The Human Network

Found a DVD from Alan November in our office on Tuesday, so I gave Big Brother a miss and watched the 2005 Stoke on Trent Keynote instead. The message was similar to that which he delivered to us in Redbridge in June. And yet it still sounded fresh. Key things that stuck out for me were the following:

There are three skills that we need in the world of work and that we need to be equipping our students with:


1 The ability to access and deal with vast amounts of information

2 The ability to think and work globally and ultimately build communities

3 The discipline of self motivation and direction

I notice that Alan has refined this list slightly over on his blog and the other good news is that he is writing a new book!


The nature of work has completely changed, as we can move the work to where it might be cheaper or more competitive to do so. HSBC has bases in over 77 countries in the world, when asked what he thought the killer skill for an employee was, the CEO of this multinational said 'empathy'. The ability to show sensitivity across the global regions.

Estelle Morris made the comment that the day of the standalone school is over. We need to be helping schools and communities link with each other, and not just for the sake of gaining a skill for work but also to improve understanding @ a time when cultures are changing and blending with each other. I have been listening to lots of Alan's work this week on the way to work and his talks are full of examples of such global communication. For example the Indian girl who arrived in an American class and missed home. The teacher was able to connect her with her grandma, using nothing more than Skype. From that initial hook up, the whole class got excited and wanted to chat with children all over the globe.

I was told by a colleague recently,that Skype was dead and long live Click to Meet. Fair enough . And then I started using it ( Skype that is). So far I have connected with my Mum and Dad in Swansea (over 250 miles away), using just the Software and our cheap web cam. This meant they could see their grand children in almost crystal clear video. Once we got over the weirdness of video chat it became a natural way to keep in contact and free too! Since then I have connected with an ex-colleague from my y6 days, a guy who has now moved back to Dunedin in New Zealand (over 11855.762 miles away). He showed me round his house via web cam and we chatted about the differences between a day in Seven Kings and a day in Dunedin. I hadn't heard of Dunedin before I met him. During our conversations, I truly 'got' video conferencing. It is not that you have a project or that you 'do video conferencing', rather you are using the tool to learn about and communicate with others.


I hope to set up some links between Redbridge schools and other trusted readers of my blog in this coming year. I already have some interest, if you we haven't chatted/IMed?skyped already and you would like to hook up with Ilford,East London then leave a comment on this post. One person who has made the link between his class and a class in New Zealand is Paul Harrington, click here to read a May blog entry where wales and NZ meet via Skype. Maybe it is not dead after all!! Click here to watch a video podcast of the skypchat.

Alan mentioned that schools were not at the cutting edge of technology and that if we wanted to move our schools on with ICT, then the answer was not pouring more technology into schools!
Interestingly he called BSF one of the biggest waste of money. If we want to improve ICT and move on with ICT, then we need to look at industry. Industry where people use IM and blogs and Video conferencing. Well the first two are blocked and the second is in its infancy in schools.

While mulling over these thoughts I came across the following Cisco video shown on TeacherTube, a site I hadn't visited for a while . It is aptly titled the Human Network.

I think the message is clear.

updated 16th August- now using Youtube version- Thanks to Omar

Conference Podcast

Thanks to David the conference podcasts are now online. Lets hope they work. Click on the icons below

Alan November Part 1

A challenging and stimulating talk from Alan November at the Redbridge ICT conference

Alan November Part 2

Part two of a Challenging and stimulating talk from Alan November on June 13th 2007

Conference - After Thoughts

It has been a couple of weeks since the conference and I have had chance to listen to the analogue feedback of others. ( You mean you haven't heard of analogue feedback- it's like lo-fi video conferencing - or to put it simply it's talking to someone face to face). Anyway I digress, the conference has had an effect on me, or rather Alan November's talk has left me with a number of things to chew over and I'll attempt to list them below:

Collaboration-

Photo credit: Logo II pt 2 by Stabilo-Boss

Don't you get it!-

I have been thinking about this point for some time now; that the whole blogging thing can be a bit of a drag, as you can be out there alone, but this is missing the point. The excitement comes when you get a comment, and this could be an encouragement, a challenge a question or a link suggestion. The point is blogging and the like should be about "The wisdom of Crowds", the idea that 1000 or more heads are better than 2. My wife, who is not a massive blogger, got this ages ago. She is part of a web group for autistic parents and messages from these mums are posted daily, weekly or even hourly. She can keep up to date and she can also respond quickly, if she knows the answer to a question, if not another mum with a similar experience may post an answer. The point is their group works because they share knowledge and support and they can post at a time that is convenient.



In a Primary ICT context, I'd like to be able to blog more collaboratively, with a blog containing several authors. It seems a bit crazy that I am reading Nic's blog about the course I provided last week on animation, when the ideal would be to have a place where we can share what we learned together. This collaborative blogging feels quite exciting and has been a bit of slap in the face as both a revelation and a reminder.

What has been inspiring to see since the conference, is that some teachers have picked up the whole blog idea and anonymous publishing phenomenon. One or two teachers have started their own blog and one has even tried to use his as a space to publish work. The children can then see the feedback they get from others online who might read their poems. This feedback may be accepted far more than the the overnight scrawling of the teacher, though it is not a substitute for good target setting and marking from the teacher. It does though, provide that elusive concept that we have been trying to trick kids into believing, the idea of the audience. Kids know that you are the audience, when you mark their work, even though you might pretend otherwise, but if they post their work on the web, then the audience is real and unknown!


I had written other points here, but I think I'll return to them later. The problem with a blog that lacks anonymity is that I spend too long striving for it to read well. When in actual fact I am now past caring, because I just want to get posting.

November Learning | Publications | Empowering Students With Technology by Alan November

November Learning Publications Empowering Students With Technology by Alan November

This is an essential purchase!!

Web Literacy

Image Credit: transcamp

The way we use / read the Internet is different to the way we read/use a paperback. Obvious yes, but is it? I was struck recently by children's over reliance on Google. During a lesson I taught on animal cruelty, I asked the class, how could we find out more about this issue. Almost unanimously the reply was Google. These were Y6 kids, for whom the Internet is their one stop shop for research, knowledge and facts.

But there are dangers, apart from the stereotypical predators and cyber bullying. There is the danger of misinformation, bias and the cut and paste phenomenon. For instance I remember bringing up a colleague who saw nothing wrong in allowing her children to to research Sir Frances Drake by cutting and pasting huge chunks of text into a publisher leaflet. Needless to say the leaflets looked great, but none of those children could tell me anything concrete about the great man. Furthermore, they seemed slightly irritated by this question, so too did the teacher. She told me that they were learning the skills of Internet research and cutting and pasting. Why do we reserve inference and comprehension skills to SATS past papers and guided reading.

Ruth Hammond, Becta's Netsafety goddess, reminded me recently that we used to compare and contrast newspapers in the classroom. analysing their style of reporting a news story. Why, she asked don't we do this with internet pages?

Thank goodnes that the new Literacy framework asks children to read texts on screen and paper. As teachers we have a duty to go beyond the decoding method of reading with website and acknowledg that there are different rules and assumptions that we have to employ when studying a website.

An extreme example of this would be Martin Luther King research. I foolishly asked my Y6 kid to locate information on this great man last year. Thankfully, we did most of this at school. Here there are filters and safeguards, whereas at home they may not have the same tools to protect them. A search for Martin Luther King on an unfiltered Google, would bring up Martin Luther King.com and Martin Luther King . com. One is a hardcore porn site and the other is run by white supremacists, kindly offering free black history resources!!

Further examples (and indeed ones that could be use in Key Satge 2 ) are the Victorian robots sites and the Pacific Tree octopus. Both of these are fictitious yet both are presented in a believable format.

In June's ICT conference we are welcoming the web literacy guru Alan November to the teachers Centre. His work is all about teaching people to use and read the web. I look forward to his message and hope we as a borough sit up and take note.