Education, opportunities and challenges for generation OurSpace: Taming the beast

The paper discusses the opportunities and challenges presented for current notions of schooling by adolescent online cultures. Young people are increasingly active Web 2.0 users and their interactions through these technologies are altering their social identities, styles of learning, and exchanges with others around the world. The paper argues for the need for more research to investigate this phenomenon through the use of virtual ethnography and identifies the ethical challenges that lie therein. It raises questions for school education and presents an argument for the need to study the area in culturally sensitive ways that privilege adolescents voices

Web 2.0 in the classroom? Dilemmas and opportunities inherent in adolescent web 2.0 engagement.

The paper discusses the implications of the current phenomenon of adolescent engagement in digital spaces. Young people are increasingly active Web 2.0 users, and their interactions through these technologies are altering their social identities, styles of learning, and exchanges with others around the world. The paper argues for more research to investigate this phenomenon through the use of virtual ethnography and identifies the ethical challenges that lie therein. It raises questions for school education and presents an argument for studying the area in culturally sensitive ways that privilege adolescents voices

Primary Teachers’ Professional Learning Preferences in Science and Technology

It has long been established that there are particular challenges to the teaching of primary science and technology. Teacher professional development is almost universally regarded as critical to the provision of high quality school education and to the provision of effective science and technology teaching. This study surveyed 173 primary school teachers in Australia to determine the current state of teacher professional learning in order to understand what professional learning might be attractive to primary school teachers of science and technology. The survey was conducted during the roll out of a new national curriculum and obtained information on: personal and demographic details, professional learning preferences, and school science and technology capability. The findings suggest that these teachers’ preferred professional development that included: expert input, sequences of workshops delivered during school time, the trial of practical activities in their own class with collaborative reflection, sharing and discussion of classroom experiences facilitated by a team based strategy such as co-planning and teaching common lessons or lessons with similar activitie

Mobile learning for teacher professional learning: benefits, obstacles and issues

This paper reflects on the role of mobile learning in teachers professional learning. It argues that effective professional learning requires reflection and collaboration and that mobile learning is ideally suited to allow reflection-in action and to capture the spontaneity of learning moments. The paper also argues for the value of collaborations between teachers and students in professional learning. It suggests that authentic artefacts and anecdotes, captured through mobile technologies, can enable the sharing, analysis and synthesis of classroom experiences by teachers and students. Such analysis and synthesis helps to encourage collaborative reflective practice and is likely to improve teacher and student learning as a result. Ethical issues that might arise through using mobile technologies in this way are also discussed. Teacher voice is presented to indicate the range of views about mobile learning and to indicate current practices. Practical, school systemic, attitudinal and ethical factors may inhibit mobile technology adoption; these factors need to be researched and addressed to realise the potential of teacher mobile professional learning

How do early career teachers value different types of support? A scale-adjusted latent class choice model

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Using a discrete choice experimental approach and associated Scale-Adjusted Latent Class Model (SALCM), we quantify the relative value early career teachers (ECTs) place on various types of support in the form of affirmation, resources, collegial opportunities, mentoring, and professional development. ECTs with intentions to depart the profession, place greater relative value on the sharing of resources, cooperative teaching and planning, offsite discussions about classroom management and programming with mentors, and having a greater professional voice. In contrast, those with intentions to remain, place greater value on observation from and conversations about teaching with more experienced teachers at their school

Examining Museum Visits as Literacy Events: the role of mediators

Museum exhibitions are literacy rich environments. Visitors may engage with a range of texts including texts that constitute the exhibition objects themselves, those that convey information about the objects and those that instruct visitors about how the visitors are expected by the museum to navigate through the exhibition. The ways in which visitors engage with these diverse texts are important defining factors of the visitors museum experience. For museums, understanding how texts in their exhibitions are influencing the museum experience, and the possibility of a museum experience for the broad public community is important in the fulfilment of their public mission as cultural and education institutions. In this paper, we adopt a view of literacy as a social practice, the perspective of New Literacy Studies (NLS), that offers a fruitful way for museums to consider the interactions between exhibition texts and their audiences. Such considerations, we argue, can inform museums approaches to broadening their visitor demographics to more strongly fulfill their public mission. We show that the goals of NLS resonate with some of the goals of the New Museology movement in museum studies, a movement that aims to democratize what museums represent and how

Reconceptualising schooling for a Web 2.0 generation

This paper frames and theorises the nature of adolescents informal experiences in Web 2.0 environments to articulate their fit or misfit with current conceptions of school education. Adolescents are increasingly active Web 2.0 users. However, the traditional research and education communities have been slow to respond to the rapid emergence of the digital generational culture. Adolescents new ways of interacting and producing are likely to render current configurations of schooling obsolete and hence demand new conceptualisations of schooling. This paper discusses how these new visions might influence, disrupt and interact with future schooling scenarios