I stopped by a PD session for educators online this morning. It was run via ustream.tv on the wiki site Open pd and was not without its glitches (sound drop outs etc but this is almost mandatory in sessions like this). This truly open, global professional development session demonstrated a very useful way for individuals’
Continue reading ...I often use improvisation with my students in acting classes. It is never entirely ‘free-form’ as is often thought. Improvisation bears fruit when allowed free rein within a ‘cage’ of understood rules … what we tend to call in acting the given circumstances or GCs … the who, where, when and what of a scenario.
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There’s been something of a theme running through the last half dozen or so posts here. I guess it’s a function of the time in the new academic year … beginnings and the raising of issues that are challenging us all. I was at another faculty meeting last week where e-learning was discussed. You could feel spines stiffen a bit as the topic went round the table. The conversation went something like this: ‘People won’t (make an effort/change their way of doing things/appear to be even slightly interested in innovation or … add your own phrase here) unless they are made to.’ Now the ‘people’ being referred to are academics. I’m moved to ask what happened to the spirit of intellectual inquiry and the desire to develop one’s scholarly practice? Well that’s another matter, but for now there’s a management imperative that has to be addressed by individuals in the faculty collective, and fast.
Continue reading ...Those of us who spend our lives working in theatre are used to the disappointments that come all too often it can seem. One production somewhere is OK, or doesn’t work … quite, despite the best efforts of all concerned; we forgive and perhaps forget. Another somewhere else can be plain awful … and at
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It’s been quite a week and a bit getting a new class of students signed up and into blogging on a group project. I’ve written before on the apparent e-learning challenges to students, and on some of the roadblocks I’ve encountered with their digiphobia. This time round, very few found the process of signing up with edublogs … the platform I’d chosen for the class blog … to be a trial. It seemed that following the instructions and getting themselves signed in with user names was just too complicated to bother persisting. Keep the approach simple, but no simpler (thanks Einstein).
However, I’m wondering after the past 10 days whether, rather than the unfamiliar navigation in a new environment being the stumbling block, that it’s not the actual process of reading online that is the real problem.
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