Personal Learning Environments compared

As part of attending the University of Manitoba course on Educational Technologies in Africa I've had to take a look at Personal Learning Environments.

George Siemens the tutor asks for us to sketch our own but I found it more interesting to look at the PLE of Abdou Makayang, the 16 year old student I met in Gambia and whose final two years of High School I have agreed to pay for (£75 the notional price of education ending at 16 vs. 18). And to contrast it with the PLE of my own son Remy, 14.

The two slides are here

PLEs Africa and Europe compared

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BBCrap

Roll up Roll up for the online horror of the year.

The BBC has rebuilt and redesigned its cbeebies site for under-10 kids. What was a site that gave 3 year olds complete web mastery is now impossible to navigate, poorly designed, and mostly broke.

Yes it looks pretty.

But it's organised by categories that are meaningless to children.

They used to be able to select a character and then find all the activities they wished under that person/toy/animal. Perfect. That's how small minds work.

Now they have to identify first what output mode of production they want (stories, games, painting etc) and then they can select the character. Small kids don't work like this. They are multitaskers and their motivation for a character can and should drive them to experiment in all kinds of output modes.

The page of characters (now called "shows") organises them by alphabet in such a way that you can only ever see a dozen at a time. Gone is the miraculous gallery of friends that you could recognise and click to. Instead, get literate and get spelling. Navigate six pages of names, or scroll down a master-sheet of all characters that is three pages long.

The home page does offer "picks" - what they'd like to recommend your kids to do. (That's what the BBC means by choice !). But these choices are below the fold so unless your kid knows how to scroll down, they will never want to discover anything.

The old site was a treasure trove. This is blah and unworkable. I predict the children and their parents will drift away and stay away in their droves from what has hitherto been one of the best and most popular sites in the world.

BBCrap

Language and Technology

To SOAS for a conference on technology and language learning run by its CETL. Programme is HERE. Astonishingly for a technology conference, no wifi allowed so no communication from the inside. Ah well, at least got some proposals written in the boring sessions (there were a few)

What the academic speakers don't get, is that this field is about dynamism, energy, initiative and taking part. I heard at least three funeral orations, I am sure.

Honourable exception: Graham Davies. A consultant well past retirement (by his own confession) who is more energised and participative than all the post-doc whippersnappers put together. Check him out, and his language lab at Edunation in second life. He goes by the name of Groovy Winkler and Second Lifers would do well to befriend him and get the tour. A gripping use of the Startrek concept of the holodeck, to beam the language learners into every conceivable setting and really stretch their social and metalinguistic powers. Bravo EU for supporting this guy.

Saw a demo of a videoconference-linked joint class format between Aberystwyth (Wales) and Masaryk (Czech Rep). The setting means that the learners are also picking up mediation, film use, technology... as they learn language. The Welsh group is mostly Asian and exposes the Czech learners to different accents. The Wales learners are doing a foundation access course and come out with social confidence as well as English. Some slides here

How to get 15 mins to catch up with work

Headphones and a kiddy download to itunes create the small space necessary to deal with something right now.

Says it all

Thanks to Iain Tait for finding this. Follow him www.crackunit.com

A Web for Learning in an IT-free space

The kids' school asked me to construct a site and online service to help them to use their remarkable GREENSPACE better. Greenspace (current holding site here) is an unused portion of a cemetery behind the school, which a group of parents has taken over and reclaimed as outdoor classroom. Now, we want to get the kids using it on a regular basis. Some schools teach up to 80% of lessons outdoors. We'll start modest.

The job of the web is to sow inspirations online that can be taken offline by the teachers into the Greenspace.

So: video, searchable resources, community and support....

I'd wondered about a googlesite simply because it's so simple to get every person in the school and community adding stuff to it. But the search is poor so you have to construct an elaborate hierachy of content to get navigation to the right pages. Sure, that conflicts with an anarchic site. But the lack of a webmaster authority brings benefits too.

Maybe it's not a site but a wiki, anyway ?

This video by Michael Welsch at digital anthropology got me thinking that perhaps it doesnt' matter so long as the tagging and bookmarking are powerful...

Colours of the Past

This kodachrome from summer 1978 came to me from the friend third on the left. The visit of our French Exchange students, and another family (Davis) to our home in Beeston, Nottingham. The table, made of sicilian tiles, is still my dinner table in London. The colours have such a 70s emotion ! I still have the silver teapot (bottom centreleft) and indeed it makes my tea most mornings.