Peter Ford snaps Barbara
Barbara Ganley's approach to speaking is different to most. Peter might use live blogging in his presentations but Barbara uses iMovie to tell a digital story as she opens. Very refreshing.
Memorable moments and why blogging happens
She's asking us to think about memorable moments from our educations and to relate to how these might affect the fact we are here today at a blog conference. Here are my memories, the first ones that come into my head:
- Nursery School years:
Eating tomato soup for the first time, sharing the surprise at how tasty it was - Primary School years:
Writing a 12-page project on the hydro electric plant, where the turbines were 80 times taller than me (I was a small 11 year old). - Secondary School years:
Playing in the school orchestra at the school prizegiving, the first time my friends had heard me play. It was the best concert I had ever played. - University years:
writing until 3am every week on a Tuesday night for the Student newspaper, and nearly failing second year because of it.
What do these memories have to do with my blogging today? Everything. There's some degree of discovering something that is pleasurable for me and which I want to share, from tomato soup to shocking stories from campus.
Children are already engaged in the same kind of world, sharing their experiences online instead of or as well as in school books or student (print) newspapers. Yet, as Will pointed out, schools are still
about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.
As Peter has pointed out in several talks: students demand to be connected and to communicate.
For Barbara, five years ago as she started out blogging with her students, it seemed so obvious. Before blogging her students' work was predictable, safe, dull and not preparing them for the world outside. Yet, outside school the students were connecting and interacting with multimedia. Barbara needed to bring this connectivity into the classroom, moving beyond the facile connections between family and friends and providing something where they could really connect to the wider world.
These students watched their skills develop as their work, their thinking was taken seriously. After all, it had a real audience who respected what they wrote. Nobody can complain about the results (in ethos and in grades) - everything improved. Even those who don't like to blog or who don't do it very well get dragged along by the group (the team?). The bloggers are those who are proving to be most successful in the college-wide scheme of things.
From the teaching stage to the learning circle.
This is how Barbara describes her changing role as she blogged with students. But things are changing again. Accountability is the reason Barbara gives for teachers turning away from this medium of social software. Or using new technology to do old things. Students complain about doing "stupid stuff" with computers, going through the motions. It's the "technology façade".
If you're using these technologies there is no choice but to use connective collaborative teaching. Bloggers give up a whole lot of control, something Don Ledingham was sharing with Head Teachers in East Lothian just two days ago.
In fact, how much is this just like real life?
More coming soon...
Just a small point - I don't "have" Headteacher - just as a school does not belong to a headteacher. I've always been uncomfortable when anybody talks about "my school" or "my teachers". Educational success depends upon the power of "we".
Posted by: Don Ledingham | June 03, 2006 at 12:21 PM