RussDev - Blog From Russell Dyas

Well I was at Blog.ac.uk 2006 today and big thanks to Josie Fraser for getting this conference up and running it has been very useful and it opened with a very passionate talk by Barbra Ganley.
Barbra talked about her use of using blogs in classroom and one key quote she said is that students improved but both in terms of thing she measures class room dynamic, student involvement and in terms of what establishment management measure such as grades.
Also she made a comment about “not keeping schools apart from rest of world” this is so true and the divide between schools and outside world can’t stay apart and learning 24-7 is a must…
Comment that did stay with me was that young people use email and voice mail to communicate with older generation but when they communicate with there generation they use other forms sms/im etc.
“We must risk failure” – Barbra said this when she made the call to discuss with each other what works and what doesn’t, talking with colleagues, blogging about it and communicate about it..
“Hope and technology won’t solve it only we can do that”
Then it was coffee time and chance to talk to some of people I have communicated with but never meet such Miles Berry, Leon Cych.
Then we split into working groups to work on individual topics I was in panel with Peter Ford talking about how blogging can be safety but it turned into a discussion on if blogging skills are any different to skills we learn i.e. students being critical of other students works like giving feedback on PowerPoint presentation and the fact for example comments are just a mechanism to do that.
Then import part of the day Lunch and one again chance to talk to other attendees and discuss morning going on.
Then in afternoon again split into working panels and this time I was in panel with Sue Thomas titled “Are our students more literate than us” which we talked about concept of Transliteracy and I will post separate post on this as it quite a subject to comment on.
Then more coffee and then on to session on blog.ac.uk and the emerging community of people blogging in education and best way is let blurb produced describe it is
“blog.ac.uk is launched via the UK’s first blogging and web 2.0 conference, bringing together leading educational practitioners and technological experts to explore the challenges that weblogs and social software present to our current understandings of teaching and learning. This is a chance to be part of an agenda-setting discussion of how new and emerging low-threshold tools are reshaping our notions of community, connectedness and engagement with learners.”
Discussion is what this community is and what will be involved with it and what it needs to be done for this community to go forward.
The final session was a wrap up Stephen Downes running down what happened today and to wrap everything up.

All posts from people attending should be tagged with blog.ac.uk2006 and Ewan McIntosh has some great posts from day on his blog at http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/

Filed under: Bloggers, Conferences, EduBlogger, Education, blog.ac.uk, blog.ac.uk06, blog.ac.uk2006