Chris Sessums tagged me with the 5 things you might not know about me meme, and, asssuming late is better than never, here's my response.

I taught ESL to adults

That was my first job after I graduated from university, teaching English as a Second Language to adult immigrants. Exam week my last year, I overheard a girl in the cafeteria line ahead of me talking about it, and asked her for the phone number. (I waited an hour before calling about the job, to be fair to her. Years later, I found out she hadn’t called till a week later.) I got the (per diem) job.My boss gave informal lessons in his office every coffee break. The classes were rarely larger than 12 or 15 students. I learned how to teach by working with extraordinarily motivated students; they had six months to learn to speak English well enough to survive here.

I found my students and their stories fascinating. I found it thrilling when they made clear progress. And I learned that I was a teacher, something I had never thought I’d be.

I coached a college intramural (male) hockey team for a season

I was a young feminist when feminism was young, and in a new job teaching in a college. I was earnest, intense, and given to speaking up in our male-dominated program. One day my boss, with a perverse sense of humour, used my feminism to manipulate me into agreeing to coach the program’s male intramural hockey team. I didn’t follow hockey, though Jim did, and I hadn’t played a team game since high school basketball, but I couldn’t fail my gender and refuse this challenge. All the players had been playing hockey since they could wobble on skates and my husband gave me a book on the rules of hockey, so I set forth, ignoring my complete incompetence.

I was surprised at how hard I found it to go into the Men’s Dressing Room to give the pre-game pep-talk, even though some of the players were my students, and were kind and rather protective. Psychological barriers are very powerful!

My most important resulting skill was how to quietly listen to what one end of the player bench was saying, go to the other end, and repeat it as an instruction. I learned how to fake it, but more importantly, I learned how to listen.

I designed the costumes for an “on-spec” sci-fi movie that never appeared

Jim worked in and then taught film, tv, and audio, so we had friends in those businesses. One was an aspiring director, and he pulled together a group of friends and contacts and asked us to work with him “on spec”; we would get paid in the future if the movie made money. We were all young, still finding our ways, and we were discovering what we could do.

The actors were amazing, as they dealt with the filming rhythm of hurry up, and wait! They had to do brief moments of acting, and then just hang around while the technicians set up for the next scene. It was an intense experience, a time of constant involvement with the same people and very little sleep. I learned a lot about people, co-operation, and film-work and found it a valuable experience, even though the film was never completed.

I was a technophobe who was initially forced to use the computer, however reluctantly

I never would have learned anything about computers if I hadn’t had to do some writing, and hated both how messy my handwriting looked and having to re-type pages. Our first computer was DOS. I could never remember how to start up the writing program. Jim had to start it up every time, and even after he posted step-by-step instructions, I still had trouble.

They introduced a computer lab into the English department and my closest colleague volunteered the two of us to work there. There was a computer technician; she turned the machines on and set up the programs. All I had to do was help the students edit their work. I learned how to use the Bank Street Writer for my own writing, and found I loved writing with a keyboard.

When the English department was disbanded and I joined some other programs, Interior Design had started teaching Computer Assisted Design, and needed someone to introduce the students to file management, so the CAD teachers wouldn’t have to spend time on that. I was asked to teach Electronic Communications, a course introducing students to writing using the computer, and basic computer use. In the political environment of the time, I didn’t feel I could say no, and, besides, I had several friends who knew computer 'stuff' who promised to help me. My first year teaching EC, I was literally hours ahead of the students. There’s nothing like teaching something to force you to learn it! By the second year, I realized that I loved this machine. The rest, as they say, is history!

I received an annual Teaching Excellence award

For some years I taught a course where the third year Interior Design students, many of whom hadn’t done any writing since high school, had to write a 100 page academic thesis. I had inherited the class from someone who had structured it well, with assignments that were actually building blocks, but it required hours of editing from me.

By this time I had discovered Robin William’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book - http://lookleap.com/peachpit.com/a1 - and was teaching the students not just how to write an academic paper, but how to make it look like a designer wrote it, using the basics of design as found in William’s wonderful book. My theory was that once we had the capacity, through the computer, to affect the page’s appearance, we had the responsibility to make it attractive to the readers’ eyes, So they learned the basics of page design and how to write an academic paper, and I learned all about aspects of Interior Design. It was great!

When our school instituted a teaching award, they set it up so that students and colleagues had the dominant influence. My office mate nominated me, and my students confirmed the nomination. For someone who stumbled into teaching and backed into computer use, it was a truly stunning honour.

So those are my identity stories, and now it's time for me to pass the meme on! (I apologize if I'm tagging anyone who has already been it!)

Tag!

• Harold Jarche
• Terry Wassall
• Stephen Downes
  

technorati tags:5Things, meme

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Time magazine's decision to spotlight the participatory Internet leaves little doubt that the issue has moved from the edges of cyberspace into the mainstream, forcing policy makers to confront their role in this exciting new world." Michael Geist, Toronto Star, 08/01/07

What I like about Michael Geist's articles is that he combines extensive knowledge, an ability to see both the forest and the trees, plus a clear, crisp writing style. And he's Canadian so I get both information on what's happening in technology here and and a sense of where the rest of the world is.

In his article in today's Toronto Star, he articulates a point of view that that hasn't been all that evident in most media responses. Even my favorite (American) news commentator, Jon Stuart, was quite biting about this choice. I felt a certain unease, because I thought Time was, in this case, absolutely correct. I believe the changing pattern of communication and the unleashing of a tidal wave of (voluntary, unpaid) creativity brought about by the Social Web, web 2.0, is changing how we humans gather information and how we think. It's the most important change in human communication since the printing press.

Technical experts and commercial interests may have set up much of what can be done on the web, but it is being powered by playful, voluntary participation - like this blog I am writing for whomever stumbles across it and chooses to scan through it, like all the shared writing, audio, video and combinations now easily available and easily created.

I highly recommend Geist's article.

technorati tags:Geist, Time_Person_of_the_Year_2006, user-created

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I've mentioned SlideShare, the YouTube for presentations, before - http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/134207.html I like to browse it sometimes and just read what I find. Dr. Steven Warburton has put up an interesting set of slides on student blogging - http://lookleap.com/slideshare.net/a1 - I recommend it, and using the full screen mode.

I found it quite interesting, a bit different from mine.

I used an Elgg Community Blog which gave my students some control over how public, or not, their post was, set topics, often based on current readings, and required they write in it for a portion of their marks. Oral Rhetoric was classroom based, but the frequent writing paired with personal icons, either their photos or a chosen image, created a kind of threading in which we could, with a quick glance, see who the writer was.

The setting of weekly questions scaffolded the students in learning how to use a blog, which many, if not most, were uncomfortable with, especially using it for an educational purpose. As I believe they will sometimes be using blogs for professional purposes in their futures, I wanted them to begin to understand that there are different genres of blogs, and different rhetorical approaches - which I've explored here,

I wrote up my opinion of blogs used as part of a learning / teaching strategy - http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog/145563.html - I believe that that blogs can be used in many ways, and that they are especially important in creating learning communities.

technorati tags:blogging, genre, SlideShare, education

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I've been musing about how I could discuss the online approach I used last term for my course in Oral Rhetoric. I rejected using a Course Management System (CMS) for a variety of reasons, including its current difficulty and the Blackboard patent b.s. Despite that, I'm not against CMSs. I used WebCT when it was still a teacher-created application and had strong institutional support, both formal and informal, where I taught. WebCT was in many ways the scaffold that allowed me to learn how to use online applications to support classroom learning. But I feel I've outgrown it.

short_pants - Retrieved from http://flickr.com/photos/braintoast/349242617/ and edited

Currently, I find the CMS bloated and complex, and it teaches the students almost nothing in terms of what they might use in the future. When I read Graham Attwell's post http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell and his mention of the "industrial model of schooling" we still have, I was inspired to download the linked pdf , which looked daunting at 55 pages, but turned out to be a slide show that could be scanned very quickly. In composing my comment I found the word "bricolage" surfacing.

If the web is a place of Small Pieces Loosely Joined then we who use the web are bricoleurs. As Wikipedia describes it "A bricoleur is a person who creates things from existing materials, is creative and resourceful: a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do."

I like being a bricoleur of the web, and I like using that approach as a teacher. For one thing, we all learn more than is being directly taught when we are in a classroom, and I think that CMSs are part of the "industrial model of schooling" and reinforce the concept of the heirarchical control of learning. CMSs are institutional, not classroom in scale. So while I acknowledge that I learned through being scaffolded by WebCT, I want to leave that womb and operate more independently, as a web-using teacher/bricoleur.

I also believe that by using a variety of web 2.0 applications that I link together, I am giving students the opportunity to use a variety of types of applications that they are more likely to use in their professional and personal futures.

Last term I used Wikispaces because it is still the easiest-to-use wiki that I have found, with its WYSIWYG editor. However, I'm watching PBWiki because it has a WYSIWG editor in beta, and I find it more visually attractive. My students, many of whom had little or no wiki experience, were able to get up-to-speed on using Wikispaces very quickly and they used it as a reference for course needs, and contributed to it by adding their assignments and course-relevant materials. It is easy to attach files and to embed videos and slideshows, and the course wiki becomes a multimedia platform.

I posted all my course materials, schedules, requirements, and information in our course Wikispace. I also added links there to Engrade, a site where teachers can set up students' grades and allow individual access to them, one of the aspects of a CMS that I found most useful.

For more about Engrade, read here.

I also linked to the Elgg Community Blog I set up for the class, and linked back to the Wikispaces course site on the Blog. I wrote about why I choose Elgg here. That was all I needed, 3 applications and the free audio editing application Audacity, found on the web, and some extras like Box, which allowed for easy transfers and storage of large (audio) files. I was a bricoleur - I took what I found on the web, linked together what we needed, and had everything a CMS could have given me.

Back to PLEs
So what does all this have to do with PLEs? Well, to a certain extent, we already have a bricolage form of PLEs on the web. Just search someone's name, to see what they've done or can do. And some people have already started setting up their portfolios, with links to the work they want seen. A wiki can work for that. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I think sites like LinkedIn have already started growing a kind of PLE.

Please, if I'm reading what a PLE is and does wrong, explain it further to me or send me the links I can learn from.

The acronym "PLE" reminds of another, "PLA", "Prior Learning Assessment". I think there's a good chance that PLEs will become associated with institutions that function as accreditators of informal learning as much as learning places. We'll still attribute the power to assess to institutions, but increasingly we'll have the choice of checking a person out by looking at how they present their knowledge and skills on the web.

technorati tags:bricoleur, bricolage, PLE, PLA, CMS, LMS

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From Boing Boing - http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/21/children_of_men_uses.html

 

Very interesting! Creative Commons is recognized as a source - web 2.0 and accurate attribution are both honoured!

One often overlooked aspect of the impact of computers is the impact on writing. I heard CBC Radio's And Sometimes Y yesterday as it explored what it called "handwriting". It made me think about what, in this age of the computer, "writing" means. I searched for answers.

from the usr at Flickr.

When I was an undergrad at university, eons ago, all my papers were handwritten. (I hated typing because I almost always made an irreversible error in the last few lines, and couldn't stand the messy look of correction fluid painted over it.) I found the look of my handwriting depressing too, with its large loopy letters, The neat and professional appearance of the printed text (or even correctly typewritten text) signaled its value; it showed a professional writer. Handwriting signaled that the content was not worthy of being properly typewritten, or even printed, the work of an amateur and/or someone who couldn't afford a typist.

Today, as came out in the radio show, penmanship is a dying concept, less of an art than calligraphy, but, like calligraphy and home-baked bread, simply a trace of a previously necessary technology. Like many (most?) I now do all my "writing" using a keyboard and word-processing software (like most of us buy bread made by machines and industries). I still use pens for writing cheques and grocery lists, but the elctronic tools available are making even those uses of pen & ink less common.

That's "writing" meaning inscribing words on paper using a pen and ink. What about "writing" "composing an extended public text for business or art purposes"? What about writing articles and books? On the page describing the radio show, linked above, The authors John Ralston Saul and Scott Richardson, a first-time novelist and graphic designer (if I remember correctly) discuss their writing processes. John Ralston Saul described his fairly traditional approach of writing, by hand, in notebooks and re-writing on the side pages, the way writers write (that is real writers, writers who get published).

Scott Richardson, on the other hand (pun alert) uses software for designing books and designs his text as part of creating it. He works in a visual and verbal mode, not simply composing the words of his text, but preparing it for the eyes of the reader. I can relate. When I was forced to use word-processing and a computer to write with, my first article was called "Two-Handed Writing" and was about how using this tool, this technology, freed me as a writer.

I loved the neat appearance, like typing but easily corrected. As the sophistication of fonts grew, I discovered that I could make my work look formal and professional, could signal through its appearance that I was writing something worthy to be read. (No psychologizing here please;-> ) Like Richardson, I designed my work as I composed the words, finding the visual a help to my textual thinking, however using word-processing not design software.

I find the same need when I write for the web. I like WYSIWYG editing for two reasons, my techical knowledge is limited, and I like to see what it looks like as I compose it. Which brings me to what is, perhaps, the central point: more people are writing for public audiences now than ever before in history. As millions of us blog and create wikis, we have shifted from a system of elite writers being the only ones in print, to anyone who can use a WYSIWYG editor and the basics of web use, being 'published' on the read/write web. Writing is now a matter of using a computer and the web. And that has changed the meaning of writing fundamentally and phenomenologically.

technorati tags:writing, composing, blogging

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