I do not usually write ranting blog posts, but today here is an exception.

As many of you know I have been travelling around and spending a huge proportion of my life at conferences lately.  This has enabled me to have some amazing conversations with some absolutely brilliant educators.  One such educator pointed out the concern that we are talking to each other in an echo chamber where agreement has the potentials to curb change and community.  This statement had me thinking and to be honest this is the 6Th time I have tried to write this post but thought it best to get it off my chest !  It may not be the views of my own echo chamber but hey I have never been the shy one !

We need to stop creating buzzwords such as elearning and eteaching as they are no longer relevant in our schools.  Computers and technology have been around long enough.  We need to move beyond this speciality paradigm and move into powerful learning and teaching.  I see a real danger in the titles such as elearning integrator and epotential.  Whilst we still continue to view ourselves as a speciality with specific skills we will never have integration into our classrooms where it is needed to benefit students.  I was one of these people butting my head against the wall two years ago trying to understand why people did not integrate technology,  I had to change my tact and look at it from a student perspective.  I ran student roundtables and asked them what they would like in regards to powerful learning ( I never mentioned eteaching or elearning) and our students wrote about how they learn best.  They wrote about the use of images, multimedia, web and how they can get answers but do not know how to distill or make sense of this information overload.  There was also a huge push for content creation instead of passive dictation and exercises.  These students never mentioned that they wanted more elearning in their classrooms and the teachers couldn’t help but rub it in when it wasn’t mentioned.

However it didn’t bother me in the slightest as these students articulated what powerful learning was for them and as a school and as teachers we responded.  We reevaluated where our goals were.  We had to change the goal which said “we want to integrate more technology” to “we want to teach powerful inline with our students needs”  elearning was a term no longer used in the middle years at our school and the pressure was off and the power boundaries changed as well.  Reflection time was an essential part of every class and teachers developed goals with the students for the next lesson.  Teachers did have to integrate technology but it was from the students needs, each class had student mentors who assisted in making powerful learning possible with a multitude of technologies.  As a group we had moved beyond teachers always having to know the how and the what but assisting with the why ! All this without elearning or eteaching? Who would of thought?

We offer all these buzzwords and terms which allow us to drift from our main purpose in schools which is to teach, scaffold, faciltate and reflect to ensure powerful learning.  Teachers all around the world are using these buzzwords as excuses for ignoring the fact that the use of ICT as a learning environment is powerful learning.  I am not saying we need to withdraw all support but we do need to shift the paradigm so that buzzwords are no longer used to ignore meeting the needs of every student in our schools.

I asked some of my Personal Learning Network in twitter about this conundum and these were their reponses:

Now I would love to hear from other people in regards to their thoughts on whether elearning and eteaching are still relevant in our schools?

Apologies for the rant !

L

The last two weeks I have felt like I have not stopped, been at conference after conference. The learning has been amazing. I have met some of my geek heroes and shared drinks and great conversation with them, most of all I learnt heaps and was stimulated to learn more. This was all done via technology, I met these people face to face for the first time over the last fortnight but felt like I knew quite a bit already through my e-network. My enetwork is my online personal learning network. The people in my enetwork are found via blogs, twitter, secondlife and various other networking sites. These applications are making me more human not less, I am out meeting and having some of the most powerful conversations in my life thanks to these networks.

So who have I met? and why was it so powerful ?
- Dr Michelle Sellinger: We had a great discussion on the advent of mlearning and the implications it has for multimedia content creation in the classroom. We spoke about how linking mlearning and elearning together we can collaborate, connect and create with greater ease than ever before
-Al Upton: I feel like I already knew Al before I got to South Australia, he is my neighbour in second life. I learnt again not so much from the content of his presentations but the way he presented making sure all voices were heard and everyone were actively part of the moment.
-KerryJ what a woman with passion and knowledge ! I never knew this time last year I would have met such a dynamic person with great knowledge of copyright and creative commons and life through secondlife. Kerry organised dinner for a group of us and we had an absolute ball and have made connections and conversations that may have the possibilities for collaborations in time.
-Others: Over the time I had amazing conversations and reflected what a small world we live in and how much we need networks so that learning is not a one sided process.

So from these connections where to for me? I have set some goals based on the learning’s from people and thought it best to print them for the world to see :
-Be more present and treasure each moment you have when working with people.
-Listen more, people have amazing knowledge to impart but I am sometimes too busy talking to ever hear it
-Have fun, I am only 28 and don’t need to be the best at everything being where I am means I always have somewhere to go and always have something new to learn

So my question to my network is:
Where can we take these conversations?
How can we collaborate?
How can we further connect to ensure future learning?

Google likes to have its fingers in many pies as we all know, they have google docs, spreadsheets, pictures, video and maybe even toilet paper but I haven’t had that in my inbox as yet.

Now they have launched Lively which is a virtual world. Lively, which Google likes to call a “virtual experience,” allows users to create an avatar, decorate your own virtual room, invite friends to your room and do things you’ve always wanted to do, like increase your bust size and lose through few stray kilograms.

It looks kind of like a dumbed down version of  Second Life without the commerce and user created community aspect. One of the biggest pluses for Lively is that it is on the Web, embeddable on your own site, rather than parallel to it as a separate, private world — although you do have to download a small browser plugging to participate. For now, it’s only for Windows which means for me a pretty big downside as I am predominantly a Mac user.  It of course links in with all the other Google suite of products so you can have youtube clips showing in your lively room as well as your picasa pics up on the wall.

So will this mean that I am no longer considered a nerd for loving Second Life and that my facebook friends will suddenly understand why throwing penguins is fun and therapeutic in Second Life?

I am not convinced

There seems to be a big difference between a virtual 3d chat room and a user created community like Second Life.  I am interested in hearing other peoples thoughts on the applications of Lively in education and business.  The opportunities for teachers to embed 3d virtual private conversation spaces onto their class blogs seems to me to be the biggest draw card for this new application.   I would love to hear other peoples views, ideas on Lively !

I have posted googles promo video below for you to look at !

I found this video on Fulltimecasuals blog and it really made me reflect on the discussions we have been having at Oz/NZ educators and through twitter on copyright and intellectual property.  I think it is a great conversation started and would love people to add their comments below.