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the secrets of successful tools

Issues in education, This working life Comments Off

Jan 282013

I’ve been downloading a lot of apps the last couple of years – I’m sure you have too. About half of the sit there, unused, for a year or so, then I realise they’re a waste of memory and they get trashed. But the other half become a part of my life. Why?

I only download things I think I’ll use, but I’m busy – so the first thing they need is to answer a clear and present need. Yeah, there are a few apps that I’ve never even opened once. Intellectually it sounded like it would make me more efficient, or more creative, but the need was never urgent enough. Or there was an alternative that was more familiar, easier – regardless of whether the unopened app would meet my needs better.

That’s the first cut.

Second cut: I try the app, but one of two things happen: Either it’s not flexible or powerful enough, or the interface and user design features are too disorganised and unintuitive. If I’m really sure I need it, I might persevere through the second reason – it’s amazing what you can get used to if you have a strong enough need – but the first reason is a real killer.

Third cut: the life-change. The ones that I begin to use constantly are the ones that change my life. Wow. Usually this is not just greater efficiency. I’m doing something different, something new. That’s when the app has captured my attention and I’m excited. I choose to use it above other things.

My daughter, who is 2, love apps too – but I think her reasons are a bit different. Maybe because she’s got such a different relationship with time, she’s happy to click things and swipe things with no real sense of purpose. She’ll quit the game half way through, just when, from my perspective, she’s getting to the good part. In a sense, it’s not the app that excites her, it’s the zen of interactivity. Her favourites, however, tend to be the stories and the nursery rhymes for which she is the master of the interface. At the moment, the more creative ones are a bit beyond her independent play abilities, so she quits them quickly.

[quote by Ivan Illich]

Do we infantilise our undergrads?

Issues in education Comments Off

Jan 192013

A lot of new e-learning etcetera developments are discussed online and many of them sound great. But I don’t see many people wondering about what will happen to universities if they really do become widely embraced.

Universities will have to dismantle a lot of the structural and bureaucratic traditions to really embrace the learning revolution. Individual teachers are often confronted by all sorts of impediments from centralised bodies. While some of these road-blocks really do concern equity, many are derived from tradition and conservative thinking.

Until recently, online learning has not been particularly customisable to individual needs, and when it has been, the educator has had to put in a lot of work learning and establishing systems. The web is increasingly allowing individuals (teachers and students) to set up customisable environments to manage and pace learning and teaching without being expert programmers.

Flexibility, yes – but most universities operate with a very narrow concept of what that means. Why should we force students into a 4-month course / 2 semester per year turnaround? This model suits bureaucracies, not students. We need to be able to give our students learning environments that allow them to manage the pace of their learning (within reason, of course). Group work will be catered for by putting the onus on students to find group members who want to meet a collectively agreed-upon deadline. Teacher workload needs to be managed via peer learning, flipped lectures, and consultation times where the relationship is more like supervision than teaching.

This will force students to become proactive, independent learners actively seeking out their peer learning circle, probably partly via social media and managing their progress and deadlines much more than we currently allow. I think our institutional bureaucracies infantilise undergraduates, and they respond accordingly. This model does not renounce face-to-face classroom time, but treats it as an option rather than a necessity.

Students, of course, often expect to be spoon-fed. They don’t necessarily like it when you suggest they have to find their own answers, or set up their own learning timetable. They might think the teacher is just being lazy. But getting them over this hump is a significant outcome. And it should be possible to prove we are not lazy with the effort and care we take in other ways. It’s all about personalised learning environments and strategies, and that will never be lazy.

interactive documentary about international students

Non-Fiction Project, This working life, tv, web Comments Off

Dec 142012

A convenient education, directed by the first-time filmmakers David Elliot-Jones, Louis Dai and Lachlan McLeod, is about international students, particularly from India, in Australia. The story told is a devastating one of exploitation from Australian businesses, dishonesty from international education providers and their agents, racism and neglect.

This documentary illustrates one of the more elegant ways to integrate user-generated content into the actual linear moving image documentary. A bar at the bottom displays comments, which are attached to a specific moment in the timeline. Rolling over icons, then clicking on summaries, expands the comments. Users can add their own comments too. yes, it’s rather limited in its scope, and it doesn’t allow for synchronous exchange, but it works. Using HTML5 makes it more flexible for different screens, too.

[Still from A convenient education, screened by SBS More information]

teaching by stealth

Issues in education Comments Off

Nov 232012

I delivered last semester’s course in a new way, combining gamified assessment, flipped lectures, and storytelling. Yes, I made the course content into a story. Above is 1 episode.

Why?

According to Peter Guber and Jonathan Gottschall

After a decade of gory stalemate at Troy, the ancient Greeks decided they would never take Troy by force, so they would take it by guile. They pretended to sail home, leaving behind a massive wooden horse, ostensibly as an offering to the gods. The happy Trojans dragged the gift inside the city walls. But the horse was full of Greek warriors, who emerged in the night to kill, burn, and rape.

Guber tells us that stories can also function as Trojan Horses. The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

via Why Storytelling Is The Ultimate Weapon.

I’m repurposing marketing talk to education – and it appeared to work. i’ve never had such a lively discussion about copyright and the internet in a class before, and it was stated by the students – after they read my stroy eps in which our heroes get into trouble for breaking copyright from the Ministry of Blogging.

My media isn’t perfect – or ever, in a lot of cases, finished – but that didn’t appear to matter. Although a lot of the narrative was just text, the students engaged with it.

I don’t usually stick marketing in my blog, but here’s a really cute marketing vid for Tell to Win by Peter Guber

edu-confucius-ing-ism

Issues in education 1 Response »

Sep 262011

Via: Online Colleges Guide
A wonderfully detailed infographic from OnlineColleges.net on the educational aspects of (the anachronistically named) video games, aimed at primary school level.

According to the OECD’s Education at a Glance (2011), Australia is somewhat under-average in its funding of education, and funding has been more or less stagnant during the past decade:

Heaps more data available from the report.

Adrian Miles has been reconsidering his own teaching principles in Creative computing, network literacy, seeing how they stack up over the course of time (stagnant funding or no). He’s pretty pleased with his little internal review. They are phrased in a rather hermeneutic style, for example:

Creative computing is being creative with a computer/network, not being creative on a computer/network.

Um, om.

However, there’s nothing much to disagree with here….

Adrian is such a passionate creature, when education comes unstuck, he likes to let off steam. In these cost-cutting times, when we are asked to locate things like ‘the value point for education today’ (George Seimens), he replies:

The scarcity model is gone, but it is still about quality and the quality is in enabling for students a shift in their understanding. Of themselves as thinker practitioners (or practitioner thinkers), of their discipline, of their relation to all this stuff out there, of their role in a knowledge economy where knowing how counts for more than knowing what.

Where does the onus lie? The responsibility? Educational beauraucracies have got thier knickers surely twisted trying to answer this question, with their performance indicators and multichoice survey assessments. Often, changes afoot in students take years to percolate through; they are attitudinal way before they are performative, they are as visible as the wind … until, one day, the clouds blow in and you get the storm.

…increasingly I understand that the difference I have made that made a difference was never been about content, about teaching *more*, but in providing, mentoring, modelling a variety of things that are more abstract, and teaching myself how to help students to find and learn these things themselves. What Schön would characterise as some sort of reflective practice, the sort of ‘back talk’ that you do and need to learn to find and listen to to be a good theorist, maker, learner. So the qualitative change is not in them coming to learn more, that’s a collateral outcome that’s going to happen anyway. It is a qualitative change in their own understanding about something that will matter. Or, as I mention above, learning how to become.

Vicki A. Davis writes so well about the aha moment with her students; its about empowerment more than anything else:

Students want to have their own place on the Net. A place that is theirs. Every time I bring these digital natives into a place where they can create a full-blown page of their own making I’m overwhelmed by their desire to own and create things. They don’t just want networks of friends – certain kids like that and others don’t really get into it. They want to create.

From empowerment and reflection upon that experience hopefully comes the sorts of developmental outcomes Adrian writes about. Hopefully I can do that in the course I’m taking over, Network Media. From Google+, LinkedIn, blogging and Twitter to a sense of your place in the world, and the possibilities for expression that lie therein.

That said, I’m not sure, from this brief description from
Caroline Baillie from the University of Western Australia, whether these aha moments need to be encased in new terminology. How far “threshold concepts” will progress this problem, except, perhaps to appease beaucrats and their need for measurable outcomes? This model may be inoffensive in progressive teaching circles, but I suspect we need a coming together of minds more than new ways of expressing how we teach?

Hey, I might be wrong, haven’t read the book. [But what's a blog for...?]

Teaching is hard enough without educational administrators and politicians wielding outdated educational philosophies getting in the way. Confucious say, make it beauraucratic.

You can tick it off your list, guys.