Yearly Archives: 2006

FirstClass as a tool

Leave a reply

Reading Guy Claxton on ‘Learning to Learn’. He’s taking a cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) approach. He says that the student is:

‘learning in the context of, and with the aid of, a host of culturally constituted tools – books, symbols, computer graphics – which afford or invite certain approaches to the learning task and preclude others. The settings in which people find themselves – especiall those which they inhabit recurrently – thus channel the growth of their minds.’

Something to consider in the light of FirstClass, and of SecondLife.

Teaching roles

Leave a reply

I ought to consider teaching in the online environment. Could start by breaking this down into the different roles generally encompassed by the term ‘teacher’ in this sort of environment. Most of them can be passed on to someone else, but perhaps they all need to be done for successful learning to take place?

  • arbitrator
  • instructor
  • moderator
  • organiser of activities
  • supporter.

‘Educators are in the business of making value judgements about what kinds of minds people need.’

I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this list in future.

Emotional analysis

Leave a reply

Just been reading Guy Claxton, and that reminded me of the importance of emotion in education. Could I do an emotional analysis of the conference? Is it emotion that moves the students on, or does emotion get in the way of doing anything?

I think, when a student gets upset about the deadlines, that stimulates the rest of the group to move things on. However, it’s not a very emotional group – or they don’t express much emotion anyway, so perhaps this wouldn’t be useful.

According to my word-by-word breakdown (knew it would come in handy sometime)  positive emotions include happiness, sympathy, confidence, enjoyment and negative motions include anxiety, paranoia, frustration, fear, distress, exhaustion, dread, confusion, vulnerability and stress. Seems to be a clear bias towards the negative emotions here, especially as the happiness tends to be because they all wished each other happy Christmas!

Poor little blog

2 Replies

There’s obviously a limit to how much text I can face entering on the Intenet at one time. Since I’m musing on SecondLife over in the schome wiki at the moment, that doesn’t give me much time to look at my blog – or anyone else’s for that matter.

I’m increasingly frustrated at the moment because my mailings to students should go out today, but I STILL haven’t had the OK from the course chair, after a couple of months of asking. It’s not a problem from the point of view of archiving conferences, but if I’m going to do epistolary interviews while the course is in progress, I want to get them well underway before Christmas which means starting on them NOW.

Oh, and whenever I go to the digilab to go on SecondLife, there’s always something wrong with SecondLife or the Internet connection, and so I waste far too much time.

Source of ideas

Leave a reply

heatmaps, originally uploaded by ebbsgrove.

It’s easy to follow up comments in other people’s blogs.
This is a page from the blog of Tony Hirst, who’s a lecturer in the Technology department.
I referred to it on 15 September and again on 9 November
Also discussed it with Steve and various others