Just finished re-reading Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of Freedom’, by the way…….

Amazingly, I have that thin green paperback on my bookshelf. Quite prescient really, the way that Illich talks about “learning webs”.

Apologies for the incorrect reference - Illych wrote Deschooling Society. But I like Freire too!

We need to harness enthusiasm - it’s well known that that’s a major characteristic of good teachers! As long as they move at the pace of the learners that is. That is the key to making change rather than innovation.

Isn’t AifL strangely good? When it first came appeared on the horizon, I must admit that I thought “oh dear, here comes another initiative”, but it’s turned out to be the most worthwhile development in education that I’ve seen in 16 years at the chalkface [when will that expression die out I wonder?].

I must confess that I had to look up ZPD - once I decoded the TLA, I was with you though
Exemplars are where Web2.0 in education gets interesting. Are the fascinating things being done by enthusiasts like those at Teachmeet06 really replicable on a larger scale, or do their successes rely on an innovator’s enthusiasm? The jury’s still out on that one!

Some of the above discussion is scarey, some comforting. There is a temptation for the techies to blind the rest of us with jargon. Yes, teachers want ’stuff’ but partly I suspect because they don’t necessarily know what Skye, blogging, wikis, etc. are. (Actually the fount of all knowledge in my house - a 15 year old girl - doesn’t really know either - nor does she play games although she is sugically welded to MSN, ipod, etc.)

What teachers do increasingly understand - enhanced by such bottom up processes as AifL - is that the most effective learning occurs in social situations. ‘Think, Pair Share’ is now part of most teachers’ vocabulary, for example. Many teachers have now actually heard of Vygotsky and the ZPD (more jargon, I know) and celebrate this underpinning of their instinctive beliefs about pedagogy. In order to ensure that our colleagues are excited rather than intimidated by the advent of Glow we need to speak their language as well as demonstrate that we are on a learning curve too.

Rather than discrete content, what I need are exemplars - the sort we tried to develop way back in 2003, John - to help me understand how it may work so I can more clearly faciltiate that comprehension in my colleagues.

Sorry I missed this until Hamish emailed me. The answer is a simple one: that it will be up to anyone who is already currently running any kind of local or national forum to decide if and when they might wish to move their forum onto Glow. If, as Robert notes, you do not feel that Glow gives you the same or better functionality than your current set-up, then there will be no problem with your forum continuing to co-exist separately.

However, Glow will give you, apart from the interest-group functionality, access to all the collaborative tools to use as well for your forum members. So, as well as threaded discussions, shared areas or whatever else you might enjoy within Sputnik, your members will also be able to communicate via the desktop video/audio conferencing tools, virtual whiteboard, application sharing, chat rooms, mailing lists, and so on.

Get back to me if you need any other info.

Cheers,

John

Whilst not in any way qualified to answer your question, I would say that members of existing online communities will probably continue to use them, unless Glow can offer some compelling new functionality. If John doesn’t chip in here, I’d suggest that you ask him on his blog - follow the link on the right!

I guess, for many teachers, to be fair, it was a question of ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’ - sounds a bit Donald Rumsfeld-ish!! - in other words, teachers like to have lots of resources to play with and they saw SSDN/Glow as a means to get their hands on lots of new resources. So resources were seen as the main raison d’etre for Glow.

So - rather than try to persuade otherwise (and, of course, content IS important in any case) we have been working on the assumption that, in order to achieve a quick win with teachers when Glow goes live, it will have to make available a reasonable tranche of content (stuff!) from Day 1. Only gradually, perhaps, will we be able to persuade teachers that, hey, there’s something in here that is just as important - and maybe more important - than stuff, namely all the collaborative tools that will allow you to bring your pupils together with others from across Scotland or across the world.

In the meantime, of course, the social networking tools have appeared over the horizon. I believe that, over the next year, we should be able to use blogs, wikis, etc to persuade more and more teachers that collaboration is the central attribute of Glow and of the Web 2.0 tools themselves (it’s just obvious with the latter!), so that by the time Glow goes live, more of our teachers will be willing to look beyond ’stuff’ as the main success factor for the national system.