David WeinbergerOfcourse I should have read the Cluetrain
Knower – Knowledge – Known
World is more complex than knowledge.
Knowledge is big, Knowledge is orderly – Tree structure.
Properties of knowledge are the same a properties of the real worlds. So we have to categorize by yes/no into trees. Ideas are separated by physicality of books. Libraries are trees, so cooking fish, will not be in the fish section.
2rd order: Metadata, card catalogue can sort in different ways, but you need to reduce the info to fit on a card.
3rd order a leaf can be on lots of branches, amazon lists books in many categories. Nice illustration of messy linking, the messier/richer the better. metadata and data will not be separated (copytight laws are lunacy) in the 3rd order.
Dynamically organized tree, hey del.ico.us tagging.
Data storage is so large, keep and tag.
Mass media dumb down. People are tired of this, simplification. Blogs can expand and check the detail, take simple idea and add complexity (nothing new conversation does this).
Wikiopedia can lack credibility. Lots of checks, edits, history, discussion. lots of examples, disclaimers add to credibility, why not in main stream media .
Wikipedia will come up with collaborative knowledge, not in someone’s head, but in the conversation.
Wikipedia will ban if you repeatedly roll back to your edit without explanation. My battery is going, David want his children to work collaboratively, to read socially.

Going to go to teachmeet06.

scottishlearningfestival DavidWeinberger teachmeet knowledge

GO 2.4 Optical Air Mouse and Compact Keyboard Suite
Paul and I just got excited about these on the scotsys stand, at £99 they look great for using on smartboard.

scottishlearningfestivalsett06

The Reading Bus http://www.readingbus.co.ukA couple of minutes late, children presenting.
Hannover PS Aberdeen; High social depravation mixed backgrounds and abilities.

School has lots of parent links.
Raising attainment in Reading, fun and fostering lifelong reading.
The bus started from school, but includes other partners.
CFE – Enterprise, affected parents as well as children.
Learning bus, Aberdeen Bus company for education staff, buses are fun and unthreatening for parents, halfway house.
Involved more than one school, schools were to raise money for bus and conversion. Flat funding, lots of other charities contributed.

Bus launched 31 Aug 2006.
Partnerships with libraries, heath, school nurses, community health.
Emphasis on non-threatening place for teachers, learners and parents to contribute together. Children very involved in all aspects and implementation.
Bobby: 10 primaries involved, children from all schools worked together. Enterprise approach. Eg. Design of bus competition, great ideas. Bobby obviously benefitted great confident presentation.
Samantha: great list of events she had been involved in.
The slides in the background are going too fast to blog.

Morag Russell Aberdeen University
Learning conversations designed to find out what children think (and let the children know).
Wicked witch idea: What might happen if you cannot read?
Great use of conversation.
Wher do you want to read, not in classroom
Parents recall of school, lack of choice, again asking parents why reading was important?
Eg: misreading of pregnancy test.
Parents think they are not good readers, didn’t read novels.
Community Radio project, children lead, interviewed based on wicked witch.

Slide, children learned: adults think they are smart but they don’t know what children thing
Question to children, why can people read but puppies can’t? Great answers from children.(need time to think)

There is far to much in this, to blog as it goes on. keywords, conversation, enterprise, (revisit children’s conversations with them, lets them know that their contributions are valued).
Children link reading to real life rather than education.

Bus as neutral space, teacher shares custody of learning, teacher welcomes. Children given a safe, secure dialogic space. given a voice.
Live broadcast radio show.

notes: £120,000 to buy and convert bus

scottishlearningfestival readingbus

An early start, I sneaked in.How primary teachers create a community of learners.
BeBo: blogs not used, children don’t want to write?
Connections and discussions.
Ewan’s BeBo deconstruction, blog least important, comments, bands, photos, friends, Attention
Ewan:

• Blogs and Comments
• Heh, Sandaig otters, thank goodness we blogged yesterday. On to the teddies and out of school communication.
• Musselburgh trip to France, 4698 visits, advertised on posters in local shops.
• Clustermaps, opportunity to shoutout to the audience.
• The Dream Dragon, example

David: Photos

• How to bore your friends and family or A useful tool
• Photos with notes Viking Invasion Project on Flickr
• Highlight, link and learn, open photos to others to add knowledge.
• Telling Tales: teddies, bubbleshare: audience.

Ewan: How do you make friends:

• Link Out, East Lothian blogs for all children with custom sidebar .
• Online link shareing.
• scotedublogs

Some of the five top tips:Shoutoup sig, business card, letterheads, school boards.Read, write comment, join a wiki.
Discussion, problems and blocks from HTs and authorities.

phones in the classroom on you tube

Last night I was reading an interesting post And, don’t forget to breathe! on GD’s Random Jottings a blog by a teacher in Argyll (one of Andrew Brown’s 118 I’d guess). It was an interesting post from the chackface, I was especially interested in

But I’m beginning to wonder how many others have stalled ICT projects, their progress barred not by large rocks but by small, irritating pebbles of problems.

There are plenty of rocks in the way of progress, but the small technical details are often a show stopper, things that work at home or on an inservice or training day just don’t work in the class where the pressure is on, frustration will lead to the stall. And there are so many pebbles.

At lunch time I was planning this post, it was going to be about the use of wee cheap devices, namely the iRiver and cameras and just getting things done quickly and generating excitement in the class.

This morning I was doing a bit of talking in one of our primary six classes, the one that is ‘not ‘mine’ (or half mine, I am sharing one of the p6s this session), we were looking with a projector at some posts and comments the children had made, following links in comments, and talking what makes a good comment. 15 minutes before the bell we decided to blog about the French lesson from the previous day, the children’s second one. The children wanted to blog about it, but couldn’t think of much to say so I pulled out my iRiver and recorded a short song about the alphabet, we uploaded that onto the blog and the children were delighted (I am not sure how delighted their teacher was with their accent). I was pretty pleased with myself, and thinking about the afternoon.

The day before my class had been working on electric circuits and a group made a tiny movie with a digital camera, they has written a good report and were going to blog it, with me giving a hand to get the quicktime movie in the post.
I’ve installed the stuff from embedthevideo.com to make it simple to generate code to popup movies.

We uploaded, blogged and tested. The video was blank and QT said it needed a component. Eek, I then spent any free seconds for the rest of the afternoon trying to get a move exported from QT pro that was a small size and played on our school PCs, needless to say I didn’t get it to work until after the end of the school day. The problem was I had encoded the movie in H.264 format, doing it again in H.263 format worked fine (and the movie was smaller). I uploaded the replacement file and the post is now working well.

Anyway, this post was, in my imagination, going to be about the ease of using small devices to make quick, simple and exciting posts with children.
It turned out not to be so simple. I’ll know the next time.
The idea of making really short, small video and audio clips and blogging them easily was really attractive, getting away from the larger scale podcasts and dv projects to something more spontaneous, this technology should be transparent but it is full of grit and pebbles.

Another awful glow pun, sorry. I got the news yesterday that I had been accepted as a glow mentor, and therefore would be going to SETT. I had not asked my HT before as I’ve gone the last few years and thought that it might be pushing it. She said something like ‘I expected that you would be going and wondered why you had not asked.’Of course I was going to pop along for TeachMeet06. I am not sure what to do about the teachmeet vs glow dinner clash?
I also don’t really know what is on the program and have not chosen which presentations to go to, I know I want to see the Interactive Chatting Teddies as I would like to get my photo taken with Spencer and Campbell, and I presume Ewan will be doing a turn, so I will probably heckle.Any suggestions as to other good presentations gratefully received. What I am really looking forward to is meeting with everyone who has supported the Sandaig Blogs, by commenting and linking, over the last couple of years.The other thing I’ve got to do is work out exactly what i am going to talk about for 7 minutes at TeachMeet, seems harder than talking for an hour, I am going to be talking about RSS and APIs but have not really worked out a conclusion yet.

TeachMeet06SETT ScottishLearningFestival Glow

My class are working on a bit of their Scotland topic researching cities. I had planned that they would use Wikipedia for research and was even thinking of using a wiki for presenting there results. Unfortunately we still have only one pc as the suite is still in progress. Anyway we had a look at Wikipedia with the projector and white board, compared it to our old classroom encyclopedia, hmm nothing on PSPs or IPods in the old book. We talked about who put Wikipedia together and how quickly it could change. We talked about accuracy and reliability of information. We had a quick look at the Tyrannosaurus page, and then the page about Glasgow. We had a quick chat about licensing and the fact that we could use the dinosaur photo if we liked. Covered a lot of points which will need further discussion and clarification.

Then I gave groups of children printouts of the Wikipedia pages about Scottish cities and highlighter pens, they went through the entries highlighting bits of text which will become note and then their own texts. Steam-powered Web2.0. good fun was had by all and the children ended up with some useful starters for their research. There should be a child’s eye view on the Sandaig Otters blog tomorrow.

I will be talking to folk from the schools in our Learning community tonight these links are for me to talk about.

Sandaig Blogs:

• Sandaig Otters
• Sandaig Poets October 2005
• The Dream Dragon
• Kimberley’s Bio-Poem
• The Netherlands 2005

ScotEduBlogs Wiki Links to the Scots Edu Blog world.

A couple of tutorials on using wordpress (interface might be a bit different)

• Intro to WordPress
• Posting to WordPress
• Blogging in WordPress – pdf A great guide to using WordPress at edu.blogs.org, so there may be a few differences.

A list of a few other school/class blogs