This is a slide I have used in a number of presentations this year. Each presentation has been different but has focussed on one or more aspect of the slide. I hope to make an Articulate version of the slides in due course. The way it is going so far I will be publishing one slide at a time! Mostly I have been asked to speak about the contents of the left-hand box, about social software and how it is being used in education. Less frequently are found discussions of the context of all this outside of the formal education system. But it is this external context that tells us why we should be considering using social software and what we should be seeking to achieve. Below the picture I have listed some items, mostly on-line presentions, that have some interesting things to say about this context. I have gleaned most of these items from educational blogs, including several from colleagues here on Elgg. I doubt whether I would have found most of them so easily, or at all, without being a member of this community and the good offices of RSS. Some of them are quite long but if you are short of time I would especially recommend the Sir Ken Robinson talk which I think is quite inspirational, and Karl Fisch's 'Did you know' which is particularly thought provoking.

Click on image for bigger version. 

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants the seminal paper by Marc Prensky on the concepts of digital natives and immigrants. This is a pdf file.

Engage me or enrage me The presentation given by Marc Prensky at the Learning in the 21st Century conference for school leaders, Shropshire County Council Education Dept. 5th April 2006.This podcast and associated PowerPoint slides are hosted by Learning and Teaching Scotland

Integrating Tradition and Technology  A presentaion given by Diana G Oblinger (who is giving a keynote at this year's ALT-C I believe). This video is from Cornell University's University Computer Policy and Law Program's (UCPL) speaker series.

"Information technology has catalyzed the creation of new forms of communication, self-expression, and collaboration. The distributed cognition enabled by social networking, podcasting, and videoblogging aligns well with the habits of today's learners. And, with the Web as learners' information resource, no learner is ever far from information resources. This presentation explores how well education is keeping pace with user expectations, IT capabilities, learning principles, and cultural shifts".

A newly Open and Public Quality to Learning The keynote presentation by John Wilinsky given at UBC Okanagan's 2nd Annual Learning Conference 'Learning Free of Boundaries'. The presentation reviews "educational developments in the public sphere that are taking place outside of classroom settings, which include open access to scholarship, the Wikipedia cooperative knowledge movement, the democratic pursuits of the blogosphere, the open source software movement, and the health information revolution. The pedagogical implications of these movements for educators and researchers will be considered in terms of fostering new lessons on the circulation of knowledge, the intellectual properties of our work, and the prospects of a more deliberative democracy". This is an mp3 audio file.

Liquid Modern Challenges to Education by Prof. Zygmunt Bauman. Address given to Leed’s Alumni May 26th 2006. My old professor and still going from strength to strength since retirement in the early 1990s.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Presentation to the World Bank on his book of the same title published April 2005. This sets out the global context within which Western economies and education institutions are being challenged

Did you know? Karl Fisch’s blog, The Fischbowl. The first few slides are about the IT provision in the school Karl works at but the rest of the slides illustrate extremely economically some of the key points Thomas Friedman makes.

Talk given by Sir Ken Robinson recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA and hosted on TEDtalks. If you have not visited TEDtalks before you will undoubtedly find some very interesting stuff there. The talks are given by world leaders in the fields of science, music, innovation and design, computing and software, business etc. Sir Ken Robinson is author of 'Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative', and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. His talk is specifically about the challenges to education in a rapidly changing world.

I'd be very interested in any comments or observations you have to make about any of these items, and/or suggestions of others that address similar themes. Also, if I have left anything out of the three boxes in the slide I would be grateful for suggestions.

A little while ago I suffered from a complaint called plantar fasciitis. I didn't know it was called that to begin with, I just had a tremendous pain in my right heel when I got up in the morning and could hardly walk. It seemed to come from nowhere. It was so bad I went to the doctor a couple of days later who said I must have bruised it badly somehow despite there being no visible bruising and I could not recall any event that might have caused it. I looked the symptoms up on the web, found an exact description of the symptoms and context, followed the advice and, as predicted, about 10 days later all was well.

A very good friend of mine lost his father and brother to cancer of the oesophagus. Like them, he suffers from recurrent heartburn, or acid reflux. In researching this he found that about 10% of heartburn sufferers have Barrett's oesophagus, a precancerous condition, and that these are between 30 and 125 times more likely to die of oesophageal cancer than the 90% that don't have Barrett's oesophagus. Neither his father nor brother were diagnosed with Barrett's O. My friend arranged to have the appropriate test, which his doctor had never heard of, and sure enough he has it. The good news is that there is a great deal that can be done to reduce the likelihood of BO becoming full blown cancer - diet, weight loss, etc. - so my friend is quite upbeat about it and feels he has a measure of control.

Another close friend suffers from Torticollis, or wry neck. This developed very quickly and had the effect of forcing his head round over his left shoulder. Apart from being very embarrassing, it stopped him driving and at meetings he had to make sure he was sitting at the side of the conference table where he could look at and address the Chair. His doctor advised surgery to cut the contracting neck muscles was the only solution and he would have to wear a neck brace to stop his head lolling around. Research on the web found that increasingly the condition is being treated with regular injections of botulinum toxin. This partially paralyses the contracting muscles and relaxes them thus allowing the muscles on the other side of the neck to stabilise and control head movement. His doctor had not heard of this and took up the research. As a result my friend receives the botox treatment and leads a normal life, looking to the future rather than where he has just been, and his doctor has had a free episode of professional continuing education.

Several messages could be gleaned from these last two stories. One might be that, if you are a friend of mine, you are probably ill and definitely dying.

Another, more positive, message is the one that John Wilinsky describes so eloquently and entertainingly in his keynote presentation to the UBC Okanagan's 2nd Annual Learning Conference 'Learning Free of Boundaries': A newly Open and Public Quality to Learning. This is an mp3 audio file about 62 minutes and 50 Mbytes. The whole presentation is a very rewarding listen when you have the time. The bit of the presentation relevant to this post topic starts at the 21st minute. However, I have taken the liberty of extracting the 11 minutes or so where John is talking about the internet, literacy and reading ability, and how people are increasingly using the internet to research their medical and health issues and how this is changing their relationship with doctors and the medical profession. This is gradually developing into a process of "shared decision making". Of particular interest is John's account of the process whereby individuals develop from not even understanding the title of some research papers to gradually developing the context that enables them get a handle on it and talk productively to their doctors about it. He draws some important and interesting general conclusions about the nature independent learning, developing critical thinking skills but in the context of a vastly expanded access to knowledge.