Came across this video on Silvia Straka's excellent post on her blog.
All too realistic and the the only thing missing was an image of the yellowed notes the lecturer wrote the first semester he taught the class 10 years ago.
Oh… and maybe a few smudged up overhead sheets and the stack of unread hand-outs left behind on the lecture hall floor.
I know that there are lots of passionate, engaging lecturers and speakers of all sorts but they maybe in the minority. Any value in terms of content from this type of presentation could be easily delivered in a half a dozen different ways, video, podcast. At least that way students could review the material when they were ready to learn, or at least awake. They could pause for reflection, rewind to review, and use a social network to engage with the subject matter. And they wouldn't have to put up with the smell of the guy who came to class hung-over.
Everyday, thousands of people spend millions of dollars to drag themselves to a campus to participate in this sort of ritualized behavior. Just think of the carbon footprint.
To insist that students drag them selves into a lecture hall to sit for 50 minutes of this sort of mind numbing presentation is abusive and constitutes institutional malpractice.
Still in a lot of institutions this passes as the ideal of teaching and learning, predicated on the hegemonic assumption that the institution owns knowledge and can inject it into the minds of students. After a while there will be test or a quiz to test the student acquisition of knowledge, a dip-stick pushed into the mind of students to check the level. And then the assignment of a grade that permits the student to advance to the next stage of injection.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Gift Economies
Gift Economies have been around for a while.
Most often the gift is not monetary but reputation/karma enhancing. I read Cory Doctorow's Book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom when it was syndicated on his website. You can download it for free at this link. A highly recommended read.
He described a society that used Whuffies to recognize a persons reputational status in a post-scarcity economy to encourage the production of useful and creative stuff.
Came across a great instance of a gift economy on Twitter today. Its called Twollar
So you want to recognize someone for the value that they have freely offered to your Twitter community you send them Twollars by creating an entry like "Give 10 Twollars to @ggatin for telling me about gift economies" Twollars picks up the code and registers exchanges in their system.
The idea is that corporations will provide sponsorship so that Twollars will be translated in to charitable giving for worthy projects like drilling water wells in 3rd world countries.
I love it. Anything to break out of the corporate mindset, that everything of worth can only be measured black ink in by the bottom right hand corner of a spreadsheet.
So here is the deal. I will send a Twollar to any Tweeter who comments on this post. Heck of a deal. I have no idea how much this will cost me, I guess I should figure out how to the check the stats on this blog. Entirely likely that I will get off pretty cheap. Still trying to figure out the rate of exchange between Twollars and Whuffies.
Most often the gift is not monetary but reputation/karma enhancing. I read Cory Doctorow's Book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom when it was syndicated on his website. You can download it for free at this link. A highly recommended read.
He described a society that used Whuffies to recognize a persons reputational status in a post-scarcity economy to encourage the production of useful and creative stuff.
Came across a great instance of a gift economy on Twitter today. Its called Twollar
So you want to recognize someone for the value that they have freely offered to your Twitter community you send them Twollars by creating an entry like "Give 10 Twollars to @ggatin for telling me about gift economies" Twollars picks up the code and registers exchanges in their system.
The idea is that corporations will provide sponsorship so that Twollars will be translated in to charitable giving for worthy projects like drilling water wells in 3rd world countries.
I love it. Anything to break out of the corporate mindset, that everything of worth can only be measured black ink in by the bottom right hand corner of a spreadsheet.
So here is the deal. I will send a Twollar to any Tweeter who comments on this post. Heck of a deal. I have no idea how much this will cost me, I guess I should figure out how to the check the stats on this blog. Entirely likely that I will get off pretty cheap. Still trying to figure out the rate of exchange between Twollars and Whuffies.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Self-Styled Edublogger
Another great blog entry and good discussion from Terry Anderson.
A couple of references in the article and comments to "self-styled edubloggers" got me thinkin' harder than Queeks Draw .
From the article:
And Scott Leslie's comment:
I'm not sure if the term is being used in a pejorative sense and I don't want to poke anybody in the eye here but is there any kind of edublogger other than self-styled? Is there a certificate or license or graduate degree that would designate someone as being other than "self-styled"... Official edublogger or something like that? As the article goes on to point out the qualification to be an edublogger is pretty loose and informal.
There are people like Downes and Anderson who really do get me cogitating on a regular basis but even as I read them I try to remember my catechism of critical thinking.
I recognize that I also have a tendency to look for people who's views and attitudes are similar to mine but I also recognize that that tendency can be very self-limiting. If my network of practice just confirms what I already think I know for sure it's not much use to me.
There is an other issue for me about that Clarence Fisher alluded to in a recent entry on his blog Remote Access He was taking issue with the notion of "ed tech" and points out that the prefix "ed" or "edu" may be loosing its usefulness. Others took up the notion in the comments.
I write in a blog and often I write about topics of education and critical pedagogy as I try to learn more about those topics. The blog is more for my personal learning than a broadcast medium.
So I'm promising myself to start looking for and read material from people who have views and outlooks that may be dissimilar from mine. Started already!
Sharon Elin contributed a comment on Andersons blog post supporting the use of Twitter and microblogging.
I agree with her that it is a great new format and getting better all the time. I posted my first twitter post in Apr of 2006 but didn't really get into it until Jan 2008. Watching it evolve over the last year has been very interesting.
I'm still trying to work out my personal Twitter following policy but I find I look for a few things in a Twitter buddy.
When I look at a persons Twitter account first page I look for the frequency of posts and the recency. Somebody who hasn't posted for a month might not be appealing similarly someone who posts 100 times a day can be a pain. I look at the display page, I think it shows your last 20 Twits. I look for value, pictures, links, interesting comments.
I then look at profile. Is there a link to a blog that gives me some personal information? I find my preference is for those who are straight up, use their real name and are using a blog for personal development.
I block spammers, web entrepreneurs, new media gurus, porno sites, hookers, real estate agents and personal injury lawyers or anybody telling me how to make my fortune from Twitter.
Note to future self: look at this post in a while and see if this has changed.
A couple of references in the article and comments to "self-styled edubloggers" got me thinkin' harder than Queeks Draw .
From the article:
self styled EduBloggers or even that subset who consider themselves to be EduPunk
And Scott Leslie's comment:
what I find constantly amazing is when I come across another self-styled edublogger with whom I share absolutely NO points of connection.
I'm not sure if the term is being used in a pejorative sense and I don't want to poke anybody in the eye here but is there any kind of edublogger other than self-styled? Is there a certificate or license or graduate degree that would designate someone as being other than "self-styled"... Official edublogger or something like that? As the article goes on to point out the qualification to be an edublogger is pretty loose and informal.
There are people like Downes and Anderson who really do get me cogitating on a regular basis but even as I read them I try to remember my catechism of critical thinking.
I recognize that I also have a tendency to look for people who's views and attitudes are similar to mine but I also recognize that that tendency can be very self-limiting. If my network of practice just confirms what I already think I know for sure it's not much use to me.
There is an other issue for me about that Clarence Fisher alluded to in a recent entry on his blog Remote Access He was taking issue with the notion of "ed tech" and points out that the prefix "ed" or "edu" may be loosing its usefulness. Others took up the notion in the comments.
I write in a blog and often I write about topics of education and critical pedagogy as I try to learn more about those topics. The blog is more for my personal learning than a broadcast medium.
So I'm promising myself to start looking for and read material from people who have views and outlooks that may be dissimilar from mine. Started already!
Sharon Elin contributed a comment on Andersons blog post supporting the use of Twitter and microblogging.
I agree with her that it is a great new format and getting better all the time. I posted my first twitter post in Apr of 2006 but didn't really get into it until Jan 2008. Watching it evolve over the last year has been very interesting.
I'm still trying to work out my personal Twitter following policy but I find I look for a few things in a Twitter buddy.
When I look at a persons Twitter account first page I look for the frequency of posts and the recency. Somebody who hasn't posted for a month might not be appealing similarly someone who posts 100 times a day can be a pain. I look at the display page, I think it shows your last 20 Twits. I look for value, pictures, links, interesting comments.
I then look at profile. Is there a link to a blog that gives me some personal information? I find my preference is for those who are straight up, use their real name and are using a blog for personal development.
I block spammers, web entrepreneurs, new media gurus, porno sites, hookers, real estate agents and personal injury lawyers or anybody telling me how to make my fortune from Twitter.
Note to future self: look at this post in a while and see if this has changed.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Don't just say no
Just reading
Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (n.d.). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved February 27, 2009, from http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/.
The latest Horizon Report. In the critical challenges section they mention:
Just as important for faculty and admin to be technologically adept. Using Word docs and email attachments doesn’t quite do it.
Also in-house, institutional IT needs to get up to speed on many of the new ways of using web based tech for learning. New slogan: “Don’t just say no!”
Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (n.d.). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved February 27, 2009, from http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/.
The latest Horizon Report. In the critical challenges section they mention:
There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. The skills involved in writing and research have changed from those required even a few years ago. Students need to be technologically adept, to be able to collaborate with peers all over the world, to understand basic content and media design, and to understand the relationship be- tween apparent function and underlying code in the applications they use daily.
Just as important for faculty and admin to be technologically adept. Using Word docs and email attachments doesn’t quite do it.
Also in-house, institutional IT needs to get up to speed on many of the new ways of using web based tech for learning. New slogan: “Don’t just say no!”
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Edupunk and Colonization of Web 2.0
Great debate/discussion going on between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell in a series of videos posted on YouTube called EDUPUNK Battle Royal. Jerry Bayne on behalf of Educause is the referee/moderator.
One of the issues is the corporatization of education by major learning management companies who have been very aggressive (piratical?) about claiming many Web 2.0 features that have been developed by innovators and DIY ers.
The punk movement may not be the best metaphor for the counter-culture ethos arising in the face of the coporatizing of education. However, it works for the time being. As was pointed out in the video, the punk movement actually turned out to be the biggest corporate sponsored scam of all. Still the idea of resistance is there and to those that object to the punk meme, I think a true punker would say f**k em if they can't take a metaphor.
A couple of great images raised in this video. The notion of the big LMS companies corporate agenda to take over education is colonization. Certainly fits. They are like the Company of Adventurers moving in to Canada at "the pleasure of their majesties" and squeezing the last bit of juice out of a whole continent and leaving a devastated indigenous population and a servant class of colonialists.
Also love Grooms image of a LMS being a "florescent lighted space for learning". Really captures the dismal blandly uniform experience that passes for online education in many instances.
My ICT for Teachers course was constructed and conducted entirely using Web 2.0 tools. The object of the course was to increase teacher literacy with web based tools so what better way to do it. I think the course may be regarded with great suspicion by the institution. They use Moodle which means at least that they don't get involved with the type of hostage taking that Blackboard or WEBCT imposes on institutions. Still the institution is more interested in saving money and control than empowering learners with the possibilities of web based learning tools.
One of the issues is the corporatization of education by major learning management companies who have been very aggressive (piratical?) about claiming many Web 2.0 features that have been developed by innovators and DIY ers.
The punk movement may not be the best metaphor for the counter-culture ethos arising in the face of the coporatizing of education. However, it works for the time being. As was pointed out in the video, the punk movement actually turned out to be the biggest corporate sponsored scam of all. Still the idea of resistance is there and to those that object to the punk meme, I think a true punker would say f**k em if they can't take a metaphor.
A couple of great images raised in this video. The notion of the big LMS companies corporate agenda to take over education is colonization. Certainly fits. They are like the Company of Adventurers moving in to Canada at "the pleasure of their majesties" and squeezing the last bit of juice out of a whole continent and leaving a devastated indigenous population and a servant class of colonialists.
Also love Grooms image of a LMS being a "florescent lighted space for learning". Really captures the dismal blandly uniform experience that passes for online education in many instances.
My ICT for Teachers course was constructed and conducted entirely using Web 2.0 tools. The object of the course was to increase teacher literacy with web based tools so what better way to do it. I think the course may be regarded with great suspicion by the institution. They use Moodle which means at least that they don't get involved with the type of hostage taking that Blackboard or WEBCT imposes on institutions. Still the institution is more interested in saving money and control than empowering learners with the possibilities of web based learning tools.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Personal Learning Networks, aka Skunk works
Picked up this great notion from a new Twitter connection Jim NacLennan. He described the steps necessary to make a skunkworks project a success. A wiki project being like a skunk works project. Old reference to a Lockheed Martin work strategy for secret projects undertaken with ad hoc resources.
Thought that went together well with the idea of personal learning networks. People put things together using whatever is at hand, whatever works.
It also brings together the notion of bricolage.
I consider myself a bricoleur, putting things together out of bits and pieces using unconventional means. This certainly fits as part of the pedagogy of propinquity and also reflects a useful mindset for making sense out of the vast amount of resources on the Internet.
Thought that went together well with the idea of personal learning networks. People put things together using whatever is at hand, whatever works.
It also brings together the notion of bricolage.
"Levi-Strauss used the idea of bricolage to contrast the analytic methodology of Western science with what he called a "science of the concrete" in primitive societies.11 The bricoleur scientist does not move abstractly and hierarchically from axiom to theorem to corollary. Bricoleurs construct theories by arranging and rearranging, by negotiating and renegotiating with a set of well-known materials." (Turkle and Papert, 1992)
I consider myself a bricoleur, putting things together out of bits and pieces using unconventional means. This certainly fits as part of the pedagogy of propinquity and also reflects a useful mindset for making sense out of the vast amount of resources on the Internet.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Gotta be true, I read it in the paper the other day
Responded to a post on elearnspace http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2009/02/19/the-death-of-news/
It would be nice to believe that we could be better informed if I has some guidance from the experts in the news media. The people who are trained to be skeptical about the facts, present an objective view and have a system of editorial oversight to ensure that we "just get the facts, ma'am."
However it is more and more apparent that the corporatist news media has made a science out of deceiving their viewer.
This recent article brings the argument together quite well. Although there is no shortage of evidence to suggest that academics and the editors of peer-reviewed journals might be just as likely to manipulate "findings" to support an agenda.
Stocking, S. H., & Holstein, L. (2009). Manufacturing doubt: Journalists' roles and the construction of ignorance in a scientific controversy. Public Understanding of Science, 18(1), 23-42. doi: 10.1177/0963662507079373.
Quote from the article"
In the article (p.23) there is also a nice concept map of Smithson's Taxonomy of Ignorance.
Michael Smithson,1989,Ignorance and uncertainty:Emerging paradigms., New York: Springer-Verlag.
Cf. earlier blog post on Agnotology and a companion mindmap.
It would be nice to believe that we could be better informed if I has some guidance from the experts in the news media. The people who are trained to be skeptical about the facts, present an objective view and have a system of editorial oversight to ensure that we "just get the facts, ma'am."
However it is more and more apparent that the corporatist news media has made a science out of deceiving their viewer.
This recent article brings the argument together quite well. Although there is no shortage of evidence to suggest that academics and the editors of peer-reviewed journals might be just as likely to manipulate "findings" to support an agenda.
Stocking, S. H., & Holstein, L. (2009). Manufacturing doubt: Journalists' roles and the construction of ignorance in a scientific controversy. Public Understanding of Science, 18(1), 23-42. doi: 10.1177/0963662507079373.
Quote from the article"
Most research in mass communication has instead found journalism to be profoundly conservative in support of existing power structures and the status quo (Shah, 1994; Hallin, 1986; Gitlin, 1980; Gans, 1980).
In the article (p.23) there is also a nice concept map of Smithson's Taxonomy of Ignorance.
Michael Smithson,1989,Ignorance and uncertainty:Emerging paradigms., New York: Springer-Verlag.
Cf. earlier blog post on Agnotology and a companion mindmap.
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