Three questions for my sage fellow travelers. Do you possess the answers to these three questions? I would feel happy to read your views.

1. How can teachers and students exploit Web 2.0 technologies for teaching and learning?

2. How will these new technologies benefit educators with respect to their teaching?

3. How will these new technologies benefit students with respect to their learning?

To begin I feel that students learn best when they are teaching. Is exploit the right term to use in the first question. Which measures do we apply? Myself and other teachers will be sharing these questions tomorrow. Your enlightened thoughts would be most welcome.  I am putting my ideas together. More to come during the day…

Singaporean bloggers have been very hard at work in recent weeks and in particular this weekend.

First of all a group of Singaporean bloggers, known collectively as the ‘media socialists‘ have been quite busy. They are not ‘socialists’ per se. They are a group of academics, civil servants, consultants and designers who are passionate and actively involved in social media, or what many people call “new media”. A group of the media socialists devoted a rather busy week creating a response, via a collaborative wiki, to the recent AIMS Consultation Paper advising the Singaporean government on engaging citizens through new media.

This form of collaboration and selfless sharing demonstrates how blogging and social media can be utilised to connect with governments and organisations. Individuals can come together collectively to achieve outcomes that would have been so difficult for an individual. Another group of Singaporean bloggers have also contributed to the debate. You can read all about the work of the media socialists here. I am heartened by the knowledge that the media socialists have included myself in their ranks due to my connections with the island state and personal friendships with a number of the actual bloggers.

I have been keeping tabs on their work via blogger extraordinaire, Kevin Lim. Now, who is Kevin Lim? He is a visionary, a researcher, a student and as he points out on his blog Kevin  “…is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Communication at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Dabbling for both pragmatic and play, he seeks an ideal interplay between online and offline life, through social networking, blogging and lifecasting. He openly wishes to become a “social cyborg”, where the meshing of human and networking technology would allow one’s presence to be augmented by the minds of many.”

On a separate front my friend Siva has been co-ordinating the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore. This involves 3000 volunteers. Blogging and connectedness play a crucial role in harnessing the volunteers, gathering data and publishing results. I remember back in 2001 and 2002 results were being published within minutes of the cleanup conclusion. Tonnes of rubbish are cleared away from beaches and mangroves during the cleanup.

Siva provides updates via his blog and the ICCS blog. The cleanup is happening today, as I type, and already several updates have been posted to the blog.

Siva uses blogging and the net to bring together students, teachers, and members of the community to work on environmental and other projects that benefit the people of Singapore. Siva has been using blogs as a tool to augment his research and teaching for at least five years now. Here are some of his blogs, those of his students and blogs that he contributes towards.

The Otterman ~ original blog
The Otterman ~ current blog
Habitat News
The Biology Refugia
LSM2351 Ecology and Environmental Processes
LSM1103 Biodiversity
LSM3261 Life Form and Function
LSM1301 Animal Behaviour
The Biodiversity Crew at NUS
The Pursuit of Anurans
Biodiversity of Insects at Kent Ridge
Fauna of Kent Ridge
Johora singaporensis
Frogs in Singapore
Horseshoe Crabs of Kranji
ToddyCats
Mangrove Shrimps of Kranji
Pasir Panjang Heritage
Singapore Heritage Blog

I would not be surprised that if one looked up the term blog in an illustrated dictionary there would be photographs of Siva and Kevin within the text of the definition. They are the definitive bloggers.

Most of all they achieve measurable outputs. They are productive. They assist the community. I wish I was in Singapore right now.

Conducted a blogging and edublogs workshop at St Vincent’s College in Potts Point, Sydney at the conclusion of the school day. Chris Morris, ICT Coordinator at the school, organised this workshop as part of a series of workshops that covered such areas as Second Life, Wikis, RSS feeds, Google Reader and Flickr. It was an excellent opportunity for staff to explore all of these possibilities.

I had the pleasure to work with a most interested and receptive group of teachers. I shared with them the possibilities and realities of blogging with students. Management issues were covered yet I also pointed out the advantages in simply allowing students to open their own edublog accounts and then to invite their own teacher to be co-author. Empowerment and responsibility.

The pro and cons of different types of blogs were raised during the workshop. My main message was to take small steps and gradually evolve from that point. The workshop was most enjoyable. I was most impressed with the staff, the students and the school.

While waiting for the Edublogs site to happen at various points during the workshop I whipped open a couple of tabs on the Firefox browser and shared Compfight and Posterous with the teachers. One of the best things was the fact that I simply conducted the workshop using the presentation desktop computer in the computer lab. I did not use my MacBook. The portability, accessibility and cross-platforn nature of all these tools is simply useful.

An updated edublogs workshop document and related presentation can be downloaded from this page.

This week I set up 60 Edublogs for my two of my three Year Nine History classes. They are about to begin their time diaries. The students will hop into their own imaginative tardis and export their minds back to Australia of the 1930s and 1940s. They will keep a diary of their experiences during those turbulent times in Australia’s history.

My main aim was to add the 60 students as authors to the class blog and the easiest way to do so was to simply use the multiple Blog and User Creator in eduBlogs. I created the 60 blogs, 15 at a time. I created 60 student ‘temporary’ gmail accounts using that neat little short cut that is described here. You know the one…

yourmailaddress+studentname_01@gmail.com

I kept the students’ names, gmail account address, edublog username, edublog address and edublog password in a word document. I also subscribed to the 60 blogs in a Google Reader account od I could easily monitor the student progress.

I set the permissions for each blog and also the permissions for each of the students in the class blog. As you can imagine I devoted some time to these activities. When I first logged into edublogs to begin this process I had to reset the password of the main class blog due to a software upgrade. That only took a moment.

This morning I began to share the new edublogs with the students and I set about to demonstrate a blog set up for a fictitious student, Fred Ziffel. Anyway, upon logging in that message regarding regarding the software upgrade and password reset appeared and I initially thought,”Well, that is not a problem. The students can reset the password when they log in to their new blogs.”

But, then it hit me! I had used a single gmail account to create the blogs! I was the only person with access to that gmail account. I would have to reset the passwords for all 60 blogs myself. These are the steps I will need to take.

First of all I will need to log into the specific student account.

Then I will need to click on the link to reset the password.

Then I shall type in the student’s username.

Then I need to check the gmail account.

I will open the gmail account and read the message from edublogs.

I will click on the confirmation link.

I will be taken to this page where I will be asked to recheck my email for the new password.

I will then go back to the email to retrieve the new password.

I will open the email to obtain the new password.

I will record the new password in the word document.

I will need to repeat these steps for each of the 60 student blogs. If you know an easier way please let me know. I guess the Edublogs Campus edition is the real solution.

Dean Groom in his role as Howard as he weaves his OzNZ disciples down the PBL pathway

Sat in on an OzNZ educators flash meeting. It seemed I arrived first and rather idiotically I clicked on the Start Broadcast button and sat there like a stunned mullet for a bit until I realised I had hijacked the opening of the proceedings. Oh well, I will not lose any sleep over at that.

There was discussion regarding Second Life and also Interactive Whiteboards. I was looking forward to more talk on SL actually. SL intrigues me somewhat.

Some educators rave about SL. Others deplore it. Two documentaries regarding virtual worlds and Second Life that aired on the 6th August on SBS TV here in Australia, the Age of Avatars and Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love did not go down too well in some education sectors. PodLove may have perturbed some educators as well.

Then as the online discussion continued, Dean Groom, provided us all with an excellent and impromptu live example of PBL. We were all involved as we gradually collaborated to solve the problem set up by Dean. One gradually took on a role as we sought a solution to the conundrum. Dean is a real practitioner. Impressive. It was a good get together. I lurked more than contributed. Next time I should be more proactive. A number of sites were referenced during the meeting:

AUGrid
Machinima
OSGrid
GenerateWebSite
Skoolabarate
Digital Ethnography

I participated in what I believe was the first OzNZ flash meeting back in April. That was a interesting experience as well.

This evening’s meeting has been archived here. The OzNZ educators group is well supported with a wiki, diigo group and a ning.

Addendum: Discovered this nice piece on Machinima on the SBS TV website. May interest you.