Spend a windy Wednesday night at the Education Development Centre and come out celebrating the commitment and work of teachers.

Despite hail, peak hour traffic and a string of out-of-action traffic lights, teachers and principals leave work (unless they are committed to parent-teacher interviews) and head to Hindmarsh to be part of the historic launch of a Charter for the Australian teaching profession. A charter developed by the national professional associations with Teaching Australia, a statement of values and commitments.

Teachers believe in the power of education to make a difference to the lives of individuals and to society. As teachers and principals we are committed to giving students the best education possible for them to lead fulfilling, purposeful and productive lives. We bring to the role high levels of professional knowledge, expertise and ethical commitment.

Chris Robinson, Chief Executive of DECS does the honours assisted by the youngest and the oldest registered teachers in South Australia. Ian Smyth and Lia Tedesco also acknowledge Jim Dellit’s work.

Two hours later, walking down the corridor past the food standards in early childhood workshop, I come across the ESL educators presenting the ESLE Ann Sexton Memorial Awards to merit award winners of SACE Stage 2 ESL in front of proud parents and teachers. It is wonderful to realise that an educator with vision, dedication and passion for giving ESL students access to excellent courses and opportunities is remembered by her colleagues in this way each year.

Then downstairs to the CEGSA AGM to join in congratulating colleagues receiving awards for SA Computer Teacher of the Year: Graham Taylor, and SA ICT Leaders of the Year: John Travers and Anne Ballard. What a wealth of talented teachers we have: http://cegsa.editme.com/awards2007
And don't forget the teachers staying back in country schools to take their professional learning via Centra videoconference.

The teaching profession does indeed set itself demanding standards. As the charter says "We take responsibility for the development and renewal of our profession. We act to advance the quality and reputation of teaching through professional learning and reflection."

Learning about the International Year of Sanitation, Year of the Potato and UN Year of Planet Earth with 100+ South Australian teachers.
http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=32

Lots of toilet humour, biogas and ideas for online projects. 

Beyond GLAT (Gee! Look at that): technology in the SOSE classroom
Malcolm McInerney's great quotes, questions and resources...

• Toys do not mean engagement
• How can you teach about the history of a place without a knowledge of the geography
• Snow who worked out the connection of cholera to water source would have killed for GIS technology
• Ozepedia initiative - is this needed?
• Digital geography, historical GIS
• What is the profile of the teacher who jumps into new technologies? Commitment, not age-related, personality, flexibility, happy to work outside comfort zone
• Careers that require GIS knowledge: tourism, planning, police, military, emergency services, industry, councils, statistics,
• Why has education not taken up GIS? Don't blame schools for performance without considering spatial context
• GIS competition 2007: why were there no entries from Victoria or South Australia?
• If the technology can get into Sun Hill (The Bill) why can't it get into schools?
• What can we do to convince government that geography needs to be part of the national curriculum?
• Earthquakes have to be red don't they

Resources

• Derek's http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/
• GTASA: http://www.gtasa.asn.au
• Juicy geography blog: www.juicygeography.co.uk/blog/
• Surname search (UK data)
• Earthcam: http://www.earthcam.com/
• Fly to Gallipoli (Google earth)
• Geoscience Australia - data sources minerals, disasters, etc
• National Toilet Map: Australia's incontinence project
  www.toiletmap.gov.au/

Spatial literacy: ability to understand spatial relationships, how geographic space is represented, ability to reason and make key decisions about spatial concepts
3D games, flight simulators, Google Earth
GIS is used to solve real spatial problems - need to create conundrums which require students to collect data and do original research

Creative enquiry and problematic approach through GIS
Use at all levels of education

Skills

• Visual literacy
• Cartography
• Design: some students have a real way with maps (use of colour, de-cluttered, easy to read)
• Searching: querying a map, developing a search syntax, eg find the 10 biggest cities in the world, or over a certain size
• Refining search: What data fields do you have? What do you need to get the specific information you are interested in?
• Reading maps
• Mathematical/statistical skills
• Analysis and application
• Create a new information produce, eg develop a disaster plan for local council
• GPS
• Database skills
• Mashups

Many packages: some free download, examples ArcGIS & ArcView (~$595 for unlimited education licence). ESRI have invested in education materials
Online training available: GIS for dummies
Huge datasets behind queries from range of sources: eg SA planning - agreement in place for all South Australian schools to receive SA data.
ESRI - need to get in (shape) .shp data file form
Composite layers of files - move layers to expose different data
Check out the data (eg Earthquake exercise: all the earthquakes that occurred in 1999: date, location, magnitude)
Buffering technique
MapINFO (same price as ESRI) has converter for .map files to .shp files (ABS data released in .map form)

I have just finished compiling the results of a survey of teachers visiting the Global Education website and as usual the survey raises more questions than it answers.
One of the questions asked teachers about their interest in new online services. While it is dangerous to generalise from a specific cohort such as this, I would love to know how closely these results mirror the teaching profession at large. There were some surprises in it for me, partly in which services educators were already using, and also in those of least interest to this group. BTW: total respondents = 44.

Finding online interactive global education learning activities for students
-  I do this already:	15 (34.09 %)
-  Could be useful:	25 (56.82 %)
-  Not of value to me:	2 (4.55 %)

Reading an online global education diary or blog with postings from people working in other countries
-  I do this already:	0
-  Could be useful:	37 (84.09 %)
-  Not of value to me:	5 (11.36 %)

Listening to global education podcasts or other audio formats
-  I do this already:	1 (2.27 %)
-  Could be useful:	32 (72.73 %)
-  Not of value to me:	9 (20.45 %)

Clicking a button on your web browser to bookmark/save global education links and resources for yourself and other educators
-  I do this already:	13 (29.55 %)
-  Could be useful:	26 (59.09 %)
-  Not of value to me:	4 (9.09 %)

Using global education website content in your own website, intranet or learning management system
-  I do this already:	5 (11.36 %)
-  Could be useful:	29 (65.91 %)
-  Not of value to me:	9 (20.45 %)

Setting up or taking part in an online project with my students where they share presentations with other schools
-  I do this already:	1 (2.27 %)
-  Could be useful:	34 (77.27 %)
-  Not of value to me:	7 (15.91 %)

Joining an online group for sharing global education images and photographs
-  I do this already:	2 (4.55 %)
-  Could be useful:	28 (63.64 %)
-  Not of value to me:	11 (25.00 %)

Sending an email to a global education discussion forum to ask a question or share ideas
-  I do this already:	2 (4.55 %)
-  Could be useful:	29 (65.91 %)
-  Not of value to me:	10 (22.73 %)

Uploading and sharing global education teaching activities online with other educators
-  I do this already:	5 (11.36 %)
-  Could be useful:	32 (72.73 %)
-  Not of value to me:	4 (9.09 %)

Contributing new information, content or links to a global issues wiki
-  I do this already:	0
-  Could be useful:	27 (61.36 %)
-  Not of value to me:	14 (31.82 %)

Working with a team of teachers online to organise a global education conference/workshop
-  I do this already:	0
-  Could be useful:	25 (56.82 %)
-  Not of value to me:	15 (34.09 %)

I know it's not a question of one or the other, but here is the 'for and against' table I drew up in Dec 2006 about blogging versus writing for professional association journals - open vs closed publishing didn't even rate a mention, but I suppose that's what it was basically about.

Publish by Blogging	Publish in professional journal
Personal	Corporate
Immediate publication	Published in the future
Subscribers based on author's profile	Subscribers based on association's profile
Author decides what to include	Rigorous selection process by editorial committee
Content does not have to be edited	Professional editor at work
Archived in individual's blog, not covered in legal deposit	Permanently archived via legal deposit
Discoverable through blog search engine	Discoverable through professional indexing services
Ephemeral	Permanent record
Free to read	Subscription required to read
Flexibility for author in determining licensing and permission for re-use, likely to be Creative Commons or Free to Education	Association determines permission required to re-use
Linking system built-in through Trackback	Citation indexes or Google Scholar
Built-in comments and discussion	Letters to the editor or external discussion
Embedded or additional links	Bibliography or reference list
Informal	Formal
Credibility through the individual	Credibility through the journal and association
Self-motivated writing	Commissioned or submitted as part of association responsibility or for kudos
Author sponsored publishing, or advertising dependent on blog hosting company	Association or subscriber sponsored content or selected advertising model
Direct line to readers	Communication with readership mediated through journal editor
Audience largely unknown	Known audience

While finalising my Personal Learning Environments paper for the ASLA Online III conference I came across an unfinished document I started this time last year entitled 'Trust and the terrible 2.0s'. It was meant to be an article for Access the ASLA professional association journal, and it touched on similar issues to the one raised in the latest CEGSA journal, RAMpage by Judy Beal about blogging vs writing for a print publication.

This is how it started:
----------------
Web 2.0: What's in it for me?
There is an emerging trend in sessions and discussions I attend and take part in about emerging technologies and Web 2.0 or School Library 2.0 and all the associated so-called ‘terrible 2.0s’. It revolves around trust, identity, quality and community. Web 2.0 is about giving up control in return for trust. If I only listen to, or am exposed only to those I trust, how do I learn other opinions, become exposed to other issues? This is particularly problematic when I am in with the 'wrong crowd'.
------------------

And after a lot of stuff that is slightly cringe-making to read a year later (wow - what a year 2007 has been!) the article ended abruptly with a paragraph that was so inconclusive it is no wonder the article was never finished and submitted to Access.
--------------------
Why am I writing an article for a print journal for a limited number of subscribers to read in 3 months time, when I could be sticking these ideas on my blog and have them splashed all over the web sphere tomorrow? Reasons might include: credibility, considered opinion, association endorsement, and broader audience. It removes the 'personality' element, and because it was requested or commissioned then there is a chance it might actually get written. It may also gain publication points or kudos for my employing institution. On the other hand, perhaps personality is the key and the individual is the new institution?

Writing my Christmas wrap up letter to interstate friends  (very late I know) I was interested to note that this morning - 1 week after http://me.edu.au/ went live at its current address, it is ranking 3rd in an ego search in some search engines. It is still not rating on the first 5 pages in some others - they have http://rad.edna.edu.au and http://me-uat.edna.edu.au/ though, so it could be a frequency of indexing issue.

It will be interesting to watch whether people's personal blogs will rank higher than their myedna profile, ie will my http://elgg.edna.edu.au/pmitchell which has content (and hopefully get updated more frequently again now) rank higher in search engines than http://me.edu.au/p/pru?

 

It is fantastic to see the new improved myedna go to beta release this week. A great end of year/Christmas present from Kate, Nick, John, Ben and team - thanks to you all!

With the launch of myedna 2.0 (to be known ask me.edu.au) Kerrie asks 'How many personas do you have?'
[Click to view link]

I have a more immediate issue, which is how are you coping with multiple edna Groups personas (not to mention edna Lists when they join the party)? For many years I have been registered with edna with both my work email address and my personal address. This enables me to separate my mail so that professional association traffic goes to personal email, and work related lists and groups get directed to the work server/folders. It has always seemed good information management practice, and means my professional association connections are independent of my employer.

With the integrated profile of me.edu.au which brings together my professional interests and communities irrespective of 'pigeonhole' I don't really want to maintain two edna personas and duplicate myself through communities. 

So, is it time to merge all my logins and only use the one email address for edna? This was certainly one of the key cases for myedna proof of concept projects: give me a space online that is independent of a sector/system/institution/employer. Perhaps a new identity system not based on email address?

The opportunity to hear danah boyd today was very timely, giving lots of food for thought for the myedna project scoping, for my learning journeys paper and for helping to understand the facebook phenomena.

What are the common features of social networking spaces?

· Organised around individuals/egos: unlike usenet, lists and groups

· Profiles: a formula for personal information

· Friends: danah thought no-one really took the time to work out the right term to use here. Friends here are not friends as we know them. Friends mean ‘audience’, doesn’t necessarily mean these people are paying attention to you. The term watchlist has been suggested for myedna which seems more accurate, with colleague being used for a mutual 'watching' relationship.

· Comments, testimonials, the wall: for public expression, social patter, becomes a way of showing social status and who you are paying attention to.

· Private messaging function

· Apps

· Theming:  danah made an interesting point about online spaces that are themed to reflect the personality of their owner (like this one is). She likened it to the teenager's bedroom wall or decorated lockers - a further expression of who I am.

Critical differences between online publics and traditional publics (eg parks, malls, libraries etc)

·         Persistence of comments and content which can never be deleted

·         Searchability which enables you to be found anywhere, by anyone

·         Replicability and copying over and over raises issues of where is the original vs the copy

·         Invisible audience where I never know who is watching me, and I'm always writing to an imagined audience

Other issues

Context: part of being socialised is context and how you want to be seen in this context. Not all public spaces have the same rules. You can't easily be simultaneously cool in different contexts, eg to your family and to your colleagues.

The paper which formed the background to my presentations at the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa SLANZA 2007 conference is now published. Thanks to  all those at education.au who assisted in the process of thinking, reading and publishing of this.

Information literacy experts or expats?
[Click to view link] (102 Kb pdf)

This paper challenges library staff to reconsider their role in information literacy and how we ensure students and teachers are equipped to navigate the new information landscape. Are we experts in contemporary information literacy issues – issues such as online identity, digital rights, social networking, personalisation and collaborative content? Or are we in danger of becoming more like expatriates - continuing to do things like we did in ‘the old country’? The landscape and culture is changing, and this paper aims to assist library staff to start tackling emerging technologies as part of a personal and schoolwide information literacy programme.

We had a great keynote this morning from Gerry White on the SA scorecard for ICT in education infrastructure.

• Do a thorough literature review – comprehensive for Australia and your sector, and at least checking international papers and key documents from other sectors, or complementary fields. There is no point presenting what others have already written, but building on their work benefits everyone.
  
• Pull together relevant work and themes from existing presentations by colleagues
• Set up [del.icio.us] tags and let people know what you are researching so others can contribute relevant material and follow your research.
  
  
• Draft an outline of the paper, and organise collected quotes, documents, readings, links and ideas under key headings. At this stage I find it best to keep the references firmly attached to quotes as footnotes, even if this is not the final format required.
• It is not enough to just collect material. Remember to make time to actually read and note these.
  
  
• At least four weeks before the paper is due, take a writing day away from the office, and offline (!) write a first draft from the material collected.
• Create a ‘to do’ notepad document where you note gaps that require further research, quotes to research or references to follow up.
  
  
• Blog the big questions/issues you have identified at this stage and invite comment.
• Continue to collect, read, think, follow up on the ‘to do list’ and clean up the paper.
• Remember to check back to the abstract and the conference requirements to ensure you have not strayed too far from the original submission.
  
  
• At least one week before the paper is due, do the final cut including correct referencing and styling and give it to at least one proofreader. You need to leave time to make the changes that they will suggest, and follow up any leads they provide to key references.
  
  
• Submit the paper in the required manner and ask for confirmation that it has been received. Find out how and when the paper will be published, and whether you are permitted to publish online either before or after the conference.
  
  [If it is a refereed paper, you will need to re-work it in line with the comments received back from the reviewers, and resubmit. There may well be a very short turnaround for this process.]
  
  
• SAVE a copy of the final paper clearly labelled as such in your official personal repository/file space. Then back it up.
  
• Provide a copy of the final version of the paper to the editor of your organisation’s document archive and website if appropriate, and advise of any embargo on publication.

Note: Sometimes the paper is not required until after the conference in which case you have the luxury of including any feedback, comment or issues raised by participants in the final version. The paper will also be more up-to-date.
However, by this stage you will quite probably never want to look at this paper again and will wish you had finished it before the conference.

• Create a record for the event in an edna calendar and in your own professional and personal calendars noting due dates.
  Set reminders for at least 2 weeks before each stage.
  Check whether anyone else in the company is planning to present or attend.
  
  
• Read through the conference website and brainstorm some topics around the theme of the conference, strands or the brief given by the organisers.
• Check out presenters and papers from the same conference last year to get an idea of what they might expect.
• Spend some time doing a scan of the literature for your preferred topics, and reading key related material online, in academic journals and books.
• Have a discussion with a colleague, a manager and someone from the target audience group about the topic to check out whether it is of interest, relevant and meaty enough to sustain a full presentation.
  
  
• Draft an abstract, then check back against the theme, requirements, length of session
• Future proof the abstract because a lot may have happened before you get to present it. Keep it generic enough to protect you from planned development that may not be ready in time.
  
  
• Decide carefully whether your presentation style and topic is best suited to a formal paper or a workshop. Do you need/prefer hands-on or computer-based session?
• If refereeing of papers is offered, do you want to take advantage of this process?
  
  
• Come up with a snappy title that suits the theme of the conference or strand, and sums up the content of your paper. You are trying to attract attention and get your intended audience to choose this session from a range of other offerings. The title also needs to work as the title of a published paper if it is an academic conference.
• Check your snappy title in search engines to ensure it is not too clichéd.
  
  
• Draft a biographical statement that matches the conference, audience and the paper being proposed, ie include things that will mean something to or impress this particular conference programme committee and ultimately their audience.
  
  
• Send in the proposal in the required format and ask for confirmation that it has been received. Many conferences are organised by volunteer programme committees and proposals and papers do get lost.
• If you haven’t heard about whether the paper is accepted three weeks after the date that was promised, then contact the organisers to check.

The invitation arrives! Perhaps it falls out of a journal you are reading, or in a generic posting to a forum or list, a 'why don't you' from a colleague, a personal invitation from the organisers or a strong suggestion from a manager or mentor.

Will you submit a paper for Conference X?  It's not as easy as that single question makes it seem.

Before you get to step 1 consider:

• Are you interested in doing this?
• Do you have time to do the preparation?

• Do you have something new/different/unique to say?
• Is a conference the best way to say it?
• Should you present alone or with others?

• What are the benefits for you? Does it represent a professional development opportunity?
• What are the benefits for the organisation, for the profession?
• What other opportunities might this provide, eg further presentations, networking, publication, marketing?
• What is the likely reach in terms of audience numbers, influence. Is this worth the time, effort, cost?

• Are you going to be able to attend the conference?
• How much time away is it going to involve?
• Who is going to pay for the conference? Is there a reduced rate for presenters?
• How much is going to cost when you factor in travel, accommodation and relief salaries?
  
• Can you combine this with holidays, other activities?

Wednesday last, 20 June ALIA Information Science SA and Australian Law Librarians' Association SA held a joint session entitled "Get a First Life! Working Smarter, Not Harder: using existing technologies to improve productivity".
It was intended to be a practical, non-Web 2.0 sharing session, and I got to share my all-time favourite word processor functionality: <Convert text to table>, plus the Document Map navigation for thesaurus builders that Sarah and I fell in love with during the ScOT education build. I also managed to sneak http://www.picnik.com/ in at the end.
Handout: http://elgg.edna.edu.au/_files/icon.php?id=51

Tom was also roped in, and his presentation on how to create a website using excel is at:
http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/tcotton/2007/06/20/office-tips-to-show-off/

John Banbury from Flinders University challenged us to change negative work behaviours around: futzing, email, mousing about, multitasking, procrastination and paperwork. Just loved the mouse stats:
      The humble mouse travels 675 km in its lifetime, according to research from online insurer, ESure. (2005)
On average, office staff click 73 times an hour:
- over 500 clicks a day
http://www.lib.flinders.edu.au/info/staff/banbury_john.html

What a thrill tonight to find a package on the front step with my own copy of our Wiki book translated into Italian with the title 'Oltre Wikipedia (Beyond Wikipedia): I wiki per la collaborazione e l’informazione'.
http://www.bol.it/libri/scheda/ea978882004277.html

Doubly exciting as apparently it has been on the best seller shelves in bookshops.
http://www.efiles.unibocconi.it/index.php?tema=9&idart=775

An extensive podcast episode with Jane is online. Now I just need to convince one of my friendly Italian speakers to listen to it for me.
http://www.leledainesi.com/archives/2007/04/09/jane-klobas-va-oltre-wikipedia/

myedna: the vision

My dream is for a personalised space for me as an educator where I can go about discovering, expressing and sharing my learning journey.

myedna: the place

Just like my ideal physical workspace, my online learning place will be beautiful, and comfortable to work in. It will look professional, - no advertisements stuck all over the main pinup board. Colleagues will recognise it as my place, and they will feel safe to come and learn with me there - no threatening behaviour, noise or images coming from the workspace next door.

This workspace will be mine because I am a participant in the Australian education and training community, and my community recognises the importance of lifelong learning. When I finish my university or TAFE course, change employers or finish my term as an office bearer of a national professional association I don't have to spend a weekend packing up all my resources and moving to a new workspace because my institution is cutting off my login.

Of course it will be really simple to use: uncluttered but expandable, smooth, flexible and full of the latest tools - sliding panels that I can move easily to hide things away when I don’t need them; plus a calendar; my key reference sources; lots of interesting stuff to read, and really importantly an easy way to label or tag things so I can find and organise the resources I need for all my different courses and projects.

I will be able to create unique tags for my personal organisation (eg Year10Asci) which is great for me but probably meaningless to others. I will also be prompted about appropriate terms from a recognised education thesaurus, eg ScOT (Schools Online Thesaurus) to organise my own resources and to make my tags meaningful to other educators at the same time.

I will have a way of linking together all my learning stuff regardless of its format: websites, learning objects, videos, books, feeds, podcasts etc

http://rad.edna.edu.au/myedna/  (Firefox preferred)

myedna: the links and tags

As well as tagging resources, I will have a space off the desktop for keeping resources and links. Here a tag cloud of my favourite tags will show colleagues where my interests lie. Here I will be able to navigate around resources via tags, find related tags and manage and edit my tags, as well as recording comments on tags to explain what and why I am using this tag.

http://rad.edna.edu.au/edna-links/bookmarks.php/pru_mitchell

myedna: the teams

The best part about my workspace is that it supports collaboration with my peers. So much of my work involves being part of a team, and here I can share resources with my teams. The team members working with me on the Global Education climate change module for Year 10 science are here, and I can easily find the resources that one of them has left for me about the biology topic we are working on. I can review these resources and then contribute to a discussion about how we will use a resource with students. This ongoing discussion will remain with the resource as a forum for everyone else in the team to contribute to.

http://rad.edna.edu.au/edna-links/watchlist.php/pru_mitchell

myedna: the community

Of course other teams of educators will also be working in this myedna ecospace and they will also come across our resources and discussions and tags. Hopefully they will contribute their ideas. When I look at a tag I will be able to see a tag cloud of the people using that tag and be referred to their resources. This way I will find others interested in the same topics, can discuss resources with them and expand my network beyond the original team to a community. I can add them to my team.

http://rad.edna.edu.au/edna-links/bookmarks.php/pru_mitchell/climate

myedna: rss

I can always keep in touch with new resources, new tags and new discussions via RSS feeds from each user, each tag and each forum discussion. Pulling these various RSS feeds together into one stitched feed which I provide to teachers and students as the resource list for this learning module is the last step on my wishlist. With the climate change stitched feed url, teachers and students will have a resource list on climate change that will be constantly updated by any member of our learning team.

Technorati Profile

A question I have had to address both before and since this conference is why would a librarian who works in an online education information service attend and present at a conference for indexers? In writing this conference report I am looking to clarify the benefits of involvement both for education.au as well as personally. From the ANZSI Conference these benefits came in the form of Connection, Promotion and Education.

Connection

The opportunity to network with presenters and delegates, both in formal sessions and during breaks, provided plenty of avenues for promotion and education. Major discussion themes included usability and the need for greater research into and awareness of user search behaviour, where search patterns indicate fast, accurate results may not always be the user’s goal. There was reference to some evidence that some users prefer optional answers, or popular answers to a ‘correct’ answer.

The difficulty of indexing both for intermediaries who are search experts and to accommodate self-service by end users was raised. The ‘pointing finger’ for me for the conference was the observation that the greater the distance from the user or ‘the information discoverer’, the more danger that indexing, search functionality and cataloguing practice will be irrelevant.

A common theme amongst the web indexers present was the fact that in many cases organisations including government do not recognise the cost of metadata creation, or are not resourcing this activity. Discussion about the Australian government’s portal strategy was one aspect of this. The explosion of audio and video formats was also raised and the question of who is going to index the thousands of podcasts being produced?

Connection with leaders in the field is another benefit of conference attendance, as is exposure to the latest publications. Pam Peters launched a new ‘bible’ or Indexer’s Companion written by Glenda Browne and Jon Jermey, and was both eloquent and persuasive in her introduction to this important work.

Promotion

The opportunity to present a paper was a major benefit of the conference for my organisation. It enabled me to relate the work of education.au to a new audience with particular reference to information architecture and search, and to raise issues of the impact of social tagging and folksonomies on indexing. Our current work on the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) was of immediate relevance in this context. The fact that we presented alongside a key search partner, Jean MacKenzie of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) enabled us to reinforce the strong collaborative culture of education.au.

Education

It is interesting to learn from an allied discipline and to make links with prior knowledge. Geraldine Beare’s opening keynote session entitled Indexing Past and Future provided an illustrated historical overview of indexing, information retrieval and search, from the hand symbols seen in cave and rock art to the machine indexing of today. The large proportion of publishers now outsourcing, particularly to India, is a significant issue which could well impact on web services in other areas. The fact that a search engine is an index was a point worth emphasising, and put the rest of the conference in context for me. The challenge of regularly tweaking search algorithms raised many questions which warrant further research.

Director of the Dictionary Research Centre at Macquarie University, Pam Peters provided a keynote session entitled Language on the move. This was based on research conducted around language innovation, variation and change. Some well chosen examples provided a fascinating insight into the process of how language evolves, who adopts various rules and spellings, and how quickly the process occurs. This was a timely session for those immersed in thesaurus work and struggling with currency and literary warrant issues.

I was challenged by presenters from concurrent sessions to investigate new software options for managing thesauri, to upgrade my database management skills and to investigate the search engine interface of some major Australian online services. A compulsory exercise session for sedentary workers complete with soup can weights was an interesting and energising session idea for a conference. As someone who is often involved in conference organisation, it was great to watch highly efficient conference organisers go calmly about their tasks, making it a very easy experience for participants and presenters.

So what are the two key things I take from this conference? An action point to research machine generated indexing, tagging and metadata, and a renewed resolution to centre attention on the two basic principles of usability and findability.

As Australia's national ICT in education agency, education.au faces the challenge of indexing web resources, learning objects and teacher-created resources for optimum discoverability by students and educators across all sectors of Australian education. This paper provides an overview of current thinking about learning architectures and raises questions about how educational institutions are managing the cloud of learning resources currently available.

Particular issues include how to provide seamless access to the most relevant learning materials from the wide range of resource collections on offer; how to ensure Australian-specific vocabularies are used to describe curriculum resources and how to keep pace with terminology to describe the rapidly changing world of technology in education.

As well as concerning themselves with traditional concepts of collections, cataloguing and copyright, information professionals in the education sector are now dealing with creation of metadata to describe new forms of learning including collaborative technologies, communities of practice and professional learning events. This session reports on issues, strategies and a vision for learning architectures that incorporate the best of both worlds.

It appears 2007 is set to be a busy year for conference presentations.

SLAV, 19 Feb - Melbourne
I presented to 100 library staff at the SLAV conference on Monday this week in a session entitled: Web 2.0: making connections. This was a dangerously speeding tour through wikis, rss, blogs and podcasts (what they are, how they work, uses and issues in education, some good examples and how to get started). I experienced the usual problem with conference abstracts submitted months in advance that I had moved on somewhat since then. So, I couldn't resist trying to fit elgg, del.icio.us and myedna into the session also.
http://elgg.edna.edu.au/pmitchell/files/12/16/web2_handout.doc

The week ends with the Social Educators conference on Saturday, presenting a workshop 'Getting to know the neighbours' with Cathy McNicol. An opportunity to take a group through a hands-on tour of the Global Education website with emphasis on SOSE and Studies of Asia.
http://groups.edna.edu.au/sasose

Next stop is the ANZSI conference in Melbourne on 15 March, presenting 'Learning Architecture: Issues in Indexing Australian Education in a Web 2.0 World', and an opportunity to promote edna metadata, search and infrastructure, as well as ScOT.
http://www.aussi.org/conferences/2007/index.htm

South Australian library technicians have requested a keynote session for their conference on Friday 14 September.
I am also off to Wellington in early July as an invited speaker for SLANZA contracted for two sessions on what constitutes information literacy in a web 2.0 world.
http://www.cmsl.co.nz/default,467.sm

And what started this trail through the calendar was notification of a paper accepted for the ASLA Conference, 2-5 October at the Convention Centre. This one on 'Learning journeys: sharing the passion (and the pain)' which is sure to feature plenty on elgg and myedna thinking.

News of acceptance of other papers came in this week for the team

Nick and Sarah's proposal to the World Library and Information Congress was one of 4 papers selected internationally. This is for presentation 19-23 August 2007 in Durban, South Africa, and is entitled 'Taxonomy Directed Folksonomy: integrating user tagging and controlled vocabularies for Australian education networks."  Fantastic effort!

This was a fantastically well-presented and informative session by Anthea Amos, SCIS Customer Support Coordinator at Curriculum Corporation as part of the SLAV conference.
Anthea has been a Library technician in various Victorian secondary schools, now working at SCIS as Customer Support Coordinator.

Audience: 24 library technicians and staff

Why ScOT?

Anthea started the session straight up with a great introduction to TLF Learning Objects. She followed the golden rule: Show first, talk about later, and demonstrated:

* Example 1 Recycling
* Example 2 Mobile phone plans

- Enhancing resource discovery
- ScOT in metadata for digital repositories, Content Management Systems, Learning Management Systems
- Federated searches

SCIS Subject Headings Online

Subscription $44 p.a. on top of SCISWeb subscription
Search SCIS Subject Headings Online uses the same interface as ScOT online search.
Does not timeout (whereas SCISWeb does)
More comprehensive than SCISWeb?

Special Order files

Check these regularly.
Batch catalogue records for
o Clickview files – complete, current Clickview records, or term by term
o TLF Learning Objects (NB Vic DET include all Learning Objects on new teacher laptops)

Search

Great idea to demonstrate the same search in SCIS and ScOT: example used was embarrassing: a string search: surf
Why is the preferred term lifesaving in SCIS and life saving in ScOT? No wonder users roll their eyes!
Is it because ScOT references its terms from Macquarie Dictionary?
Can we run an automated alert or report to this kind of issue?

Reflection

Do we have a ScOT logo yet? What brief would we give a designer? What was Anthea's thinking on mauve?
We need to give feedback to users who report issues, eg childhood obesity (result of CSU assignment)

Survey

It would be interesting to run this as a quick survey at the beginning of such sessions to inform marketing.
Tick to indicate if you have any prior knowledge of
1. Learning objects
2. 13 digit ISBNs
3. The Le@rning Federation
4. Curriculum Leadership Journal
5. Educational Lending Right (ELR)
6. SCIS Authority files online
7. ScOT terms in SCIS OPAC
8. SCISWeb
9. SCIS home page (as opposed to SCISWeb)
10. ScOT search online
11. SCISWeb profile

I have been hanging out hoping someone was going to provide an intelligible account of what educators needed to know about copyright since the changes to the Copyright Amendment Act 2006. Thanks to Ian for trying his hardest (and with humour) at the SLAV conference today.  He outlined what we need to worry about in the 200 pages inserted in the act and explained what he referred to as the ‘glossy new add-ons.’

 

He noted that copyright and flexible thinking (the theme of this conference) seems a contradiction in terms. It is more usually thought of as the epitome of rigid thinking or paralysis of fear. At least he thinks keeping up with changes in copyright legislation will help you battle Alzheimer’s – it will certainly keep your mind flexible.

My notes..... [not to be assumed I either got them right, or understand full implications of what follows]

Educational provisions

Part VA Screenrights scheme

Now with podcast add-on: schools can copy radio and TV material in its podcast version

Checklist?

-         Radio or TV only, whether commercial, free, or satellite – if you can receive it you can copy it

-         You can also change format to any format you like, eg DVD, mp3 etc

-         You must mark analogue copies

-         You can also communicate the material by making available through Learning Management Systems (eg Clickview) and Internet if restricted to your students
notice format must be followed

Part VB Copyright Agency Limited

Not quite as new and improved as Part VA – fairly minor tweaks, check these out

-         insubstantial parts (eg paragraph)

-         anthologies

-         AMOUNT = 10% or 1 chapter

-         AVAILABILITY

-         Digital copies can be placed on LMS/Internet

-         Notice: warn the recipient that material might be copyright and not to copy further

-         ACCESS: take reasonable steps to restrict access: passwords, encryption

Library provisions

There are also specific library provisions which may be relevant

-         REPLACING: provision for material stolen, or which becomes worn out through use BUT not ‘in case’ that happens, can be copied or sourced as a replacement copy elsewhere BUT not if the material is commercially available.

-         ONLINE ON PREMISES – no limit on amount of content for something acquired electronically can be provided WITHIN the library and printing permitted. Requires notices near printers to inform users of their responsibilities.

AMCOS licence

Refers to photocopying ONLY

Digitising print music requires reference to CAL Part VB

AMCOS/ARIA licence

Issue of format change to availability of commercial sound recordings (use Screenrights for taped off air/radio) loaded on intranet within educational institution for research purposes

Access on intranet but with authentication/restricted access

Section 28

Playing music within the classroom is deemed NOT to be public performance (popular music, instrumental teachers, music classes) so is not an issue

In 2002 piping music through a centralised system/server or LMS/CMS was deemed to be a performance

2006 – changed to accommodate merely to facilitate communication for in-class

performance

NOT to cover entertainment/end of term treat. Need to think flexibly to make this an ‘educational experience’ – then it does not require permissions (or to pay the $90 per ‘performance’ cost).

GAP – if you have to COPY a commercial video or DVD to your server you may have problems, but if server only READS from the DVD it is fine.

Section 200AAA

All NEW

Only half of what the education sector (CAG) asked for and agreed to by Screenrights, who wanted to allow Primary Schools to be allowed to actively cache and provide it OFFLINE, so that protected material can be ensured.

Proxy web cache (cache on a proxy server) provided you only do it TEMPORARILY.

A lot of controversy over how far they stretch.

Section 200AB

The shiniest of all the new provisions

Just for that ‘special case’ / flexible dealing provision

Must ensure that the use is NARROW in both a quantitative and qualitative sense

1. Threshold: that there not be an existing provision available

2. ONE of three purposes

-         educational INSTRUCTION

-         operating or maintaining a library (or providing a service usually offered by a library – may be a future service)

-         assisting someone get a copy of something in a form or with a feature which reduces the effect of a disability (print, intellectual, learning, physical etc)

3. Three hoops

-         doesn’t conflict with normal exploitation (now or potentially in future, trade law issues)

-         doesn’t UNREASONABLY prejudice the copyright owner

-         a ‘special case’

Educational sector’s wish list

-         included format shifting/

-         preventative/back up copies

-         examination copying

-         web caching

-         distributed systems

 

Individuals can now format shift, eg tape off air to watch later

Not such an issue for students because they are entitled to do many things as a personal/study purposes, so give them the url rather than reproduce the content.

As long as you are providing links to non-infringing material there should be minimal issue. May be able to revisit the ‘get permission to link’ policies in some sectors in the light of the recent Queensland mp3s for free case.

Express permission

-         Creative Commons
Is almost an evangelical movement. Ian warns copyright owners off using this licence, but encourages educators to make use of Creative Commons

-         NEALS: National Educational Access Licence Scheme
Education sectors in conjunction with governments and statutory organisations. Not sure if they are going to keep the blue square logo – it may change in the future

-         FfE: Free for Education
AESharenet – also restructuring at moment

Implied permission

-         A print-friendly version seems an invitation to print the material

-         email to a friend – does this imply personal use?

Resources and commentators

-         CAL guidelines includes notices wording

-         Screenrights pamphlet includes notice wording

-         AMCOS/ AMCOS/ARIA and APRA Guidelines

-         enhanceTV

-         Australian Copyright Council information sheets
www.copyright.org.au

-         National Copyright Guidelines (Copyright Advisory Group)
www.smartcopying.edu.au – Information sheets not updated in relation to new act yet

-         Sector advisors, Victoria Shirley Thompson
thompson.shirley.c@edumail.vic.gov.au

-         Kenneth Crews, Indiana

-         Apparently one summary version of changes has been distributed to schools. Check this out.

-         Explanatory memorandum! If you’re brave

myedna feeds

Friday 16 February 2007Goal: single url on a business card

Edna search
http://api.edna.edu.au/search.rss20?qt=pmitchell 

Files (elgg)
http://elgg.edna.edu.au/pmitchell/files/rss/

slasaepd
http://slasaepd.blogspot.com/atom.xml 

Flickr
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=76236783@N00&format=rss_200

You Tube
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/gdaytc/videos.rss

Del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/rss/pru_mitchell

Where do educators like me live online?

Academic institution or workplace portal or intranet

Stand-alone login, but it is the provider of the core email address which is the key to so many other of my online identities.
ISSUE: when I leave this place, or my uni or school, what happens to all the identities based on this email address?

Some Learning Management systems, repositories, portals have RSS but most do not let me share anything with anyone outside this workplace.

So, as a nationally connected professional I am not going to park much of my learning and discussion in my work portal – I can already talk face-to-face with these colleagues, they don’t need my stitched RSS feed.

Email Lists

Many Australian education professional associations, teams and projects conduct their business and discussion on edna Lists (51,000 educators are currently registered there). The choice of email or web delivery, plus Single sign-on with other edna services is great and not available on other list management services, but it’s still another site to visit. How good would it be to have an RSS feed of My Lists http://www.lists.edna.edu.au/lists/lists/mylists, if not the actual posts from these Lists?

Groups

edna Groups (Yahoo Groups, Google Groups. etc). I make the same request for RSS of My Groups page at http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/my/, but I can get forum posts, news and events as RSS feeds from Groups. Yeah!

edna Sandpit

My e-portfolio at http://elgg.edna.edu.au/ is the most organised of my online spaces.
Here I have the space and the structure for a detailed professional profile.
Here I can upload my files (well 10MB worth of them) and know that wherever I am I can access my presentations, my journal articles, and key documents. For content that has no publication or sharing restrictions I can provide colleagues with an RSS feed that alerts them when I upload something new.

elgg also gives me an online rss aggregator where I can paste lots of feeds, give them meaningful tags and also share them with other elgg users. BUT I still can’t stitch up all those feeds and give them to my colleague who chooses to ‘live’ somewhere other than edna Sandpit.

With thanks to the ideas of all the myednapoc team over the past months... 

Today I share with you an issue which faces many educators who have been dabbling in the online world in a somewhat haphazard way over the past 5-10 years. Basically we have evolved something of a 'splattered identity', spread across the web in a plethora of identities, forgotten passwords, personalised bookmarks we never visit and projects half completed.

Surely there must be some way to stitch these disparate threads into a single coherent online address – a url I can put on a business card?

More and more of my work, and most of my learning, is now happening online. As I move around the country sharing my learning with educators and library staff I give out a multitude of urls pointing to websites I think are important. I do this knowing most educators won’t have the time to check out these sites once, let alone on a regular basis.

Luckily, many websites are providing RSS feeds, which means if I can get participants to subscribe to these feeds through an RSS reader, start page or browser they will receive updates automatically – a lot less urls to remember, but still quite a few RSS feeds.

Surely there must be some way to stitch these various RSS feeds into a single feed – a short meaningful feed url my colleagues can display in their preferred format?

Well, perhaps there is (or will be...)

One challenge this week is to develop elevator messages about the agency and our services which would help my grandmother grasp what we do.

[I'm actually quite confident that my grandmother who was herself a pioneer educator (in home economics), and who produced a daughter recognised as a trendsetter in multicultural education (http://www.esleducators.org.au/awards.html) would be keen to understand the current issues in education.]

This article from Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix) was very timely both for the first challenge, and on the day I got to dump 10 issues in 10 minutes on the poor CEO.

Beyond Elevator Speeches! A Process for Influence http://www.sirsidynix.com/Resources/Pdfs/Company/Abram/IOColumn_53.pdf
Q. What is required for new ideas to be taken on board?
A: 5-stage process of awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption.