Blogs, Blogging for PD 501 blog post: All for one and one for all...

Alright folks, I had NO IDEA what in the world I was missing until today when I logged in with my Google account, and, Wham-O, I opened GoogleReader and found exactly what I had been looking for this whole semester! I can’t believe how amazing a Reader is for bringing information to the user. I have been adding RSS feeds to my blog over the duration of this course, but it was never exactly clear to me how an RSS feed could help me to glean information from others’ blogs easily, as their updates only showed as blips in a sidebar of my own blog. I can now understand the enthusiasm some of our classmates have had over GoogleReader, and I completely agree with their reviews of this tool. Another thing I realize about RSS is that a Reader eliminates the accoutrements found on my blog, and that is better for making all blogs more readable. A few weeks ago a problem developed with my blog after I added some widgets, and it made the linked terms on all of my blog into a deep blue color that is next to impossible to read; with GoogleReader all that mess is not apparent. Although it is disappointing to try out new things and have them fail, it is still great to know that sometimes the failure isn’t so apparent to others (e.g. GoogleReader), and the learning that cam from an obstacle was worth it.

RSS as a simple syndication is quite a novel idea, and I’m not sure who developed this concept, but it almost seems like a natural extension to blogging and news catching. Again, In Plain English explained RSS and blog aggregators in quite an intuitive way that made me appreciate that this tool can be seamlessly integrated into a users repertoire of Web2 tools.

Bringing RSS together with blogging as a thematic study was a great idea on Joanne’s behalf. I think there are definite values to using a blog aggregator to provide a person working in a professional capacity with substance for improving their practice without having to spend countless hours searching for information, or being away from their workplace. I have used webinars for professional development, but my school does not recognize a webinar as formal professional development, despite the direct connection it provides for linking a learner with an instructor, and also for providing a venue for dialog between attendees of the PD seminar. And, although it is difficult to quantify the learning one gets from professional readings, a blog aggregator is an evidential way to collect up-to-date information from multiple sources into one ‘site’.

I see strong similarities to blogging and RSS with my grade one students. Several students bring DSLite or DSi portable gaming devices to school, and each one has their own game going on, which is like a blog. The students all want to feel special by bringing an artefact of modern technology to school and into the classroom. Occasionally I send home a note in the students’ agendas letting parents know that on a certain day students will be permitted to use their GameBoy devices during free time. The classroom becomes like an aggregator for all students who want to participate in gaming at that time. Students from all grades in the k-6 spectrum show up, and do in the classroom what they do in their ‘regular’ lives. The stigma about technology and gaming is reduced, and students know that their skills with gaming are recognized and appreciated. Each student brings in spare game cards, but others choose to connect with one another through the wireless system that allows them to form a network of up to 16 users at a time. There is usually a 50/50 split between boys and girls who are gaming, which shows me that at the younger ages girls are not only interested in technology, but in many cases have better fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination than the boys (*that is old new though*). Behavioral patterns of non-gamers crowding around the gamer to see the screen is as prevalent in girls as it is in boys, but I’ve noticed that girls are less likely to recline on the couch when they play than the boys are. In an age of collective wisdom, and coconstruction of knowledge it is nice to know that by leveling the playing field amongst students by allowing all of them to experience being the gamer, the everyday language of all students develops in such a way that technology and gaming is not an elitist activity set aside only for students whose parents have the financial resources to purchase $100+ systems. And, begin in a trilingual school, with many second language issues, it is a definite icebreaker for students from foreign nations to become a part of the social circles amongst students, and to acquire vocabulary specific to their peers.

Sunday

Today I began to read blogs using GoogleReader in ways that I haven’t before interacted with blogs. Up until now, I have always read every blog thoroughly, because for me, blogs were more happenstance as random links to other users I’d befriended, and typically the blog was ‘where I wanted to be’. Now, however, it is becoming clear that I can elicit new posts from more blog users and be able to skim through more postings to find information and topics of interest. My own blog has been linked to so many blogs prior to today, but I was only able to get to those blogs by linking to the updater in my own blog. Now, via GoogleReader I am able to quickly breeze through many blogs, or even do a key word search in each of the blogs for information I need to find.

I remember joining listservs during undergraduate studies, and those listservs were deemed to be the primary tool for disseminating knowledge about a theme to members with similar interests in that topic/theme. The problem with listservs was the overwhelming number of emails I would receive every Friday from the listserv coordinator, I think called the postmaster. It was not only time consuming to parse through the emails to determine what was of value to me, and what was not. RSS is a step beyond those lists, and the information is more easily obtained than copy/pasting to links from the listserv emails, since the RSS can include more information than an email, or can contain an embedded link to another site. And, best of all, I can bookmark a blog, but not have to revisit that blog at all—bonus!




























Here’s an icon for RSS that is either bringing information to the spherical terminal node, or is sending out information from the node in a transmission signal?:

Tonight, I read Villano’s (2008) very interesting article which was a qualitative investigation of what teachers perceive to be beneficial and reasonable professional development, based on Web2 technologies. www.sdbor.edu/euc/mci/links/PD_Dialogue.pdf

I can relate to many of the sentiments that members of the focus group provided for the researcher about a teacher’s perspective on professional development. “In the old days,” writes Villano, “professional development didn't extend any further than the workshops teachers would attend to learn new applications. After the workshop, the teachers were on their own once they returned to school and had to figure out how to use their new tools.” I have long been an advocate for accountability around professional development, because too many teachers attend professional development sessions and come back with great ideas that they cannot implement because of a lack of training in new interests they develop via professional development. I also ask, how many teachers have received training, professional development or inservicing about a theme, but have never explained to their peers and colleagues that they received training or development in an area, that makes them an informed agent who can help others because of the knowledge they acquired through PD? I like how Jim Gates of the focus group responded to a question posed by the researcher, “If you think of the alternative, which is not to have ongoing professional development, then the bar would have stopped five years ago with PowerPoint. Look at technologies such as RSS, wikis—none of that would be in schools if we'd just said, "Okay, we've reached the end." It's not a journey with an endpoint. It's ongoing.” (Villano, 2008, p.42)

Monday

Tonight I was thinking back to Oakville, when I used to go to the ride board, and get someone’s phone number off the board if the person was advertising a ride to a palce that I wanted to go to. I can recall numerous times I would make arrangements to meet a driver who was advertising that they would be traveling a certain stretch of road past my grandmother’s house so I could get there cheaply. Too many times, however, the rider never appeared, which meant there was one less passenger in the car to pay for fuel, which would be crummy for the driver. Oh, and I also remember banging around Blankenese and needing a ride to Swtizerland. Now, Hamburg and Zurich are quite far apart, and in a big city like Hamburg, it is great that there is a business that operates a ride board system, where you just call the phone number and tell the people in the office which day you would like to leave the city, and the destination you have in mind, and they match you up, for free with a driver who is looking for a passenger. I think I once paid a joker about 100 DMarks to get to Zurich, and somewhere along the way he and his friends decided that they would stop for a break, and get out of the car at a rest stop. I hadn’t spoken German with these guys, and they assumed I only spoke English, I suppose, because they talked amongst themselves about getting me out of the car while my baggage was in the trunk of the car. Well, when we got to the rest area, I didn’t get out of the car despite their persistent urgings for me to “relax, man!” Well, by the time we got to Frankfurt Am Main, they were really mad at me, and they gave me back my money and put my backpack on the ground and told me to get out. It was not so funny at the time, but now when I look back I remember the driver, Carston, and I can’t believe what a fraud he was. I wonder how many innocents he ripped off like that?!? I’ll never know, but I’m glad I wasn’t one of them.

So, why a story about ride boards? Well, not only because my trip to Zurich ended with an awesome three month stay in Modeno, eating cheese and driking wine, but because of the nature of aggregators in my life. I think that humans generally like aggregators because they are social in nature by collecting many similar things together to provide an efficient way of staying informed. Really, a ride board is just a social form of organized hitchhiking, which is a bad thing, but when it is brought together into a collective, it seems so much more agreeable to most of us. Lu and Yeh’s (2008) article Collaborative E-Learning Using Semantic Course Blog, I believe, accurately summarizes RSS, and how it is developing semantically to prove itself to be the linking step between Web2 and Web3—the Semantic Web.

“Semantic blog takes the advantage of RDF extensibility by adding additional semantic structures to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) (in RDF) (Winer, 2003). The richer semantic structures have two effects. First, they enable richer, new subscription, discovery, and navigation behaviors. Second, by accessing vocabularies in ontologies, they provide richer annotations sharing of higher level structures and encouraging peer commentary and recommendation activity.” (p.88)

Tonight I listened to Dean Shareski’s wonderful audio podcast Demystifying RSS from a talk he gave at the IT Summit 2007, "Learning in the Digital Age" in Saskatoon on May 1, 2007. In the podcast Dean discusses Personal Learning Networks through RSS. Dean talks about the nature of RSS between 10:59 and 11:54, and he asks some very important rhetorical questions, and sheds light on what RSS is about. The entire podcast is a gem, but here is a transcript of what I heard (minutes 10:59 through 11:54):

“So this idea of overload is something that we hear a lot. And we get to the point where it’s just too much and so there’s times when we say “it’d be a whole lot easier if kids were learning about something like they did before internet, and the go in the library and here are the five books, learn, go have fun, right? We know that’s just not the reality. That was kinda nice to live in that world, (but it’s not reality any more). Then the next question is, what happens when information can come to you? Rather than you going out there? What if we could reverse that trend so that I wasn’t going out and searching all the time for stuff? And, all of a sudden the information was coming to us? …That’s the power of RSS, that’s what it does: it allows information to come to us in a timely and efficient manner.”

Shareski’s podcast:



After 40 minutes of active listening, on top of the readings, I have a lot of ideas about RSS that are getting my brain thinking in terms of having information come to me, instead of searching for information the way I was schooled to do years ago.

~rob

Tuesday

I am always a fan of Lee LeFever’s In Plain English videos, but I watched PBriscoe’s YouTube video about RSS, because it is also relative to GoogleReader, and I am SUCH a fan of GoogleReader now.



Briscoe leads a user right from zero, instructing how to open a GMail account, how to access GoogleReader, and how to use the reader. This video is really informative, and helpful for anyone hoping to use RSS. Again, the collaborative nature of social networking and linking that takes place on the web is well emphasized in this video as Briscoe connects RSS with GoogleReader, with Gizmodo, with several news sites, with GMail, and with personal websites.

Stevens’ (2006) Revisiting Multiliteracies in Collaborative Learning Environments: Impact on Teacher Professional Development is a paper that I wish were updated by Stevens today so he could share further insights into how and why microblogging has captured the interest of citizens around the world, and what the next probable steps for integrative, constructivist social networking could look like. Two profound passages from Stevens’ article are presented here with respect to RSS, a topic that he recognized as the “ability to findrelated materials through tagging and other social networking devices.” (p.3)

Clearly, lives that revolve around computers, where one's productivity and one's
access to information are funneled through a single device that's always 'on', might find a more wired process of converting information to knowledge more convenient and efficient than working through traditional print resources. The only drawback is that information-rich systems require some means of indexing them so that information is accessible, and this was not straightforward in the early stages of the Internet. Fortunately a workable system of access is emerging through search engines, social networking, meta-tagging, and other pull technologies such as RSS. Accordingly, emerging concepts of multiliteracies must take into account how these ordering processes work and ensure that students (and teachers) understand these processes (Richardson, 2005). (p.6)

Another interesting development in consideration of the new literacy is the effective control that this peer review has over it to prevent its becoming chaotic and to regulate its integrity and authority. Since the read-write web is not only a place where anyone can write, but where anyone can comment, correct, and annotate thanks to tagging and meta-tagging, information can be retrieved in a number of effective ways and, with RSS information streams, content can be accessed by individuals as soon as it is created and posted on blogs or other sites that generate RSS feeds -- all this makes it possible for individuals to publish at will and be read almost immediately by anyone who has selected to follow the musings of that particular content creator (anyone who subscribes to the feed of that author or podcaster and who decides to read or listen to it through his or her online aggregator). This will prompt responses which will again be read and critiqued. Unlike with other media, where deception can stand uncorrected for some time, the truth or falsehood behind Bree and perhaps Albert/Robert tends to be examined, exposed, and corrected by community members, resulting in a high standard of integrity of information for the community in the long run. (P.8)

Again, there is so much to learn from this article, that I hope you can find time to read Stevens’ article that helped me to get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’ of Web technology.

~rob

Wednesday

Today’s readings come from David Jakes’ (2010) 21st Century Strategies for Professional Development. Jakes reminds readers that all of the Web2 tools available for use produce RSS feeds, which are immediately updated for subscribers to a blog to receive in their aggregator. In Jakes’ own words:

Personal Learning Environments
The new tools of Web 2.0 enable individuals to define their own personal learning environments by connecting to individuals and resources through a variety of social software tools. Blogs enable individuals to engage in a global conversation about mission-critical issues relative to education. Because of the ease of blog creation, anyone can be a contributor and can have a voice in a matter of minutes. Podcasts, or voice recordings in mp3 format, enable anyone to produce their own “show” with “episodes” about any topic. Wikis enable a group of individuals to have a shared, collaborative Web space where ideas can be posted, remixed by others, and in the process, produce a social negotiation of understanding. Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us and Furl, enable users to store and share online resources, allowing anyone to leverage the cumulative power of many users to find the best resources. Each of the above resources produce a syndication feed, called an RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) that can be collected in a piece of software called an aggregator. The aggregator is similar to a home’s mailbox, which collects various pieces of mail. In this case, the aggregator (Bloglines is an example) collects the information from blogs, wikis, podcasts, and from social bookmarking sites that is distributed by RSS, and presents it to the user in a single interface for processing. As a result, a teacher can collect multiple types of resources about a topic, and have that information automatically fed into one location, in effect, creating their own personal learning environment that is constantly updated with new content as it is produced.

Tonight I joined four new blogs that I know will interest me: one about Harley Davidson, another about powerlifting, another about The Pink Floyd, and the last about the Grateful Dead:

http://blogs.hotbikeweb.com/index.html

http://www.johnnyd2.blogspot.com/

http://pink-floyded.blogspot.com/

http://www.thedeadblog.com/

I found that just because a user creates a blogspot account, it doesn’t mean their blog is automatically RSS-friendly. It seems that a blogpost user hhas to create an RSS feed for their blog in order to be readable by GoogleReader. There were some other blogs I tried to follow, but it was quite disheartening that the blogger hasn’t yet enabled RSS for their awesome site.

Chittleborough, Hubber, and Calnin’s (2007) prose Investigating the factors of professional development programs that effect change in the classroom, raised an interesting point for me as I read the accounts of teachers’ professional development with Web2 technologies:

The second project The Development of Thinking Skills Through ICT was held in 2007 also provided specialist instruction in the pedagogical use of ICT to teachers, however this project provided instruction in Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and social-networking sites. The teachers involved were computer literate before the project began.

I have never before considered the prior knowledge about technology, in general, a teacher might bring to a PD session that would be a determinate or predictor of that teacher’s likelihood or willingness to acquire and integrate more technology. However, when I look back on my own experience with learning about Twitter in a formal academic setting, I realize that I had a less-than-perfect experience with developing fluency with that tool, which made me more likely not to consider it the most appropriate technology for my own learning, which is regrettable because I definitely see the value of microblogging. I wonder how much time, energy and monetary resources must be invested in teachers before they are willing and capable of making technology a natural tool for instruction in their classroom practice. This makes me think back to Villano’s (2008) sentiment raised by two of the members of Villano’s focus group:

Martinez: The trend that's really going to make the difference is just the amount of technology in schools. People are bringing in all kinds of technology. I think it's going to push us to realize that students have to be included more in professional development because it's impossible to keep trying to funnel this through teachers and hope it trickles down. It just doesn't make sense to give every student a laptop, and then only teach the teachers how to use those laptops in educational ways. Students are 92 percent of the population in schools. We've got to start thinking of them as these incredible, eager, willing partners who really want to help. This is what it means to be a citizen of the 21st century, where everyone's learning, contributing, communicating, and collaborating.

Hokanson: I agree, we need to get people connected. Too often, we are working to meet the needs of school initiatives, and we're not looking at individual needs of teachers and connecting them with like-minded people so they can have more individualized learning in an area of support that they need. Either via webinars, virtual environments, or learning management systems, I see this notion of interconnectedness as a growing trend.

Maybe we assume that teacher carry forward a basic knowledge of technology, when in fact, they have insufficient background knowledge on which to build skills that can integrate Web2 tech into their personal lives and into their professional practice…

~rob

Thursday and Friday

 

Two days were spent navigating with the technology I am now very fond of, and I managed to read more blogs than I ever thought I would get to in a month’s time because they are all centrally located in GoogleReader. I really like Marc McPhee’s comments on RSS in an abstract from CSLA 2009 Conference Presentation on  RSS for Personal Professional Development,

“Why RSS?:

Staying abreast, especially of emerging technologies, requires continuous professional development. Subscribing to feeds from library journals, publications, web sites, and other sources provides us with an excellent source of continual professional development. And, it is easy to subscribe and later unsubscribe. So, the worst thing that can happen is you won’t like the content, and will have to go to Manage Subscriptions to unsubscribe!”

It can’t get much simpler than that! Subscribe to a blog or feed because it is like subscribing to a magazine; except, it’s free! And, if you don’t like the content of the information sent directly to you, then unsubscribe and you are done with that information source (not like trying to unsubscribe from a magazine and still paying for a year’s worth of issues you never receive!) Hey, I’m really beginning to like this technology even more than I thought I would!

Will Richardson is quote by Lawrence and Smith (2009) as stating that RSS is “A powerful yet fairly untapped tool that educators can use to easily track many sources of information and knowledge. But it’s also evolving into an effective way to connect people and ideas in ways that we’ve been unable to before. Using RSS, we cannot only read what others write, we can read what they read, and even read what they create in easy, time-saving ways.” (p.6) In my time of using RSS for a couple of days at the end of this week, I subscribed to links that can help me in my daily professional practice. As I mentioned last week, my success with Twitter was nix’d by a complete inability, on my behalf, to get my account to do what it is supposed to do by all standards. RSS, on the other hand, is more than living up to the reputation it is given by the accounts of many users from Joanne’s Trailfire, as well as from works I read this week.

It is regrettable that there isn’t more that an aggregator can do, because it has provided me with an incredibly positive experience, and a strong sense of accomplishment. In fact, I wish there was more to figure out about it so I could learn more and develop more skills with RSS, but it really is ‘S’imple.

Reflections on the process of learning about the tool

RSS has been fun to learn about, and the readings for this tool are all pretty much straight forward. There is a lot of advice about RSS and blog aggregators, and I found all of the readings to be complimentary to one another, so that I could glean the best information from each article, website, or video, and use the knowledge to make my own aggregator experience the most it could be. I think that of all the tools I am most likely to continue using after this course is complete will be a blog. Why a blog? You might be asking! Well, a blog is one of the first tools I got used to using on a regular basis right from the beginning of the course, and despite not having read any reviews or articles about blogs, per se, I have developed an understanding of how to develop a blogging voice, and how to maneuver through the blogoshpere with greater ease. As for blogging, I agree completely with Chris Lehmann’s statement that, “When students now see themselves as teachers to others we have truly harnessed the power of the audience. This isn't about novelty anymore but authentic exchange between interested learners. It doesn't matter if it's only one person but the idea that your work or ideas not only matter but are important in the development of others learning.  A little anonymity and distance seems to be a good thing in some cases. It's less about personalities and more about learning.” In my class community there are students who enter the class in September who cannot understand, nor speak, a word of the language spoken in the classroom. By distributing power to teach back to the students, and to encourage them to be coconstructors of knowledge in our community, students learn from one another, developing vocabulary that is peer-generated. Similarly, I hope to build a blog community with my new Web2 skills that will attract users who can help to build a collective knowledge about second language learning that will present an opportunity for each person to teach all others. I think that it will take a while until I find my blogging voice in the 25 Blogging Styles outlined by Bhargava, but very quickly after testing each, I will know which best suits my own personality and the goals I set for the community I would like to cocreate.

Discussion of the tool in terms of my own personal learning

This week’s posting was really a ‘feel good’ topic that provided a strong sense of value to me as a user and Web2 student. As I mentioned above, I appreciate that we have been using a blog to post information for several weeks now, and after gaining so much practical experience with this tool, that to finally get to know the ideas and history behind blogging and RSS feeds, my understanding of the tool is very well-grounded. I always like to begin my weekly blog with an analogy of how a tool relates to my own life, but this week I was so overwhelmed with how amazingly simple, yet totally effect blog aggregating is, I had to lead-out with my first impressions of GoogleReader. Even so, finding an analogy for a tool that doesn’t exactly bring information together, but links information into a coherent whole is difficult to compare with most aspects of modern life, I think, just because there aren’t, in my opinion, a lot of similar tools for other areas of life. And, with that said, I’m sure that a Tupperware salesperson would say that the latest Tupperware storage system is a framework for holding several related items together in a common location for ease of use and convenience of accessibility. But, I find GoogleReader to be so much more than a plastic organizing tray (metaphorically speaking, of course). For those of us who are working toward higher academic pursuits, the convenience of locating a source for information, and having that information arranged for delivery is quite a remarkable tool for students and researchers. And, although I cannot exactly put my finger on it right now, I get the impression that RSS will continue to hold its own far into the future because it is such a useful tool that supplants so many other ‘systems’ that society used in the past (i.e. magazine subscriptions, listservs, email messaging, forums, and XXXXXXXX. Mostly, it is the development of an intuitive model of communications that represents the organic methods of social  communication employed by humans for thousands of years that strikes me as the nature of blogging, and the interaction it creates between users. My own personal learning with blogging and blog aggregators is just beginning, and I believe the journary I make with this tool will prove to be a success given more time to work with this Web2 tool.

Discussion of the tool in terms of teaching and learning

Teaching and learning…those two words used together really represent professional development—a teacher doing the teaching about a subject, and learners doing the learning about a subject; with learners contributing to the body of knowledge by participating in dialog about the topic with the teacher. For me, I think the best aspects of blogging and bloglines is how they provide information to me about the very narrow field in which I teach. Some days I think it is unfortunate that I am not able to connect with others who teach in similarly configured learning communities as my own, so there could be better collaboration and collegiality amongst professionals. The social constructivist teaching methodology I try to create in my practice lends itself well to a collaborative approach to building community through the use of technology. To me, blogs, in some way, are like focus groups in which one person begins a conversation, and others contribute to the qualitative dialog by offering related stories that connect with the original story told by the initiator of the conversation. That blogs allow users to add comments, request topics, edit information, and link pages (voices) is an extremely social human endeavor presented via technology. In guiding students to develop healthy social lives, and to make right decisions, it seems almost natural that educators should use media to create conversations with students who speak through digital formats. In order for a teacher to develop familiarity with a tool, exposure to the tool in a guided setting can provide a venue for initial acquisition of basic skills, and foster an interest in a tool. Unfortunately, too many professional development sessions present ideas with little or no follow-up, and teachers resort to modifying a professional development idea to suit their own needs simply because they are not provided with an opportunity to measure their own understanding of the initial idea against the original idea learned at a session days, weeks, months, or possibly even years prior to them trying the new idea in practice. As an example, I attending an excellent PD session about archive digital resources where a number of salient ideas were presented. Regrettably, I was never able to get together with the initial cohort again, and I was not able to check my own understanding and progress with implementing the idea a few months after the session took place. If a blog had been created and advertised at the session, and all members of the audience in attendance had signed up for the blog, it would have created an arena for making the PD session more meaningful to support long-term implementation of the idea.

In Pillai’s own words, “The online course can be provided to the teachers using social networking tools such as Wikis, podcast, blogs, Facebook ,voice thread, slide share, Google docs, YouTube, etc. As per the demand of teachers the professional development modules have to be designed. These modules can be accessed through the tools mentioned above. A questionnaire, an online fee back form, discussion forum, etc. will help to find the impact of these modules on the professional development of teachers The constructivist model of learning holds that new knowledge must be built through the socially dynamic and interpersonal interplay of experiences, beliefs, and prior knowledge each individual possesses and shares within a community of collaborative learners. In this model knowledge is the result of work of the individual to make meaning out of information and to expand individually held knowledge through the interaction of other learners in the social context of a learning community.

Through a range of activities including access to resources and information, publishing stories on the site, asking questions, having a say, access to invited guests with experience in the online environment, participants were provided with a diverse range of learning opportunities. The knowledge and skill of participants about the online environment was varied. Some had a very basic level of skills through to sophisticated questioning of the pedagogical issues associated with the online environment. Some of the key elements were planned and others unfolded as the community evolved. These included:

1. Appropriate resources: Instructional Design, professional development strategies, how to use the Web, information literacy, Models of teaching, Multiple intelligence, teaching with technology 2. Access to experts in the field

3. Forums for discussions Most of the online tools discussed below are very user friendly and can be incorporated into the teacher education programme without much need for any extensive training. Teacher training activities can benefit from these tools in facilitating greater interaction and reflection on the process of teaching, in the conduct of practice lessons and field experience, as well as an understanding of theoretical foundations of education.” (2009, p.366-367)

You see, when I watch MTV, I am able to participate in a chat session with other viewers by texting messages to MTV that show up on the television monitor as the show is happening. Why in the world are professionals not getting audiences involved in chat sessions at conferences so the ‘specialists’ can later read what members of the audience were ‘thinking’ or ‘saying’ to themselves or others while ideas were being presented? I think that a specialist in an area would greatly benefit from being able to review others’ responses to their claims that might cause the specialist to reflect on their own ideas in ways they never thought possible. And, if we can develop a system for including the audiences, why not provide fee-based access to live video feed from conferences, that also allow remote users to engage in chat with audience members also chatting via the screens situated behind presenters? I have wondered about this for some time, but then I remembered that MTV can do it because there is more money in entertainment than in academics (cf. Satire X ‘bread and circuses’).

I enjoy good PD, but I love great PD. I know that this week’s theme has enabled me with the personal resources and tools to find my own PD and make my own practice considerably better because of it.

Thank you, Joanne.

~rob

References

Briscoe, P. (2007, February 22). What is RSS? Podcast retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/user/pbriscoe

Chittleborough, G., Hubber, P., & Calnin, G. (2007). Investigating the factors of professional development programs that effect change in the classroom. Retrieved from: http://www.aare.edu.au/08pap/chi08695.pdf

Jakes, D., (2010). 21^st century strategies for professional development. Retrieved from: http://www.techlearning.com/techlearning/events/techforum06/DavidJakes_ProgramGuide.pdf

LeFever, L. (Producer). (2007, April 23). RSS  in Plain English. Common Craft. Podcast retrieved from http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/58016

LeFever, L. (Producer). (2007, November 29). Blogs  in Plain English. Common Craft. Podcast retrieved from http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/61578

Lu, L., & Yeh, C. (2008). Collaborative e-learning using semantic course blog. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 6(3). 85-95.

McPhee, M. (2009). CSLA 2009 Conference Presentation on: RSS for Personal Professional Development [PDF document]. Retrieved from: http://csla.aaiden.com/pdfs/112309_cslaIsession_McPhee.pdf

Pillai, P. (2009). Creating an Online Community of Teachers and the Librarian for Professional Development through Social Networking Tools. Retrieved from: http://crl.du.ac.in/ical09/papers/index_files/ical-62_74_179_2_RV.pdf

Shareski, D. (2007, May 1). Demystifying RSS. IT Summitt 2007. Podcast retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/podcast_27

Stevens, V. (2006). Revisiting Multiliteracies in Collaborative Learning Environments: Impact on Teacher Professional Development. Teach English as a Second or Foreign Language eJournal. 10(2) 1-12.

Villano, M. (2008). A dialog on professional development. T.H.E. Journal, Mar, 40-46.