There’s a good discussion about the Accelerated Learning approach to displays in the History Teacher’s forum :

I have a colleague at my school who only displays students’ work outside of her classroom – that is in corridors really. She never displays work in her classroom.

She says it is because she went on an Inset course once about ‘classrooms as places of positive work patterns’.

The idea is that you should celebrate student work and achievement with displays of their work, but never inside a classroom. Inside a classroom should be entirely and only devoted to work and positive motivation.

I’ve read a lot about this approach but I’ve almost never seen it in action. It bothers me slightly, like an itch I can’t quite reach. I like so much of the theory of Accelerated Learning but this is just a sticking point for me, a blind spot.
What do others think?

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I’m more and more convinced that social networks like Twitter are a powerful force for informal learning. I do wonder though if people are accessing them ‘in their own time’ then what impact is this having on their work/life balance? Many of my American Twitter network have been off work today, but I’ve watched them slogging away all day. I often see people in both the UK and the US working late into the evening on work related projects. If you ask, many will tell you that sites like Ning, Twitter and Facebook are banned in school. Just today John tweeted that “Wikispaces is blocked because it’s like MySpace.” Some schools still even ban edublogs.org! So I was interested in this post:

Pontydysgu - Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » Has informal learning a chance as bosses crack down on internet socialising?

Informal learning is the most powerful route to competence development and innovation in the workplace. But informal learning means trusting employees - trusting employees to usefully use their time, trusting employees to make decision, trusting employees to try out new ideas.

The public sector is probably the worst place for trust. In many organizations public sector workers are not even entitled to send emails without prior approval. Supervision rules. Why? The work culture of the public sector is still all too often rooted in Fordist ideas of production. Knowledge is carefully filtered and controlled. Strict hierarchies prevail.

I ‘m not sure even researchers and those who defend the workers get it. From the same article: “Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, said that managers should be realistic. “Britain has some of the longest working hours in the developed world. Employers have created this culture. It is natural for people to have to use work computers for organising their personal life.”

Of course I agree with him. But that is not the point. Social networking is not just about organising ones social life. I certainly do not go to Facebook to arrange to meet my friends in the pub.

Social networking can be about spreading and sharing ideas, solving problems, forming and participating in communities of practice. And to all of you who say I am not being real, I suggest you study how people really use the internet n companies. Most people like to learn, they enjoy learning. Learning is a natural human activity. How sad we are so suspicious of it.

I could not agree more!

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This video comes from Dr Andy Oliver, a member of the Flickr Classroom Displays group, via another more distant member of my network - Jen’s new Ning group, for professional development in her college. Real people using the power of Web2.0 and seeing its value for their own development not just as ’something to use with students.’ Good stuff!

I’m having one of my more connected phases thanks to the power of Twitter. This is where the network really shines and the dots connect themselves.

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Chris Lott is blogging about his approach to running a pre conference� session on Web 2.0 tools. He’s distilled his points down to a really good list I think. He’s put his materials online too, which is becoming the norm now. I get quiet grumpy when people don’t these days! His last point is very strong and put a bit more directly than you usually see but I really couldn’t agree more.

Ruminate Blog Archive Web 2.0 Tools for Education
If only one point sticks, I hope it was/is the last one.

1. Learning emerges from community, which is based on conversation.
2. Online community demands from its participants skills that come from the triad of information fluency: content, critical thinking, and participation/presentation.
3. Blogs are the place to start because they are the most portable, can fill-in for more specialized apps in a pinch, and help put in place valuable general practices� but you can�t approach them half-heartedly. You have to get all connected to all, make use of syndication and aggregation of content and comments, and push practice.
4. Teach your students how to contribute� passivity leads to failure because there will be no positive network effects.
5. Wikis work in particular ways that most educators don’t understand because they mistake presentation-based activities for collaborative ones, and they’ve learned how wikis work by outliers like Wikipedia.
6. Synchronous chat and backchannel activities can, as counterintuitive as it seems, lead to higher comprehension and enhanced participation.
7. Twitter is not just a useful tool for participating in a fun conversation of peers, but a direct test of whether one has really made the transition to information like water.
8. Student resistance to technology is mostly a mask that obscures the real reason for resistance: students aren’t used to being challenged. Participating and being a social learner is a rich experience that demands activity something a lot of students are unused to.
9. If you don’t walk the walk and use these tools yourself to create and participate in your own personal learning network, then don’t bother trying to use them in your classroom.

Interestingly enough, Chris is someone else I discovered via Twitter. Good stuff

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