I live in the largest centre outside of the capital of South Australia. Adelaide is about 450km away.  That’s a 4.5 hour drive if you don’t stop. I’ve been teaching in rural and regional areas for my 30 year career and a consistent statement I heard and often felt during that period of time is that the decision makers worked as if South Australia’s border with Victoria was at the Toll Gate. The past five years has seen PD for me that would easily defeat the sum total of all PD prior to that time in both quantity and quality. I could possibly stick in a multiplier to quantify it and its all been free.  I’ve not needed to travel and that’s significant for rural folk. I’ve been independent of the capital city. If you are reading this, then the method is probably no surprise to you and may in fact be old news.

I’ve immersed myself into blogging, Delicious, Diigo, Linkin, email lists, RSS, Twitter, Ning, Edna, Facebook, Orkut, forums, ….. I get my information in smallish chunks which makes it easy to digest and has put me in touch and in conversation with experts in the fields I am interested in locally, nationally and globally.  I’m an expert to others in return. It’s flexible. It is not a problem to vary the degree of immersion and even work in fits and starts. It’s been great for professional networking, hobbies and links with industry.  In many ways it has replaced what a professional organisation used to offer me.

Is it any wonder that I’m over the moon about the new SACE Research project then?  What a great subject and in view of the way the world is heading as a consequence of the ICT led Information Revolution it is also very timely. Having such a subject points strongly to a notion that is gaining more traction in the education world and that is that the “pipe is more important than the contents”. (Almost as good an argument starter in a group of teachers as “God doesn’t exist”) It is how we access, process and use information that makes the difference and equips students for life long learning. Use being the operative word. I am thinking that it possibly should be the only subject that we have at school.

BUT there is a snake in the grass and its poised to strike. Filter is its name and Information Nazi is its game. It is Kerries recent posts that have drawn me into this filtering fracas once again after making at least one comment about it over the past years?   I suspect that these broken, primitive, clunky, chunky filters will be one of the main obstacles to making the Research Project a success.  The filter obstructs access to most, if not all, of the things, that I listed above that have been so good for me, that can really make the Research project tick and because students will be doing different things, even the newly acquired teacher filter override will be too clumsy to use effectively with a larger group of students.  Where will that leave things?  Running to Web1.0 and books and a huge opportunity lost. In the past some people have reacted to my criticism of the filter indicating that it is not such a problem and that all I have to do is be more proactive in unblocking things…..that will be the answer they say.  I guess that is fine if all the kids are doing the same thing and it is important for some obscure reason that they access the same information.  Ha….now they will, by the very nature of the Research Project subject, be doing different things.  Now what?  Mr Filterer…..are you listening?  If you must be here then do your protection thing properly and stop being such a stupid obstruction.

Cybersmart provides activities, resources and practical advice to help young kids, kids, teens and parents safely enjoy the online world.

Cybersmart also offers training and resources for schools and materials for library staff.

Developed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, Cybersmart is part of the Australian Government’s cybersafety program.

I posted on my own blog about the idea of educators being easy to find online which builds on the concept of “clickability” that Will Richardson talks about so eloquently on his blog. He also spoke about this when he was in town a little while back when a smallish but dedicated group of South Australian educators got to hear from this amazing well respected expert on the learning potential of the web.

Here we are, a dedicated community of educators whose passion for technology is such that we willingly join a professional organisation and network at events like the annual CEGSA conference. But how of our ranks are Google-able where a quick simple search of one’s name brings up a comprehensive overview of one’s professional work and innovation?

If the web offers connection in a way that was not easily possible before via blogs, twitter, wikis, discussion forums, flickr etc. then why wouldn’t we as a community be embracing this possibility to publish our work, ideas, resources and share with the gloabl education community?

Or on a more personal challenge level, what does a simple Google search of your name reveal about you as a learner and educator?

I love evidence that confirms one or more of my prejudices. Just came across a very intersting little study of social networking habits on Facebook that confirms my prejudice that the more things change the more they remain the same. I don’t believe that people’s lives are being radically changed by ICT. Our basic habits remain much the same but we do things in different ways. So here is the story I came across.

A sociologist called Dunbar produced a hypothesist years ago that people can only manage a network of about 150 people. That is what their brain allows. So ancient villages and Roman military units and lots of other organisations are about this size. Within this network people communicate intimately with a quite small number of people. So, The Economist magazine asked the in-house sociologist at Facebook to crunch some numbers of Facebook members, and in brief he found that the average number of friends on Facebook is 120, which is consisten with Dunbar’s 150. And, went on to say,

“… an average man—one with 120 friends [in Facebook] —generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.”

So this bit of research seems to suggest that while members of Facebook apparently are networking on a huge scale, they are actually interacting with a handfull of people, which is what people have been going for a very long time. Facebook and other social networking sites are making it easy to newtork with a wider group of people that normal, but people still only have real interactions with a similar number of people, and their intimate relation ships remain much the same. You can get the full, but quite short, story at The Economist, here. Of course Facebook allows you to network with people that are dispersed geographically.

The article suggests that much of the communication that is new in social networking (and blogging more so) is broadcasting rather than networking. They are broadcasting their views and information but there are a modest number of responses, mainly from a handful of people.

So I am a bit skeptical about the notion of everyone needing to have a PLN (Personal Learning Network), even though I have been working on several projects to support this concept. My skepticism is about whether most people want to network with more than a small group of people that they know personally. This does not contradict what Graham has said about his experience. The key work is ‘most’. How many people to you want to interact with?

I wrote a post on my blog this weekend.

Nothing too unusual about that – for me. I also attended a Professional Development day earlier in the week along with about 140 other educators from at least four local schools. We were there attending a great day with Mark Treadwell, traveling scholar, author and education consultant for the New Zealand education system. Mark is an acknowledged expert in the field of 21st Century Learning, brain research and curriculum design and therefore had a lot to offer us regular educators sitting there soaking in his message. He challenged us with plenty of thought provoking information – and many people were ready to apply his words to their practice, quoting his work as a form of pedagogical gospel.

Now I really, really liked what Treadwell had to say. In fact, it was the second time I’ve heard him speak. But unlike the vast, vast majority of his Monday audience, I don’t have to accept his words as total, unchangeable gospel just because he is in the well-known role of expert. Because I am an online educator, because I am connected, I am “Googleable”, because I have a PLN (Professional/Personal Learning Network) I have advantages over many of my colleagues. I can pose half formed thoughts around one of his propositions in written form, share them in a public forum (like this blog) and gain valuable pushback from colleagues all around the world. I get to filter my initial ideas back through my network to moderate, balance and mould an emerging viewpoint that may differ to the advice offered by the expert.

I’m not discounting the role of the expert. We need them. But through the use of a PLN, a self selected collection of colleagues in various systems, sectors, countries, stages of career using a selection of social media tools (blogs, wikis, twitter, podcasts, videos, bookmarking) can offer me greater counsel in tapping into the collective wisdom of many, many experts. After all, we all have expertise. and we have something that many experts don’t have (or only have a second hand experience of) and that is grassroots experience. That is the grey area where the expert’s boundaries intersect with our experience. It is true that we need critical skills to make this work in the “publish then filter” era but technology can be utilised knowingly to filter any ideas around education and learning.

No one person holds the key to learning success – not any more and for me, that is the true shift of the new Internet Based Education Paradigm that Mark referred to on Monday.

Image: Sue Waters http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/files/2008/12/plntool.jpg