Friday, August 22, 2003
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Facilitator Guides
Had a meeting yesterday with the "evangelical" from the entrepreneurial course, who I mentioned in my first Reflection piece for the course. I'm under real time pressure to get these Facilitator Guides ready, because they need to be sent to Vietnam next week. It's hard when you're only at work for eight hours a week because a deadline keeps getting closer but you still only have the eight hours.
He came in at about 1.30 and said "Oh I've done the Guide but I lost it on my computer." Oh yeah, think I. Anyway, I sat down with him, me on the keyboard with my flying fingers, and him on the chair behind me with his awesome ability to talk off the top of his head and have it actually come out coherent and sensible!!! I must admit, I don't think I could work that way.
I've been wondering if the whole tenor of the Facilitators Guide I have set up is just too hard. There's lots of sections and questions about WHY are you doing this particular activity? What do you expect the students to do here? What is the rationale for this particular assessment task? What does successful performance look like for this particular assessment task? And so far, the academics I've been working with have found it really, really hard. They just don't seem to be able to unlock themselves from the content. I don't want them to tell the offshore academic what the content is- surely they already know that. I want them to talk teacher-to-teacher about the TEACHING bits.
For all his slickness, Marcus yesterday was fantastic. He didn't seem as fearful of the offshore facilitators as others seem to be: fearful that they'll spoonfeed the students; fearful that they'll substitute material that's not approved; fearful of the reputation of the course (and indirectly, their own reputation). I'd been worried about the dominance of his own personality in the site, but he said "Well, they should just treat me and the site as just one resource"- which is exactly the way that I thought I'd handle it if I were the facilitator given this online material. It was great to be able to actually give permission for facilitators to use it this way!
It will be interesting to see what happens with these Facilitator Guides. One of the whole problems with the factory-model of online course production we have is that content writers/academics seem to see their "production" as a once-off: reinforced by the project method of payment for a specified time to write the materials....then nothing. They see writing the Facilitators Guide as an added, unpaid burden, and because they might not even be involved in teaching the course online, there's no lived-in experience of online facilitation to draw on. There's no money put into later iterations, updating, maintenance etc. and so there isn't an emphasis on continually growing the course. Actually, I was interested to see that the current USQ course was used as an exemplar course for USQ generally, using the 2001 (I think) iteration. I've had a look through to see how the course has changed since then. Most of the readings are the same, but the assessment has changed.
Monday, August 18, 2003
What I've read: Theater of War
This book (complete with American spelling of the title!) is written by Lewis Lapham, who is the editor of Harper's Magazine. That doesn't mean much to me, I must admit, having never read the magazine, but I do assume that he's a fairly cynical, outspoken, leftish leaning sort of commentator. His book is pretty light on facts, and pretty heavy on rhetoric which I would probably find fairly unsufferable if I didn't agree with him- he tends to take an image and run with it metaphorically rather than flesh it out with facts. I think that these must have originally been columns in Harpers, because some are written in the declining days of Clinton (who he excoriates for moral laxness), the dimpled-chad fiasco of Bush's election, September 11 then the war on terror. It
Still- some interesting observations.
- By talking about a "war" on terror, we have ascribed to terrorists the sovereignty of a nation-state. Interesting, perhaps, seeing Libya (as a nation-state) taking responsibility for Lockerbie and offering reparation. It seems to me that Bush and Rumsfeld have tried hard to make a nation-state responsible for terror (Saddam Hussein; Afghanistan), but like a many-headed hydra, it keeps spilling out of nation-state boundaries.
- The argument that terrorists are "jealous" of the west- repeated just this weekend by the visiting tub of lard Armitage who said that JI would continue to target Australia because we're prosperous and freedom-loving. Ascribing it all to jealousy removes any obligation on us to change our behaviour in any way.
- He points out that governments need to stage-managed the end of a war for it to be mythologized. Thinking about "successful" wars- WWI, WWII, Falklands, Bosnia...there was a carefully constructed end-point to these wars which was/is lacking in the "unsuccessful" wars of Vietnam, Korea (?), Afghanistan, Iraq
- He quotes a memorandum by George Kennan in 1949 at the start of the cold war "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." Hmm. Roll on the IMF, globalisation etc etc.
Course Reading
Herrington, Oliver et al.
Remember in that Meg Ryan movie (can't remember which- they all blur into one!) where she's faking an orgasm in the restaurant? Well, it wasn't a restaurant- it was my kitchen table; I wasn't with anyone,- just by myself; and it was this article that had me shouting "Yes!" "Yes!!!" and highlighting with vindication!!!!
More and more, I'm leaning to the idea that a traditional approach is just as ubiquitous in online learning, complete with all the technological bells and whistles you want, as it is in a lecture theatre with tiered seating. Likewise, you can have a constructivist approach online, just as you can have a constructivist approach (albeit with more difficulty) in a tiered lecture theatre with 500 students. It's not the technology; it's not the setting. It's the intent of the lecturer: it's what he/she expects the students to do, and how the educational environment is designed to encourage and assess that. That's the paradigm shift.
My ongoing issue is how much the adoption or maintainance of a paradigm of learning is a personal thing. Perish the thought: is this what John Howard was talking about in eschewing political correctness- the right to say "no" to a paradigm change??? If, as I believe, the shift to a new paradigm is an individual world-view shift, is it possible and morally right to force a new paradigm on someone? But is it responsible and organisationally feasible NOT to force someone to adopt a new paradigm?
Blogs
Well, I've heard back from Nic, Alison and Carole and much to my relief, I don't think they think I'm a complete and utter dork. I wonder if any of them know any more about this than I do? Do we want one big blog (which is not really my preference because I'd rather we kept our own, distinct personalities)? How do you get comments- apparently there's script you can put into the HTML at Blogspot, but Blogger itself doesn't support comments. I think that the comments are crucial. Perhaps we could form a little Yahoo group to sort this out?
What I'm doing and where I am
It's Monday afternoon at 2.00 p.m. No work today- going in tomorrow instead (I usually do work on Mondays but I've got a meeting with a lecturer tomorrow). I'm drinking a cup of very weak black tea (weak enough to see the bottom), I have Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 on the CD player and three of our four dogs are with me, which makes me wonder what the other one is doing that she shouldn't. I'm in the "middle room", which used to be a double garage, but we've put windows in the space where the garage door should be, and windows out onto my back deck. There's a phony-log gas fire, and we've just finished putting up wooden venetians, it's carpetted and has a big check-patterned lounge suite, with this computer desk in the corner. The sun is streaming through the windows, and it's very pleasant.
Friday 15th August
Shanghai Dancing
Just finished reading Brian Castro's "Shangai Dancing", which has been shortlisted for Age Book of the Year. Now THIS is a book, compared with the pap that was served up as the shortlist for the Miles Franklin. (In fact, I think I'm aware of Brian Castro fulminating in a fit of pique about not being considered for the Miles Franklin- must see if I can find it somewhere).
This is certainly no straight biography. In the blurb on the back, Castro himself describes it as a "fictional autobiography", but it skips around between generations, there are continuities and ironies across generations, the author himself slips between "he" and "I". No easy reading here: it is difficult, complex, almost over-written. There's a few books that I've read that I really don't think I've understood, but have been overawed by their brilliance: "Gould's Book of Fish" for one; "Wind Up Bird Chronicle" as another. I can't work out whether they are works of genius, or post-modern exhibitionism, using every trick in the book. This book is similar: it could probably bear a re-reading, and another one again, but it is hard work.
Does it deserve the Age Book of the Year? Yes, I think so. It's "competition" is easy slop; no challenge there. If such awards are for crafted, poetic writing and active, deliberate reading that requires the reader to put in (as distinct from time-filling), then yes, this book deserves it- in a way that "Moral Hazard", and "Journey to the Stone Country", and "Of a Boy" do not.
