I contacted someone in Student Services, who was speedily and enthusiastically helpful. She said: ‘I hope the research goes well. In my other role…on the Student Support Review we would be likely to be interested in the outcome of your work.’ Must remember to contact her when I have some results.
My supervisors asked me to note in my blog / journal that I should consider my interview questions carefully as I am carrying out my interviews, and I should remember that I can change the questions to elicit the best possible data.
I deleted some graphically uninteresting presentation pics from my Flickr account last night. I’d blogged them here, and now I see that they are gone. I’d vaguely assumed that they were exported into the blog, but now I see that the blog was picking them up from Flickr. Anyway, that’s why (if anyone’s interested) there are now holes in my blog.
I just logged in to FirstClass to see what was going on and in the vague hope that I would have received a message from my unhelpful gatekeeper. No such luck. However, logging on reminded me that while the gatekeeper claimed to have had no time in the past three months to OK a couple of letters I had written, they had found time to exclude me from a whole series of relevant FirstClass conferences.
It’s bad enough to have a gatekeeper who is wasting hours of my time, disrupting my research and stressing me out. That’s their prerogative. They’re not paid to help me. But being deliberately obstructive? hat sort of educator does that? My opinion of this gatekeeper has fallen very, very low.
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.
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?
‘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.
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!
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.
Shifts in the power structure of the conference. Who are the members expecting to have power? When do they take power? When do they have power passed to them? When is power forced upon them? How does this happen? Why does it happen?
First try at using the blog in place of Powerpoint.
Again, this was inspired by reading blogs condemning the widespread use of Powerpoint.
