Pinterest: beyond the buzz

You may have heard of Pinterest, the new social media platform that is taking the web by storm. Pinterest is like a virtual pinboard, where you share images you like either gathered from the web (like a shared bookmark) or uploaded from your own collection. Users can create boards on any theme and these are also tagged in categories, so you can browse through History or Technology, for example, and re-pin other people’s favourites to your own pin boards. You can follow other people’s boards and you can also integrate it with your facebook or Twitter accounts.

 

Image of Pinterest Education category

A Pin it! bookmarklet to add to your browser makes it easy to grab web content.

The joy of Pinterest is its visual nature – you can’t save text-only content, only material with images attached (even if it’s a web page with lots of text and only one image). That makes it perfect for gathering items together like a scrapbook.

Interestingly, most data so far indicates that the vast majority of its users are women. That’s not surprising, as many of the early users did use it as a scrapbook, so that some of the most glorious image collections are in themes like historical fashion and home decor – including drool-worthy bookshelves and libraries (there are also a lot of recipes).

Image of Pinterest board

But dig a little deeper – if you can – and you’ll soon recognise Pinterest’s value as an image repository, link sharing community, and easy-to-use site for students or classes to quickly assemble project materials on a huge range of topics.

Under the Education category you’ll find teaching materials and classroom activities gathered together by educators all over the world, and in other categories you and your students can find everything from historic photos of Victorian London or World War 1, to images of shoes worn in 1770 or wildlife or botanical drawings.

These “pins” can be shared on social media or embedded in blogs or websites.

 

Image of Pinterest pin

Pinterest is deceptively simple and dangerously addictive. Beware.

Meeting of the Minds 2012

Meeting of the Minds 2012

The inaugural Meeting of the Minds Unconference (#MOTM12)  was held over the weekend of February 25-26 at the Quantum Victoria facility. Educators came together from all over Victoria and from interstate to discuss the role of technology in learning.

The guiding motto of #MOTM12 was  “The shortest distance between two people is a story.” Participants were invited to create their own digital story before the event and then to share them on the Meeting of the Minds website. This was just one of the interesting ways that participants were encouraged to share their thoughts and meet each other. Attendees were even tasked with making lunch for their partner!

The organisers of the event had obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about how to have attendees collaborate and guide the content of sessions. A shared display area and sticky notes were used to collect ideas and suggestions, which were then grouped into sessions that were then run by participants.  Shared notes were collected in Google Docs and sessions were streamed live with many people joining in the discussion on Twitter using the #MOTM12 hashtag.

There were lively discussions about using technology in the classroom and the importance of self directed learning, not just for students but also for educators. Many participants discussed the way professional learning might be improved and encouraged within their schools. One great idea was to gather for a coffee at the start of each day for a 5 minute sharing session.

Have a look at a Storify of the event, produced by online attendee Roland Gesthuizen, to see how it all unfolded. You can also visit the #MOTM12 website to find out more. Shared notes from each session can be found in the Spaces menu.

Congratulations to the event organisers Jess McCulloch, Tony Richards and Andrew Williamson for putting together an event that allowed educators to get together and collaborate in such an interesting way.

The Victorian PLN is almost here

The next round of the Victorian Personal Learning Network is now less than two weeks away, so get ready for a new influx of blogs to read and educators to meet when the course kicks off on March the 5th.  The course aims to help educators build their own PLN and learn about some of the great tools available on the web.

As with previous years we are sure that the Bright Ideas community will get together to support these new participants. Many of you would have completed the Victorian PLN in the past, so hopefully you’ll be able to help people along as they build their own network. It might even be time for you to brush up on your own skills by doing the course again. You might like to form a PLN group at your school to take the course together.

So why should you or your colleagues do the course? Here’s a participant’s reflection on the 2011 program.

“Doing the PLN was a decision to ensure that I was keeping up with the world. I learnt a lot of new things from doing it, and it gave me opportunities to explore tools that I’d heard about but never really had the interest to pursue any further – like Twitter for example. This forced play, and the space set aside to investigate things was useful for my learning.”

 

Please encourage your colleagues to take part in this great course. Enquiries can be sent to learning@slv.vic.gov.au and course details are available at the State Library of Victoria website.

Privacy in networked publics

RMIT’s School of Media and Communication recently hosted a talk by Dr. danah boyd, an influential researcher into the way young people make use of social media and technology. The talk, which is available for download,  was a fascinating insight into danah’s work with young people. danah explored the ways teens make use of social media and their attitudes to privacy in what are essentially public spaces.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of danah’s talk was the concept of teens ‘hiding in plain sight’. Teens used to socialise at shopping centres and malls, but now much of their socialising and ‘social grooming’ happens online. To many teens sharing is an important aspect of staying connected with their friends and danah’s interviews expose the very different attitudes that teens can have to privacy.

Interestingly, danah has found that although teenagers may share publicly on sites such as Facebook, this doesn’t always mean they expect this information to be viewed or commented on by everyone (particularly their parents or teachers). Several of danah’s interview subjects revealed ingenious ways of using both structural tricks or codes to protect their privacy whilst still sharing with their friends.  If we think back to our own childhoods, many of us probably used similar tricks to communicate with our friends when older people were around. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

To find out more about danah’s work (including the reason for her lower case name) visit her website, or follow her blog. In a time where the media often resort to scaremongering when exploring how young people use social media, danah’s research provides some balance to this very important discussion.

 

Bibliography generators


It’s always great to show students online bibliography generators when they’re starting research projects at the start of the year. They’re a quick, easy way to record resources as you go and encourage good research practice.

Here are a few generators to help students start the new year on the right foot.

Harvard generator

This site is one of the few bibliography generators that gives you the option of Harvard/Author-date formatting, a system commonly used in schools. Tabs across the top of the page let you choose either print or electronic as the source type.

Harvard generator doesn’t however export references or allow you to save your list so you need to fill in the details and then copy and paste the formatted references into another document.

BibMe

This well known website quickly and easily creates reference lists in MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian styles. It also lets you search for books and other sources by title, author etc., retrieving catalogue records and using them to auto-generate references for you.

By creating a personal login you can also save your bibliographies online and export them as Rich Text Files (.rtf).

EasyBib

EasyBib allows you to create bibliographies using the MLA system free of charge and like BibMe, uses existing online catalogues to retrieve source information.

You can save your bibliographies by signing up using a Google, Yahoo or even Facebook account and can export your bibliography as a Word document or Google doc.

Zotero

Zotero isn’t strictly a bibliography generator – it’s a complete online referencing system. It lets you store, catalogue, annotate, file and tag references to name just a few of the things it can do.

References can be drawn from Amazon and library catalogues etc. and you can export bibliographies in a broad range of styles and document types. You do however, have to use Zotero in the web browser, Firefox.

By creating a login, you can access your research at any computer with access to the web. Signing up also lets you connect with a community of people using Zotero and share research.

Zotero is a powerful tool and probably only worth introducing to older students or even having a look at whether it would suit your own research.

Some note taking applications like Evernote are now powerful enough to be used in a similar way to Zotero. It’s worth thinking about how some of  these tools can empower educators and students to become more effective researchers.

Shelflife: Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory

The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory has piloted a number of projects looking at how their collections are accessed online. One of the most interesting is the Shelflife/LibraryCloud project.

LibraryCloud  aggregates collection and usage metadata from a number of different libraries and feed them into Shelflife, a sample front end for how this kind of information might be viewed and used by library patrons.

Main features of the interface include:

  • use of the visual metaphor of a book shelf (Stackview) to help people browse popular titles trending at libraries across America
  • all books appear in context and have their own page with recommendations and tags

At this stage Shelflife is a testing environment which is best introduced by taking the online tutorial, although you can also explore the site independently.

Ten meta-trends from the Horizon Project

The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international community of experts on technology in education who produce an annual report known as The Horizon Report.

Horizon reports highlight key trends in technology and education for the year to come, with an emphasis on innovation and adoption of new devices into schools and higher education.

In commemoration of the tenth year of the project, the NMC will issue a report highlighting key meta-trends in technology and education. The top ten trends have been released:

  1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative.
  2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to.
  3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges.
  4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media.
  5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world.
  6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society.
  7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success.
  8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy.
  9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities and training.
  10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing.

 

CYL turns 21

The Centre for Youth Literature has come of age this year, reaching the ripe old age of 21.

In celebration, the Centre is hosting two events, one for library professionals and another for students on Tuesday 21st and Wednesday 22nd February respectively.

Authors involved in both days’ events include Melina Marchetta, David Levithan, Michael Pryor, Alison Goodman and Simmone Howell.

For more information, visit the Centre’s blog Read Alert.

Back for 2012

Welcome back to a new year of Bright Ideas. Hopefully you’ve had a relaxing and restorative break and a chance to sort through your email!

At the start of the year when everything is beginning, it’s often worth taking time to be inspired by the great ideas that transform how we work, live and see the world.

RSAnimate is a wonderful source of videos to get you thinking. Some stand out talks include:

The RSA channel on You Tube also includes other RSAnimate videos, talks and presentations.

We look forward to another year of sharing, inspiration and bright ideas.