digitalmaverick

“Fail Snail” by @ikepigott  (thanks @motownmutt for the tip off)

Apart from yesterday’s Bob Dylan song which I kind of searched for, all the others I’ve blogged about so far have randomly popped up in my iTunes playlist - and spookily  have had an uncanny connection to the theme of each main blog post.  Today’s, ‘You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go’ is probably the spookiest, for after the way that Twitter has hung and crashed and trailed and being ‘interTwittent’ (thanks Timbuckteeth) today,  the song has reinforced to me how reliant I have become on Twitter to provide me with information and contact with my Personalised Learning Network.

As Bob himself puts it (with one wee change from me):

“I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time.

…

Yer gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’,
Yer gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to.

…

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go”

 Today’s Bob Dylan song is ‘Floater (too much to ask)‘ the only one of his I could find that had the word ‘inspire‘ in it - which I selected  so as to be in keeping with the theme of this post.  It’s taken from his 2001 album ‘Love and Theft’ and is him at his gravelly rasping best. 

He sings:

“One of the boss’ hangers-on
Sometimes comes to call
At times you least expect
Tryin’ to bully you, strongarm you,
inspire you with fear
It has the opposite effect“

I think that verse could well describe the way that many teachers feel about the perception held by some that ICT in school seems to only matter if it involves the use of Microsoft applications.  In a way WE are ‘bullied‘ and ‘inspired through fear’ by people saying - pupils will use Microsoft products in industry therefore that’s ALL we showed be training them to use..  Whereas the success of TeachMeetBett last year showed that what teachers REALLY crave is the sort of inspiration that only be derived from hearing practicing teachers talking about how they are using exciting, and often freely available, technology in the classroom thereby showing ‘it has the opposite effect’.

Just a brief post today to praise Twitter from the rooftops for the way in which one can use it to seek solutions to your problems.  I used a couple of Tweets to plead for fincial support in the form of sponsorship for the TeachMeet and was deluged with offers of support.  I’ll give more details in a future post but its simply awe-inspiring that a tool like Twitter can constantly bridge gaps and allow such responses to occur.

On a Siberia-like, freezing cold day like today, it’s appropriate that I choose ‘Cold Irons Bound’ as today’s Bob Dylan song.  It’s from the Time out of Mind album and contains the great line “I’m gonna remember forever the joy we’ve shared.”  As schhol Chistmas holiday truly comes to an end tomorrow, I know Dylan’s words sum up how I feel about the past couple of weeks spent in the company of my 2 children as they enjoyed the excitement that only the arrival of Santa can bring.

 In just over a week the BETT Show starts in the hallowed halls of Olympia.  This is the biggest educational ‘trade’ show in Europe.  Despite many cynical views of the BETT Show as an event (many people see it as becoming less essential every year), I have fond memories of a BETT show a few years ago when I and the other members of the HUGToB team helped set up a stand for Moodle by raising sponsorship.  It had been unheard of for teachers such as us ever to have funded a stand for a product we just used and did not have financial interest in.

Anyway, with this sort of grassroots, bottom-up spirit in mind it is rewarding to note that a range of unConference models have been adopted in educational circles - Joe Dale’s ‘Show and Tell’ at his brilliant Isle of Wight conferences spring to mind.

The TeachMeet model is one which encourages anyone with something of interest regarding the use of technology in the classroom to talk about,  to speak to a gathered audience of people who (in a nutshell)want to be inspired.  It makes for an excellent antidote to the BETT Show which is effectively a showcase for hundreds of companies trying to sell teachers their products.  This is because you know that the people talking are genuinely talking about THEIR classroom practice, as opposed to a salesman peddling their latest tool or software package. 

This year’s event is being organised bu an underground team of volunteer helpers (mainly triggered by Ian Usher & Leon Cych - two great catalysts)  trying to ensure things go without a hitch. 

You can sign up to attend to:

• speak
• listen & be inspired  within the venue or remotely using our online access
• lurk
• or attend an informal meal afterwards.

Signing up for this FREE event is done via this Wiki and it’s open to ANYONE - and did I say it was FREE?  At the time of writing over 100 top educationalists have signed up to attend and there’s still space for many more; and over 20 people have bravely put themselves forward to speak about topics covering a wide range of exciting topics - here’s an example of a presentation (my talk from last year’s TeachMeetBett). Talks can be either 7 or 2 minutes long and should try NOT to make use of PowerPoint, nor should they be a blatant attempt to promote merchandise.

Here’s a cross-section of some of the talks to be heard:

1. Tom Barrett (Twitter) An update on Multi-Touch desks.
2. Neil Winton (Twitter)- The Adventures of Johnny Bunko - What is Lesson 7 anyway?
3. Leon Cych (twitter) - ‘Why the government doesn’t get it about digital culture and learning‘ - a brief polemic.
4. John d’Abbro - Digital Creativity with children experiencing Behavioural Emotional and/or Social Difficulties (BESD)  
5. Doug Belshaw (Twitter) Would also like to give update on EdTechRoundup after launching it officially at last year’s TeachMeet
6. John Connell The view from the emerging markets: seven countries in seven minutes!
7. Theo Kuechel (Twitter) Seven places with valuable (free) content.
8. Drew Buddie - (twitter) - Scatterlings No More - building a Personal Learning Network across the world and how it can impinge in the classroom
9. Mark Mullis - (twitter) - B(v)SF ischool project - building virtual schools for the future in Second Life.
10. John Cuthell - (twitter) Project Learning, 21st Century Skills, and embedded ICT.
11. Christina Preston (Twitter) Just social networking? or creating new knowledge and influencing change trajectories.
12. Josie Fraser (twitter) DCSF’s new cyberbullying advice for teachers who are victims of cyberbullying behaviour & online identity management
13. Ian Grove-Stephensen (twitter) some of the amazing resources teachers have created on Yacapaca in the last year.
14. Ollie Bray - (twitter) Mobile Phones in Education or Google Earth or Graphic Novels in the Classroom or Computer Games Based Learning in Secondary Schools. I’ll probably decide on the day!
15. Dughall McCormick - E-Learning Consultant - ’Henri’ - How to exploit VLE tools in a cross curricular way with Primary children.

In keeping with the switched-on nature of the event there is are Facebook , Twitter & Flickr groups and a Ustream feed (the latter won’t be active till the night) already set up for the event and there’s plans afoot to have all videos hosted on a TEDTalks-like portal so that the talks can be used to inspire others once the event is over.  There’s also going to be a Flashmeeting providing a backchannel which will run throughout the event so that attendees all around the world can participate in the event. An example of the support we’ve been offered by 2 non-educationalists is by Toby & Phil who are voluntarily setting up a Rezpondr site to handle all RSS feeds as the event happens.  This shows that the wider community can be involved in TeachMeetBett, not just educationalists.

So to attend TeachMeetBett09:

• Sign up for the BETT Show here
• Sign up on the Wiki here
• Make sure you arrive at Olympia’s Apex Hall (its directly above the Pizza Express on the Corner of Olympia) BEFORE 6:00pm or you won’t be allowed in
• And prepare to be AMAZED!

The organisers are still looking for people to help sponsor the event, as this is a non-profitmaking event every single penny helps and  some large costs have to be paid, especially to make the conference available to online attendees.  In addition we’re looking for prizes that can be donated to our charity raffle and items that could be included in our ‘Schwag Bags’ (we’d need 100 or more of whatever you’ve got if everyone is to receive one).  If you can help in any of these capacities, please add your details to the wiki in the appropriate section. [A previous TeachMeet offered THREE visualisers as just some of the prizes, lets see if we can do just as well this time.] It’s a great opportunity to get you or your company promoted and be seen to be supporting this event being run by teachers for teachers. I promise to acknowledge all those that support the event on the night and in this blog.

I hope I’ve provided enough information to make you think about attending and hope to see you there.

Today’s Bob Dylan song is ‘Visions of Johanna’which is often described as one of his greatest works.  Dylan biographer Mike Marqusee stated that in ‘Visions of Johanna’ Dylan was “stranded between extremes - total freedom and abject slavery.” And it’s fair to say that today’s educationalists often feel that way in terms of the tools they are able to use in school.  Thank goodness trailblazers such as those speaking at the TeachMeetBett 2009 are doing what they can to break the shackles of ‘abject slavery’ to traditional software packages.

Each Sunday I’m going to look  at either a Bob Dylan track sung in collaboration or by someone else, or  a song by another artists that was inspired by Bob Dylan.

Today I chose ‘Ain’t no more cane’ which is a traditional prison song of the American South that he sang with The Band.  In this case it is sung by The Black Crowes.

I’m enjoying listening closely to one Dylan song each day and this particular song grabbed me because I’d never heard it before. 

Perhaps the most striking  thing for me is the use of the word ‘Brazos’ in the refrain of the song:

“Ain’t no more cane on the brazos
Its all been ground down to molasses.”

which refers to the river that passes by many of the Texan prisons and so features in many such songs.

I was stimulated to write this blogpost by a brilliant piece of news I saw in Twitter today by one half of a band that I’ve started following, called Georgia Wonder. Their music is stunningly beautiful and is reminiscent of a variety of 70’s artists who’ve influenced them.

In a ‘Tweet’ they said that they had just released all of their music on a Creative Commons Share and Share-alike non-commercial licence.  I immediately applauded this - they are a forward thinking band, looking beyond the horizon, a bit like Radiohead tried to do, by allowing their music to be listened to by the public without having to pay for it.

Earlier in the month, despite their music being already freely available for download from their own site, I chose to purchase the music from iTunes because I enjoyed it so much.

Anyway, my friend and erstwhile mentor Theo Keuchel would have applauded this move had he been online to see it as he is such a fervent proponent of open licencing of media.

I got all excited to see that Georgia Wonder had taken this step - even going as far as suggesting that school students could embark on a video-making competition using their songs as a basis for the works.

However, in preparation for this blogpost and when returning to look for the link they put up I was unable to find it and instead a series of clearly deflated Tweets showed that the band had realised that in choosing the CC licences they had, they were actually signing away all rights they had to their music.  This led to them saying “…it sure does give too many rights away. Like the right to make any money from something at all! ” with the result that they may end up just putting up a statement “saying ‘you can download our stuff but not profit from it’ and be done with it!”.  Whichever way Georgia Wonder choose to disseminate their music, there is clearly a great deal that other bands could do to learn from their approach.

Moby has created a great resource in this vein and I wonder how successful it has been so far - it certainly encourages students to make use of his high quality music to support their own works. In the classroom there can be no substitute for students being able to make use of music that’s been made freely available by the artists without worrying about copyright issues should their work be shown to a wide audience.

Ally Kerr and Duke Special have also run competitions which have involved fans taking their music and making videos with them - I see this a way to really engage fans with the bands music.

Today’s Bob Dylan track could not be more appropriate - in title at least - and I used it as the title for this post: Beyond the Horizon, taken from Modern Times.  According to Wikipedia the song is “based around the song “Red Sails in the Sunset,” written by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams in 1935 using its melody and basic structure. “

Queue, image originally uploaded to Flickr by gadl.

I went shopping for some ski wear for my son today - he’s going on a school trip to Bulgaria in February. It is hard enough to get him out shopping with me at the best of times, bless him, but on this occassion I figured it was one of the last chances I’d get to have him out and about with me before he goes on the ski trip. So out we went, braving the post-New Year sale hordes.

To set the scene a little, I want to be more restrained this year and less impatient, both when driving and in my general life, but I feel that we now live at such a pace and we are used to things being done NOW that when one has to queue for a long time - particularly in a shop - it’s something we are just not used to these days.

We were unfortunate to be in a queue that took us over 20 minutes to move just 3 places (oh how I hate people who return 7 bags of clothes to the one shop to get their money back!) and I found myself thinking that one of my resolutions was going to bite the dust on the 2nd day of the year. But I persevered and eventually we left the shop with our bargains.

This made me think about the speed I am not only used to my personal life being lived at, but also the pace at which things occur in my classroom these days. It seems now that in the ICT classroom, rapid advances made in the subject mean that no longer are children having to be told ‘this is a mouse and this is a printer’ as I used to do in week 4 of Year 7 about 10 years ago - yes, SERIOUSLY! Now we’re making slideshows within the first couple of weeks of term.

Although this has to be a good thing, it still means that pace of lessons and my expectations of what my pupils will produce has moved on at an almost exponential rate. In some cases, I’m sad to say, it seems like the ‘fun’ has gone and been replaced by ‘If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium’-type moving from one tool to another. Add to this, me introducing the class to ‘yet another cool tool’ and the problem is compunded.

It’s got me thinking all day about whether I need to readdress the way that I introduce new tools in class and find way to ensure that all skills learned are retained and that pupils get the chance to take stock of the new tools that they have been introduced to.

I know the feeling personally, as I can get overwhelmed with the plethora of fun, useful and interesting new Web 2.0 tools and sites I come across every day. And to this end I find myself as big a culprit as any of creating Dotsam - “The wasteland of abandoned Web sites … that their creators have ignored for months or years but which remain accessible.”

As if to illustrate this I found myself, thanks to people I Follow in Twitter, in the space of 3 hours today, I had:

• Summarised my hopes for 2009 at ‘Year in a sentence’ from which I then found out about:
• Xtranormal - a site that lets you make videos from text - yep you read that correctly!
• Ten minutes later I had contributed to a wiki, my dream line-up for the film remake of classic 80’s cartoon series, Thundercats - Tom Waits as Jaga anyone?
• Which in turn has led me to Grupthink - a fab site for polling opinions
• I was encouraged to contribute to ‘The Power of Less’ - a great forum that gets you to suggest a small change you want to make in your life to effect a big change within you. I chose one of my resolutions - to better care for my psoriasis
• Which in turn led to a very challenging response from a moderator that made me dig deeper into the reasoning for chosing such a focus
• I was further challenged to pledge how I would be greener in 2009, and I said about refusing coathangers & carrier bags (2 days down & still practicing what I preach).
• And signing up gave me 100GB of free file storage from Filedropper

And all of that was done in the space of THREE HOURS this morning, and I was able to act upon it all as I am on holiday.

So, if this is what I did in only three hours today, imagine what opportunities we face daily and which we maybe let pass us by or we never return to (see Dotsam above).

Thus I feel privileged to have been able to make the most of these opportunities today and I thank my PLN in Twitter for bringing these to my attention today ( dogtrax broadus lewiswebb ).

Today’s Bob Dylan song is ‘When the Ship Comes in’ which is apparently “a sprawling epic allegory about vanquishing the oppressive “powers that be”. ” And I can think of no more appropriate song to have listened to, on the day that I made use of some amazing opportunities to use technology to broaden my horizons far beyond the mundane.

Original image ‘Writing Resolutions’ originally uploaded to Flickr by Tojosan.

This is the start of my new regime to write blog posts on a far more regular basis. Part of my motivation to do so is the encouragement I have received from others on microblogging site Twitter -its always motivational to see other people doing something that you want to do in the same way.

And therein lies my first tale of serendipity for the New Year - perhaps one that augurs well for 2009. I was looking for a photo to illustrate this post, and searched ‘creative commons’ photos on Flickr, and the picture above was the first one I saw - but I simply could not believe my eyes when I saw that the person who had uploaded the picture was Tojosan, the same Tojosan that I follow on Twitter! What are the 0dds of that I wonder, that of the 44,000 Creative Commons photos tagged ‘resolution’ in Flickr, the one I picked should be one uploaded by someone I know, someone that I didn’t even know had a Flickr account?

Anyway I digress, the purpose of this post is to outline my plethora of resolutions that I REALLY want to achieve this year. There are many, but I am determined to succeed this year if I can.

My New Years Resolutions for 2009

1. To stick to my resolutions
2. To follow a much more rigid and rigorous lifestyle, I’ve been too lackadaisical for too long
3. To apprecaite the lyrics of Bob Dylan more by listening to different Bob Dylan song every day
4. To walk to school each day
5. To use no carrier bags in shops & leave all coathangers and other reusable packaging items at shops
6. To read a book, watch a film, and listen to a new CD each week
7. To do a random act of kindness at least once a week
8. To teach my own children something new each day
9. To improve the quality of my photography
10. To comment on each Blog post I read
11. To create a podcast of ‘Wee Free Men’ by Terry Pratchett
12. To speak to my own children each day (whether or not they are staying with me)
13. To meet all of the school-based targets I have set myself (see a future Blog Post)
14. To make a machinima with my son
15. To take better care of my psoriasis
16. To go to bed with an empty email inbox as first pledged by Bill Thompson
17. To respond immediately to emails
18. To visit a town I’ve never been to each month
19. To establish MirandaMod as a leading model of unconferencing
20. To curb what bad language I use
21. To have a far more positive attitude no matter how I feel about something
22. To ensure my THREE major goals relating to Moodle are met this year (see future blog posts)
23. To pay all my bills and handle all important paperwork immediately
24. To pass my Grade Two singing exam
25. and… To sing ‘Hallelujah’ to the whole school
26. To phone my parents twice a week
27. To be less wasteful of food in the home
28. To allow no one to upset me or to belittle my achievements
29. To DO rather than just SAY I will DO.
30. To start what I fi……..nish

Phew… that’s a long list but one I want to meet and I will be disappointed in myself if I don’t. Let’s see how I get on.

Todays Dylan song is ‘Song to Woody’. This was one of the first songs Bob Dylan ever wrote and whilst being a sort of prayer to Woody Guthrie, it includes words that could be so apt for the way the world is at the moment: “…I wrote you a song, ‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along. Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn, It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born“.

How could a man as young as Dylan was at that time, write lyrics of such timeless poignancy? It’s a lesson to us all!