Experiments in Learning

If you read Tom Friedman's "World is Flat", then you will recall the story about the airline that outsourced some of it's holiday planning and advice to retired people that may just be answering your phone call while they were sitting in their hot tub ... or something like that anyway.

I've just watched Sugata Mitra on a short 7 minute clip about "Gateshead Granny Cloud" - a project where elderly in the UK are donating an hour a week of their time to connect with students in India to help learning. Interesting. The video is below. But what may be more interesting is the bit after the "grannies" have had there turn. The two sections on letting young kids loose on the internet armed with nothing more than what i guess is a pretty damn big question. In the example "Where does language come from?" - 

I've seen enough in this clip to make me go and join the 103,000 others who have watched the TED talk from Mitra of a few years ago - I've known of it since it appeared on the TED site - just not bothered to watch.

And as I watch I have numerous thoughts running through my head ...some of them are

• how do we capture the enthusiasm of our students in the same way?
• how do we encourage staff to take the chance and try something like this?
• why don't we encourage these types of behaviours - especially at year levels where we should be experimenting?
• what might our students have to contribute to students in other parts of the world in a similar way? [I think I am going to have a shot at something like this with one of my classes this year. In fact - it may just become the target for next term's work for some of my team. 

I've been inspired by Alan November's "meaningful work" and it's time to test what I hear from so many sources - that today's youth want to make a contribution. 

So, I will watch Mitra's TED talk over the next few days. Here it is  - all 17 minutes of it.

So much for the new resource!

I heard on the radio coming into school today that TVNZ7 will have funding cut from June next year. The Herald has the article here. Guess I now understand why the DVDs have been so long in coming - shame that the resource that announced itself yesterday looks like suffering an early demise.

New Resource for NZ Teachers

It's been some time now since TVNZ7 first announced they were making a DVD available to schools - and nothing arrived. Until today - when an email arrived announcing that the DVD would soon be here along with the announcement that the TVNZ7 Learning Hub was to go live today.

Here's what the website has to say ...

The TVNZ 7 Learning Hub explained
Welcome to TVNZ 7's Learning Hub, a destination for teachers, parents and students offering quality education resources based on popular TVNZ 7 programmes.

Through partnerships with other organisations we have compiled education resources to suit the New Zealand curriculum. All of the resources link through to our TVNZ OnDemand page where you can view the accompanying episode.

So, what's available? Well, not a lot at the moment - there are a dozen or so episodes of the Ever Wondered TV series - I had a look at one on astronomy (just because I'm interested - sad eh?) and was pleasantly surprised to find a pile of links through to resources and student activities on ScienceLearn . 

One thing I did find was that it was easy to get lost in the standard TVNZ7 website and from there to TVNZOnDemand - and end up watching missed episodes of Coronation Street and others. 

But - all in all - a welcome addition to local content - let's see how it develops over the coming months.

Learning with a Real Purpose

Two years ago I had a class that studied the 2008 Horizon Report and published a wiki as the end product of their work. What I have found interesting is that while they finished their work 2 years ago, their wiki site still attracts around 50 unique visitors per day from countries like the US, UK, Russia, Canada, Ireland and Australia - oh, and a few from NZ.
This reinforced to me the importance of having a real purpose for learning. In the past if students had created a research report on the Horizon Report it would likely be be shared with at most two people - the student and the teacher. Here - the students have created a resource which is being shared with upwards of 1000 people per month.
Alan November talks of learning with a real purpose in his TEDxNYED. This neat little 15 minute talk of several student stories has one really cool one - the one about the 13 year old girl using Fan Fiction. "When I wake up I have to decide - do I write for my teacher or do I write for the world?"
Enjoy Alan's talk - he's a great thinker and practitioner.