Prue Salter’s Blog: Exploring the Power of Technology as a Learning Tool

As this semester and this subject comes to a close, it will be interesting to see how this blog develops as I will then be totally free to find my own ‘voice’ - I am looking forward to seeing how this develops and how my interests in technology and learning develop. I remember reading in someone’s blog where they thought their blog was about ‘X’ but when they went back and had a good look at all their posts they were about ‘Y’.

So Anne these flowers are for you (the perils of a digital age, it is all online cards and online flowers!) as a thanks for opening my eyes to so many new and exciting learning technologies.

It has been an intense time, this subject has had a greater workload than any others I have done in this Masters but this has been compensated for by the fact that what I was learning was really relevant and useful to my life and business.

So thanks again Anne, good luck with all your endeavours, I look forward to citing many of your works and writings as I start my PhD next year and you get ever closer to the end of yours.

And ok, I may have to have a week or so break from the blog just to catch my breath again….

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“Collaboration is a process through which people who see different aspets of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond theoir own limited vision of what is possible.” Building a collaborative workplace, AnecdoteCollaborativeWorkplace_v1s.pdf (541.552 Kb) Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk and Nancy White from the Full Circle Associates website: http://www.fullcirc.com

Callahan, Schenk and White state that ” today we all need to be collaboration superstars”.  The article discusses how a new environment for getting things done is evolving. Technology has made it easier to communicate, to share ideas and to work collaboratively without the need to occupy the same physical space and now with the pace of change we need to be link up with people with complementary skill sets to meet increasingly complex outcomes.

The article discusses that fact that collaboration skills do not tend to be taught. Having just completed a collaborative project using a wiki with my uni colleagues, I began to reflect. What collaboration skills did we use and how could we teach these?

Some of the skills that we needed were to be open and honest about our ideas and those of others in the group, to be receptive to other people’s point of views, to have the ability to take and give constructive criticism in a supportive and accepting way, to accept that it is a joint piece of work and you will not always agree with everything that is done, to not take over and to encourage others to share their ideas as well.

I have always thought that good team skills in really an extension of being a good human being and now I am starting to think collaboration is just taking good teamwork skills to the next level.

I think the big difference is that in team work often the work is parceled out and worked on individually whereas in a collaborative experience that notion of proprietary ownership is dismissed.

Perhaps it is best summed up by a statement in our group standards for our collaborative wiki project:
“Edit the entry as though it was your own, but with consideration and respect for differing viewpoints.”

 Thanks JuJu Members - it was a stimulating experience to work with you all. Truly the whole ended up being greater than a sum of the parts!

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I never knew there was so much choice!

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SUMMARY NOTES of the key concepts in: ’Building a collaborative workplace’ - Callahan, Schenk and White

New environment for innovation and getting things done:

• no lone pursuits
• need collaboration
• changing skills so seek people with these skills

But:

1. Collaboration skills don’t tend to be taught - on the job or hit and miss.
2. Organisational culture will determine how collaboration is supported.
3. Many companies but ‘collaboration’ software they are not using well

“Technology makes things possible; people collaborating makes it happen”

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So what prompted these musings? There is a school I work with in Sydney, St John Bosco College, that runs a wonderful day for their Year 11 students and I came across something in their booklet that make me think.

 First, I run a study skills session with the group. Then they break into smaller groups for the school’s GROW program (Glossary  Research Organised Writing) where they work on writing styles, identifying key terms, marking criteria, supporting evidence, using scaffolds for writing, and advanced research skills. It is a really impressive program and takes into account the sort of navigation literacy skills that students need.

While waiting Year 11 to arrive, I was flicking through their booklet and came across a section ‘How Web 2.0 Savvy are you’. I quickly jotted down a few points to see whether I was savvy as the Year 11 students:

• Am I comfortable using the Internet. Yes.
• Do I have a web page. Yes.
• Do I read blogs. Yes.
• Do I write a blog. Yes.
• Do I have a Myspace etc page. No. Doh!
• Do I use YouTube. Yes.
• Do I use podcasts/vodcasts. Yes.
• Do I subscribe to RSS Feeds. Yes.
• Do I use Flickr or similar. Yes.
• Do I read/write wikis. Yes.

So I felt pretty good about how I would compare to a web savvy student. Mind you, 6 months ago prior to this subject for uni I would have only been able to answer yes to 3 of these!

But I started thinking - what else should be on this list? What else do we expect a Web 2.0 afficiado to be comfortable with?

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What prompted these musings? Hearing a discussion on ABC Radio that prompted me to visit this blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

Jonathan Schwartz is chief executive officer and president of Sun Microsystems. And he keeps a blog in his role as president of Sun.

He writes about all sorts of topics and everyone from employees to the general public can comment on his posts. What a fantastic way for a big org to be more accessible and what a fabulous marketing opportunity.  How many companies can you go direct to the CEO? I found the comments more interesting than the posts in some ways although it was interesting that after skimming a few you start to get a feel for what this man is like. 

Another interesting application for blogging.

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 What prompted these musings? Wondering how I was going to get the CD-ROM drive on my laptop fixed without being parted with from it for days on end, then seeing a SuperGeek van - we come to you and fix computer problems and thinking, why not?

Anyway, so the guy arrives on time (great start) and proceeds to fix not only the CD-ROM drive but lots of other fiddly things that had been bothering me but that you wouldn’t take to a repair centre to fix - I figured I had to pay for the hour, may as well use it all! Was great value for a hundred bucks.

But it was a short conversation with the guy that inspired this blog.

Me: ‘Gee, they must have to give you heaps of training to do this job cause everyone expects you to be able to fix every possible software and hardware problem.”

Him: “Nah they can’t really train you for this”.

He then proceeded to solve all my various problems, not through knowledge acquired in a series of training courses, but through jumping online, google searches, checking forums etc etc until he found a suggested solution he could try. It was quite incredible to watch. It was a perfect example of why teaching our students navigation literacy is so important. The important knowledge he possessed was knowing what to look for and how to look for it.

PS. Now after listening to ABC Radio this morning talking about how unscrupulous bloggers are paid to promote people, products and companies I just have to say I have absolutely NO alliances etc with SuperGeek other than being a satisfied customer!

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What prompted these musings? A great video provided by a classmate Debra.

We need a fundamental shift in the way we approach text. We are used to thinking of text and literacy from a one-dimensional perspective but now we need to start looking at text as a multi-dimensional tool. Until we embrace this perspective, our use of web-based technologies will go the same way as other technologies like our digital cameras, our dvd hard drives and our mobile phones - most of us know how to use the basic functions but never bother to explore the depth of functionality that is available. While it is not that big a deal if we don’t know all the functions on our digital cameras, it will be a real shame if we as educators turn our backs on the power of this developing medium of Web 2.0.

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 What prompted these musings? Reading a chapter about ‘affective computing’ and no, it is not about computers who are showing affectations….

Yet another new term!  Hershey (2006) defines ‘affective computing’ as computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotions - basically it is researching about emotion in computers.

One of my classmates John, will be pleased to know I have discovered in this reading even more new terms: ‘perezhivanie’.  Vygotsky (1994) found that the development of a child depends on the way the child experiences a situation in the environment, ie. how it relates emotionally to a certain event and coined this as perezhivanie.

The idea is that we know now that emotion and motivation strongly affect learning. So wouldn’t it make sense that we design the technology to react to the emotion of the students? Researchers in artificial intelligence have looked at ways to customize educational systems to the affective states of students.

For this to work, Piccard (1997) postulates that first the system has to be able to recognize the emotions of the student - are they disappointed, do they need encouragement, have they given up? Second the system must be able to express emotion and usually to make this more realistic the system is represented by a lifelike character (called animated pedagogical agents: check out  http://www.isi.edu/isd/ADE/ade-body.html) .  So where to from here?

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