Here is the direct link to the 'Grade 11 students discuss ELGG' podcast. I tried to embed the podcast into this blog but could not get it to work as an embedded file.

Check out my podomatic podcast page 'Flat Classroom'.

Also today I joined ELGG Spaces after finding out there was a free version that can be used with advertising and up to 50 people. From what I can tell so far the Spaces version of ELGG is different to what we have set up here already by allowing more than one 'space' to be set up under a person's name. This is a feature my students were talking about in the podcast. Having come over from blogger.com we have all been missing the facility to create more than one blog. Now that other teachers (OK, let's not exagerate, one other teacher) has started to use ELGG with some of the same students we decided the only way to keep the two subject separate was through tagging. Now, if they join Spaces they can start more than one blog.

I think we have come into ELGG at a difficult time (as free account users) as we are now not in Spaces but have set up blogs and communities that I do not want to have to start again in Spaces. Will have to think about this one. 

The sign leading into the main road to Gulshan goes without saying: No rickshaws are meant to enter!

John and the new mosque: three years we have been here and it is still not completed.

Building site workers: there is always a lot of building going on here and most of it takes a long time to complete. No wonder seeing as it is extremely intense physical work. 

To say the least I am impressed and pleased with the collaborative power ELGG provides and the ease with which we can develop socially and foster a productive and refelctive learning environment. 

Still in the early implementation stages I am encouraging my students to use the networking facilities of the software. They are choosing how they post, what they post and who they interact with. There are some curriculum requirements in terms of me wanting to see activity every week on their blogs and in response to others blogs. I also encourage them to interact on the community blogs set up just for them and their class/subject.

Most students are now getting the idea that they can post for private viewing, public, logged in users only or community members only (this is a little different to the blogger.com interface we have used in the past as well). They are also getting used to (at a slower rate however) using keywords and connecting via these keywords. This week the use of keywords has become imperative as I now have another teacher who has introduced ELGG to his students and started a community for Theory of Knowledge. Some of these students are also in my ITGS class. This time last year we may have asked them to create another blog using their blogger.com account, however with ELGG I see no reason for this. They can keep blogging chronologically and use keywords to locate postings for each subject. My colleague is a little unsure as to whether this will work effectively, as are the students. Let's see.

Other great features of ELGG are the ability to upload files and hyperlink to them within the posting and share them with others, also to easily find other members of their immediate community and beyond. I am fascinated by the tagging (keywords and more) facility. For example the tag on this weblog for Bangladesh reveals all those in the ELGG community who have the country profile of Bangladesh, my weblog posts in category Bangladesh as well as other users with weblog categories using 'Bangladesh'. At this stage there are no other people/classes using ELGG in Bangladesh so we have it to ourselves ;-), however the power of this community and social learning facility has amazing potential. I think I will podcast some student responses to ELGG this week and share them with you. 

This year we also recommended DELL laptops to our students if they needed a new device. We are content with what DELL can do for us throughout the school and find them to be generally quite robust and hard working. So, now we have 49 new PC's to unpack, configure and distribute around the school from PreK-12. The changeover itself is a logistical headache as 49 have come in but 40 must go out when this is all done. Forty old (4-6 years in service) PC's will be decommissioned and put out to a quieter life somewhere. Probably our local staff will purchase them for a very low amount or we may donate some to local schools and organisations.

As well as the DELLs arriving, Ramadan started this week. Most of the local Bangladeshi staff are fasting during the day. This means that they often wake before sunrise to have a meal, but then do not eat or drink again until sunset. At this time of year this period of time is over 12 hours. The breaking of the fast is called Iftar. Our IT Department, also fasting for Ramadan, are working heroically through 12 hour days, in a room that is feeling the effect of power cuts and blackouts that are affecting the continuity of the AC, in order to get the DELLs out to the students and teachers. They are to be commended.

I wrote a paragraph about the need to hyperlink and how having a text book in your hand does not do it anymore. (well that only took a sentence this time!).

In my classes I promote and develop the use of digital tools. Here is what we are currently using:

• Blogs (elgg and blogger.com for personal and collaborative writing)
  
• RSS (bloglines for making the inforamtion come to us)
• Wiki (for presenting and collaborating and creating a subject knowledge base)
• Del.icio.us (for social bookmarking of websites and resources)
• Flickr (for online storing and sharing of images, see my photos)
• Protopage (for me to deliver tasks and information, for individual storing of ideas and resources)
• Writely (for collaborative writing)

I then went on to talk about how important these digital tools have become and how our one-to-one laptop program in conjunction with our wireless network allows us to work ubiquitously 'anywhere, anytime'. We do not have to move to a computer lab, we do not have to stop interacting and learning from each other at the end of class time. Our classroom walls are down, our vision is strong and we work independently but together on a common goal. My students not only consume knowledge, they also create it and they use these digital tools in the process. They also collaborate and use social networking online. This is 21st century learning. This is probably a classroom of the future. And we are having fun!

Technorati Tags: elgg Bangladesh digitalliteracy socialnetworking

 As the only invited guests we were treated to a wonderful Bangladesh meal with chicken biryani, prawns and vegetable pasta, salad and prawns with sweet potato. We had a bottle of Coca Cola and to finish off a large chocolate and cream birthday cake. As part of their hospitality and custom we ate the main meal by ourselves while the family stayed in the kitchen. The cake had one candle and we sang Happy Birthday, everyone had a piece but we ate ours by ourselves.

In between eating, various family members, especially the young boys, came in and out and conversed with us.  Berno's brother (in the purple shirt) is deaf and has an animated way of communicating. I am always impressed by the generosity of people who have far less than us. The willingness to share food, to share customs and to open their home to us was very touching.

The family have little money, everyday is a struggle but they are the lucky ones in Bangladesh. They have a roof, they have jobs and they have food. Their children have the hope of a future in a developing nation. They even have a computer which I was assured did work (looked about 8 years old). Happy Birthday Berno!

I am still exploring the implications of having this personal blog and what it means to own a community. I can see there is going to be some interesting cross-links made between us and with other ELGG members. Already I find we are the only ELGG members to have 'Bangladesh' as a tag. But I don't fully understand this as I had this word as a tag but the students had it in their profile.

Now to the bit about bananas.......

Having spent 3 weeks recently in my home town, Melbourne Australia where the cost of bananas was prohibitive (due to the crops being destroyed in a hurricane in northern Queensland), I took this photo of my daughter, Violet, with a 'bunch' of almost ready to pick bananas growing just outside our front gate here in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

To start on a light note I showed the short movie called 'Ask a Ninja about Podcasting'. There is a whole 'Ask a Ninja' series out there for you to explore. This particular video takes a humerous look at the term 'podcasting' and comes up with a very odd explanation of what it is. I can thank my sister in Melbourne for putting me onto this...however I am a little concerned that she may believe it. Watch it and see what you think. If nothing else it should give you a laugh to start the school year.

Another movie I showed last week for the teacher PD session and also to the students this week is 'What is RSS' created by Wesley Fryer and his students at the Texas Tech College of Education. This is a partly comic, partly animated movie aimed at showing what RSS is and how to use it in this inofmration overloaded world. It starts with images of traditional card catalogues as found in libraries and moves into how syndication using aggregation can save time and be a more efficient way of finding information. What I found really interesting was the discussion with the students afterwards. These are 16-17 year old, mostly Bangladeshi girls and boys who have largely spent most of their education years in Bangldesh itself. Some of them are very well travelled, others not so. They had no real concept of what a card catalogue looked like or functioned like. In fact they had no real concept of what a large library was like in terms of it being a place to go and find numerous resources.

I felt a terrible generation gap had opened up, as well as a cultural gap to an extent. There are no local libraries that these students go to here, even Universities (government) do not have accessible libraries and resources that can be shared by all. I tried to relate to them my experiences, particulalry as an undergraduate in the late 1970's and early 80's and how I lived and breathed being in the library searching and reading and exploring. I tried to remember the card method and the long drawers of paper cards, dog-eared with use and the pencils and slips of paper at the ready to write down call numbers in preparation for the trek to the shelves to find 'the book'.

My students have never experienced this! Therefore they must a totally different perception of what RSS is and what it can do for them to what I have. To them it must seem more natural, more accessible and less 'wow' than to us digital immigrants.

1. Recent readings of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and my interest in exploring concepts to do with the flat classroom.
2. Continued interest in best practice blogging for education and feeling the need to model this as a practitioner (technology leader and class teacher).
3. Current interest in ELGG as a tool for online communities to share, present, blog, and interact.
   

The title of this blog, In Touch with a Flat World, has been chosen to signify that wherever we are in the world (east, west, first world, third world) we can stay in touch and be part of the global conversation through the development of online learning environment software and the Internet.  

Therefore I intend to post on a regular basis and explore the world of ELGG while relating experiences at my school, International School Dhaka where I am Head of Technology. I hope you drop in from time to time and see what I am up to with colleagues and students.