Hack to the Future organiser, Alan O'Donohoe

I was delighted to be able to speak to Alan O’Donahoe via Skype recently. In a wide-ranging conversation, Alan told me some fascinating things including:

The Hack Rap!

Hack to the Future

Alan on Twitter

Teach Computing blog

Alan’s Audioboos

Teknoteacher on YouTube

Dr Kathy Seddon – online learning guru and famous Welsh person (@kathyseddon) recently asked me to tell her everything I know about Twitter.

She called it a ‘brain dump’.

It took some time, as you can imagine.

Later on she described me as a ‘digital gardener’. This is not an expression I had heard before but it struck a bit of a chord so I thought I’d share my thinking and a few questions.

If you have heard this term before, do let me know as I’d like to credit the originator. UPDATE: see the comments below!

GARDENER? CURATOR? IMMIGRANT? RESIDENT?

The debate around the usefulness of terms like ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ has raged for years, as I’m sure you know. Like all labels, these can useful as starting points for debate but don’t stand up to proper analysis. There’s always a risk they will be used as shortcuts to avoid discussing or analysing the real issues.

• “They will be fine with this technology – they’re all digital natives.”
• “We can’t ask them to do that – they are digital immigrants and won’t be able to cope.”

Recently, I have also heard the term ‘curator’ a lot and, once again, it is used with the assumption that all the audience understand what it means – it is used as shorthand. I have to say it seems a bit dry to me.

BETT 2010

At the BETT show in January I took part in a discussion with (amongst others) @daveowhite about digital identity and he introduced me to the concepts of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital vistors’. As I work in e-learning for adults at the moment this made a lot of sense.

I would classify myself most definitely as a ‘digital resident’ – hence this blog! I work to maintain and develop my online persona via blogging, twitter, posterous, delicious, Moblog, Moby Picture etc. In fact, after seeing @tombarrett ‘s home page I have set up http://everything.mulryne.com to collect a lot of these together. This sounds quite like a gardener, tending plants and creating the right conditions for growth. I tend the places on the web where I reside – I want them to grow and portray me in a positive way- to be a fruitful expression of my (online) personality.

ADULT LEARNERS

However, many (but crucially not all) of the adults I work with are very much ‘digital visitors’ – they like the web, they are not necessarily scared of it but they want to get on, get what they want and then get off again – leaving no trace that they have been there. It reminds me of the way I used the internet way back in the early 90s when I paid by the minute.

So how can we facilitate learning for groups of adults who might be ‘digital residents’ or ‘digital visitors’? What difference does it make? How far down the age range does it go?

Certainly, I’d say that every time I hear someone use one of these terms from now on, I’m going to question exactly what they mean and whether or not it’s just an excuse to avoid the hard work of analysing our audience properly.

Why don’t you do the same?

Creative Commons image credit

Wallwisher

I need to introduce someone to the world of UK education soon so I was trying to think of all the relevant education organisations she will need to investigate to get a good idea of the ‘domain’.

This, I found, is not an easy task. There are many important bodies both within and beyond the government sphere. I was sure to miss lots out. So I turned to my personal learning network.

PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORK

For me, this consists of my colleagues at work and my Twitter buddy list. A quick request for a link on Twitter resulted in a great link to a page on the DCSF site from @ChrisPadden which was a great start.

I then thought how I could get more of my PLN involved and decided to use the lovely http://www.wallwisher.com to set up a wall for suggestions. Tweeting and messages to my work colleagues have so far generated 25 suggestions on the wall which can be seen here:

http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/edorgs

Please feel free to add any more you can think of.

This fantastic response has further convinced me of the value of crowdsourcing via the PLN – and it’s also been a lot of fun seeing it develop!

When all the responses are in, I intend to transfer the links to a more useable format/system. If you have any ideas of what I could use, let me know!

Holy Trinity Church - a thin place

Jane (not her real name), a long-standing member of the congregation of a local church recently died at quite a young age.

THIN PLACES

At her funeral, the minister giving the address referred to the concept of thin places. This idea comes from pre-Christian Ireland and describes special places where the distance between this world and the next seems very small. Some of the aura of the other world seems to have crossed into these places through a divide which is thin enough to allow this kind of transfer.

Everyone experiences thin places differently and everyone has their own, personal collection of thin places, whether or not they are religious. Perhaps they have special memories of a place or a time when they were happy, at peace or in love. For me, thin places include Trinity Hall Chapel where my wife and I sang in the choir, Culbone in Somerset where we stayed in a fantastic holiday cottage and the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where we were married.

THIN PEOPLE?

It’s not very helpful terminology but it seems clear to me that there are also ‘thin’ people. Jane was one of these. The minister visited her shortly before she died and said it was like being in the presence of someone who was beginning to be ‘beamed up’ in the Star Trek fashion. Jane was always thin, though. Everyone who met her noticed it. She was the leader of the church welcome team for a reason.

THIN LEARNING?

So what has all this got to do with education, learning or elearning? Well, I was wondering what we might be able to do to create thin learning – online or offline.

The ultimate in user-centred, usable and accessible online environments would, I suppose be the thinnest – the ones which get in the way the least. I have heard people saying that when the technology becomes essentially invisible the learning takes over but it’s not really possible to have invisible learning environments – they are always visible in some way. It’s easy to give examples of environments which are the opposite of thin – several I have used are at the very least ‘tubby’.

Another obvious example would be the presentations we have all had to endure which are so thick they message is completely obscured – you can’t see the message for the medium.

It won’t be the same for everyone, of course, just like thin places. Art studios in secondary schools are manic, disorganised, chaotic places for some but for others they are thin – letting the creativity flow and stimulating deep learning. I suppose the trick is to maximise thinness for as many as possible.

THIN TEACHERS?

I’m sure we can all think of thin teachers – mine was a history teacher who dramatised the topics with dry humour and had an amazing mastery of the subject. History came alive and the room melted away – the walls were made thin and history flowed through.

I also tried to create a thin environment in my classroom. When introducing a year 3/4 class to the internet (this was a long time ago!) I suspended thin tape in a complicated web from the ceiling, joining pictures of various types of computers – pretty obvious but seemed to work for them.

WHO’S THIN?

Maybe I’ll finish with a few recommendations of people I think may be amongst the ranks of the thin:

• @tombarrett with all his collaborative and creative crowdsourcing activities (amongst many other thin practices)
• @dawnhallybone the doyen of classroom games-based learning
• @russeltarr history teacher and online guru
• @mwclarkson ICT super-teacher and blogging super-power

That’s only scratching the surface, of course – add your own nominations for thin people below…

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