Are we there yet?

I had an interesting conversation on the train home the other day with Stephen Parker about this book, interesting enough for me to come home and google it and blog about it.

Changing Images of Man

Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) released a report in 1974 that has become a classic in the "alternative futures" literature. It
has been adopted as a text in non-traditional courses at more
than a dozen universities and reprinted repeatedly by SRI.

Changing Images of Man explores the reasons why changes may have to take place in the fundamental conceptual premises, laws, attitudes and ethics once suitable for guiding the development of the United States and other highly industrialized nations if a humane (and "workable") future is to be achievable.

I was intrigued and amazed that 34 years later the characteristics actually reflect the buzzwords of the society and the workplace. Social engineering? What do you think?

.....A provisional list of characteristics of a new vision of the world, published in 1974

(1) a holistic sense of perspective on life,

(2) an ecological ethic,

(3) a self-realization ethic,

(4) multi-leveled, multifaceted, and integrative,

(5) balance and coordination of satisfactions along many dimensions, and

(6) experimental and open-ended.

It discusses the evidence that such changes may be occurring and the possibility
that an evolutionary transformation may be underway that is at least as profound
as the transition in Europe when the Medieval Age gave way to the rise of
science and the Industrial Revolution. SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND WORLD ORDER LIBRARY
-- Explorations of World Order 255 pages - 1974, 1982 O.W. Markley, Willis W.
Harman (DIGICAM PHOTOS OF ORIGINAL - PDF FORMAT

)

Today I learnt that:

Skypecast is for audio casting only, no video feature.

Videoconferencing on skype only seems to work with one to one videoconferencing.

There are additional programs that will share the desktop and allow collaborative work while using Skype

Skypeout is very easy to use, and seems reasonably inexpensive

Using the webcam with Skype is easy, efficient and effective

My work today!

I am enjoying what I am doing so I thought I would include it here:

I have been working on the Real Skills Virtually project (see links in side bar). I have updated the Real Skills Virtually blog and developed the Preparatory Phase project plan in the Immersive Environment wiki. Now, I am going to whip up a storm via email with the six teachers that are interested in participating - and off into teaching and learning in an immersive virtual environment we will go. The project team I am working with is great, we are all considered but positive and enthusiastic in our approach!

My other job today will be to draft a project proposal for funding that I initially worked on with Alex Hayes, and recently with Grant Casey and Paul Wray. There is an interesting balance in developing project proposals for external funding, because while I may want to venture into new territory there is a need to expand on comfortable and proven concepts - small rotations of the existing wheel, rather than trying out completely different wheels. Anyway, between all of us, and in conjunction with Alex Hayes concept of pushing out audio and video interactions with Trades people (TradeCast) - we have come up with the idea of the TradeFeed project.

Briefly TradeFeed will use RSS to capture and distribute information about trade training pushed out and will feed in learner generated material related to their study and assessment. The push out will be RSS from various sources, including TradeCast by Alex Hayes, then subscribed to and distributed by RSS in a personal learning environment like IGoogle or protopage etc.

Learner generated material will be posted to a scrapbooking site like Tumblr, which is also mobile enabled. Tumblr generates RSS of the learner generated material, and the teacher and other learners can subscribe to this.

So in this project we are combining a number of technologies that have been tried and tested in previous educational projects and applying them coherently to training in the trades skills shortage areas.

Summary - TradeFeed includes:

Podcasting and Vodcasting for distribution of educational material
RSS subscriptions and distribution of resources and learner generated material
Personal Learning Environments for managing own learning
Blogging, videoblogging and moblogging for learning and assessment

I will get some feedback from the others and then I will write it up!