August 28th, 2010
Can you remember the last time you witnessed someone being wise? I know for me these moments are far and few between. This might be because of the circles I move in – but I do work in a university, so I might expect to come across it more often… A thesaurus provides a number of synonyms for wisdom such as; sagacity, discernment, insight, understanding, knowledge, perception, astuteness, intelligence, acumen, and good judgement. It’s interesting when you think that wisdom is all of these.
I’ve been thinking about wisdom for a few reasons. The first is my previous post and the idea of a big picture. The second was the coincidence that three friends blogged about a similar issues this week (I’ll get to them in later post). The third was the Macquarie University Vice Chancellor’s Annual Lecture by Steven Schwartz this week. The speech was called ‘Wise up: Restoring wisdom to universities’ and talked about the changing curriculum at Macquarie to ensure students learned how to think. Students will be required to participate in activities other than just book learning. They will undertake a range practical learning applications to provide better understanding of themselves and those around them. A range of contexts outside the classroom will help develop life skills that will make them ready to take on a meaningful role in society.
Wisdom is special, an ability to distil something to the essence and apply it to a situation. And it doesn’t come cheap. It takes time to develop because it is, as Confucius suggests, the culmination of reflection, imitation and experience. Some of that experience comes the hard way, but we do learn best when out of our comfort zone. Reflecting on what we know & learn and practicing things to understand the consequence all take time – maybe that’s why the stereotype of a wise person, is an old one. But I don’t think that’s an excuse for us not endeavouring to learn how to apply our knowledge and experience in wise ways throughout our lives. I reckon wisdom takes courage too and there’s a level of responsibility to use this talent to benefit those around us. Maybe some of us are fortunate to have a disposition to better thinking processes.
Of course just being wise isn’t enough to be an active, informed, participating, member of society – there are many other qualities (virtues if you will) that make us complete, but being able to think is a great start. So, I think changing (or realigning) the curriculum at University is a wise move.
You can hear Steven interviewed by Richard Aedy on the Radio National program ‘Life Matters’. You can also follow Steven on twitter @macquarievc or read his blog at: http://www.vc.mq.edu.au/blog/.
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August 21st, 2010
This week’s been an interesting one in which I’ve been challenged to think more deeply about what might be possible with regard to improving curriculum design during the implementation of an LMS. I believe there is an opportunity to have academics think about their teaching (how they might achieve better learning outcomes & improve student engagement) during the time of transition and preparing/revising their materials in the migration process between two systems. In response to a tweet I posted regarding the possibilities of change afforded by new tools in our new LMS, Dean Groom tweeted to remind me that the tools won’t change a teachers perspective. I appreciate this, but I don’t want to explore what opportunities there might be to make incremental change (if only small) in the way academics teach.
At one level the implementation of a new LMS is fraught with risks – it’s a process that needs to be planned and managed so that there is a smooth transition and teachers and students can get on with their teaching and learning. So, should we be happy to accept this model of ‘let’s just get the course material migrated, the staff and students trained, and it’ll be business as normal’? I’d like to think not, but there a number of institutional pressures to have things working properly – and we’ve become risk adverse as we don’t want to distress our clients (students) and staff with a poorly implemented system. So, I understand we may want to work on an implementation process that provides a robust and working system and then focus on what we can do improve learning and teaching.
On an another level there is an opportunity to work with, and encourage staff to re-think their curriculum in light of the affordances of the new tools available in the new LMS. I see a challenge in helping academics come to understand the potential of different ways of designing learning activities & experiences to achieve outcomes using the functionality of the LMS. Maybe there’s a need to be subversive in all this – change won’t happen en mass – it requires a slowly slowly approach understanding that academics are time poor and looking for efficiencies. There also needs to be an understanding that this will involve some cultural change if new modes and models of teaching and learning are used. The level of resourcing required to develop a framework (and hopefully policy) as well as materials for professional development to support systemic change, will need addressing. It is only by stepping back, and zooming out to see the bigger picture, that we might be able to better understand the context and demands of university education. This includes; teaching, research, service, having work ready and beginning professionals as graduates, and as well as other things, achieving government and institution priorities. I hope that there is some institutional recognition of this and that appropriate resource might be directed to supporting not just an implementation but ongoing curriculum renewal.
So, my mission (that I wish to accept), is to support the introduction of a range of new tools available via the LMS that are intrinsic to holistic learning processes. This will lead to the development of better learning experiences while encouraging teachers to think about how they could adjust/ their curriculum design to develop higher order thinking and engage students more fully.
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August 13th, 2010
This week I’ve been to training sessions to learn how Desire2Learn (our new LMS from next year) functions. It’s been week of adaptation and my brain hurts. I’ve had to restructure and adapt my mental models I have of how our old LMS (Blackboard Vista – formerly WebCT) worked – to a new one. While much functionality is similar, the way you do things is different. I suppose most of this is about how to system works rather than using the system for teaching. I have found it useful that we have been presented with examples of how particular tools and functions can help to develop learning activities.
While I’m learning new ways to build courses, create discussions & quizzes etc., I’m wary of mapping old work practices onto new ones – I’d rather start again from scratch and ask the question, “What do you want your students to do?” The new system provides new choices – not just in how to configure roles and permissions but also in look & feel and tools to use. I’ve come to understand that there’s a lot of work to be done, particularly to do with course building and learning design.
I suppose we’re initially focused in getting it as nearly right as possible so that we can migrate and get all the courses, staff & student into the system so that learning & teaching can begin when we roll out next year.
There may be some compromises in the first instance, so that the mainstream are operational, but from then on we’ll have to tweak things as we come to understand the possibilities and respond to issues and requests. The system will allow for these adjustments and I’m looking forward to being able to fine tune things once we’re underway.
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August 5th, 2010
Another busy week so far and the highlight was that we were able to announce (internally) that our university has chosen Desire@Learn as it’s new Learning Management System. While we haven’t announced anything publicly, D2L made this announcement last week. It’s all very exciting as we’ve been using the same system for the last six years (Blackboard Vista) and it has come to the end of its life and we needed to find another platform to support our learning and teaching program. Our short list of potential systems were BlackBoard Learn (v.9), Desire2learn, and Moodle. Personally I thought that the open source route with Moodle and the Mahara ePortfolio would have adequately suited our needs, but the decision’s been made, and D2L it is. Lots of implementation planning underway with configuration, integration, training, migration, trails & pilots all leading toward a phased rollout from Trimester 1, 2011. So, the job is ahead of us and I’m keen to see us make use of some of the available functionality of D2L like their competencies, analytics and learning design tools, as well as the ePortfolio. I’m expecting lots of challenges as well as an excellent adventure over the coming 18 months…
Photo credit: Marc Wathieu
On another matter, I tweeted this during the week,
“@colwar interesting the difference a simple explanatory conversation can make to clear up misconceptions. (let’s have more of them)”.
It was in response to a situation were I was able to explain how a certain new technology worked and give some people have a better understanding of how the technology functioned. I suppose I’m wondering why people don’t seek out good advice and want to know more about something, rather than rely on someone else to make a decision without explaining letting stakeholders know why. Maybe we all just need to make space (and/or go out of our way) to have more conversations and share the knowledge we have. I believe the spent spent doing that would easily cover the delays encountered vacillating around in the unknown.
Technorati Tags: communication, conversation, D2L, implementation, LMS, planning
Tags: communication, conversation, D2L, implementation, LMS, planning
Posted in software, technology | 2 Comments »
July 30th, 2010
I’ve felt that I’ve neglected this blog a little. While I’ve recently spent some time overseas on holiday/travelling and haven’t posted here for a while, I want to be more consistent in writing posts reflecting on my professional experiences. While I’m active in Twitter, the posts I make there aren’t as in-depth, or able to contain the resources I might include in a blog post.
So, I’m going to try and post every week on a Friday morning, and try to capture what’s happened during the past week. My intention is that this will become a ‘story’ of my journey as an educator and how I (we) might use of technologies to support learning and teaching. I also hope that I’ll provide information and reflections that are of interest to other educators/learners. I don’t think this is a huge commitment, but I understand that I’ll have to be disciplined to collect my thoughts (and resources) and set aside the time to write them down regularly.
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July 30th, 2010
This week I was fortunate to be able to attend a seminar presentation by Associate Professor Matthew Allen, called “Using Web 2.0 in Your Teaching”. Matthew is a Teaching Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and is the leader of the ‘Learning in Networks of Knowledge‘ (LINK) project.
Matthew emphasised that Web 2.0 is about connection and stressed that when thinking about Web 2.0 we need to take into consideration the 4Cs.
- Components: what feeds into the knowledge work system
- Cognition and Collaboration: thinking and working together forms the processing system
- Communication: the results of processing become public and the basis of audience reception and conversation
Matthew presented us with his top 10 Web 2.0 tools and gave us some great ways to use them for learning & teaching. It was useful to be reminded that it’s not about the tool, it’s about what you can do with the tool. Here’s his list – I was surprised that I was only familiar with only two of them. They may not all be mainstream, but they could add value to the learning activities/ experiences you develop.
- xtimeline – xtimeline enables users to create timelines of events, in a constrained but flexible format, with collaboration features, and public communication options
- listphile – “a powerful tool for organizing and collaborating around structured information. Call it a database tool, if you will (but please don’t scare anyone away)” [**I couldn’t access this link today, but will check again later]
- slinkset – slinkset creates social news sites, private, shared or public like digg, with extensive yet simple to use design features
- posterous – posterous is a powerful yet simple blogging engine with a particular emphasis on ease of posting: do it by email
- mind42 – Mind mapping is … about entering ideas, arranging them … and refining and deepening ideas with colors, links and other attributes”
- quizlet – quizlet is a flashcard production and use system, with inbuilt group and collaboration features and innovative ways of testing knowledge
- reviewbasics – reviewbasics is a web-based service allowing users to work together to review documents, websites images with an emphasis on annotation
- springnote – “wiki, word processing, and file organization [and] … sharing, having collaborators… to organize all the information you need at your fingertips”
- knol.google – knol is Google’s answer to Wikipedia: editable, classified user-generated content based on the idea of a ‘knol’ (a unit of knowledge)
- wiggio – comprehensive group collaboration tool: calendars, to do, sharing, online meeting and polling … people work as teams, not a group of individuals
You can also access the presentations on each of the tools on Slideshare, and a video recording of Matthew’s presentation capturing his discussion on each of the tools. You can follow Matthew on Twitter and read more of his work on his website (look for ‘writing’ tab).
Technorati Tags: activities, tools
Tags: activities, tools
Posted in learning, software, teaching, web2.0 | No Comments »
