Music seems to be a bit of a theme on the blog at the moment. An old friend from Ultraversity days, Sarah Hackett, got in touch recently to tell me about her new venture. Sarah did some fine research (First Class in fact!) for her final year project on using Moodle and video coaching to work with groups learning folk fiddle. If you are going to TeachMeet08 North East London edition you might be lucky enough to hear her talk about it.

Her new venture takes that work and extends it out to a wider audience:

Folk Fiddle lessons online

Learn OnLine 4 life and Laugh Out Loud 4 Life
Learn Folk Fiddle tunes by ear and and improve your aural skills, memory, musicianship, awareness of harmony, violin technique, appreciation of musical form and structure, and enjoy practical application making sense of music theory in a logical way. Most importantly though - have a great deal of fun and get involved in a really sociable activity!

Sarah’s work is always innovative and interesting. She provides a flavour of what people can expect:

A free course of online lessons

I have posted videos for the tune Trip To Matlock that you can access without charge so that you will be able to get an idea of what to expect.

Please would you give a donation to one of the charities suggested in the Trip to Matlock News Forum for the use of these videos. There is no need to sign in - just click on the blue i button to find out how to access.

The site is great for individuals or could be used by schools groups. Sarah’s charges are very reasonable and you’d certainly be getting expert coaching.

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Friday was Work Your Proper Hours Day and the TUC issued this report to go with it.

Trades Union Congress

It looked at variety of professions, 3 guesses which one worked the most unpaid hours:

• Value of unpaid overtime per employee £12,009
• Value on unpaid overtime per profession £7,348(millions)
• Percentage doing unpaid overtime 52.4%
• Average hours of unpaid overtime 11.2

Yep - teachers
So even with the reforms in the workplace, the 24 (or is it 25?) tasks, the Well Being Programmes, and the rest, teachers are still working more longer hours than they are paid. This even takes into account the ‘holidays’ and ‘early finishing’ that people are often so envious of!

What About Teaching Assistants?

I couldn’t find any figures for teaching assistants but I suspect it is vastly more than even teachers! It’s easy to see how a culture has grown up in schools where the teachers are not expected to make a fuss if they work unpaid hours and so they in turn just expect the TAs to do the same. They often forget that TAs are not paid for any hours they don’t have in their contracts, so no paid lunchtime, no paid holidays, and a very low hourly rate.

Not that TAs do themselves any favours. I’ve known people whose hours were cut because of budget issues carry on working.

“because if I don’t there will be no one there to run X for the children”

(OK, I confess - I was that loony!)

Early on in my time as a TA someone told me that schools run on the goodwill of teachers, TAs and the other support staff. I suspect that’s very true. People chose to work in schools in part because they care about children and their education and the institution relies on that.

Now we are expecting education workers to use even more of their ’spare time’ learning about internet technologies and undertaking informal CPD. It’s only going to work if they can see it as a way of eventually reducing those 11+ extra hours a week, not just another burden.

How are we going to do this? Ideas on a postcard please or better yet you could leave a comment below

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This scriptlet can display not only a flickr photo in a web pages or blog articles, but also the notes.This means you can embed a flickr photo with its notes in your own website. Just mouse over the image to reveal the note.

There’s a handy bookmarklet to pop on your toolbar. This means you can just generate the code whilst you are looking at images in Flickr & then nip into the blog, switch to code view & paste it in. Cool or what?
Don’t forget to only use Creative Commons images though or you might run into copyright issues.

See a more detailed use over on Classroom Displays

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I’ve been thinking today, in between lots of other bits of work, about the need to widen my network. I want to start to link up with other bloggers working in Further Education, particularly in the UK. Most of the people I already read are classroom teachers or edubloggers whose main concerns are the teaching of children. I won’t stop reading them of course but I’d like to find some new contacts who are working with adults. Trouble is I’m a bit baffled as to how to do it.

My network of people I read and sometimes interact more directly with grew up dynamically over the last 3 or 4 years. I must have gone looking for people at the start but mostly I just found them from other people’s blogrolls. It’s the same with Twitter. I just added people I saw other people following who looked interesting.

So where to start? Technorati seems like an obvious place. They’ve got a search button and they use lots of tagging. But what to search for? I tried “informal learning uk” as a starting point - I’m not too hopeful, might just link here lol!

Ah - well there’s Ewan of course And quite a few KM (Knowledge Management) bloggers but nothing obviously relevant.

So I tried GNVQ - none

Erm - Further Education UK?

• eew an Official Microsoft blog which hasn’t updated for 88 days. I suppose I ought to subscribe, I do have to use windoze at work
• Going through the Phases might be interesting, not a tutor though. More ICT stuff probably isn’t what I need. Might be fun though.
• EducationState - Promises:

  An alternative and critical view of UK education news, policy and issues and a fly-on-the-wall insight into the day-to-day running of educational institutions.

  But it has a baffling theme, still I won’t notice that in my rss reader and the posts look controversial & interesting I’m starting to feel better!

• AoC NILTA Aha - Josie Fraser, she’s usually worth reading Oh, Josie is listed as one of the authors in Technorati but she doesn’t appear on the “Who we are” page. The writing looks a bit dull but I’ll put it in my ‘on probation’ folder & subscribe anyway.

Everything else is either dead or totally corporate Where am I going to find ordinary FE tutors who love blogging and want to use Web2.0 with their students to read?

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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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I found Jennifer’s blog because she started following me on Twitter. I’ve been using Twitter for a while but mostly to follow people I’ve had contact with on or off line. I’ve started to see how it can become more useful today. It’s partly because I now use Twitterific so it sits on my desktop the whole time and takes no effort to update/ read updates. Now some of the stuff is undoubtedly trivia but I’ve started to think there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just like a quick chat with someone from another department you vaguely know that you might have in the lift. It makes the day more friendly, helps you feel rooted. Now that’s important stuff in this online world! Anyway, by looking at who she follows on Twitter I found lots of other interesting edtech people and expanded my network. Then I looked at their blogs and found some really good stuff So that’s my feed reader full, again!

One of the most interesting things Jennifer had to say, (apart from the fact that Twitter got her a job!) was this:

injenuity

What if we could increase the size of �The Network� ten fold. There are about 100 or so active ed techies in the network putting in more than a full day�s work of discovery every day. That�s certainly not enough people to stimulate change in educating our children or our workforce.What if, instead of discovering new tools, for one day we discover ten more people to add to the network. Do we really need a hundred social networking tools? Would we be better off with a hundred new techie teachers?

Answers on a postcard

If anyone wants to add me on Twitter I’m lindiop - don’t be shy

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Classroom Displays � Environment Display - Antarctica

I’ve been blogging about the environment over at the Classroom Displays Blog because today is Blog Action Day

Today�s classroom display has an environmental theme in honour of Blog Action Day. I love this project which was done as part of the International Polar Year .

Dee, the teacher writes:

I began with a classroom standard, a KWL chart. On the KWL chart, students first listed what they knew (K) about Antarctica. Next, they listed questions they wanted (W) answered. Eventually, they would list what they learned (L) on the last part of the chart. The students asked some very good questions. Where do icebergs come from? What do blue whales eat in the waters surrounding Antarctica? How tall are emperor penguins? How did Shackleton and his men survive being trapped in ice? Why don�t fish freeze in the cold waters? What�s on the ocean floor? These were just a few of the questions they listed.

This was such a great project I’d been waiting for a good excuse to write about it and this seemed an ideal opportunity. If you are at all interested check out the post for more details of their classroom field trip and how it came to life for them because of an expedition blog.

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When I started blogging the Blogroll in the sidebar was a vital part of building a blog community. I’d add bloggers who became friends or I’d found interesting and hope that people reading my blog would find it useful for discovering new blogs to read. I’d trawl through other people’s blog rolls for the same reason. If someone made a comment it seemed only polite to add them to my blog roll and hope that they’d do the same for you. If you used one service to produce your blog roll you could even see when friends had updated their blogs. I like the personal touch of adding and the feeling of sharing favourites. I used to have my ‘furl’ (or del.icio.us) there too so I could share what I’d found as well.

Recently people have been suggesting it’s best to ‘de-clutter’ your sidebar, reduce your blog roll, worry less about building reciprocal links, or providing a ‘discovery’ service to your readers, and more about search engine optimisation. I’m slightly seduced by this. In practice I discovered from my stats not that many visitors use the blogroll as an exit point on this blog. The feelings of community that it used to engender seem to have been a bit of an illusion. The only really strong thing about it is that it is a hand-picked set of links. I made these choices, these are blogs that I think it’s important to connect to but they are all in my RSS reader so it’s not so vital to me have them here too. In the end it’s a sort of courtesy to leave the links there.

My BlogLog is also in my sidebar and it’s quite different. These are the readers of the blog, or at least, those that belong to MyBlogLog. I didn’t choose them - they chose me. I have no control over them and they may or may not have blogs with relevent content that other readers might find useful. Mostly, I think, the widget in the sidebar is for my benefit. It lets me see who is looking at the blog and sometimes I do find new blogs that way. Unlike Andy, I don’t think much of the stats it produces and find Statcounter much more useful.

BlogRush is a new blog promotion widget for the sidebar that just started yesterday. You can scroll down and have a look at mine. You’ll see that it displays 5 headlines from other ‘related’ blogs. I’m having a few problems with this. Firstly you ascribe a category to your blog, I chose ‘education’ . The headlines that appear in the widget should be from other blogs that also categorise themselves as ‘education’. A quick glance at the first results showed mostly blogs trying to sell software, loans or ‘other things’ to students. I quickly went back to the control panel of Blogrush and added some keywords to filter out. This sort of worked, some of the more obvious spammy sites went but it didn’t filter out the word ‘loans’. Hmm.

This could be a nice ‘discovery’ tool but there are other problems, not just its roots in marketting. It’s got an inbuilt bias towards already popular blogs. Everyone who signs up via a link in your blog like this one BlogRush adds points to your blog and it is by earning these points that you end up in the widget on other people’s blogs. It seems likely that this will just exagerate the power curve and the big blogs will just get even more traffic. Early adopters are in with a chance and might do well at increasing their targetted traffic at first, though, because of the viral nature of the thing as it spreads through the blogosphere.
Anyway, I’m trying it out for one month from today so if you do have any thoughts on the matter perhaps you’d let me know in the comments.

Sign up for Blogrush to try it out yourself.

Via Andy

Update - checking all the blogs currently in the widget not one has the widget code enabled in their sidebar!! Which is another way to use it I guess!

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