Instagrams from somewhere
All my Bags are Packed (Photo: Mark McGuire, CC-BY)
On 12 October, I flew out of Dunedin, New Zealand, headed for a conference in Vancouver (Open Education 2012). As I waited for the plane to board, I flicked through the stream of images from people whose work I follow on Instagram, a photo sharing/social media service (Facebook purchased Instagram for $1bn back in April 2012). As well as sharing photos with my Twitter followers, I noticed that it is now also possible to sent a photo to a Tumblr blog, as well as t0 Facebook, Flickr, foursquare, and to any email address. I hadn’t used Tumblr for a long time, but I thought I would be a good idea to collect and archive my Instagram photos on a Website set up specifically for the purpose. So, I quickly created Marks McGuire’s Journey (not very original, I know), and snapped a photo of the plane that I would momentarily board, which I used to illustrate this post. My intention is to use this blog only for the photos that I take during my one-month trip to Vancouver, Manchester, London, Toronto, Wellington, and home again to Dunedin. I added one further constraint — the captions would all be in the form of a haiku (three lines of five, seven, and five syllables). As I write this post, I am ten days and about 60 instagrams into my journey.
Where Learning Happens
Monsters with teeth by Cubby CC-BY-NC-SA
Hybrid Pedagogy‘s week-long #MOOCMOOC (a MOOC about MOOCS — Massive Open Online Courses) is finishing today. The organizers provided a plan for each day, which included readings, other resources and suggested activities. They also created a handy dashboard where we could see the stream of announcements, Twitter messages and blog posts. I contributed to a collaborative 1,000 word Google doc (“A MOOC by Any Other Name“) with 52 others, and I participated in the Twitter discussion by following the #MOOCMOOC hashtag. On Tuesday, we were asked to create a short video that responded to the question: “Where does learning happen?”. I started by writing down some thoughts, but I didn’t manage to finish a video. In the end, I thought the words (pasted below) were enough. It will take me a while to wade through the many twitter messages, blog posts and other online documents that resulted from the MOOC MOOC. Already, participants are collating and curating their thoughts and the work of others who this course enabled them to connect to. A summary of MOOCMOOC stories has already been posted. I’m looking forward to my next MOOC, which will likely be #CFHE12 (Current/Future State of Higher Education). This course will run from October 8 to November 18. Like the best (Connectivist) MOOCs, it will be Open, and it will attract open-minded people.
.
Where Learning Happens
It can happen out in public places
alleyways and funny spaces
underneath and in between
locations where you’ve never been
before.
.
It can happen on an airplane
at 30,000 feet above the ground
you’ve found the person sitting
next to you has lived the life you
might have.
.
It can happen walking down the street
you meet someone you haven’t seen
in ages who tells you
everything
before the light changes.
.
It can happen in mid sentence when
you interrupt the program for
a message
from one sponsor
or another.
.
It can happen at a party
once I met a guy who told me how
sub atomic particles romance
with partners rooms away
that made my day.
.
It can happen in a pub
an angel at the bar sharing whisky
while a stranger tells
a history of the world
in six glasses.
.
It can happen when you go to bed
and in your head you find
an alleyway at 30,000 feet
where faster than light neutrinos are
dancing the night away.
.
And it all makes sense.
Here are the slides and audio recording from a seminar that I presented at the “Open Educational Resources Seminar” at the University of Otago on 28 June 2012. I uploaded the audio (MP3) file (19 minutes, 14 MB) to Soundcloud and embedded it here. The slides (19 MB PDF) are embedded from Slideshare. I also uploaded the audio and slides to UniTube, a repository hosted at the University of Otago. The easiest way to hear and see the presentation is from this post. Just start the audio playing (it takes several seconds to buffer) and then advance the slides manually. I showed 80 slides in under 20 minutes, so that’s about 15 seconds per slide. I tried to design the presentation so that it could make sense as a stand alone PDF. I included links to all of the images, sites, and texts that I quoted. I used images that have a Creative Commons licence, and the presentation itself is covered by a CC-BY (Attribution) licence. I followed a similar process for an earlier talk, “Open Strategies in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges”.
Abstract
If we think of OERs as we think of physical artifacts, we might focus on their design, production, storage and distribution. We could quantify their number, calculate their popularity, and track their use. However, in open, distributed, networked learning environments, the emphasis is not be on the resources but on the engagement between participants who create, use, modify, and share experiences. Resources can be used to prompt and fuel conversations, and the results of one conversation can be saved and used as fuel for another, but it is the way in which they are created and used that determines their effectiveness in learning contexts. In this talk, I will use examples from several open courses to explore the nature of digital resources and discuss how they are used to enable constructive engagements between networked learners. I suggest that, although appropriate resources are an important part of the learning process, we need to pay more attention to the design of the structures and networks in which they are generated and circulated.
Audio Recording (19 Minutes)
You can download a PDF of these slides by clicking on the link below.
National’s Budget Blunder – Increasing the quality of education by eliminating technology teachers?
“Technology News” Balmacewen Intermediate School Newsletter No 3 May 2012 p. 5
In their eagerness to cut costs in their recent budget, regardless of the effects, the governing National Party made a serious blunder. Aside from a complete lack of vision and leadership, they are trying to argue that increasing class sizes and eliminating specialist technology teachers will improve the quality of education for young New Zealanders.
In a press release from the New Zealand Association of Intermediate Schools, association President and Principal of Pukekohe Intermediate School, Gary Sweeney, reported that more than 300 intermediate school teachers could lose their jobs next year. These are experienced specialists who teach cooking, sewing, art, ICT, woodwork and metalwork. Following an avalanche of complaints from teachers, principals and parents, the government set up a working party in an attempt to deflect some of the criticism. Radio New Zealand continues to follow the story, reporting on the working party yesterday (Monday, 28 May), and, this morning (Tuesday, 29 May), on the Government’s effort to backtrack due to the unintended consequences of spreadsheet decision making.
It is very hard to see how increasing class sizes and eliminating specialist technology teachers can possibly improve the quality of education. The government may well have realized that they have made a mistake. The question now is whether they are able to correct it. The ability to learn from our mistakes, and to correct them, is one of the fundamental skills that we learn at school. Let’s see if our political leaders have learned this lesson.
Last night, I sent the following email to Mr Andrew Hunter, the principal of Balmacewen Intermediate School, where one of my two sons is a student.
Dear Mr Hunter
As a parent and academic in Applied Sciences, I am shocked to hear that the government is planning to cut the funding that currently supports the teaching of technology to Year 7 and 8 students in New Zealand. Removing specialist, experienced teachers in Art, Food, Fabric and Workshop Technology clearly undermines the government’s stated objective of encouraging more students to pursue a career in science and technology. Furthermore, it will limit the ability of schools to expose young learners to the broad range of disciplines and experiences that enables them to develop as a whole person.
By offering well-supported, hands-on teaching in technology subjects, intermediate schools support a thoughtful engagement with the world of physical materials, as well as with the world of ideas. They encourage students to extend the capabilities of their hands as well as their mind at a formative stage in their development. Understanding the properties and potentials of materials is crucial to design thinking, problem solving, product innovation, and creative expression.
We need creative problem solvers who can navigate and operate within an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Intermediate schools play a crucial role in helping young students realize their potential as well-rounded, well-educated, multi-talented individuals and citizens. By reducing the capacity of intermediate schools to do what they do best, this ill conceived cost-cutting measure undermines not only the education of our youth, but also the future of our society.
Best regards,
Mark
Dr Mark McGuire
Senior Lecturer, Department of Applied Sciences
University of Otago
Teleporting to Romania
This is why I love Twitter. I caught this message from @Letitia_Potorac (who lives in Romania) early this morning. Read the article, “Chinese Physicists Smash Distance Record For Teleportation“, then see the conversation that followed . Lots of fun — and all before breakfast.
edX Press Conference
Several high profile open course initiatives have attracted a lot of attention in recent months. These include Stanford Engineering Everywhere, (especially Sebastian Thrun’s popular Artificial Intelligence course), Udacity (Thrun’s Internet start-up), MITx, Coursera (Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and Pennsylvania) and now edX, a collaboration between MIT and Harvard. Class Central lists 53 ongoing or upcoming open courses from these universities. Clearly, collaborations between several institutions, and between traditional universities and private providers, is an incresing trend.
The following is from MIT News (2 May 2012):
“Online edX courses will open both universities’ classrooms to the world while enhancing on-campus learning”.
“MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard University President Drew Faust, accompanied by top officials from both institutions, announced on Wednesday a new collaboration that will unite the Cambridge-based universities in an ambitious new partnership to deliver online education to learners anywhere in the world.
The new venture, called edX, will provide interactive classes from both Harvard and MIT — for free — to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. But a key goal of the project, Faust said, is “to enhance the educational experience of students who study in our classrooms and laboratories.”
Continue reading this article here.
A key goal of edX, according to Michael D. Smith, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, “is researching how technology can improve education, both on campus and off campus.” Other universities should be do more than just follow the news about what happens with these experiments. They should be running experiments of their own — and publishing the results in a way that ensures that they are freely available to the public.
