Cognition

In November 2009, Cognition won the contract to manage English, ESOL and Literacy Online for the Ministry of Education.

The first priority was to re-engage teachers in professional communities which had previously had little use, says Dr Phil Coogan who is leading the project for Cognition. In February 2010 mailing lists were launched for literacy, secondary English, ICTs in English, secondary literacy and primary and secondary ESOL. In their first 3 weeks they attracted approximately 2700 subscribers who have made immediate and intensive use of these communities. The next stage of community re-development is to provide teacher resource exchanges to facilitate teachers’ sharing of resources. A parallel development involves the restructure of the websites to ensure teachers can easily and intuitively access resources.

The project team had its first orientation meeting in February. At this meeting, the team worked through development plans for the year as well as exploring in some depth the complex job of effectively facilitating online professional communities.

The communities are well on the road to being re-established as the heart of English/literacy education in New Zealand.

Project team members are:

• Phil Coogan (Cognition) – project director (and ICTs in English community facilitator)
• Maria Lute (Cognition) – project leader
• Katrina Young (Cognition) – web publisher
• Chris Henderson (UC Education Plus - Canterbury University)– literacy community facilitator
• Gaylene Price (from UC Education Plus) – primary ESOL community facilitator
• Denise Hitchcock (Accent Learning - Victoria University) – secondary literacy community facilitator
• Mike Fowler (Hagley Community College) – secondary English community facilitator
• Breda Matthews (Mahurangi College) – secondary ESOL community facilitator
  
  English Online -http://englishonline.tki.org.nz/
  ESOL Online -http://esolonline.tki.org.nz/
  Literacy Online -http://literacyonline.tki.org.nz/