Martin Pluss

Hi all,

I was so excited when I found The World is Flat. Then tonight I was reading something, via the K-12 Online Conference by David Warlick where he pointed to his wiki and things looked familiar. Mate there is nothing new in this flat world.

At first I was discouraged and then I realised it just reinforces what I am trying to do with Web 13.0 – distill everything , well some of it I can find and remember, and simplify it down to something usable.

Meanwhile, I really liked what jutecht said in his Thinking Stick Blog today where he talked to 350+ students and staff in a school in Shanghai.

Only today I was talking to my network manager on what the next stage should be for my students on the SharePoint Platform. I would really like to get moving on the Personal Learning Environments PLE for the students.

A re you like me.? Everytime friend(s) come over with a school age children I grill them about their school’s ICT and if possible get them to log on to their intranet and they show me what they are doing?

cheers MArtin

Hi all,

I am still coming to terms with running two blogs. The running and life blog gets updated more frequently.

Anyway when I was at the airport to go to Dubbo for my ICT Presentation there was a cheap version of Friedman’s The World is Flat and have been reading it carefully for the last month. Time now to distill a few notes which I would like to put into application. First up he talks about 10 flatteners – should be 13 of them.

10 things that changed the world

1. 11^th September 1989: the walls went down and the windows went up – Berln Wall
2. 8^th September 1995 when the web went round and Netscape went public – WWW
3. Workflow software: connected machines and software applications encouraged standardised business software.
4. Uploading: Apache, Linux, opensource – community developed software and answers – Wikipedia
5. Outsourcing: all caome about with Yk2 and India helped out and have been their since.
6. Offshoring: running with gazelles and eating with lions. 2001 China joined the WTO and the rest of the world has had to run faster and faster.
7. Supply chaining: Walmart.
8. Insourcing: FedX and Us Postal. not just delivering packages they are doing logistics – sychronising global supply chains – they actually fix Toshiba lap tops rather than forwarding them to Toshiba.
9. Informing: google
10. Steriods: you can access the internet in Japan on the Bullet train at 240km/hour. Look at storage, IM and filesharing, VoiP, video conferencing and computer graphics.

Now what I want to do is work through the issues and see how I can apply them to education.

cheers Martin

Hi all,

I may be a slow learner when it comes to this topic. I just thought the money was raised from the cute long skinny ads on the side of the profile and the pages. Then I looked at one of my “Friends” My Room Application and started to get a real handle on the potential of advertising without the passing of real money.

The concept of My Room I really like I was going to fill it with all sorts of running and cycling things.

And then I saw I only had 1000 coins and I could not find any running shoes. So now I have to consider buying coins or buying advertising coins so I can put runners in my room.

Very Clever.

Whoops now I have been really naive – you  can pay real money as well.

Cheers Martin

HI all,

Google Reader and prior to this Bloglines have improved my efficiency a great deal. I share and star things I want but often have trouble coming back to them.

This one I could not let go by. If you have not noticed I am trying to put up only my stuff in this blog rather than reams of links to other people’s work. I like this one and want to keep it and share it.  Thanks Mr Pullen – well said.

Random observation about teachers: The very best teachers and the very worst teachers both typically want as much autonomy as possible.The gifted teacher wants permission to go above and beyond prescribed standards and materials. He wants to glean resources from a number of sources, using the best parts of them to meet the individual needs of the different students he serves. He wants the freedom to make lessons longer or shorter, to intertwine subjects, and to adapt lesson plans from day to day based on student learning.

The lousy teacher wants the freedom to teach whatever he wants. He doesn’t want to have to teach much of anything in subjects he doesn’t like. He certainly doesn’t want to be held accountable for generating lesson plans or for meeting certain standards and benchmarks, because all of this just forces him to work harder and do more stuff he doesn’t enjoy.

The trouble is that we haven’t done a good job of allowing the gifted teacher the freedom to fly while still imposing tight-but-necessary restrictions on the lousy teacher. So all teachers get tighter standards imposed on them, causing the lousy teacher to at least be mediocre, but reducing the great teacher to just being fairly good.

Just as teachers are expected to differentiate their instruction based on student talents and needs, maybe it’s time for principals and other administrators to differentiate this autonomy piece with respect to the talents and needs of the individual teachers they serve.
http://mrpullen.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/teacher-autonomy-vs-forced-uniformity/

cheers MArtin

HI all,

I havebeen a regular user of Google Documents and I have signed up to use the beta version of  Microsoft Office Live Workspace when it comes out.

cheers  Martin