Thank you to everyone who has expressed an interest in the PD Day. I asked for initial expressions of interest to be able to cater to the greatest number of participants possible, here now are the finalised details, which I hope will accomodate your attendance:

Date for PD: Saturday 2nd of September
Times : 9.30am - Morning Tea; 10.00am - Session 1; 11.00am - Session 2; 12.00pm - Session 3, 1.00pm - Finish.
Location: Bunbury SHS, Computer labs (Rooms: 27, 29 and 21)
Presenters: Lucy Mandyczewsky, Mike Leishman, Brad Hicks
Sessions Details: Each session will run for approximately 50 minutes and offer a choice of three activities.
Sample software: Please bring along a blank CD if you would like a copy of trial and open source software that is being used during sessions.
Cost of PD: $20.00 (this is a nominal charge to cover presenters’ travel expenses and morning tea only)
RSVP: Please confirm your intention to attend by Wednesday the 23rd of August (this week), please advise total numbers if more than one person attending. Please RSVP to contact@web2learn.net .

Note: The PD day will go ahead based on confirmed numbers being sufficient to justify presenters travelling from Perth.

Please refer to the attached Word document for a detailed schedule of the activities being offered in each session.

If you have any further queries please contact me. A venue map will be sent out to all confirmed participants at the end of the week.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Brad Hicks

ECAWA SW PD Schedule

Has anyone else noticed the Google Ads appearing on the Digital Chalkie Blog about the changes to the WACE?  Seems the Curriculum Council has the resources to fund a Google Adwords campaign!

Ian Bogost over at Water Cooler Games discusses the release of a game based on the Paris riots.  He refers to an emerging genre, “documentary games” and leads us to discover a few we may not have encountered previously.

I’ve been increasingly interested in so-called documentary games (or docu-games), such as JFK Reloaded and Escape from Woomera and Waco Resurrection. In fact, Cindy Poremba and I wrote an article on documentary games that should be out in the coming months (click over to her blog for more links on the topic, to which she is devoting her Ph.D. research)

I’m really interested in the rationale and development approaches to these games - most seem to be simple single player games at this stage but I’m sure over time this will shift into multi-user environments.

I’m thinking that the use of Gamemaker could be turned to making more socially aware games - most of the discussions of Gamemaker at education conferences are about learning to make the games and the coding sequences as they relate to programming - but why not layer another level of learning upon the process?  This follows on form my recent mention of Thomas Malaby’s New Approach to Gaming and subsequent mentions over at socialstudygames.

There is quite a flurry of discussion on US bloggging and eductaion sites about the passing of the DOPA.  I suspect it is a case of well-intentioned ignoramuses making policy that throws the baby out with the bath water.

We all know the benefits of engaging students through online interaction.  Look at the project being started by Drama Australia - Vineblogs (an exciting implementation of Wordpress MU) to see the potential.

However, in the great ttradition of prohibition the DOPA over steps the mark  The debaes that are emerging are multi-pronged - the common threads are gainsayers and do-gooders who seem ill-informed about the technology in question.  The do-gooders seem to be fired up by the intention of the act rather than the efficacy - the gainsayers include most of the mre lucid arguments but there are always some crackpots about.

One of the most engaging starting points I found was was Henry Jenkins - What DOPA means for Education - I love the implication (dopamines)!!  He refers to a significant thesis he was reading and how the educational impact of the research by Ravi Purushotma is likely to be overlooked because it addresses educational uses of social networking.

Henry refers to some of the more interesting discussions on the topic - where you can also see some of the more vox pop responses in the comments section - admittedly this article does cite Henry as a major critic of the DOPA.

To my mind Henry’s viewpoint holds a lot of value - especially when he comments thus:

I have made the argument that if supporters of DOPA really wanted to protect young people from online predators, they would teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers…

But Ravi’s thesis suggests something more — we are closing off powerful technologies that could be used effectively to engage young people with authentic materials and real world cultural processes. Here, social networking functions not as a media literacy skill but as a tool for engaging with traditional school subjects in a fresh new way.

Henry laments the impact of the DOPA and I think we need to pay some heed here in Australia is we are to avoid the same nett outcome of internet hysteria.  Internet predatrion can only occur with an ill-informed or ignorant user base - the DOPA ensures that students will remain exactly in that demographic…

This artcile also points to some interesting uses of Web 2.0 - unfortunately the Digital Chalkie slipped by his notice!  But here are some links to projects…

 Ravi has done more research than anyone I know about into how teachers are using this technology now and what purposes it might serve in the future. He has prepared his thesis as a multimedia web document that mixes sound, video, and text in ways that really puts his ideas into practice.

…a recent blog post, more and more teachers are discovering the value of getting kids to learn through remixing elements of their culture….

Here, for example, is a middle school Literature teacher who has students prepare profile pages for the characters in Shakespeare’s Richard III. This exercise offers students a rich opportunity to dig deeper into fictional characters and understand what makes them tick.

Or here’s the testimonial of a writing instructor who incorporated blogging into his 8th grade class and saw immediate shifts in the ways that children thought about their assignments…

We learned about this teacher’s project through Weblogg-ed which provides an important community resource for educators deploying these kinds of technologies in their classes.

Let’s hope that Australian authorities have a little more insight before they start wading in and destroying amazing educational possibilities.

labdien lurkers

ever wondered why afl coach kevin sheedy has a 3 on his shirt ? seems stupid. the essendon football club is proudly brought to you by the number 3. however, it is not so much the name of a phone company dreamed up by clever marketing people so much as the third generation of online technologies that are tied up in the so called 3 phones.

the first being static web pages interpreted by a browser on your machine and the second, being the point of this posting, being the set of technologies like php and python that operate scripts on a server before sending the return back to you.

most typically, they operate databases. and there is a whole mob, called the open source community that supply it all for free.

now, the first php script was written by rasmus lehrdorf and it simply kept track of who visited his web site. the next thing he did was write a guestbook, so folks could leave him messages. this was an enormous advsance ‘cos it made the website *interactive*.

the word quickly spread around the open source community, and people started to make logs online of what they were thinking and doing; web log became blog. being pesky little nerds, there was an explosion of interactive web pages, all working off php and its clones and you can check ‘em out at http://www.sourceforge.org

these technologies were termed the web 2.0 technologies and provided a vehicle for online communities to share and collaborate. names like joomla, elgg and lately druple come to mind. these are based on the one trick ponies like forums, wikis and bloggers. of course, being open source, folks can incorporate these into their projects. a sort of black hole emerges, incorporating all of these into one mega app.

enter moodle.

moodle is just fantastic. termed in the top ten best educational innovations on the planet. anytime you have six stubbies and a couple of hours i will tell you about moodle.

now, back on earth, i have been mucking around with these web 2.0 apps for a while. feel free to mosey on over to my joomla based content management system at http://www.numbatconspiracy.com to see what i have been doing.

specifically, lob into my wiki to see how i have been attempting to write a textbook on liquids in two double periods. see, by getting forty kids to each write a paragraph or two, i can quickly generate text to read. by making them do a draft first, i can pay attention to plaigarism etc etc etc.

i can discuss how my project like the fabulous falcon flyer went on my  forum.

or, i can try to teach kids in broome how to program in logo using my moodle site (thhp://www.numbatconspiracy.com/moodle)

computer studies => languages = intro to logo

if a teacher wants to knock himself out writing course material all power to him, but it sort of is his. it occurs to me that purveyors of fine trade agreements have tied things up so tight, that reading from a longmans book out loud probably breaches some sort of copyright involving broadcasting. let alone recording it to download to a kid’s phone so he can use the mp3 player to read to him as he checks out the text. oops a web 3.0 technology

they said i was mad building a castle in this swamp, but like i suggested in 1995 that email and web pages might have a future, i just wonder where this current rash of technologies will go. computers have only been in schools thirty years, so we can’t rush into these things.