Leigh Blackall Opening presentation to Learnscope Showcase

to Learnscope Showcase Day,Tasmania. Dec 5

EPIC
E
volving Personalised Information Construct

One way street many years ago where information came to you eg TV, newspaper.
T
hen two way channels became available, however you needed to be an expert to publish a webpage or pay someone else to do it.
R
ecently, whole suite of tools to DIY are all there for 'normal' people to use.
.
..
C
an't afford to keep investing huge amounts of money into developing learning resources when there are cheaper ways of doing things. Rather than spending $20-60K should be looking elsewhere.

Wikipedia - rigour and accuracy etc previously was better. Story of finding a fantastic 3d animation for a teacher free of change when they had been planning to spend tens of thousands.

Social Networking - When creating your profile then the systems can start linking you with others. This has a lot of power in terms of building networks. Enabled a spike in content creation and location.
Q
uestion then will be how do we find the content that is out there? Over the years lots of $ has been spent on shareable learning content systems.
Y
ou can subscribe to a blog and get immediate notification on topics that are of interest to yourself. This also means that you can miss out on things because you are only seeing what you have selected. Subscribing to diverse points of view on topics of interest enables deeper reading and thinking than available in mainstream media??
Q
uestiosn from the audience on how do you know you are getting the best stuff? - My thoughts are that when you subscribe to a wide range of materials that each draw on a range then you are less likely to restrict. Could a possibility be to subscribe to some peripherals or dissenters to keep you on your toes?

Tagging - metadata on resources so that can be quickly found. Tagging is about a grassroots approach to metadata "taslearnscope05" suggested as the tag for today.

Massive spike in content and Creative Commons is the stuff that makes the spike in content useable. Highlighted the difference in content ownership for parttime and fulltime teachers. I think from previous converstions that the parttime teachers in TAENSW are all contract, no permanent parttime.

"We need
d
igital image literacy
t
o be on an open network
t
o be free and open source"

need to be able to use webmail rather than just Outlook (in our case Groupwise) The software we use in organisations needs to be transferable to other parts of our life. WebCT given as an example where a change of location may mean change of LMS.

Open network - not having our resources locked away behind password controls. Previously you could walk into a library and open a book and teach yourself, couldn't walk out with books without a library card. Make it okay for people to read our content, but maybe pay for facilitation, accreditation, guidance and assessment. Free to learn, costs money to be educated.

Leigh told his story about the TAFE NSW blocking filters and the impact on youth at risk class, and the student who ended up drawing a line for himself and increased his media literacy through the process.

Role of education is to find ways to support development of media literacy for selves and students.

Wants to find a way to enable teachers to teach on an open networks, and students can learn on an open network.

Http/;//networkedlearning.wikispaces.com

Ended presentation with attribution page for flickr photos!

Afternoon Workshop to concentrate on tools that will be relevant for the next 5-10 years.