Facing the Divide

Sad news this week with the death of one of our students. Her death and her illness aren't what I want to blog about however. What I want to talk about is how the students at school found out about it and are dealing with their grief.

I was talking to a group of my year 7 students - and one of the questions they had for me was "Have you ever lost a close friend?" When I said yes that one of my friends had died when I was in Year 11, they then asked how long it takes to 'feel better' (my words as I can't remember the exact wording). When I was explaining to them what had happened to my friend and how I found out their faces were unbelieving. At first I thought it was because of the way my friend died, but as we talked more it dawned on me they were surprised about how I found out. I found out thru a news report on the local radio - and then had to wait at school as all my friends arrived to see who it wasn't/was.

They were surprised that I didn't know before I went to school.

They were surprised that I had to wait for people to arrive at school to find out who had died.

They had the answers to all of these questions within hours of our student dying.
I had come face to face with the digital divide.
Finally I had concrete proof that it existed -- that it wasn't just something that people write about to get their name up in lights.
Whereas my friends and I had to wait and wonder, my students this week knew and started their grieving process.
Whereas my friends and I had to wait for the funeral to say goodbye, my students this week were leaving their messages on a Facebook group -- they started their goodbyes so much earlier than we did.
This is one of the times when we need to say thanks to SMS, Facebook, email etc. Whilst they will never forget their friend, I'm hoping that today's technology will spare them some of the pain that we went through in dealing with our grief.

MacKenzie wants us to think in the classroom

In his november posting for FNO "Getting Attention in the Laptop Classroom"

• tags: laptop, dissertation, professional_dev, mckenzie

  • 
    • need to get a copy of this and read for dissertaion. also give to clt @wis - post by leekevp
  • chart on the white board
  • teachers being able to see the students' screens when they are working on challenges and tasks assigned by the teacher
  • teacher who ignores landscape in laptop classrooms is likely to encounter difficulties with classroom management
  • Authentic discussion of alternatives is often blocked by the egos of so-called visionaries who are intent on imposing their ill-considered dreams on others

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What does your horizon look like?

Have just finished reading the Horizon Report 2008 as part of both my dissertation and group assignment for uni course. What I find interesting is the emphasis that has been placed on each of the chosen technologies.

I found it very interesting that "collective intelligence" is relegated to the mid-distant horizon... 4/5 years away... weird as this is the one that I see most people using and is one of the easiest sells in my role as a LT co-ordinator. So many people are using wiki's and blogs in their classrooms as a way for students to collaborate and construct knowledge, so why the long time frame? The bigger question I suppose is how we value this type of knowledge construction. Is the use of collective intelligence just replacing pens and paper for taking notes? or is it making a real difference in the way we collect and value student work? Is the wiki the process or the end product?

The report looks at collective intelligence as more than just a wiki - it looks at how the open source approach to a problem means that in the business world collective intelligence is used to solve problems in a way that is quicker and more cost effective. It also looks at collective intelligence as having 2 subparts; 1) the wiki or explicit collective intelligence where students can contribute as well as consume (something that I think is already often used in education settings), 2) Implicit collective intelligence where data from a wide variety of sources is combined and analysed to reveal patterns that lead to new learning.

I think that the explicit is easy for us to get our heads around, easy for us to see uses in our everyday learning in the classroom. The implicit by definition I think will be a little harder - at least until the tools to make it accessible to the everyday teacher (read tech-phobic) are as easy as YouTube.