OK – biting the bullet. I CAN read through my conference notes. I DO want to blog about this – especially the first presentation, which was so relevant to my work. Taking a stance: promoting deliberate action through online postgraduate professional development Peter Kelly, K Gale, S Wheeler and V Tucker, University of Plymouth See […]
I’ve been off for a week with flu, and I’m really up against the deadlines. So, what do I spend an hour or so doing? Shifting furniture around the office with Gill and Anesa. We’ve now got a very airy office with a large ‘junk’ corner. And my conference paper is still nowhere.
John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html ‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function […]
My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up. Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU […]
Interviewing Gill via email reminded me, indirectly, that I ought to blog about the DZX222 tutor day at the beginning of the month. Some of the points raised included: the virtual sumer school is not a break from everyday life for students like a residential school. Students may feel isolated and vulnerable to both doubt […]
Martin LeVoi referred to ‘critical mass’ – the size that an online group needs to be in order to be effective. Thought I’d go and check this out. ‘Critical mass’ doesn’t appear to be a technical term in regular use in the literature, but there is some discussion of group size. Glass and Smith looked at […]
At the DZX222 weekend, Martin LeVoi gave a very interesting talk on how the virtual res school had originated (1994: 12 students, 14 staff, all the students had to have computers and mobile phones shipped to them). Now that it’s been running annually since 2002 and is attracting 700 students in one year, Martin […]
You can see them in action at http://www.palindrome.de/ We had two performances by this group, who use motion tracking software and a host of other gadgetry to foreground the ways in which human conversation involves a host of other things beside words. Eye motions, body position, movement, they’re all involved. So sound and dance and […]
* Which are the main subject positions to be found within a learning community which comes together in an aynchronous online environment? * How are these subject positions introduced or created? * Which of these subject positions work to support learning, and which discourage learning? * How can the asynchronous environment be designed in order […]
Ingvill says that ‘in studying an educational activity such as project work, it is essential to take into acoount that participants have existing and established relationships.’ That’s obviously true of her work in the classroom, but I wonder to what extent it would relate to an asynchronous conference? There may be pre-existing relationships from other […]