New Year: New Challenges: New Opportunities

For the first time in 10 years, I'll be focusing my working attention on a single school community. My experiences in the past decade creating and leading programs for all the schools in my district school board; and most recently serving the e-learning needs of school boards across southwestern Ontario, I'm looking forward to focusing my energies at Regina Mundi College in London, Ontario.

The role I'll be playing, is that of Student Success Teacher. It's a role that was created by the Ontario Ministry of Education, to assist schools in meeting the 2010-2011 target of graduating 85% of high schoolers. It's a lofty goal, one that challenges schools to offer unique opportunities for credit accumulation in lieu of pegging students into traditional courses .

With my experience in teaching others about e-learning; in developing rich performance-based learning activities; and in leveraging social media to build relationships, I'm very much looking forward to engaging my interests and abilities to ensure students, staff and parents learn in relationship.

While the position is formally focused on meeting the needs of the at risk student, my goals are more challenging: I'm working to build an environment of Learning Immersion... for students, staff and parents.

Photo Credit: SnaPsi

Social Media Revolution

The Social Media Revolution is bigger than most realize. Sources for the statistics in this presentation can be found on the Socialnomics - Social Media Blog. Unfortunately, this message will be missed by those not already in this space...

Re-Imagining Education: Part 1

As the future continues to beckon, I hope more educators will feel a sense of urgency to re-imagine classroom learning. This series of podcasts will consider how school can be made relevant for today's learners.

The Changing Workplace: Change is rampant everywhere... so why do our classrooms continue to function in the same old ways?



Related Links:

10 Principles for the Future of Learning: Miguel Guhlin
The Future of Work - Time Magazine
"The Future of My Kids' Work" - Will Richardson
A Whole New Mind - Daniel Pink
Seth Godin's Blog
Coke & Pepsi on Twitter
Linux & Microsoft on Twitter
TMZ

Photo Credit: naraekim0801

On Leaving the Flock

Over the past two years, I've had the opportunity to build relationships with e-learning colleagues that span my home province of Ontario. While I've greatly enjoyed working with online teachers and their support teams, it is in collaborating with provincial colleagues who share my role, that I've experienced the most insightful personal and professional growth.

Although we gathered in person only 10 times over the past 24 months, the Region e-Learning Contacts (ReLCs) took great advantage of modern communications technologies to build relationships and to collaborate in support of provincial school boards and school authorities.

As a testament to how close we've become, the ReLCs will be with me FORE a long time, thanks to a perfectly appropriate 'going away' gift!

In preparing for the challenges of my next professional role, I am very much looking forward to reconnecting with local colleagues. Only time will tell if we will be able to leverage professional networks as effectively as my ReLC colleagues and I have proven possible.

The Web vs The Cloud

It's still very early after the launch of Opera Unite, but already, I'm seeing some logic to the idea of saving your personal documents and media files locally, instead of 'in the cloud'.

While it's always been possible to share files from your home computer through remote management tools, the engagement of a web browser as the conduit, may well bring content sharing to the masses. By installing and activating the Opera browser, anyone can host a meeting, publish resources, or share media files.

As the open source development community begins to imagine new applications for this browser, consider a future where any mobile device might have direct access to the files and programs on any other computer. Mobile, hyper-networked computing, might completely re-wire the nervous system of today's World Wide Web.

The brief overview provided to TechCrunch tells the opening chapter of what promises to be an ongoing story.



Questions to consider:
Might traditional 'cloud computing' become less popular?
Can software be accessed and run through this browsing technology?
Why might we want to access our home files from handheld devices?
How secure will the unshared files on my computer be?
Will loopholes allow hackers to leverage our computers as drones?

And the big question on everyone's mind:
Will 'Opera-tives' really pursue facial gestures as hinted on April 1st? ;-)

#iranelection

The potential of social media is being realized in telling the story of the election in Iran. Citizen journalists are using the tag #iranelection to create a historic blip on the World Wide Web. And by following the story, our trend-setting is telling the media which news is most important.





Related Links:
#iranelection
The Big Picture (photos from Boston.com)
Tweeting from Tehran
Tweets from Tehran
Iran's Day of Destiny (as witnessed by Robert Fisk)
Extraordinary Scenes (more first hand reporting by Robert Fisk)
Twitter Reschedules Maintenance for Iranians
Open Letter to the World (a plea from Iranian Artists in Exile)