#ocTEL week 0: Big and Little Questions

Posted on 29th April 2014 by NomadWarMachine

Another day, another MOOC, this time ocTEL 2014, the MOOC run by ALT.  As ever, I’m just signing up to see what it’s like, and actually wondering whether these low level activities are good for me or whether (probably) I’d be better off going away and doing some independent reading and writing.  However, I’ll spend a few minutes now thinking about the course.

We’re asked to reflect on “big and little questions”:

Q: Can you identify the most important question about TEL that matters to you?

Q: Or alternatively do you have a cluster of issues? Or perhaps you’re ‘just browsing’?

A: I’m just browsing. I’m interested in learning communities, though – always looking for evidence of those.  I’m more interested in what makes good learning than in any particular technology.  I work as a learning technologist, but that’s a job title, not who I am.  I don’t think that using technology should be hard, either for staff or for students, and I’m a little bit interested in why there are barriers to adoption of specific technologies, I guess.

Q: Write down your reflections on this, privately or publicly:

A: Why do I browse?  I guess that, since #rhizo14, I keep looking around to see what makes for successful courses/communities – without expecting to find the answer.  I’m learning what works for me, and that’s a start, at least!

Q: Try and hold these reflections in your mind in the weeks to come – to direct the choices you make about which options to pursue, or as something to revise or refine it in the light of what you learn.

A:  Well, as my students say, obv.  😛

I’ll stick around for a bit – there’s a few familiar faces and that might make up for hating having to read to find out how to engage with the platform.

 

 

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BlendKit2014 week 1

Posted on 24th April 2014 by NomadWarMachine

I’ve just realised that I@ve sugned up for another MOOC, this one called: Blendkit2014, becoming a blended designer.  I’m not sure how much time I’ll give to this, it’s not gripping me so far, but here goes…

For the first week we’re set some reading (sigh) but at least it begins with a list of questions for us to think about:

  1. Is it most helpful to think of blended learning as an online enhancement to a face-to-face learning environment, a face-to-face enhancement to an online learning environment, or as something else entirely?
  2. In what ways can blended learning courses be considered the “best of both worlds” (i.e., face-to-face and online)? What could make blended learning the “worst of both worlds?”
  3. As you consider designing a blended learning course, what course components are you open to implementing differently than you have in the past? How will you decide which components will occur online and which will take place face-to-face? How will you manage the relationship between these two modalities?
  4. How often will you meet with students face-to-face? How many hours per week will students be engaged online, and how many hours per week will students meet face-to-face? Is the amount of student time commitment consistent with the total time commitment of comparable courses taught in other modalities (e.g., face-to-face)?

I’m sure, if I engage with this class, that I’ll start to think about this more deeply, but coincidentally I gave a workshop about classroom flipping yesterday, so I have some thoughts.

  1. I think it’s something else entirely.  I very much like Eric Mazur’s comment that our first question to ourselves should be about how  we teach, rather than just what we teach.  I don’t think that trying to bolt on “enhancements” to existing courses is the way forward, I think one needs to sit down with a blank sheet and think about what the desired outcomes are before starting to add content.
  2. I think blended learning could be the best of both worlds if it manages to meet the needs of all groups of users, the worst of all possible worlds when it is badly thought out and different groups (say F2F and distance learners) end up being isolated from each other.  One unusual experience I had of this was when I taught for U Aberdeen.  Normally the tutor would be in a class with most of the tutees, and a few isolated students would join in via VOIP.  Because I lived in Glasgow, I also taught via VOIP.  This led to most of those in the classroom feeling left out as we could not hear them over the phone. Hmmm!
  3. We’re looking at our online and distance provision here at the moment.  I expect to be involved in some way, and I definitely have opinions!
  4. I have no idea/it will depend.

As I was about to publish this I got distracted by social media and saw that Maha has already blogged about this.  More from me later, and no doubt I will also be tweeting with the hashtag

 

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Lecture notes

Posted on 23rd April 2014 by NomadWarMachine

I gave a workshop today about Flipping Classrooms which I’ll blog about on my other blog.  At one point I paraphrased Eric Mazur saying something like this:

College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

Well, if you follow that link above you’ll see it’s sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, but it’s probably not by him.  I like it anyway 🙂

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Moocaholic

Posted on 4th April 2014 by NomadWarMachine

My name is Sarah and I am a MOOCaholic

Only joking, well sort of.

This post has been brewing for a while and it’s been sparked off again by some discussions in our #rhizo14 Facebook group.  I posted a link to one of Martin Weller’s blog posts and the comment that one of his graphs:

shows that if you get to 12+ weeks it’s probably just some bloke in a shack in Arkansas left

This amused me greatly, as we’re just going in to week 12 of this crazy roller coaster experience, and we’re still carrying on.  Anyway, it’s got a few of us thinking about why we sign up for MOOCs and why we drop out from some and there’ll probably be some messy* writing about it at some point.

So – why do I sign up for MOOCs?  Well, initially it was to find out about them and see how they were going to affect HE, and also to sneak a peek at the various platforms that were being used.  I’d sign up, sniff around and probably not interact at all.  And then suddenly, bang!  I got hooked.  I know who to blame.  It’s that Dave and the gang.  I’m loving being part of such an exuberant community, never knowing what we’ll be talking about next but knowing it will engage me.

So that’s why I do MOOCs. I do them because I love finding out new things and meeting new people, and MOOCS are a great way of doing that.  It’s more about the Twitter hashtags and Facebook/G+ conversations for me than the courses themselves, but I’ve finished one other MOOC (FutureEd) since starting #rhizo14 so it is the content as well, to some extent.

Talk to you soon. 🙂

* “messy” is not a derogatory term in #rhizo14

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On Creativity

Posted on 29th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

This week in #rhizo14 we’re meant to be thinking about creativity.  Some people are running with this and going and doing lots of lovely creative things, like this image on this, others are engaging with #ds106. I’ve been really busy catching up after a week off work, so I’ve limited myself to posting a few links to the Facebook group such as this one (love number 9) and this by Poincare.

I’d started thinking about creativity a few months ago, and gave a talk to our Research and Scholarship group called Collaboration in the Arts and Humanities:
[slideshare id=32889269&doc=collaborationintheartsandhumanities-140329132012-phpapp01]

In case you can’t be bothered to read it all, or it doesn’t make sense without the words I spoke, I talked about originality, creativity and plagiarism and suggested that there was a tension between the need to assess arts and humanities students and award them individual marks for assignments; and the fact that (imo) many of our social and academic practices are inherently collaborative – as Ken Bruffee writes:

pueblo

I’m sure that Deleuze somewhere makes a similar point, but I have no idea where it might be … anyway, you get the point, I hope.   Originality and creativity are not particularly easy to assess in a formal academic environment.

A related point to what I am trying to say is that we are not cartesian ghosts in machines, we are what Heidegger calls Dasein (this is a brilliant wee video, btw, and I highly recommend it):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZznldvBP-G8&w=560&h=315]

We are beings in the world – we are thrown into our embodied existence and we are naturally social beings (and I really should be hyphenating all of this).

This is all fairly rough and messy, and I have no idea how I will ever write it up into something that will satisfy formal academic standards, but I am starting to make connections between philosophers who have inspired me, at least.

Sapere Aude, as they say 😉

Posted in #rhizo14, Academia, D&G, Philosophy, Wedding, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

On Lurking

Posted on 19th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

juve lurkThis week we’re talking about lurking: what it is and what we think about it. I’ve been doing a fair bit of lurking myself, as I’m recovering from a wee exploratory op at the weekend and finding that I’m too sore to sit at my desk and type, so I’ve been spending more time than usual passively watching conversations and not always participating.

There’s been  a lot of conversation in our Facebook group this week about what lurking is, and an undercurrent of feeling (I think) about whether this is an appropriate word to use.  This is something I wonder about from time to time, without really coming to any conclusions about what I think. In her book E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online Gilly Salmon writes about “browsers, lurkers or vicarious learners” (p.42), and (a couple of pages before this) suggests that “browsing” might be a better word.  It might.  However, what “browser” misses, for me, is the sense that lurkers are hovering, waiting, watching – they are actively involved in some sense.

There’s a lot of discussion about whether lurking is socially acceptable.  Maybe this stems from thinking about behaviour in face to face learning, and maybe that’s a mistake.  If I daydream in class and rely on my classmates to help me to a good result, that does seem like cheating, but lurking happens outwith the context of formal education with high stakes assessment.  If you lurk on the side of rhizo14 then that is your right – our discussions are happening in open (ish) forums and I know before I type that my words may be read by many who will remain invisible.  That is my choice, and it is one I can make freely.

As some of us have said, to an extent we are all lurkers, anyway.  Sometimes we have other priorities, and are too busy to post; sometimes others know more than we do, and we sit and watch the conversation; sometimes we are too shy, or do not have the words to join in.  I usually begin by lurking in any new forum to get a sense of the tone before I begin to post, and I suspect many others are like me in this.

One thing I have not addressed.  Scott asked why we needed lurkers.  I don’t know how to begin to address that question.

The picture is of our cat, Juve.  Last year I spent a few days in bed.  Juve lurked.

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Demob happy

Posted on 13th March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

So it’s week 9 of #rhizo14, but I have still not got around to saying anything about week 8 so here goes.  The topic, set by Simon, was Demobbing Soldiers.  Of course, being demobbed was meant to be a happy experience, but it can also be an unsettling one – how do we help our learners to continue to learn once we have left the room?  How do we ourselves keep up the momentum to continue our rhizomatic journey?  Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be a problem any more.  I’m still talking to the funniest, most talented, full of beans folk that I’ve ever met and I feel like Alice in Through the Looking Glass:

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!

Allons-y 😉

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The Lunatics are taking over the Asylum

Posted on 1st March 2014 by NomadWarMachine

Week 6 came to an end.  The roller coaster that was #rhizo14 had ended.  We sat, twiddling our thumbs, not quite knowing what to do.  Some got their coats and drifted away, others of us sat warming our hands over the embers of the fire, unwilling and unable to put the fire out completely.

Simon started it:

Dave chipped in:

So off we went.  I threw up a couple of lines of text and a couple of links and we continued tweeting, posting in the Facebook groups, business as usual.  Well, not quite as usual – some voices that I had become accustomed to are silent now, some new ones have piped up, but the rhizome is still alive.  Very much alive, as Sandra noticed in her latest blog post.  So, as she says:

If that leaves you a bit breathless and hungry – join the #rhizo14 FB Group – you will be welcome. Spread the rhizome. Be the fungus!

We promise it will be a lot of fun:

Kevin is writing a hip hop song, Simon is blogging beautiful words, we’re collating thoughts for an autoethnography. As Scott said: One seal short of a circus, we carry on! Allons y 🙂

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Planned Obsolescence

Posted on 20th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

There is a  saying, supposedly Buddhist, that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.  This week in #rhizo14 we are looking at the opposite to this  – how should the teacher disappear – how do we empower our learners to begin to think for themselves?  It’s something that I try to do in my tutorials by using the Jigsaw Technique and a neo-Vygotskian approach to learning which means that I begin the year with fairly structured activities for small group work and, as the semester progresses, I gradually provide less and less support.  My proudest moment was when a group told me that they didn’t need me to hang around at the end of a class, they could carry on without me.  And then they did.

A metaphor I often use when I am teaching, especially when I am working with adult learners, is that of a ladder.  I like to think that I started somewhere near the bottom and that, in some way, I have climbed up some way.  Maybe it’s not very rhizomatic, but I find it helps to explain to some folk the thought that “experts” are not more intelligent than “novices”, they have just had longer to learn and become familiar with subject matter.

And, or course, it allows me to quote one of my favourite parts of one of my favourite thinkers:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.  Wittgenstein. Tractatus Section 6.54

Need I say more?

Posted in #rhizo14, Academia, Learning, Wittgenstein | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Transitory communities

Posted on 14th February 2014 by NomadWarMachine

London Underground being used as an Air Raid Shelter Image by US Govt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

London Underground being used as an Air Raid Shelter Image by US Govt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday I blogged about my journey back through the North West of England during the storm that hit the country the Wednesday.  Then last night I took part in the unhangout for week 5 of #rhizo14, and began by saying that I had not had a lot of time to think about this week’s topic Community as Curriculum because of having been away unexpectedly. But I had been thinking about communities and networks, at least I had read Bonnie Stewart’s piece about networks and I’d been thinking about what makes a network and what makes a community, without really coming to any conclusions.

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/390029_' City_of_Stoke-on-Trent'_at_Birmingham_New_Street.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/390029_’
City_of_Stoke-on-Trent’_at_Birmingham_New_Street.JPG

So Wednesday was awful – stuck on train not knowing how long we’d be there or how we’d get home.  I was tired, having woken up at 4.15 am to catch my train, and I was worried about getting stuck overnight without a change of clothes, or being stranded on a station platform overnight, and other passengers had similar worries. But here’s something. Usually on a train I will sit silently, head in a book, and the other passengers will do likewise.  This time within minutes we were all chattering with each other.  As I realised during the unhangout last night, having a common factor – all being stuck on the same train – made us bond very quickly and form a community.  I don’t know any of their names, and I will probably never see any of them again, but I felt incredibly relaxed and at home with all of them.  We weren’t a network, I don’t think we were a group, but as Dave said last night, if we weren’t  a community he didn’t know what we were.  It reminded me of the community spirit during the Blitz, folk pulling together and cheering each other up: packing up our worries in our old kit bags, so to speak.

LagerfeuerSo what lessons can we learn from this?  Well, in order to form a community there needs to be a common bond: a shared goal, or maybe a shared value.  In our case it was being stuck together on a train, in a classroom it might be thinking the teacher is a big meanie, or all having to pass a test, or work collaboratively on a project.  Communities can be transitory: they can form quickly and disband just as swiftly.  But before the community can be the curriculum, the community needs to be a community.  Dave’s enabled this very well in #rhizo14, imo – as he said, he’s lit the the fire and we have all gathered around it, drifting off to chat in groups in Facebook, Twitter, G+ – whichever suits us best.  How do we enable this in our classrooms?

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