absolutwillie

Month: February 2016

  • So hot right now…

    Nothing says “I get it” quite like a pop quiz! Something we had a lot of fun rediscovering in class on Thursday, when I opened up the lines for a 5 minute tweetup on the question:

    How is blogging influencing your learning in #DigPed?
    Scheduling the opening and closing tweets to be posted 5mins apart took the pressure off of myself to stick to the time-limit. Projecting the live feed on the big screen (the wall) allowed the entire class to enjoy the exercise – even those who weren’t able/didn’t want to tweet. I also discovered the value of having a twitter client that allows you to display custom streams of information in columns: This allowed me to keep the opening tweet (Q1) open and stable right next to the live feed of responses (A1). Being able to see Q1 next to the answers helped to make sense of the potentially chaotic stream of information that we pommeled ourselves with. Interesting activity on related topics that I follow – in this case #DigPed – helped me to revisit how hashtags are used (and abused). Judging by the responses, many PGCEmixers enjoyed the activity immensely. Not only did the activity bring a bit of excitement into the lecture, but it also brought all sorts of useful information about students’ learning challenges and victories to the fore. 
    I am using this information to inform our next contact session. Perhaps I’ll find a way to bring the tweets into my structure and planning? Inspiration often comes from stranger places… Take the following quote (below) as an example. I scribbled it down as a side note on my research journey, because it resonated so much with my own praxis. Rediscovering the messy handwriting in the margins of one of my notebooks started me off on a quest to find its source, and in the process inspired me to reconstruct my third lecture with the PGCEs around it:

    “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”  (emphasis added)

    – attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    (I have yet to find the original text…)

    Using these two sentences as my framework, I hoped to “build a ship” that would make sense in the context of our voyage of discovery into the vastness of digital pedagogy. (Teach like a Pirate comes to mind. Also Peter Pan… Jung would have a field day.)

    I had some reservations about presenting the Industrial “old school” model of teaching as the polar opposite of digital pedagogies – mostly because I’m not convinced of their mutual exclusivity. (Can there truly be perfect absolutes in responsible pedagogies?) However, a free-association exercise of the deconstructed quote seemed to shed an interesting light on our studies:

    “If you want to build a ship, don’t          Old School 

    drum up the men to gather wood,          Standardisation? 

    divide the work                                      Artificial segmentation 

    and give orders.                                     External motivation


    Instead,                                                  Digital Pedagogies 

    teach them to yearn                               Internal motivation 

    for the vast and endless sea.”                Diverse and malleable realities





    I have to say that I am rather chuffed with this approach to the lecture. Still, I do wonder if the lecture makes sense to my class in terms of the rest of their work? Did something click? Were questions answered? Were answers questioned?? As teachers do, I dream about feedback from my classes with a mixture of dread and excitement… but I digress.

    As a foundation for the consideration of current trends in digital pedagogy, I introduced Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration as a potential source of the necessary tools to re-evaluate our own perceptions on the utility of technology in our classrooms. With the current emphasis on social media in education – both positive and negative – I wondered how we could analyse and evaluate trendy tech for creative application in our own teaching. Remembering my PGCE year, I suddenly understood how my own thinking was setting me up to find a very specific aid: Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. (See what happened there?)

    One of my personal learning strategies involves image searches via Google. The weird and the wonderful (“safe search” switched on, please) have often helped me find novel ways of making meaning of the results. Take a look at the wealth of graphic representations of Bloom’s Taxonomy for some inspiration, if you are so inclined. A treasure trove of digital taxonomies and pedagogy wheels promised to be nifty little bridges between my subject, our focus of the week, and work that is done elsewhere in the PGCE programme.

    In retrospect, I am worried about the quality of my transitions between the phases and content of my lecture. Am I depending too heavily on the reading (and blogging) that my classes need to do beforehand? Being two thirds deep in my own research, do the links I propose between the content and the learning outcomes of this module make sense to anyone besides myself? These anxieties are probably universal, but they help keep me focused on designing better teaching and learning experiences. I believe this is good for my module, although I have to admit that my own dissertation is suffering. Which I should be writing.

    Better hop to it!

  • Are we not edutained?

    After a week of tinkering and coordinating with my colleagues, the second lecture had finally come to pass. I say finally to underscore my excitement for the contact session, knowing full well that the week that had passed didn’t quite feel like seven days for any of us. Seven hours, maybe. (Optimistically trying to avoid the thought of someone finding a minute of my classes way too much to bear…) I was ready, and fully focused on delivering a well paced, meaning filled, easy-to-follow exploration of unplugged pedagogy; linked to an equally vivid exposition and consideration of our developing pedagogies in the South African context. Fancy words aside, this is not as complicated as it sounds. At the same time, it is infinitely more complex than I am able to unravel in one go. Things could easily have gone either way, but I was betting that these were the right risks to take.

    Opening with a self-locating activity was worth the weird looks from left field. Asking the class to consider their relative comfort with their immediate environment seemed to help settle them. In dimming the lights, and then double checking their feelings of comfort and safety, I hoped to gain intrigue without losing trust. Asking my students to close their eyes, and to again consider their sense of comfort and safety, I endeavoured to flip the class into a completely “technology-free” space. For those who were not comfortable enough to close their eyes, I hoped the dimly lit lecture hall would do the trick. In a very real sense we were learning at the same time, but in very different spaces – entirely unfettered by technology. (Apart from the technology of imagination, that is.)

    It appeared that some sense of contemplative meaning-making and honest participation was achieved. Who can tell what really came to mind as I asked four orientations: Who are we? What are our goals? Where are we situated? When are we situated? Wherever their thoughts had taken them during the thought experiment, the class easily switched gears to discuss the work done so far.

    A chance conversation earlier that morning reminded me of Sugata Mitra‘s experiments in self teaching. His work resonated so well with the content of the lecture, that I had no qualms in including one of the TED Talks videos on his work. This was an authentic, internet-enabled, electronic realisation of digital pedagogy similar to that which many of the PGCEmixers defined in their initial musings on the subject.

    Que the crisis in our storyline – the screening of Molly Blank’s documentary: Testing Hope. A potent, uncomfortably real challenge to what most anybody’s answers to the four orientations might have been, the documentary unapologetically thrust the not-so-shiny realities of our Education System into the room. A fifth orientation brought it all home: Why Teaching?

    It was a potent and sobering note to end the lecture on – and one I’m very glad the class had time to digest before discussing it in one of their other modules the following day. I am incredibly thankful to have colleagues to collaborate and coordinate efforts with in the humbling task of preparing the teachers of tomorrow. I’d like to believe that the way we work together adds value to the programme, and enriches all our lives and pedagogies.

    Looking forward to next week 🙂

  • I'm a model!

    This year’s first PGCE lecture in Digital Pedagogy could probably best be described as… well… a bit of an explosion, to be honest. The distinct impression of a sudden and rapid release of a vast amount of information and mental energy still echoed in the lecture hall some time after class had been dismissed. Did I just manage to traumatise a group of nearly 200 postgraduate students? Did I get through everything that I needed to get through? Did I really speak at a hundred miles a minute, or was that just the natural high of being in front of a new class again?

    There are few spaces as eerie as an emptied classroom after a first lesson, but were there any more conducive to wide-eyed reflection for newly spent pedagogues? At least, that was what I was wondering as I wandered through the deserted isles of the lecture hall, gathering sticky-notes and picking up rubbish. (Banana peels?  I have to remember to include a class hygiene moment at the end of my lectures.) With piles of colourful bits of paper finally (albeit not so neatly) stacked on my desk, I got to thinking about what had transpired in class, as opposed to what I had planned.

    Turns out including an activity of writing an “I am here to…” message on a sticky note (which was consequently stuck on a vertical surface) did bring a measure of physicality to the concept of micro-blogging. Surprisingly, the physical act of “posting” these notes turned out to be immensely more interesting than the actual content of the notes (with exceptions, naturally).

    Contributions varied in levels of profundity.
    I was fascinated to see students not only boldly posting on the walls and blackboards as many do on social media (here’s my latte), but also sticking notes on their own foreheads, or hiding them in the nooks and crannies of the room. I tried sharing the intrigue by raising awareness of the varying degrees of intimacy that reading these different “placements” would require:
    • How close do I need to get to you in order to read your message?
    • What does the placement of a message say about the author’s expectations i.t.o. engagement/intimacy?
    • What are our assumptions about intent, character, value of different contributions?
    • How does all of this relate to our own classrooms/pedagogies?
    I am, however, not entirely sure how successful/rich the attempted link between sticky-notes and Twitter was. In retrospect, I think it would make sense to separate micro-blogging and blogging into distinct introductory lessons. This should provide greater opportunity to delve deeper into the nuances and implications of such an activity for teaching and learning practice.

    One significant weakness (in terms of a SWOT-analysis) of the lecture was how, and how much we got to deal with the different aspects of blogging. I still forget that the everyday terminology of the blogosphere is, in fact, not so everyday and familiar at all. The difference between a site-URL and a post’s permalink poses a potentially debilitating challenge to many who struggle with the creation of a blog to begin with. While it is a significant challenge for one person to provide individual technical support and teach an already compressed module – there are ways around it. It would, for instance, be incredibly useful if we could find a way to incorporate a Digital Literacy short course into our faculty’s orientation programmes in future. 
    (Sidenote: must investigate this further.)
    Getting back to what did or didn’t work in class – explaining how the class’ blogs and tweets were expected to “kick off” formative, peer assessments didn’t go all that well. Modelling the process was more successful. In fact, I have just decided to use this post (with the accompanying #PGCEmix #taskmodel tweet) to further my modelling prowess:
    You know what I mean… Fred?
    (Decoding: this post represents the blog-post PGCEs are expected to produce in response to the work.
    Next, this post’s permalink gets tweeted, giving our peers access* to it.
    Peers are encouraged to respond and engage with several blog posts in the comments section but
    are expected to tweet at least one reply to a colleagues’ permalink tweet.)
    *blogs should therefore preferably not be set to “Private”

    Happy blogging!
    🙂

  • Moving our noodles

    As I prepare for my first class with our university’s PGCE group of 2016, I realise that I’m asking my students to not only wander outside their comfort zones, but to choreograph and perform their own command performances in alien environments. That’s quite a mouthful (and some shaky grammar to boot)! That is sort of my point: When we’re tiptoeing around an idea that seems too complex to be let out of its packaging; we won’t learn much of anything.

    In a programme characterised by complex language, dense literature, and very unfamiliar academic scaffolding… adding Digital Pedagogy to the mix could break a few backs. This is not my intention. In fact, my goal is quite the opposite: I hope this fledgeling module can highlight cohesion and synthesis between various strands of teaching and learning coursework, whilst facilitating a mediation of student-teacher identities.

    So why move this particular module’s interface away from our official Learning Management System, and onto the open web? Sean Michael Morris (2016) says it best:

    “Something happens when we go to write our very first page inside the LMS. We suddenly become the very old, white, male, tight-lipped scholar who can’t use contractions or ellipses or emoticons or ironic parentheticals or risky language (or run-on sentences). Even those of us who are not grammar guardians become hypervigilant about sounding like the stony, unapproachable expert. Most teachers sound nothing like themselves when they write online; and yet voice sets the tone in an online course. Perfect grammar shakes no one’s hand, gives no hugs.”

     

    And I want this module to be one where we take each others’ hands, and give each other hugs (albeit in virtual, sensitive, and ethically responsible ways).

    Shall we dance?