PD thoughts

Throughout the PD meetings I attend I am coming to find that not a lot of teachers have a PLN or are not very into the PD event being attended. Because of this I have ventured out of my district, state (yep good bye NC) and country (hello Canada). I believe it is important to expand outside of all borders and share educational philosophies, resources, tips and advancements in content delivery. There is a real business model here in the US and a lot of the rhetoric infiltrates the conversations especially data driven gains in student growth and the money or the actual survival of the school is at stake. Because of this focus nearly all PD meetings are about reading data discussing data and writing goals to better student achievement. At least that was my experience for the past 5 years.
Don’t worry though there is a ray of hope in here… I was able to choose to take a PD seminar and got to attend a Blackboard site development workshop. It consisted of short how to lessons followed by 10 to 15 min of work time to fine tune what you had just learned. We attended 5 sessions like this and then our final session was a 3 hour free for all on the site where we could create and post and organize the content. Even amongst the varying skill levels a lot of great content was generated. Now because of the session I have a direct online link to students as they have access to all my assignments and notes. The 3 hour block at the end was the key to its success. During this time I had learned enough to really get in to the program. Great use of time and as a class we are now connected to other social media sites and collaborating outside of the classroom environment. Really beneficial!

Are we creating an Internet Ghetto?

While doing some class reading I got taken on a 2.0 ride. I was reading and some links and quotes caught my attention. I decided to clip a quote from an article using clipmarks (an amazing web 2.0 tool) and I came upon this article in a feed I am following. Thought it might make some good reading. Enjoy. Are we filtering ourselves into an internet ghetto?
Please feel free to provide your thoughts and any connected articles you may find.

Prepare for jobs that arent there

One of the many discussions taking place in education right now is with the ever changing work place demands and the fact that “we are training students for jobs that don’t exist yet” how do we revamp to better prepare an emerging work force. Here is a article that helped guide some thought.

The end of the office… and the future of work We love to hate the workplace, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone

Over reaction?

Colleague tweeted this article earlier, Science project prompts SD school evacuation . After reading it I had some mixed reactions, especially to some of the comments. I agree there may have been some over-reaction to the device itself but is it not an administrators duty to protect the student population from an unknown threat? There have been school shootings, bomb threats and various threats so to be cautious is important. However, who has the right to call it stupidity or safety? It sometimes seems like when we are over cautious we are called foolish or claim ‘the terrorist’s must be winning b/c we’re doing our jobs’ and keeping school safe. On the other side if we are not cautious enough and we are not taking care of the best interests of our student population and someone gets really hurt there are the ‘well why didn’t you take it seriously’? Some of the counseling comments made in the article did extend past what was called for in dealing with the incident but who can really blame a cautious administrator who is being responsible to his clientele?

Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s philosophical understand of the cultural impact web based technologies is having is an impressive historical perspective along with providing a guide in thought as to how the way we organize and interact with our world is changing.

He describes it as lumping and splitting, the act of categorizing materials and ideas. The way in which we categorize our world is an essential part of our understanding of the world. We place many aspects of our lives into categories, segments, and groups in order to reflect on the values we place on these contexts and disseminate their value. The basic act of tagging violates this fundamental thought. If we are to make available a thought or physical object there should be a specific place to find it. But with Tagging you are allowing more paths of queries to find the same end. The more tags an object or thought has the more valuable the content.

In early thought a person who has the idea owns the idea. Perhaps an early form of intellectual property rights advocacy. Individuals have exclusive rights to content and can edit it how they wish. The massive collaboration on the web through RSS feeds and the use of wiki style webpage’s provides editing for the masses runs head on into the ownership of knowledge. When we share the content online we are developing a shared consciousness. The editors of the content are now the owners. We have the power to reorganize. We are now the owners of the content as we to have a say.

ECI 830 First session

After a three week hiatus I m back in class with my fellow colleagues in EC&I 830. We had our first chat this evening and it was a really fun get to know each other. Its looking like a lot of the web 2.0 tools I was exposed to during my last class will be utilized here. Keep checking back there will definitely be more to come.