Jonesieblog

Today I had my first day of training as a Glow mentor.  I’ve seen the portal before, but things have progressed over the last few months and it was useful to see what is possible now.

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!

Stumble it!

Scott Wilson has a superb diagram on his blog showing how institutional software and user-controlled spaces should interact in an efficient learning environment.

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!

Stumble it!

Tess is speaking about her experiences trialling Glow.  Highs and lows!  You can find all the presentations and background stuff here.

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!

Stumble it!

Here’s the fruits of our labour so far….

Stumble it!

Do you see Glow as the ground in this picture:

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.

Stumble it!