Now build it out with an evocative vision. Improvise progress by tinkering: with lots of trial and lots of error. The not knowing is the best bit: the mysteries the surprises, and from time to time the windfalls!
Hello there, I'm Steve Collis!
Click on "contact", won't you, and wave right back at me?
I have to give a short presentation at school about my role, so I've recorded a music video promoting the web for use in education.
Here is the music video. All the projects featured are from my school, but I had in mind to make a video others could use, to play to staff to encourage them about the potential of the web.
In making the video I was again reminded, and now believe more strongly than ever, that the internet can give students an awareness that they have something to contribute. Nothing beats the little visitor map you put up on a class website showing where people are visiting from. When such a powerful platform exists that we can provide our students, it is an awful shame to deprive them of it.
Here's the song:
And here's the lyrics:
Lyrics of the Song: Our hustle bustle world is spinning in infinity With multifarious ways of reconnecting to each other such as Facebook Bebo FriendFeed YouTube Twitter Second Life Utterli Wikipedia Flickr Skype and rate my poo.com
The God of Pedagogy doth demand that we devote ourselves To leading on our young ones so they thrive in this connected world of Facebook Voicethread FriendFeed YouTube Twitter Second Life Utterli Wikipedia Flickr Skype and rate my poo.com
The four walls of our classroom hold the roof up, keep us warm and shut us in, But as Shakespeare said about the Web 'The world's a stage' log on, perform, promote, engage, The world's a stage, dont lock your daughters up, just log them in.
Our students have so much to say, to offer, give, compose, create, The internet provides the perfect platform for empowering kids to take the lead, define a voice, contribute something, something useful, something far superior to what's on ratemypoo.com
Its the Wild Wild West, the Wild Wild Web, were well aware of lurking dangers, Students must be guided, trained, equipped, instructed, left to wander, They should seize their salad days, surf the web, avoid the rips, and make a page, avoid the rocks, and make a betterworld.com (deliberately corny, kk?)
I've created this page to bring together everything I've learnt about using mobile (cell) phones for audio blogging. You can set this up easily, and for free. Students only pay for a local call.
Warning = AS OF MARCH 2009 THIS WILL ONLY WORK IN THE USA, SINCE UTTERLI HAVE CANCELLED THEIR NON-USA NUMBERS
Students ring a local number, and what they say is recorded and then published at the class website. The two pilot projects I've been involved with are http://wordsworthreflections.wordpress.com and http://australianenvironment.wordpress.com . In each case we added a map with red dots representing visitors to the website, so students could see they had a global audience.
I've created two tutorial videos, below, showing you how to set this up. Importantly, in the tutorials I assume no technical expertise. You should be able to follow the instructions exactly as shown, and have yourself set up within half an hour or so. To set up the students will take a little longer, but it's very easy, just time consuming. A class of 20 students might take an hour to set up, once you've passed around a bit of paper for them to write down their mobile phone number and email address.
Parental permission is a good idea, especially because there is a small cost involved with students ringing a local number from their phone. You can see a letter I used here.
Before I go further I had better post the tutorial videos. They go for about 18 minutes and show you exactly what to do, including how to set up a pin number for the student so they can audio blog from any phone, even a landline, and how to put one of those maps on your website. Here they are:
PART ONE
PART TWO
A summary of the steps:
1. Get parental permission.
2. Create your wordpress.com website.
3. Gather student information - their mobile phones and email addresses.
4. Set up the students at utterli.com and set up cross posting from utterli.com to your wordpress website.
Then you're away!
There are SO many applications for this technique:
- students could be roving journalists, posting one audio story a week about local events and issues
- students could interview family, friends, local community members or experts, with their phones
- students could broadcast persuasive political speeches each week
- or poetry, or short, dramatic stories
- they could give a 'position statement' on a particular issue
- they can record their reflections
- they can role play important historical or fictional people
- they could record 'good ideas', i.e. the whole class, over many weeks, rings and records whenever they get a great idea. The class website would become a repository of the class' great ideas.
Why bother with mobile phone blogging?
In all of these cases, students are developing their oral literacy, learning to speak deliberately for different audiences, contexts and purposes. I have a feeling that a lot of schools don't do oral literacy well. We focus on writing as a means of expression, and then 'do' oral literacy once a year with class speeches, which scare the students to death. Or is that just me??
Please, if you try this system with your students, let me know how it goes.
Below I'll link all my previous posts about mobile phone blogging:
I still have some footage of the students talking about the value of the mobile phone blogging. I'll put this footage up on this page at a later date once I have permission.
It's January of 2009 now, and I've been tagged byPam Thompson to reveal 7 things you (probably) didn't know about me. What a lovely little challenge! Everyone loves talking about themselves (don't they?)
Here we go:
1. I am an ENFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (This means I'm very inspiring, but if you need something practical done for you and I'm around, well you're bang out of luck!)
2. My life is a string of obsessions to learn new skills! I've spent two years now stubbornly learning Korean. I'm getting somewhere, very slowly.
4. I have a rare neurological disorder called Charcot-Marie-Toothe disease. I have to concentrate hard to walk around, and especially go up and down stairs. People don't necessarily notice, or just think I have a limp. Several students have sincerely asked me if I have a wooden leg. I certainly don't, I just come across rather uncoordinated.
5. I'm constantly reading Science Fiction & playing cooperative computer games like a 15 year old geek, & I see at least one film a week at the cinema, often by myself.
6. In person I come across as endlessly cheerful and extroverted, but I am actually quite melancholy, and need heaps of time by myself.
7. I am bizarrely obsessed by the U.K. comedian Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office. My wife chastises me for beginning to act more like him every day. Apart from The Office, Extras, and heaps of other stuff, he's recorded well over 100 hours of radio shows with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. I listen to these endlessly while bike riding, washing up, or in the car.
STOP PRESS: My school have now followed in the steps of Suffern - see our experience with our own 3D Virtual World click here for news, video, advice, and reflections on our own experience.
On the last day of our visit to the USA, I caught a train up from New York to Suffern Intermediate School, in Suffern.
There, Peggy Sheehy was the first educator in the world to pioneer the use of Second Life for teenage student. Second Life is a 3D Virtual World which you can walk around in, and interact with other people who are simultaneously in the same environment. Amazingly, the 3D environment itself is created by the users themselves. I must mention the world has voice chat, so the social dynamics of interactions are surprisingly like real life. For instance at a party in Second Life you can hear the music coming from the stereo and might need to talk loud to talk over it. If you walk away from someone your voice is fainter to them, so you might walk up to someone to converse with them. You can text chat too, of course.
Now, obviously, you can't let teens run around the unregulated environment of Second Life. In fact Linden Lab will not allow teens into Second Life.
However, the company Linden Lab also offers 'Teen Second Life' for teens aged 13 to 17 (very strictly).
Still not good enough for structured, systematic use by a school. But wait! Educators can purchase a "Private Estate" - a piece of virtual land over which they have complete control. Bingo! A locked-down piece of virtual land!
I first heard Peggy Sheehy talk at a conference held in the adult Second Life environment. Second Life is great for conferences! No registration costs, no travel expenses, no organising for cover for your classes. Just log in and get the wisdom of colleagues, and offer your own wisdom.
As Peggy started speaking I quickly warmed to her and she won my confidence. SO MANY TIMES I have felt like gnawing my own elbow off in a conference presentation. But I immediately had the impression with Peggy that... - she had common sense and a strong grip on reality / real life practice - er, frankly, she was smart - she could tell the difference between the important bits, and the irrelevant bits. - she was relaxed and could roll with punches (you have to hear her anecdote about the time a pigeon flew into her classroom). This certainly proved true during my visit, when I arrived an hour late (thanks to the bloody New York taxi system - anyone with a car can be a taxi, is what I observed in NY). Peggy offered to be my taxi back and was entirely relaxed about juggling her schedule for this!
Peggy started planning to use SL in 2005 and launched in 2006.
It was such a delight to meet her. She is relaxed, but manic. Her manner with the students, as you'll see is assertive, but relational, with lots of space for the students' initiative (she gets through the 'official bits' as quick as possible!).
If there is one thing that has stood out to me from her observations on the educational value of a 3D virtual world, it's the notion of a "Psychosocial Moratorium" - a term coined by Erik Erikson. The idea is that the social space of a 3D virtual online world is particularly 'safe', and therefore particularly beneficial for nurturing the confidence of adolescents trying to figure out who they are, what they are good at, what they stand for and what they are are known for. As someone who has spent countless hours in the safety of online environments, I know exactly what she means. As of November 2008 I am seeking to set up Teen Second Life for my school, and can't wait to see how the students respond. Peggy has many anecdotes of students who have 'found themselves' through what is essentially a scaffold to constructing social identity (my wording there).
Now, when I visited Suffern, I had my little Dell netbook and webcam, and 'taped' some conversation with Peggy. I also recorded a conversation with some students, and a short, intense, and fascinating first session where a class experienced TSL for the first time!
The following footage is not brilliant quality, and is lengthy, but I found 'being there' very rewarding and have cut out very little from what I recorded. My intended audience is educators keen to explore the real life detail of a case study in the use of Second Life for students.
Let me start with the students and we can go from there to my interview with Peggy. Here are some random students who came into the library and whom I quizzed:
Here is Part 1 of the session introducing a new class to SL. The moment when the students realise you can fly in Second Life is priceless. They've been grabbed, hook, line and sinker. This moment is so significant. It is the moment where a simulated environment becomes interesting and of value to young people who are, themselves, at their age, at an age where their key challenge is to begin to define the parameters of who they are as independent beings in a complex reality. Again I think - Second Life appears to have the potential to be a scaffold.
Here is Part 2 of the session introducing a new class to SL. Some intriguing moments for those who have the time to watch it all. The noise level slowly lessens. The students are at times confounded, at times confident, at all times utterly engaged.
Now let's take a step back from practice and hear from Peggy. My big question is "What's the point?" She announced 3 thoughts and gets distracted after #2.
But we do come back to #3!
Now, if the Second Life environment is built by users, who builds the locked down private estate 3D world used by any particular school?
The answer appears to be: - the students, students, students (such a good sign!) - third party developers (Peggy highly recommends a gifted developer - Eloise Pasteur who is efficient and practical with her quotes. There is a funny moment in the recording where I don't understand the surname!) - third party companies, e.g. NASA and many others, more than willing to make available their 3D Stuff (e.g. a simulated rocket ship) available for installation in a school's virtual space. - noticeably absent - the classroom teacher. i.e. you do not need expertise!
And finally, some more casual chatting, and Peggy shows me the security system they set up to prevent students from using SL when there was no teacher present in the world. (The teacher can flick a switch in the virtual world that glues anyone who logs in, to the one spot so they can't move.)
My thanks to Peggy Sheehy for being such a wonderful, flexible, energetic host, and so willing to share, so able to remain relaxed while cramming in an extraordinary amount into what was basically less than 3 hours, AND I had 3 cups of coffee! Peggy's twitter ID is www.twitter.com/maggiemarat. Her blog is http://metaversedltd.com/ . She also administrates a school blog at http://rampoislands.blogspot.com/ which says it has been relocated to http://ramapoislands.edublogs.com , although this website seems not to exist. (Peggy - you are sure to read this, where is the new website?)
All this the day after US election day. I was at Times Square that evening... but that is another blog post.
To follow my school's adventures of using Second Life, subscribe using the box on the right hand side. I am committed to posting material I believe will be useful to classroom teachers myself interested in the potential of technology to empower students and thereby transform education. On twitter I am www.twitter.com/steve_collis and on YouTube I am www.youtube.com/lestep. You can see my non-professional blog at http://stevecollis.blogspot.com . I have so much more to post about what I saw in American schools! Fingers crossed I find the time to publish!
