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LT2:2 Learning Technologies Day Two: Warming up to a mind-filling day

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 28 Jan 2011, 14:17

Warm Up

LT2:2 Blog 2

If I’m swimming lengths or running lengths then three minutes into my conference warm up I met Jonathan and Steve from Raise the Bar.

As a swimming coach who is currently on the last of 11 parts of the Senior Club Coach certificate, who produces training videos and has an interest in career development I am bound to find using sport and sporting personalities of interest.

Speaking to Jonathan Stanger from Raise the bar I wish that I’d recorded the conversation to play here as a podcast, even to have had a person with a Steadicam floating over my shoulder to record it all for later editing (that would incorporate their footage).

Jonathan talks with conviction and passion (it must be a Jonathan thing).

Thinking about it, a steadicam tour of the entire event, like a quick-march around an Ikea store, would offer a valuable view of it all ... we should have moved on from chunky exhibition directories by now. I didn't notice anyone flicking through the PDF version on an iPad either.

Raise the Bar. Stand 219

Raise%20the%20Bar%202.JPG

  • Goal Setting
  • Bringing out strengths
  • Making an impact
  • Body language
  • Confidence
  • Energy
  • Emerging leaders
  • Feedback and best practice
  • PDP = performance development programme

Key words and buzz words

Personalities have a role to play, they can inspire. It implies to those attending such events/courses that they matter, that getting insights from the best makes them the best.

I believe that motivational presentations have their place

They are uplifting; a personal story of overcoming hurdles/obstacles while striving for success is our own life story. Ideas expressed by the right person may last a lifetime. Now what was it that Roger Uttley said to me when he was playing for Gosforth FC (Newcastle FC since 1996). We lived out the back of the rugby pitch (now a gated estate of executive homes): I would have been 12 or so. I'll look it up later.

Why do we listen to sporting legends or our own sporting heroes?

We will have a period of 18 months where the sports analogies will fly; a good result for team GB will see stock prices rise as the national spirits picks up its pace too.

My hope is to be covering swimming extensively, using HD cameras above and below water, to follow the development of swimmers, coaches and the clubs they belong to and so to raise the temperature in the pool, as well as the bar.

Raise the Bar clients to be proud of: NatWest, Metropolitan Police, Lloyds TSB, RBS, Caudex Medical, Unum, Boots, Talisman, TMB.

P.S.

Most seminars were covered and at various stages I spotted a broadcast crew and other camera people about. Where is all this footage going? In need to be in the public domain soon all we'll have all moved on.

DSC00592.JPG

 

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Video expands the mind ... and use of the Internet

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012, 16:58

 

 

GoldernGuysofVideo.jpg

I call it the coming of 'WikiTVia;' the tipping point where we view and listen to wikipedia. This will engage, persuade, educate and entertain audiences the way reading can never do (however many links you have).

Jakob Nielsen and his team, as well as academics, are stripping the blogosphere bare to understand how it works.

Birds of a Feather: How personality influences blog writing and reading.

It ain't like you imagine.

Those who generate content are a fraction of total users, 1% is the figure Nielsen gives. This 1% generate content beyond the ken of lesser mortals; you may say they are obsessive about it. Nielsen cites the Amazon book reviewer who wrote 1,275 reviews in one year (is that all). I liken these people to what advertisers call 'champions.' The key influencers of a cohort or group, early adopters, who innovate first and do so with conviction and passion.

Nielsen eleaborates on this and calls it 90-9-1.

Taking this into the realm of video my intuition supposes that these 'Golden Boys & Girls' of content generation will be and are the same people who will have a Flip camera in their pocket (or simply use their phone) to capture or generate orignial content then upload. Content generated on a theme, from a premise, that has some link or basis in its text form will generate an explosive interest in the subject matter beyond its original audience. Video has this power to engage, to persuade, to intrigue and interest the viewer.

Rich content enriches minds.

VJs ?

Like DJs they have a following.

Though the content should be king, not its author.

Me?

I'm this 1%.

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Text Volume Control Slider Thingey

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 4 Feb 2013, 14:20

 

Once you have the definitive response to a fact, something composed as a wiki that has been thoroughly reviewed I'd then like to see this thinking, initially just in words, animated via a slider, the kind of volume control we're used to seeing, only this, instead of increasing the volume of sound, increases the number of words.

 

Text Volume Control drawn in Dia

 

In this way you choose your moment to read a bit, a bit more, or a lot, the whole thing, and or everything (in theory) that went through the author's mind when they wrote their chapter/boo/report in the first place by having not just the links, but the references open and ready to read in an instance.

Indulgent?

The expert mind does this anyway. By the time you've read so extensively on a subject that you hear its authors speaking, you tap into a form of this. You could at any moment offer a summary, or talk for hours on 'your' subject.

I would like this opportunity from the start, from the point of ignorance, to nudge back and forth, to 'rock n roll' as a soundengineer would put it, finding the point to cut a sound track, the 'sweet point' for where I was at, where enough was being said to engage me ... or, were I about to alight from a train, a bitsize thought on which I could chew 'til the opportunity arose to indulge and nudge this 'text volume control' along the scale.

Now think of this as a slice in a pie.

 

Asset%20Slider.JPG
From Drop Box


Open it out and you migrate away from text alone to include stills, video and sound. For example, the image-based expression of this concept, and a particular issue/idea/fact/report, begins with a single image, like a book cover, or TV title sequence ... as you run along our 'volume control' the number and range of images expands.

Just a thought.

 

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The importance of the words

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 08:15

Writing is everything.

I'd master it now. Keeping a blog is a sure darned way to do that. Handwritten is fine; find yourself the perfect pen.

Writing, or rather the ability to write.

It is the key to communication, to learning and to e-learning, and a great deal else besides.

On my passport it says 'writer, director.'

I like that, though I think of my skill as a visualiser and the writing and directing is rarely TV, but corporate and classroom training, desk-top learning, and product launches, change brand and change management.  Still there can be drama in it, and tears, and death, and love, and life, and music and dance. We go underwater and scale mountains, enter shear caves of nuclear power plants and wade through sewers, track super-models along catwalks in Paris and record the last words of a man dying of cancer in Carlisle.

I see things in pictures.

Perhaps the MA in Fine Art IS what I should have started a year ago ... though I fear I may have missed out.

It's easy enough I find to get my 'hand back in' if I want to draw something as it is rather like riding a bike, or skiing in deep powder snow, or racing a Fireball, or pushing off a wall in Breaststroke and emerging from a legal transition half way down a 25m pool ... once you've put in the days, months, years (even decades) learning to do these things, barring ill-health and great age, you ought to be able to do them for some time to come.

Which reminds me, I want to crack written French in 2011.

Clients think of me as something in addition to writing and directing (I produce), but no. that's not it; there are words, voices, images, cut together and linked in various ways that form linear and non-linear assemblages, but to them I am 'a problem solved', a job delivered, with passion, on time, on budget (of course), sometimes as a team of one, but sometimes in a team of a few or many more. I do wonder if sometimes an email with the finally agreed Creative Brief is the end of the process, rather than beginning.

Today, once you've solved that you can invite everyone to come up with their own creative execution.

Now there's a thought I'd not heard coming.

All of this takes words, expressing and solving the problem and sharing this requires words. A fast, reliable typing speed helps too. So perhaps my Mum was right to get me a typewriter when I was 13 when I wanted an electric guitar.

Sometimes I find the problem for the client and share it with them in all its beautiful ghastliness.

This is what good writing means. And experience. And judgment. And belief. And your approach and thoroughness. And the write people around you. And sometimes conviction that £60,000 will deliver the job, but £600 will not.

Good writing is less about the words chosen and put on the page (unless you are a novelist or poet, and I am neither), no, good writing is a good idea, clearly expressed, in as few words as possible. (Which in due course requires editing something like this).

Who is it who said the selling is a good idea?

That all it takes to sell something, is to have a good idea.

Good writing has a purpose and the author knows how to put the words to work by addressing a problem, because you know your audience and whether you or someone else is the subject matter expert, it is your responsibility, even if the words are hidden by a creative brief, a synopsis, treatments and scripts, to get the message across ... like, with some or many images (photos, graphics, cartoons), or with the spoken words and/or similar images that move ...

A swimming club session plan written on a whiteboard to take a squad of swimmers can be beautifully written if it is magically composed, and serves its immediate purpose. The good swimming coach rarely leaves such things in the head. It is thought-out, it is planned, it fits into the scheme of things, it is the right session for that hour or two.

Good writing hits a chord; it too is of the moment.

I conclude that a good teacher, a good tutor, educator, practitioner of e-learning ... all have this ability to write well at the core of their being. They are confident with words, words that are as carefully chosen even if spoken on the fly, as a result of their experience and all the lesson plans or scripts, or class programmes, they have written in the past that bubble up to the surface when faced with a problem - a fresh student.

(My only caveat is the from the podcasts I've heard before an educator is interviewed they should at least have the wisdom to do some media training).

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Mind, metaphor and mirror neurons - and the impact on blogging

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 Nov 2014, 06:56

1. Are we hard-wired to how we conceptualise ideas?

2. Does this help or hinder the way we use eLearning tools?

3. Will children, say, 50 years from now, look at paper and pen in the same way as a person does now when they take a first look at computer?

4. Are we at some 'transition' point, and if we are, what does this mean?

My tutor in H808 asked me this on 12th September.

I feel far better able to reply now after four months of H808 and some fortuitous reading, though I did respond at the time. My forum thread exchange then and reflection on it today will form part of my ECA.

It surprises me that I have subscribed to a magazine at all, but I find the New Scientist offers plenty on our e-world upon which to reflect and insights to all kinds of other things that tickle my brain.

It matters that you read broadly.

The French Film Director Francois Truffaut was a firm believer of reading everything and anything that caught your attention. He’d have loved the web. It matters that you follow what the web offers, then browse the shelves for magazines at the newsagent on the forecourt of your station.

My favourite button that has been crucial to the longevity of my blog (elsewhere) for the last seven years is ‘Enter@Random.’

We don’t think in chronological order.

thinking is a mess, it selects ideas and makes things up sing different sides and corners and crooks and crannies of our brains. I unplugged the calendar on my diary in year one and replaced it with 12 themes that have now grown to 37. For a period there were 37 blogs, but try managing that, to say you end up with a split personality is an understatement.

My tutor put it to me (and us) the H808 Tutor Group:

1. Are we hard-wired to how we conceptualise ideas?

Dr Vilayanur S Ramachandran thinks so. We have a unique capacity to think in metaphors. This matters. It is this ability that makes us creative, allows us to be inventive, it is what makes us human beings.

Read all about in the New Scientist.

Quoted here within the 200 word count permission for a student quote.

Added as for student reading in a non-commercial academic context having read the copyright permissions.

Ramachandran is particularly interested in metaphor because it ties in neatly with his previous work on synaesthesia - a kind of sensory hijack, where, for example, people see numbers as colours or taste words. "Metaphor is our ability to link seemingly unrelated ideas, just like synaesthesia links the senses," he says.

After spending years working with people who have synaesthesia, he believes "pruning genes" are responsible. In the fetal brain, all parts of the brain are interconnected, but as we age, the connections are pruned. If the pruning genes get it wrong, the connections are off. "If you think of ideas as being enshrined in neural populations in the brain, if you get greater cross-connectivity you're going to create a propensity towards metaphorical thinking," he says.

I don't have synaesthesia, neither does Ramachandran, but he points out to me the strangeness of asking why, say, the cheddar cheese in your sandwich is "sharp". It's true, cheese isn't sharp, it's soft, so why do I use a tactile adjective to describe a gustatory sensation? "It means our brains are already replete with synaesthetic metaphors," he says. "Your loud shirt isn't making any noise, it's because the same genes that can predispose you to synaesthesia also predispose you to make links between seemingly unrelated ideas, which is the basis of creativity."

www.NewScientist.com.

Thomson (2010)

Of the 12 photographs in this issue as many as 8, I think, are from the Getty Image bank. I wonder if one day, especially if I’m reading this on an iPad the images will move, rather as the paints are alive in the background of a Harry Potter movie. It wouldn’t take much for a photography to video as well as, or instead of taking a photograph. Indeed, the BBC now permit directors to generate HD TV footage using digital SLR cameras … the lenses are better, the creative choices wider.

Interesting.

2. Does this help or hinder the way we use eLearning tools?

How we use the web, let alone e-learning tools is in its infancy. We are still putting old ways online, still making web-pages into slide shows and calling them immersive learning. Gaming may change this, with the budget. Better, faster tools will enabled more. Collaboration on world wide wikis with like minds, and great minds, contributing will speed up the rate of change.

We’ll think in the same metaphors though, share and reinforce new metaphors and then some Leonardo da Vinci of the 21st century will come along and break it apart. Though we may not appreciate their insights at all.

Mobile learning, smart-phone learning on the move, or whatever you want to call it should shake things up. At first this will be, and is, the same old stuff sent to your phone, basic card to card Q&A even if it includes a bit if video or an animated graph.

I want learning projected onto the back of my scull, I want it in my head, not online or in a device. I want interactions with specific parts of my brain. I want my brain duplicated so that I can take more lessons at the same time, to learn multiple languages and to take several degrees simultaneously.

3. Will children, say, 50 years from now, look at paper and pen in the same way as a person does now when they take a first look at computer?

It is extraordinary the relationship between our minds and out limbs, or arms and finger tips. With training we can sight read a score and play complex musical pieces, we can scroll, cut, edit, fly and colourise images into a piece of drama that has us crying, or heads in our hands and we can type, like the clappers.

We can draw too, and sculpt, and swim and dance and do gymnastics.

Our relationship with the nerves in our body is a complex one. As for handwriting, our relationship with fountain pens, marker pens and pencils? It ought to be a skill still taught at school, there need to be handwriting competitions as there once were … even if they are tied into art classes and design.

How different is a stylus on a tablet to a piece of chalk on a slate?

I implore my children to write and draw. An illegible Christmas list is no list at all. They’d type, they do type. Yet how backwards is a QWERTY keyboard?

4. Are we at some 'transition' point, and if we are, what does this mean?

Yes. And I mean to be part of it.

We have reached the Tipping Point.

A book a read if I recall in 2001 when we thought we were approaching a tipping point, actually we were reaching the point at which the first e-bubble would burst. First and last? These things go in cycles, whatever the politicians do to stymie human nature. Greed and regret, progress, reflection, reinvention … then we do it all over.

We’re not even less violent than we were at the times of the Viking raids.

Meandering? A stream of consciousness? Reflection? Regurgitation?

All of this, and it all matters. You don’t have to read it, and you probably haven’t. This is here for me to find when I need it in seven months or seven years time.

It is remarkable how your views change; so it matters to have what you originally thought in front of you. There are memories I have that haven’t just been reworked over the decades, but have become different events. This isn’t simply age, though that has much to do with it, I view what I did as a child or teenager as I observe my own children today, the difference is, I can’t influence the behaviour and actions of my younger self, though I can, I hope listen to and guide my own children to actions and decisions they will feel comfortable with in the years to come

REFERENCE

Thomson, H (2010) V. S. Ramachandran: Mind, metaphor and mirror neurons 10 January 2011 by Helen Thomson Magazine issue 2794.

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Collaboration in most things

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 21 Nov 2011, 08:18

Experiences here, lessons learnt and studied, has me now appealing to friends and colleagues to collaborate on all kinds of things.

What strikes me, having spent a few years buried in my writing and alone with the task, is how I have always worked best in a team, if only in a team of two. I do well as number two, I like to have someone working to, for or with me, I like constructing larger teams.

The intention therefore is to throw several balls into the air, but rather than juggling alone there will be a troupe. These will be formed into formal teams (businesses, projects) and less formal ones (writing, thinking teams and partnerships).

The outcomes?

  • Results
  • Credits
  • Reputation
  • Income
  • Contentment
  • Pride

Whilst supported online I know too that for the sake of cohesion and commitment there will need to be face-to-face meetings and shared offices. As soon as I can get an office in town, I will do so. I am looking for a space at the University Innovation Centre and for the first time in a decade will get an address in the West End, back to Newburgh Street or Newman Street, or in Covent Garden.

Ask me in 12 months time how 2011 has been.

Either way I'll keep you posted here.

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Is it a conversation if all you do is nod you head?

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Is it a conversation if all you do is nod you head?

And contributions, whether relevant or not, are ignored?

Sometimes people want to release what is going on in their head, their frustration, anxieties and misunderstandings.

They want to verbalise their thoughts. This is reflection. They don't want you to comment either way. If anything all you can do is nudge them along.

Like a therapist?

Should a peice of reflection be offered publicly where comment is perhaps hoped for?

Does this make an asynchrnous conversation better than the one that's being going on at me for the last ten minutes?

(No I wasn't typing. Yes I'd turned off the TV and radio. Ostensibly I was listening. I made the mistake yesterday of suggesting some thoughts, even inviting a subject matter expert I know to get involved. Mistake. Sometimes after a couple of weeks writing a report you can't help by leak some words.

Wouldn't a mirror do?

Or as the character does in Avatar, just talking to yourself on a webcam?

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Where the OU's MAODE course fails, is to recognise an e-world currently dominated by Google and Facebook.

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 4 Dec 2010, 13:20

All efforts to deliver the best learning online will fail unless it can be commercialised and can compete in a global market.

Hasn't Google already got its foot jammed in the OU door?

Next the OU VLE will be ditched in favour of all OU courses being operated through Facebook with the OU eportfolio (already being compromised by the OU), ditched in favour of Google Docs or PepplePad. MyStuff is vastily superior - it was designed for the specific purpose of supporting OU students and is intergrated to the platform. Please simply put some effort into making the content interoperable. I've got 883 pages of content to date which I wish to exploit forever.

And why not?

The OU should and does concentrate on its core modus operandi ... sharing the higher education learning experience to as many as possible.

The OU is not and can never be the developer of software. It hasn't the capital or the commercial drive to compete. Instead it sidles up to the BBC and delivers worthy cross-platform learning experiences and indulgences.

The best place to e-learn on the planet?

Here of course. A bit of the OU, with the BBC, with an iPlayer.

I could do with a lot more TV to liven up H808.

I had expected video galore, clips on You Tube and men with beards on BBC2 in the middle of the night.

Let's do H808 TV.

I need a portaprompt.

I can write the script.

P.S. As a TV persion I do however appreciate that when you watch a TV programme you can be fooled - transcribe the script and you'll discover that more often than not the content is pitched at a 12 year old. Without instant links, peer review or collaborative development they can be as effective to learning as seeing a pretty picture in a cook book. The learning comes from gathering in the ingredients then having a go yourself. Anyone for 1066?

 

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H807 Block 3

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Now the building blocks come out. What stages must be passed through, what needs to be included, to create an effective e-learning course.

Not a teacher, so the reading will be gone over with great care.

Fascinating. Something I should have studied long ago, in the 1980s when I become involved in the production of training videos, in the 1990s when these become interactive in from 2000 as we went online.

My role? Writing and directing the video material that anchored the learning, as 10-20 minutes narrative pieces or as case studies, or vignetters to be inserted into a learning design that was of no concern to me.

Now it is.

Everything here in will be thought through not only with the ECA in mind, but with the scheduling, costing and team-creation for this project which will start looking for sponsors in July.

A focus and an incentive to learn.

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