Yes, I am still here!

I apologize for not writing more. I have been beyond busy during the past 15 weeks writing up research findings for my study. My goal is to hand in the first draft of my dissertation to my advisor next week. The study identifies specific advantages and limitations within which teachers' learning might be supported online, so needless to say, I am anxious to share the results with an edublogging audience.

Once I've received the green light from my advising team, I will begin to post chapters in pdf form here in Eduspaces. I am also considering creating a wiki to house the final product to make the content more accessible to the public and open to social judgment and adjudication. There are scholars all over working on projects that could benefit more than their peers if they opened up their work to a larger audience using the freely available social media tools. I understand how funding for research and scholarship works and that you cannot always have your cake and eat it too. So in the spirit of seeking balance, I will do what I can to always make my scholarly efforts public.

 I have also been quite busy developing content for a course I am teaching this fall titled Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum. I have two sections of 16 and 22 undergraduate education minors finishing up their careers in college. Some are truly gung-ho and interested in teaching and learning. Others less so, but are willing to play along in the name of learning something new about themselves. I was hoping to share more of what is going on in these classes in this space, but with course preparation and the dissertation, my attention is needed in the latter.

In the meantime, I have not completely fallen off the map. The wonderful bits of minutiae that I find in my travels I have been posting to my Tumblr blogs.  So in the spirit of Friday, I give you a literal translation of A-ha's famous pop fodder Take On Me. Cheers!

Taken from the HTML 5 spec <video> and <audio> are now documented and have landed in Firefox 3.1 (currently available for developers and testers in the nightly builds). These will play Xiph's Ogg Vorbis and Theora media which are both open and royalty free.

Now web authors can include media without requiring users have plugins or proprietary players.

The culture of teaching and learning is a rich topic to explore. Not only are there the stereotypical differences between learning by memorising and learning by doing but there are also differences across generations and this is particularly noticeable when you work in adult education. In this case your participants have clear expectations about what is going to happen in the classroom based on their prior experience. For these people it can be just as big a culture shock to come into the participative and experiential classroom as visiting another country.

Teaching Culture was the name of a project I participated in a couple of years ago when we developed an international training course to encourage teachers in adult education to include more cultural awareness and cultural competency aspects in their courses. The coordinating partner for that project was the German Volkshochschule Rhein-Sieg and I was delighted to be invited to take part in their workshop day on September 7th which was just after the VITAE project meeting ended nearby in Remagen.

Knowing how keen VHS in general and VHS Rhein-Sieg in particular are on training I was surprised to discover that the idea of a teacher workshop/conference day was new. In fact it was the closing event of the Teaching Culture project 2 years ago which had given them the idea. In addition to the workshop I gave with Laurent Borgmann about using digital tools in learning there was a wide variety of topics explored that day including Suggestopedia, learning styles and using songs in French teaching.

Inevitably Laurent and I could not let this opportunity go and we were both armed with our recorders. The first results of our conversations are the topic of the latest Absolutely Intercultural show in which we find out about the generation differences in attitudes to learning, the gender bias in adult education and the need to include fun in learning. In the case of the workshop day this included a wonderfully multi-cultural lunch and to round off the day a musical performance by Mauricio Virgens from Brazil and Andres Villamil from Colombia who played for us and 'bossanovarised' our lives a little. Included in the podcast are extracts of the music we heard and an explanation of how Mauricio sees himself as a cultural ambassador for his country through his music and acerbic observations about life in Germany as a Brazilian.

http://biltongrangefrench.blogspot.com/2008/09/bonjour-les-amis.html

http://bgjuniors.blogspot.com/2008/10/music-timetable-for-week-beginn

I am way behind with many of my readings for Manitoba but  I am reading an article by Gordon Wells called “Dialogic Inquiry in Education: Building on the Work of Vygotsky”. 

His statement, referring to Vygotsky 1978 chapter 8, that curriculum needs to be reconceptualized in terms of “a negotiated selection of activities that challenge students to go beyond themselves towards goals that have personal significance for them.” This seems to articulate so much of what my vision is in the classroom.

 Wells argues that the curriculum should be arranged around what he calls real questions – those that “correspond to or awaken a wondering on the part of the student”. Here I am reminded of students who were reading and discussing Thomas L.Friedman's 'The World is Flat' in their JH sessions with me. They said that a key component of their discussion was the personal implications of the changing nature of work. Will they get a job, will the job be temporary, how will they acquire 'expertise'. (comment on connectivism) It is not surprising in the context of changing global economics. Given whats happening to the worlds banking system, perhaps a few more people (myself included) should be a little more concerned and think through the implications of radical change towards my economic well being. The adoption of an ill-defined question for group discussion (elaborate on EBL/IBL)

Another question for me is Wells’ insistence that “the goal of inquiry is making not learning”, and thus the construction of an artifact is necessary. The artifact can be a material object, an explanatory demonstration  or a theoretical formulation. The problem with discussion on its own is that it leaves no record of what has been jointly constructed from the perspective of meaning. 

In another section he writes about inquiry not being a method rather it is an “approach” in which “tentative answers are taken seriously” and the teacher should be involved as a co-inquirer. As well, the importance of dialogue in coming to understanding is stressed. Wells writes on what he calls “progressive discourse… the process by which the sharing, questioning and revising of opinions leads to a new understanding that everyone involved agrees is superior to their own previous understanding,” and it would seem that recording a discussion would be important to show this happening.

If we see knowledge as being (re)created in the school setting, which is the group of students pursuing their common goal of developing as a professional teacher through evidencing the 33 standards. What would the students say it is? 

 Wells discusses writing as a tool for thinking: the old quote, “how do I know what I think till I see what I say,” quoted  from Forster in 'Aspects of the Novel'. Wells sees that “few students seem to have discovered that writing can function as a ‘thinking device’. Wells sees this as “knowledge transformation” where the writer tries to anticipate the likely response of the envisaged audience (teachers and others interested in education - presumably) and “carries on a dialogue with the text being composed.” Can the English PGCE students be convinced by this argument (and Jenny Moon's work) to experiment with Ning and the reflection rubric?

http://drnblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/ftse-on-iphone.html

Hello.

I'm currently the administrator of an e-learning community available at http://eduspaces.net/cnocml08g1

Once logged in and when I click over the community link, I keep getting the same error and so do the other community users:

Array
(
    [20452] => Array
        (
            [owner] => 20452
        )

)

Array
(
    [20452] => Array
        (
            [owner] => 20452"
        )"

We would like to use this community as means of suceeding to achieve oficial school certification for our students. As you can see it would be of vital importante to solve this issue, could you assist us?

Thanks in advance,

Helder Touças

http://bgjuniors.blogspot.com/2008/10/nights-are-drawing-in.html

The nights are drawing in!, originally uploaded by rogbi200.

7.30pm outside the Junior area, and lights still show the school is full of life. Mrs Sakkalli seems to have her green Christmas fairy lights on already and a crescent moon adds a white glow to proceedings.