Collaborative Learning
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From little things, big things grow
Image by James Kirsop via Flickr I can’t get the lyrics or the tune of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly‘s sweet and moving song out of my head. Why? Dr Kev Carmody, Australian singer-songwriter, raconteur and Aboriginal Australian activist was inducted as a Doctor of the University Honoris Causa at yesterday’s graduation ceremony for the
Continue reading ...Day 2: Comment08
Photo: Thanks Doug Miller And so to day 2 and visiting a previously-unvisited blog. Easy this one and a nice outcome. Several of my commenters are new to me, so it was a pleasure to visit all of their blogs and to leave a couple of comments and they commented back and hey ho, off
Continue reading ...Comment Self Audit:Comment08
Day 1 of the 31 Day Blog Comment Challenge is over in Australia from where I’m writing. I’ve picked up on the overnight posts which include the task for Day 1: A Comment Self-Audit. So … here we go Do I comment daily? Well … yes and no. I try to make it habitual to
Continue reading ...Day 1: Comment08
Interesting that this little video continues to get referenced. A year on and we’re still not all that ‘easy’ with video commenting. It seems that words rule whether they’re delimited by 140 characters (Twitter-ish) or given full rein in a blog post. Lots of reasons for this of course – the single most-cited is that
Continue reading ...Another 31-Day Challenge!
Image: Thanks Stephen Downes Last August, and along with a smallish but hardy group of bloggers, I took the 31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge, led by the energetic and insightful Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project. As I’ve written elsewhere, this was a seminal event in my development as a blogger. (Use the
Continue reading ...The State of e-learning in Early 08
Image from WikipediaOne of my favourite sites is The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies which contains a link to Jane Hart’s blog. Jane keeps a finger on the pulse of e-learning and she’s doing some great longitudinal research into who is using what tools and where. I’ve been signed up via her blog this
Continue reading ...PD, Twitter and Me
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 ...Organisational Change and the Power of Collegiality
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 ...Digital natives and the class blogging blues
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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Cinco de Mayo or Day 5 of the Comment Challenge
Now Cinco de Mayo is huge elsewhere, but it kind of passes us by down here in Australia, a bit the way Australia Day would in Mexico. There you go! However what does unite us globally on a daily … seemingly hourly basis what with television, Twitter, Facebook et al … are words and images,
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