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6 December 2007
December Newsletter
Editorial
Dear MirandaNetters,
Well done to all our MirandaNet authors who jumped all the academic hurdles to qualify for entry in the volume of Reflecting Education on multimodal concept mapping. This volume was produced in partnership with the Institute of Education, University of London. Teachers who want to develop their academic credentials and improve their work based learning in this subject will find this volume very useful. However, it took two years to publish this volume because of the high academic standards that had to be achieved. Well done to our members who achieved publication.
What militates against this kind of academic writing is the time it takes to express these complex ideas in a polished way. The results are important to long term and proven developments in digital technologies because so much careful thinking has gone into their production. On the other hand, MirandaNetters have vital information about digital technologies that needs to be communicated more quickly because the digital landscape is changing so fast. MirandaNetters also want to explore with others ideas that are only just forming. This is why our forums, MirandaLink and the ejournal Braided Learning platform are such crucial elements of membership because they provide instant sources of information and collaboration. Professionals use to traditional communication can feel challenged by these more informal and less polished publications so I am delighted to see so many more members getting involved in these online facilities.
Judging from the number of visitors to our website it is clear that the practitioner case studies in our braided learning e-journals are greatly valued by professionals all over the world. These represent contributions which are between an email response and a full academic paper. We give support to any prospective author who asks because do not want to be a test of members' ability against some external criteria, but a way of empowering all professional voices however they wish to express themselves. If you need support in preparing your Fellowship contributions please get in touch, especially if you have an idea for a multimedia or multimodal entry.
In the context of our ejournals, Robin Bevan and Erin Antonius gain a Fellowship for their contribution to the MirandaNet ejournal volume Mapping Inspiration (www.mirandanet.ac.uk/ejournal). Ian Mursell will receive his Fellowship certificate for his contribution on Mexicolore and so will Maka Baramielze and Anita Bjelica for their report on their visit to Prague and the presentation they did with their pupils on World Ecitizens at the international BESA conference last January. Jane Shuyska for her Reflecting Education paper.
We also have a new category of long-term participation award this year, Senior Fellow. This award has been created because many of our Fellows have continued to participate after their first Fellowship award in building global professional knowledge in the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning. Their commitment includes managing forums, participating in MirandaLink, giving seminars, writing conference papers, organising video conferences as well as continuing to publish in the e-journals. We wanted to celebrate the continuing efforts of these Fellows who have already gained their first Fellowship awards. Therefore, Senior Fellowship have been awarded to Christina Howell Richardson for editing the two MirandaNet volumes of Reflecting Education on E-learning and Mapping- also our multimodal concept mapping critical friends, Averil Loveless and Di Mavers
Senior Fellowships also for papers in the two multimodal mapping ejournals for MirandaNetters: Sylvia Rojas-Drummond, Steven Coombs, Nigel Riley, Wilma Clarke and Jane Finch (www.reflectingeducation.net and www.mirandanet.ac.uk/ejournal).
We are finding that interviews provide us with the most immediate means of access to Senior Fellows' expertise so you can already enjoy interviews with some of the 2008 crop of Senior Fellows. Andrée Jordan, for example, talks about her awards for exchanges with other schools in a podcast www.mirandanet.ac.uk/fellowship/senior.htm. Andrée's Peace room for World Citizens will be launched at BETT08.
We have also used the forum facility for these interview/discussions. Michael Smith talks about his inspirational journey through ICT CPD as part of the Visual Learning knowledge hub www.mirandanet.ac.uk/visual. Lawrence Williams has provided information in the forums about his international exchanges and Dai Thomas talks to John Cuthell about his knowledge about Virtual Worlds. You can also join into the discussions in these forums which is an opportunity to exchange ideas with these experts www.mirandanet.ac.uk/phorum.
In 2008 we will also be interviewing more senior Fellows. Amongst them are Dughall McCormick, Jan Lepeltak, Niki Davis, Mara Chrystie, We'd love to know if you would like to nominate a member for this award or the Basia Korczak Award. This year Mechelle De Craene was awarded The Basia Korczak Award for an outstanding contribution to global professional knowledge in the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning www.mirandanet.ac.uk/profiles/profile.php?prof=480. We also have a special MirandaNet award for Sean Dodson, the Guardian journalist, who joined us for our Etopia week in Prague and wrote a generous piece about our work (http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,2037510,00.html).
These new Senior Fellowship certificates for 2007 will be awarded along with the Fellow certificates at BETT08 on Thursday 10th January at 4:00pm on our stand: S97 All members who attend are welcome to join us at an early supper at about 6:30 p.m.
Yours in Fellowship,
Christina Preston
The news
This month's online forum: Virtual Worlds - in CPD
Dai Thomas and John Cuthell
You can see evidence of Dai Thomas's Senior Fellowship expertise in helping us building up our understanding of Virtual Worlds. As a result of his advice, MirandaNet has bought an island in Second Life. We would welcome members who join our forum to decide how to plan CPD events in this space.
If you log in you will receive a message in your email when comments are added so that you can keep up with the discussion. Here are some extracts from the forum below.
Dai Thomas says:
Pete Twinnings Schome project at the OU has seen some remarkable uses by the system by students to build architecture, to develop social rules and etiquette, to exchange art and clothing design or to talk about Second Life Physics and how this relates to real world physics such as gravity and mass. Other areas of SL have used the gaming aspects of VR to allow us to walk into an historical setting such as the American Civil war and role play reliving this history. There is a fantastic project which gives you an insight into schizophrenia.
http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2004/09/in_the_minds_ey.html
John Cuthell says:
When we were talking about Second Life this evening and I realized something, that no matter how much you critique the application/site, you talk about events there - and events as if they're happening in the 'real world.' What other environment generates such a self-created ongoing diegetic? Things falling from the sky, people griefing others, people wandering around, creating and destroying, talking and talking, maybe making a living. SL plays the 'real world,' of course however defined. And that is its strength - semantics and content moving among ordinary subjectivities.
Reports on past events
(Please send us a report with your presentation about events that you are attending - many MirandaNetters cannot attend conferences and would be delighted to hear what you have been doing.)
Social networking between professionals - what is the point?
This paper uses braided learning theory to analyse the online discussion that occurred in the Naace forum on Portfolios. It was an eventful discussion as one of the members was removed from the forum because he would not follow the code of conduct. It is interesting to speculate on how so many professionals can be expected to support young people in online practice when they have so little experience themselves in this medium and little training in e-facilitation.
Versions of this paper were presented in Amsterdam at the Taconet conference on 8th September by Jan Lepeltak and by Christina Preston at the Naace conference on Social Networking on November 5th in Tamworth. The latest version will be published by the Taconet European Network by the end of this year.
A new e-Community of Practice in Varberg, Sweden
The teachers of Varberg, a city in Sweden in the Province (or county) of Halland near Gothenburg (also Göteborg) have had a very traditional approach to education until recently. They have decided to transform their approach by using ICT in classrooms. However, the region is now asking the heads to act as leaders in a new impetus to transform teaching and learning using ICT. Since England is already in the middle of this transformational process, they hoped that the MirandaNet Fellowship would be able to help with building an e-community of practice (e-COP) amongst the practitioners. We expect to hear more from the heads as their new project progresses.
Handheld Learning 2007 Conference - see the video
Videos of all of the main plenary sessions, including the opening by Jim Knight and keynotes from Stephen Crowne and Marc Prensky, from the recent Handheld Learning 2007 Conference are now being uploaded to Handheld Learning TV which may be freely viewed at: http://handheldlearning.blip.tv
Links to other materials including presentation slides, pictures and podcast maybe found via: http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/41/2/
Graham Brown-Martin
Free Publications and Resources
Latest volume of Reflecting Education on multimodal mapping
The latest issue of Reflecting Education has now been published and is available to read at www.reflectingeducation.net. This special issue, entitled ‘Fascinating cultural objects: multimodal concept mapping in teaching and learning', focuses on the ways in which digital concept mapping can be used to support teaching and learning activities. Christina Preston and Christina Howell-Richardson (Associate Editors) were the associate editors with Avril Loveless and Di Mavers as critical friends. The volume features the work of MirandaNetters, Nigel Riley, Wilma Clarke, Sylvia Rojas- Drummond and Jane Shuyska. We have also included podcast of interviews with Tony Buzan and Gunther Kress as well as contributions from Ahlberg, Mavers, Novak and Canas who are leading experts in this field. We've already had a comment from member, Chrysoula Hadjichristou, who says that concept mapping is a very good and important teaching tool to organise the mind. She uses it to organise projects and so do her students from the primary to the secondary school. She congratulations MirandaNet Fellows on their work in this field.
We would value your comments on this volume of research papers. What do you think of the index which is a concept map? Is this kind of research helpful to practitioners? What subject should we tackle next?
www.reflectingeducation.net/index.php/reflecting
You will find our companion practitioner volume about mapping in the MirandaNet Braided Learning ejournal - Mapping Inspiration. www.mirandanet.ac.uk/inspiration
Research-based professional development resources to support interactive whiteboard use in the secondary classroom
The T-MEDIA research project
Four disks are available, at cost price, covering secondary English, maths, science and history, or as a fifth summary disk.
The discs were produced in association with Caret, the University's Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies, and are available at cost price via a downloadable order form from the team's publications website:http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/istl. The T-MEDIA final report is also downloadable from the site.
Circling the square: six activities for listening to teachers and students
If you are really interested in ways to incorporate student voice, as well as listening to teachers, please check out our short publication at www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/ehy/circlingsquare.pdf
We also have paper copies if you would like to request some.
Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young
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Visual Learning Site
Nigel Riley suggests we check out all these visualisers
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm?all=yes
Developing learning through the use of drama, guided by animateurs
Jane Finch
There has been a significant amount of rumbling on various forums (or is that fora?!) about ICT and creativity in a myriad of different guises so I thought that you may be interested to have a look at something else which adds to the mix.
MirandaNet Events for 2008 in UK, Czech Republic, Estonia and Finland
Thursday 6th December 6 - 8 pm (Bath Spa) Video Research Methods Workshop
www.mirandanet.ac.uk/news/diary.php
7th - 9th December 2007 (Algarve, Portugal): Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age
www.mirandanet.ac.uk/research/algarve_dec07.htm
Tuesday 11th December 2007 13.30 - 16.00: (Institute of Education, University of London) Innovating Learning and Assessment in Work-based Learning
www.mirandanet.ac.uk/research/wle_seminar_dec07.htm
7th January 2008 London: A major pre-BETT 2008 International Conference - Making IT work
MirandaNetters have a 20% reduction on tickets for this conference. Please get in touch with Ray Barker if you would like to take advantage of this.
DBERR Conference Centre, Victoria Street, London SW1H 0ET
www.mirandanet.ac.uk/associates/besa_conference.htm
To find out more or to book your place see www.besa.org.uk/intconf08
BETT08 9th - 12th January 2008 Olympia, London
MirandaNet stand number S97 Grand Hall Gallery
You can register using the logo on the MirandaNet front page. Please say that you are from MirandaNet.
We will have two events at BETT08.
The Peace room and the Award of Fellows' certificates
1) World Ecitizens: The Peace Room
Wednesday 9th January at 4.00 pm
wec.mirandanet.org.uk/peace_room
This is not the only project run by Andree who has just been awarded the International Schools Award.
Andree's full report is on www.mirandanet.ac.uk/news/news.php.
2) 10th January MirandaNet Awards 4:00pm Drinks and meal 6:30pm
7/8th February London
Pedagogies for interactive technologies: IWBs and Visualisers
You will find full details and a flyer here www.mirandanet.ac.uk/profdev/wle_seminar.htm
Friday 29 February 2008
The Education Resources Awards 2008
www.mirandanet.ac.uk/associates/besa_er_awards.htm
We would like MirandaNetters to apply for these awards. If you are eligible or you want to suggest someone please get in touch.
12th/13th March What Works Where?
ICT CPD programmes as a focus for changes in policy and practice
The view from the UK, the US and Eastern Europe
19th - 20th June 2008 International Conference in London
Multimodality and Learning: New Perspectives on Knowledge, Representation and Communication
Keep these dates in your diary. We will have more information soon
23rd - 25th June 2008
Valuing individual and shared learning: the role of ICT
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic IFIT
Contact Mirka Cernochova for more information. Christina Preston will be giving the keynote address.
September 22nd - 25th Third International Conference on Concept Mapping
This two-site conference will be held first in Tallinn, Estonia from 22nd-24th. We then take the ferry which is about two hours to Helsinki in Finland to continue the presentations from 24th 25th.. There is some early information on this site presented in the form of a concept map:
Christina Preston will be speaking there and hopes MirandaNetters will join her.
Members' news
Worcestershire is Highly Commended for its Support for Schools
Congratulations to Jane Finch who is a key adviser in the Worcestershire's Learning Technologies Team who won honours in the prestigious, national ICT in Excellence awards run by the Becta, the UK's government agency.
See the press release Support for schools - Highly commended
http://awards.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=34579
Jiri Sulovsky - Greetings from Liberec under snow
We are very busy with my work and also with work of my wife, who is running Mother center (http://www.centrum-kaspar.cz), where they do ICT literacy increasing courses for mothers on maternity leave (incl. using Moodle for elearning), so they can easily return to their work, and also i.e. accounting courses, so far funded by ESF. Just last week they have been voted as Women-friendly organisation of the region in 2007. Next to this project we are running Children TV, with close cooperation with Gymnasium F.X.Saldy where we want to go for ESF funding as well for improvement of Media literacy and Media courses for teachers so they can incorporate this as part of their teaching plans. Next to it we do run film event call Fresh Eyes, which shows children television production from all over CZ+SK with plans to go Europe wide (always searching for partners in this area, I plan to come over for BETT in January)... In fact this is very similar activity to BBC Blast!... Some of the videos can be seen at http://www.dtv-liberec.cz/porady.php, and few of them are even with EN subtitles (http://dtv.lbc.cz/video/041108sf.rm)...
New Scholars
Sheila Feasey
Having worked with children and young people for many years I am now a student in my third year of a BA in teacher training which qualifies me to work in either KS2 or 3. My specialism is ICT, and to date I have no qualifications within that field, having taught myself along the way, and more recently through lectures and seminars. I chose ICT, as I have had experience within the SEN sector, where I have witnessed how empowering ICT can be for students with communication difficulties. To date I am open-minded about my first teaching arena, finding all age ranges interest me. I am currently contemplating my dissertation idea. My current thoughts are to research how well non-ICT specialists are able (capability and resources) to incorporate ICT across the full subject range, or perhaps how authentic 'discrete' ICT teaching can be and whether this is more motivational for students. In just two years of student teaching practice I have witnessed a range of teaching using ICT, and feel teacher capability and limited resources may have been restrictive. In other instances I have seen apathetic interest in 'rote' instruction that had little relevance to the Year group. Food for thought.
Greg Scanlon
Full-time research post-grad student, investigating the potential of ICT to assess conceptual learning, in the Department of Education and Professional Studies, University of Limerick. Working with Dr Oliver McGarr, I have taken an existing course "ICT in Education" and changed it to an e-learning course with online assessment using Moodle, available at: http://paulo.ul.ie/ (please contact me to get guest access). The course has been presented to first year student teachers each year since 2005 during the Spring semester with an average cohort of 280 and the data gathered from student surveys, formative assessment responses and student grades, will form the basis of my Masters thesis. The teacher-training programmes involved can be viewed at:http://www.ul.ie/education/programmes/index.html.
My interest in determining the usefulness of ICT in assessing conceptual learning is driven by the conviction that learning can be made so interesting that self-directed learning will be widely practised, by a large segment (a majority?) of the population. Does this mean that teaching will no longer be a recognised occupation? I don't think so, but the occupation of teaching will change to one of facilitating, so that learners will be facilitated in their search for learning.
Ilona Terescenco
In a fast-moving and knowledge-based society like ours it is extremely unwise and painful to stick to the so-called traditional methods both in learning or teaching. It is just like trying to swim against the tide. Young teachers in particular ought to adapt faster than ever and re-invent their teaching perspectives and methods. As a matter of fact a modern E-citizen ought to re-invent himself as well as his environment. Therefore, those who loathe and fear ICT will be swept away unawares. We must either adapt to ICT and incorporate it in our educational system or quit teaching!!!
My best wishes to you all! Globalisation is not so fierce after all!
Paul Vale
I work as a freelance educational consultant specialising in ICT and using ICT to enhance teaching and learning. I have been increasingly involved in promoting and developing the use of safer web-sites for students and adults to use within virtual communities as a safer alternative to MySpace, Facebook, MSN Messenger, Piczu and the like.
My current work includes leading an extended project funded by the Oracle Education Foundation using the web-medium www.think.comand contracted to edit Naace's Sharing Success fortnightly e-magazine and Primary Focus termly journal.
Karen Waterston
I am interested in how to use the technologies around us to enhance the learning and teaching experience. I'm particularly interested in digital media and content, Interactive Whiteboards. I love finding new ideas especially ones which require minimal preparation but that go a long way.
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