How well are we doing in education?

Learning to change, changing to learn

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and the Pearson Foundation announced the official launch of a new public service announcement (PSA), Learning to change, changing to learn. This five minute video shares the views of an international panel of key educators and thought leaders including Education.au CEO Greg Black.

Once again you may not be able to view it at school. Let me know how you fare.



This veritable who’s who of educational thinkers (Keith Kruger, Greg Whitby, Greg Black, Julie Evans, Stephen Heppell, Yong Zhao, Barbara Nelson, Cheryl Lemke, Susan Patrick, Chris Dede, Karen Greenwood Henke, Deborah Baker, Daniel Pink, and Ken Kay) are all asking what learning in the 21st century should look like.

Educators won't be able to watch this video

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has extended an invitation via YouTube http://youtube.com/futureinternet for people to ask questions and share ideas on the future of the Internet ahead of its conference in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008.

education.au CEO Greg Black has made the following submission of behalf of education.au. Titled Educators won't be able to watch this video, Greg poses a challenge to the conference delegates regarding the barriers teachers and students face in using web-based tools.

So you may not be able to see this video in your workplace.

Leave me a note to say where you watched it.

Adding a Podcast

I've taken the easy way out here and subscribed to Odiogo.
What that does is automatically add a computer generated "podiocast" capability to each of my posts, so that people can hear the post being read. Admittedly there are some quirks: the voice is American, and if you have URLs it tends to read them letter by letter, but in general it works well enough. You need to check your spelling carefully though, and put full stops and commas in so that it punctuates verbally. Otherwise you get run on sentences.

I have been using it successfully over on my other blog Mysteries in Paradise for some weeks now. What I have found is that although it has only been there a couple of weeks, you can access the podiocast on each of the posts in the archive. Occasionally it does take a while for the audio to become available, but usually it comes up within 15 minutes of the post being published. Visually impaired friends have reported that it makes "reading" my blogs much easier.

In order to use it you have to have "ownership" of the blog. So for example, I can't add it to my education.au blog because my status is sort of "sub-domain blogger". Nor can I add it to my me.edu.au blog, for the same reason.

The other thing that I've discovered is that you can save the file as an mp3 onto your computer for using elsewhere. So I am using them as part of a presentation that I am giving at a workshop in Darwin this week.