Nov 4 2006

Delicious links for 2006-11-04

Well thought I’d add a little more than my normal del.icio.us automatic post above, as there is alot going on out there to interest even the likes of me. It was announced by the examinations officer in our school that plagiarism software would be used by EdExcel for coursework essays (have not checked if this is true or not) it was funny to see an article about top American universities still turning down the use of this software…running scared I suppose.

After downloading and being impressed with Firefox 2.0, mainly in the fact that it seems to be much more reliable and all those memory leak problems have seemed to disappear, it is amazing to know how much it has caught on in Germany – as usual the UK internet population seems to be lagging behind.

WEB BROWSER SHARE, BY COUNTRY -Source: Web Side Story, June 2006

Country Internet Explorer
(all versions)		 Firefox Other (Safari,
Opera, Netscape)
U.K. 88.78% 8.82% 2.40%
Italy 84.76% 12.46% 2.78%
Germany 65.04% 26.80% 8.16%

As a visual person, I always like when resources related to my M.A. are published in poster or graphic format – so these posters showing the Educational Map of the Last 10 Years and a poster about Informal Learning. Will report back further on my thoughts on these and how useful they really are…at least they will be add some decoration to my walls!

Finally as I misses by First-class meeting as I was away for the weekend, I decided to read through in more detail – Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:(warning straight to .PDF) Media Education for the 21st Century- Henry Jenkins. After our discussions about the so called new literacies, or multi-literacies I found these studies to be quite pertinent and practical. The articles very much acknowledge that the new literacies should be built on a foundation of the more traditional literacies e.g. textual literacy.

The skills are linked very much with ideas from ‘Siemens Connectivism’ and the new technologies enabling collaboration in virtual worlds and environments aligned with Web 2.0:-

  1. Play
  2. Performance
  3. Simulation
  4. Appropriation
  5. Multitasking
  6. Distributed cognition
  7. Collective Intelligence
  8. Judgment
  9. Transmedia Navigation
  10. Networking
  11. Negotiation

Definitely worth a read and much better than me trying to go on ans summarise what the paper is saying. It is interesting to think about the paper in terms of practicality and what is going on within the school that you teach – and so maybe scary as well to know little at the moment is happening to promote these new literacies and so will future students be even less prepared for the workplace than past generations?

Anyway, hope some things have provided food for thought,

Definitely need to start making decisions about my ‘action research’ for Unit 5251.

By drtech • Delicious Links • Comments Off on Delicious links for 2006-11-04