SocialTech

Edublog Awards - come celebrate!

Come and celebrate all the hard work that everyone has done this year:

• exploring and demonstrating how social media can make a real difference to the effectiveness of our learning and teaching
• battling restrictions and insecurities about new technologies and pedagogic practices
• putting the learner at the center of formal and informal learning
• making sure education is a creative, playful, enjoyable and worthwhile experience for all

The International Edublog Awards is now in it's fourth year, celebrating and highlighting excellence in the educational use of weblogs and social media, drawing attention to the vast amount of cutting edge educational practice out there and making friends on the way.

The awards party is upon us: Saturday December 8 2007 @ 21.30GMT. For your local times please click through. We're currently sorting out the hosting issues - the event will be taking place on the Island of jokaydia in Second Life.

Not able/wanting to join us on jokaydia? Why not keep track of all the action at one of our delightful  alternative locations? ;)

• EdTech Talk supremo & long time awards partner Jeff Lebow will be hosting Ustream Simulcast and text chat at EdTech Talk   - You'll be able to watch and hear whats going on at the SL location without risking anything, and join in with the party from there. You can find the audio only listen link are there as well.

There'll be a two alternative SL spaces setup for people to meet and listen to the webcast of the event if we get too full on the Island of jokaydia:

• Worldbridges Webcastatorium on Info Island. Special thanks to the World Bridges Team for sharing their space.
• The Island of Terra Incognita. Special thanks to Decka Mah for sharing her space with us for the event.

• Use Twitter to read/post about the awards - follow 'Eddies' to join in the conversation

• There's a Flickr pool for you to add your pics to - we'd love to see what you look like while you're at the awards, on or off line.

• There's a Facebook event listing up for those of you who have Facebook accounts

• For those of you busy doing your own thing, the tag is 07Eddies - please stick it on your awards related goodness!

Award recipients who would like to give an audio acceptance speech can either skype 'worldbridges' (or be skyped by worldbridges) or speak up in SL.

See you there!

Childnet's Digizen Cyberbullying Competition for 14-19 year olds

We talked a lot last year about how we'd like to run a competition showcasing how young people were using social software to engage with local and global communities, and develop their own voices online. The Edublog Awards are run as a voluntary effort and we just weren't confident that we could expand the awards in terms of the category requests we were getting (you'll notice that we run to 20 categories this year - double the number we've previously had), and in terms of providing young people with a really high quality awards programme.

I've been fortunate to work with charity Childnet International this year - one of the worlds leading e-safety organisations, whose mission is to work in partnership with others around the world to help make the internet a great and safe place for children. Childnet provide a wide range of high quality resources covering topics including blogging, mobile phones, data protection, file sharing, aimed at young people, parents, carers, and schools. Most recently I've been working with them on their Digizen site - an amazing media literacy project which covers cyberbullying issues, and advice on using social networking services in education.

Childnet have a long history of running internationally based young peoples competitions which focus on the responsible use of technologies, and in supporting young people to models great practice. The Edublog Awards are delighted to be promoting Childnet's brand new Digizen competition (we've included the competition under category 19) and we hope that you will support it as well, by spreading the word and by encouraging young people to enter - or even supporting the production of entries in your school councils, or in your subject areas - citizenship, drama, English or IT for example.

The competition is open to young people between the ages of 14 and 19 who are in formal education, or who are being home schooled. There are main two criteria for entries:

1. Entries should address some aspect of cyberbullying.

This could be around a specific type of cyberbullying, or a particular debate or issue to do with cyberbullying. Any format or approach is allowed - it could be a videoed discussion, a comic about a students experience or views, a podcast of a radio show, reviews of resources. The entries should be targeted at their peers or at younger children. They don't need to be huge, overly complex or ultra slick - they do need to be thoughtful, interesting and engaging. One example of a potential entry could be a short discussion of why mobile phones might be banned in response to cyberbullying incidence in school, and whether or not this might be effective. A student could record this on their mobile and upload it to a video hosting site, inviting other students to leave their comments.

You can get more ideas about the range of issues cyberbullying touches on over at the Digizen site.

2. They must be online

Entries can be in the form of websites, blogs, social network site profiles or groups, and can be audio, visual or text based. Once entries have been posted online you can submit your students work here. Find out more information about the competition terms and conditions over at the Digizen site.

We'll be updating on the competition at the awards in December (the Digizen competition doesn't close for entries until January 31 2008) - and we hope to be able to highlight some of the examples of the entries to date.

UK Government launches Safe to Learn: Cyberbullying Guidance

Disclaimer: I work for Childnet International, sit on the Government's Cyberbullying Steering Group, and worked on the production of the advice for the DCSF.

Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF - formally the DfES), launched the cyberbullying guidance I've been working on for Childnet International yesterday (should have blogged then, we got a bit busy though). The cyberbullying strand supports the  new Safe To Learn: embedding anti-bullying advice in schools guidance, along with the another brand new guidance strand, Preventing and Responding to Homophobic Bullying in Schools, which was produced for the department by Stonewall.

You can find a handy overview document over at Digizen (more on that shortly), along with the full guidance, and a short film designed to be used as a discussion resource for schools.
I'm really pleased with the level approach the cyberbullying guidance takes, and it's emphasis on emphasis the role of media literacy and young peoples social participation as key to the tackling anti-social behavior in online communities and contexts - see for example the Preventing Cyberbullying strategy of Promoting the Positive Use of Technology.

Reported on all over the place, including the BBC and the Guardian. You can download the whole document over at Teachernet.

Childnet's press release after the jump:

Shout out for social networks in education

As some of you know I’m currently working on a project for Childnet International that looks at young people’s use of technology, specifically social network services (SNS).  One of the strands of this work is designed to help educators and carers in making informed decisions about using social network sites. The work will provide an introduction to what are new kinds of sites and practices for many people, outline potential risks and things to keep a look out for, and provide strategies to address these.

The project aims to

•    Look at how children and young people can use the internet safely to change the world for the better;
•    Recognise the huge positive potential young people have and the vital role they have to play in shaping the world; and
•    Celebrates the unprecedented opportunities that web 2.0 affords children and young people - to develop a voice, to collaborate, to organise, to debate, to create, to share, to learn, to develop essential skills, and above all - to participate. 

I’m putting a call out for help with two specific sections of the work:

1.    Examples of SNS currently being used to support education both big and small projects – from setting up your own social network platform to examples of students using flicker to organise a presentation.

2.    Ideas for using SNS to support education – perhaps your school blocks a lot of social network sites but you have some great ideas for how you would like to see students making the most out of these kinds of sites.

You can send your gems over to sns4ed@gmail.com
Please get them to me before the end of August!

Questions (please do add any others to the comments!)

What do you mean by social networking services Josie?

Part of the work of the project will be in addressing the thorny issue of definition. There’s a reasonable indicative list of social network sites over at wikipedia

As well as services like MySpace and Bebo, my definition would include all of those other services that support users to create content (including commentary and criticism) within a networked environment.  & Yes, I am counting virtual worlds and multi-user gaming sites. I’d also throw in social book marking services (like del.icio.us), microblogging services (like Twitter and Jaiku), and of course I’m interested in multimedia sites like Flickr, YouTube and other services that utilise mobile phone functionality.

I’m not focusing on freestanding blogs or wikis – not because these aren’t important, or don't allow people to create networks – but because of the scope of this project and also because I already run the Edublog awards which does a lot to recognise stuff going on using those tools. So if you have a great example of practice, why not enter this years awards?

What age range are you looking at?

I’m focusing on UK school aged children, that is, 11 – 16 year olds. However, if you’ve got a great example of practice with older or younger learners – please do send it in!

Are you only interested in UK based examples?

The work is primarily addressing UK education issues, but I’m happy to take examples and ideas from anywhere!

What will you do with my fantastic contribution?

Some of the entries will be featured on the website. I’ll release all of the ideas and examples as a separate CC licensed download to benefit all of us. I’ll be giving link credit to every contributor who wants it – so please remember to include your name and the site you’d like to link to.

I don’t have any ideas or examples :( What can I do to help?

Let people know about this call! Pass on the word! Huge thanks!

Tensions 2.0

Barbara Ganley has long been one of my favorite edubloggers. Here's the blogged version of a recent talk covering using blogs in the classroom and her world famous slow-blogging approach. She's also talking about every edtechs favorite topic right now: is blogging over already? For me, no. But edublogging has been radically recontextualised by the exponential growth of social networking and social media sites.

Open complimenting closed?

Interesting panel discussion over at Edition 13 of Austrailia's The Knowledge Tree. It's described as "Ewan MacIntosh, James Farmer, Brad Beach, Clint Smith, Peter Higgs, Frankie Forsyth and editor Jo Murray bring together a range of perspectives on the use of personal learning environments (PLEs) and learning management systems (LMS) to facilitate learning." Although I’m not entirely convinced that the panelists have a shared understanding of what PLE might actually be.

To my mind, Web2 tools and applications are currently being used to supplement the limitations of Learning Management Systems (LMS, or Virtual Learning Environments as we in the UK are used to calling them), rather than compliment them.

I'm sticking in my diagram here, because I think it's crucial to work forward from an idea of what personalisation might be:

LMS’s, as they currently stand, can deliver two elements of personalisation – they deal well with delivering. monitoring and recording institutional provision and proceedure, although you’d have to argue out on the ground how well they cope with customisation. Web2 apps offer a quick solution to the far more difficult issue of how institutions might engage with and support student-led participation. Just asking teachers to use both doesn’t give you anything like a PLE – it gives you a centralized, official and institutionally controlled and determined environment running alongside web-based, mainly commercial sites which support social media. Brad Breach characterizes a PLE in this way - as something distinct from and separate to a CMS.

Ewan MacIntosh confuses me a bit – he says in his opening that Scotland doesn’t use LMS and therefore is bypassing “centrally controlled hierarchical ways of dispensing information to students outside the classroom”. Later on in the interview he mention’s Glow – a Scotland wide commercial intranet (it’s an RM product) “this means that every school from primary, early years right up through secondary, will have the same virtual learning environment as every other school in the country and they will have the same collaborative tools.” To me – this seems like the very weird way of facilitating personalisation, let alone bypassing centralisation, unless the Glow VLE has secret abilities to intergrate with other systems I’m currently unaware of.

His definition of a PLE is also slightly odd – locating its ownership and responsibility entirely with the learner, rather than within a network of formal and informal relationships. I’m not sure what role he then sees for education in supporting PLE’s, or how learners would make use of PLE’s in terms of evaluation, assessment and accreditation.

James raises some really excellent points, and he also importantly draws attention to the role of identity and ownership in young peoples online presence, which is otherwise missing from a largely teacher-centered debate.

I was slightly alarmed that Peter Higgs doesn’t think that vocational education students would need a PLE, although it’s kind of interesting that he perceives a PLE to be fundamentally about reading and writing, rather than including learner selected elements which might include audio and visual.

Secondary Schools Curriculum Review

I’ve been recently working on my contribution to Childnet’s response to the UK Curriculum and Qualifications Agency (QCA)’s online secondary curriculum review. The QCA is a non-departmental body sponsored by the Department for Education and Skills, and the regulatory body for public examinations and publicly funded qualifications. They maintain and develop the national curriculum and associated assessments, tests and examinations; and accredit and monitors qualifications in colleges and at work. They also regulate the public examination system (as you can see here, I’m setting the scene for how significant the curriculum review potentially is, maybe over-egging the pudding a little because I haven’t seen anyone else in edublogland pick up on this).

Although I’ve got a lot of nice things to say about the review content, I’ll start with what a pain navigating the document online was. I don’t know if other consultees found this an issue, but although the site looks nice and is easy to navigate, a pdf of the complete text would have been more welcome that the animated tour they threw in. Examples of highlighted text appear when you scroll over highlighted text, and a lot of the core framework is repeated across sections, making it tricky to identify where the differences are. So top marks to the QCA for effort and innovation, but the format meant it wasn’t easy to do the close analysis required.

You can read the response in its entirety here. Comments focus on the reorganization of the curriculum, particularly around the themes of personalisation and inclusion, and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) curriculum at levels 3 and 4 (11-16 year olds). 

Things I’d point up:

Personalisation – unsurprisingly, personalisation is central to the review. However, its noticeably addressed in terms of adaptive personalisation and customization – not enough attention is paid to the support of learner led decisions about tools, practices and activities – which is an opportunity missed in the context of a document which stresses supporting learners to make and justify independent evaluations.

There is a bunch of stuff in the review that you might not expect to see, although should be there, and in fact is there: the role web2 technologies can play in facilitating young peoples communication with ‘real and authentic audiences’ and global social participation.

Disappointingly, although the review stresses the potential flexibility of curriculum delivery (“...there is no requirement to deliver the programmes of study through discrete subject slots and there are no statutory regulations about how much time ought to be spent on different areas of the curriculum’) ICT is only paid lip service to within the other areas, particularly disappointing with regard to English, Citizenship, and PHSEE.

Over all the revised curriculum is very exciting (ok, I know not all of you can get excited by curriculum review but hey - you've read this far). It poses massive challenges to the delivery of education that teachers’ organizations have already been commenting on. The National Association for all School Leaders (NAHT - yes they blog!) commented:

“I went along to the launch of the new draft curriculum and I found that I was at times excited about the possibilities and at others, rather concerned at what we are asking schools and teachers to do.

The new approach to subjects seeks to identify what is of central importance to the subject (e.g. why should we study history) and then seeks to allow sufficient flexibility to encourage cross-curricular project work. We are urged to look at what skills we believe that a 14 year old and 19 year old should have and then view the curriculum imaginatively and holistically.

Mick Waters aimed to reassure us as well. The tried and tested curriculum will remain. “Anne Boleyn will still be beheaded; the Pennines will still be the backbone of England”. However, although certain content is to be an entitlement, the old-style programmes of study, which were, to an extent, teaching by numbers, will go. I hope they will fund and support a workforce who have been curriculum deliverers to transform into curriculum developers.”

YouNiversity in the open

Henry Jenkins has posted his recent article From YouTube to YouNiversity over at his own blog, which is good news because the Chronicle of Higher Education (where the piece was previously only available from online) is walled off to non subscribers. I previously received the whole text via an unauthorised email list posting - so it's nice to have it in a form I can pass on.   

The article discusses the shape and impact of networked culture, and looks at how its recognition could be used to transform academic design and organisation - zoning in on Media Studies.

Christopher Sessums has also been focusing on this theme a lot recently, try checking out Read, Write, Mix, Rip, and… Burn, Baby, Burn: Notes on How Social Media Affects Conventional Teaching and Learning Practices and The Future Begins Now: School 2.0 Manifesto