Steven Cahill

This morning I had the great opportunity to sit in on a presentation “The 21st Century Teacher: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” with Clay Burell, an English and History teacher at the Learning Technologies conference in Mooloolaba QLD Australia.

Clay uses the analogy of Alice going down the rabbit hole for teachers and technology in the 21st century, and that teachers have to want to learn and use these technologies instead of being pushed into using them.

Clay describes that he is relevantly new to technology only having used Moodle in the last 4-5 years, a platform he likes.  He has also used Blackboard another Learning Management System in the past and by his words he would “put a pox on Blackboard” … I don’t blame him.

Clay is interested in the sychronous capabilities of the Internet to drive students to continue discussion of topics outside of the classroom, this engages students to take control of their own learning.

Clay raised the issue of seeing how the web is open, but how Moodle is closed to those who are within the platform.  He raised the issue of opening up the learning experience to a wider audience and he adopted this by incorporating wikis and blogs.  This gave way to peer review from others outside of the course cirriculum, however this can cause issues in creating more work for the facilitator than necessarily intended.

Later he closed it to “global participation” to “local participation” where students in other classes on the campus could participate and relate to them.

Clay raised the issue of publishing students work online, why grade and hand back the students work for it only to be ‘tossed aside’, why not share it with others and get the students name out to those who could see it and be influenced by it.

One of the issues Clay raised was the use of text books and how they are limited by text and images, with the capabilities of the Internet students can help create their own text books and incorporate a greater range of methods with multimedia and interactivity to create a more useful text book.

One of the final points Clay raised is the issue of those in power control the knowledge, from history we see those who are innovative and thinkers being killed for what they know and share.  Even today we have this issue with institutes controlling what information is shared in published textbooks (and in some instances on the web itself).