Bee - coming a Webhead
Full House
Full house at Tappedin last Sunday. 33 people from all over the world gathered for the Blogstreams Salon live chat with Ewan Mc Intosh. Ewan presented the blogging project with his students on a field trip to France and how fruitful and rewarding the experience was for all parties involved: students, parents, educators and management.
He insisted on the pedagogy behind the technology, a pedagogy of openness and cooperative work. He pointed out the digital divide in education is between those teachers who collaborate and who don't. He stressed the possibility of connecting and interacting that blogs offer and urged teachers to make time for blogging, by commenting and sharing information, opening their classrooms and practice to the world.
Here you can find the informal transcript to the conversation that took place and that will later be edited and archived at Tappedin under the Blogstreams thread.
Next session at Blogstreams will be on Sunday March 5th at 21:00 with theme and guest speaker to be announced. Stay tuned :-)
blogging
posted by Bee @ 5:16:00 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
dear Bee, I am writing a short paper for my Masters on using blogs in middle school. I thought of you immediately, of course. May I use this as reference, and have you got feedback/involvement from middle school kids, too?
thanks for your constant and wonderful help!
Susan B.
smoky7@tiscali.it
Dear Bee
Unfortunately,I couldn't make it last Sunday because my family also needs me, but I read your post and the tapescript and I thought it extremely interesting what he said about the tech divide among teachers.
I've just got a conversation group and I'm trying to motivate them to come to my blog and post their comments, but I've got none so far. I thought of trying this before suggesting opening their own, even because it's just an intensive summer group. The point is that , in my reagion,people are not used to dealing with this technology. But it's a good way to test how people react to it.
Another thing is our advanced reading project. Having students blogging regularly is the core part of the project, along with reading, of course. Let's see how we fare and I'll keep you informed.
Thanks a lot for sharing all this with us.
Lots of love
Chris Lima
First of all- great blog, it's given me a lot to think about.
I'm particularly interested in learning more about the Tapped In conference, and am checking out the links as I write this. I couldn't agree more in terms of the pedagogy of openness and cooperation. As the web, and open source movement go through strength to strength in both availability, content and freedom I find it a very exciting time. Collaboration seems to be made a little easier every day.
My own project, which is still in its infancy, is Open Source English. The idea is to create free (and advertising free), accessible, multimodal learning content for ESL/EFL learners, and a community of practice for teachers in the field. It's built on the amazing open source, free classroom management system Moodle and I am in the process of shamelessly recruiting TESOL philanthropists to contribute teaching content, or suggest ways the site might best serve the English learning community.
If you get chance, I'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, keep up the great work on your blog, and thanks for the lowdown on some really useful teaching resources and ideas!
Bee,
Thanks for your link over at my blog. I found it very interesting, and as I said in my reply over there, I was glad to finally learn that Connectionism is indeed a concept that I'm very much interested in. There seems to be a lot of common ground between the ideas in this area with those in the Communities of Practice model I'm also a big fan of.
It really is an exciting time for education. Now we just need to go about the lengthy process of turning our more jaded contempories on to new ways of thought and practice.
I'll be keeping close tabs on your blogs in future. Thanks for the great information. It has helped me to clarify my thoughts on how best to arrange and implement learning in the OSEnglish project.
Best regards,
Michael
Thanks, Bee, for this very useful blog, and to everyone for their comments above-- all very intersting and affirming with respect to the work I'm doing these days.
My quick comment is that I find the transcript useful not only in terms of its content (of course), but as an process-based example of what technology does for communities of practice. I know my teachers will be fascinated when I show them this transcript, as it will be their first glimpse of online communities in action.
At first, I expect they will focus on the seeming chaos of people coming and going, smiling, hugging, greeting, etc... But, on second glance, one sees that this is very similar to a F2F gathering, with all of its complex nonverbal communication, solidarity builiding, etc. Finally, one sees that there is real content flying around, only we can review it, reread it, catch it in ways one does not find in F2F meetings.
So exciting. Thanks again.
Karen
Great to hear from you and that what I have been doing and posting is of help. Let's keep sharing.
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