Making Waves and Culture Gone Digital

It is pure redundancy to say it, but the best part of joining a Conference like TESOL is really weaving and threading what you want to learn, your curious mind to the connections and networking that take place.

This TESOL was no different. Besides meeting my dear old Webheads community, I had the chance to revolve around the Electronic Village wonderful ideas and people excitedly presenting about their projects, ideas, developments and apps they've been trying out.

Also, it gave me immense pleasure to present twice in totally different topics that converged, though, into one idea: the idea of Culture.

In Cultural Expeditions Gone Digital, part of the Intersections colloquium,  I tried to explore with the audience some ways in which educators could enhance their culturally-smart classes through the wonders of cultural richness provided by exciting digital possibilities. Besides the cultural immersion through digital resources, I've shared some practical ideas for the classroom.


Here's the slideshow and all the references are available at http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/w/page/51986293/Cultural%20Expeditions

Culture Gone Digital

View more PowerPoint from Carla Arena

In an another session, I've explored the idea of the new paradigms of the culture of Professional Development, not institutionally-bound anymore, but, in fact, self-directed and self-assembled through the possibilities provided by the digital world in a sustainable model of continuous evolvement of our own PD. All of that in big waves of micro-revolutions, those that we are the holders of our own professional destiny in a connected realm of people, networks, and nodes of learning. 


All the references are at http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/w/page/52460489/Making%20Waves

Tesol12 Making Waves Through Online Circles of Learning

View more PowerPoint from Carla Arena

All in all, it was inspiring to be at TESOL to see what other professionals are up to. I just wish some would take more time learning about how to best present their messages...but this would be for another post!

EVO - The Art of Curation and Discovery in Professional Development

Just came across George Siemens's insights

"A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected. ... A curator balances the freedom of individual learners with the thoughtful interpretation of the subject being explored. While learners are free to explore, they encounter displays, concepts, and artifacts representative of the discipline. Their freedom to explore is unbounded. But when they engage with subject matter, the key concepts of a discipline are transparently reflected through the curatorial actions of the teacher."
(George Siemens, Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 10:31)

It is a perfect definition of how we try to do things in the Electronic Village Online, and it hasn't been different this year. With the Classroom Digital Tools session in full steam with 503 participants, the moderators are simply the enablers of people connection and the pointers to exciting educational content. We are designers and curators of meaningful learning experiences. And this is certainly disorienting at first to participants who join us for the first time. Why? Because they generally expect to have a traditional type of training in which we "teach", they "learn", in which we are the "experts" and they are the "recipients".

Soon they come to realize that by joining the EVO, they enter in a different realm of professional development. We are there together to experience learning in a community. And in a community, there's no one way road. In fact, we have roundabouts, u-turns, all kinds of communicational directions to achieve our main goal for the session, provide participants with the opportunity to learn how to be out there in the wild with more confidence, to click around, to explore, connect, add their own voices and to keep daring. Nobody wants to make a fool of himself in front of 500 other people, mainly when these people are educators. We have our own self-image to preserve. However, once participants realize that YES, it is OK to ask, to write in the wrong area, to comment, to make suggestions, to give and get constructive feedback, the learning possibilities are immediately amplified, and it seems that our professional development gets on a whirlwind of new perspectives and directions with the wonders of new nodes and connections with educators around the globe.

Week 1 in EVO is always daunting, a bit scary at times, but it is also a time of allurement and fascination, a time for discovery and optimism that reenergize us as professionals and educators trying to make a difference in every learner's life and in our own.

I can't help myself, but be totally touched by what has been shared in our session by participants coming from all over the globe with their multicultural perspectives, trying to see what works and what doesn't in their contexts.





Week 2 in the Digital Tools group has started with some creative minds in action! We never know where it is going to take us with such a fantastic community. Let us keep exploring the unbound freedom of guided discovery...

Some highlights of our session also available at http://www.scoop.it/t/classdigitools

eLearning Speedgeeking

This Sunday, November 14th, 13:00 GMT, join us for an open talk about elearning.
Where? http://bitly.com/webheadsroom

In a speedgeeking fashion and Webhead-way, we´ll have quick overviews on essential issues related to elearning. It should be was a lot of fun!

Materials and recording available at
http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/w/page/32550995/elearningspeedgeeking

WooHoo! Surfing Google Wave

The wave is huge, here to stay and to change the way we communicate. I was glued from the start. when I got there, of course there was a Webhead Wave! More than expected from this wonderful group of international educators who are always taking the lead when it comes to what's emergent, new...I had a lot of fun talking to my Webhead friends and testing things around.

Google Wave's interface is clean and user-friendly. The drag and drop feature to create a wave with your contacts and to add photos is fantastic. You can see everybody typing in real time and conversations just flow as if you were chatting with friends.

I can see a big wave of change in the way we'll be creating groups, nurturing communities, interacting with our students, and even teaching online. Can't wait to find more about the WAVE.

Pathways4Collaboration by Dafne Gonzalez

I've just listened to Dafne's slidecast with an overview of her past decade online collaborative experiences. It's just amazing to see how much she has done for her students and for the online communities she's part of. Her talk to the CALL-IS audience in the TESOL convention in Denver proves the reason I've been Dafne's fan and mentee for so long.

Listen to Dafne and get inspired!

Pathways4interaction Collaboration Daf

View more presentations from Daf.

My Valentine Webheads

Originally uploaded by carlaarena

Everybody knows how thankful I am, WE all are to be part of the Webheads, a group of generous educators who are always there for you.

We are in close contact. We meet, we share, we dare.

Here's all my love to my beloved group, the Webheads!

Happy Valentine's!

Love, com Amor.

Carla

This heart was produced with http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/WordHearts/

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And here's the wonderful Valentine gift Sasa Sirk produced for our Webhead Valentine's celebration.

Ning - Appropriate for Educational Purposes?

As we get ready to kick off one of the 17 Electronic Village Online sessions, Images4Education, Seth Dickens, a friend, educator, teacher trainer, raised an important issue in the Webheads group. Is Ning appropriate in the educational context?

Seth ponders in his post:

Thanks heavens I haven’t started using Ning with my students yet. I probably won’t until there is better filtering of ad supported sites - this could risk me losing my job. It’s really inappropriate, wouldn’t you agree? To be fair to Ning, they do offer an ad free service for 13 - 18 year olds, but I personally feel that these ads would be just as offensive and inappropriate for adults too.

If Ning wishes to expand into school PLNs and social networks via free ad-based sites, that later become converted to paying sites, they really should do something about this. I have already complained to Google about this ad, but I also feel that Ning should be pro actively pushing them to filter content more stringently. Does Ning really want to financially benefit from this type of Ad? I hope not!

I think he has a point there, and I've written some time ago how grateful I was to have a platform in Ning for newcomers to share, communicate and collaborate. However, spaces with inappropriate ads can certainly be one of the alibis school administrators may use to block digital spheres with great collaborative potential. Again, Seth points out in the group to this:

I just think that with the struggles many of us have to get ICT further included in day-to-day teaching, providers like Ning (and bloomin Google) should have some way of filtering or blocking this kind of content from educational sites. Otherwise schools will just fall back on the sledgehammer to crack a nut response of a school firewall / filter, which will totally block the whole page form loading.

No. We don't want sledgehammers striking our educational, purposeful online projects. We need spaces with no distraction, with no other intent than sparking students' communicative abilities, inquiry-based learning.

Ning provides a great service, and we're glad to be connecting more than a hundred participants worldwide there. On Oct 31st, 2008, I requested the Ning Team to remove the ads of our Images4Education Ning, but they gave a negative answer saying:

Hi!

First, thank you for using Ning for your social network and for requesting our free trial offer to remove ads from student networks. We appreciate it. Our purpose in this program is to prevent children between the ages of 13 and 18 from being exposed to inappropriate content that infrequently but occasionally shows up in the Google AdSense ads that we use to support the service.

In checking out your social network on Ning, it looks as if it is designed for use by adults (18 years of age and older). Because your members are adults, unfortunately, this does not fit within the limits of this offer. However, if your network is going to be viewed by those under the age of 18, we'd be happy to remove the ads.

Our sincere apologies if this was unclear and we hope this won't prevent you from continuing to enjoy your social network on Ning.

Thanks!
The Ning Team

Well, for a group of adult educators, I don't think it's a huge problem, though I'd love to have an ad-free space. I guess this is the price of "free". However, I have to agree with Seth that for other educators willing to use Ning and not being able to pay for their $24.00 monthly ad-free space, Ning won't be of much help if teachers feel they might face problems with parents and school administration.

Bee Dieu, in the same Webhead discussion, wisely suggests

Either use them and create teachable digital literacy moments
http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html or if you believe you should shield your learners from the
inconveniences of modern life, abandon them.
Another option is to create and assemble your own platform on edublogs, drupal or wordpress... and find platform owners that dialogue and respect educators (wikieducator, wikispaces, voicethread, for instance).

Gavin Dudeney also points out that those ads could be part of these teachable moments in which we take the chance to work on media and digital literacies.

One can only really try the 'discussion' method, raise the issue, talk about it, discuss appropriate behavior in class, discuss the issue of e-safety.

There's no easy solution here, but like Seth, I'd love to see Ning going a step further in letting us, educators, use it ad-free for educational purposes in the way Wetpaint is doing, which was highlighted by Seth in his post.

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Past Ning blog posts:

http://explorations.bloxi.jp/a/ning-where-collaboration-happens/
http://explorations.bloxi.jp/a/the-true-value-of-ning/