Fron Chuck Tryon, I read that:
I just learned that Law and Order: Criminal Intent is planning an episode loosely based on the whole LonelyGirl15 phenomenon
While I have been sitting in an ‘anymedia’ workshop I find this fascinating as the workshop has film and television professionals trying to work out how to move to the online environment, while existing programs are busy rifling through user generated content to gain cred and content for their franchises.
Courtesy of my referrer stats someone has linked to by blog teaching category from a blog that is, I think, in Russian. The permanent URL causes drama’s in my browser but this link seems to go there. Thank you for the link, sorry, I don’t know what is being said!
I enjoy travelling. The actual movement of travel, like going for a long drive, or a train trip. I also enjoy visiting other places. Right now I’m in Amsterdam. The light is quite like Melbourne in winter, but with the canals, cars on the wrong side of the road, and of course the bicycles it is Amsterdam. I like stepping out of the airport into another world, different colours, smells, sounds. The texture of place. I think part of the pleasure is the surprise of it all, a surprise that comes from the plane. There, you’ve more or less crammed into a long tin can, cruising ten kilometres above the ground at nine hundred kilometres an hour, and in that bubble you don’t travel so much as pass time. It is quite anonymous, the differences between airlines being, as far as I can tell, really quite minor (which is not to say that these differences might not make a difference), and from this generic and neutral time of international air travel you step out into place. Bang, or more usually, bang.
Five hours from Kuala Lumpur and the flight already feels long. Sheesh, not even a Kuala Lumpur yet. Missing the family. I bought myself the cheapest Sennheiser noise cancelling headhphones duty free. Apparently promptly lost the adapters to let me jack it into the plane. After watching one movie decided to watch some video on the iPod. Its dead. Not flat battery dead, more like a blue screen of death. Sort of thing I probably can’t try to fix till I’m online and can actually find some instructions somewhere. At least the headphones work, I’m sitting here with them on, turned on, and you sort of think they’re not doing anything until you turn them off and the cabin literally becomes deafening. Long haul really must be bad for you.
Update: At KL, found some very slow wireless. Found the missing parts of the new headphones. Next, the 13 hours to Amsterdam, and hopefully a room in the hotel that I can go straight to.
The first cohort of media students through our new curriculum are graduating. I taught most of them a lot of their first and second years, so got to know many of them well, and enjoyed watching them mature as people and as students. This is one of the collaborative projects that is the result of their final year. Of course I like it, it picks up some of the things that I have taught them, they are working online, and of course exploring video in new forms.
I haven’t been involved with these students at all during their third year, which is lucky for them! There remain problems with the new curriculum, which emphasises process based learning and a much more strongly integrated use of emerging technologies (I guess the simplest way to describe what we are doing is to describe it as the integration of web 2.0 into our teaching and learning), but that’s the nature of experimentation and innovation. One of the students has built a portal for their work, the 2006 media student showcase.
In a couple of hours I will be flying to Amsterdam. 50 hours total travel (return) for approximately 76 hours in Amsterdam. I have, at last count, five presentations and involvement in two days of workshops. I still have things to email that they need, which might have to be via a wireless hookup from Kuala Lumpur at midnight. I’m expecting things to be exciting, busy, and bubbling with playful investigations. As per my hosts recommendation I have got a Bach rescue remedy to help me. Have also dramatically reduced my caffeine intake so that a couple of strong coffees on the first afternoon ought to kick start me through the day. The tension of being invited to do something like this, and wondering if in fact you have enough to give, is high. (anxiety, anxiety, anxiety.) Ah, but I enjoy this sort of creative, intellectual and embedded (making) improvisation, just wish I knew more.
Michael Stiber picked up my post about prof and podcasting and the relevance of the interview, or informed conversation (after all, as academics we all know it is the conversations around the papers, not the paper’s themselves, that drives the success and productivity of a conference) to podcasting. He wonders:
Expert Opinion: Academic podcasting
I suppose I could require each student in a class to prepare for and conduct a high-quality interview of me, or do small-group conversations, on a specific topic in the course. I’d of course have to get everyone’s written agreement to use recordings beyond the classroom (i.e., non-commercial distribution rights). OK, time to contact the university lawyers (or get someone else to contact them…)
I have a ‘sustainable teaching’ rule. Which is that if the use of a technology, or methodology, leads to more assessment or teaching load, then it probably isn’t a good idea. (Too many novice teachers confuse doing too much with good teaching.) I suspect Michael might end up on that path. Rather than have students interview me, I’d get a group, let’s say four, to do research around idea n, and they are to then have a structured conversation about the idea. This is recorded and is the podcast. Of course since they don’t know how to have this sort of conversation you might provide a template of questions that all groups follow. That way you scaffold the conversation, and since you’re not teaching them interviewing, you also should not be expecting them to solve that part of the problem (hence you can solve that for them by providing a structure).
Mark has announced the release of Storyspace 2.5 for OS X. This is very good news, this is the first real hypertext program I used, quite a few years ago now, and is what I used to teach hypertext theory with in my first full time years. It is software that I am very fond of. I find it very easy to write in, much easier than Tinderbox (which I tend to use to collect information in, but not for writing longer pieces). I’m looking forward to getting this, and once again writing hypertext, hypertextually. (That is, writing in a purely hypertext environment where my practice is concerned with writing, and writing as hypertext. Design, which is what happens when I write in html, can come later. In Storyspace things get pared down, words, links, nodes, link structures, maps.) A return to basics for me, but also to get back into a writing that embraces the nitty gritty materiality of thought and an embedded or embodied hypertextual practice. Where structure emerges through writing, and where the rowdy complexity jostling of my thought is given permission to be rowdily jostled.)
Today and tomorrow I am in Canberra for a meeting with the project team for a Carrick Institute funded learning project – “Digital Learning Communities (DLC): Investigating the Application of Social Software to Support Networked Learning”. This project was initiated, and is being managed by, Rob Fitzgerald, and there’s eight of us cooking up an incendiary mix of ideas and implementation around various social tools and their possible use in teaching and learning. It is the sort of project that wants to make a virtue of the day to day online media use that creative academics (and students) use. So rather than the large all encompassing models offered by our respective institution’s IT learning enviroments we’re want to advocate, evaluate and use what amount to educational mashups. A bit of del.icio.us, some flickr perhaps, a blog, some wiki writing, aggregation and whatever else is needed to realise legitimate and meaningful learning outcomes. (The sort of thing that James Farmer would love, and be a great participant in, if he wasn’t busy working for a big media company!)
In the course of our discussions I wrote the following to myself: “To what extent do we prepare students for a web 2 world and to what extent do we prepare education for a web 2 student?”
I suspect the answer is somewhere in between these two, but it is important to be able to recognise that one half of what is being discussed is how to develop appropriate network literacies for our students, yet on the other hand also how does pedagogy need to change to be network literate?
One of the reasons podcasting has had such an easy adoption within universities is that the form fits so comfortably within existing teaching models. This is an observation, not a criticism. However, the rub could be that just as there is a lot of effort around constructivist models of learning, and so on, having a content expert deliver expertise via a profcast for the requisite 50 minutes might not be the greatest educational model. The problems with it, if that is the extent of the adoption of the new technology, is that it has the potential to repeat some of the more poorer aspects of the lecture. It is asymmetric (I talk to you, you listen), it constructs the learner as passive, and it struggles to provide room for clarification and commentary (dialogue). On the other hand it can be very effective for those students who cannot attend the lecture, for whatever reasons, and for simply distributing existing content (eg a lecture by a visiting expert) to a larger and ongoing audience.
However, in terms of teaching, radio knows very well that to have the one commentator offering expertise for a big chunk of time rarely works. Instead they have conversations, interviews. In terms of academic practice the model would be something like Radio National’s Late Night Live. Erudite, well researched. So in profcasting, instead of having the expert deliver the lecture, imagine three of the experts having an informed, directed conversation about the topic of the week. If (and this is a skill that can be learnt) one of these people developed some of the skills of the good interviewer or moderator, ensuring that the conversation is structured, on topic, and doesn’t become a blend of voices over the top of each other, the material would be compelling and generally much stronger than the direct lecture.
Copyright © 2004–2009. All rights reserved.
RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.