Jan
7
This is the tale of dealing with the frustration of an intermittent WiFi connectivity issue and finding a solution.
It’s almost 5 years since we moved into our present house. Because I had been experimenting with WiFi Internet sharing using my iMac as a base station in our previous house I was confident we would manage networking without cables in the new house. Shortly after we moved in I signed up for ADSL broadband and hooked up a Belkin ADSL modem-router which worked well for sharing the connection with the laptop my wife used from toward the back of the house.
Just more than 3 years ago we moved my wife to an Intel Core Duo Mac Mini that allowed her to run some Windows embroidery software using Parallels. Its WiFi connection to the Internet via the Belkin router worked well until a few months ago when it began to occasionally drop, or not make, its connection.
I tinkered with it, as we do, and noticing the presence of other WiFi networks in the neighbourhood, surmised that there might be interference. Using CoconutWiFi I was able to see that at least some of the time one or other of the other networks was on the same channel so I tried selecting and locking to a different channel.
The intermittent connectivity problems continued and appeared to be getting worse so in the week between Christmas and New Year I decided it was time to find a solution. I also decided that it was time I implemented WPA security rather than relying entirely on filtering by MAC address – effective for keeping interlopers out but inconvenient when adding guests.
I began by confirming with my iPhone and laptop that I had plenty of signal at the mac Mini and beyond. That should have told me something about the nature of the problem. If some devices could connect from the troublesome location and beyond it was unlikely that interference or signal strength could be the problem.
Confident that I had signal, I implemented WPA security and managed to get everything, including the Airport Express on the stereo system back on the network and operating. The Mini had intermittent problems with connecting at all or getting other than a self-assigned address from the DHCP server. My iPhone and iPod Touch had similar problems so I recalled that I had read that cycling power and creating a new network could fix such problems. I shut everything down and brought them up with a different name and passkey on the network. The problems persisted.
I tried moving the Mini closer to the base station. That worked sometimes, mostly when it had been off for a while, but not at other times. At one point I had it sitting beside the base station and unable to see the signal and connect. I began to think that the airport card might have a fault, possibly temperature related. Short of buying a replacement computer – likely to happen in 2010 but not yet – I needed some way to get a WiFi connection to the Mini without using the internal airport card (or paying to replace it). Searches of the likely producers of alternative WiFi cards with USB connections came up blank – at least for devices with easy to install Mac drivers.
I played briefly with the Airport Express but discovered it would not do the necessary bridging to the Mini ethernet port. However, in my searching I came across some mention of ProxySTA using the newer 802.11n version of the Airport Express. That, and an Airport Extreme for the near end, gave me the solution I needed. The Belkin box is now functioning as a simple ADSL modem with PPPoE and DHCP handled by the Airport Extreme. Moving to N should increase range and the Airport Extreme is dual band which allows for additional flexibility down the track. The fix cost me more than I would have preferred but at least the extra pieces of equipment represent an upgrade to the home network and should be useful for the next several years regardless of what eventually replaces the Mini.
Oct
1
Digital Literacy
Filed Under E-learning, General, Teacher Education
At the 29 July meeting of Academic Board there was discussion of a proposal to change the document describing qualities of a USQ graduate to include mention of digital literacy. I remember the discussion clearly because there was a proposal that digital literacy be replaced by technological literacy, against which I spoke on the basis of technological literacy having a well established meaning, at least for technology educators and some engineers. The concept was one of the mainstays of the technology education course I taught from 2002 until 2005 and will emerge again when a similar course is offered from 2011.
Some members of Academic Board appeared to struggle with the meanings and distinction because they were, until then, unfamiliar with the terms which were not well defined in the proposal. The proposal was passed and digital literacy is now among the qualities expected of a USQ graduate but it seems likely that many of those who will be required to ensure the quality is developed may be unclear about what it is they are facilitating.
A document that I came across today via the Sixty Seconds newsletter from education.au provides a useful definition of digital literacy and more. Hague and Williamson (2009) “use the term digital literacy to refer to the skills, knowledge and understanding that are required for digital participation” (p. 4). Although the document is pitched at digital literacy in school education it does provide some useful starting points for discussion, including a model of the processes that might be required for learners to demonstrate digital literacy through communication and enquiry.
Reference
Hague, C., & Williamson, B. (2009). Digital participation, digital literacy, and school subjects: A review of the policies, literature and evidence. Bristol, UK: Futurelab. Retrieved September 30, 2009, from http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/lit_reviews/DigitalParticipation.pdf
May
22
A couple of weeks ago, not long after the release of the Queensland Education Performance Review, I was engaged in conversation with some colleagues about the recommendations in the report. As teacher educators we shared concerns about the capabilities of some graduates and, while we recognise the problems inherent in graduating teachers with deficiencies in literacy, numeracy and science, we are sensitive to the implications of testing for registration, including that teacher education programs are somehow failing to ensure the quality of graduates.
One of my recollections of my first years of teaching in Queensland secondary schools is of sharing a staff room with a senior, in both years and level of teaching, English teacher who was widely respected by students, parents and colleagues. This was a woman who had started her career as a pupil teacher in the days before teachers’ colleges, when teacher preparation was a matter of apprenticeship to a master teacher. One of the things that had surprised me about her was her forthright admission that she had a problem with spelling. Her solution was to ensure that she was never far from her dictionary. Knowing that she had a problem and taking steps to deal with it appropriately meant that it was seldom, if ever, an issue in class.
As I recalled this in the context of talking about the qualities of graduates from our teacher education programs, it occurred to me that possibly the greater risk attached not to graduating teachers who might be unsure of their knowledge but in graduating teachers who, despite deficiencies in their knowledge, were confident that they knew their subject well. That brought to mind a statement that is often a subject of mirth, even ridicule, but which contains some important grains of truth:
as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. (Donald Rumsfeld)
Perhaps it is the “unknown unknowns” that should cause us most concern in the preparation of teachers. As a teacher of chemistry in schools, despite having several years of university study of chemistry culminating in a masters degree, I was seldom prepared to face a class without brushing up my knowledge to ensure I was comfortably on top of the topic of the day. As a principal and parent what concerned me most was not a teacher who may have had some uncertainty and made sure to get things right, but those who exuded ill-founded confidence and shared their ignorance with their class.
In the information age, when the available information on almost any subject is expanding at a rate much faster than we could hope to absorb it and much of it is almost instantly available at the touch of the screen on a handheld device, why should we assume that teachers need to know everything about their subject? Might we be better served by teachers with good basic skills, the humility to admit their ignorance of much beyond the range of everyday use, and the skills to seek out and critically apply the knowledge available on the networks?
May
13
Late last Friday afternoon I received an offer that I found difficult to refuse. One of our Faculty members had been participating in a trial of tablet computers, primarily for marking electronic assessment submissions, but was struggling to find the time to fully participate in the trial and decided to opt out. Suddenly the Faculty had a ’spare’ tablet computer from the trial and wanted to pass it to somebody who might be expected to use it. That somebody was me.
I’m not a tablet computer ‘true believer’. I have serious doubts that it is worth spending roughly twice the money on a tablet for no real gain for what I consider ‘normal’ use and a considerable loss for a Mac user. In fact I recently commented elsewhere on a post by another participant in the trial, in relation to online marking with a tablet computer:
I’m not sure that I’d like using a Tablet PC (even if that PC were a Mac
). I’ve always had an aversion to people touching computer screens and leaving greasy finger marks and for a long time I used a fountain pen in preference to a ballpoint because I liked writing with something that had sufficient friction for me to feel confident the tip would not slip all over.
Then again, I really do like using my iPhone and have learned to look past the greasy finger marks. I also used a Palm with a stylus for several years and found that easy enough to adapt to. Perhaps I need to try doing something with a Tablet PC and see how that works out but the tools I have been using for the past few years seem to work for me and inertia is strong.
The tablet trial is being run by Birgit Loch as part of her USQ Teaching Fellowship. As part of that trial, those of us who are experimenting with tablets are expected to document our experience and share it with others involved in the project. There is a closed USQ space for that purpose but I figured I could post here and copy or link to get my thoughts into the ‘official’ space.
I spent an hour or so tinkering/playing with the tablet on Friday evening. The onboard help files were not all that helpful and, without administrator access (why do techs insist on setting things up like that?), I apparently could not install some online help that appeared in a search. A quick exchange of email with Birgit straightened me out on how to get the ‘digital ink’ flowing and I was able to scratch around in a test file.
The weekend and Monday were committed so it was Tuesday afternoon before I sat down in my office, transferred some downloaded student submissions from my Mac to the tablet, and proceeded to try my hand at marking. Because I had seen folk using tablets in ‘pad’ mode, once I had the files in place I rotated the screen and went to work with the stylus.
It took me longer than it would have with the keyboard and mouse to insert a new page at the end of the submission and insert a copy of my marking guide. Part of that was lack of familiarity with the Word 2007 interface (I use 2008 on my Mac), part was my usual awkwardness with Windows (it is not my Mac), and some was the trackpad (not a mouse). With a bit of exploration I was able to record a macro that automated the insertion of a marking guide at the end of subsequent submissions.
Working with the stylus was awkward enough but I found that, although I could enter text using the on-screen entry box or keyboard, I could not locate the inking controls that Brigit had helped with on Friday night. I resorted to using Google on my Mac to find instructions, but even when I found the controls to switch on inking I could not get it to work. After several attempts I opened the test file I’d used on Friday night and had no such difficulty there. Back in the student file ink would still not activate and I spent most of 30 minutes becoming increasingly frustrated. Eventually I tried a different student submission and found that ink worked immediately. Evidently the first file was different in some way. When I checked later with Birgit she had no explanation either. Most of the 27 submissions I had to work with had no problems but at least one more did. Apparently some DOCX files behave that way for no reason we could discern. Ultimately the fix for such files was simple – save in the older DOC format and get on with it.
After talking with Birgit I adjusted my approach to use the tablet in a normal laptop configuration, typing any larger blocks of comment and using the stylus with ink for less formal comments. Even then I found it awkward to write accurately and legibly with the stylus sliding on the surface and the calibration apparently not quite right. Part of that may be related to my inexperience with the equipment but I suspect it is inherent in the device. I worked through my 27 files reasonably quickly, though no more so than if I had used my usual techniques on the Mac and probably less legibly in places. Once they were done I transferred the files back to the Mac where I was able to upload in bulk to the assessment system.
What of the tablet and the headache? Based on this limited experience I don’t think it is going to cure any assessment headaches for me and, though on this occasion it did not cause me any real headache other than some brief frustration, I see no reason yet to move from my previous scepticism about tablets. Given a choice of spending the difference between the price of a decent Mac laptop and a tablet on something else I’m sure I’d find plenty of ways to spend the money on things that would do more for my productivity than a tablet.
May
11
Peter Sefton has posted an impassioned plea to Stop saying ‘Protect our IP’ in educational contexts? In essence I think I agree with all, certainly most, of what he wrote but I might press a few points further and saw a few things that provoked comment.
After a brief discussion of the idea of IP, he hones in on copyright as the core IP issue:
There are two main areas where I think copyright might be relevant:
- Copyright in our courseware.
- Copyright in any materials which we use to support delivery of educational services.
Though given that we not only teach, but teach teachers I guess the lines between those are somewhat blurry.
[Update: As soon as I posted this I realized there is a huge third category – copyright in learner-contributed material. If we wanted to be like FaceBook we could assert copyright over that but I don't think we would, would we?]
I have argued this week that one way to get benefit from our copyright is to license our materials under a creative commons license and let people use and adapt them, extending our commitment to Open Courseware.
There is no argument from me on the value of opening up access to our materials especially if we apply a CC licence (perhaps BY-NC-SA would be appropriate). That would be consistent with the USQ commitment to OpenCourseWare which was launched a couple of years ago with the required minimum of 10 courses but has not been extended or (in at least some cases) updated since then. It would also be consistent with a long time tendency of at least some USQ courses, open or not, to benefit from links to course materials produced by others. It would also recognise what has been evident since the OpenCourseWare movement began, that content is now widely available on the Internet and the real value offered by educational institutions is no longer in the content, if it ever really was, and is more in the interactions built around the content and the certification that may be offered.
I’ve argued recently against a model for production of course material that devalues the intellectual work entailed and may misrepresent authorship and dates of production. Treating content produced for courses as work of real value with proper attribution seems to be a preferable approach.
Apr
20
A little flakiness in KeyNote ‘09?
Filed Under MacOS
I’ve owned the past few versions of KeyNote (since it was first bundled in iWork) but I really have not used it seriously in that time. I had played with it occasionally but, mostly because our campus is resolutely Windows fixated and everybody expects to be able to view PowerPoint presentation files but cannot view KeyNote files, I had not attempted a presentation in KeyNote.
This time, because I was preparing an actual ‘keynote’ for an EdNA workshop (likely attendance of about 50, so no big deal) I thought I’d give KeyNote a whirl. It helped that I fancied myself controlling the presentation remotely from my iPhone. After all, what’s the point of having gadgets if you cannot show them off occasionally.
I’ve been using various versions of PowerPoint since about 1987 so I’m used to working its way. KeyNote is different enough that I struggled for a bit to get my head around it. Then I found that it has some nice features that do certain things better than PowerPoint – mostly that’s looking better. However, I found it more difficult to adjust to the outlining style and it is missing some of the nicer points of the most recent version of PowerPoint (2008) which has some very effective diagramming tools and easy to use themes that swap colours and fonts throughout. I have not yet found the equivalents for those in KeyNote – if they exist.
Wanting to play safe, before I got too far into developing my presentation I decided to export a copy to PowerPoint in case I needed to jump back to familiar territory. Oops! Export failed with an unknown error. I pressed on and completed the presentation file but this afternoon decided to have another run at producing a ’safety’ copy in PowerPoint. Export failed again.
Thinking that the problem might be with one or more of 3 short video clips I had embedded, I made a copy of the KeyNote file for experimentation and removed the 3 video clips. Export failed. I decided upon a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. I split the file into half and tried exporting each. The first half failed but the second half exported without problems. I split the first half and repeated the process until I had isolated the problem to a relatively simple slide with just 2 text boxes. I then tried versions with just one of the text boxes and found that one box appeared responsible for the problem. I reworked that piece of text, confirmed that it worked in my test file, and then replicated the fix in my presentation file. That version exported without error. If I need to use it I’ll have to hook in the video clips that were exported separately but I won’t do that unless I need to.
I really cannot imagine what it was about that simple text box that was causing a problem. I am pleased to have managed to repair it and complete the export using a simple problem solving technique. I’ll probably try KeyNote again if this presentation works well but I hope I don’t get a repeat of this export bug.
Apr
8
Of authorship and ownership
Filed Under E-learning, Teaching
I’ve written on this topic previously (Chance encounters, May 2005) but I’ve been building up to another shot for some time and events today finally brought me to tipping point.
This morning one of the members of our University committee that deals with our LMS passed on a copy of an EDUCAUSE report (Diaz, 2009). The committee chair later circulated it to the entire committee and a few others. Evidently he thought it was important.
This afternoon Academic Board discussed fleximode, the tag used to refer to the policy that provides for all students in a course, whether studying on campus or at a distance, to have access to all the materials and experiences offered to support learning in the course. The term is not well understood across the university and is sometimes thought to represent another distinct mode of study alongside the more established on campus, external (correspondence) and online modes. Part of that discussion related to the adoption, from the beginning of 2009, of ICE (Integrated Content Environment) as the official means for producing course materials that can be delivered as web pages, on CDROM or in print. I’ve written previously about ICE (Why does PT keep going on …, November 2005).
The events of today are the proximate cause of this post but the urge goes back to January and February of this year when I spent rather more time than I had expected revising materials for a course I am teaching this semester. The course had been first developed several years ago and had been taught serially by at least 4 full-time or casual staff faculty members each of whom would have had opportunity, though not necessarily time allocated, to revise the course materials. Being a good corporate citizen, I thought it was time that I tried using ICE (rather than my preferred web editor) to prepare the materials. The most recent version available in ICE was that which was used in 2007 and I began working with those files in the ICE template.
I was prepared for the inevitable broken links to web pages that had disappeared since the materials were prepared. I was even prepared for some outdated references, phrasing that sat awkwardly with me, and occasional fractured syntax. I was surprised when I found discussion of what might happen in the late 1990s expressed in the future tense. Evidently the revisions had not been as recent, frequent, or extensive as I had hoped. Rather than a few hours of light editing I found myself engaged in several days of more extensive revisions to get the materials into a shape that I could live with.
As a consequence of that experience, I am more than ever determined not to engage in a similar editing process again and to avoid allowing material I have written to be similarly revised. In my previous post (Chance encounters, May 2005) I described the commonly used approach to revision of course materials and its inherent problems. At Academic Board this afternoon I noted the potential for academics teaching courses using such revised materials to be either credited with excellent materials or burdened with the stigma of less exemplary materials for which they may bear little or no responsibility. The lack of clear identification of authors on course materials and the tendency to show the date of publication as the current year regardless of actual revision history could be interpreted as fraudulent. Far better would be a system that followed the regular conventions of academic work by clearly indicating the provenance of the materials. Dated materials should be supplemented or replaced by new material.
The paper (Diaz, 2009) circulated by my colleagues this morning looks at some issues around intellectual property associated with e-learning materials and the particular challenges posed by use of Web 2.0 tools. It is written from an institutional perspective and argues strongly for adopting strategies that ensure ownership of IP in e-learning materials is clearly vested in the institution and that materials are stored on institutional systems. The discussion at Academic Board touched on similar issues.
It seems clear to me that both the challenges and the potential solutions are likely to be similar across institutions. I’d argue strongly that, for the reasons I outlined above, at Academic Board, and elsewhere (Chance encounters, May 2005), dilution of authorship and incremental revision of materials as practised now and advocated to some extent by Diaz (2009) should not be elements of a solution. In regard to encouraging, or enforcing, storage of materials on institutional systems, I suspect that the solution is tied to fitness for purpose. If the systems are well designed, most academics will take the path of least resistance because that will provide the easiest and most suitable solution for them and their institution. On the other hand, if poorly conceived or implemented systems make it more difficult to comply than to step around the system, there will be encouragement for non-compliance.
References
Diaz, V. (2009). Intellectual Property Policies, E-Learning, and Web 2.0: Intersections and Open Questions (Research Bulletin, Issue 7). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.educause.edu/Resources/IntellectualPropertyPoliciesEL/169662
Mar
22
Web pages are seldom as simple as they look
Filed Under Scripting
I’ve kept a personal/professional web page on the USQ web site for as long as it has been possible to do so – since the mid-1990s. It has the usual stuff – brief bio, abbreviated CV, list of publications.
Over the years I’ve done periodic renovations. It started as a set of simple pages, moved to frames when they were in vogue, dabbled with CSS driven tabs when they became fashionable, and progressed to rounded corners and other neat touches when I renovated last year with a newly acquired copy of RapidWeaver. Previously I’d used hand coded HTML, Claris HomePage, and DreamWeaver in various manifestations.
One of the challenges of maintaining such a site is keeping a neatly formatted list of publications up to date with links to copies of papers when they are available. When you realise that the same list needs to be maintained in several other places – EndNote library for future use in writing, full CV, USQ ePrints, and a Faculty/USQ Research Office database used to justify research funding – the whole thing becomes more than a bit frustrating. Surely at least some of those lists could draw from the same data entry.
A few years ago it became frustrating enough that I learned enough PHP to put together a solution that would take a reference exported in a tagged (XML-ish) format from an original EndNote entry, parse and import it into a web page that could produce APA styled lists and documents needed for reporting to the office. When the server I was using for that was retired so was my database and I’ve been using the ePrints facility for producing the necessary forms. However, that has left me to manually maintain a list on my web site and I’d prefer to pull that from ePrints if I could. In an ideal world the ePrints folk would enable that by providing a simple means to query the database and acquire the desired list. They don’t, or at least not that I’m aware of, and what is there is a set of static HTML pages generated each night.
For some reason this bee got in my bonnet over the weekend and I decided to renovate my web site (DreamWeaver and CSS this time) and to look for a way to pull the publications list from ePrints. I figured it might be done using JavaScript and expected to have to suck in and parse the page contents to get what I needed. When I started searching via Google for the snippets I needed I discovered ajaxLoader which seemed to do what I needed and offered the added bonus of an adventure with AJAX. My initial trials on my local Mac using Safari 4 were promising. I was easily able to pull in and display the content of the page from ePrints. When I looked at the code in the ePrints page and saw that much of it was styled using CSS classes I realised that I may be able to hide badging and navigation that I didn’t need by overriding CSS classes with “display: none” definitions. It looked as though I had an easy solution.
When I tested using Firefox things began to fall apart with cross-domain security. I worked around by coding an alternative that displayed the whole page in an iFrame if the AJAX call generated an error. When I had that working locally I put the files on the server where it all fell apart again as the other browsers applied the cross-domain restrictions once away from the local host.
I was resigned to doing it all with an iFrame, not so neat with all the unnecessary (for my purposes) badging and navigation, but better than maintaining a manual list. Then I realised that if i saved a copy of the ePrints file on the host serving my pages I could make it work as I wanted. All I’d have to do would be to update that file copy periodically – at least as often as my publication list changes and ideally daily or weekly. Next step is to craft an AppleScript and/or Automator solution to do those updates. For now my publications list is matched to ePrints, though Firefox appears to have some problems with formatting content that includes multiple body tags. I may need to code some parsing yet, either in JavaScript or in the AppleScript that grabs the file.
Mar
7
SITE 2009
Filed Under General, ICT integration, Teacher Education
From 28 February – 8 March I travelled to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend the 20th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). With around 1100 delegates representing at least 40 countries, despite the global financial crisis this was still one of the best attended and the most international SITE conference I have attended since my first SITE conference in 1998. I am grateful to the faculty for support to attend the conference.
The conference proper started on Tuesday, 3 March and ran until Friday, 6 March. My first involvement was with the executive meeting that I attended on Monday as a SITE Vice-President and Chair of a council that comprises 12 special interest groups. My executive responsibilities required me to attend (briefly) each of the SIG meetings held on Tuesday and Wednesday, chair the council meeting on Tuesday evening, and attend the leadership council meeting on Thursday evening.
The presentations that I was involved with were scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. I presented a refereed paper co-authored with Jay Wilson of University of Saskatchewan and based on his EdD project which I had supervised. The second presentation was a session conducted with the editor and other associate editors of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education for which I am an associate editor.
The four daily keynotes <http://site.aace.org/conf/speakers/> this year were all good. Cristin Frodella (Product Marketing Manager, Google) spoke about “Erasing the Lines: Cloud Computing and the Digital Natives” with a focus on how applications on the network rather than individual computers can contribute to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Her presentation provided evidence of some of the new capability when, because snow prevented her making it to Charleston, she presented via Skype from her apartment bedroom in New York. Tom Carroll (President, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future) spoke on “Pathways to 21st Century Teaching” emphasising the need for teacher education to respond to an environment of continuing change by shifting from teacher preparation to education workforce development. He suggested that, of three things necessary for 21st century organisations, schools are good at cultural transmission, poor at adaptation and hostile to innovation, and noted that despite evidence in popular culture (such as the evolution from the solo Drs Kildare et al to the teams of ER et al) of a move towards working in teams as the norm, teaching remains largely standalone. Aaron Doering (University of Minnesota) spoke about “Designing for Learning: Engaging Students and Teachers from the Arctic to Australia” and demonstrated the benefits available from what he has styled as “adventure learning” with learners following the activities of expeditions around the world. Niki Davis (Professor of E-Learning, University of Canterbury College of Education, New Zealand) spoke about “The Co-Evolution of Information Technology and Education – It has to be Taught!” and presented an ecological view of the adoption of ICT in Education.
Other sessions of note for me covered such topics as 3D virtual worlds and simulations (relevant to my work on the ALTC grant), Web 2.0 tools in education, ePortfolios, digital storytelling, and online communities in teacher development. Each of these helped to fill in gaps in knowledge and/or identify new ideas that I need to consider more carefully.
The key ideas that I brought away from SITE that might have wider relevance for the faculty were mostly based around the keynotes delivered by Tom Carroll and Niki Davis. The first emphasised the need to shift our perspective from preparing teachers who may not remain in the profession with what we think they might need and towards ongoing development of the educational workforce as it responds to continuing change with a focus on working in teams rather than as individuals. The second emphasised the need to see ICT, and other aspects of teacher development, as part of an ecological system in which the various components interact in complex ways rather than exist as standalone changes.
Mar
18
SITE 2008
Filed Under Games & simulations, ICT integration, Teacher Education
From 1 – 9 March I travelled to Las Vegas to attend the 19th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). With around 1350 delegates representing at least 40 countries, this was one of the best attended and the most international SITE conferences I have attended since my first SITE conference in 1998. I am grateful to the faculty for support to attend the conference and especially to my colleagues in the FOE1000 team (Catherine Arden, Henriette van Rensburg, Penny Green, Sarah Davey Chesters, Andy Yeh and Peter Evans) who kept the course moving along in my absence.
The conference proper started on Tuesday, 4 March and ran until Friday 7 March. My first involvement was with the executive meeting that I attended on Monday as a SITE Vice-President and Chair of a council that comprises 10 special interest groups. My executive responsibilities required me to attend (briefly) each of the SIG meetings held on Tuesday and Wednesday, chair the council meeting on Tuesday evening, and attend the leadership council meeting on Thursday evening.
All three of the presentations that I was involved with were scheduled for Tuesday, so that was a busy day. I presented two refereed papers. The first was based on some work being done in the ALIVE / Web3D Exchange project being undertaken at USQ with Carrick Institute funding. The second was co-authored with my daughter, Hannah, and was based on the project work she completed for her MEd at USQ. The third presentation was a session conducted with the editor and other associate editors of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education for which I am an associate editor.
The four daily keynotes this year were all very good. Barbara Means spoke about the analysis of instructional artefacts as a strategy for evaluation and professional development. She made some strong points about the advantages of authentic assessment as compared to sometimes facile pencil and paper tests and described approaches being developed to make such assessment more achievable. Gerald Knezek spoke as incoming president of SITE with a strong message about how teacher education needs to have a global perspective and how SITE might contribute to that agenda. The double act by Punya Mishra and Matthew Koehler was the smash hit of the conference. Using their work on technological, pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) as background, they spoke about the “wicked problem” of teaching and the need for teachers to be creative in designing learning experiences. Their keynote is now available online and is worth viewing both for their creative use of the PowerPoint medium and the content, which is highly relevant to the development of our new programs. The final keynote on Friday was given by Antonio Battro from the One Laptop Per Child program and looked at the experience of the OLPC program which is now being rolled out in several countries. We in Australia, and especially in teacher education, need to give some thought to how education in our country might respond to developments in which, within a year or two, every school child in Chile will have a personal laptop from Year 5 or so.
Other sessions of note for me covered such topics as ICT standards (the revised ISTE NETS), e-portfolios, 3D online environments, and LAMS. Each of these helped to fill in gaps in knowledge and/or identify new ideas that I need to consider more carefully.
Key ideas that I brought away from SITE that might have wider relevance for the faculty were:
- Comments from US presenters that their teacher shortage might result in effective out-sourcing of teaching by bringing in teachers prepared elsewhere. The Phillipines was mentioned as one prospective source where programs are already gearing up by preparing teachers to work in China with the US market seen as more demanding but achievable. Are there opportunities for us, direct into the US market or via partnerships?
- The impact that technology (ICT), especially when it is ubiquitous as in the OLPC program, has on the nature of teaching and assessment and how our programs might respond.