The Dismissal, 1975

A cold night in, by the fire with my MacBook and playing with online sites gave me an insight into the digital future of our students.

We often talk about ‘digital footprints’ and the importance of digital citizenship in the learning experiences of our students. Students interact with music, movies, software, and other digital content every day. In fact, now it starts before they even know what is happening, with blogs, videos, and images online right from birth, put there by doting parents and family. But for us it’s a little different. “Digital” is something new in our lifetime.

I played with AllofMe – an online tool to ‘timeline yourself’.  I didn’t find much of course, because I haven’t been online for much of my life!! unlike the kids today who in 2050 could find memories of things long forgotten – the good, the bad and the ugly of who they were and who they wanted to be.

But I got a tiny taste of how it would be for our kids – AllofMe dredged up a snippet of myself in 1975 – the year that the Australian Library Association appointed it’s first Industrial Information Officer – me!!

I’m embarrassed to think how little I knew but how audacious I was to embark on that role. I set the position up, then left to raise a family.  I have no recollection of that issue of  The Australian Library Journal now.  But I do remember my tour of significant libraries around the country which I undertook as part of my information research.  I was even a guest speaker for an AGM   in Melbourne (perhaps at the State Library?) – my first ever public engagement  in my working life.

Must have said a lot of rubbish

My – how times have changed! When I began to write this blog connecting online was a new thing, and it was all about creating a social focus for information exchange.

Now I connect and reconnect, share, distribute, collect, throw away – live and breath online to empower my day to day work, and enliven my friendships and opportunities for professional learning. The speed around this has also changed – as has the fluidity of daily interactions.

Take this blog – I don’t have to write nearly as much as I used to – even though  there is more to write about!  Why? Well,  I don’t have to write paragraphs to share – that was blogging of a couple of years ago -  I TWEET to share!! I DELICIOUS to share!!  I FACEBOOK to share!!  I VODPOD to share!!  All this is fast, effective, and  what’s more, it’s easy.

As I read my RSS feeds in my favourite reader Feedly, I can quickly tweet anything I come across that I know will interest others, and will often send the same information to my Delicious account, and off to Facebook as well.  Similar thing happens when I add a video to my Vodpod collection, only the places I can distribute information at a click are even more extensive.  Admittedly,it could get pretty crowded out there online as more and more people move to this style of thinking and connecting  …so let’s see how the next couple of years go with these tools.

We all have our own favourite ways of navigating our online spaces and sharing information – the great thing about it all is the flexibility and speed of this information gathering and distribution. The downside is that there is a LOT out there!!

A really nice tool that fits into this new mode of skimming is the Article Skimmer by The New York Times, recently highlighted at Free Technology for Teachers.

As the site says, kids learn best by ’seeing’ the world.  I love embedding videos as teasers into learning programs, or as nuggets of information at the right point in the learning sequence.  So I was pretty pleased when I came across neoK12 in my RSS feeds.

NeoK12 offers a great way to search for free online educational videos from all over the Internet.  30 second search provided me with some videos that will be perfect for a Year 7 science research project starting next term.  Just saved myself heaps of time, AND the videos will mean that I can embed them right into the wiki!

I recommend taking a peek. Covers just about every subject area you might want. Even better… apparently all lessons and videos have been screened by K-12 teachers.

Today more information is stored digitally than in all the libraries in the world combined. We simply don’t need to ‘remember’ everything. The output of our digital mediums exceeds the wildest dreams of nineteenth century industrialists, and alters our view of memory; forgetfulness; creativity and originality.

Thats why schools need to extend their vision of learning beyond ‘memory-arts’. We are in a hyper-dynamic world of connections, relationships, and adaptive tools that help us make sense of the information flooding about us. We are standing at the entry of an age of infinite recall, where the lines between original works and derivatives are blurred because duplication is simple and storage cheap.

Our students need to  develop insights into how to navigate and select a pathway in their learning world, how to juxtapose text, sound, media, and social connections in real time,  and how to mix and match what they see, hear and experience to build personal knowledge and understandings.

For that they need help from 21st century teacher librarians – by managing better school-wide library services; by creating better learning resources; by using better tools; and by developing better information literacy frameworks.

Rethinking our structures and learning frameworks is central to meeting the demands of 21st century learning. Along with the information revolution, we have the social revolution of new media which has created new relationships and new forms of discourse.

This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyse, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able (Wesch, 2009)

It is an exciting and challenging time for education.  Now students have the ability to search, work or publish at will using text, audio, and video, or any combination of these. They have unprecedented access to technologies and online tools that are instantly available and often free to use.  Learning and teaching has become a multimodal, multi-literacy conversation – where participation is an everyday reality for students, teachers, teacher librarians, and school administrators.

My thanks to Buffy Hamilton (the Unquiet Librarian)  for this fabulous presentation on information streams,  research and new media.

A quick tour of some of the places on Regina Public Schools’ Wascana Island on the Teen Second Life grid. It shows some of the places for gatherings and meetings as well as showcasing two “in-world” projects that are currently (2008-2009) on display.

Soundtrack: Moderato – Alexander Blu (Creative Commons)

How will newsrooms look? How will journalists’ jobs change with technology and business conditions? How will journalism itself change? There is no doubt that some new tools, developed almost daily, will allow journalists to tell stories in vivid and exciting ways, using video, podcasts and slideshows, running full interviews online, showing documents and research trails for a richer experience.

Download the Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism report here or read the online version here.

The Marathon des Sables run for charity (MDS) (Marathon of the Sands) is a six-day, 254 km (156 mile) ultramarathon, which is the equivalent to five and 1/2 regular marathons. The longest single stage (2009) is 91 km (55 miles) long. The event is held every year in the southern Moroccan desert. It is considered the toughest foot race on Earth.

Tom Armstrong, one of our energetic young teachers at St Joseph’s College, set out on this race, to raise funds for his chosen charity. He made it!! and raised nearly $10,000 in the process to help change lives for children in a village in Africa.

Right now I am in the run-up to the first exams of the year for my students. They’re getting nervous and I am too, while I gather my information, think about reports, and wonder how much information I can muster for the chats to parents that are coming up on Sunday.

Sitting at my desk with dreamy eyes I wondered when I would be able to more effectively streamline my information gathering, my classroom tracking, and various elements of the administrivia of teaching that must be done to support great learning.  I was on the verge of setting up something vaguely flexible for myself, using something online (google docs?), so that I could develop this information in class (on a netbook?) and access it at my desk or at home.

I had not worked out what to do!  Bingo – I don’t need to.

A read of my RSS news told me that a new product that will launch on the iPhone just might be a great place to start with all this.

Educate: The Ultimate iPhone and iTouch App for Teachers.   Plan lessons; monitor student attendance; with teaching and e-learning goodies too!

A meeting today reminded me of the chasm surrounding general understanding of what is going on in the new media world of our youth.  Here we are with teachers still ‘learning’ how to do basic things, while the kids have stampeded right on into the 21st century.

Tipping Point Labs has some interesting insights into Tumblr, Twitter and The Tweeters,Tumblrists and Technogeeks using them. Tumblr  is seen as being a more sophisticated version of Twitter with much more room for valuable content and interaction between users.

Now I don’t know about you – but these are old tools of trade for me and many of those in my personal learning network.  Definitly not tools of trade for the majority of those I work with and interact with on a daily basis.

I dropped by the Facebook profile of my very sociable teenage niece.  What I saw was a breadcrumb trail to some new shifts in what her friendship groups were up to. Seems the kids are starting to ’swarm’ to places like twitter and tumblr. Facebook, Myspace, Beebo and MSN are no longer enough.

This backs up the odd comments I got at school today from some random kids – “you’re not on twitter are you miss?”

I exchanged a few messages with her – and then she actually discovered who I was!

She described my presence as ‘awkward’ – naturally!  I promptly bid my farewells and assured her that I would not ‘follow’ her on Twitter.

Have you checked out lately what your students are doing online?