8823dsn:

Quoted from: losiento studio

I’ve been asked to rewrite an outline for an undergraduate sports management subject and I want to make sure that it captures sports in the context of society and culture. The epitome of elite sport is the modern Olympic Games, but it might also be seen as an example of corporate control over culture and in may cases has adversely impacted upon the societies it is meant to serve.

Elitism in sport also serves to discourage people from active participation in physical activity. Corporate interests in spectator sport promote unhealthy lifestyles, not to mention violence and misogyny. Sporting organisations are powerful global entities that are subject to corruption and become platforms for the promotion of powerful political ideologies.

The question for me, is there a way to present sport as a cultural activity that promotes learning and social diversity? Can we find in the games we play, a way to build resilience and sustainability?

dajbelshaw:

“Mobile learning, focuses on learning through mobile devices, allowing learners to move about in a classroom or remotely learn from the location of their choice. The movement has gained a lot of steam in recent years, and despite some criticisms, isn’t likely to fade fast – especially as new technologies that make mobile learning more practical continue to emerge and the popularity of remote learning opportunities like online colleges continue to grow.”

Even if you are approaching it from a purely practical perspective, there is so much scope. I’m starting with a small SMS project, after being inspired by the work of Zoraini Wati Abas in the Change 11 MOOC. Read the response to her mobile learning presentation on the Change 11 wiki I’m contributing to.

The third post of three in an attempt to uncover deeply held assumptions that have shaped my academic trajectory through higher education. In the first post of this series I covered my formative undergraduate years, and then my growing understanding of the the place of learning in my life as I finished my undergraduate.

As prepared to graduate my application of knowledge to produce novel solutions led to work with multimedia and the burgeoning web. Soon after I left University I was working in a youth multimedia centre, conducting introductory courses to the internet and training first generation web developers.

That work led me to an international career in multimedia and the web that spanned 8 years, first working for a Cooperative Multimedia Centre. During that time I was being head hunted to train for the education arm of QANTM CMC but I went with passion of developing, perhaps because I thought I could learn more from it.

That knowledge comes first hand through exploration and self-examination has been a guiding assumption in my career. It probably steered me away from becoming a teacher in the stereotypical sense of a person standing in front of a blackboard in front of class of 30 kids. That style of teaching never had much to offer me, and I always felt that I had more to learn.

When the steam ran out of my web career in the early noughties I tried a few different things, from working in the gym again to teaching yoga but realised that I still had a lot to learn about my place in the world. I decided that I wanted to learn Japanese so I took the opportunity to become an English language instructor in Japan. The other goal was to earn my black belt in a second martial art, having earned one as a teenager in karate.

I came back from Japan five years later, fluent in Japanese, but also well versed in language teaching techniques. I very quickly turned that around into a business teaching people Japanese over the internet via video conferencing software. I strengthened my teaching qualifications with a CELTA and went looking for more reliable income. I was teaching English part time when I found a job as a Learning and Support officer at James Cook University Brisbane.

I realise now that to advance my career in education I need to learn how to bring all of my life and work experience into one cohesive whole that that can bring value to a learning organisation and more importantly, learners. I feel that I have the chance to do that here at James Cook University and I really appreciate the opportunity to take part in this subject ED5300 Learning and Teaching in Higher Education as part of the Graduate Certificate of Tertiary Teaching. I am also concurrently admitted to a Graduate Certificate in eLearning through the University of New England. Hopefully I can bring both those qualifications together under a Masters of Education in the near future.

You can follow my career progression and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Jenny Mackness posted a really thought provoking post a few weeks back about MOOC principles and course design that I find myself coming back to know that I am being asked to design a small learning community for EDIT 517.

Jenny asks where the responsibilities of educators lie when attempting to replicate a MOOC on a smaller scale. Perhaps it is helpful to look at the learning principles which form the basis of a connectivist approach to learning; autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness. Jenny has placed her thoughts about course she designed using these principles on a continuum that I find really useful.

I’d like to add mine here. Massive doesn’t necessarily relate to the numbers of participants, although it might be possible to have thousands involved in a course, it might be undesirable in some instances (live sessions being one example). Smaller courses let loose over an expanse of resources could be one way of conceptualising massive. The Internet is massive, five pioneer families banding together in a caravan of wagons would have thought the prairies to be massive. Pioneering often means doing more with much much less.

Openness is important, but it needn’t be dogmatically adhered to. I like the idea that participation in a MOOC has the potential to open up your practice, simply being open to new ideas is a positive outcome. You could go even further to the radical openness espoused by David Wiley, which is truly inspiring because it is aligned with the higher purpose of educating the world. Conversely sticking with one-way of doing something because the alternative looks more centralised, or replicates a broadcast model that might be out of favour, is limiting yourself and detracting from the experience others may have of the course.

Online, we all think we know what that means, but how you see it is very different from how I do. The kinds of online experiences I wish to build for myself and those that participate in courses, events or other happenings are shaped by my very personal view of online. I’d like to see more recognition of individual learning styles in the construction of open learning environments. I want to do more of this learning mobile (i.e. moving) not just standing and sitting. I’d like to hear more of it, touch more of it, and get a spatial sense of it.

Course is a misnomer, unless it is something more like a 35 course meal. I appreciate the fact that I am able to take a plate of whatever I like and put it in to practice where I see fit. Some stuff I’m just not into, and I’m not going to get marked down if I don’t partake in it. By the same token I don’t want the content rammed down my throat just because there is a lot to get through. The overwhelming part of the course is possibly another manifestation of the need to be massive. When you want more, more presenters, more challenges, more massiveness that when it becomes a turn-off.

I’ve been watching the week five round up that DTLT posted and you can here George Siemens acknowledge the difficulties that newbies to this style of learning have. Among the criticisms of learners are that there is just too much to keep up with, and this course moves way too fast. This certainly isn’t something that you’d be able to get away with first year University students on an international campus, or an introductory course for people in nursing homes. Diversity respects these kinds of learners too.

I would echo George’s comments that a balance needs to be struck between assisting learners to develop the digital literacy to thrive while simultaneously developing the tool sets that would encourage newcomers to try their hand at a MOOC.

Looking back over the notes I have taken on the articles I’ve read relating to constructivism there is an educational idealism that attracts me to it, which is much harder to realise in practice. A closer look at the principles of connectivism is probably what I need right now.

What attracts you to connectivism as an approach to learning? Do you think an emphasis on more massiveness is missing the point of MOOC?

As you are probably aware there have a few issues with synchronous sessions at Change 11. Tim Owens voiced his concerns after the DTLT collaboration with Change 11 for Week 5, so I don’t really want to reiterate those concerns here except to say that again the focus on the tools is detracting from the learning that is possible.

Stephen Downes put out a call for help on Google+ back on the 5th of March, and so far DTLT are the only that have put forward some reasonable solutions which essentially revolve around a polished presentation and conversation integrated with a back-channel. Tim Owens suggested using Google Voice to take live calls and pre-recorded questions during the event, an idea which deals with the concerns Stephen has about following the broadcast model too closely. I’m sure Tim has plenty of other good ideas too, so now is not the time to throw in your towel (party line, integrated chat, vodcast with reliable archiving).

In my response to Stephen’s call for help, among all the other commentators spruiking the benefits of one platform over another, I suggested that the synchronous woes might be an opportunity to beat a strategic retreat from live sessions. The higher the participation rates go, the more it becomes like broadcast anyway, and then you risk disappointing (as evidenced by the declining participation in live sessions). So I wonder if synchronous bliss has become the holy grail for this MOOC.

I hope not. Synchronicity is good when you have it, but it can’t be forced. The conversation needs to happen around the content, not the platform. I would much rather have the quality conversation, interspersed with some good questions from a few well informed listeners, that I can watch over a cup of coffee the following morning. The real conversation, the criticism and the connections are happening in the comments on blog posts after the show most of the time anyway.

I want to come back to this, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Oz and the sunlight is fading.

I’m an endurance athlete. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, I focus on my breathing and find my centre. From there I find a rhythm and regain strength.This is where I am at the moment, in the early stages of an endurance event, regulating.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been a busy with work and assignments, so I haven’t had as much time to devote to the Change 11 eBook as I would have liked. Marshalling my attention again, pushing through the with the project I am recommitting myself to produce content for the Change 11 eBook.

I volunteered to help curate the record of the Change 11 in the form of an ebook because I knew the work in synthesising disparate source would help me make sense of the MOOC. I spent the first two weeks working on template, compiling links and collating blog posts and comments from around the web into an edited group response for Zoraini Wati Abas and Martin Weller. I missed the content from Allison Littlejohn but I am keen to catch up with the conversation that has risen around the presentation by David Wiley.

There are only a few others working on the project, and their roles aren’t very well defined. I’m wondering what I could to do to enhance the interaction of group members. But then again I don’t feel it’s my place, my idea, or my responsibility (it was Dave Cormier’s idea). Therein is one of the inherent difficulties with crowd-sourced content. With a wiki, lots of small contributions make lighter work for everyone, but if one person for just a moment feels as they are doing all the work then the motivation to contribute falls away.

I need a few training partners that are in this for the long haul. I’m prepared to go the distance.

If you want participate in the #change11 ebook project Dave (@davecormier) has posted a an invitation and a quick tutorial on his blog.

- http://bit.ly/qLFkW2

I’ve been going over the feedback for my first assessment task for EDIT 517, Learning Community Defined and thinking about where I went wrong. I’m really grateful for the feedback and hope that I can make amends for the second assignment. Getting back on track is going to be easier if I incorporate the feedback directly into an analysis and restatement of those sections where I lost marks.

I was looking at my experience of Change11 as participation in an online learning community. My first mistake was not to define a learning community as an outcome of the argument developed in the first section. I had placed it in the abstract and late in the second section, but it needed to be hammered home early and often.

Essentially my definition of community is that they are an emergent property of social systems where people in trusting relationships are involved in the collaborative exchange and creation of knowledge for the purpose of learning.

The second place I lost marks was not answering the question. The assignment asked for a description of one learning approach that could be used in the learning community. I gave several along a continuum. I should have really zeroed in on the connectivist approach to learning, which is after all, what I am interested in.

So in answering that question, the proliferation of the Internet and networked theories of learning have given rise to new approaches to learning (Siemens, G. 2005). Downes (2007) draws some similarities between the principles guiding the proliferation of the web and the connectivist approach which include the fostering of networks, creation over consumption, and massive decentralisation of both content and control. He argues that learning networks and technologies that foster diversity and autonomy, enable connections and support openness are more effective in supporting learning than those that do not.

Inherent in the connectivist approach is a re-imagining of where knowledge resides, which is a question that reaches into philosophical territory. At the very least connectivism offers pedagogies which emphasise the network, and knowledge creation as the user traverses nodes in the network.

I made the mistake of moving from the specific to the general when again the assignment asked for a description of how just two tools might be used to support the connectivist approach in a MOOC. I started out by describing how gRSShopper aggregated content and blogs provided a platform for metacognition, but then loosened my grip on it by talking about conversational media in general.

I am now starting to see that I can take the connectivist approach and apply it to my professional situation. Sure a MOOC does give you a taste of what connectivism is all about, but there might be ways that connectivism can work on a smaller scale, or in different domains. Our brains themselves are complex neuronal networks which at our current level of understanding defy our attempts to replicate and model them.

Seymour Papert once said that if a learning theory is robust enough, then one should be able to use it to construct a learning machine. Perhaps that learning machine is not a silver plated robot, or a humanoid supercomputer which plays table tennis. Perhaps it is the network of social structures and institutions that surrounds us?

We need news ways of imagining these structures and institutions. Our conception of the corporation as an individual with rights similar to human beings, but with out recourse to prosecution for crimes committed in the pursuit of profit, is not serving us very well. What if the corporation was re-imagined so that it exchanged the profit motive for a knowledge motive? We would then being moving forward into the territory of radical abundance.

As one of my colleagues quipped, why would you go to work if you had a replicator at home and you could produce almost anything for free? I think that is an over simplification of the argument of course. Re-imagining labour however, is something that should be addressed immediately.

Downes, S. (2007). Learning networks in practice. Emerging Technologies for Learning
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3–10.

Let me describe the arc of my academic career with two swords, learning and teaching.

When I left highschool, I left home, and lived close to university with a family friend. I had to work to support myself, although I did receive a small amount of Austudy. I remember being very lonely, only one other senior from my highschool went to UQ and he was in anthropology, and I was in human movements, so we rarely got to see each other.

In the large first year lecture halls I enjoyed lecturers that were, in a sense, theatrical. Perhaps this is what I remember because large gestures are conveyed further when your seat is way up the back. I found much of university life in my first year intimidating and socially scary so I traded it in for a short stint at the Australian Defence Force Academy. In the summer between the end of my first year and the start of my term at ADFA I had plenty of time to read and get fit.

I swam everyday, ran and rode my bike to prepare for military life. I also read several books that shaped my understanding of conflict and scholarship (as any good officer cadet should). From Miyamoto Musashi I read The Book of Five Rings, where he talked about “the school of two swords” and how a warrior prepares for death each day and ready to rush headlong to meet it, in doing so frees himself from fear and hesitation. This philosophy of seeking stillness when all is chaos and finding an eternal presence without regret, or fear, is with me even today.

I read Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which frames all human relations as a struggle between competing agendas that are prey to influence from external factors and subjective belief. His insights helped me grasp the concept that acting decisively outweighs appropriate planning in quickly changing conditions. But most importantly;

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”

As is similarly inscribed on the entrance to the Delphic Oracle, “know thyself”. My exposure to Confucian, Buddhist and Hellenic thought forced a fierce examination of my purpose in life. That, and the pressure cooker of adjusting to military conventions lead to the realisation that my quest to become a warrior was metaphoric and did not require the literal act of murder.

Eiji Yoshikawa’s glorification of the life of Musashi in his serialised novel by the same name gave possible clues to the ultimate goal of the warrior’s life, to lead others and finally one’s self to self-actualisation through an application of the way of the warrior to art and culture. Musashi claimed in his Book of Five Rings that “When I apply the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer have need for a teacher in any domain.”

I returned to University soon after returning to Brisbane, but was out of step with my study and unable to gain financial assistance so I turned my passion for cycling into an income becoming a bicycle courier for Power Couriers.

to be continued…

I’ve been asked to reflect on my trajectory through higher education and to be honest, I’ve been having trouble with the overabundance of definitions for reflection. Words tend to use their power when they are overused, and I had come to believe that the word was used in the sense of a passive contemplation. I wasn’t happy that reflection, in that sense, had any power to describe what I do in practice. Until yesterday.

While attempting to track down the recommended text for my coursework (ED5300) I stumbled across an excerpt from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield. He starts with the declaration “we teach to change the world”. I was so encouraged by this that I almost blurted it out to a fellow cyclist on my ride into work today, when he bemoaned the fact that he would rather be riding but had to find a way to pay the bills. That, my friend, is not all there is to work and play.

I believe in the transformative power of education. Education has the power to change lives, starting with my own. When I hear declarations like Brookfield’s I am inspired to continue developing academically so that I bring that power to others. But there was something more that appealed to me in his idea that reflection was about hunting assumptions.

Hunting assumptions for me becomes the primal intellectual urge. It is not just something I can do, but something that I must.

Education as an industry has been built upon assumptions that no longer apply. We see the crushing weight of student loans in the United States in an economic environment which makes it nearly impossible to earn enough to pay them back. We see student activists in South America demanding education be returned to the people, free for all and guaranteed by the government. We see similar student uprisings against fee-hikes in the UK and other global unrest that some are calling a metamovement.

So as I begin to reflect on my academic trajectory, I do so with a warrior stance.

Highly recommend reading below. How do you approach reflection in practice? Is it something you bring actively, powerfully?

Brookfield, S. (1995). The getting of wisdom: What critically reflective teaching is and why it’s important. Retrieved from http://www.ronmilon.com/Documents/The%20Getting%20of%20Wisdom.doc

Jim picks up on Gordon’s (don’t call him Gordo) take on a MOOC - http://gbl55.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/cck11-man-this-mooc-is-something-else/

Six chick interrupts him from writing an important blog post for the CCK11 MOOC and hilarity ensues.

Man! this Mooc is Something Else (by wayFarUpNorth)