The Ditigal Narrative has heaps of resources and links to other websites that explore digital storytelling and new media.

Merriam-Webster Word Central has a number of fun vocab games, including Robo-Bee (”Will your language skills blossom or wilt? It’s up to you as you control the flight of the Robo-Bee through a garden of synonyms, antonyms, spelling, and usage puzzles!”), spelling game Alpha-Bot and others.

As debate continues over a national curriculum, the ABC has an interesting forum on 21st learning. The forum is  in response to Rupert Murdoch assertions in the Boyer lectures that “Australia has a 21st century economy with a 19th century education system”.

In the first of a series of six lectures, Murdoch argued that: we need to reform our education system … the bottom line is this: it is an absolute scandal that we are spending more and more and getting less and less in return. For those still in school or just entering the workforce, the opportunities a global economy offers are greater than at any time in our history—provided you have the right skills.”

The forum, recorded at the National Curriculum Corporation Conference, examines what a 21st century education might look like.

Guests Professor Barry McGaw (Head of the National Curriculum Board and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute), Valerie Hannon (Director of Strategy for the UK Innovation Unit), Chris Wardlaw (Former Deputy Secretary of Education in Hong Kong) and Michael Stevenson (Vice President of Global Education at Cisco Systems) “discuss the current major reform of curriculum in Australia, skills and knowledge needed in the 21st century, how Hong Kong transformed its education system and the role of technology and innovation.” Download audio file here.

Other Links:

Curriculum Corporation Conference

Cisco paper on 21st century learning

UK innovation unit

Boyer lectures by Rupert Murdoch

Image: ‘Planet of Taris‘
www.flickr.com/photos/40491163@N00/2415962216

In the past, media literacy was about “getting consumers to think critically about what they were watching”. Now with huge numbers of people producing and publishing media, the need for media literacy has more relevance than ever.

This includes developing:

• judgement about the information available online,
• effective communication skills in different fora
• how to appropriate information and remix it in meaningful ways
• skills that evolve freedom of expression and citizenship
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Students in my Year 9 History class have produced quality videos that express their understanding of genocide in the 20th century, from case studies of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, Rwanda and Sudan. These are samples of how students can use primary and secondary visual sources to construct multimedia texts that express their understanding of, and responses to, complex world events and issues.

It’s interesting how language reflects our sense of cultural identity and this is evident in the Scottish Voice project, which makes a high-quality, synthetic Scottish voice available free to Scottish schools. The project website states that: “We believe there is a strong cultural and educational imperative for pupils in Scotland to be able to read and listen to Scottish curriculum resources spoke using a Scottish synthetic voice.”

Accents and idiomatic expressions have a powerful appeal and no less so than in Australia, which has its own particular linguistic “flavour”.

I wonder if this would fly in Australia – flattened vowels, anyone?

The Australian vernacular, sometimes perjoratively called “strine” (think Steve Irwin and you’ve got it), is often seen as something that needs to be sanitised and is believed to reflect a lack of cultivation (a hangover of the infamous cultural cringe that has long plagued Antipodeans). According to Wikipedia, “most linguists consider there to be three main varieties of Australian English: Broad, General and Cultivated Australian English. They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They often, but not always, reflect the social class or educational background of the speaker.” Interestingly, it says that “cultivated Australian English is now spoken by less than 10% of the population”.

Perhaps this is because Australia is becoming increasingly diverse and is reported to be:

• The second largest Irish, Maori and Maltese country.
• The third largest English country.
• The fourth largest Scottish country.
• The fifth largest Greek, Vietnamese and Dutch country.
• The seventh largest German country.
• The ninth largest Italian country.
• The eleventh largest Serbian country.
• The fifteenth largest Han Chinese country.
• The sixteenth Turkish country.
• The seventeenth largest Indian country

What do ya reckon?

Border Literacy Resources is a British site that “aims to help teachers by drawing together and categorising many of the free Literacy teaching and learning resources on the web.”

There is a whole range of different resources on here including: prose, reading for information, poetry, drama, creative writing, genre and grammar.

Helping students take control of their own learning is one of the most important challenges facing teachers. The (inquiry or constructivist) approach is based on providing students with opportunities to formulate their own research and create “artifacts” or “products” that demonstrate their understanding and skill development. However, it often becomes glaringly obvious that “research” to many students involves taking the information from the first couple of web sites that appear from a google search, cobbling it together and “voila” – there it is. This is a long way from the goal of students as knowledge “producers”. Teaching students how to evaluate the reliability of information remains one of the most important literacy skills.

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site is useful to show just how easily students can be manipulated by a professional “looking” web site.

This AfterEd video (Teachers’ College, Columbia University) discusses the importance of providing students with “educated guidance on how to use new media” and helps debunk the assumption that buying lots of computer hardware will meet students’ 21st century literacy needs.

Some key “critical literacy” questions it advocates include:
How was this text contructed?
What are its underlying values?
What are the conventions it uses?
Who is the intended audience?
Who owns and who benefits from this?

Video via: Multiliteracies

This Department of Education Tasmania site also has activities and work samples

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
William Strunk, Jr.

Lots of people are checking out the “readability” of their writing and Juicy Studio (thanks Sue) has a readability test that also explains how each measure is calculated.

According to TechBrew, “readability metrics use factors like words per sentence, multisyllabic frequency, and so on. These are three of the more common ones:

• Flesch Reading Ease: Measures sentence structure and complexity to determine how easy it is to read without stopping and re-reading, etc. Higher is better, but between 60 and 70 is a good score.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade: What grade of school you will have needed to complete to handle the writing style and structure. Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect subject matter. A score of 5 that deals with quantum mechanics will only apply to 5th graders who already understand quantum mechanics. A score of 17 is something best left to grad students, who will probably curse you for it.
• Gunning Fog: Measures the obfuscation of meaning; the lower the number, the better. TV Guide is a 6. Government cover-ups and legal papers score 20 to 30.”

Playing around with the readability tests led me to that was useful, Juicy Studio’s writing style guide and  The Guardian’s style guide (download as a pdf), which has useful tips on commonly misused words and grammatical errors.

I’ve written before about the possibilities and difficulties associated with global or “flat world” projects. This is an area of learning that I am really fascinated by and hope to get a feasible project off the ground next year (as we only have about five weeks of class time remaining until the summer holidays).

[slideshare id=140143&doc=global-projects-presentation-1192860619592528-3&w=425]

I gave a workshop on global projects last week because this is one way that we can meaningfully use the new 1:1 environment to create engaging and authentic learning rather than using the laptops as glorified typewriters. The aims of global projects are to empower, enable and connect students around the world using technology.

Global projects can foster:
* Cross-Cultural Communication
* Collaboration
* Citizenship
* Creativity

Skills developed by global projects can include:
* Multiple Literacies: digital, cultural, media,
* Communication
* Critical thinking
* Synthesis and summary
*Information literacy, research, validation, authentication of facts
* Negotiation and collaboration

Examples of projects we had a look at included:

Flat Planet Project
1001 Flat World Tales
International teen life
Global Cooling Collective
The real world actually
Young Writers 07
Mission Possible
Charlotte’s Web Writing Project
The Flat Classroom Project
The Flat Classroom Project overview video
Download Video: Posted by julielindsay at TeacherTube.com.

I also pointed colleagues who were interested to the following sites, which are dedicated to globalised education:

TakingITglobal
Global education collaborative
The Learning Foundation
Global SchoolNet Foundation
International and Educational Resource Network
1:1 Flat Classroom Network

Kim Cofino, has uploaded this Developing the Global Student presentation, which discusses “Practical Ways for Infusing 21st Century Literacy Skills in Your Classroom.” She has also created a global collaborations wiki that lists a range of projects from the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai

[slideshare id=138266&doc=developing-the-global-student-1192710777188581-4&w=425]

[slideshare id=98292&doc=literacy-remixed-in-a-web-20-world632&w=425]