Personal Blogs

A week during a Pandemic Lockdown feels like a month - at least it does to me. Every day I am faced with a new challenge. Most of the time I am OK with this, sometimes it gets me down. I am online too often and for too long - probably.

Every day starts with an hour or two or more refreshing pages of The Western Front Association (First World War History) and getting content onto social media for the day. I am played by and follow the analytics closely. 

I in the listening post of EdTech: I am looking for and looking out for anything that can make a difference. I am rainding across No Man's land a few times a week too. I will try everything once or twice and if nudged by the right person I may try it more often than this. I have taken to the UCL Knowledge Lab platform 'Learning Designer' as one of the tools I use to plan lessons or a series of lessons. I've just used it for a set of four 1 hour classes on Personal Hygiene, Infectious Disease and Stress for our FE Uniformed Services Department. Inspired by a CPD talk from Scott Hayden I am going to push to use a Mind Map app. We will start with pen and paper, but migrate to the students' mind map app of choice ... I used Simple Minds, the college, via Google Webstore has a collection of others. I've used Simple Minds for a decade and can make it sing with embedded images, links to websites, Drop Downs and Pop-Ups, embedded video and all kinds of other fancy stuff.

Other news awaits. 

To end the week I'm sitting through the Darwin Lecture from the Humanist Society. I have decided to become a Humanist - in this Census Year of 2021 it sounds more responsible and matches my Green and Vegan credentials - and is less flippant than declaring ourselves as Jedi Knights as we did a decade ago. 

Fig. 1. scamp on learning theories

As a platform I loathe whiteboards. I should have stuck with a sheet of wallpaper backing and a set of pencils. The detail can be finer and a rubber does the job of erasing adequately. And you can colour it in afterwards.

More diagrams should be expressed as 'scamps' - a messy and incomplete expression of what you think ... 'so far'.

For me to put this into an APP like SimpleMinds or Grafio would give it a locked-down completed look. Clearly it is no.

Courtesy of an intellectually sharp 85 year old retired philosophy professor (father in law) and an intellectually deep and challenging Italian (brother-in-law) I'm going to see if this is going anywhere - how the sets overlap, or not, where the theories belong ... or not. We may get on to 'connectivism too'. I may come away with a bruised brain. I'll record this too if I remember as keeping notes is impossible and the rate at which the discussion moves could be visualised as starlings flocking over the West Pier, Brighton. It looks interesting and there is a pattern but unless you can freeze-frame you're never going to figure it out.