Yesterday I came across Blackle for the first time. I wasn’t sure if it was a hoax or a real attempt to get people thinking taking tiny steps to reduce energy consumption. Google must be on people’s screens for huge amounts of time.
What if there could be a tiny energy reduction every time it was accessed?
As they say:

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com - Saving energy one search at a time”.

White or other bright colours on black was a web design that I used to find very appealing. Even now, as a dyslexic, I find it easier to read sites with either a darker background or at least a colour other than white.
To return to the energy saving theme Piers over at monkeymagic found this from the US department of energy. It suggests there could be considerable energy savings if everyone set their desk top, and presumably web site backgrounds, to one of these colours:

I’m setting up a couple of new blogs (details later) and thinking of redesigning this one so this has come at a good moment for me. Food for thought….. What do others think?
Up Date: Loopzilla via email sent me this from the Numbers Guy

On LCD displays, color may confer no benefit at all. In response to my inquiry, Steve Ryan, program manager for Energy Star’s power-management program, asked consulting firm Cadmus Group to run a quick test by loading Blackle, Google and the Web site of the New York Times (which is, like Google, mostly white on-screen) on two monitors — one CRT, one LCD — and connecting a power meter to both. “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor,” said David Korn, principal at Cadmus, which specializes in energy and environment, and does work for the government. The changes were so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter.

Plus Andy scoffed at the whole notion of tiny actions making a difference but refused to take the bait and add a comment here!
So there you go - if you’ve got an LCD screen you can have any colour you like. As you were.

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Using Flickr photos from the Classroom Displays Group I made this in 30 seconds. Neat. It uses the Flickr slideshow format and you can post it to Facebook too.

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Following on from Will’s post comes a suggestion of another route to teacher and headteachers grasping the power of blogging.Monkeymagic

A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.

I think this can happen too, especially with teachers who have the confidence to let the children become the experts.

Piers (MonkeyMagic) set up a blog for the children at his school to use with litttle or no teacher intervention beyond a little initial “hand-holding”. He didn’t publicise the blog in any way but handed ownership over to the children. Wow - powerful stuff ownership Their byline “Our News. Our Views” says it all.

..one boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.

The blog started to get comments from teachers, pupils and parents.
Now here’s the crunch:

By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom.
And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.

“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”

Roberta happens to be the head teacher.

On a side note Piers also says:

Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work.

I know! I know! I saw it when she first started posting. They just happen to be members of Classroom Displays Group too For a real treat have a look at the slideshow of their vision of London in 2057

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Weblogg-ed » Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning?

Will is writing about teachers who just can’t quite grasp what blogging could really do for their own practice. This is where I came in One of the main reasons for setting up The Classroom Displays Blog was to influence positively teachers to start seeing how blogging could change their learning landscape. But it’s a slow process and we’re asking an awful lot of people who are already feeling hard pressed. Will says:

And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.” I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.”

Quite! Until people actually experience the power of connected learning it’s hard for them to grasp.
Will goes on:

So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

It is a huge shift and maybe people are being asked to do it in too much of a hurry. That head’s desire to ‘get’ it straight away sounds very familiar. There’s no time for teachers to learn this stuff themselves first. They assume they can just teach it, without going through the process themselves. How many times have we seen teachers asked to do this sort of thing before? Non-specialist teaching languages for example? How are they supposed to grasp that this is a paradigm shift after a couple of training sessions?
Listen to Ewan, see what John is saying in your comments. Have a look at what Scotland is up to and you might get a better idea of what is needed:

• Support, frequent, ongoing, online and face to face support from people who do ‘get it’,
• Time to pay attention to their own learning,
• Meaningful solutions to their day to day issues (like “What shall I do with that (*) wall this time?”)
• and ideally an element of playfulness to sugar the pill and stop them scrunching up their faces in agony.

Or, maybe it’s just me…

No, it’s definitely not just you Will and it’s not just the US either!

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Engineers without Fears responds to Andy’s post about creative thought and chimed quite nicely with my own thoughts about reading.

And another thing: more on social creativity
I listen to others perform & I also read their work (reading is a paradoxically private and social activity)

Reading often feels like the ultimate asynchronous conversation. By reading a book I can engage with a long dead author yet in my mind I hear his (her) voice and have my emotions touched by their words. They can make laugh, cry or shiver. I find myself debating with them, sometimes impressed by the power of their argument, sometimes enraged by it.
The same is often true of the blogs I read but there’s a subtle yet huge difference. I now have an audible voice. I can argue back or tell them how much I agree. I can thank them for their insights or rebuke them for their lack. And, just sometimes, I can enter into a longer conversation with them.
I came across this lovely quote yesterday in the Charles Lamb pub in Islington (celebrating Bastile Day but that’s another story)

What is reading, but silent conversation?
Charles Lamb

Spot on Charles, even if you said it at least 150 years ago

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John @ Sandaig Primary » Facebook
John is on to something -

Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

I’ve been moaning on to Andy about how I just didn’t see that Facebook was much use to me. The main thing I’ve done with it so far is join a couple of fun groups and indulged my love for The Archers and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
The thing for me is that you are dependant on having a wide circle of friends actually on Facebook to provide your community. Hierarchy is not flat, you are there with your profile and just the people you ‘actually’ know for company. Trouble is for me, and lots of people like me if John’s comments are representative, the people I know just aren’t there.

But it’s more than that. Some people are talking as if Facebook could replace blogging. I think that would be tragic. For me one of the best things about blogging was that I could comment on some expert’s blog and no one would say “Well you are just a teaching assistant - what right have you to an opinion?” Better yet some expert might read my stuff and actually tell me they thought I’d a valid point - or not That sort of thing can’t happen on Facebook. It’s for established friendships and it’s not even as open as Myspace in that there’s no culture of adding online aquaintances. Not realising that at first I tried to add a few people from my e-mail address book only to be rejected. Well I thought I did know them but they obviously thought I didn’t or that ‘online’ isn’t real.

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Andy blogged My Blog Story today and it set me off on a bit of a wander through my blogging history. I didn’t want to do a straight post about the how and why of my blog. I did that quite recently anyway. Instead I decided trawl back through my early days of blogging and see what’s really there. Here’s what I found:
My Blogging Time Line
2003
Nov 15 - My first blog created on Blogdrive chosen because it allowed comments without the person having to have a blog themselves, unlike Blogger.
Nov 16th - First blog comment from Andy puts me off using it! When I try to reply on his blog he has comments switched off Blog abandoned.
2004
Feb 11th- First post, not to really make a blog but to provide a space where I can talk to the people I’ve lost contact with because of the way the course software has been set up.
Feb 12th - from little acorns…

I’ve been asked to record all the displays in school (which I was doing anyway) with a view to putting them on a cd & using them as screensavers all over school. Sounds like a nice idea doesn’t it?

Feb 16th - first comment from any learning facilitator (LF) (Martin)
Feb 22- the blog gets its first comment from my own LF
Feb 25th - I realise the blog is turning into a learning journal

This blog has by accident become a place that I use for my general thoughts about what’s going on

March 1st - begging someone to leave a comment, offering virtual tea and shortbread, feeling like a dotty person talking to her cat. Mo takes pity on me.
March 3rd - seriously thinking of giving up the blog after a comment from Andy (is this a pattern?)
March 5th - lots of blogs:

Blogs everywhere
So many blogs in Ultralab now! And some of them really interesting. I loved Gina’s blog, really colourful. It made me think of her as a person rather than just as someone else’s LF. Shirley’s is good too but quite different. It’s interesting to see how people personalise their on-line spaces.

March 6th - mixing work and play

“I bought some real organic cider from the supermarket next to the train station in Windermere. I’ve never had anything quite like it before. Dry & rather tanniny, but really, really good:) I’m going to put the broadband off in a minute & watch a dvd of “Hideous Kinky”.”

march 9th - assimilated into the Ultralab borg by Tom with Shirley’s help. This predates the blog of blogs and had LFs, the MA students and e-fellows in it too but only 2 researchers, myself and Andy.
And so it continues through the rest of my first and second year. There are several entries a week and lots of comments. Contacts are made and friendships grow. The blog slowly changes into a Meta-Learning Journal where I write about my learning, reflections and double loops all jumbled up with personal and fun stuff. It’s a lively, vibrant blog. I keep trying to hive the personal stuff off into other spaces, including another blog but it never works.
2005
Oct 20th - First entry in Acting to Improve - my serious Year 3 research journal on Andy’s Darnet domain, partly because I can access it from school and partly because it seems the right place for it as my topic is a form of distributed action research.
Dec 11th - first entry in Classroom Displays Blog on edublogs where I hope there will be a supportive community.
2006
July - I get the degree. With 193 entries in my main blog I move over to only blogging in Acting to Improve.
2007
April - moved Classroom Displays to our own domain on usefulwiki
July - 74 entries in Classroom Displays,
88 entries in Acting to Improve
I’ll think about what all of this might mean tomorrow

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The dynamically produced Project Based Learning links page on usefulwiki is turning out to be a powerful tool for finding out how educators are actually using this method. Here’s Nick in Minnesota writing about the end of year assesment process in his school.

Nick’s Education Spot
Finalization represents the end of most projects. Students bring their completed project and supporting documentation to a proposal team meeting. There they must present their work to a group of staff members, and argue for the credit they think they deserve for the work they put into the final product. It’s an interesting process of give and take, with the staff weighing in on various aspects of the student’s project, including the documented time the student put into the project, and the overall quality of the project as compared to the expectations the staff and student have for their projects. It’s the student’s job to argue the merits of their project in an attempt to receive as much credit as they can. It’s a fair process that gauges the value of an education on a much grander scheme than “pass/fail” or a series of A’s, B’s, and C’s that can represented a variety of different standards.

Can’t help feeling that process would be a more appropriate way of ending Year 3 of the Ultraversity degree……..

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I’ve decided to expand my creativity over the summer with the help of Edward De Bono’s new book “How to Have Creative Ideas”. I’m a big fan of De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and I’ve seen the method used in schools to good effect. So I’m going to spend 10 minutes a day or so working through the excercises in the book and chart some of my experiences on the blog. Like a good action researcher I intend to extract my significant learning! What I will blog about are my reactions, thoughts and reflections on the process rather than the experiments themselves. If you want the actual experiments you’ll need to buy the book Day One
Context
I read through the introduction, recognised some familiar stories and some stuff about lateral thinking. The book looks interesting and I’m feeling quite positive about the games. I spend a short time reminding myself that De Bono is talking about creative ideas not artistic creativity.
(Sudden flash of negative memory - a nasty, destructive, but witty teacher once wrote on my report when I was about 14 that I had “an artistic temperament with none of the talent to justify it” Ouch!)
Ok so I decide to try the the first in the book and set a 10 minute deadline. It seems simple enough……
What?
It was quite hard to get going and fight off the feeling that I wasn’t doing it right.
Once I’d got my first idea I carried on and by the end of the ten minutes I had one quite good solution to the task that fulfilled the criteria and one (the first) that slightly missed the point.
So what?
Ok extract my learning from this:

Now What?
What do I take forward to the next game?

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