Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Mike Wesch’s latest Youtube video, A Portal to Media Literacy, is essential viewing for all educators. He describes so clearly why we have to change and challenge the present system of educating our young people. He is clearly a passionate teacher and someone who understands the world in which his students move.

His dismantling of the idea that “to learn is to acquire information”, the basis of our exam-driven school and college system and our institution-centred university system, is a joy to listen to.

He argues that our students might know how to use Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, Digg and MySpace for their own entertainment but they don’t know how to use them to learn or to create something interesting or new. So, in this sense they are no more “natives” than we are. We can’t assume that our students are media literate – even though they use Wikipedia all the time, many don’t realise it’s a wiki and can be edited.

The challenge for Higher Education, and indeed our 5-18 system, is to create “platforms of participation that allow students to realize and leverage the emerging media environment”. Moving our school, colleges and universities out of their “content delivery” model to one where students are participating, collaborating, sharing, creating and evaluating is how we develop an education system that is relevant to the next generation of learners. As I have said before, we have undersold and largely failed the Google generation – those who are in the system at the moment. But it is not too late to do something about the ones who are coming along after them. Put aside some time and watch the entire 66 minutes of this video – in 67 minutes you’ll be inspired to do something!

It gives a good picture of the current thinking and position with regard to how young people are using the technology, how adults deal with this and a number of other topical issues.

It’s worth a listen.

4 questions you should ask yourself as a teacher:

1. What are your passions?

2. How are you connecting with your students?

3. How are you building your networks – creating opportunities for lifelong learning

4. How do you as a teacher learn?

Definitely worth a listen – but you’ll need the best part of an hour to do it.

These pages correct some of the errors people have found in Encyclopedia Britannica, illustrating that EB isn’t always the definitive and authoritative source that some people think it is, and also highlighting the benefits of a collaboratively edited encyclopedia.

Nature carried out a comparison between Wikipedia and EB in 2005.

The main features of Ning are:

• it is easy to set up (you can be up and running in a couple of minutes)
• it is free (although you can pay to have the Google ads removed and for premier services such as more space, your own ads, your own domain name)
• it is highly customisable with a good selection of themes and options
• anyone within your network can set up a group (so, for example, you could set up a network for your course, e.g. Year 1 English, and invite all your students to join. Each of them could then set up a group within this network which others could join, e.g. Shakespeare appreciation society group, Creative writing group.)
• Flickr pictures can be embedded
• YouTube videos can be embedded
• you have a blog (which you can allow everyone to see, only your friends, or only you)
• there is a discussion forum
• as network creator you have full control over what goes on in your network (you control who has access, you can remove individuals)
• you can broadcast messages to everyone in your network quickly
• you can view stats and trends, i.e. what areas of your network are popular

Ning is about collaborating, sharing and communicating. I set up this site in less than 10 minutes (if you visit it please leave a comment on the Comment Wall so it looks like I’ve got some friends).

This site works. Set a network up and see for yourself.