e-wot?

It’s the Parents’ Fault. Not. Weblogg-ed post

Mark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:31:27 +0000

Interesting post and comments on Weblogg-ed. It’s about new literacies, cyber-bullying and the roles of teachers and parents, the curriculum, etc… The comments are full of good links and stuff. Worth a look.

I tried to post this as a comment to the post, but couldn’t. So I’ve posted here instead.

First up, it made me think of the Byron Review Report commissioned by the UK Prime Minister: Safer Children in a Digital World I can highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it before. I particularly like this quote:

“Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.”

Second, I thought of a course a colleague’s just written. We were recently given the opportunity to write a teacher training course in ‘Media Literacy’ for teachers in Singapore schools. One of the main focuses of the course is to develop knowledge and skills to enable the critical evaluation of different types of content across the different media available today. Helping teachers to empower children by helping them to understand, assess and manage risks - so they can make better choices.

Third, I thought of another colleague who’s helping secondary students to use blogs responsibly, by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than they’d resorted to before. link to e-wot post

The last two aren’t a direct attempt to ‘teach’ ‘cyber-wellness’, instead they do something which I think is more powerful. They help develop the literacies which are the foundations of better risk management and self-regulation.

40 Beautiful Free Icon Sets

Mark — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:19:56 +0000

One of those rare moments of internet zen when you stumble into something really nice for free. In this case, a whole bunch of very nice icons.

Click for 40 Beautiful Free Icon Sets

TED Prize Winner James Nachtwey

Mark — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:16:24 +0000

The brain, creativity & education

Mark — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:53:47 +0000

I was fortunate to see Graham Higgins give an inspiring presentation at KM Singapore earlier this month. He showed clips of two TED presentations. They were fantastic. So I’m showing them both here. Get a cup of your favourite beverage, sit back and be amazed. Jill Bolte-Taylor on her brain - stunning, inspiring, amazing. Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in education - funny, wicked, inspirational. (if you get prompted to choose a player (7 or 8), choose either one. Both worked equally well for me.

Jill Bolte-Taylor.

Sir Ken Robinson.

From consumers to producers - Neil Gershenfeld

Mark — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:37:58 +0000

Technology empowers us to do things which make us unique. In this TED talk, Neil Gershenfeld from MIT talks about “the killer app of personal fabrication”. He sprints through some breath-takingly brilliant visions of the future. But the point which hit me hardest is that we need to give students, teachers… everybody, more opportunities to move from consumers of technology to fabricators of technology. Watch the video here:

You might be prompted to choose ‘player 7′ or ‘player 8′ (Flash). Pick either one, both worked for me.

It’s a brilliant talk, but hard to follow. Quite complex, compared to other TED talks. I had to watch this one a few times to get the whole picture. But it’s awesome.

All the TED talks are amazing. Check them out at TED.

In the spirit of making stuff, check out Makezine too. It rocks.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008

Mark — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:23:00 +0000

Compiled from contributions from over 200 learning professionals who shared their top 10 tools for learning here are Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008

The top 3 are Delicious, Firefox and Google Reader. Huzzah!

My fave Firefox addons

Mark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:13:05 +0000

Here are some of the Firefox addons I’ve been using in an educational context for the past 5 years or so. The links take you to the pages that explain what each addon does:

Essential

Good to have

Nice to have

Web Development

*The essential search addon*

MyCroft Project searchbar addon Add this to your Firefox searchbar by clicking the ‘MyCroft Project - All’ link on the page this takes you to, and then use it from your searchbar to find all the available Firefox search addons you’ll ever need. There are thousands. You can also go to the MyCroft page and find searchbar addons from there. Here’s the Mozilla MyCroft page link. Test the ones you install, because some work better than others.

Here are some of the search addons I use regularly from my Firefox searchbar. (no links here, sorry - you’ll have to find them yourself in MyCroft):

Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
Urban Dictionary
Wikipedia
Websters Online Dictionary
Word Reference en - definition
YouTube
HowStuffWorks
Quotation Book - Search
Google Scholar
Google Trends
Download.com
Amazon.com
Yotophoto.com
Yahoo images (better than Google Images because it has Flickr, but don’t use this in class because you occasionally get uncensored nude pics)

The searchbar is one of Firefox’s strongest features. Having the right addons greatly enhances Firefox’s functionality. I’ll write another post on this at some other time.

Ning tip #3 - disable ‘comments’ option in Ning groups

Mark — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:45:10 +0000

Switch off ‘comments’ in groups.

We’ve found that the ‘comments’ option in Ning groups gets a bit confusing for our members. All our teachers can create groups. So we encourage all teachers who create groups to disable ‘comments’, and encourage group members to use the forums instead. Not a problem for you yet?

The problem we’ve found is that group members get confused if they have to choose between writing a comment or starting a group discussion thread. Too many ways to communicate. Too many choices.

The ‘discussion forum’ in the groups works better because discussions are threaded, the comments are not, and they’re in reverse order - which is confusing.

Now, I’m sure comments are great in groups where the members know the difference between a forum and a comment wall. But in our experience, most don’t. If the comment wall gets used for something that would work better in a discussion, then any potential for developing a good discussion seems to dry up immediately.

Ning tip #2 - add a favicon to your Ning network

Mark — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:08:33 +0000

Ning has a couple of pages (1, & 2) that tell you how to do this, but I thought I’d tie them together here for relative simplicity (they miss a couple of steps too, but they haz picturz). Please read everything below carefully.

The Ning Developer network post says this is a beginner difficulty-level task. Without being condescending, I’d say it’s a tad harder than that. (So I’m assuming that if you’ve read this far, you’re not a beginner and you already know what a favicon is. =P )

I’m doing this for Windows XP users (sorry Mac people, check out the links above).

Suggested tools
I recommend that you use http://www.favicon.cc/ to make your favicon pixel by pixel. It’s fun. To get the colours right, I recommend that Firefox users get the great Colorzilla addon (use it to pick colours from your page to add matching colours to your favicon).

WARNING
BE CAREFUL: You’re going to use WebDAV to connect to the source code and folders on your Ning network. Do not do this on a computer that you share with other people! They might be able to wreck your network. (see, this isn’t for beginners, is it?)

12 steps to the favicon
Once you’ve made your cute favicon, save it to your desktop as favicon.ico and follow these steps (in Windows XP):

Open ‘My Network Places’
From ‘My Network Places’ click on ‘Add a network place’ (under ‘Network Tasks’ on the left)
The ‘Add Network Place Wizard’ will open. Click ‘Next’.
Click ‘Choose another network location’
Enter the WebDAV network address for your network which will look something like https://XXXX.dav.ning.com, where you’ve replaced XXXX with your network name as it appears in the regular URL/URI of your network. (don’t forget the ’s’ in ‘https’, m’kay)
Once you’re done, click ‘Next’ (you might have to wait a bit here)
Select ‘Choose another network location’
When prompted, enter your Network Creator’s email address and password (read the WARNING above if you want to select/check the ‘remember’ option offered)
Choose a name for your WebDAV connection and click ‘Next’, ‘Finish’, then log in.
You’ll now see all the folders and files in the root directory of your Ning network. Your Ning network source code is now available via ‘My Network Places’ (read the WARNING above)
To be safe, copy everything you see there to your local hard disk as a backup
Copy the new favicon.ico on your desktop and paste it into your WebDAV window to replace the favicon.ico which is there.

Clear the cache in your browser, hard refresh your browser (Firefox: Ctrl Shift R), maybe even close your browser… and behold the glory of your new favicon!

If it doesn’t show after all that, then wait a bit. I’ve known favicons to take a day or two to appear.

The ladder of participation in social media

Mark — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:39:15 +0000

Jay Cross has some interesting stuff here from a Forester Analyst Click for The ladder of participation in social media

I doubt the validity of the results without more detail. A bit contentious to say that people in China participate more in social media than Europeans without some supporting data. Entirely possible, but some data to back up the figures would be good.