Chris Betcher

In a recent speech delivered by Senator Helen Coonan, I was impressed by some of what she said about the changing nature of the world. Coonan is Australia's Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (yeah, we like to give 'em broad portfolios down in Australia) Her speech was entitled "An Integration Plan for Digital Migrants", and although there didn't seem to to be a lot of action points for a "plan" as such, I found it an interesting speech. Of course, a lot of her talk will sound quite familiar to many of us who live in the educational blogosphere, but it's good (and unfortunately somewhat unusual) to hear insights like these coming from the political world. Among other things, Coonan said... Digital immigrants are, on the whole, outpaced by the hoards of digital natives who do not see technology as technology but as an appendage. It’s not technology to the teens – it’s routine, it’s run-of-the-mill, it’s life. They don’...

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was simply uneconomical to think in terms of small production runs. Indeed, the term "economy-of-scale" alludes to the notion that it's cheaper to produce a lot of something because the price per unit is reduced the more you produce. This economy-of-scale idea has been especially true in the printing business, where most of overall price for printing something was tied up in the initial setup costs of creating the artwork, producing the plates and setting the presses up for the print run. Of course it doesn't just apply to the printing process... cars, furniture, food and most other things are cheaper to produce (per unit) if you make a lot of them, but the printing industry is a great example. When I was at art school in the 80s, I did a lot of screen printing, and this was again a classic example of the way scale affected production cost. About 97% of the time and money required to produce a screened image was consumed ...

I have a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs. As one of the founders of Apple Computer, Next Computer and Pixar Studios, I think he's a pretty amazing guy and his impact on the world via his contributions to the computer industry are huge. If you're interested to hear what advice a guy like Steve Jobs might give a young school leaver when it comes to life and success, then you might enjoy watching this video of Steve giving the commencement speech at Stanford University last year. In it he offers his thoughts about what matters most in life and what success really means. [youtube]D1R-jKKp3NA[/youtube] What I thought was interesting is that he was not saying the things that "the system" promotes, namely go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work hard for the rest of your life. Instead he talks about diversity of learning experiences - connecting the dots, as he calls it - and how learning should be for life, in areas that fascinate you, about thing...

This just made me laugh...

A mate put me onto the great mashup of GWB doing U2... very clever I thought... [youtube]4kKN92DASn0[/youtube] Thanks for pointing me to it Simon.

I admit it. I'm terrible at staying focused. Especially when you put me in front of a computer, I find it easy to get distracted by the million and one things that can distract a computer user... emails coming in constantly, IM messages bleeping at me every few minutes, RSS feeds constantly updating and all the other services that tend to bombard one with "stuff". Sometimes, especially when I need to write, it would be good to just shut it all out for a while and resist the temptation to answer that email, respond to that IM or browse that RSS feed. I suppose I COULD try to use a bit of self discipline and just ignore these things, but where's the fun in that? I COULD turn off all that stuff and just shut it out, but it's too tempting to need a distraction from what I should be doing... and that's the problem in the first place. So I thought this piece of software looked interesting... it's called WriteRoom , and basically turns your fandangled, geewhi...

Ah, parent-teacher night. That wonderful night that comes around every so often where you get to meet all the parents of all the kids you really don't need to see. You know, the kid who's getting straight As, has an 85+ average, always does their homework, works well and contributes to everything, and their parents always turn up to the interview asking "So, how's he doing?" Of course the kids who are nearly failing the course, the ones with 15 absent days and who never handed in that last assessment task... how come the parents of those kids never seem to turn up? If I was a cynic I'd think there might be some sort of correlation between the two. I'm sitting here at parent-teacher night right now. Alone. Next appointment not for another 25 minutes. I mean, I'm not a Math or English teacher. Fortunately I'm getting a wifi signal, so I thought I'd drop a quick blog post on here... But what jumped out at me the most during the report wr...

Just lately I've noticed that I seem to be coming up with workarounds for problems, just so I can get my job done. In the past few days I've had to rethink a lesson because the school network won't support a particular action, or I've had to switch plans midstream because the software I'd been planning to use does not run properly, or I've had to change my original idea for a lesson because there is no power outlet where I need it, or I've had to modify an assessment task because the tools that I have been promised are not available... and the list goes on. I've had conversations recently with other teachers who tell me that they cannot do things with their classes because their school system has filters that prohibit them from using certain software or accessing certain sites. These teachers are "making do" with less than they'd like because "the system" is not able to provide what they need. It's occurred to me how much of...

Following on from the success of the "When Night Falls" Skypecast that concluded the recent K12 Online Conference, I offered to run a similar Skypecast for members of the Australian OzTeachers group. If you have an interest in education, you might like to drop in to say g'day. It starts at 10:00am Saturday morning (AEST), or 6:00pm Friday evening (US EST). You'll have to do the math for other timezones. https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=52950 Update:  It was quite a success and about 30 people showed up.  Keep your eye out for the next one, which we will do as a conference rather than a Skypecast I think...

I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It's a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more... The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple's built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro's standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop. For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I'd suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I'd say it's definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the af...

Kudos to James Farmer, who runs the Edublogs service. He has outdone himself. The server was upgraded last week and the new functionality is fabulous. We can now easily embed Flash, Director, YouTube, Google Video, and iFilm files directly into blog posts, which is a greatly appreciated feature. As well as that, he has installed additional Wordpress plug-ins which enable us to do a heap of cool stuff, like the "listen to podcast" option through Talkr, and a link to easily add photos directly from your Flickr account, like so. Thanks James for continuing to make Edublogs (and I'm hoping Learnerblogs too!) better all the time. By the way, all this funky Web 2.0 spelling of words like Flickr, Talkr, Frappr, etc is making me wonder if I should start spelling my own last name as Betchr?

Even though I'm just outside Toronto, Canada, I just a fun little chat with a Year 7 class at a school in country Victoria, Australia. Anne Baird is a teacher from this Victorian school. Anne and I have been exchanging a few emails and Skype calls recently to share some blog and wiki ideas. Anne noticed I was online and buzzed me to ask if I'd like to talk to her Year 7 kids. I said yes, and the rest was easy. From my place in Canada, she was able to have my voice and video image magically appear on the board in a little school in country Victoria, and then Ms Baird and her kids were able to chat to me about life in Canada. We spoke for about 25 minutes, and the kids asked me a bunch of questions about Canada, what it was like, the weather, the food, the people, and so on. Then my daughter - who is in Year 6 here in Canada walked past the computer so I put her on for a chat. Kate told them about school here, what it was like to live in a different country and so on... Her...

We had a staff meeting yesterday and I couldn't get over how much of it was just "administrivia"... Stuff that could have been just as easily done using email. You know the sort of thing... "this event is taking pace at such and such a time. That event requires people to do XYZ. The deadline for so and so is on some particular date..." I was trying to figure out why we bother holding meetings to tell people stuff that could be done so much more effectively and efficiently using email or other electronic means. Then they have it in writing. They can refer to it at anytime. And we don't waste an hour waffling on about this stuff when we could actually be doing something constructive. For a few brief minutes a colleague gave an excellent SMARTBoard demonstration and the rest of the staff were actually engaged and interested. Then it was back to the usual stuff that goes on in most staff meetings in most schools I've ever worked in. Dates, events, bla...

Here's a link to another fine post by Will Richardson from his Weblogg-ed blog. I feel the same frustrations that Will is talking about, and I think he raises some excellent thought-provoking points. I find it interesting that Will's post arrived in my feedreader at about the same time that I received this beautifully written post by one of my students on her class blog. I asked the kids to write me a short piece on the topic of Communication... I told them they could interpret that pretty much any way they liked, I was just interested to see what they might come up with. I was blown away when I read Michelle's post. I'd encourage you to take a moment to read it, and please, if you can, leave her a comment.

I made a little video the other day. It was just a simple time lapse movie of my students carving a pumpkin for Halloween. Nothing really tricky. You can see it here if you like... [youtube]Lbl9U_Jm-Yo[/youtube] What's interesting to me about it however, is the speed and simplicity with which I was able to publish it to the web. I've put plenty of stuff online before, including videos, but it always involved creating an html page, embedding the video using code, uploading to a server using FTP, yaddah, yaddah... the process usually took a fair bit of time, some specialised software, a place to upload to, having the correct ports open on the network, lots of messing around, and a hat with a propeller on top. Thanks to Web 2.o technologies I was able to upload the video directly to YouTube, which took care of all the compression, rendering, hosting and other technogeek stuff, and it was online within minutes. I then posted a link to it to the class blog so the students cou...

I was exchanging a few emails with a colleague the other day, and he proposed an interesting question... "...imagine that when you go to your school tomorrow, somehow all curriculum (not admin) computers, peripherals and multimedia devices had disappeared - vaporised! Could quality teaching and learning still occur in your classroom? If not, specifically why not? I have heard it said a lot (that we need some serious changes in education) and it never fails to be a crowd pleaser and draw an enthusiastic response. But do we really? Is a good teacher in 2006 really that different a species to a good teacher from 20 years ago? Or 30, or 40 or 50 years ago?" Interesting question. I recall Seymour Papert proposing a similar question in one of his books, where he suggested that if you had a time machine whereby you could go back to the late 1800s, pick up a teacher, a doctor and an engineer and bring them back to the 21st century, how well could they function? Papert sugges...