photo credit: Leo Reynolds
I’m on holiday, so I’ve been playing with Animoto again today. I produced a short animated postcard on life around my place, here on a ridge in southern Queensland. It’s called Yarrawonga, which in the language of the indigenous people means ‘place of trees.’ I took the shots from the Project 366 set I’ve created on Flickr.
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Well it had to happen sometime. I was alerted yesterday morning on my Dashboard that someone had provided a bit of link love to one of my posts from September last year. The link cited a small vodcast I had produced. At this time I was working on the Blogger platform; since then I have gone across to Wordpress.org.
Now I thought all permalinks and post content were … well, permanent. Not so. When in a misguided sweep-up after a few months on the new platform I deleted the old blog … bang went the post’s internal links. The end result is that the link provided yesterday turns up the post, but the link from there to the media file is dead, kaput, out of service, Error 404 etc. How many more are there I wonder!
Continue reading ...You know how the old saying about mothers goes …. they’re sociologists, counsellors, tutors, managers, chauffeurs (add your own personal favourite). So it is these days that I find my role as a university lecturer diversifying in the oddest ways. Now this has probably got more to do with the nature of the discipline field … theatre, and preparing young artists for a professional role in the entertainment industry. Most of my classes are involved with training students for careers as actors. Yes, I teach and direct, but also and for nearly 10 years now as the industry has changed its face, I’ve been training them to think about themselves and their work in a business-like way. Empowering them to engage in what the economists like to call disintermediation, and which in the arts industry means extracting yourself from the middle man and the control they can have over your work (aka agents of all kinds). The jury’s out on whether or not it’s a good thing to cut the painter entirely, and let’s face it, actors wouldn’t be actors if they didn’t have an agent to blame for most things.
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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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Another year, different students, but how far have we come together with e-learning? Speaking personally, I’m older (I hope wiser) but a lot more savvy in the way I use and continue to experiment in e-learning. As the old Chinese proverb has it … it’s the journey not the arrival (or some such) through which satisfaction and true acheivement arise.
But is there a sense in the air that we’ve moved on, in however small a way along the road? Are the majority of students we work with any more savvy and less technophobic than they were 12 months ago? Are institutions making it easier for teachers to develop their own e-learning skills via professional development and/or easy to use CMS (course management systems)? Have telcos brought down the costs of web access ensuring that ubiqitous little ‘fourth screen’ can become a handheld e-learning device? Do pigs fly?
The more work you put into the preparatory phase of a journey … and barring disasters or unforseen circumstances … the smoother the ride. Right? Knowing where you’re going and how to get there is also useful. When it comes to prepping course materials for delivery to students, it’s helpful to switch thinking from what
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photo credit: Greg Melia
Next Monday is day 1 of teaching for a new academic year… or should the emphasis be on learning! Change is in the air. It’s a change in thinking, a sort of ‘can-do’ feeling that is beginning to nudge colleagues into giving this e-learning stuff a go. I’ve experienced this several times this week alone at my place. Now change at institutional level can be notoriously slow in uptake, and never more so than in academe. Tried and true ways that ‘work’ are hung on to perhaps long past their shelf freshness date, and for all sorts of good reasons. One of the prime excuses is time-poverty, and free-thinking academics are notorious for resisting the kind of change that comes from above … administrative mandates being one of the most resisted. But I digress a little.
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photo credit: WriterBarb
I wrote recently about good design and some of the aesthetic principles from the philosophy of Zen, and which inform my personal preferences. I wanted to list a couple of small tools which fit the bill in terms of ease of use and elegance. I find myself calling on them constantly for their convenience and reliability. They save time, and they just plain work. What’s more they are fine time savers with a purpose.
Continue reading ...photo credit: miheco I’ve been intrigued for many years by the philosophy of Zen and its impact upon the aesthetics of traditional Japanese art … particularly Noh theatre, a topic I teach in a history course. I also love good design. So, I’ve been a fan of Garr Reynolds’ blog Presentation Zen for some time.
Continue reading ...The past couple of weeks have been busy for most academics in
Australia. If they’re not grabbing the last of the summer before term
begins … and it’s been a miserable, wet summer for most of us …
then others are jetting home from far-flung cold climes. Most probably,
like me, they’re prepping for the first semester of the academic year.