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H818 Conference: Day One

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 27 Feb 2014, 16:29

I was up at 3.30am and I'm not even presenting. I use these early hours to write - pulling together ideas before they blow away in the wind of daily life in a household where the number of teenagers has suddenly doubled. We have the older teenager couple, and the young teenager couple ... and the parents of two of this lot looking at each other and thinking 'we're teenagers too'.

Three hours of short presentations and without exception each has an impact and contribution to my thinking an practice.

This despite the presence of a lorry full of blokes with pneumatic drills who attacked the house an hour ago - cavity wall insulation.

I am sitting here with industrial strength headphones - for a 'test to destruction' I'd say that these Klipsch headphones are doing their job admirably. I 'suffer' from having acute hearing ... I do hear the pins drop a mile away. I need headphones like this whenever I leave the house otherwise travelling is a nightmare. 

Is this normal?

The great value of a session like this is to listen to your fellow students - a voice, more than a face, evokes character and conviction. Not that I ever doubted it but everyone is clearly smart, focused and keen to 'play the game' when it comes to using online tools.

There isn't enough of it.

The OU has a habit of designing the life and risk out of a module. Bring it back. Vibrancy and energy are born of risk.

Permalink 1 comment (latest comment by Rebecca Kowalski, Thursday, 13 Feb 2014, 14:34)
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Design Museum

Learning or e-learning?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 2 May 2013, 05:29

If you could study full time at a college where there are only 30 students - all the same year group, and you work in teams of two or three - would you?

This 'college' has 500 mentors - people 'from industry' who come in as volunteers so that several times a week, if not most afternoons, the students have experienced people to listen and learn from how does this benefit the learning process? Is it 'learning from the periphery' when the 'centre' comes to you? It is socially-constructed, and cognitive?

How does this contrast and compare with 'learning at a distance' 'old school' with a box of books and DVDs or here on the MA ODE with everything online?

As a mentor at the School of Communication Arts, London I go in to sit with pairs of students for anything between 15 minutes and an hour. I listen. I try to be a sounding board and catalyst. I try to motivate. I refuse to judge or infect/impose myself, rather helping them to draw their own conclusions.

Permalink 2 comments (latest comment by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 2 May 2013, 05:52)
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