Gonnay no dae that

Posted on 6th October 2015 by NomadWarMachine

I’m keeping half an eye on Chrissi Neranzi’s Creativity for Learning in HE, which started for real this week. The first activity for this week is to:

Select a few objects from home/your office you would normally never use in your teaching. Add them to your portfolio and briefly explain your rationale why you would never use these.

I wonder if this is meant to make me realise that I can be creative and use an awful lot of these everyday objects in my teaching. Hmmm – as they say around here, just naw. So here’s some of the objects I would never use – normally or ever:

  • My ukuleles. I teach analytic philosophy. I might (read: I do) sometimes play Monty Python clips, but I have limited time and set questions to cover, so I am not going to get them to listen to me playing So Much Wine. Or anything.
  • My carving knives. They are sharp. I don’t think putting them in my backpack and carrying them around is a good idea.
  • My bedding. Sometimes I do feel like crawling under my duvet instead of teaching. I should not encourage that behaviour.
  • My knitting. Unfortunately, I can think of no tutorial topic that could be enhanced by the inclusion of this. Descartes’ proofs of the existence of God? Logical fallacies? Nah. I’d like it to be fine for me to knit while conducting a seminar, but it’s not.
  • My bust of Beethoven. It is one of my favourite things, but he already has a chip from moving him years ago and he is heavy!
  • My alcohol. Oh, how I wish sometimes that this was allowed …

I could go on, but I won’t. I do get the point though – there’s lots of stuff around that we could use creatively to enhance our teaching.

For anybody wanting to know what the title of this post means, see below.

Posted in Learning, Teaching, University | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Blogging is a way of life

Posted on 5th October 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Steve Wheeler’s recent #Blimage, #Blideo and #TwistedPair challenges have been great for getting me thinking and helping me find inspiration when I want to blog. This weekend he also inspired my husband, Niall Barr, to participate. Steve’s been a great motivator for many of us – he leads by example by blogging frequently and he is fervent in his encouragement of others to be more active in their blogging.

Back in the 90s an exercise trainer, Derrick Errol Evans, hit our TV screens in the UK. Better known as Mr Motivator he dressed in brightly coloured spandex and released a selection of videos. More recently, in 2012, he released a music video in which he encourages others to be more active.

So there we have it. Steve Wheeler is the Mr Motivator of blogging. Only he can tell us if they share the same love of spandex 😉

(This blog post title is inspired by Mr Motivator’s web pages.)

Posted in Learning, Twisted Pair, Writing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Kicking down the cobble stones

Posted on 4th October 2015 by NomadWarMachine


I took part in a Twitter chat organised by Hybrid Pedagogy on Friday (#digped).  As ever it was fast and furious and there was no chance of catching everything that was going on. Another participant asked how to cope with the vast amount of tweets, and I replied saying that I just dipped in and out of the bits that caught my eye, and didn’t worry about the rest. As I reflected later, I realised that my attitude to these types of event had changed at some point – where once I felt that I had to try to keep up with everything I now accepted that I could not, and would not, and my social angst (FOMO) must be reined in. That’s hard to do, but I try.

In this modern age of connectedness, it’s easy to feel, like the Red Queen, that however much we do we are still not getting anywhere:

 ‘Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’ Through the Looking Glass Chapter 2

So how do we cope? How do we narrow it down to the things that really matter? How do we learn to focus on an aspect of a conversation and enjoy it to the max, while letting other aspects go by us. And, related to this –  how do we avoid the feeling that the grass is greener everywhere that we are not? How do we concentrate on what we are doing and have confidence that it is just as meaningful as alternatives going on around us? And, as educators, how do we teach our students to learn in this internet age? Do we need a new pedagogy to help us to answer all of these questions? Maybe.

Dave Cormier talks about rhizomatic learning as “a story of how we can learn in a world of abundance”. This approach involves letting go of the idea that learning is about devouring big piles of content, realising that nobody can know everything and that includes the educators! Now, anybody who participated in #rhizo14 or #rhizo15 will tell you that they were hectic roller-coaster experiences – nobody could keep up with everything that was going on – we had to learn to let go of the idea that we could “complete” everything. Rather than running as fast as we can in order just to stand still, then, we need to learn to relax and take time to smell the flowers.

So, there we have it. Today’s #TwistedPair. Dave Cormier replies to the Red Queen. (Original challenge by Steve Wheeler here)

(When I started writing this post I was thinking of using Simon & Garfunkel’s Feelin Groovy, hence the title of this post.)

Image of Alice and Red Queen By Джон Тенниел [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted in Learning, Online learning, Social Media, Technology, Twisted Pair | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Fools march in (a #twistedpair post)

Posted on 3rd October 2015 by NomadWarMachine

For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

Roobarb_smilesWe all know them, don’t we? Those enthusiastic colleagues who launch into everything they do with fervent enthusiasm without a thought for the consequences. Remember Roobarb? Voiced wonderfully by Richard Briers, the green dog approached misadventure with boundless enthusiasm as Custard the pink cat watched cynically.

It’s easy to be a Custard in HE, especially as we get older. “Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt” we sigh as we hear of the latest bit of shiny, shiny technology which we are told will revolutionise education. “Fools rush in” we say, wagging our finger and advising caution. But, though fools might rush in where angels fear to tread, angels must remember to evaluate possibilities and step purposefully forward later.

So how do we train our inner Roobarb? How do we curb our inner Custard? How do we strike a balance between reckless abandon and curmudgeonly complacency? Or maybe that’s just me 😉

This post was inspired by Steve Wheeler’s new challenge

Image from Wikipedia

Posted in Learning, Teaching, Technology, Twisted Pair, University | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Really connecting

Posted on 3rd October 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Here’s some pics of my pals wearing my hand knits. I’m having a lot of fun doing this 🙂

Rhizoknitting

Posted in #CLMOOC, #rhizo14, #rhizo15, knitting | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Penfriends

Posted on 25th September 2015 by NomadWarMachine

IMG_20150925_155351573[1] When I was a teenager I had two pen friends – one in Paris and one in Berlin. I wrote them painfully dull letters in excruciating French and German and received  equally dull letters back from them. My heart sank when I came home to find one of those letters awaiting me – foreign looking squiggly writing from a friend who was not really a friend. I wonder if modern, middle class teens have the same awkward experiences that I had, or if the internet has helped to improve such things.

Nowadays I am EXCITED when I come home and find mail in an unfamiliar hand. Which of my friends, I wonder, has written to me? I’ve had a lovely dish from Autumm, yummy peach preserves from Karen, a beautiful painting from Stephanie – I am rich, and I am thankful that I live in this digital age and have real friends all over the world. It’s not about the gifts, precious though these are to me, it’s about the friendships they represent.

IMG_20150925_161231397[1]IMG_20150831_174707110[1]IMG_20150910_195555584[1]

IMG_20150925_163607678[1] Karen also wrote me a long letter – and as I sat down to read it I remembered those earlier letters from abroad. There’s lots of us talking and writing about these new friendships at the moment – whatever these are, there is nothing virtual about them.

This picture was a gift from Maha to Niall – not through the post, but when we met her recently. I’ve already written about that 🙂

Posted in #CLMOOC, #rhizo14, #rhizo15, MOOC | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Being vulnerable

Posted on 19th September 2015 by NomadWarMachine

18425537072_954d4b0e1d_oI’ve had so much fun over the last 18 or so months. Ever since I happened upon rhizo14 and then discovered other such events I have been making the most wonderful friends. I’m not going to list you all – there are too many of you for that – but I hope you know that I mean you  – that’s right – you. It’s been glorious – I’ve laughed so much, and learnt so much, and I feel very lucky to be a part of it (whatever “it” is).

Then something happened a couple of weeks ago that hurt me – a lot. It still hurts. And Helen wrote this blog post asking how we share our human side online. And it made me cry, because I saw that she understood.

I knew about trolls, and how they could hurt – I’ve been hanging about in left-wing, feminist spaces online for long enough now that I am mainly immune to them – but I didn’t expect to be hurt by somebody I counted as a friend.

So – my questions are – if we reveal our human sides in digital spaces, and in so doing we make ourselves vulnerable, then how do we prepare ourselves for the possibility that others, also being human, might do things that hurt us? And how do we attempt, being human ourselves, to model our behaviour so as not to inadvertently hurt others?

And how would we go about helping students work through these questions?

Picture of vulnerable black-handed spider monkey: flickr photo by goingslo http://flickr.com/photos/goingslo/18425537072 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Posted in #rhizo14, Love, Rhizomes | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

Not virtually connecting

Posted on 15th September 2015 by NomadWarMachine

I was at a loose end.  I spotted my pals.

“We’re going to do a Hangout”, they said. “Want to join in?”

I didn’t, really, but I perched at the end of the sofa.

The hangout started. I waved. They angled the laptop screen away from me so I could nearly hear and see what was going on. Not enough to join in, though.  I had my knitting, so I got that out. It seemed churlish to move away, so I stayed.

They thought the hangout was deep. Maybe it was. From where I was it was not even shallow – it did not register. I was not included. Look at the photos and you might think I was there, but I heard nothing, saw nothing, said nothing.

Was I there?

Posted in Learning, Online learning, Peer interaction, Rhizomes | Tagged | 7 Comments

Squinting sideways

Posted on 13th September 2015 by NomadWarMachine

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect. (Wordsworth, The Tables Turned)

I often used to feel that doing analytic philosophy was like pulling the legs of a spider in order to see how it worked – by analysing things too rigorously and asking what things “really” are we miss any chance of understanding them at all. As a wise man1 once said, sometimes it doesn’t pay to look at things too deeply – it’s better to sort of squint at things sideways, out of the corner of one’s eye – that’s when you’ll see the spider scuttling off to weave its web.

Wittgenstein makes a similar point about the futility of finding and defining essences with his talk about games and family resemblance:

One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges.—”But is a blurred concept a concept at all?”—Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need? (Wittgenstein, PI, Section 71)

And, earlier in the same discussion he admonishes those who think that games must all have something in common to challenge such assumptions:

Don’t think, but look! (PI, Section 66)

A few days ago some of us from #rhizo14 presented at ALT-C In this talk we ask how we should describe ourselves. A community?  A collective?  A network?  A group? A swarm? Rhizocats, I jokingly said.2

We simplify, in order to discuss. And in so simplifying we distort. There is no one thing that is/was #rhizo14, there is no one band of rhizo researchers. As Heraclitus probably once said:

You cannot step into the same river twice (Here)

Actually, I don’t think you can even step into the same river once.3

1. I’m paraphrasing and extending something Dave Cormier once said in a Facebook group when some folk were trying to work out what rhizomatic learning was.

2. Simon might be making related points here and here

3. This semester I have to tutor about personal identity to 1st years. Ugh!

Posted in #rhizo14, #rhizo15, Learning, Rhizomes, Wittgenstein | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Rhizocats

Posted on 12th September 2015 by NomadWarMachine

This week we presented at ALT-C, a fairly large (about 500 delegates) annual conference which was held in Manchester this year. Maha has already blogged about us all meeting there, so I won’t repeat that – but I do have a tear in my eye remembering all of it, and thinking about sweet little Hoda. We were asked (by Catherine, I think) what word we used to describe ourselves – as Ash said afterwards, we should have returned to our title slide – we’re rhizocats!  Thanks, Scott, for the inspiration.

Niall recorded our talk, and I have uploaded it to YouTube.

Slides from the talk are here.

Posted in #rhizo14, Conferences, Learning, MOOC, Online learning, Rhizomes, Social Media, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments