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Mark Boyle

edublogs: Angela McFarlane @ BLC07: Why do we build communities? - 0 views

  • I think eduBuzz.org has helped create not just this, but far more in terms of explicit reflection that wasn't there before. I'm wondering whether reflection is, in fact, a personal, private thing rather than a community issue, since often the community at large may not choose to be 'interested' in what you have to say. Take live blog posts, for example, written for the author more than the audience. The biggest problem of online communities, and we've seen this, too, in East Lothian and eduBuzz.org, is that novices in particular find it hard to filter information. Angela says that the problem is one students have, but so many of our teachers and managers also have trouble filtering what is important, what is of interest and might be important, what is of interest but might be a waste of time, and what is of no interest at all, personal or professional. Teachers and students are guilty of not knowing how to question the authority of an information source, other than to say blogs must be relatively poor quality and the BBC must be of relatively high quality (both, of course, had had their moments). And again, not just students but for many teachers, too, it is not cool to have an extensive vocabulary to express oneself. We see a resistance in students to use words to say how they are feeling beyond 'good', 'bad' and fine (and I'd be advocating the use of sites like We feel fine to both educate our students and help counter this claim to some extent), and we also see resistance from some teachers to use a more extensive vocabulary to think about teaching and learning. Finally, both teachers and students, because we over test, tend to not want to do anything that doesn't fit into the test. We cut and paste without engaging with material, we can take tests but cannot learn.
    • Mark Boyle
       
      From Diigo
Tony Searl

SocialTech: Online Educa Berlin 2010 Keynote: Building Networked Learning Environments - 2 views

  • what constitutes digital literacy or digital literacies, should, in symmetry with the subject itself, not be perceived as a problem we aim to solve, or a thing we aim to determine once and for all.
  • At some point, we need to agree actions.
  • What I’m interested in is supporting the skills and critical thinking about educational engagement in networked environments, and particularly in how educators and learners can use these to support and transfigure existing practice.
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  • Supporting or learners and staff to use collaborative digital environments and tools in safe, critical and innovative ways should be on the top of all our digital literacy wish lists and informing local and national policy and practice.
  • We need to be mindful that a great deal of current research highlights correlations between socio economic status and access.
  • But supporting all of our children and young people’s ability to have meaningful, useful and safe online interactions means that we don’t further disadvantage some of our most vulnerable populations.
  • It turns out what people most want to know about their friends isn't how they imagine themselves to be, but what it is they are actually getting up to and thinking about
  • Recent research has clearly underlined the need to address children’s and young people’s use of the internet, mobile and games technologies in the context of digital literacy.
  • The report points up young people’s largely pedestrian use of technology, and highlights the role that educators could and should be playing in supporting young peoples engagement as producers, creators, curators rather than primarily as consumers:
  • There are many definitions of digital literacy. In one of the earliest (2006), Allan Martin defined Digital Literacy as “…the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.” 
  • The characteristics across many of the available definitions are that digital literacy are that: it supports and helps develop traditional literacies – it isn’t about the use of technology for it’s own sake or ICT as an isolated practice it's a life long practice – developing and continuing to maintain skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices it's about skills and competencies, and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied it's about social engagement – collaboration, communication, and creation within social contexts
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    reducing our aims just to types of skills risks boring everyone to death with short lived, tool specific training which doesn't address the social and political context of people's lives or their reasons for engaging with technology.
Nigel Coutts

Encouraging Metacognition for Learning - 0 views

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    A critical component of learning is the ability to reflect on one's learning and the processes that occur while we are engaged in learning. If we are to develop independent, empowered learners then we need to build the skills required for metacognition both directly through the provision of suitable strategies and indirectly via the modeling of effective learning that we provide.
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