Chris Betcher

Here's an interesting thought about the nature of communication through conversation... Michael Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and the creator of several well-watched YouTube videos about the nature of web 2.0. I'm sure most of the edublogosphere has probably seen " The Web is Us/ing Us ", " Information R/Evolution " and " A Vision of Students Today ". All of these videos have done the rounds of the web in a completely viral way, and if you haven't yet seen them, you should. In an interview with John Batelle from Searchblog , Wesch was asked about the videos and some of the ideas he was exploring by making them. It's an interesting read, but I was particularly struck by one of his responses in the comment section at the end of the interview, as he was counter-responding to a long string of blog comments from multiple readers... "The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revis...

If you read blogs about education with any sort of regularity you will no doubt recognise the name Will Richardson .  Will's blog, Weblogg-ed , has become somewhat of a keystone in the edublogosphere, not just for the things he writes about and the thinking he does about education in the 21st century, but also because he is just so darn prolific! Thanks to the jungle drums of Twitter, I was really excited to hear that Will is coming to Australia to deliver a talk entitled The Why 2 of Web 2.0 .  I don't know Will personally at all, but we have bumped into each other a few times in various chat rooms and UStream sessions.  He was one of the founding ideas-people behind the global K-12 Online Conference (although his commitments at the time required him hand it over to others to run).  His has been a seminal voice of the blogosphere for a long time, having written several books on blogging and the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom, spoken at conferences all around the world.  Will ...

I didn't write this, but I enjoyed reading it and wanted to share it.  It comes straight from mouth of Seymour Papert, one of the most influential thinkers of our time.  This quote comes from a speech Papert gave, and is worth reading the whole thing. "School as we’ve known it is based on an assembly-line model. And the assembly line was a great invention when Henry Ford made it. And the school might have been a great invention when it was made, but it is an assembly-line model. You come into school, you’re in the first grade, in the first period of the day. You do what the first chapter of the textbook says. You go to second period, third period, second grade, third grade. It’s an assembly line; at each point some new pieces of knowledge are put in. Why we did this was because we had only such primitive knowledge management technology as chalk and blackboard--and even printing is inflexible, impersonal. With our new forms of knowledge technology, there is no reason why we sho...

Today is Australia Day here in Down Under land. It celebrates the arrival of the first fleet into Botany Bay, marking the beginning of white mans' occupation of Terra Nullius - literall meaning "Empty Land". Quite a large presumption really, and to the aboriginal people who had already lived here for over 40,000 years it was not quite such a cause for celebration. Even today, Australia's indigenous population still refer to it as Invasion Day. Anyway, that could be the subject of a whole other discussion ... The point is that January 26 in Australia is celebrated as Australia Day and a quick visit to the Google Australia home page at www.google.com.au has the Google logo swapped out for another one with an Australian theme. Swapping the Google logo for temporary logos derived from the original one is not new... Google does it all the time and you can browse the collection of past special logos in their Holiday Logo gallery . The logo being used today is a litt...

One of the really cool things about being a globally connected teacher is the opportunities to develop relationships with other like-minded educators. As I've said once or twice before, learning is a conversation and as we start to engage in that conversation it continues to feed our need for ongoing learning. Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as some still-useful "old skool" technologies like Skype, email and mobile phones means that we can be incredibly connected to each other if we choose to be. I started hanging around online communities a long time ago; in fact, as a teenager I was a geeky kid with a Citizens Band radio and used to sit in my room late at night having conversations with lots of people from all over Sydney and beyond that I mostly never met. (I say "mostly", because I did actually meet a few of my CB buddies and became quite good long-term friends with some of them) When I got into computers I remember the excitement...

It's sometimes difficult getting kids to understand the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don't realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins , once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it. This video makes a pretty good point of showing the effect of this behaviour... [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/iwBz-hxjSLU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It's something that both children and adults need to understand well. This is a post-Google world we live in. It's no longer unusual that an employer Googles the name of a potential hire to check their reputation and see what they have done (or equally, not done). When you go out with a new person, it's likely that your date has Googled you, MySpaced you or FaceBooked you to get a little bit of "background" on the sort of person you are. In a digita...

As a parent, it's a fine line we walk sometimes in knowing where the boundaries are for your kids. We want to protect them from danger and shield them from hurt. At the same time, we need to allow them to experience the world and learn to interact with it in meaningful ways. This paradox of safety versus experience is a tricky balance to get right, but I'm convinced that we are probably the most overprotective generation of parents in history. A recent post here listed a number of tongue-in-cheek example of how much we seem to overreact to things that would have been much less of a drama a few years ago. How many of you went out playing all day when you were a kid, and the only rule was to be home by dark? No "Call me when you get there to let me know you arrived ok"... just "Bye dear, have fun playing!" This video from the TED Talks series, called " 5 Dangerous Things you should let your Children do " makes a similar observation that maybe w...

This is a joint post between Sue Waters and myself about integrating Flickr with Picasa, and has been cross posted on each of our blogs. Let's start with a little background on this post's origin After spending some time yesterday migrating Linda's entire photo collection (well, most of it... did I mention that regular backup is very important?) into Google's Picasa photo management application and then giving her a bit of a tutorial in how to use it tonight, she asked the next obvious question... how do I put some of these photos onto Flickr ? A good question. After all, Flickr is without a doubt the best online photo sharing website around. With amazing tools and options, an incredible online community for sharing and learning from each other, and a huge array of APIs that enable Flickr to work with a range of different online and offline services, the decision to use Flickr as your online photo storage tool of choice is a bit of a no-brainer. However, on the...

A friend sent me one of these silly emails, but this one actually made me laugh. It's unnervingly close to the truth! Here goes... Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack. 1977 - Vice principal comes over, looks at Jack’s shotgun, goes to his car and gets his own shotgun to show Jack. 2007 - School goes into lockdown, the RCMP are called, Jack is hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors are called in to assist traumatized students and teachers. Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school. 1977 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies. 2007 - Police are called, SWAT team arrives and arrests Johnny and Mark. They are charged with assault and both are expelled even though Johnny started it. Scenario: Jeffrey won’t sit still in class, disrupts other students. 1977 - Jeffrey is sent to the principal’s office and given a good paddling. Returns to...

The Kiwis got there a few hours before us, but Sydney's New Year's Eve celebrations have come and gone for another year. Linda and I caught the train into the city last night, along with more than a million other Sydneysiders, and watched $600,000 worth of gunpowder get launched above the harbour. As always, it was quite the spectacle. We got in there a couple of hours before midnight and wandered through Martin Place, then down George Street towards the Quay. The crowd was getting pretty raucous the closer we got to the harbourfront so we turned up Hunter Street and tried getting a spot at Mrs Macquaries Point but it was completely full. We kept walking all the way past Wooloomooloo, Garden Island and eventually found a decent vantage point in Potts Point, just below St Vincents School. I took a little bit of video, as I promised I would on Twitter... here you go Jen Wagner! At the time of posting this, the Pacific, Australia, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have a...

There are two ICT trade show events that I'd love to attend - NECC in the US and BETT in the UK. I've probably left it a bit late to attend BETT (it starts in a week or so), but I'm seriously considering attending the 2008 National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio Texas. After hearing all about it for the last few years I've been curious and interested to attend a NECC event, and the 2008 event just happens to fall conveniently in the midyear Australian school holidays (where I potentially have a full three weeks off!) One of the motivators for attending this year is thanks to the amazing connections I've made with so many educators throughout the US and Canada via tools like Twitter and Skype. I feel like 2007 has been the year of expanding my own personal learning network and I'm keen to get to an event like NECC to meet up with people in real life that I feel I've come to know through these virtual spaces. Besides, last years Bloggers...