56.01.

This number may mean nothing to you, but this was the number I received when sucked into a scam like so many others on twitter yesterday. It’s only now the lone voice of reason @jonesieboy comes into sharp focus as he couldn’t believe how many people had voluntarily typed their username and password into a website merely to find out a number that few (if any) knew the meaning of.

Fortunately for the gullible, it wasn’t truly a scam, but an experiment to find out the extent of the network in twitter – it’s easy to see your own @ replies, but just how far do these connections go? Thanks to @katiebarrowman for pointing out the truth behind the story to me. I think we’re all suitably shamed. If we’re not, then we should be.

Why did I do it? Well, quite simply, because others had. It brings the value of this network into sharp focus again for me. Here is a group of loosely related individuals that I have learned to trust for their advice or opinions. Now I know how gullible we all are, should I value this network as much?

It’s been a bit of a day full of numbers for me today. I’ve watched over the last few days the number of people in Learning & Teaching Scotland joining up to ‘Yammer‘ (a closed equivalent of twitter for those that share the same email address domain) reach roughly a quarter of the organisation. Is this a valuable tool? One of my colleagues noted that if we all actually answer the question posed by Yammer ‘What are you working on?’, then it would be worthwhile, as we’d all be much better informed as the workings of our colleagues. Will people do this though? I suspect we all value the opportunity for conversation too much to be ‘merely’ productive.

Which brings me back to twitter – I have only two contacts in twitter that only ever answer the question posed ‘What are you doing?’ – would it be a better network if that’s all we said? The problem is our nature – we just can’t resist clicking on a link from someone we trust, can we?

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Launched today are the Glow Games – spread the word!

Visit the GlowScotland website to grab the embed code for your own site, or even better still, login to Glow to play the game and clock up an extra high score!

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working on the LTS stand.

As with previous years, I thought it might be a good idea to share what I’m up to at the Learning Festival?

Wednesday
9:30 – 10:15 C2A – Carron 1: Effective Learning & Teaching in action with Glow
11:00 – 12:00 LTS stand
12:30 – 13:15 C2B – Carron 2: Glow and e-mentoring: supporting development, 2st century style
15:00 – 17:00 LTS stand
17:45 – late(!) Forth: Teachmeet ‘08

Thursday
09:00 – 15:00 LTS stand (with a few breaks in between!)
16:00 – 16:30 Scottish Education Village: SLF Extra in Glow

It would be great to catch up with others if you’re coming to the Festival this year? Get me anytime on twitter @whereisab, or come along to that stand and find out what’s happening with Glow.

Apparently this year has the biggest number ever pre-registered – add to that the industrial action scheduled for Wednesday, and this event could be even more huge than usual!

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Over the coming year we’re going to see a huge growth in the number of live chats and web conferences taking place in Glow. What better way to kick things off for the Scottish Learning Festival this year than to have the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning Fiona Hyslop take part in a live chat in Glow?

You can join the Cabinet Secretary in a live discussion on Wednesday 17 September from 5.30pm until 5.55pm to exchange views, to chat, ask questions, or share your experiences.

You’ll need a Glow login to take part, and can find the chatroom and discussion forum here.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity – if you are involved in Scottish Education and don’t yet have a login to Glow, get in touch with your Key Contact to find out more about their rollout plans for Glow in your area.

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Today I took part in a CPDCentral/CPDReflect workshop with CPD coordinators from some of the local authorities around Glasgow. This was the fourth of a series of workshops abley led by Con Morris of the National CPD Team.

So what was I doing there you might ask?

In order to answer that, I’ll need to tell you a bit more about CPD Central and the newly developed tool CPD Reflect.

CPD Central is a National Group inside Glow for anyone that is interested in CPD. It’s an area to share and make connections across local authorities. I had the pleasure of doing a demonstration of Glow and an introduction to this online community for those present at the session. What interests me most about this community however is not merely that it exists, but how it’s being developed. You see CPD Central is not being managed or administered from on high, but rather the members are deciding what they want to do with the space. To me, that screams collegiality and community.

I wonder if people are ready for that though? All too often in Scottish education we seem to have a ‘what can I get’ mentality when faced with using technology. Where does an online community begin? Does it start with ‘what can I give’ or ‘what’s in it for us’?

The second tool that we were looking at in the workshop sessions was CPD Reflect. I remember sitting down with Con a couple of years ago as he started to gather opinion and advice about what a reflective online CPD tool could be, and we spoke at length about how beneficial an reflective journal could be to a practitioner, and how valuable it would be to have a tool that allowed a practitioner to judge their own development against the standard for professional registration.Two years later, CPD Reflect is about to be launched on a unsuspecting nation of educators.

Off the bat I love the whole concept of CPD Reflect. I think it’s great that there is now a tool to help in the whole CPD/PRD process, and make it far more meaningful for those involved, instead of the ‘tick the box’ exercise I fear it is for so many in scottish education. I love the fact that using this tool, you can personally set targets an objectives for improvement in areas of your professional practice and let technology do what it does best – collate, track and share. How brilliant is it that this tool allows you to share what you want from your own area of CPD Reflect with others of your choosing?

Does this all sound too good to be true? I suspect there has to be a catch – I don’t know if teachers will have time to get the best out of this tool. It takes time to fill in sections of information. You’d have to commit to this tool to realise the benefits. Do teachers have time to do this in an already busy working day?

How often do we merely choose a CPD activity because we saw something we liked in a local authority calendar, or because it related to the school development plan? How closely do either of these factors relate to our own professional needs for development? CPD Reflect allows us to flip this model on it’s head, and focus instead on our needs for development. It allows us to recognise areas where we are merely beginning to adopt good practice, or integrate it into our working life. Perhaps the tools best strength lies in the ability to note not just where we are integrating, but where we are innovating in our work – connecting innovators with beginnners could work wonders on our profession.

CPD Reflect will be available soon through Glow – watch the CPD Scotland and Glow Scotland websites for further details.

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