… the beautiful, leafy campus 4 k to the south of the centre of Dublin city

DLD and nTLT are no more. Done. Over…  Rolled to History as those sad users of managerialist jargon would have us say.

And surprisingly enough we are not only (all) still standing - it even turned out rather well in the end. 

It was my intention to post a bit about these modules as they developed (together they make up a new specialism on our masters’ programme at the university) but that didn’t happen.  Mostly because it all went a bit pear-shaped with a change in priorities a little further up the food chain within my own college.  The modules then suffered in terms of resourcing. Badly so in my view.  And when you are constantly given the line that there is no money to buy-in expertise while other programmes seem to have no such restrictions, it can all become a bit disheartening.  Still, the students didn’t seem to notice and not knowing where the next input is coming from can add a certain ‘mystery  train’ feel to a course… :-) 

And besides, it probably was time I got back in the sandbox.

So, when the course wrapped last week it was particularly heartening to receive some of the best course reviews I’ve had in recent years and to hear that about half of the participants are planning to take technology as a focus for their dissertation work in the coming year.  And also to know that during the year three of the course members found their way onto various conference programmes to talk about their ICT work and especially their ICT work in relation to the course.  Can’t be bad. Not even half finished a graduate programme and already they have something to say… 

The only thing to regret is that I took on teaching a programme on the promise of support to make it something that would bear comparison with the best that the other Dublin universities can offer, and then found myself running a yellow-pack version that still doesn’t even come close.

File under experience. And as Oscar Wilde once observed: Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Next year will be different…

… this must be Ljubljana!

I’m here to speak at the KONFeT event, thanks to Robert’s invitation and the patience and organisational skills of Simona. It’s been a very impressive event - well organised and full of the buzz that eTwinning often attracts.

My slot was about web 2.0 and the teacher and I promised the group I’d post a short blog on the various references and sites I used. So here it is…

Flickr is essentially an image sharing site with great potential both as a source of teaching & learning materials and also as a platform to build and share resources for an eTwinning project. The example I used can be found by searching under thesultanselephant on the flickr site. The supporting materials in both English and French come from  here -  www. thesultants elephant.com .

Google PageCreator is one of those semi-secret Google projects. It allows anyone who has a Google Account to simply and effectively build a website or a webpage.  The whole thing revolves around point-and-click principles and should have even the most tech-shy eTwinning teacher up and running in a matter of minutes.  I like particularly the way the site allows you to ‘grow’ your project over a period of time; as new ideas emerge, pages can simply be added.

Del.icio.us was the next site we had a quick look at.  The idea of building with your colleagues an accessible on-line resource that can direct those who share your teaching interests to sites you use and enjoy is a simple but powerful one. The video I used can be found here: www.commoncraft .com/show as can other interesting stuff by the Le Fevers. 

As far as easy to manage class / eTwinning project blogs are concerned, http://www.21classes.com is the site I’d recommend.  It is simple to set up and run - you ‘own’ the portal and invite members to write individual blogs, upload favourite images and comment on the work of others. And it is a fire-proof as they come - only those in a ‘class’ can comment or respond to notes on their blogs.  There are some limitations around size and image uploads but in the main this will do everything that a simple learning site should allow.  Crazy. 21classes.com gives you a good sense of what the application can do…

Social networking has great potential for education - we can all see that. But it can be difficult to  persuade the authorities to allow Facebook or Bebo or whatever into schools.  One solution is to build your own - which is a lot easier than it sounds using Ning.  This has all the adantages and none of the drawbacks of its more non-teaching world relatives - the real power of this one is that it allows for rich-media as well as the basics and supports forums, groups, picture sharing and podcasts as well as integrating well with existing media sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

Those were the keynote references.  I also mentioned Ewan McIntosh’s blog, and Will Richardson’s portal.  I should have mentioned Joe Dale - another blogger who talks about an amazing range of web 2.0 applications and always seems to have found something cool that teachers can try out. The videos from Irish schools I mentioned can be found here: www.fis.ie.  And finally, The Bridge project - or at lease the public parts of it - can be found here, - thebridge.blogs.ie .

And that’s it. Now on to the next thing…  a walk in the Old City and a look at the Dragon Bridge.

… you send a guy in Dunlaoghaire an email to follow up a discussion some weeks previously about maybe doing an input on your masters’ programme. In the back of your mind is the possibility of approaching another guy in Blackrock to borrow a few Mac laptops so that the session can be more hands-on.

And this comes back:

http://www.viddler.com/player/78e2ad6b

They are both in Africa. Travelling together on an Ireland Aid project team. It’s times like this that you just know the world is a smaller place than it used to be…

For the past few years, I’ve been invited to give a guest input on this course. They keep asking me back  for some reason! Anyway, I went in last Friday to talk to the current cohort about public policy formation, with particular reference to their area of interest - policy for ICT in the education and training sectors.

We talked a lot about the emergence of policy authoring and development as an alternative to more ‘traditional’ approaches. And as ever the Bowe, Ball and Gold model (1992) proved a useful entry point. What I forgot to mention was that this came my way originally from a masters student working out of IOE in London - one of the many good things that came from that connection…

I should also perhaps have said that my points about the increasing presence and influence of transnational and supranational agencies ( such as EU, World Bank, UNESCO and especially OECD) in the policy process are echoed by others such as Sugrue in EERJ and  much more powerfully by Martin Lawn in a number of contributions he has read to ECER conferences over the past few years as part of the EERA Network 22; Research in Higher Education series.

The DEMOS materials I cited can be sourced here: www.demos.co.uk , ESRI is here; www.esri.ie and the some background on TASC can be found here: www.tascnet.ie .

For those with the interest the IT 2000 (’the framework document’) can be downloaded from the DES site but is hard to find there.  So too is its successor the “Blueprint document”.  I can make digital copy of either available to you, if you need one for your research.

The Geoff Mulgan referening was a bit more hurried that I would have liked ideally. But if you found what I said about his views on policy making interesting, you will find a good introduction to his thinking here; http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-think_tank/article_1280.jsp . It’s in his own words.  The hosting site is also well worth a bit of a dig around in terms of social and political  commentary on technology.

Obviously, there was a lot I couldn’t get to in a once-off visit.  Even if the session was a two hour one.  Besides, I hold a strong belief in the old adage of not getting between students and their tea…  

So…. that’s about it. There was a lot more covered in the session but I reckon those are the principal references you might want to  chase-down. As it’s the weekend though, there are one or two other ‘places to go’ that might be more appropriate in terms of on-line time.  Here’s one of my current favourites.  One of the Vlogbrothers - John or Hank,  I can never tell  them apart -  had some time to kill in Denver airport; what he came up with is wonderful!  But to fully appreciate it you will need first to check out the original that he is parodying; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tin6NJqQQsM 

There is a really interesting debate going on at the Economist site  just now about the value of social network sites in education:
http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?debate_id=3&action=hall

Even danah boyd - American blog-godess, wears a big hat to protect a
fantastic technical brain - has swung into things;
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/01/15/the_economist_d.html

All in all, a very interesting exchange of views. Ewan - unsurprisingly for those who know him - is as passionate an advocate as you can find for the idea.  And Michael Bugeja thinks it’s all just another case of techno-smoke and mirrors.   danah boyd reckons they are both missing the point entirely… and while you have to go to her site to read why ( she doesn’t appear to think commenting is worth doing) she does have a couple of interesting observations to make…

All in all, a good scrap with lots of things to think about as the digital furniture is being chucked around, bar-room brawl style…

At the Janet Workshop,  Loughborough, 26th –27th November 2007,  I mentioned a number of urls within my talk on Web2.0 / Student2.0. They are posted below:

The Horizon Report is at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf  And Vicky Davis’ excellent media-rich reading of the report is here; http://www.techlearning.com/blog/2007/03/a_superwave_is_on_the_horizon.php

The MIT offering is here: http://scratch.mit.edu/. And Carnegie Mellon’s ALICE is here; http://www.alice.org/  

The YouTube video I used came from Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropoloy at Kansas State University. It’s teh same one I used recently at the HEAnet conference. It went up about a month ago and looks at student 2.0(American edition) ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o).  His seminal earlier one on Web 2.0 is there also (http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE).

The sequence on First Year HE identity / lifehistory is modelled heavily on the work of Mary Madden, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The graphic relating to kids’ school experience is from a recent eTwinning presentation by Enel Mägi of the TIgerLeap Foundation, Estonia.

Scrapblog can be found at http://www.scrapblog.com.  It’s a free-to-use, web-based application.

The MIT and Stanford courseware materials are available at their respective sites: http://ocw.mit.edu and http://www.stanford.edu .The CERI Report on the emergence of open education resources can be found here: http://www.oecd.org/document/41/0,3343,en_2649_35845581_38659497_1_1_1_1,00.html  and informaton on the related OECD / CERI project can be accesssed here: http://www.oecd.org/edu/oer .

All of the materials used on the Dutch SURF initiative come from their site; http://www.surffoundation.nl . Ewan McIntosh’s blog ( he speaks about task-based learning among many other educaiton and web2 issues) is here: http://edu.blogs.com .Information on the DIT’s work on institution level elearning can be found here: http://ltt.dit.ie/html/elearning/summerschool2007/summerschool2007_index.html . And some material on the UCD large class project can be accessed here: moodle.ucd.ie/ . Nick Short’s work on ‘potcasts’ a unique Royal Vetinary College, London initiative can be found here: www.rvc.ac.uk/StudentResearch/silvia/documents/podcasting.pdf. NDLR background and comment on the nature of the Repository initiative is here: http://www.ndlr.ie .

And finally, NING is a great place to pass an afternoon.  Look here: http://www.ning.com

At the HEAnet conference in Kilkenny today, I mentioned a few urls on the fly. For convenience they are posted below:The Horizon Report is here: HORIZON 07.   And Vicky Davis’ excellent media-rich reading of the report is here; HORIZON.The MIT offering is here: SCRATCH. And Carnegie Mellon’s ALICE is here; ALICE.

The Wesch video I used in the ppt is from YouTube ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o).  It went up about a month ago.  And his really amazing earlier one on Web 2.0 is there also (http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE).

Seamus Ryan, ex-Principal of Dunshaughlin Community College - a designated Microsoft School of the Future  - is talking to the conference on  his experiences in ‘building the dream’.  DCC is a state school just north of Dublin, Ireland, one of eight in the Meath VEC area, 930 on roll - so in the top 5%  in terms of size nationally, a large catchment but no competing schools and a staff of about 77.

From what he’s saying it’s clear that they’ve learn a lot from the work they have been doing in the Transition Year.He talks about the experience as making change a whole school project - all in - care staff, cleaners, teachers; deepening our understandings of 21st Learning; providing a wider variety of learning experiences (mentored by John West Burnham) and being innovative and adaptive of technology ‘where appropriate’.  He talks about fixing the learning spaces and ‘much more importantly’  getting to grips with the learning styles of the students to personalise their schooling experience.  The work is all about dealing with what he terms a Phase Two  / Phase Three change situation – where it’s mostly about changing and rewriting the process.  The work they are doing on tablet PCs in the teaching of Maths seems impressive; grades moving up, teachers getting into mindsets that allow them to teach themselves and each other.  So much so that ‘the IT is not the issue here, the issue is development teaching skills around the learning and the personalisation of the student experience’.

It’s  a refreshingly teacher-aware take on the whole new schooling movement. 

 *after W.B Yates

… where the air is crisp and clear and the Microsoft World Summit on the School of the Future is in full swing. It’s not the way I usually spend Halloween and there will, I suspect, be A Price for this one.  But so far it’s been interesting.

The highlight for me has been Bruce Dixon’s excellent scene-setting presentation during the opening event.  The low point was sitting at dinner last night too near to a Major Software Company executive who had all the right words and phrases, a passion for teacher accountability in that particular vein of one who wouldn’t know a teacher if clubbed over the head by one (and he came very close), and probably hasn’t been in a school since his K-12 days. Oh well, some things just are as they are, I suppose.

The panel sessions that I’m here for - Preparing New Teachers for the 21st Century - more than compensated for Mr-Day-33-this-is-where-they-should-be -and -this is -how-our-branded -technology-can-make-sure-they-are. It was both thought provoking and fun. It was well attended - which I must admit was a bit of a surprise given the range of alternatives on offer. So there was an excellent mix within our sessions of presentations from widely differing teacher education contexts followed by an engaging series of round-table conversations. The organisers plan to post some of the content here in time. And there is even talk of a follow-out blog.

In the meanwhile, here’s a rogue’s gallery to consider:

Pepe, EGE Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico; myself; Leena, University of Helsinki, Finland; Deirdre, Session Wrangler(!) and SPD Dublin; Philip, NIE Singapore; and Tommy, University of Makati, Philippines. And not a bad looking one in the bunch!!!

…there is a gentle breeze coming up from the sea and the sun is shining brilliantly. From the windows I can see the roof tops and harbour cranes of Valetta in the distance and – if I hang out a bit, and risk the drop – the city walls of Mdina in the other direction. Birds call and chit-chat among the palm trees. The school is buzzing. One hundred head teachers from all over Europe are here at the Margaret Mortimer Junior Lyceum on Triq il Kaħwiela, Santa Luċija, Malta.  So, all in all, not your average Belfield Sunday.

Some people say it can be difficult working with headteachers. I have to disagree if only on the evidence of the workshops that have been taking place here over these past two days. 

The secret is, I think, to offer challenge and a bit of fun involving the change to work together to get something done. I’ve just come from one on stop motion animation. Twenty headteachers, a handful of laptops and webcameras and a small mountain of coloured clay. They are having a ball and learning too.  Multicoloured clay models are shuffling and smiling, winking, swinging swords and clubs, showing incredulity just before their heads are lopped off, and so on… and we think kids have violent tendencies when they play! But it’s all good fun and Winston and Conrad – the workshop leaders – are busy advising, guiding and making suggestions, helped out by those of the participants who have a little more experience that others. Next the avi files will be imported into MovieMaker and sound, titles and so on will be added. Upstairs similar scenes are taking place at blogging, telling stories with photos, and simple digital video sessions. Joe and Jacqeline ( a formidable Ireland/ Malta alliance) have led the blogwork. Franco – another colleague of Emile’s from the Malta NSS – has led the video sessions and James and Dennis have amazed everyone with their suggestion for using digital photos in the classroom and the potential of Photostory in particular. Franco’s crew may not win any Oscars but they are having a lot of fun and the bloggers are now juts that – each workshop participant is going away with a blog frame in place and ideas about how they might use it in their schools.   The energy is palpable.  And the interest in mastering one or two new ICT skills that they can bring back to their schools – and use tomorrow! – is blindingly obvious among this very mixed ability crew of headteachers. As is the enjoyment. I’m here as a guest of Emile Vassallo, coordinator of the Malta eTwinning NSS. Along with Brenda Bigland of Lentrise School in the UK, and Anne Gilleran and Slyvia Binger of the Brussels based eTwinning CSS, I’ve been asked to add my thoughts to the mix. It’s been a really good experience.  The conference has alternated between our St Julian’s hotel base and here at the Lyceum. It’s been a very effective arrangement. We have the luxury of a decent evening base and the (surprisingly) common culture of a working school setting to keep things moving along during the day.  The fact that there are no pupils around is proving an extra benefit for some of the principals!