Personal Blogs

In the rubric to the EMA task set, we are told that the segmented directive tasks historically produce good work from students but that some may find it over-specified. I'm beginning to see some of the problems here.

The killer is that this piece, given its specification, is actually quite short. Given that Part A and B both require 2 technologies, you have say 1250 words to describe for Part A the 'main uses' of each and evaluate them against these uses. That is a big ask and some selectivity is going to be required and concision.

My immediate concern is that larger issues are hard to 'fit in', though they seem important. For instance, I've been pondering how to think of evaluating strengths and weaknesses of its 'uses'. How do I distinguish between creative and innovative affordances of a technology and the technology itself? Which am I evaluating? Strengths and weaknesses really seem to belong to the interaction between the technology, its application within a teaching and learning design and serendipitous factors that might emerge as it is used - not to the technology per se.

I don't think I can explore that in 1,250 words and there will have to be some very some SMART thinking about how to frame this issue which addresses the issues economically without reducing the task to a functional list. The answer might lie in being clear about what is meant by your 'experience' of the technology - how has that experience opened up strong uses in teaching and learning design that can be made of the particular technology. What were its deficits? Are they intrinsic deficits or ones that can be changed by a) improvements in the teaching and learning designs or b) in the potential evolution of the technology for change in its own nature. Thus, at a certain historical moment - a weakness of some Wiki applications is the integration of features like charts and graphics but, although this problem persists in the OU wiki it doesn't in other versions of the wiki that are discussed in the literature.

Even then vast areas for potential exploration grow. HOW do you learn to be selective here - to specify the project even more than it is already. I'm struggling with this!

My past is a bit mixed academically but now I'm retired I have reverted to an old-fashioned expository style, trying to enjoy describing things again, especially things that were before outside my experience. I'm used to writing myself into a topic - getting immersed into it but that has dangers here of getting lost in its newness to you and the joy of discovery of what, to other people, are already probably quite standard ideas.

Below is how I started on wikis. I quite enjoyed it but it isn't addressing the issues. To exorcise it, I'm including this false start in my blog  as a self-warning: SELECT, SPECIFY, BE DIRECT and therefore concise. Learn how to 'park' certain questions for later reflection.

MY FALSE START.

"WHAT are Wikis?

A backward-looking discipline like etymology seems a poor place to begin definition of 'emergent' phenomena like software learning applications, but in this case it is necessary. Whilst few still attempt to use the false etymology of wiki as an acronym ('what-I-know-is'), it can still be found in Gomes and Sousa (2013:627), probably as a result of confusion of the prototypical format of wiki software with the encyclopaedic ambitions ofWikipedia. As the latter flourished, it began to retrospectively validate the 'bacronym'. However, although semantic connections to the aggregation of personal knowledge in wiki work, and are of some interest to teaching and learning: they are also pedagogically misleading.

The term was adopted by Howard Cunningham for his new WikiWikiWeb after he learned about the fast shuttle service (Fig A.) serving the airport at Hawaiia: in Hawaiian, it means 'quick', and when 'doubled', 'very quick' (Oxford 2015). Hence the associations are with perceived pace of time and connection not with personal knowledge aggregation per se. It is this act of attaining personal association within a larger group, without the constraints usually posed by the time taken to bring about human interactions at a distance that should, and will, occupy us more in what follows. Linking people up very quickly from the moment of serendipitous contact with output from one by another is the essence of asynchronous media (where time as constraint is not a significant factor in cementing the link)."

So bye-bye bus and languorous exploration. Time to relearn how this might be done!