Room With A View

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article about the way news from Myanmar is getting out via its citizen’s using cellphones and blogs. It goes on to talk about the way the media is controlled there. Interestingly, I’m posting this via an anonymous proxy because my blog is blocked where I live.

Other stories state that the government has now cut internet access. We’ll see how successful the government is at stopping the flow of information. John Lennon’s song Power to the People springs to mind. I’ll think I’ll put it on.

Here’s the link to the article.

I attended Alan November’s session entitled Creating A New Culture of Teaching and Learning. He was entertaining and provocative. In fact, there was an un-conference session following Alan’s. He went right through it. His session was to end at 2:00 but he didn’t realize it. At 2:30 he asked us what time he was supposed to finish. He was told 2:30. We all laughed and someone in the group said, “You’re on a roll. Keep going!” So he did. He ended up finishing at 3:00. My head was spinning after his session.

Take aways from the session include:

• All high school students should have to take an on-line course as a graduation requirement.
• “Cisco is a learning company.”
• My goal as a teacher is to help students create the infrastructure for life long learning–their Personal Learning Networks (PLN)
• Empower students to have a global voice

Links from the session include:
http://nlccommunities.com/communities/setonhall.defaul.aspx
http://www.epgy.org

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Wesley Fryer presented a session entitled I’ve Recorded a Podcast, Now What? He focussed on tools that are free or low cost that teachers can use to post their podcasts. I’ll post some of his links below in case you want to follow them.

Though I enjoyed Wesley’s presentation I’m not convinced podcasts hosted outside of our school is the right way to go at ISB. Externally hosted sites help with some of the support issues of local hosting and lessens the load on our school’s servers/bandwidth but local hosting is better for us. By hosting locally we don’t have to worry about the slow connection speeds we face when we try to surf outside China. Also, we don’t have to worry about investing a lot of time into a site to suddenly find China has blocked it and we can no longer access our content. Finally, we learned from the earthquake north of Taiwan in December 2006 that it’s best to keep our content close to the principle users. For several months many of us had trouble getting to our wikis at http://wikispaces.com because of a broken pipe. Lesson learned, keep content close to those that need it.

http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/podcasting2
http://teachdigital2.wikispaces.com/podcasting2
http://www.podcastpeople.com/

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I’m attending the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, China. My brain is spinning from so many great ideas. I thought I’d take advantage of my blog being unblocked to jot down a few thoughts.

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I can see my blog!! I wonder how long this will last? I’ve got my fingers crossed.