Leigh Blackall is an experienced educator with a background in secondary and vocational education and training, based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales Australia. Leigh's core interest is in using social software with learners. Leigh maintains the Teach and Learn Online Web Log and facilitates the Teach and Learn Online e- Groupto maintain a community of practice around social software and distributed network learning. He gives presentations and workshops, provides professional development to teachers and develops multimedia learning resources.

Click to view an archive of Leigh's recent Elluminate Live! session on Knowledge Sharing and Distributed Networking Tools at the Cool Results conference. You will need to join the LearningTimes community to view this archive. Click to listen to a Podcast (mp3 recording) of the presentation (this is very large at 22.4 MB - 112 minutes) or click to view the presentation webpage.

In this critique Leigh Blackall discusses how digital literacy affects teaching practices in Australian education. Consideration is given to understandings of digital literacy, the impact of open source software and the place of content within the worldwide rapid publishing and networked learning revolution (Web 2.0). Participatory action research is suggested as an approach to developing awareness of new models for online learning, improving digital literacy skills and enabling networked learning practices in Australian education.

In developing this critique Leigh has collated and annotated, in a wiki, a fantastic range of links to relevant research. Scroll down to 'A sample and remix on what has been said already'. Click to view this valuable resource.