Their expectation is control of the media in a manner that lets them learn more about others, and in turn
share information about themselves
Consider these attributes of youth as positive assets for instructors to draw upon
A good note here about the use of a student to help with teacher ictpd
http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/take-a-student-to-workshop-day/
There is a little bit of this in NZ, eg. the tech angels at a Wellington School that I forget the name of, but it should be a much bigger and intrinsic part of the whole ICTPD program.
A report from Becta that is worth a quick browse. Emerging technologies for learning. Nothing radically new, but a good summary for anyone wanting to catch up on the latest trends.
"The underlying mechanics of joining information up in newer, faster
and more efficient ways that anyone can control in a commutative
way is one of the keys to greater productivity, and results in a
greater engagement on the part of the consumer or learner.
It is akin to what Stephen Heppell calls symmetry. The learners in
his studies were keen to have far more control over their information
and data; they were producers as much as consumers and, when
presented with the opportunity to participate, found the process far
more compelling because of this. He says,"This is closer to a model of
communication than a model of dissemination and it is the future."
Have just spent a bit of time with a fellow developer grappling with the issue of maintaining multilingual documentation for an open source software project.
The initial thought was wikis are the answer, put up a basic framework and then let the users take over the development and maintenance of it, which all looked swimmingly good until we looked at the issue of the other language versions (the application interface is already translated into several languages so the documentation base needs to support these users).
Currenlty with the standard wiki architecture there is no easy way to keep different language versions in sync, and to allow fallback to a default language if certain sections are not translated. There is also no way to take a snapshot of the current default language as a basis of your translation as there is no way to edit the link text for each node, you basically have to recreate the documentation from scratch, copying as closely as you can/want the default language set, and adding in the inter-language links as you go.
This problem is solved by your usual application interface language strings setups, as there is a unique key for each string set by the default language, and so a translation can start of by falling back to the default set of strings, and then you translate as many of the strings as are needed - and any new strings added to the default langauge can be automatically pushed out to the translations, so people using the translation at least get the default langauge version until such time as it is translated.
Having thought about it, it appears that the only way of replicating this in some sort of wiki style would be to build an imperialist wiki, in which only the default langauge version was allowed to add new content and structure, and the different language versions could only translate the content and structure put in place by the default language people.
Anyway, we will keep thinking this one over, would be interested in thoughts of others on it …
Just playing with a developer download of Flock - a tagging/blogging tool devloped using Firefox.
Typing this entry up in Flock and hopefully submitting it via the xmlrpc interface into plog.
Some interesting things happening with tagging
http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000067.html
A semantic mozilla by summer 2005 - this is a project worth watching!
Some very interesting discussion taking place on Folksonomies. It takes me back to my library days, when the web was just starting to take off and the Librarians were all busy trying to correctly classify every new website that popped up, dublin core and all that. Every library conference was full of speakers trying to reassure other librarians that the world needed them to bring order out of the caos of the web - search engines would never provide adequate access to quality resources on the web! Is time (and google) starting to prove them wrong on that point?
Another interesting read on the cognitive cost of classification here. Both articles should give some food for thought to the learning object cult that is putting a lot of cognitive energy into working out how to classify all those wonderfully reusable learning objects.
