It was my intention to get back in the swing this week, ready for the start of the academic year, of doing my Weekly Roundups. Those who can remember back before Ben (my 7 month-old) was born will remember these were fairly popular; they were a good way for busy people to catch up with things I deemed important in the edublogosphere. It’s also a motivating factor to make sure I read every edublog to which I subscribe… :)

Well… what with re-writing my Ed.D. thesis proposal, transferring the historyshareforum to a new web host, setting up edte.ch, preparing for my new classes and actually having a holiday, my plan’s gone a bit awry. So I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with a list of links with some brief comments. Sorry. Must do better. :p

So, in order of when I read them (oldest first):

• Weblogg-ed: On Wikipedia Discussions – Will Richardson discusses the value of the conversation behind the production of documents. Interesting to read that there were 10,000 words of discussion to produce a 9,500-word Wikipedia article on Ireland! :o
• Weblogg-ed: The Future of Teaching – Will reflects on his visit to the Institute for the Future – love the quotation he includes by one of the participants: There are 1,300 teacher preparation programs that are preparing teachers for schools that none of us think should exist. Amen, brother! (or sister)
• OECD: The OECD Schooling Scenarios in Brief – presents three scenarios for education up to 2020. Scenario 1 is the Status Quo, Scenario 2 is Re-Schooling, and Scenario 3 is De-Schooling. Would like to think we’re working towards 3, but can’t help but think a variant of 1 is going to obtain… :( (via George Siemens)

• Christopher D. Sessums: Who are we really failing? – Chris looks at the problem of what to do with ‘gifted’ students in mainstream education. To be honest, I’m sick and tired of tokenistic efforts such as taking them out for random lessons/days and giving them ‘problems to solve’. How artificial and boring…

• SpeedOfCreativity.org: Relying on Technologies and Attitudes Toward Creativity – Wes Fryer reflects on the recent Skype outage and includes an ever-useful image in his post I’d almost forgotten about: the (almost) bell curve of technology adoption.
• Life Rocks! 2.0: Complete Guide to Using Google Apps – 1 – I can’t remember how I came across this, but it’s timely as I’ve set up Google Apps for Education on my domain (start.mrbelshaw.co.uk)

• Borderland: Redrawing the Shape of Learning – It’s great having a namesake (Doug Noon) who’s such a luminary; I bask in his reflected glory ;) This post deals with Doug’s reflections on a book he’s recently been reading entitled Complexity and Education. If you’re looking for metaphors to understand your school, I recommend the classic Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan.
• Christopher D. Sessums: Fix It, Close It, or Move: One Englishman’s Perspective on How to Improve Schools – Chris reflects on some reasons why the UK education system is perceived by some as better than the US system. I can’t help but be reminded by some lyrics from a Kings of Convenience song: Things seem so much better when / They’re not a part of the close surroundings…
• Borderland: Emergence – another great post by Doug exploring some of the complexity theory he’s been attempting to apply to his classroom recently. This one deals with authority, ‘classroom management’ and creativity.

• Connectivism.ca: Network, Ecologies, Curatorial Teaching – George Siemens uses a lot of metaphors and similies to explain the current state of networked education and how it has given rise to edubloggers talking of ‘ecologies’, ‘habitats’ and the like.
• The Fischbowl: Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 1 – Karl Fisch ponders how staff and students at his school can create personal learning networks. I, for one, welcome our Twitter overlords. ;)
• Artichoke: Making a Brilliant General: Halo Effects in the BES School Leadership Research – I don’t understand a lot of what she writes (not sure if that’s my stupidity or her somewhat hifalutin style of writing) but I love this quotation: Good leaders are often said to have a handful of important qualities: clear vision, effective communication skills, self-confidence, personal charm and more. Most people would agree these are elements of good leadership. But defining them is a different matter altogether, since several of these qualities, tend to be in the eye of the beholder – which is affected by company performance.(i.e. whether or not people think you have certain qualities depends on what other people are doing around you…)

• Blog of Proximal Development: Creating Learning Experiences – Konrad Glogowski reflects a growing maturity in the edublogosphere, focusing not on the proliferation of online tools, but on the actual learning experiences and pedagogy behind them.
• Cool Cat Teacher: The Most Common Struggles When Introducing Wikis in the Classroom – The indefatigable Vicki Davis reflects on her experiences introducing wikis to classes and lessons that can be learned. You might also want to try Wikipatterns for some ideas.
• Dangerously Irrelevant: It’s the first day of school (again!) – a tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless somewhat sad post by Scott McLeod. He wheels out his Beginning of the Year tick-box list of desired things. Shame he only manages to tick the one next to Lots of shiny new equipment. It’s an experience a lot of us will share over the next couple of weeks, methinks… :(

• Teach42: How Effective Are Filters? Ask Australia – Steve Dembo mocks the thinking behind an $84 million porn filter that was bypassed by a 16 year-old within 30 minutes. So they updated it. And it was bypassed within 40 minutes. When will administrators learn that it’s the underlying issues (digital literacy, bullying, online safety, etc.) that matter most?
• Teaching In The Digital Age: Supporting beginning teachers – Louise Starkey reminds us of the important of early professional development and networking for new teachers. She’s set up a Ning social network to support them at newteacher.ning.com. If you know of any beginning teachers, you might want to direct them to the site!

A note: If you’ve got comments about the content of the blog posts, please add them to the original author’s post. If, however, their about my opinions regarding the posts, add them below! :)

A final note: One of the advantages of using Google Reader (as I do) for your RSS feed reading is that you can star and share items. This means that you can easily revisit those you star and – more importantly – those that you share automatically create what’s sometimes known as a link blog. This link blog in turn has both a static presence and an RSS feed – you can see the latest posts which I’ve shared to the bottom-right of this site, or visit my Google Reader linkblog.

Those posts that I think are extraordinarily important and might be of interest to me a few months down the line I bookmark using del.icio.us. Again, a link to my account (as well as those in my ‘network’) is provided at the bottom-right of this site. As I add bookmarks for everything here – personal and professional – you might want to look just at those I tag with education or edtech, for example. :D