Tonight a small group of learners met at a school in Coquitlam for a lesson on how to construct wiimote ir pens. These little homemade devices are amazing. They turn any ordinary whiteboard into a smart board sort of tool. These are all made from common household sorts of part yet this was no common lesson… The learners included three teachers, one sfu faculty associate (me!) and one middle school vice principal…. the teachers, two twelve year old boys. When I walked in the boys were just finishing up their organizing. They were dishing out the components to the work stations, scrambling to find an extra extension cords, getting the soldering irons preheated and downloading some software on to one of the classroom laptops. Then the teachers arrived and we got going. The boys showed us how to plan the wiring, solder the connections, complete the circuit and then use our cell phones to test the connection. They had the software up and running so that we could test out our pens on the screen as we finished. They had to talk us through downloading the softwareon our own away from home, but listening to them, it all seemed amazingly simple. All in all the experience was nothing short of wonderful and I loved that it was them teaching us. If you want to know more about these pens or how to contact these amazing young fellows, let me know. I’m happy to support them in this venture.
Category Archives: Technology
Why we blog?
As I read blogs, and I read a lot of blogs, I marvel and wonder about what keeps each blogger writing. I wonder when in their day they find time. What inspires them to choose that topic? What makes them believe that what they are writing is worth blogging about?
Last Friday I attending UBC’s Noted Scholar Lecture Series sponsored by The Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education (CCFI). This one, A Faculty of Education Celebrate Learning event, Learning 2.0: Digital Cultures, Media and Citizenship for a New Millennium, featured Megan Boler, Darin Barney, and Douglas Kellner. All three were fascinating with different perspectives on the role that digital culture and new media are playing in the creation and participation of citizenship in today’s world. Megan Boler spoke to her research which really looks at how people are participating and making sense of what she refers to as “truthiness” – that stance that politicians or others take that they are certain about something whether it is true or not. She distinguished between video (tv, online video, etc.) and blogging, finding that the same truthiness is not generally found in blogging, but is indeed in “viral video” productions which more often invokes satire and humour. Darin Barney spoke more to the increased politicization of technology and then Doug Kellner, in a very humorous and down to earth presentation explored the idea of media spectacle through tracing the US election thus far. All this lead me to think a bit about the role that blogging is playing in politicizing us and involving us in more active citizenship. So bloggers may blog for political reasons, to sway an audience, to provide a point of view or some kind of “truthiness” to borrow Boler’s phrase.
Certainly that is true in educational blogs as well. Educational bloggers, like political bloggers, blog to share ideas but is it more than that. Are we blogging to create a “camp”? to sway others to our way of teaching?
Catching up….
Day 2 – Ok, so it is really about day 12 and I’m a little behind. I can’t bear to miss the activites and so here is my work on
catching up. I’ve finally been off posting on other blogs that I haven’t visited yet. I haven’t done a lot so far but it is really getting out of the house here that is important. I did also manage to add a cocomment widget to my site so that I can track those comment I’ve made abroad. So that’s Day 3 covered too except that it wasn’t just joining cocomment that I needed to do, I still had to read Sue’s excellent post about various ways to track blogs. I learned a lot from that. Now I’ve joined the comment challenge group and I’ve figured out how to track a whole network of conversations.
Then, a little out of order as I often tend to be, I went looking for a blog post I didn’t agree with. I didn’t get very far before I found myself on Hey-monkeybrain looking at some rather silly but intriguing debate questions. It wouldn’t have been hard to find something I disagreed with there as the whole site is set up not for blogging so much as debating. An interesting tourist site for sure. But rather than posting I found myself needing to go back to drdyers site from where I had been referred to hey-monkeybrain, to post a question. (Day 4 taken care of except that it wasn’t a great questions, but hey, I’ll get better.) So still working on Day 5, finding what I disagree with, I managed to skip ahead to Day 6. After responding to another comment I came back and read that there is netiquette for doing that. (Who knew? I’ll get it right next time.) Day 7, I’ve done a few days ago almost right after my very steep learning leap into this challenge. I may be ready to tackle a repeat of that one soon. So, tomorrow I’ll move on to finding something outside my niche, considering the allow/not allow comments debate and my own comment audit.
The 3 best things I’ve learned in the challenge
I’m blogging in two places, here and at TLITE online. TLITE online though is intended more as an information blog for the SFU TLITE program (Teaching and Learning in an Information Technology Environment) not my own personal blog. So when Sue Waters commented on my post there and asked me what three best things I’ve learned from the blog challenge, I decided to move that conversation here.
First off, it is a great question. Like blogging it general the question really made me think because when I write to post, as opposed to writing privately for my own clarity in thinking, it matters what I say. The blog challenge has made that even more apparent for me because by being encouraged to go and comment on other people’s blogs, I’m now finding that others come and find my blog.
So, what I learned? The first and most delightful thing is really a whole paradigm shift. It hasn’t happened just from the challenge alone but really from the convergence of a variety of factors, probably some of which made me decide to take on the challenge in the first place. That shift is about the amazing connection and webbing that can happen with blogging. Previously I had thought about it almost as a semi public version of my own private journal. I was never ever writing for an audience even though I knew others could read it, I hadn’t really thought about that they would. Now, the understanding that not only can others read it, but in fact they will read it adds a whole twist to the idea of being able to engage in a dialogue. I see blogging much differently. It has much more relevance towards being able to create voice and actively work for change. I’m interested in change in education, specifically change in the way we teach. Blogging has become a potentially powerful tool in promoting that change.
That leads to the second best thing I’ve learned in the challenge and that is that blogging is not just about doing what I am doing right now. To really be a blogger I can’t just write my own blog. I have to be an active member of the blogging community and so I have to get out there and read and comment on other people’s blogs. That is equally as important because it is the participation and active membership that makes blogging such an incredibly powerful change agent. But like any good conversation I learn from both listening to others (reading blogs) and exercising my voice (writing my blog).
The third best thing is that there are a whole lot of tricks and tips, best practices if you will in this blogging world. I’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg but I’m on the lookout for building my own toolbox of what these are. I’m starting with the questions I’m coming across: how to keep a conversation going, when to comment back, when to move a conversation back here to my own blog site, how to track comments, how to collate my favorite blog sites into one collection, how to best use tags and so many more that I’ll discover today. So this third best thing is really that it is an art that I’m only just beginning to learn to master.
Collaboration
In reviewing my portfolio this week, I’ve decided that I’m actually not that great at collaborating. I think I’m too easily impatient and/or too social when I’m working with others. I find it hard to get the right balance and so my tendency is to feel that I don’t get a lot done when I collaborate, at least in the style of what I think optimal collaboration ought to be. My preference is usually to share ideas, plan what needs to be done and then divide the work up to do. I’m not very good at writing with others or actually doing the work right along side others. I wonder if anybody is? I find it hard to balance being nice with getting my own thoughts or opinions across, having my voice heard. I tend to give too much to being nice, or if I don’t I often end up feeling as though I was too pushy. I think this is something that I really need to work on developing more.
With my increased interest in learning to use blogging to collaborate this will be an interesting undertaking to see what, if any difference this technology as a tool can make to my ability to collaborate. The challenge will be, can I find ways to get better at collaborating by making better use of the technology? Will blogging help me? Will commenting on other blogs lead to better collaboration? Or, are these completely separate things? I wonder what others think about this. If you’re reading this perhaps you’d comment on your own ability to collaborate effectively with others and what difference technology is making for you? Does blogging help? What can I learn from you about how to be better at collaborating?