21st century educators, work and students

Friday afternoon is a good time to kick back and relax thinking about the wins of the week. Why not spend some time thinking about the powerful influences on education in the 21st century? Here are some things to excite and inspire - or at the very least interest you.

• The 21st century educator: creating a personal learning network “The kind of questioning, collaborative, active, lateral rather than hierarchical pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools.” Howard Reingold, Smart mobs

This is only one quote from an incredibly interesting look at 21st century teaching and learning, personal learning networks and technology tools.
This presentation is on slideshare. If you haven’t had a chance to explore the presentations uploaded to this site yet, set some time aside … there’s lots to learn!

• Shoulder pads are out! Working from home is outré! Enter the Digital nomad. “Wireless internet has develop a new kind of colleague – the digital nomad. They work wherever they can find a wireless Web connection and then reach their co-workers via instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, email and more.” The Washington Post (story and video).Seems to me DER NSW is getting us moving in a direction where students are preparing for this emerging world of work!

• How teenagers consume media was an instant hit on the internet just recently. Why? Well I’m not sure … the article was written by a 15-year-old and whilst this cannot be considered to be representative it nonetheless a really interesting insight in how teenagers consume media.

This document has been published at Scribd, a place to upload and share your documents. Not been there before? Take a few minutes to trawl and see what’s of interest. I just found one … Reinventing Edison, maybe not something you’re interested in though.

Connected learning

Mark Treadwell: At the Connected Learning conference last week, Mark made great use of narrative to describe the ‘most dramatic paradigm shift of all’, the Internet-based paradigm. He argues that we have reached our upper limit in the book-based paradigm. Also of interest is his stuff on thinking, Thinking 101 where he explores What is thinking?, how the brain works, Socratic questioning and much more.

Trudy Sweeney: At the same conference, Trudy touched on her work which I think is most interesting, i.e. Interactive whiteboard developmental framework which give technical and pedagogical indicators through the stages of ICT integration. There is a neat description of her study to develop this model published in the Australian Educational Computing journal (Vol. 23 No. 2 pp. 24-31). It captures teacher practices at different levels of sophistication that would allow teachers to identify their professional learning needs. She also draws on the NSW model of Quality Teaching making this a most interesting framework.

TED talks is always a great sources of the new and very interesting – the latest big GASP is Pattie Mae’s wearable device with projector, Sixth sense on TED talks. If this is achievable then …

NSWIT, The digest, Talking to learn: Dialogue in the classroom promotes lengthy interactions between a teacher and a student or group of students for collaborative and mutual support, the importance of dialogue and interactions to help students build understanding, explore ideas and develop thinking skills. Well worth a read!