brainstorming ideas

The SiMMERR national seminar was held to increase our awareness and understanding of learning outcomes for students of computing studies, regardless of school or location. The event was held at Flinders University in South Australia. Organised and hosted by ACCE. The goal was to discuss and recommend issues related to the use of technologies and pedagogies, particularly students in rural and regional Australia.

During October, I took the opportunity whist on vacation in South Australia to attend the SiMERR summit and participate in the workshops. Whilst there I presented a progress report on the project jointly supported by the VITTA and the ICTEV.

The keynote talk by Alan Noble, Google Engineering Director helped articulate many of the ways that we can create an online learning environment that are both fun and stimulating. Increasingly it is expected that we will best prepare each student to be an innovative and creative Prosumer (producer consumer) and Proam (professional amateur). To innovate globally, Australia needs to harness the diversity of different cultural backgrounds, take the jobs to the people and leverage technology to new tools. To best do this, our students will need good maths, communication and problem solving skills.

Many parts of the conference were broadcast to online participants from around Australia using an audio and video conference link, chat room and resource bank. I was impressed by the many of the online participants that asked good questions of the keynote speakers and contributed to the workshop discussions. Later there was some discussion amongst presenters and participants about the different and free software options that could be used.

There are already several examples of good practice. Whilst some have created specialist software, others have adapted current technologies using free web2.0 tools, explore new technologies such as robotics and game programming and adapting constructivist and connectionist approaches to using virtual spaces such as Second Life. Following the workshop sessions, we considered how teachers need to learn how to teach online without the visual cues to engage their students. It is still very important for educators to develop a connection and relationship with their students.

Subject associations can help by providing professional development opportunities and encouraging the provision of free online resources. They should foster the use of free, standards based software solutions and freely debate the merits of Internet website censoring. A little collaborative and online development can go a long way. On a national level, there is considerable scope to better coordinate terminology between the different states and give consideration towards a national survey of computing studies and tools. Acronym overload is holding many educators back.

I can thank VITTA for the opportunity to attend this conference and jointly represent our contribution with the the ICTEV.

http://home.att.net/~slugbutter/evil/

http://www.nationalmemorytest.net.au/

Any discipline with a significant gender imbalance is the poorer for it.

A recent report in The Age newspaper indicated that "Google Australia can't find any female engineers who want to work for it. Internationally, the search engine behemoth strives to employ workers from many backgrounds, a recognition that its customers also come from every background. In Australia it hired more than 10 engineers from five ethnic backgrounds - but despite its best efforts, not a single woman."

I was interested to read the words and work by the representative of the Victorian ICT for Women Network mentioned in the article, Rhonda O'Donnell (Novell Asia Pacific). Perhaps this is somebody to invite and involve in a VITTA conference / special gathering / something?

It has been suggested that misspelt words could make you money by attracting extra traffic to your website. By including these words on a web page, the traffic will come from users that have entered information that has been similarly misspelt into a search engine. Well it seems that some web users have already tried to measure the typo popularity of misspelt words including doesnt, and seperate. Armed just with Google, try this yourself by checking the following spellings:

• calendar  351,000,000
• calender 2,560,000
• calander 545,000
• calandar 129,000

"Pubic Library" just scored 5830 on Google with new pubic libraries opening every week. What would you think if the UK MP Angela Smith, Minister for Health, Social Services and Pubic Safety came knocking on your front door? Robyn Gallagher has a nice list of these screamers on his Pubic Service Anouncement page. Enough misspelling about these typos. I am having enough trouble today, trying to finish this article reversing all the mistakes that I had deliberately created and accidentally fixed.

A spell checker for web browsers? I noticed that this was an evaluation criteria when I last looked a Wikipedia comparison of different web browsers. Now, Mozilla Firefox can add this feature with some free, Open Source extensions. I admit that adding in the feature had me puzzled. Why would anybody want to check on the spelling of a web page? Would this only appeal to English teachers that like to spell check whilst they surf the web? I noticed many examples of words that I misspelt on this list of 100 commonly misspelt English words.

Spellbound is Firefox extension that lets users check the spelling of web forms before they click on the submit button. It is free to download and requires the co-installation of the Mozilla spell check libraries. I was surprised to see that it could handle more than one language so I promptly added Dutch to the English Australian set. Tot ziens!