Scott Mcleod has organised Leadership Day, since 2007, by requesting that bloggers post their ideas on a range of pertinent edtech topics. The 30th July has dawned and some reflection is in order. Last year I wrote a response and quoted Seth Godin suggesting that leaders must be prepared to be ‘incompetent’ for a while in order to learn: […]
After my post, Twitter Literati for English Teachers, some discussion arose about the reasons why teacher-librarians are so engaged with twitter, social media and digital technologies generally. Colleagues on Yammer had some good ideas: Darcy, in schools TLs are one of a kind. We have therefore needed to look beyond our schools for support and guidance. […]
Australian English teachers have not flocked to twitter in the way I envisaged back in early 2008. I have been guilty of spamming email distribution lists, evangelising at conferences and publishing traditional print based articles in professional journals, all with very limited success in convincing my colleagues, in any great numbers, to tweet. There are some notable exceptions, tweeple I admire greatly, […]
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the […]
Cory Doctorow is an author, essayist, activist and public intellectual I admire greatly. His musings on copyright and creative culture are of particular interest, as is his advocacy for the rights of young people. Educators should be, IMHO, cognisant of his ideas. The fact that Doctorow operates in a traditionally commercial way, as an author who makes the […]
Holiday Fun At the beginning of the school holidays I asked Miss 4 and Miss 6 what we could do together for fun. Quite a list emerged, including – ride the bikes, play ‘Cinderella’, take photos, see Toy Story 3, play soccer in the backyard, tease Mum and go to websites – and ‘Dad, can you fix the Wii’? […]
Craig Foster’s recent analysis of Spanish footballing success is likely to resound with many educators. Spain are a wonderful example to Australia because the fruits they enjoy today were cultivated over the last 20 years through an advanced youth development system, by churning out thousands of qualified coaches to educate young players and through the […]
This is a draft of my presentation, to be delivered next week at the Office of Schools conference, Engaging learners through innovative practice, about blogEd, the NSW DET blogging platform. Actually, the presentation is more about using blogs at school and in class, rather than anything specific about using this great tool for students and teachers. If you are […]
My interest in photography has always been, in a sense, academic. In truth, I am not really a practical guy and the technical aspect of taking a picture and developing a print never really appealed to me. Whereas the stimulation and aesthetic pleasure of vicariously enjoying someone else’s carefully crafted simulacra was immensely, is immensely pleasing. I like […]
WordPress has a video explaining the new features available in Thelonious, their WordPress 3.0 release, that may interest anyone considering an upgrade. https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21 I have installed the Organic Themes template Structure and am starting to understand what it can do. For example, the left sidebar disappears when one navigates away from the homepage and also, one can have featured rotating […]