Holidays.... and learners inheriting the earth

Well, you can tell the last week of term went by in a gallop!  Not a peep from this direction - too busy with everything else!

Also, I do love the tentacle in the last blog entry.  So very much.

A bonbon to leave with you to tide you over till the holidays end.




Will Richardson at TEDxNY in March 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni75vIE4vdk

A screenshot of my favourite slide from his presentation: a quote I was using years ago, and which still (despite all that has changed) applies.

If you're on holidays too, enjoy.  If not, we will for you.  Ain't that kind?!

Cheers

Ruth

NSW public schools resume on the Wednesday after Easter for teachers, and the Thursday for students.

How to learn? from mistakes (Diana Laufenberg)

To start the new school year*, an inspirational TED talk about teaching



Her three key points (and please do watch the video, don't just clock these and click on in your travels - it's a great ten minutes) are:

• experiental learning
• student voice
• embracing failure

Page URL if the video doesn't work for you:
http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html

Cheers

Ruth

*Yes, the Australian school year follows the calendar - we've just finished our summer holidays and are back for a new school year.

Heads-up! TedXSydney this weekend.

If you don't know about TED, you should.  If you want to experience TED, TEDXSydney is on this weekend - you can go to the Carriageworks, or view the live webstream.  Brief talks on a fascinating range of subjects from an extraordinary range of speakers.

TedXSydney has the program and all you need to know.  If you want a flavour of TED, click on the TED tag at the end of this blog entry for some earlier entries where I've highlighted TED resources for schools.

Cheers

Ruth

TED Tuesday: a different view

Instead of listening to a TED talk today, go and look at their website.

http://www.ted.com/

The access you have is either through a list of themes, or a 'visualisation'.

I don't have the answers, yet; still thinking. But I wonder how that style of presenting information is something we should be considering in relation to how we teach, how our libraries are organised, how we are communicating with our students.

For now, I don't know how to program such a layout/format, but that's not really the point.

Many teachers came through our own education in the linear, text-based age (I was chuckling last week when our school internet cable had been damaged, and there was no internet at all for two days till it was repaired - ye gods, how DID we all manage to get an education without the net???) and yet our students operate in a world that also includes hypertext and the visual in ways that we, too, need to incorporate into the learning environments we create, to engage them where they're at and bring them along on this educational journey.

TED Tuesday: Goodbye textbooks; hello open source learning

From the TED online archive of talks, Richard Baraniuk on: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning




To quote from the TED website:

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

TED Tuesday: Our cellphones, ourselves

From the TED resource of online talks, Jan Chipchase on the many possibilities of cellphones (mobile phones):





To quote from the TED website:

Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way.

TED Tuesday: Redefining the dictionary.

From the TED resource of online talks, Erin McKean talks about the paper dictionary in the internet age.



To quote from the TED website:

Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? When does a made-up word become real? And could you use "synecdochical" in a sentence, please? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways in which today's print dictionary is poised for transformation in this internet era.

TED Tuesday: From 1984, four predictions about the future

From the TED resource of online talks, one from 1984, in which Nicholas Negroponte discusses convergence in technology.



To quote from the TED website:

Speaking at the first TED Conference in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte waxes prophetic on the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word "convergence," Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the "electronic books of the future" and computers as the future of education. In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this was before TED's 18-minute time limit), he foreshadowed CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Oh, and there's also a fascinating project called Lip Service, which, well, let's just say it's still ahead of us ...

TED Tuesday: 18 minutes with an agile mind

From the TED resource of online talks: Clifford Stoll, 18 minutes with an agile mind.




To quote from the TED description:

Clifford Stoll could talk about the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or hunting KGB hackers. Or Klein bottles, computers in classrooms, the future. But he's not going to. Which is fine, because it would be criminal to confine a man with interests as multifarious as Stoll's to give a talk on any one topic. Instead, he simply captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides -- and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he's a scientist: "Once I do something, I want to do something else."

Technology, Entertainment, Design: resource of online talks

Sourced from Ali Edwards' blog (her entry is here), I found Technology, Entertainment, Design.
To quote from the TED site:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free.

Click here to go to the TED site and explore an extraordinary range of talks to see and hear, online. For example: Sir Ken Robinson on "Do schools kill creativity?"



which is part of the theme How We Learn.

It's the kind of place where individual teachers should explore to see what they can find for their subject areas and interests. The A-Z list of themes (each theme has a number of talks) is a good place to start.

Each Tuesday on this blog, I'll highlight a different talk from this amazingly rich resource. They'll all be labelled with the tag TED, so you can look at them at a group if you wish.