Webucation

I was going to call this piece 'Teachers' - Gatekeepers or Keyholders?' the role of the teacher is critical in fostering learning and we all have had experiences of good and bad teachers in our school lives.

Some years ago I did some work for local schools to create a single sign-on system to allow schools to access a wide range of free and purchased e-learning content from a number of different suppliers.


The idea was to provide access to a wide range of learning resources for use at home and and at school which was always available. Interestingly some of the materials that schools bought were provided as content services covering a number of subjects.

Some months into the project I did some surveys of how the service was being used by speaking to students and teachers in some of our High schools. Pupils reported that they found some of the materials very helpful in clarifying or explaining things they had covered in class. Others said that they were able to look up other things they were interested in. Teachers were far less enthusiastic. Some said they hadn't promoted the content related to their subject as they didn't like it or it didn't explain topics in they way they wanted things explained. More worrying was the comment that they didn't want content made available for topics coming up in the future as it may 'spoil their lessons'!

What were were attempting to do was tap into the huge resource that is out on the net to support learning drawing on as many services as possible to increase the range and type of material available to young people.

The system we put together was based on the Shibboleth authentication and it worked very well - we ended up with more than 40 commercial services and some free content linked into the system but our real goal was to tap into the growing number of learning repositories around the world. Much of the work being done is focussed on university level students but a number of repositories also explore and index content for school age children.

One of the first we looked at was the Merlot repository which contains a large number of peer reviews materials including simulations, presentations, text materials and apps for mobile devices. Merlot allows integration with other search systems and the aim was to develop the search side of the system to allow pupils and teachers to access the materials they needed to support their learning or to use in their teaching. The potential is huge and the number of repositories has grown over the years, some specifically aimed at the younger students. A visit to any one of these repositories is well worth it - spend a little while there rather than dipping in - go to iTunes U and take a look at the awesome materials that are available there - again well worth an hour or two of your time.

So why is it that we are not all accessing learning where and when we need it? - why is it that these fabulous materials are not used across the world to support teaching and learning on a daily basis? How come that when you speak to almost any teacher they have never heard of them?

There are probably too many reasons to list but for me the main ones are:

1. Teachers are fixed in the way they work and teach - many do innovate but the critical mass of innovators in any particular school to change to way we learn and teach has not been reached. If something takes a bit more effort to do than their existing ways of doing things it tends not to be adopted.

2. Content is still difficult to locate and it means that teachers have to search for just the resource they regard as 'valuable' before they build it into their teaching. There is no common standard for indexing materials so you have to navigate each repository rather than being able aggregate many of them and carry out a single search.

3. Authentication into some of these services is not easy to automate so you end up registering with multiple sites and that involved too much fiddling about to get at the resources you need

4. Peer review is powerful, in that it establishes a 'value' placed on the resource by other practitioners. Trouble is there is no standard and no real match between the teaching you may do as a teacher and the reviewers

There are others but the potential is huge and the quality and range of resources is impressive and all given away free by educators. Once we have cracked the indexing, searching and access issues, the opportunities for personalised and independent learning would expand rapidly. Teachers would have access to a wealth of materials to promote the learning of their subject and students would have control of their learning. Institutions and formal learning would still be a key component of education systems around the world - I'm not a de-schooler, but the focus could become more individualised and to a degree paced for each learner.

It may be a vision for the future we never achieve but having a direction of travel is important and there are many that share the vision and are working hard to achieve it.

In the UK we have spent a lot of money over the years creating a high speed infrastructure for schools. Many schools have fast internet connections but I wonder just how many of them are working to establish what might be called an infrastructure for learning. What does this mean?....

What do we mean by quality indicators when thinking about building a new school.                                                                            

The following information was provided as part of the UK's BECTa Agency work for UK government. Becta was disbanded in 2010. The links below have been updated to archive copies of materials which are still perfectly valid documents

The development of tools for social interaction and which foster collaboration and membership of online communities has exploded in recent years. Myspace, Flickr, Bebo etc are all sites which draw people in, share their identities and interests and then share in all sorts of ways (some not quite legal).

There are tensions in the educational world regarding such technologies. Leading advocates like Steven Downes would claim that Web 2.0 will provide massive opportunities for learning but absolutely not in the traditional school or even a school at all. Others say it is the way forward and it has a significant contribution to make to, what you might call, more formal education.

The term Learning 2.0 was coined (I guess) by those advocates of Web 2 technologies to claim the educational ground and to promote their vision of the way the future of learning should go. Learning 2.0 is really what Wikipedia would refer to as e-learning 2.0 i.e. the second generation of e-learning tools based around collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs etc.

Most innovations in learning and which have an ICT component have come and gone - remember the CD ROM? We have been through a whole raft of software and hardware systems which we have put into schools. In most cases the ones that stick are those that seem best to fit the traditional mode of teaching and learning e.g. Learning Platforms as course delivery systems or whiteboards which look a lot more interesting that black ones but still hang on a wall at one end of a room and have everyone looking at it!

The same fate may lie in wait for Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 if we try to fit it into the standard school setting other than to be used by a few interested people with a passion for exploring at the edges of what we still refer to as schooling.

Alan November was asked a question about the relationship between web 2 and learning 2 at a recent conference - although the audio is poor his comments are pretty realistic.

Many educators are concerned about the way in which students seem to accept the results thrown up by Google as the ultimate truth and there are major efforts in the UK to raise the level of web literacy for students and educators alike.

Understanding what you are looking at, knowing its origin and whether the content is valid is a 21st century skill for learners of any age. We have never been in the quite the position of having to validate the sources of information they way we do now.

Many of us are used to paper based publications which have ISBN numbers, known publishers and which are subject to peer review or scrutiny by peers prior to piublication and we are often told something about the author. This is not the case for the web and search engines like Google. A colleague of mine created a situation in a school which was filmed for Teacher's TV - a UK service sharing practice and ideas within the teaching profession.

This film says it all. If the film does not run or you have difficulties you can access it here.



There are a number of Information Literacy resources available on the web and it is vital that we make kids safe, not by blocking access to things or preventing them using the web, but by providing them with the information literacy skills that they will need for the future.

Tony Buzan is probably one of the best known proponents of Mind mapping as a means to aid thinking by using a diagram to represent words and ideas.

The development of computers allowed the Mind mapping idea to become extremely flexible and Tony Buzan developed his own software to allow maps to be created and stored.

Now the web host a number of mapping tools that not only allow you to create and even illustrate mind maps but to share them with a wider community of users . Most of the online mind mapping tools are free to use but additional features can be accessed at an additional cost.

Probably one of the best around is MindMeister which is simple to use and has a large number of maps created by other users to browse. Another is Mindomo, which also has a library of maps to access but is a little more powerful. Yet another is Bubble.us with similar features but has a relatively limited tool set.

If thinking is a human trait, and we often think through things with other people, then using this sort of online tool provides new opportunities.

Gliffy is an online tool for creating drawings. You can then invite others to work with you on deisgns.

The online application is free to use for a limited number of diagrams but for most casual users this would be ok.

There are a number of different shape libraries including flowchart sybmols, room layouts and computer interface design. Users can make their own as well.

Once created the drawing can be shared with other collaborators or published to a Blog or Web site using a simple script. Fles can also be saved for off line use as jpg, svg or png files.

Access Gliffy at http://www.gliffy.com/