EdTechUK

Panic in the streets of New York

David Shaffer and James Gee on why learning technologies (and investment) are crucial in US education today: It's not just about better, faster, smarter - it's underpinned by a fundamental paradigm shift away from (only) knowing how to do stuff, to preparation for life long learning in it's most innovative sense: finding, evaluating and applying information, tools and techniques. This is why top twenty skills lists can only ever function as  temporary markers.

Before every child is left behind: How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education (pdf):

"The coming crisis is this: Young people in the United States today are being prepared—in school and at home—for “commodity jobs” in a world that will, very soon, only reward people who can do “innovative work” and punish those who can’t." 

From elearnopedia

Wikipedia in the news

Following the recent bombings, there's been a resurgence of attention drawn to how well the Wikipedia and Wikinews communities did in delivering clear, up-to-the-second coverage, particularly in comparison to legitimate media (actually looking more and more like an unfair comparison for the poor old regular news channels - given Wikipedia's scope, resources, and community based commitment to accuracy).

Derek Morrison convinced me to go read Clay Shirky's interview for On the Media (there's a Real Audio file as well as the transcript, but it was down when I visited), Get Me A Rewrite. It briefly covers wiki's, Wikipedia, and why people should know about both.

Wikipedia often comes up in a variety of workshops I run as an example of an new application and practice that educators need to be aware of - whatever the view they eventually take after investigating it. Students are already using it, and that's the bottom line. They need to be in a position to discuss what it is and how it works and how it should be referenced - or to offer viable alternatives.

A great activity, for both staff and students, is to assign a relevant Wikipedia entry to individuals or teams, and get them to verify the content and offer an alternative version. The work can then be used to lead discussion on finding and evaluating information online (BTW, Stephen Downes has just written a great resource, Principals for Evaluating Websites, which would support this approach perfectly).

Free Software for Busy People

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli seems like a pretty amazing guy, a medical doctor and computer programmer, originally from Bahraini, currently working on a million things including as a Research Fellow for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US.

He's also a champion of open source and has a collection of on and offline resources to that end: His blog, Free Software for Busy People and a book of the same name that you can buy in hard copy or peruse online.

The book is aimed as what Cory Doctorow terms information-civilians (what a great term! That'll appear again) - regular people who need to work with technology. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli has created the six characters above - who include a primary school teacher and a captain of industry-  to address a series of real life scenarios where open source software provides the solution.

Skype set

Not big news, but I've swapped hard drives & had to reset my Skype contacts. Unfortunatly it was the one thing I didn't remember to make any kind of backup of, so my contact list is currently down to two people. This is one of the biggest problems with Skype (the other thing I'd like to be able to do is customise my unavailable messages).

Anyhow - my Skype name is josiefraser. Please feel free to add me to your contacts and ask me to recipricate. Also, my iSight name is josiefraser@mac.com.