School 2.0 in South Africa

I am asking to date yourself now, but if it will make you feel better- what old technologies did your parents and grandparents use that is not in existence any more? My dad was a gadget mad so we use to get all the thingies that that could switch on and off which probably explain why I am still so crazy about gadgets. I remember my tape recorder fondly and definitely the 16mm “movie recorder” where we had endless footage of our holiday by the sea. I loved my vinyls and still have a huge collection hiding in one of my cupboards. See which of the devices you recognise. (This video had us in stitches at the recent #schoolnetsa11 conference.)

I recently had to help a very gifted “performance artist”, pianist and poet take the first steps into creating a virtual presence for herself. @laraafrika can be defined as a free spirit that definitely does not like being being restricted by any conventional, let alone virtual, boundaries. She is also a proclaimed technophobe that worries about cellphones frying our brains with radiation. She likes to get on her bicycle and hit the inhospitable roads of our country, woman alone, stopping off at little villages in remote areas to enthrall school children and art lovers with her piano music and poetry along the way. She does not organise where she will stay and choose to depend rather on the generosity of human spirit, touched by her unselfish sharing of artistic expression, to give her a place to sleep, food to eat and company on her way. Scary surreal stuff actually.
She does amazing things and I find myself intrigued by not only her writing and unique way of life, but what wealth of “stuff” she could share with all of us. So I decided to “adopt” and “save” her artistic offerings by making sure that it is captured and shared to a wider audience, something a virtual presence can facilitate. She was horrified- I could see it in her face. She did not want to tell me out loud as she, at the time, was dependent on my hospitality and definitely did not want to offend me! But when I am on a mission- there is no stopping me.

I did realise that @laraafrika, like most artists, have a private side that she did not want to “put it all out there”. Her biggest concern was keeping her hybernatory self and her exuberant expressionistic artistic self in harmony and of course the severe threat of all this virtual stuff smothering her spirit and holding her captive. Not to mention the radiation frying her brain. I, on the other hand, wanted to document her poetry, film her “artistic expressions” and get her to document her nomadic journeys. So the question was to marry her fears with my expectations without scaring her off and losing the opportunity to watch some genius in motion.

As technology activists we tend to scare people away. We make them feel freakie for not using technology and insist that they adopt tools and skills before they even need them in the slightest. Using technology for the sake of technology has never and will never work. So I decided to create a virtual framework for @laraafrika that will not change what she is doing anyway, in any way. The technology must fit in with her and not the other way around. The best way to get technophobes into using technology is to use the tools they are already using but in a more effective and innovative way. An unobtrusive framework is what @laraafrika needed.

I set up a twitter account (@laraafrika) a blog (www.larakirsten.za.net), a private facebook profile for her personal network and a fan page (www.facebook.com/laraafrika) for her. As she was totally comfortable with e-mail I decided that I will keep that as her main communication tool until she is ready to explore further. She was also gifted a blackberry which I had to beg her to use. This meant that she could create her blog posts as e-mails on her phone from her bike, from where it will automatically post her blog entry onto her blog. Every blog entry then automatically created a tweet and posted the link and a short intro to her Facebook fan page. So in effect all she had to remember was to capture her journey in an email, something she was totally familiar with. I did not scare her with the technical side of things- so all she knew was that when she send an email to her blog, it miraculously appeared on her blog and twitter stream as well as her facebook fanpage. I also learnt something interesting from the experience. Most of the interactions originated from Facebook. Even though her friends and fans interacted with her on facebook, they clicked through to her blog and then returned to Facebook to comment. Interesting….

We were able to follow her progress on her latest road trip from East London to the Tankwa Karoo where she had to go off the grid due to lack of mobile access. It was great to experience her trail and tribulations along the 700km’s of inhospitable road, rain, wind, uphills, snow and tricky drivers. (See her road trip blog entries).

Then she dropped off the virtual radar for a while and I wondered if she has wandered off or if her brain got fried by my well-intended efforts. The answer was quite simple. Somewhere along the way someone tampered with her berry and her stuff just did not get to where it had to get to. On wandering into my space, I quickly corrected her mobile tool and she was ready for action yet again. This time round she is far more excepting of the technology ideas I have to share with her and is lamenting the fact that she has got ensnared into the virtual tentacles as well. She in fact did a magnificent performance piece on “technological spaces” which, in a next virtual step, we will be posting as a video onto her blog. Watch this virtual space(s).

I had the amazing experience this weekend to meet up, for the first time face 2 face,  with one of my foremost gurus and mentors, Bronwyn Stuckey (@bronst).  Up to now, she has just been this person, far away, yet close, who helps me when I am stuck, points me in the right direction when I am stumped by googled multitude knowledge overmation. She has been my filter of “good learning stuff” and my way of keeping on the edge of the latest information in my field of passion, namely educational communities of practice. And all of this via twitter.
What makes this so amazing and special is the fact that she lives all the way down under in another time zone. Yet she is always there for me. She is an essential cog in my Personal Learning Network (PLN). There is just no better way to learn that this. I got to know her way back when I was doing literature research and discovered her devotion and inspirational work and research which provided me with a minefield of juicy stuff to chew on (so to speak- mindfood).
Where I found my own supervisors unavailable, unreachable and always to busy to have time for me, my omnipotent PLN made it possible for me to have access to the top minds globally in my field, including @bronst. And what is more amazing is that my PLN gives me unconditional learning opportunities -on demand. And all of this via twitter.
So if anybody tells me that twitter is an irrelevant silly tool, I present to you @bronst (and all the other amazing people in my twitter PLN). After 3 years of twitter learning and sharing and the occasional Skype sessions, meeting face to face felt like an emotional fusion of what we have already created online virtually. The other amazing thing is that we have created and presented a weeklong online workshop  during a conference, without ever meeting face 2 face. We just had that online learning bond that we created via our online PLN.
As she said, we could have talked for hours (and hours) but the fact that we just had a few hours to touch base F2F did not matter as we knew that our learning pathway is forever there via twitter and any of the other learning platforms that we run into each other across the learning landscape. We had this virtual educational bond and it felt that I have known her F2F forever.
So, teachers, find yourself a few learning partners to sustain you. Learn from them and maybe you will be blessed to meet up with them F2F  (or not) along your learning pathway.

I am currently busy creating learning objects for the COL (Commonwealth of learning) for their CCNC (Commonwealth Computer Navigators Certificate). It is kind of hard for me to return to my roots to create a “web 1.0″ learning object and I am hoping (time permitting) to advance the process to elementary web 2.0 level. So what I thought is to incorporate some subtle social media references and emerging the learners (novice computer using teachers and vocational students) into some social media examples.

So I thought to incorporate a blog commentary as well as short twitter examples into the learning object. This is where I need your help. What were your worst experiences with presenters and their presentations?

I attend a lot of local conferences and are sometimes flabbergasted at the level of boring/bad presentations and even the way people are presenting. It is as if they do not care and think that by merely having their speeches up on the screen, it is enough and that they have the right to bore us to death. As teachers we neither have the time or the money to attend conferences and workshops where we are exposed to the mushroom effect (sitting in the dark growing mould in our brains)

So come on, tell me your stories! What have been your worst experiences? I do reserve the right to include it in my learning object as examples. You can also submit short ones to me via twitter: @maggiev

Quite a few of my teachers have asked me how I get it right to twitter, bookmark, chat, engage in social media and get my work done. I do not always get it right to juggle everything as effectively as I would have liked to, but I have devised a way to slip in all the things that I feel strongly about into my workday in a way that I do not even notice that I am doing it. So I thought I will share it with you.

My main daily communication and resource tools are Twitter (microblogging tool), Delicious and Diigo (bookmarking tools), Google reader (keeping track of new posts from my network and all over) as well as Skype/gtalk (for real-time chat and support)

I check my Twitter , say, every 1/2 and hour or so. Mainly to see if my network has anything valuable for me to look at and to see if there are any @replies or direct messages for me to respond to. Twitter is an instantaneous learning tool – it is not as intrusive as e-mail and it is quick to scan. If I am passed a great resource (and my network is really brilliant, so I always have!), I look at it (click through from the tweet) and immediately store it for later reference and use. I do this …

• Using my Diigo button (installed when I downloaded the Diigo toolbar), a little window then pops up where the
  • Web address is automatically captured as well as…
    Whatever I have highlighted as a description. I always try and insert something relevant there as it makes it easier when searching for resources.
  • I can then tag the resource at the same time. This step is very important as it will make it possible to find the resource again (and that is what it is ultimately all about in the end) So I make sure that I tag it using relevant tags familiar to me.
    • I also use tags that I have set up in Diigo to perform certain actions..
      • like creating a automatic weekly blog post of all my resources tagged with that word (eg see all the weekly bookmark posts- they have been tagged with the word “school2.0” which then make Diigo create a blogpost once a week)
      • also have specific RSS feeds set up that will look for all the resources tagged with a specific word and then send it to a feed located on a different blogpost (eg ML123 tagged resources go  to my mathsliteracy blog feed, and resources marked with “mathematics” go to my mathematics social network on NING)
      • I can also decide if I want to send the bookmark (resource) to a specific list or group (eg if it is a maths literacy resource, I post it to my ML123 group or if it is a general teacher resource I post it to my Educator group)
  • The window also has a little checkbox which, if ticked, will send my resource to twitter. I love this feature as it is a quick way to share resources on the fly with those interested in the same things I am (maths, social media, teacher stuff, ICT4teaching&learning) who are following me on Twitter (instant learning).
    • All my twitters automatically go to my Facebook update, which means that in the process I educate my kids, family and Facebook friends (advocacy ) They moan bitterly about this!!!
  • I have also set up my Diigo to automatically post all my bookmarks to my Delicious bookmarking system as well
    • Diigo is like a database of resources (a very good user friendly one) and depending on how well I tag my resources, I can find anything, drilling down to the last detail, in seconds.
    • I initially started off with Delicious which is also a bookmarking system, but has a far simpler interface (I have tried both with my teachers and Delicious has been more user friendly for new computer users) It is not as social and do not have annotation and discussion features. This means that I physically have to go to it to see what my network is up to (which I do once a month and the tag back to my system). (See my Delicious learning object for teachers here)
    • The reason why am using both systems simultaneously is
      • I actually find that Delicious is an easier search engine to use
      • I have an established network on Delicious that I value and support
      • My novice teachers are on Delicious and I need to support them as well.

I check my Google reader at least once a day. Google Reader is a RSS (real simple syndication) tool that downloads (automatically) all the feeds (from articles) that I have set up for it to fetch.

• When I open it (and I always keep it open) I can see when anyone in my network/blogs/websites have updated their blog etc.
• Scanning through the heading titles quickly brings me up to date with the latest news and Edtech skinner
• and If I find something that I would like to use in future I tag it using my
  Diigo button (see above) –> database–> delicious–>twitter–>twitter replies. So this is a vital part of my daily professional development

Skype/Gtalk is my personal contact with the world and I mostly use it to support my teachers and stay in direct contact with my kids. I can talk anybody through anything using Skype. It is almost like being in the same room. I always mark myself as “away” (even if I am there) in order for me to have the choice to engage or not. This way people do not have to feel bad about bothering me, as they know that I have a choice to talk to them.

I do  not use Google search much any more. I rather search through my database (Diigo and Delicious) or ask my Twitter network directly. I only go to Facebook once a week and get my friend updates in my Tweetdeck or via my Friendfeed. As I find Facebook to be very “slutty” it can be a mindless distraction and I limit it for myself.  In a next blogpost I will highlight all the other tools that I use on a daily basis.

As everybody know I have been having an on-off relationship with my Cell Phone for years. Cell phones do not like me. They break, grow legs, and mostly get alienated from their power cables. I have tried moving over to smart cell phones. They make matters even worse. They are power- hogging little devices out to cripple Eskom and I find myself (that is if I remembered to plug in /had a power cable) without any power by tea time! Also, my eyesight has now officially progressed past puberty and I am struggling to read which new reading glasses I should acquire. But I am digressing. Maybe I just want to mention that I do believe in cell phones as great learning devices and will use it more actively the moment I found my charger cable!

So how do you contact/get hold of me? As you have gathered by now, phoning me on my cell phone might not be a good way to go. In the past e-mail was a very effective way to get my attention. But since I have not been able to catch up on the 3000 e-mails that accumulated during my Christmas virtual break, I have funnelled my e-mail into folders and play eenie-meanie-minie-mo on which folder I will read every day. Those who know me, knows to mark their e-mail as high priority (I check that folder a few times a day)

So what is the best way? My current favourite way of communication is Twitter. I had to smile at my niece, who, on failure to contact me on my cell and landlines (Telkom took 2 weeks to fix it), resorted to see what I am up to on my twitter feed. Clever girl. Contacting me is as easy as sending me an @maggiev or direct message (d maggiev) at www.twitter.com/maggiev . And yes, it does get delivered to my cell phone via sms as well!

What actually inspired this blogpost is this cartoon:

Today is the start of my first online blogging workshop. I have about 23 enthusiastic local learners who are going to walk this learning pathway with me so I should not be so scared, should I?

My main aim is to see how an online un-workshop can bring together a bunch of people to learn a new skill and also to pilot my self study tutorials for my subject advisors training initiative. I have decided to create it in PowerPoint so that subject advisors (and who-ever) can just adapt it effortlessly for their own learning and training purposes and I can also just embed videos and links into it. I had some good feedback from my twitter community with hints and suggestions. For instance, I forgot to cite my cartoons and am now frantically trying to figure out sources and permissions!

I am using a NING platform for the workshop and have no idea if it is going to be intuitive for those who attend. I first started in the main network space, but then realise d that it will be very difficult to keep track of discussions in a general space, so I created a seperate group where only the people on the workshop can engage. This provided my first mess-up as I have already asked everybody to introduce themselves in the main space. I have decided to wait an see how we all cope with my brain-dead moment. Indeed a very interesting learning curve for me.

So today we will just get to know each other and find our feet in the group. I have loaded the “Why Blog” learning object for everybody to look at and start thinking about. My main aim for today is to get everybody into the separate workshop group.

The Blogging workshop is here

I am visual learner and quite enjoyed the creation of a visual image of my blog, which I found at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph and after investigating this interesting site (http://www.learning-styles-online.com) I have decided that I do not nearly enough use “learning styles” as a lens for material development and teaching!

I investigated this after reading this class blog post. (Sometimes I wish that I can remember to record the learning pathways I am taken on…..)

Note to self: Make a list of visual learning aids for teachers to use…..

• Flickr (a place to upload and share images that can then be embedded using all the lovely slideshows and widgets)
• Voicethreads (Making conversations/discussions meaningful with images and sound)
• …..feel free to add you own visual tools in the comments