Wednesday, July 11, 2007

MOE ExCEL FEST 2007, 13 July 2007

I've been invited to give a one-hour talk to teachers attending the MOE ExCEL FEST 2007, 13th July 2007, held at the Singapore Chinese Girls' School.

Title: Meeting Challenges of the NEW MEDIA FRONT
This talk explores the onset of the New Media Front that teachers have to grapple with. Some of the tools and online services introduced include YouTube; TeacherTube; SlideShare; Flickr; Blogger; and Wikipedia. Presenter Ivan Chew will also share examples of how these various medium are being used by educators, both in Singapore and abroad.

Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of challenges faced when adopting these new media tools, as well as when students adopt new mediums for school-related work.

I'd just looked over at the notes I prepared earlier, for the talk. And I threw out 80% of the outline.

Do other presenters or educators face this problem? When you look at your initial outline, you think you've got a winner; that the audience would love it. But only to review it later and find that even you're bored just going through it. I'm not worried about embarrassing myself by doing a bad job per se; I'm concerned that the audience won't get the most out of it.

On the positive side, I'm quite confident of delivering a talk off the cuff, if it comes down to it. But I'd have to prepare a few screenshots, just in case the Internet connectivity goes wonky on me.

You folks have any comments/ suggestions/ pointers for this group of teachers? I'd be happy to incorporate them into the talk (with due credit, always).

Thanks!

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:10 am

    Hey Ivan,

    You might wish to talk about Swiki, a search engine that learns from your community's search behavior. I am actually in a beta test for my students at the university, who are doing Advance Research Programme. I guess it a good tools especially for teachers who are teaching history ior geography.... on my blog, dude.

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  2. Another note to self: Using Flickr to share photos and learning something out of it (in this case, about the closure of the Singapore National Stadium): From Siva and Kenneth

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  3. Anonymous6:59 am

    Here the url, I am testing about SWIKI, dude, http://hazman.e-joi.com/myspace/2007/07/12/incoporating-swiki-into-project-open-access-journal/

    Another site, you might want to share with the educators is http://www.larkin.net.au/. He is a specialist educational technologist, who always deliver his findings in NTU and NIE.

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  4. Here's one teachers can use straightaway: Wikispaces. I had students produce their own exam study guide collaboratively, while I gave hints by editing their entries. See my recent example here: http://com125.wikispaces.com

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  5. Hey Ivan,

    Wow, an hour is a really short time to talk about New Media. Introducing the tools is one thing, then teachers want to know how they can use the tools. I suggest you concentrate on three tools, share a good - no, the best - story about how that particular tool has been used in the classroom. After you delve into what the tool is about, then you can quickly go through other examples.

    Story suggestions:
    Blogs - http://jalankayutrail.blogspot.com/
    How the FoYers came across it. What the blog is about. etc.
    Used for documenting and sharing history project research.
    Benefits/outcomes:
    - an authentic audience for the students (it's exciting that they get readers and comments)
    - picked up by other blogs (yesterday.sg)
    - knowledge sharing
    - the blog is the 7th hit in google if you search for "jalan kayu"

    Flickr (and Creative Commons) - Erm... not sure if I can share the teacher's name but i suppose you can say a teacher from Greenridge Primary.
    Used as a resource for photos. You can present a problem/solution scenario. Primary/Secondary school teachers are very mindful of copyright infringement. So this teacher got around it by searching for photos on Flickr. Not sure if he knew about Creative Commons, but he definitely knew that there are tons and tons of photos on Flickr. He made a slideshow with photos from there, using the National Stadium as a focal point, for Racial Harmony Day. Contacted the photographers (he used some of my girlfriend's and my photos) to ask permission (I told him that was nice but unnecessary since my photos are CC-licensed.)

    I think they can see how useful this will be for other subject matter. That people meticulously tag their photos really helps. Also the annotation might be a useful possibility: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/265279980/

    The third tool... erm. I've not seen a really good local example of the use of wikis. But it would be nice to feature that. Or perhaps Kevin's students' videos?

    You might want to point out that the common thread about all these tools is sharing. =)

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  6. Hey Ivan,

    I hope that this response is not too late for your presentation.

    I would second the apps that Kenneth raised. In addition I would be careful about the term New Media. It's a term that "tastes like chicken" and comes to embody meanings for so many things. When you say new media, I am presuming that you are referring to Social software/social media/web 2.0 type applications? If so, you may want to highlight that these new applications are very diverse in their content and purpose, all of them share the following common features:

    - Participation/contribution = these apps often rely on participation and contributions from its users either in terms of context or activity.

    - self-organizing = Self-policing, rating/trust sytems and reputation systems help to control for quality, coordinate activity and use of the apps by the community.

    - Publicness/openness = these applications aggregate and organize contributions thus making it easy for potential contributors to see what has already been contributed. This is similar to Kenneth's suggestion of 'sharing'.

    - Networked = these applications not only capitalize on the structure of the internet but also the social networks of the participants/users.

    Hope that was useful and that it made sense Ivan.

    jude

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