Talkin' 'bout my cerebration.

Remember way back when, those days when you packed up the bulky desktop and CRT monitor to drag it over to a mates place.  The old parallel and serial cables would come out to connect a few of the old beasts together to play multiplayer RPGs and the like.  Those days we were all concerned about input / output (IO), interrupt and relay quotients?  Well those memories came flooding back recently when I was asked to present to a conference about how I manage information flow within my learning environments.  The old terms of input, output, interrupts and relays are still relevant today.  Don’t look too closely cause it’ll cause strain, but I’ve tried to represent the process in a mind map below.

Communication, conversation and collaboration (3Cs):

As messy as this looks, any attempt to describe it in one go would be even messier, but here is an attempt.  Essentially my students receive and transmit information with a range of media.  I spend significant time teaching them how to gather the information in a manageable manner so they can sort and select as they desire.  This wouldn’t be possible without tags.  As a group we bookmark resources and assign pre-determined tags.  I have previously developed the RSS feeds of searches that retrieve any updated or new bookmarks with that tag.  There are RSS feeds that I add to in a Learning Place Project Room, they set up their RSS catchers (I encourage Google Reader) to retrieve these feeds.  Typically I compile a separate feed for each unit of work. Conversations (asynchronous) occur using media devices, mobile phones, posting or emailing to transmit and transfer.  Chat rooms and discussion forums are used intermittently as the need arises.

In the next unit of work with my year 12s I will be facilitating them searching for and retrieving RSS feeds of relevant information.  I will purposely not search for these beforehand, instead relying on my students ability to judge the validity of information.  What I have not done at this point, is show them RSS for audio or video.  All of them use iTunes, so one suspects it would be a simple process.

In this next unit, my students will be required to consistently blog.  I have not had this focused attention on blogging before – allowing students to choose their method of information flow.  However I have a plan in mind.  I’m not yet sure of the finer details, but definitely think it is a workable possibility.  As the exam, I want my students to blog a response.  This response would then be accessed by invited guests who will comment and question as they see appropriate.  I’m thinking I’d like the responses to include links to further information (potentially oppositional viewpoints).  The students would then need to submit a subsequent blogpost that addressed the comments and questions with reference to the original post.

Is this a suitable examination proceudre?  I think so, just need to nut out the details.