In early June of last year I created this presentation and wiki (details below). The sessions went well and now I’ve been asked to present again. This time the audience is Chinese parents and I have a translator. My slide show is heavily text based because I tried to make it work as a ‘stand-alone’ presentation to support the wiki without me presenting,
(I even added presentation notes to the slideshare if you view it on their site).
…As a result, I am feeling like I almost have to start over before getting this translated.
…Furthermore, I feel like there are definite Western biases to the things I say.
…And finally, there are things that I wanted to add to improve this anyway such as:
• More multi-cultural examples
• Links to creative work done by students (outside of school)
• Include a video of a kid while he is in the role of a World of Warcraft guild master
• More advice and strategies for dealing with kids that are addicted to (or at least highly consumed by) video games – (What strategies work to deal with this?)
Any suggestions or examples would be greatly appreciated!
Be honest, be critical, be brutal if you need to be… just please offer suggestions to help me strip this down to the essentials before I get it translated.
(I’m presenting next week Tuesday:-)
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For this presentation I created a wiki: http://raisingdigitalkids.wikispaces.com/
These were the learning intentions:
- Examine children’s use of technology
- Increase awareness of the potential challenges around technology use
- Learn practical, proactive parenting strategies to maintain connections with children using the media they are using.
- Learn how to guide children in appropriate and safe interactions on the Internet.
- Find support and resources to better understand these issues
A key part of the presentation is the handout called ‘Engaging with kids‘. It is made up of a series of questions based on the presentation, but not necessarily in the presentation. The point is asking questions and finding the right balance or ‘fit’ for each family rather than offering any kind of prescribed answers.
Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!
This reminds me of ‘The Miniature Earth’ that I shared here: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/caring-across-the-curriculum/
I wonder what 7 billion grains of sand or rice would look like or weigh?
The biodiversity game on the site is also a great conversation starter: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/biodiversity-game
So are the photos: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/olson-photography ~Very powerful!
Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.
The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:
That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.
~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.
The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out.
So it didn’t quite work as planned, but then things seldom do.
Yesterday I turned my video off a few seconds early. At the next corner, this was the scene. A bicycle, a chair, a sheet to cover the patron, a pair of scissors, a comb, and a battery-operated shaver. That’s pretty low ‘overhead’ for this ‘street barber’. I’ve tried a lot of different street food, but must admit that I pay a bit more for an indoor haircut!
(I asked before taking the photo.)This is less than a 5 minute walk from our school, and it’s a China you don’t see when you visit Beijing or Shanghai and do what the tourists do. A block up was a barber cutting hair on the street corner. I’ll share that photo tomorrow.
For the next few days I’ll share a number of different sights and sounds and ‘Chinglish’ phrases that help to make this a wonderful experience here. There are many hard-to-describe events and circumstances that happen here and our staff will say T.I.C. – “This is China”. I’ll use this same term to celebrate and share in the adventure our family is having here.
Just to put a little perspective on T.I.C. – one of my teachers shared her elevator ride to her apartment with a neighbor and her goat today… T.I.C.
“At this point, we appear to have a 19th century curriculum, 20th century buildings and organizations and 21st century students facing an undefined future.”
’20th century organizations’ – We spend a lot of time discussing our out-dated curriculum, and about students graduating into an unknown work force… could things move faster if we paid a lot more attention to our organizational structures that perpetuate an out-dated education?
Related:
A pro-d session I did with Bruce Wellman, ‘Promoting a Spirit of Inquiry‘
and
Andy Hargreaves and the 4th Way ‘Part 1‘ and ‘Part 2‘.
Unlike Rock Band, you actually have to know how to play music to do what these guys are doing. Here is another group doing a Christmas concert with iPads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DJddb73OOQ
Or how about 1 guy putting all the pieces together himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYo5dCeBZYA
Garage Band comes free on Apple computers and the same ‘equipment’ would have cost about $20,000 and needed it’s own room when I was a kid. It’s just amazing what you can do these days if you have a musical or creative flare.
Taking this one step further. Have a look at what Eric Whitacre did using technology to connect “individuals alone, together.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyLX2cke-Lw
Rock band is fun, but making music is definitely beyond Rock Band!
Danah Boyd asked this very question, last June, and here was my response:
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I’m interested in knowing more about:
1. Gaming: As it relates to socializing with others vs isolating & playing on their own.
2. Friendship: Actually two things here, first, definitions of online friendship by teens, and second, more about the duration and quality of friendships teens are creating. I know that as an adult I have created some very meaningful online relationships (in my case with other educators) with people I have never met f2f, is this happening with teens as well?
3. Content creation (trends): What are teens creating and sharing online? Here I’m actually interested in the bleeding edge, where are they taking content creation to a new level? How are they ‘mashing’ things up?
4. Learning: How are teens taking learning into their own hands, what are they doing outside of schools to educate themselves and learn new things?
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I’m still interested in these things… who can help me learn more?
