RSS feeds and widgets can now be inserted easily into pages, which is very cool.

My job over the next wee while will be to educate other teachers (and pupils?) about Glow, and to lead by example in putting it to effective use in the learning and teaching process.  Whilst this is a daunting prospect, I’m looking forward to taking on such a positive role – it’s all too easy to slip into the usual teacherly pass-time of moaning and criticising!

He also has a slide show about OpenID and education, in which he says:

Far from threatening institutional viability and control, distributed, user-owned technology offers an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, and bureaucracy that come from a supply-driven model. Rather than spinning us out of control, they offer a way to get back under control.

Oh yes!

 I’ve just been into the phase 3 version of the Glow portal, and they have included instructions to insert rss feeds into pages.  The way to do it is rather circuitous, but at least it is now doable.  I’ve tested it with a couple of feeds, and it seems to work fine.

The “glowing potential” bit has a page showing how to insert external web sites into pages, and they have use our scotedublogs.org.uk as one of the examples.  Very flattering

I’ve been back in the Glow portal this evening.  Everything worked smoothly on Linux running Firefox.  This is a real credit to the original architects of Glow. It would have been so easy to get sucked into a Windows or Windows/Mac only solution.

Once inside I began trying to set up a glow chatroom.  I have to say that this was not an intuitive process, but I got there in the end, and I’m sure it’ll be easier next time.

It did strike me, as I looked around, that this whole environment will by default be hidden to the wider world.  We will have to think carefully about the implications of that.  I currently have two classes doing scribe post blogs, and their global audience is a big selling point.  It will be a shame if the wider world isn’t able to see what we are doing or share the resources we create.

The VLE should, of course, have some privacy – I look forward to seeing how this turns out. Or I could just use Moodle now… oops, I promised didn’t I?

New stuff for me is the idea of an ebay-style rating system for resources.  Tess raises the scary prospect of potential future employers looking at Glow and seeing what one’s Glow rating is!

or as the walls in this one?

I guess I’m not alone in hoping that the first metaphor is better suited to what Glow will become.

If so, then we need not worry too much about what Glow itself can and can’t do internally.  What Glow does well will happen within Glow, and what it doesn’t do so well will be done elsewhere. Glow will provide a ground of functionality out of which the interesting stuff can develop. In order for Glow to be successful, based on the first metaphor, we need it to allow the seamless flow of information to and fro between it and the wider Web:  RSS feeds in other words!

Provided we get these facilities, I don’t share the concerns of others about Sharepoint as a platform.  Sharepoint can do the boring stuff, which I hope it is fit to do, and the rest can happen wherever works best.

Whilst the Ajaxy tagcloudy web2.0yness of it all is a bit over the top, the idea seems very good to me.  If they would just relax and let users generate content in an easy manner they might really be onto something.  As it stands, it’s empty and it will probably stay empty. It’s got tagging and user ratings though – all good.

I would make a comment about Glow at this point, but I’m following the advice not to say anything that might be construed as negative

I don’t think, in taking on my role, that I ever claimed or was expected to be the fount of all knowledge regarding interactive whiteboards, but I have certainly met some expectation in schools that this is what I should be. “Here’s the whiteboard expert come to show us what to do” is the way I have been introduced sometimes. From this perspective, it could be seen as somewhat threatening to discover that there are others who know more than I do, or are using the board in more exciting ways than I am!

My perspective, however, is that my job is to support the effective use of whiteboards and voting systems to improve teaching and learning in maths. Nothing in that job description says that I have to be the source of all the good ideas, nor that I have to be the expert. It does say that I have to make a positive difference, and this is made all the easier by the existence of excellent practice to draw upon.

My role in East Lothian is in many ways similar to my Glow mentor role. As Glow mentors, we should recognize from the start that we will not be the experts. Within a couple of weeks of the roll-out of Glow, there will be bright eyed young (or maybe not so young) enthusiasts putting us to shame. At least I hope so! This is all fine and grand, provided we don’t create a model for our own roles that is based upon our being the experts. If we do, then we will end up looking rather pointless and ridiculous before too long.

I suspect that I may be simply paraphrasing part of Don’s vision thing. Once his podcast becomes audible, I’ll find out!

Actually, lest you think me too modest by far, I should say that in the field of web application development I am indeed an expert. Anyone looking for a Ruby on Rails developer should get in touch – I work freelance for very reasonable rates

I missed the afternoon (visiting Ross High School), but thoroughly enjoyed the morning.

Karen Robertson began the morning with an overview of where we are and where we are going.

Alan Yeoman then spoke to us about the training programme for Glow mentors, and I was very impressed by what he had to say. Whilst the Glow launch at SETT was a disappointment, with the feeling that it was underprepared, Alan’s presentation today showed that they have been doing some serious thinking about how to prepare us for our roles as mentors.

The residential training at Stirling may include sessions on ACfE and the theory of co-coaching, for example. I had been concerned that the training would focus upon the basics of the use of the Glow portal tools. In fact, as Alan said, most teachers won’t need any training to use the tools – if you can use a web browser, you’ve already got most of the technical skills you need.

Alan told us that VLE training is not going to be part of the residential training. The cynic in me can’t help wondering whether that’s because it won’t be ready by then!

After coffee, Don Ledingham spoke to us about the vision. He ran us through his multiple metaphor model, which I have to say made a lot more sense than when I read about it on his blog – there is sometimes no substitute for face-to-face meetings! A lot of what Don said about the role of Glow mentor applies equally to my secondment so I found it very useful.

Towards the end of the morning, Ewan McIntosh raised an interesting challenge. To paraphrase him, “Most of the tools in Glow are already available for free online now. Hardly anyone is using them. Simply putting them within Glow will not guarantee that they begin to use them”

It’s a fascinating introduction to the educational possibilities of Web 2.0.

It’s homework for me, because I haven’t finished reading it yet!