berry and a view on OER from Frank Rennie of Lews Castle College.

The audience lapped it up and it was good to see  folk from schools , colleges and Higher Education in audience. Good too to see SQA E-Learning and Assessment folk joining in too. Twitter stream #open4ed
picks up lots of goodies from a rewarding day

Sad that this is last event to be organised by the team at RSC North and East Scotland. Over the last ten years they have proven an innovative bunch and delivered for the North East , Scotland and for UK and beyond.

Lots of achievements for the team to be proud of and a lot for RSC Scotland,  the successor organisation,  to take forward . Still some distance to go before teaching profession in HE, FE and Schools get all of this but great legacy to build on.

 Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed !

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Technologies for Learning Strategy #ediff #TforL



Now the election is over it is great to see some things starting to move quite quickly again. One area is that of technologies for learning and the whole possible reprocurement of GLOW. Spotted today that the Technologies for Learning Website sprang back into life. All three of the new papers are worthy of discussion. I spotted too that Lesley Riddoch is asking well intentioned questions about what is needed in this space.

The debate starting here is worth a look - here is Lesley crowd sourcing her next Hootsman feature.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Amusing Guide to Making Folks Feel Old


Battleship Potemkin is off the scale then ..

Typing Shop Abu Dhabi

Typing Shop by joecar80
Typing Shop, a photo by joecar80 on Flickr.
I'm sure they will move on to other devices - but worth a pause for thought. These shops feature all around the world and help folks with form filling , reading and translation ..I'm not sure what the UK equivalent would be.. an internet cafe ? not sure they are quite as community orientated.


Today, the last type writer manufacturer shuts up shop http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/861749-worlds-last-typewriter-factory-ends-production .

In 1985 I was the envy of the staff room as a proud owner of an electric typewriter,  it even had an auto correct white ribbon. By1987 I was programming wordstar or some other package to get better results out of a personal computer. I don't miss inky fingers - but they were really clever bits of engineering.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Five Big Mistakes in Virtual Education

Liked this as a presentation and for way it handles some challenges.Still not certain there is enough learning around this being shared between workplace, HE , FE and Schools The 5 big mistakes in virtual education
View more presentations from guiramirez

Monday, April 11, 2011

Get Thinking through Images

Just thought this was such a wonderful animated gif from Dr Strangelove.
I found this and lots of other images that are food for thought at http://ffffound.com/ A great place to feed your head.  Guessing most graphics and media teachers will be steeped in this site but you never know.
Would make a great image for a caption competition.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

ELearning Alliance



Spent this morning with old and new friends at the E-Learning Alliance having a look at ;  their mission, the support they provide to members  and their website ( which is about to be radically updated). I can't believe it has been around since 2002 originally pump primed with Scottish Enterprise money.  They now have an established membership base and their events make for a handy gathering spot for those involved in e-learning across the public and private sectors.

I've always found it a productive place to build bridges between developers in the public and private sector and a place to hear about where delivery is being made on a large scale across organisations.  A local focus point where I can learn from private sector and world of work on implementation of e-learning programmes.

Looking forward to new website and tools including neat web conferencing tool supplied by http://www.bigbluebutton.org/

Monday, April 04, 2011

The Role of New Media in Vocational Education

I spend a lot of the time trying to explain things that George Siemens seems to have developed a knack for.  Link above links to two really useful presentations.Sharing is an essential part of a globalised learning community too.The map of use of on-line communities is particularly  interesting as Linked-in  became  a community of 100 million users last week .What strikes me most is that these communities and ways of working still exist in a parallel universe to much of the corporate culture in both the public and private sectors.

View more presentations from gsiemens

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Meta Data in Music and everything else


3D Data from Decibel on Vimeo.

I am not sure how this arrived on my desktop this morning - but it is a great example of how metadata changes both the means of production and the means of consumption .

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Scottish Parliament Dissolution

The Scottish Parliament election takes place on 5th May 2011, and the formal election period begins on 23 March following dissolution of Parliament. While I  do not write directly about Government policy within Scotland, I currently work for a non departmental public body and as such I must remain neutral during this time.
I expect my blogging and twitter activity  be lower over the next 45 days.

Monday, February 28, 2011

The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System



As hype continues around Finland's amazing educational achievemennts cynic in me
suspects that we might be about to get 5 years of Finnish system bashing .

In meantime sit back and enjoy the hype.

Friday, February 11, 2011

New Improved ScotEdublogs


John Johnstone  and  Robert Jones  have once again been  updating the platform that Scotedublogs sits on .They are stars and I was glad that SQA could continue provide some support for this . These guys should get a medal !

News of updated platform here

The SQA make regular use of the RSS Feed on Scotedublogs. It is a fantastic barometer of activity across Scotland – The new Times Ed ;-)

There is still a lot more we could do to promote Scotedublogs as a means to link up bloggers in Schools to those in Further Education and Workbased Learning.

Remember if If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:
  • Make sure your blog is listed.
  • Make sure the tags on your listing describe your blog.
  • Link from your blog to ScotEduBlogs (there are some images and help on the wiki).
If you check out my sidebar and you can see ScotEduBlog Logo. If you work in Education in Scotland you should have a look at getting your blog listed.

I Digress Digress.it


What is digress.it and why use it? from University of Lincoln on Vimeo.

I was enjoying looking around the excellent http://jiscpress.org/ and wondered
what made it work.  Wordpress and Digress.it make for a superb combination.
You can see how this could be future for lots of things .. just think a living national curriculum.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Open but Tough


Open but Tough from Commonwealth of Learning on Vimeo.

Here are some very sage words from Sir John Daniels on open education and on
assessment and certification. Some very good thinking driving the creation of the Commonwealth of
Learning's resources

1964 JOHNNY SEVEN OMA TOY GUN COMMERCIAL



Amused friend's kids have finished with antique toy we passed on when we cleared family home and wonders if I want it back. Not sure there will be much left of it.
It was the toy gun to have in ancient times.I inherited it from my cousin at some point in late 1960's .

Times have changed, now we try and discourage our kids from playing with guns. Wonder what they use to "clear bunkers" these days ?

Monday, February 07, 2011

Future of Mobile Learning


Here is a great presentation from Andy Black on what is just around the corner for learning. I'm hopeful that Andy gets to keep exploring this territory as he moves from Becta into the corridors of the Westminster Govt.  Hoping too in the austere times ahead we find flexible ways to get our learners in to this creative space.

Time will tell but in meantime lots of food for thought for #ediff and other debates.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Rethinking Education



Guessing I'll see this a lot of times over next few months.
But real question is how are we are using these changes to shift education ?
Do you value the links and connections your learners make ?
Would you trust your learners to contribute responsibly to the sum of human
knowledge ?
How ready are you to support collaborative learning ?
Do you use primary data or real research in your class ?
How authentic are the assessments you set?
Which school , college , university has really changed the way it offers things ?