A discussion with Patrick Duignan, Emeritus Professor of Education Leadership, Australian Catholic University, and business consultant.
Many years involvement in educational leadership prompted Duignan to research the concept of authenticity in leadership – and how ethical leadership can be attained. Working from the premise that education is a value based process, its purpose he says is not simply to teach maths and science and such, but to form the person and equip them to be better human beings. “The biggest challenge of all is to ensure schools and teachers and educators do that – basically they don’t end up with a group of young people who aren’t transformed in any way as human beings and who only go out able to regurgitate facts and knowledge”. The key to the transformation rests with the leader – ask any student about who was their best teacher and why, and the response reflects not technical ability, but the esoteric capacity for inspiration. “Students will always mention two areas – one is giving them self belief, and the other is the confidence to go out and engage with others in the world, the big bad world out there.”
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Built on the foundation of four years of research and implementation of mobile learning projects (m-learning), this paper provides an overview of the potential of the integration of mobile Web 2.0 tools (based around smartphones) to facilitate social constructivist pedagogies and engage students in tertiary education. Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0 tools are evaluated, and student usage and feedback is outlined via an interactive multimedia timeline (using YouTube videos) illustrating how these mobile Web 2.0 pedagogical affordances have transformed pedagogy and facilitated student engagement in a variety of course contexts. A rubric for evaluating appropriate smartphone choices is provided, and a model for implementing mobile Web 2.0 pedagogical integration is presented.
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A interesting point of view on Facebook. I took the same step myself a few weeks ago. It was surprisingly liberating.
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by Mark Pesce.
On Friday evening, under a full moon, I lit a candle, gathered my thoughts in a moment of silence, and clicked on the big blue button. It felt odd – and made me giddy, perhaps a bit lightheaded. I crossed over, entering a digital bardo, becoming a ghost…. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2915364.htm
Last week at the ISER conference I listened to a keynote from an engaging young presenter who talked about generational change and how the arrival of Generation Y is causing such challenges for us in the education sector. Michael McQueen presents insightful and commonsense arguments as to how we can better look after beginning Gen Y teachers and more critically engage the Gen Y students that many teachers find difficult to engage and motivate.
Presently I am reading his book, The New Rules of Engagement (a review here) and will post a review here when finished. So far I find his arguments compelling and something that we all need to consider. I am cautious though at categorising people into generations. Generalisations can lead to problems when you meet individuals that don’t meet the mold. I read with interest yesterday this opinion by Roger Pryor regarding the eGeneration. Somewhere in all this lies the key to student engagement and the allusive key to retaining young teachers in a modern workforce. I hope to discover more about this topic over time and offer some opinion to the debate.
Until now the blogs and content management systems I maintain have always related to my interests outside of my work life. The reason for this is I’ve never seen much of a need for an extension of these activities into my life as a teacher. As someone who uses Web 2.o extensively in my teaching I’ve never considered the value of a personal blog related to my activities in education. I’ve maintained blogs for students to share ideas, work collaboratively and publish work, but haven’t seen the need to extend it beyond this.
This was until a presentation at the Illawarra and South East Region Principal’s Conference by Darcy Moore. Darcy demonstrated the extensive network of educational leaders that are networking and sharing ideas via their personal blogs and other mico-blogging technologies like twitter.
Needles to say this was enough motivation to register a new domain and set up this blog. I’m hoping something significant may come of it and people will find it useful.
Grant 
