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H809: Activity 8.5 Reading Crook and Dymott

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 1 Apr 2013, 09:14

Reread the introduction to Crook and Dymott’s chapter. Then read the rest of the paper. As you are doing so, make notes on the following:

What part do the five aspects of writing (text on the screen; text on the network; text as electronic traffic; text and the website; and the dialogue around text) play in describing the activity of writing? Do they ‘effect’ writing or ‘constitute’ it? How?

Do you think that the learning involved in writing the assignments, or carrying out the other tasks described, is located in the head of the students? Or do you think it is distributed and situated?

Crook and Dymott discuss the fact that there were substantial differences in the ways in which individual students used resources in one of the tasks (p. 103). What does this tell us about the mediated, situated and distributed nature of the activity?

If you were given the opportunity to assess some of the students’ assignments that are described in this chapter, where would you focus your attention: on the end product or on the process of writing, and why?

Which methodologies would you use to carry out your assessment of the students’ assignments, over and above those described in the chapter, and why?

_____________________________________________________________________

Writing is a function of the communicating clusters in our brain and will produce the same results whether cuneiform on clay, hieroglyphs on stone, handwriting on papyrus, printing on paper, text on a screen or an annotated animation in a video. The way the brain functions is to read it or to compose it remains the same.

Learning is both an artifact and a process - the artifact exists as a potential in the brain and when stimulated can in part, through the complexity, be seen in a fMRI scan. The process of learning takes place as an interaction with the world around us, more people, but also the context and ours.

Quiz 100 students at the OU who study online and you will get a wide variety of answers.

I don't think one approach would correlate with better or worse results either. Students come to understand that it requires some kind of participation with the text beyond simply reading it - so whatsoever the platform you learn to take notes, or highlight, or in my case even screen grab and crop in order to filter, punctuated, and reduced the text - and in the process make it you own.

The end result is far and away the most important consideration, if the result is very good or very poor it might be worth asking what the students did. Chances are nit long ago it would have been exactly the same thing - the higher scorer simply doing more of it, with greater effort and focus.

An in depth hour long interview, with video recording for further later analysis - and a follow up even to this. And stuffing the ethics of it leaving the recorder on beyond the end of the formal interview. This is necessary in order to get some semblance of what was really going on.

A diary or journal kept st the time and discussed can offer insights though some will struggle so a prompt sheet of some 16 or so questions might help them record the facts and detail that matters.

Going to a further extreme, and with any ethical and legal, and privacy/data protection issues covered, to use a SenseCam or some such life-logging device in order to understand what really went on - in particular the context.

I am flat on my back on a bed with an iPad at the moment, but can be at a laptop in the kitchen or in front of some huge screens on my son's desktop. I prefer eBooks and will highlight, note, even comment and Tweet thoughts as I go along.

Wherever my head goes my 'cloud' comes with me.

When I can only have the book then I do as I did as an undergraduate - I take notes as I go along - into the iPad with pages bookmarked with PostIts.

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H809: Activity 8.7: Comparing your answers with your tutor group (2 hours)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 20 Oct 2014, 09:19

As a way to consolidate your activities in Week 8, we want you to discuss how you completed Table 8.1. We suggest you use the following questions to frame the discussion in your tutor group forum.

 

 

Does learning happen within the head of an individual, or is it mediated, situated and distributed?

 

Learning as an artefact is the potential informed or insightful response in an individual's brain. Learning as a process includes the mechanisms of the brain and everything that person perceives around them - which must indirectly include everything they've laid down in their memory and how the subconscious responds to any of it.

What does a test or exam measure?

A test or exam can only be judged by how it is constructed and where and how it fits into a period of study - is the test part of the learning process or an assessment? Are the questions open or closed? Are their significant time constraints or not? So they should test what they were designed to test.

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H817 Open Activity 8: Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 21 June 2013, 07:40

H817 Open Activity 8

ACTIVITY: Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Often the messiest and most problematic of tasks prove to be the most revealing.

Thinking of a group of swimming teachers as participants in some Open Learning was a challenge as some would never have used a computer at all. I thought of another group, nursery nurses and even contemplated going on to undergraduate medical students or junior doctors so that I could imagine working with a digital literate group but then returned to the challenge of introducing those with no experience of computers at all.

Do you try to teach someone to swim butterfly when they cannot swim? Can a swimming teacher learn anything if they don’t have access to a swimming pool? This is what it felt like - clearly OER is never suitable for everyone - the learning outcomes must come first, then how to deliver these in a way that suits the participants. There’s a saying in advertising, ‘preach to the converted’ i.e. you are selling goods and services to people who want them anyway. The easiest ‘sell’ would be to create a course on digital skills for those who are just coming online and are eager to acquire the skills, rather than a group that includes those who have no digital skills and are even belligerent or disinclined to take any interest.

Coming from Learning & Development we have sometimes been expected to ‘shoehorn’ other people’s content, or the client’s old content, into the production. We decline. We will use the material to inform the production process only. There is a reason, for narrative and continuity why I still feel that creating your own bespoke content is often a better alternative, otherwise there can be discontinuity, the need for writing in caveats, or simply reversioning as participants take a negative view of the smallest of things - say US English used instead of UK English.

Week

Topic

Resources

Suitability (G/M/B)

1

INTRODUCTION

to the Web and digital skills

Learning on the go

Mobile devices

Just in time or applied resources and tools.

Websites and social media

Twitter, Facebook … WordPress

Wikis

Keyboard Basics

6 Learning Methods Every Teacher Should Have

Internet Basic (UK GOV)

Using the Web (BBC Webwise)

M

M

M

G

2

SEARCH

Find a variety of content on MSM Website related to schedules, programmes, events, Swim21, contacts and compliance

Download and open PDF files.

Login and add personal details

Searching: Making the most of being online (BBC Webwise)

Searching the Internet (UK GOV)

Mid Sussex Marlins

Locate Swim21, download the Code of Ethics PDF, email the Swim21 Officer to say that you agree to abide by these guidelines.

G

M

3

VIEW

Select a video on swimming  technique from the Breakwater Swimming Website and note tips you would use in a training or teaching session.

Breakwater Swimming Training

M

4

PARTICIPATE

Register with IoS

Online Forms

Navigate/Search Function

Find and do a 1 hour free CPD of your choices

Multiple-choice

Audio/View

Rate/Comment

Register with the Institute of Swimming

Do a Free Continual Professional Development (CPD) refreshed - 1 hour

Working and Learning in Sports and Fitness

Open Learn, The OU

Track 6

How to develop reflective skills and improve leadership techniques. Part of The OU course E113 Working and learning in sport and fitness.

G

5

CREATE

Register withe blog host

Create a journal entry on a session and reflect

ELABORATE

Find and comment on other club and personal blogs

Create and load video

Legalese

Starting a new Web Site

Blogging, a tool used to reflect and learn

Be Secure Online (UK Gov)

How to avoid online fraud

Twitter Users.  A Guide to the Law (BBC Webwise)

B

B

G

G

 

REFLECTION

It was recently announced that a company had created a connector or ‘brick’ that allows those playing with either Lego bricks or Konnex to connect to two. It strikes me that OER requires some conformity in the creation of the learning resource in the first place to allow such bonds and that templates or connectors are required too. However, even if the learning resource is an idea expressed as a doodle with some text or a series of annotated diagrams from a whiteboard that are photographer and put online I believe this is far preferable to shoehorning another’s ideas into your learning design. Can you construct a new short story by lifting paragraphs from others? Can you construct original Shakespeare by mashing up lines from different monologues? Can you create a coherent painting by grabbing elements from a number of masters? This isn’t the same as the remixing musicians do, or is it? This isn’t the same as taking a cooking recipe and changing some of the ingredients - it is about the quality, truth, conviction, coherence and flow of a persuasive narrative.

My greatest challenge is the nature of the intended audience, whilst ‘Swimming Teachers and Coaches’ is one way to define them, for most this is a volunteer role for an hour or so a week, for a few more a modest part-time and paid role for perhaps 6 to 8 hours and only part-time and professional for 3 or 4 - say 12-16, sometimes 22 hours a week. They are a disparate group too - from airline pilots and Doctors, to a retired postman and an assistant in Waitrose who left school with no qualifications and now understand that they have Dyslexia. One is doing an MA in Sports Science online, another gets his wife to receive and send emails - yet another her husband. This spectrum of digitally literate ‘residents’ to the ‘occasional visitor’ even the non-user - and in some cases belligerently ante-Internet means that to reach this group requires more group workshops, face to face applied ‘poolside on the job’ and hand-outs. Content online needs to be printable so that if necessary intermediaries can print off in specific fonts onto coloured paper for those with Dyslexia. Content in the post, the traditionally distance learning approach would be favoured by some.

PROBLEMS

Links no longer valid or content removed, sometimes for declared copyright issues, such as here. Not having adequate input into the bespoke construction of the content in the first place, and then the possibility that the content may be removed is a problem.

Several hours too late I gave up on the depositories. I have always found UK Gov websites very easy and clear, say for calculating and paying tax, or getting a Road Licence for the car. With the drive to have everyone on Universal Credit using the web - those in the community who are most likely also to have no or poor digital literacy skills or access, I wondered what training and support UK GOV offered. I was delighted with the ‘We Make Getting Online Easier’ website and feel that it would support those for whom using the Internet would be a struggle - how and where they get online is another matter if they don’t have an Internet connection at home, or a Smartphone. For continuity reasons I may then use this website through-out with the only venture away to look at YouTube ‘How to ...’ videos relating to swimming teaching and coaching. I then checked the BBC and for UK residents found the BBC WebWise resources perfect. Start on the home page, run through the content bit by bit over the weeks.

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What will the impact be of the Web on education?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 29 Mar 2013, 04:54

How is knowledge sharing and learning changing?

From four or five months after conception with the formation of the brain, to the moment of brain death we have the capacity to learn, subconsciously as well as consciously. Whether through interlopers prior to birth, in infancy and early childhood, or through family and carers in our final moment, days, weeks, months or years. At both ends of life the Web through a myriad of ways can advise, suggest and inform, and so educate, like never before. While for all the time in between as sponges, participants and students we can access, interact, interpose and interject in an environment where everything that is known and has been understood is presented to us. The interface between person and this Web of knowledge is a fascinating one that deserves close study for its potentially profound impact on what we as humans can achieve as individuals and collectively:  Individually through, by with and surfing the established and privileged formal and formal conveyor belt of education through nursery, primary, secondary and tertiary centres of learning. Individually, also through expanding opportunities globally to learn unfettered by such formal education where such established opportunities don’t exist unless hindered through poverty and politics or a lack of communications infrastructure (a robust broadband connection to the Web). And individually and collectively alongside or beyond whatever formal education is provided or exploited by finger tapping into close and expanded networks of people, materials, ideas and activities.

By seeking to peg answers to the role the Web is starting to play, at one end to the very first opportunity, at the micro-biological level to form a thought and at the other end to those micro-seconds at the end of life once the brain ceases to function - and everything else in between, requires an understandings neuroscience and an answer to the question ‘what is going on in there?’ How do we learn?

From an anthropological perspective why and how do we learn? Where can we identify the origins of knowledge sharing and its role in the survival and domination of homo sapiens? And from our migration from the savannas of Eastern Africa to every nook and cranny of Earth, on land and sea, what recognised societal behaviours are playing out online? And are these behaviours mimicked or to a lesser extent transmogrified, warped or elevated by the scope, scale and speed of being connected to so much in such variety?

A history of learning is required. From our innate conscious and subconscious capacity to learn from our immediate family and community how has formal education formed right the way through adding reading, writing and numeracy as a foundation to subject choices and specialisms, so momentarily expanded in secondary education into the single subjects studied at undergraduate level and the niche within a niche at Masters and doctoral levels. And what role has and will formal and informal learning continue to have, at work and play if increasing numbers of people globally have a school or university in their pockets, courtesy of a smartphone or tablet and a connection to the Web?

The global village Marshall Mcluhan described is now, for the person connected to the Web, the global fireplace. It has that ability to gather people around. Where though are its limits? With how many people can we develop and maintain a relationship? Once again, how can an understanding of social networks on the ground inform us about those that form on the Web? Multiplicity reins for some, flitting between a variety of groups while others have their niche interests indulged, celebrated and reinforced. Is there an identifiable geography of such hubs small and large and if visualised what does this tell us? Are the ways we can now learn new or old?

In relation to one aspect of education - medicine - how are we informed and how do we respond as patients and clinicians?

The journey starts at conception with the mixing of DNA and ends once the last electrochemical spark has fired. How, in relation to medicine does the quality (or lack of), scale and variety of information available on the Web inform and impact upon our ideas and actions the length of this lifetime’s journey At one end, parents making decisions regarding having children, then knowledge of pregnancy and foetal development. While at the other end, a child takes part in the decision making process with clinicians and potentially the patient - to ‘call it a day’. Both the patient or person, as participant and the clinicians as interlocutors have, potentially, the same level of information at their fingertips courtesy of the Web. How is this relationship and the outcomes altered where the patient will know more about their own health and a good deal about a clinician’s specialism? The relationship between the doctor and patient, like others, courtesy of the connectivity and capacity of the Web, has changed - transmogrified, melted and flipped all at the same time. It is no longer them and us, though it can be - rather, as in education and other fields, it can be highly personalized and close. Can clinicians be many things to many people? Can any or only some of us cope with such multiplicity? A psychologist may say some will and some won’t, some have the nature for it, others not. Ditto in education. Trained to lead a classroom in a domain of their own, can a teacher take on multiple roles aimed at responding to the unique as well as the common traits of each of their students? While in tertiary education should and can academics continue to be, or expected to be undertake research as well as teach? Where teaching might be more akin to broadcasting, and the classroom or tutorial takes place asynchronously and online as well as live and face-to-face. Disaggregation equals change.

In relation to one aspect of education in medicine and one kind of problem, what role might the Web play to support patients so that they can make an informed decision regarding the taking of potentially life saving, if not simply life improving, medications? Having understood the complexity of reasons why having been prescribed a preventer medication, for example, to reduce or even eliminate the risk of a serious asthma attack, what is going on where a patient elects, sometimes belligerently, not to take the medication. Others are forgetful, some misinformed, for others it is the cost, or the palaver of ordering, collecting and paying for repeat prescriptions.

Information alone isn’t enough, but given the capacity of the web to brief a person on an individual basis, where they are online, what can be done to improve adherence, save lives and enhance the quality of life?

My hypothesis is that a patient can be assisted by an artificial companion of some kind, that is responsive to the person’s vicissitudes while metaphorically sitting on that person’s shoulder i.e. in the ‘Cloud’ and on their smartphone, tablet, headset, laptop or whatever other assistive interface will exist between us and the Web.

 

 

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H809 Activity 8.1-8.5 Teenagers do Physics with the intervention of a computer to prompt discussion

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 June 2013, 09:14

Mini+Marshmallows.JPG

In the abstract we are told that ‘Although ICT resources are commonly expected to produce uniform benefits’ Tolmie (2001) Are they? And that, ‘they are necessarily employed within pre-existing contexts of educational and social activity’. Tolmie (2001)

When and where could a context NOT be pre-existing?? Something is, or is not. Context is an absolute.

Rather, what is that specific context. Otherwise this is tautology. It is like saying that electricity pylons go into an existing landscape. Isn’t this stating the obvious so that a gullible audience nod in agreement?

Tolmie (2001) talks of ‘unexpectedly diverse effects’. Unexpectedly or diverse? Surely not both.

Is this not something of an exaggeration? And in any case, such diverse responses should be either expected, or not presumed either way to be likely or unlikely to happen. It is very dangerous to pre-empt findings.

I visualise the introduction of new technology such as this as drops of ink in a pool of water in a stream  - it has to compete with the mix that is already there, as well as its natural flow and other behaviours - leaking away into the land and evaporation for a start.

My conclusion based on reading the abstract is to: Think people above all else. Internal and external contexts are fluid and based on responses too and feelings.

It is all complex, and more to do with the brains of the individuals than simply their context . Everything can and should be measured in some way, from an agreed benchmark, to monitor, track then analyse. It is far more complex.

Take any class, habituated by the classroom, the people around us and the pattern and behaviour of the teacher … especially on a warm Friday afternoon, no wonder the mind wanders. Just because a person is physically in a classroom, even participating in a task, does not mean that much is going in if they are dreaming of the weekend or Fiona Henderson from the girl’s school down the road …

The expression ‘oversimplified’ used by Tolmie (2001)  is a) hyperbole b) a value judgment.

Better ‘simplified’, preferably qualification of the term - simplified as in ‘clipped or contained’ that parameters are created because of the remit of the funding process. You are not able to ‘look outside the box’ as only that which takes place in the box is funded. There needs to be some of one and some of the other - research based on ‘tackling circumscribed needs’ while at the same time research that has an open brief and is open ended - that stands back to see the wood for the trees, rather than, to continue the metaphor, to examine only one kind of tree in the woods in order to avert the ‘mentality of one-stop resources’ mentioned by Oliver & Conole (1998)

How else do you address improving a situation other than by identifying the problems?

Anything else is misguided (literally), or indulgent. Far worse, in the NHS, and Post Office and Banking System have been wholesale computing systems that really were alien and universal.

Change management. Everyone has a point. Time to listen and involves matters most. The psychology of innovation. Resistance is despised. (Robinson et al., 1998)

Making the wrong assumptions that blame the teachers rather than the technology - which is a catalyst for complexity, rather than a tool for conformity.

Evaluation work also rarely does more than examine the explicitly intended effects of ICT, and so fails to identify unintended or serendipitous repercussions that may actually be a critical aspect of its impact (Jones, 1998).

But the entire point and context of an exam is to remove such context in the surroundings by placing the student in ‘exam conditions’ in a neutral space, where parameters of time and context are controlled and aim to be common to other students and impartial.

Surroundings mean different things to different people. It is naive and deterministic to think that people are so easily governed by their context. The individual over the surroundings. Unless we think students are like a uniform tribal grouping.

I'm through the reading and taking it further - reading the original paper to see if my concerns and amusement are justified.

I find the gender difference uninsightful and unhelpful - we know this anyway. Men and woman are different physiologically - which includes the brain where there are various documented differences especially between the differing amount of grey and white matter and the concentration of neurones and close connections in women compared to men. But the differences between men and women are not black and white (and their are not racial differences whatsoever) ... within these differences there is considerable variety.

Now add each person's context - which for me starts a few months after conception and every possible influence since - the same chaos theory that says that when a butterfly beats its wings in the Brazilian Jungle there is a typhoon in Malaysia will suggest that that marshmallow your grandmother gave you on Christmas day when you were six while watching Jimmy Saville introduce the Chart Show will influence how you respond to the 14 year old boy you have been paired up with in a physics class who offers you a handful of mini-marshmallows by way of 'making friends' who in turn is nervous about this strange but beautiful creature who he hasn't noticed all year but rather fancies even though his older brother has his eye on her - what was that the teacher said checking the trajectory of your balls on the computer ?????

The wrong approach was taken, though the theory throws up some interesting questions

I will change my opinion as I go through my notes but my current stance is that a quantitative before and after study requires many hundreds of participants in a randomised controlled trial and the gender differences are a distraction - far better to have administered questionnaires before and after and drawn upon each students SATS results or some such to get some sense of where they were coming from in relation to physics.

More interesting pairings would be like-minds and enemies - really. A couple of buddies having a laugh might learn less than a pair who can't stand each other, or another pair who are rivals.

Have I been watching too many teen movies? Probably.

Already I have a script in my head based on Tolmie in which far from being the less talkative, the FM pairs are chatting away to themselves (in their heads, written and delivered as stream of consciousness voice over), communicating in subtle ways through body language and as a result actually communicating more, not less than the ones who won't shut up - and who may be playing up to the research conditions.

This is the other fundamental humdinger of a problem - these students are being tested under 'lab conditions'.

My memories of teenager physics classes are more akin to St.Trinian's with boys. I even have a diary to call upon which I may look at just to get me into the role. I have a household of teenagers and another five nephews and nieces in this age bracket if I need to be reminded of what it is (and was) like.

Oddly enough, work is often the last thing on their minds. Which is why homework is so important - fewer potential distractions.

This will be less than hearsay in due course - I am also refreshing what it was and is like to be a teenager through some additional reading. Problem is my daughter senses that I am observing her from time to time.

I'm just asking myself the same question I asked when she was born, 'what is going on in there?' - but in a quasi-academic rather than father-daughter way.

Researchers make the mistake of believing that their intervention - in this case using a computer to support a physics class by trying to prompt discussion - is going to make some measurable difference.

Can they not see the bigger picture, and how vast it is?

If each human brain has as many neurons in it as the visible galaxy - 98 billion, and each brain though similar, is connected in different ways, by gender but essentially by genetics, with every remembered moment of waking and sleeping life in between. This is why, to have something measurable, researchers taken to the lab and until recently would have stuck with sea-snails, rats and in the past cats and primates … while gradually observation and measurement of electro-chemical activity in the human brain has become possible.

When it comes to exams surely examiners know that the response to a unique set of questions in an exam, certainly at undergraduate level, if not at post compulsory level, will test the student’s ability to construct a response both from what they know, and what they have to surmise.

REFERENCE

Jones, C. 1998 Evaluating a collaborative online learning environment Active Learning

Oliver, M. & Conole, G. (1998) Evaluating communication and information technologies: a toolkit for practitioners. Active Learning, 8,3–8.

Robinson, H., Smith, M., Galpin, F., Birchall, D., Turner, I. (1998) As good as IT gets: have we reached the limits of what technology can do for us? Active Learning, 9, 50–53.

Tolmie, A. (2001), Examining learning in relation to the contexts of use of ICT. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17: 235–241. doi: 10.1046/j.0266-4909.2001.00178.

 

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What is the point in playing chess if you let a computer give you the answers and all you do is move the pieces?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 June 2013, 09:20

IMG_5002.JPG

The act of playing chess, and the process of thinking it through is the joy and the learning.

  • What will be the point as or once all the answers are online?
  • Where we let algorithms and the Web provide the answers?

Does this mean that anyone can be a doctor so long as they have a smartphone in their pocket and a good connection?

Knowledge acquired is how learning occurs.

  • The learning process is necessary in order for the brain to make sense of it (or not)
  • And we do so, each of us, in an utterly unique way.
  • Less so because of when or where we were born,
  • But because we were made this way.

'Je suis comme je suis, je suis faite comme ca'.

Our DNA is unique and the brain it constructs also.

Not hard considering considering:

  • There are some 98 billion neurons in there.
  • And every neuron has some 10,000 connections.

It is this mass of interconnections that makes us both ridiculous and smart,

Able to think in metaphors, provide insight, solve problems, conform, deform and inform.

And fall in and out of love.

Enthusiams bubble up like farts in the wind.

Life is like a game of chess

We are its players and pieces whether we like it or not.

It is the sense of participation and control that makes life worth living.

Which suggests that absolute machine power - Google-eyed algorithms could be no better than prison.

Life is not a game though

And we are more than merely players.

There is no need to strut and fret our hour upon the stage.

Unless ...

It is a story we tell, defined by our actions and responses

A rollercoaster of our own making.

There is no need for noise and tension,

where we can be cool in war and love.

 

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Is Google translate teaching me written French or am I teaching 'it' to translate French into English?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 2 May 2014, 14:31

It's 21 years since I lived in France.

Amongst other things I translated kids TV cartoons from French into English! I'm now trying, once and for all, to get my written French in order courtesy of:

  • Doulinguo
  • Qstream
  • OpenLearn French
  • Google Translate
  • A MOOC in French (ABC of business start ups if I have understood what is going on!!)
  • And the threat of legal action from the owners of my late Father's timeshare flat in the French alps (he died 11 years ago ... ). Only this week have they finally acknowledge my letters - probably because I chose to write in pigeon French rather than bolshy English.

When I want to write in French I give it a stab, stick it through Google Translate then  jig my English around until I get what I would have said in French out of the other end. (I can speak French - like a Belgian I am told).

When I read any tricky French I paste it into Google Translate and adjust until, once again, it has the sense of what I would have understood had I simply heard it spoken to me.

The test is how quickly will I be found out in an all French MOOC.

The only issue is that hopping around computers in our house (My teenage son has a couple of huge screens which I particularly enjoy using while he is at school) - I found one viewing of the MOOC was being automatically translated - which can in itself be quite a laugh. But at what point will such translation be seamless, at least to the non-linguists? At what point will it suffice as an adequate stab at what is being said and meant by what is being said?

Will be have a Bable Fish in our ear along with the Google Glass(es)?

 

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H817open MOOCs to get lost

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 15 Oct 2014, 12:58

 

'If you're not lost and confused in a MOOC you are probably doing something wrong'. Martin Weller (18:45 25th March 2013)

 

A terrific webinar hosted by Martin Weller with George Seimens speaking. Link to the recorded event and my notes to follow.

 

I took away some key reasons why OER has a future:

 

1) Hype between terrifying and absurd.

2) State reduction in funding will see a private sector rise.

3) Increase in rest of world's desire for HE OER

4) Certificates growing.

5) The Gap

6) Accelerating time to completion

7) Credit and recognition for students who go to the trouble to gain the competencies.

8) Granular learning competencies and the gradual learning and badging to stitch together competencies.

 

‘MOOCs indicate that we are seeing a complexification of wishes and needs’ - so we need a multispectrum view of what universities do in society. George Seimens, (18:51 25th March 2013).

 

 

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H809: Activity 7.1 Timelines, theories and technologies

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 24 Feb 2014, 15:21

This is a learning dilemma that will become increasingly prevalent. You have a stinker of a complex mass of resources and cobbled together ideas to compile into some kind of order only to find that it has been done for you. This is an activity of how understandings of the process of learning has changed over time.

On of our tutors offers a helping hand:

 

Take your time reading this through and then consider how these historical changes might affect

  • the development of educational technologies
  • ethical considerations in e-learning research
  • research in your own discipline.

There's quite a lot in there. If you want to start just responding to one of the bullet points above, that's fine.

When these modules are designed is proper consideration really given to the students? Who they are? There levels of commitment and understanding? For all the personas I'm familiar with I do wonder.

And that's not even the start of it. We are then asked to look back at week 3 (a month ago), and look for relationships and connections between the narrative we create (above). Then, as if this isn't enough we need to rope in last weeks ethical considerations, and while we're at at put in the 'wider politicalo and social changes'.

Already we have, in my estimation (and this is my sixth postgraduate module and the fifth in the MAODE series) a good 16 hours work to do.

But there's more:

'Consider how the subject you studied for your undergraduate degree has changed over time'.

Post your answers in your tutor group forum and compare them with others.

Across the five groups I think, so far two, sometimes three people, have given this a go. Each could write a chapter in a book (one nearly has)

2 Hours have been allocated to the task.

I repeatedly find that whatever time is given as a suggested requirement for a week's activities that you need to add 50%. So 14 hours becomes 21.

Like a junior solicitor I've been keeping tabs on how long everything takes - and this is someone who is by now, evidentially, digitally literate and familliar with the OU VLE. If you can find 21 hours great. If not then what? If you can handle getting behind or strategically leaving gaps that's fine, but if you feel obliged to get you money's worth and want to do it all then what? And of course life goes on around you: kids off school, elderly relations fall ill, the workload ebbs and flows, the car breaks down ... your Internet connection becomes about as vibrant as a mangle and it snows a bit.

A simple guide to four complex learning theories

http://edudemic.com/2012/12/a-simple-guide-to-4-complex-learning-theories/

I came across this from edudemic and can't think of anything clearer.

 

The discussion offers some further thoughts, deleting the word 'traditional' and replacing with classical.

The ifs and buts of the people associated with each of these and how absolute any of them can be, especially connectivism. However, I see connectivism not as the end of a chronological chain, but rather a loop that has people connected and learning in their family, extended family and community. And the one component that has not changed a jot? The way the human brain is constructed during foetal development and the unique person who then emerges into any of some hundreds of thousands of different circumstances and from way they may or may not develop 'their full potential'. Though I hazard a guess that this will always remain impossible to achieve. 98 billion neurons take a lot of connecting. It starts at around 4 months after conception and only ends with death - death being after the vital physiological supports have collapsed and like the self-destructing tape in Mission Impossible 'all is lost'.


The infographic runs to and 12 rows. This is the last row. The rest you ought to see for yourselves.

This is the charming copyright notice.

Copyright 2013 © Edudemic All rights reserved.

Powered by coffee, and a love all things education technology.

Simplistically the technologies I can add across this chronology are:

Books - Learning by rote > Literacy (writing, paper) - but then the Oxbridge Tutorial goes back over 750 years and that was and still is 'Constructivism' before someone came along 700 years later and gave it a name.

I'm reminded of the aphorism from Philip Larkin, 'Sex started in the Sixities' - about the same time as constructive learning. As for 'connectivism' what happens in a market, what has happened at religious gathering for millennia? Why do clever people have to come along and say these things have never happened before? Connectivism = discussions. Perhaps we'd be better off NOT writing it down, by going and finding people. I spoke to a Consultant the other week who for all the technology and e-learning swears by the conference. And for how many milliennia have 'experts' likeminds and the interested (and powerful/influential) had such opportunties to gather.

In 1999 my very first blog post was titled 'what's new about new media, not much'.

Whenever I read it I feel the sentiment is the same - as people we have not changed one jot. Just because everyone has a 'university in their pocket' - if they are some of the few hundred million out of the 7 billion on the planet who have a Smart Phone or iPad does not change the fundamentals of what we are and the connectedness of our brains.

 

 

 

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H809: Activity 7.4

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 June 2013, 10:39

20130324-234258.jpg 20130324-234309.jpg 20130324-234322.jpg 20130324-234644.jpg 20130324-234330.jpg

KEY

Green = Activated

Amber = Engaged

Red = Blocked

What concerns me is the belief that theories of learning, which academics have identified in eduation in the last 90 years, are either key drivers or infleuncers in the design of learning. Surely these are all observations after the event. Like trying to analyse a standup comedy routine using a set of plans and parameters - 'Good Morning, Vietnam' comes to mind. As, I suppose would 'Dead Poets Society' to bring in Robin Williams again. Was the Khan Academy a product of such analysis? No? An investment banker wanted to help his nephews out with their Math so he recorded some videos. Actually, I jsut realised my wife is doing this for a friend's daughter who is learning French - creating bespoke French language pieces for her to practice on. I can't even think what either of them are - behaviourist or social-constructive and experiential. I'm afraid, given what the academic 'gurus of e-learning' keep coming up with they are probably the least intuitive or inventive because their hands and minds are tied by this kind of thing. Just my opinion.

If I want to develop a platform or school that uses e-learning I'll go find myself a 'Robin Williams' kind of educator - someone has a natural flair for it, who engender a following, who most importantly delivers extraordinary results.

Looking back at school I know that what motivated me was two fold - my own long term goal and the quality of an inspired and informed teacher who had tutoring, moderating and teaching in their blood.

There's a reason why research and teaching don't mix. I've asked some academics about this and they have told me that they haven't gone into the commercial sector, nor do they teach ... 'because they hate people'.

Where in these theories is the person?

This relationship, the rapport that can form between tutor and student is what is lacking and it is why, in my opinion, the lifes of the Oxbridge Tutorial, that one to one, or one to two or three hour long session once a week is far, far, far from dead.

Neuroscience is going to blow this allow out of the water.

Already the shift is very much in favour of genetics and the way our unique brains are formed as we develop as a foetus. It is nature, not nuture, so frankly, we can have anything thrown at us in terms of life experience and how we learn and how we respond will remain individual. This is the perspective of my father in law whose secondary education was the being in the Polish resistance during the Second World War, his first university a prisoner of war camp. He had England or the US as choices having decided not to return to Poland. And found himself learning English in Gateshead. The story continues ... so what kind of learning was occuring in the POW camp?

He bartered lessons in German for lessons in English.

Social-situated in extremis.

Not that it can be injected into a class, and even less so in online learning, but 'fear' doesn't half help turn a short term memory into one that will stick. Playing Devil's Advocate, can 'e-learning' only ever be 'cotton wool' the safest, tamest learning you will ever recieve? Try reading an essay out in a tutor group - there's fear! Try getting up in a hall of 300 people to make your point in a debating chamber - terrying. An odd conclusion to reach at the end of this reflection on the exercise - but where is the 'fear'?

And I mean the right kind of fear, not the threat of the cane or other such punishment, but the fear of letting you down, or your side down, or of humiliation ... against the public reward if you get something right?

Pinned down in a collapsed cellar in Warsaw my father in law believed he would die. He was the only one alive. Everyone else had been flattened. By some chance he had been standing under a beam that had partially protected him. He made promises he'd keep if he lived. He was found. A smash to the head.

Does learning have more impact when there is something at stake?

Try introducing this element into an e-learning module.

The impossible hypothesis - people learn better and make decisions with firmer convictions, where their life is at stake?

Then again we turn to neuroscience and will conclude that some will, some won't, that the response of the individual to a shared experience means that you get as many different outcomes as there are people.

Institutions think that grades divide students - that's only the tiniest fraction of what makes each person in that class different. If the student isn't suitably self aware to know how to play to their strengths and managed their weaknesses then the observant tutor and others who are part of the institution should be doing this on their behalf - as parents, friends and siblings might do. Even with medical intervention.

The 'Flipped classroom' for me is finding ways to work with the individual who happens to be in a class that is probably already sorted by age and culture, if not also social class and gender.

And therefore already inappropriate.

Maybe the classroom has had its time. A short-lived interlude in human development over the last 70,000 years.

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A history of learning - in preparation for sprinkling 70,000 years of human development with the educational theories of the last 90 years

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 11 June 2013, 10:44

70,000 years ago we were getting something right in relation to learning and responding to circumstances and left Africa.

We have been learning in communities ever since.

Perhaps population pressures or stability permitted reading and our inexorable desire to innovate led to the printing press and more since besides. Meanwhile populations and civilizations grew and society required or permitted the development of formal learning.

For me all the learning theories are observations of human behaviour as individuals or in groups.

Open learning is if anything taking us back to learning on the fly, in more vibrant less formal communities online. A response to the necessity of educating 7 billion and solving many of the human created problems on this dot in space called Earth.

I rather think the theories come AFTER the event to philosophise over what is taking place - in a commercial and entrepreneurial world you get on with it.

Take virtual worlds - they are commercial gaming and entertainment environments which educators would like to use and as they use them explain, position and justify.

  • All I want to know is, does it work?
  • Is it affordable?
  • Is it scaleable?
  • Is it going anywhere?
  • If not ditch it snd try something else.
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H809 Activity 7.3 First part of the Conole et al. paper

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 26 Mar 2013, 06:57

Activity 7.3: Reading the first part of the paper (2 hours)

Read the first part of the Conole et al. paper through to the end of section 1, ‘Introduction’ (pp. 17–21).

As you read the paper note the different purposes the authors envisage for their model. Then consider and make notes on the following questions:

  • Who do the authors see as the main audience for this paper?
  • What is the main aim of the paper?

Try to fit the readings met so far in the module into Table 1 of the Conole et al. paper.

The main audience of the paper would appear to be fellow academics of tertiary education and postgraduate students of the same with a particular interest in e–learning. This might include PGCE students, teachers and educators, learning designers and e–learning designers. The main aim, purpose or outcome of the paper is to provide insights and practical skills, to isolate and match theories and application so putting theory into practice and allocating theories to design decisions and choice indicating implications, objectives and choices. Models help to Visualise and clarify.

The dichotomy suggested as existing between reflection and non-reflection is a false one.

We reflect on everything we do in our subconcious whether we like it or not otherwise we'd be dead. This is what is going on when REM is observed in our sleep - our brains are going through stuff, mixing it up with and across some 15 parts of the neuronal network and slowly turning a short term thought into a long term memory. Or some such, I'm neither a neuroscientist nor a psychlologist.

By stating non-reflection the authors may be suggesting this is a conscious decision not to do a formal exercise of reflecting. We can't, as I said, turn our brains off.

The 3D model doesn't work for me while the 2D do.

Three years of reading Conole and I still find some of her visual conceptions hard to comprehend, bucking the trend or coming from a conceptualisation of the world that I don't get - or reinvention where it isn't necessary. I recall the triangle of Vygotsky and Activity Theory by Engestrom transmogrified into a diamond.

There is a good reason for a copywriter and art director to sit together in the creative department of an advertising agency - one words, the other visuale. It is rare for a person to be good at both.

1) Hiltz and Meinke (1998) Virtual Classroom in a traditional setting. Behaviourist/Cognitive leaning towards constructive where content can be viewed and reviewed at leisure. Experiential in 'suck it and see' what happens from the research point of view.

2) Wegerif and Mercer (1997) Computing to analyse large amounts of text. Socially–situated and Activity Theory / Experiential.

3) Laurillard (1994) A conference presentation where others listen and observe - both the presenter and the slides they show. Behaviourist. Didactic. 'Telling' in a lecture.

4) Oliver et al (2007) A chapter in a book. Written for academics and students to read.Behaviourist. Didactic. Read our wise words as an absolute. Constructively formed via a peer–reviewed paper. Two authors collabirating.

5) Rouen and Eliahu (2000) is a conference presentation too, financed by the Centre for Education. Behaviourist. Didactic. 'Telling' in a lecture. Constructed between the authors.

 

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My interest in the Web and learning is the interface between the two

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 24 Mar 2013, 08:04

DSC03192.JPG

Fig.1. Scan at four and a half months.

My interest in the Web and learning is the interface between the two, from cradle to grave, from the a foetus at around five months once a brain has formed enough to register its surroundings through sound and touch to the moments before death as the faculties fail - and the interface between neuroscience and psychology and web-science through learning, from the perspective of both student and educator.

As a parent and child I have been present at both the moment of birth and death.

I wondered 'what is going on in there?' as our child formed and wondered, with my late mother, 'what is left going on in there?' after she had suffered and at first survived a series of strokes.

Our daughter, born in 1996 - it was a tad too soon to be trawling the Web for information – books played their part and soon both mother and foetus fell into a habit of listening to Mozart and falling asleep, a pattern that continued through our daughter's early years.

My mother died last year, but not after I defied the medical view of her condition and found 'a way in there' with an iPad loaded with photographs of paintings: images from a Van Gogh exhibition at the RA did the jobs, she had hosted a family visit and was her granddaughter's guide. She was born in 1931.

I even have a link, via the Web to a generation before, having interviewed my late grandfather at length to create his blog in abstentia.

Learning impacts the brain in ways that neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to map and explain.

Even the Web is yet to match the possibilities of the 98 million neurons of the human brain, though at the current exponential rate of growth it is expected to make it some time around 2030. By then both the mind and the Web will make more sense. What is going on in there? The brain. And what is going on out there? The web. And how does the interface and engagement between the two inform, educate and change behaviours?

P.S. If anyone can 'read' this scan and explain what I am meant to see I'd be most grateful. I have this moment on video too somewhere. It says 'face' on the scan. Really??

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How insight and creativity works - towards a theory of creativity

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 4 May 2014, 10:32

Why are we insightful? What is going on in the brain when we have a flash of insight?

Horizon on the Brain looks at:

  • Insight
  • Divergent thinking
  • Improvisation
  • Unusual and unexpected experiences
  • Schema violation

Based on this I'm going to take up something mindless to do between the gaps - doing the dishes surely counts?

Reading does not?

Watching TV does not?

  • Walking the dog
  • Falling asleep in the bath
  • Pruning bushes
  • Mow the lawn

When and where do people have moments of creativity?

The neuroscience of electromangentic and fMRI scans.

Human advancement is dependent on creativity.

You will hear from:

  • Prof Jonathan Schooler
  • Dr Mark Beeman
  • Dr Charles Limb
  • Dr Simone Ritter
  • Dr Jon Kounios
  • Dr Rex Young

You will hear about:

  • The neural correlate of creativity
  • The anterior superior antilial giros
  • Look for unexpected experiences Scehema violation
  • Breaking cognitive pedants

Breaking any routine – switching steps Change your routines Well trodden neural pathways are abandoned.

  • Mind wandering helps the creative process Engaging in a non–demanding task
  • Don't just do nothing, do something undemanding instead ...

If you're stumped, take a break e.g. walk, shower, gardening ... walk the dog.

  • Down regulate your frontal lobes.
  • Some people are hypofrontal. Losing your inhibitions when you improvise.
  • Releasing your mental handcuffs.
  • Science to explain.

Towards a theory of creativity.

REFERENCE 

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Right now I need an AI Companion

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On my shoulder, perking up when asked like a well behaved, very small butler. 'They' are creating such things - like a dog or cat plugged into Google that knows your mind. Thinking this through I think a couple of AI squirres would do the trick, one red and on my left shoulder, and the other grey and on my right. They can talk to eachother when I'm not around, otherwise they can remind what I've done, what is coming up and what I need to do next. Reading and responding is the measure of the day.
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Why are we insightful?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 22 Mar 2013, 23:15

Why are we insightful? What is going on in the brain when we have a flash of insight?

Horizon on the Brain

  • Insight
  • Divergent thinking
  • Improvisation

 

 

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H809: Reflections at the end of week 7

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 22 Mar 2013, 15:03

Still playing catch-up after the TMA

Through week six writing and most activities (a few hours left to wrap)

Familiar with week 7 as we begin week 8. I will catch up over the weekend. Perhaps. If it rains a good deal and my son's football is off (again). This will come back to haunt me - with all the bad weather they are moving to two matches a week. The Daddy Taxi might be busy.

For H809 conjured up the 'Perfect Storm of Online Research'

  • Young people, including minors
  • Online - gamified if not virtual worlds, with social aspects (whether wanted or not)
  • Medical - not a medical market research but ostensibly an 'intervention' of sorts that would require expertise, training and sign off for everyone involved.
  • Global - what isn't if it is accessible online?

The good news?

  • They haven't found life on Mars yet so I can keep it contained to Earth.

My plan

  • Set further parameters.

I'm looking at use of e-learning to improve uptake of perventer medication by young people with servere moderate asthma (i.e. they are supposed to take a daily preventer inhaler, like me, I do - they don't).

I may 'contain' the research to a group where in some cases a step has already been taken to amerliorate the situation - swimming. I'll talk to the ASA (hypothetical) and have participants as UK swimmers with asthma

 

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Communismization of knowledge

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 22 Mar 2013, 06:54

The penny just dropped ... what's all this fretting about process for? Have we all forgotten the purpose of research???? Not to get the process right, but to get answers to problems, to find better ways, to understand and share what is going on so that we can act, or not act on it?

I'm doing the H817open MOOC so my head is spilling out in various directions trying to define what 'open' is all about. It isn't even the democratisation of education and knowledge either, it is the Tim Berners-Lee rather than the Google approach to knowledge - give it away for free, it is 'communismization' - which is a word, however horrible it sounds, I just looked it up.

This moves me onto dwelling on Creative Commons.

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Where do I stand academically? Where and what next? And the madness of being.

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 27 Feb 2014, 07:48

Masters in Open and Distance Education (MAODE) with the Open University, UK (OU)

H800: Technology-enhanced learning: practices and debates

H807: Innovations in eLearning – Learning outcomes

H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students

B822: Creativity, Innovation and Change

H808: The e-learning professional

 

This completes the Masters Degree. I graduate on Saturday 27th April 2013

Currently (March 2013) I am taking H809 as a bridge towards doctoral research or professional consultancy. Complete in June 2013.

H809 Practice-based research in educational technology

I joined the #H817open MOOC for one component of this module. I will register for 2014

H817: Openness and innovation in e-learning.

I am applying to undertake doctoral research in education - using learning technologies.
 
H809 will help prepare for applications starting in January 2014 for an October 2014 start. Most are now a 4 year programme, with a Masters in research to begin. WebSciences at University of Southampton is an interesting option - I attended an Open Day in January.
Too many active interests was a stated issue on childhood school reports. Nothing's changed.
 
I am looking at an MA in History with the University of Birmingham which would give me the opportunity
study the First World War. (I have written extensively about this through my late grandfather's memoire 'That's Nothing Compared to Passchandeale')
There is more.
 
I attended the School of Communication Arts, London. A full-time programme in copywriting, art direction and design and have worked in the 'creative' and 'communications' industries all of my career.
And 'EAVE' (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs)
 
My first degree is in Geography. My dissertatio nwas on demographics. I love maps. Perhaps I should try to match maps, e-learning and the First World War. Animated it all and add some interviews and 'drama reconstruction'.
See what happens when you let something fester and wake up in the middle of the night.
 
Neuroscience and long term memory are fascinating too.
I need my life over. I need to split into three and start again. I need a coffee and a long walk on the South Downs. (I need to go back to bed)
And then there's Fine Art.
 
And Creative Writing. And cooking. And the garden. There's teaching, and moderating ... and blogging. There's movies. And sailing and swimming coaching. There's family and friend ... ah. Friend? I knew there was something missing in all of the above.
Scrap the lot and have a belated 50th birthday to celebrate 20 years of marriage, parenthood and the madness of being. Then sign up to crew in the Round the World Yacht Race.
And if that doesn't kills me ...

P.S. ADHD

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H817 Visualizing Open Learning

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 23 Oct 2014, 07:17
From E-Learning V

Fig.1. This IMHO is what learning has become in the 21st century - and how it got there

There's more going on here than you may realise!

From E-Learning V

Fig.2. Traditional top down learning

Two triangles, one above the other and linked with a downward arrow suggests traditional top down learning ... or simply knowledge transfer from someone who knows something to someone who does not.

From E-Learning V

Fig. 3 By someone's side

Two triangles, one facing the other, may represent a shift towards collaborative or horizontal learning in a formal setting, though for me it represents the learning you do away from the institution - with friends, with family 'on the same level' as it were.

From E-Learning V

Fig. 4. Participatory and situated, networked learning on the periphery

From E-Learning V

Fig.5 The thinking starts with Vigotsky and his research into behaviourist learning

It then progressed to the study and analysis of learning in communities

From E-Learning V

Fig. 6. Activity Theory as conceived of and developed by Yrjo Engeström. 

From E-Learning V

Fig.7 The interplay between two entities or communities coming together to solve a problem and thus producing something unique to them both (object 3) - a fresh idea.

From E-Learning V

Fig.8. Activity Theory re-connected - breaking out

Though developed over some thirty years the structure of 'Activity Theory' as a model is breaking down because of the quality, speed and way in which we now connect overrides barriers and invades silos making communication more direct and immediate.

From E-Learning V

 Fig. 9 Activity Theory in a connected world

Everyone and everything is just a click away.

From E-Learning V

Fig.10 Visualizing the maelström of original ideas generated by people sharing their thoughts and ideas as they form

The maelström of new ideas where people and groups collide and interact. Historically this had been in grounded 'communities of practice', whether a London coffee shop or the senior common room of a prestigious university, the lab, the studio, the rehearsal room ... today some gatherings online are frequent, enabled by the Internet and no less vibrant as like-minds and joiners contribute to the generation of new ideas. 

This, drawing on Engestrom via Vygotsky, might be a more academic expression of Open Learning. Here a host of systems, expressed in model form, interpose their drive to achieve certain objectives into the common whole. That mess in the middle is the creation of the collective powers and inputs of individuals, groups, departments or institutions. The Open bit are the connections between any node in one system, and any other node from any othe one of the systems ... which blows apart the actions within a single system, making them more open, though not random. 

From E-Learning V

Fig. 11 It's going on inside your head.

fMRI scans reveal the complex way in which ideas form and memories are recalled and mixed-up, challenged and re-imagined. We are our very own 'community of practice' of conflicting and shared viewpoints. 

From E-Learning V

Fig.11. Perceiving brain activity as the interplay between distinct, interacting zones

From E-Learning V

Fig. 12 Ideas enter your system, your brain and are given a fresh spin

From E-Learning V

Fig.13 Ideas coalesce until you reach a point of understanding. The penny doesn't so much as 'drop' as to form.

Where would we be without one of these. 98 billion neurons. A uniquely connected mass of opportunity and potential. This is where, of course, memories are formed and thoughts had. Increasingly we are able to share ideas and thoughts as we have them, typically through the tips of our fingers by sharing our thinking online, especially where it comes to the attention of like-minds, and troubled-minds - anyone in fact or strongly agrees or strongly disagrees enough to contribute by adding their thinking and revealing their presence.

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Scale of the Universe

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 20 Mar 2013, 21:05

Scale of the Universe

http://www.scaleofuniverse.com/

See Powers of Ten

 

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H809 Activity 6.5: Reading the first part of the paper (30 minutes)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 13 Nov 2014, 11:43

Read the first part of the paper (to the end of page 4).

Note the kinds of changes that the authors describe, and consider the extent to which these apply to your own practices and research interests.

Are there changes that the authors have not considered?

  • The transition to tablets, extensive and preferred use of Smartphone, hot desking in the home, in the home of friends at school so keeping everything online, but also sharing /exposing identities, a 21st openness and frankness in relation to gender, sexuality, individuality, beliefs, bullying, privilege and disadvantage. In my planned context if 'leakage' of content is highly likely then a randomized controlled trial is porbably undoable.

  • The history of informal learning and categories from home, games, clubs, apprenticeship with a social anthropological slant. Is it so different to the way people have always learnt in social groupings, the difference being that if you don’t have someone at your shoulder, you have them at your fingertips and in your head? Take for example the Boy Scout movement of 100 years ago. Even the ‘invention’ of games like football and rugby as a result of informal game-play. What can be learnt from looking at the take up of technologies, or new attitudes to learning in the past?

  • Is a tutorial an informal setting? Socrates in a discussion is preferable to Socrates as a TED lecture? The lessons from the 'Oxbridge Tutorial' of two/three to the workshop-like tutorials of 12+ at the Open University.

  • Is an extracurricular society a self-learn and informal setting?

  • Amateur dramatics (youth theatre), and youth orchestras, teens forming bands, sailing and swimming clubs all show young people learning together, picking up where adults leave off - or taking over as it suits the person rather than the age or cohort - as occurs online. Having something to talk about in the first place encourages its discussion.

  • Virtual worlds are not everyone’s cup of tea, or everyone’s opportunity (Eynon, 2012) 13% excluded, 4% of the remaining choosing NOT to use the Internet.

  • Counter impact of interloper by having participants briefed to undertake research.

  • Are the ways so new? As the Internet is a mirror to human behaviours online, the behaviours are the same though more akin to living in a close-knit community. ‘With brass knobs on’ - people can be rigidly themselves, alter egos, or even a different gender, age or cultural identity. (Kelly, 2011)

My own experience, very dismissive of, even reluctant to bring the classroom into any of these domains, indeed, it is anathema. However, during the Olympics, not surprisingly a few swimmers would say what they’d seen or followed in relation to their stroke or development as competitive athletes - mostly, ‘its not for me!’. A young adult art student, whilst he won’t adhere to his asthma medications, uses the sensation of being breathless in his art.

Observing online activities akin to similar in a boarding school setting - life skills learnt, but rarely to do with class work, my life and team skills, personal identity, coping mechanisms, learning from each other, forming opinions etcsmile Eastbourne College, Mowden Hall School. In contrast to home life football practice, amateur theatre group, dance and so on …

The drivers that see a person transition from child to adult, and the sophistication of the brain makes these impacts of no less or more influence than anything that has occurred for previous generations, indeed, I’d contend that two World Wars, for those caught up in them would have had significantly more effect that anything the Internet can throw at an adolescent.

REFERENCE

Eynon, R (2009) Mapping the digital divide in Britain: implications for learning and education.

Kelly, D (Forthcoming 2011) 'Karaoke’s Coming Home:  Japan’s Empty Orchestras in the United Kingdom', Leisure Studies 30.




 

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H817 Open Learn

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 20 Mar 2013, 06:38

Few people know what they are doing with PowerPoint they produce a set of cards or stepping stones, then gives these out as hand-outs.

But where is the narrative, the building of the argument of the nuanced slowing down or speeding up to change emphasis - let alone the question from the floor, or the adhoc additional thought.

Visuals in a presentation should compliment what is said - one would be far weaker without the other.

Very, very rarely when I have attended a conference or lecture I have received a handout that is, give or take (though the presenter didn't read from it), the notes they used to talk the audience through the images.

When someone says 'there is a handout' and provides copies of the slides that is ridiculous.

It is like being in a train looking out of the window while someone is talking to you - you want want they said,not what you were looking at.

 

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What's going on in there?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 19 Mar 2013, 08:48

This apparently.

20130318-233848.jpg

Fig. 1 New Scientist 9 February 2013 Mind Maths by Colin Barras

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H809 Activity 6.2: Effects of audience on research (1 hour)

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Activity 6.2: Effects of audience on research (1 hour)

In the light of Activity 6.1, look again at the research question you chose for TMA01.

  • What kinds of audience were you assuming for the research findings?
  • How might this research question, and/or the methods you chose, be different for different audiences?

Post your thoughts in your tutor group discussion forum.

REPLY

The suggestion is that I am writing to a community of fellow researchers working towards the 'cutting edge' of e-learning in health care, in this instance to support patients and improve patient outcomes, through drawing on literature where various interventions have been successful with doctors.

If written for potential funders then, like the elevator pitch' for a movie script then my inclination would be to spice it up, certainly to push what is unique harder, but also to flag up those few papers that suggest that research of this nature is now required as the next step. i.e. to sell the logical progression of building on what has gone before, using my own experience and skills to say to funders 'you would be backing a safe pair of hands'.

The audience none of the papers talk about are the participants themselves. This is where an inevitable shift is occurring as patients chose to be better informed and in one piece of research I was reading the interviews were compromised as earlier interviewees had posted the questions and their responses online. Currently, from what I have read, the general public are reached via the press. In future, not just through books, radio and TV appearances, but also in blogs and other social media, academics will find they have an audience that includes students (not just their own), and other interested parties.

Just as a conference paper can lead to writing an article for a journal in future there are likely to be other audiences to be written for.

Rather than tailoring niche research for different audiences, as a hypothetical exercise I have presumed the funding would permit a broad approach that would generate material that would, edited and written and expressed in an appropriate way, suit a variety of audiences. Under Creative Commons some content might be offered to a community on the Internet to mash-up, share, curate on other platforms and so on - if the Social Media purpose is to 'spread the word' let those who are best at doing it do it.

 

 

 

 

 

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