Ross's Blog

Hi All

Here’s the link to  my posts:

<http://rosskendall.edublogs.org/>

Wk 1: My introduction. Because I’ve used WordPress a few times, I thought I’d try something new and used Edublog for my website. I added the URl to Pedagogy First, bought Ko and Rossen, read Chapter 1, got Diigo (love it!)  joined mccpot and made a few comments on others’ blogs. Delighted to see other NZers.

Wk 2: Set up Google Reader, viewed Alec Couros’s video and offered some disturbed thoughts about it. What I think we’re undergoing in our time is a transition from patriarchy through a plethora of associations (consensual arrangements, bands of ‘brothers’, single women alone, etc.) towards … matriarchy? (qv Freud’s Moses and Monotheism). Hadn’t realised all that Google has to offer. I like Google+ and also Google’s mobile apps for grading and attendance.

Wk 3: In a podcast module,  I think  I incorporated Chickering and Ehrmann’s 7 Principles (at least 1,2,3, 5,6 7):

.  Prepare a presentation of a student-produced podcast Demonstrate the ability to rehearse and communicate effectively, and to present clear, organised and engaging discussion, including the opinions of spokespersons, in a podcast. Demonstrate technical ability to record, edit and post a podcast online. Demonstrate ability to critique own work and compare work with that of partner.

2.  Develop critical thinking/problem solving strategies Demonstrate ability to analyse and synthesise information in order to implement an appropriate research plan. Demonstrate ability to conduct self-directed and shared research and reflect upon research.

3.  Understand the need for cooperation between and support of people Demonstrate ability to display sensitivity to the feelings and learning needs of partner and other participants and to work actively toward pair and group goals. Demonstrate ability to contribute knowledge, opinions and skills to the task. Show a valuing of the knowledge, opinion and skills of partner and group and encourage their contribution.

I’d also include:

• Course description, syllabus & LOs, navigation aids, email, quizzes, calendar,
• Teacher information,
• Explanations of policies and procedures, FAQs, chat sessions and bulletin board postings, student’s grades, institution resources,
• Details of, and formatting for assignments with model answers (where appropriate), rubrics and examples and assignment delivery and feedback.

The Getting Started Chart would be useful and I liked Lisa’s use of screenr for the questionnaire video (which notion I ‘adapted’ to get funding from my dept).

Wk 4: Went through Dave Raggett’s HTML programme, note its use for translating text, using tags to convey  ideas and rendering pages in particular ways, and using hyperlinks to connect to other resources. Encouraged, I’ve signed up for an online course on programming for mobile apps. I like Ko & Rosen’s idea of reworking, consolidation and elimination.  I’m also appreciating how online delivery prompts embedded processes, like ‘Prezi’, which I now use constantly. This broadens the scope of lessons and provides depth. Students love it. I’ll include HTML (and ‘JavaScript’ and ‘Cascading Stylesheets’) in next semester’s work.

Wk 5: Reading Chapter 5 prompted a deviation this week, and I offered my thoughts in this post on cheating. McNabb, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (5)2, June 2009, suggests that instructors: 1. Include critical thinking discussion in online classes, 2. Use assignments that require collaboration, 3. Choose learning activities that are “distinctive, individual, and non-duplicative”, 4. Develop an honour code for the class, 5. Explain what is considered to be unacceptable behaviour, 6. Ask for student input on creating a community of integrity.

Wk 6: This week, I offered a slideshare on ‘The Workplace’ – 6a, a ppt with audio (too much information, slides are dull narrator’s voice is flat, a good thing for a starter or a summary (also for when a reliever is required). I’ll include Slideshare in my armoury, and 6b,  a Prezi on Monet. I enjoyed making both of these, though they took time! I can now add these tools in my repertoire as well as helping students to use them too.

Wk 7: Created a late post (8a) offering some ideas from books on eLearning I’ve found useful. Read Chapter 6, initiated a Facebook account, hooted, twittered and tweeted (from NZ to Norm in the US – freaky!) connected with  POT members, watched ‘Building Community in your online class’, enjoying synchronous interaction with Lisa, Todd et al. I commented on several  colleagues’ blogs.

Wk 8: Participated in the Collaborate session on October 20 and set up a Google+ site. I submitted a short story (8b) in which I tried to marry matter to form by writing a tale with a moral and by providing links to the ideas I was trying to convey. This strategy is a creative notion I want to pursue and offer it to students as an original way to demonstrate their understanding of concepts.

Wk 9: I played around with Second Life (Post 9a) but though I wanted to, I honestly couldn’t see much educational advantage. Entertaining, plenty of social interaction no doubt, opportunity to express different parts of one’s psyche by adopting different personae, but difficult to organise and requiring a lot of skill to participate fully. Could be dangerous too – the whole point of wearing a mask is to construct a desirous mystique – but once it’s removed, disappointment sets in. Do we want to manufacture desire in pedagogy? I don’t think I or my students are ready yet to learning through it. In Post 9b, relatedly, I opined an interest in littorality and border-crossing, which Second Life clearly offers, though I prefer more open-ended and, to my mind, less worrisome situations. 9c offered some good online journals

Wk 10: I looked at Lisa’s blogging slidecast, Pilar’s tut and Jim’s session, as well as reviewing Engrade and I’ve started a site on Google <https://sites.google.com/site/welcometosocialsciencesi/>. I very much like the look of  Wix <http://www.wix.com/jelly750/soc-sci#!what-is-sociology?> where I’ve started a site for next year’s offering of Social Sciences 1. Google Sites’ ePortfolios and mPortfolios are definitely things I will adopt in the near future. I enjoy the various blogs’ opportunity to ‘sell’ courses and welcome students before they actually appear.

Wk 11a: An opportunity to vent in this post.  The tv doco on child poverty in NZ I mentioned is no longer obtainable anywhere, and the first ‘third strike, you’re out’ prosecution (for illicitly downloading music) is about to take place. As I’m writing Google cofounder, Sergey Brin this week’s Guardian reports on  ‘a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.’ 11b comments on the contradiction that is ‘Turnitin’. As Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) said in the original Wall Street, ‘It’s all about bucks, kid, The rest is just conversation’. 11c points out some disparities in all this nonsense.

Wk 12: Took the test, read Chapter 8, looked at online textbooks and e-books at Gutenberg and Open Textbook. Other good sources are: Scribd <http://www.scribd.com/> and simply ‘free ebook’. Publishers like Moon+Reader and Amazon have a pile of freebie texts, the BBC is a goldmine of nature resources and iTunesU links to a host of free online courses from a variety of tertiary providers..

Wk 13: Read Chapter 9. Easy to take screenshots with Mac (shift, command, 4) and uploaded annotated photo of dream house into Flickr. Used Mbedr to post image in blog. I like this tool and will use it in future lessons.

Wk 14: Used screenflow <http://www.screenr.com/cHbs> for a writeable slide (idea from Lisa). Also posted an interminably long and turgid audacity recording for Ethics <https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/ref=gno_yam_clddrv#G=0&path=/Music> with music in background! Hilarioualy bad! Need to make these audios snappier and more interesting.

Wk 15: Created a cool Mindmeister mindmap, a Jing and a short SurveyMonkey survey and posted ‘em. All good. Jings are essential parts of my teaching toolbox now.

Wk 16: Read Ko & Rossen, Chapter 10, Nielsen (2010) Richtel (2010) and ECAR (2010). Posted FAQ for Bus Ethics courses. I like the notion of FAQs, and will expand on these.

Wk 17: Read Chapter 11, viewed Louisa’s and Lisa’s recordings and posted  my views on  class facilitation. Taking the message to heart because I’ve had many software/hardware crashes in the past, I’m obsessive about keeping records – on USBs, SugarSync, Amazon Cloud, Dropbox, LiveBinder, FolioSpaces, and yes, plain old written copies.

Wk 18: Read Chapter 11, Insidious Pedagogy, Moodle Tool Guide, EduTools and posted my CMSs on screenflow. Recently I’ve been exploring Stanford University’s CourseWare, Sakai (thanks Sandra) and Canvas – all look promising and I’m sure I’ll locate others. It seems that as these sites become established, they tighten up their offerings (I can’t add any further links from this Edublog site) and it becomes a White Queen/ Red Queen exercise! Makes me clever!

Wk 19:Read Chapter 13, Graham, et al‘s article, viewed Wesch’s course page and posted my thoughts on ‘flipping’, trialling  a 3-hour lecture into two 2-hour slots. In this, students meet twice a week: for the first hour, the work, material and discussion occurs, then an additional hour is spent online. I think students take more responsibility for their learning, thinking stuff over for a longer time. Result -  less wasted time and more productive outcomes; in Lacanese, a decided shift from the Discourse of the Master or the University Discourse towards the Discourse of the Hysteric. Great stuff and the wa(y)ve of the future. I also provided a link to a 3-day online  workshop on open source learning, which I had participated in, organised by Wayne MacKintosh, founder of WikiEducator.

Wk 20: Read all the work, and posted my thoughts using a combination of Prezi and screenflow, with accompanying music. Begun considering ideas for presentation.

Wk 21:  I wrote polemically on Larry Singer’s piece, disappointed to receive only one comment. Tried to help Michelle with posting audio, not realising that it’s easy on my Edublog but next to impossible on her WordPress (see last comment of Wk 18).

Wk 22: Posted on Prezi (very proud of including video in this!) my thoughts about the horrid restrictions on educational sharing in NZ. And there are serious rumours that ITPs will collapse from some 10+ to perhaps 4 in the near future, similarly with universities. Teachers in higher education are working longer class-contact hours, more research is being demanded of them and many are being made redundant. Further, the serious move to corporatise education, ‘charter’ schools, PPPs (public private partnerships) and the arrest and ongoing attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom, founder of Megauploads, from NZ to the USA for trial on piracy issues, all conspire to create an atmosphere of hunkering down and hanging on.

Wk 23: Disappointed I couldn’t provide a link to my excellent last presentation, so will post it on youtube. Commented on many colleagues’ penultimate posts.

Wk 24: Here it is. And here’s the link to my final jing <http://screencast.com/t/g4tbRyp7f5V>. Thank you Lisa, guest experts and colleagues. It’s been wonderful.

 

 

Hello. This was to have been a video post but Edublogs informs me that I have exceeded my storage space, so I’m posting this as type. And here as a jing: <http://screencast.com/t/zo6lWybh64o>.

Something very strange has emerged from the POT course.

Like most of us, I suppose, I enrolled in the course wanting to enlarge my repository of technical online and blended learning. And this has certainly happened. Yet another surprising development has been a different kind of knowledge, concerning the human need for social interaction and membership.

It seems to me that we teachers need to address the hearts, minds and senses of our students, intellectually, emotionally and behaviourally, through providing models and exercises in what to do and what to feel as well as how to think. Perhaps this has to do with my increased awareness of forms and patterns of our constructed and rapidly evolving environments and a recognition that many of the things we depend on lie beyond our control.

I’ve found a vindication in the course, too, of striving to make meaning possible by collaborating in groups and through realising enduring conclusions by constant comparison and discussion of choices. What ensues in these sorts of collaborative enterprises are judgements, which, while clearly ‘subjective’, while always open to examination and interrogation, nevertheless provide insights into the meanings of what we do, enabling connections beyond the moment and the location, allowing imaginative participation in what does not exist, encouraging students to assemble goals (qv. Chris Dede) where play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgement, transmedia navigation, networking and negotiation provide the right kind of interest and reward that interest in enhanced understanding and appropriate emotional engagement. But gently, trimming excess and unnecessary items.

And this is where I think teachers raise lives to a higher level – one of active engagement and critical, ethical reflection. That’s what the course has done for me. As T S Eliot writes:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharing

 

 

 

The ‘Cartesian activities’ of reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculation are essential tools for engagement in our culture, and in Culture Counts (2007) Roger Scruton states that ‘culture’ – defined as ‘the accumulation of art, literature, and humane reflection that has stood the “test of time” and established a continuing tradition of reference and allusion among educated people’ ‘… is a source of knowledge: emotional knowledge, concerning what to do and what to feel. We transmit this knowledge through ideals and examples, through images, narratives and symbols.’ To do this, to engage in the culture, requires memory and thought. Self-realisation is the goal of life, as Humboldt and Cassirer recognised, and we realise ourselves not by retreating from the demands on our cognitive faculties, but by embracing them. As Sanger comments, ‘you need knowledge in order to know what questions to ask. …The point is to develop judgment or understanding of questions that require a nuanced grasp of the various facts and to thereby develop the ability to think about and use those facts. If you do not have copious essential facts at the ready, then you will not be able to make wise judgments that depend on your understanding of those facts’.

Quite so. Looking up facts isn’t much use if you don’t know what facts to access. I teach 3^rd year students who cannot add three single-digit numbers in their heads, who don’t know their times tables, who do not know the dates of the 2^nd World War, who cannot recite a line of poetry and who have no reflective capacity. In order to develop these areas, I use blended deliveries of analytical and reflective thinking skills, different styles of writing and expanded frames of reference in a liberal design that employs interdisciplinary connections between the sciences and the humanities and that situates the individual in her universe, not as an instrumental handmaid to will-to-power but as an engaged and committed person in process.  Students, on my view, need regular viva sessions and debates and they need to read, memorise, defend and justify.

Yet many students enter new modules of learning so damaged by the educational system, so silenced and disenfranchised by years of scorn and denial of their own skills, preferences and values, that they begin the task of mastering alien discourses with trepidation and deep ambivalence. These students need centring and assistance with cognitive skills rather than expeditions of self-exploration or quests for individual autonomy. The prevailing relativist orthodoxy, paralleled by a contradictory censorious obstinacy against authoritative meaning, misjudges the Enlightenment’s aspiration toward universal truths (which, aspiration, incidentally, suggests that the American Revolution has had far more significance than the French one). It is the teacher’s job to inculcate the sense of connection to the achievements of their culture in such fashion that students feel a sense of pride in belonging to it; accordingly, students should be able to identify places, times, people and the positive endeavours of elevating the larger community, beyond the confusions of positivism and postmodernism. Poorly developed 3-r skills (qv. Andrea Lunsford, 1980) correlate significantly with low self-image, lack of confidence and low levels of cognition. On the other hand, writing and thinking skills constitute a unique resource for enabling student success as well as encouraging stable and coherent identities.

So big ups to Larry Sanger who recognises the need for significant cognitive input into social intuitionism. The tribe needs his wisdom.

 

 

 

For Michelle

 

 

 

Instructional Design is so important.

 

 

 

Horrid Autumn Day in Auckland

 

Ownership of Ideas

I was privileged, last December, to participate in a 3-day online global workshop on the rationale behind for using of Open Source Learning. The course, organised by Wayne Mackintosh, Director of the  OER Foundation and founder of WikiEducator, offered a persuasive set of reasons for free dissemination of ideas, was introduced by a compelling talk by Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and founder and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center (see Ownership of Ideas, above).

Concerning this week’s investigations, I think that flipping the classroom lecture and homework around is decidedly the way of the future. I’ve been trialling something similar in one course, converting the customary 3-hour lecture into two 2-hour slots. In this course, students meet with me twice a week: for the first hour, the proposed, work, material and websites, etc, are introduced and discussion of these takes place. Then, one hour is spent online (individually or in small groups).

This allows my students and I to meet twice a week (ie. for two separate hours) thereby freeing up classrooms and teaching hours, so that it is theoretically possible to condense more meaningful f2f time into fewer days. What seems to be happening is that students are taking more control of their learning, considering and developing their work over a longer time span and coming to class with their questions and ideas for deeper exploration.

What I think is being achieved in this rearrangement is less wasted time and more productive outcomes, plus – beloved of administrators – more classroom space available.

 

 

 

I’m using Mac’s ‘Screenflow’ for  Week 18‘s post. I like it – demand your boss buy it for you.

 

I like this site for its challenging and educational problem-solving explorations. But, because there is seldom an outline site that matches closely with the interaction I want to offer students, I generally devise my own in progressive steps, sometimes using discussion fora, and more often, comment-sections for group work:Of the three parts of learning: perception, thought and will, I’m most interested in the first, believing that this is the best approach to developing heutagogy. Lisa’s 7 tips says it all pretty much, and I like to explore and use other institutions’ platforms for delivery, (currently Stanford’s CourseWare) both to extend my own repertoire and to further engage students in a sense of world-wide connection. Blogs, too, liberate student’s potential for expression in all sorts of enchanting ways, producing flow-on effects in both enthusiasm for learning and increased industry, and removing teacher from autocratic domination.

Finally, instant messaging, mobile email, tweets and viber are essential tools for collaboration where insurmountable problems can be resolved almost instantly. It does mean being on tap for much of the day, but there ain’t nothing like instantaneous reinforcement to build solid relationships and increased motivation with, and between students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a small class and so students and I know one another. There is rarely an issue over not knowing what to do or who to contact. Policies and procedures are detailed in the Student handbook and summarised in the Course Outline, which is presented as both bound copy and published on the Course website.

FAQs
Where do I find the course outline?
The course outline is one of the pages on the Business Ethics header (next to ‘Course’).

Is attendance compulsory?
Yes. Students are expected to attend all classes. If you are unable to attend a particular class you should notify me asap. If you are absent for 3 or more days, a medical certificate or other appropriate documentation should be handed in.

International students are required to attend 80% of classes. Failure to do so can result in the cancellation of the student’s permit.

What are the required assessments?
Refer to the ‘Assessments’ section at the top of the Home page. There are three assessments:

1. Test Week 4 (10%)

2. Debate Week 11 (20%)

3. Essay Week 14 (30%)

4. Exam Exam Week (40%)

To achieve a pass grade, you must:

complete and submit ALL pieces of assessable work

gain an overall final mark of at least 50%.

All assessable work should be handed in by the due date specified in the assessment instructions in the course outline. Failure to met an assessment deadline may result in marks being deducted for lateness or the assessment being considered a resit.

I recommend that you keep a backup copy of all assessments until you receive your final mark.

Can I ask for extensions?
You may apply for an extension for an assignment if, because of unforeseen circumstances, you can not meet the deadline. Your application must be:

• in writing, on the official assessment extension form, and received and signed by your tutor prior to the due assessment date.

Extension forms are obtainable from the Student Enrolment Centre. The extension form, with the tutor’s approval and signature should be attached to the assessment when it is submitted.

Are there penalties for late work?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Penalties occur for un-notified late assignment submissions. For each day that your work is overdue, a 10% penalty of the total assignment mark will apply. No work will be accepted after 10 days after the due date.

Can I apply for a resit?
No resits are allowed.

How do I contact you?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            By Twitter or email. My email address is:

Can I keep my mobile on in class?
Yes. If your phone rings, take the call outside. Don’t abuse this courtesy, and of course, you can’t have your phone on in tests of any kind.

Remember that we are here to help. If there is any thing that you think is harming your ability to succeed, please let me know. Together we can work it out.

Do you have any other questions?