Epimetheus

Course readings

I don't know whether I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I read the Gunawardena and Zittle, and Collins (I know my educational technologies) articles, and have only one thing to say - "meh".

"Meh" is a term much loved by my daughter whenever she is underwhelmed by something and can't be bothered talking about it. How was school? "Meh". Did you enjoy the film? "Meh". What was the concert like? "Meh".

So wherein does the "meh"iness lie? I concede that Gunawardena and Zittle's framework is probably useful- certainly the course designers of our course found it so!, but they just build it like a skeleton and didn't put much meat on its bones. And the Collins article to me just seemed self-evident.

I'm going to have to turn my mind to the second assignment, which is looming. I'd lost track of it a bit, so I'll skim over what I've read so far, and pick out bits about the five concepts that I might have missed.

AAaarggghhhhhhh!!!! (Strangled scream.)

I can now connect, but get disconnected every 20 minutes, with the final five minutes of the twenty p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y slow. I've tried disconnecting the phone on our line (which apparently draws down power every 20 minutes and can lead to disconnection, according to my ISP), but I really, really think there is something still wrong with the modem. I wish I'd never bought the damned thing.

I've taken Martine (my 17 year old daughter)'s computer from her room, because she's not here this week. She lives with me alternate weeks, with the rest of the time with her father who lives about 5km away. We're one of the few shared-custody families around, so Mr. Howard would be very proud of us. She likes having a computer in her room that she can chat with her friends at night, but has kindly offered to let me move it into the study instead. It's a good room really for a Mrs Mangles snoop like me- I can see the WHOLE street, and everyone who walks up and down it.

We're having friends over for dinner tonight. The two couples don't know each other: we inadvertently asked them both on the same night. It will be interesting- Steve's friends are both psychologists; my friends are on the receiving end of psychologists and psychiatrists over their depressed, very difficult goth daughter. I hope that they don't think we had them over together for any ulterior motives. Angie (my friend) is one of my real life heroes: multiple amputations after pneumoccal septicaemia about 8 years ago (both legs to the knee; above elbow, and all fingers on the remaining hand)- but she continues to work at Latrobe, organise theatre nights, go shopping, come out for dinner...she just gets on with it.

So what are we having for dinner?. Glooooom. Steve's on a diet for his diabetes, cholesterol AND high blood pressure so it's a very healthy vegetable soup, veal casserole with roasted vegetables and steamed greens, then a plum pudding for those who can, and strawberries for those who can't. And a glass or two or three. I'm looking forward to bringing out all my good crockery etc.- we haven't had people for dinner for a long time because I've been so-up-and-down healthwise, but I'm feeling good and quite excited about it all. (Jeeez, I really need to get a life!!(lol))

Oh dear. St Kilda just lost to Geelong. I thought that might happen- Geelong's unpredictable down at Cardinia Park, and our winning streak over the last few weeks has been against pretty weak teams. I'm looking to 2006 as the Year of the Saint. Grand Final in 2006- you heard it here first.

Well, I picked up my laptop today but I'm still not sure whether it's working or not. Three bloody trips to the computer shop it took. The first time they said they had fixed it; brought it home- and no connection (Trip No.1). I spent 2 hours on the phone with the help desk at my ISP, who suggested in the end that it was a modem problem (which is what I suspected all along), so back to the workshop again (Trip No.2). They installed a new modem; brought it home- didn't work. So back again (Trip No.3) when they assured me that they had got it connected. So home I came, tried to connect. SUCCESS at last. BUT, and a big but, I only seem to be able to stay on for about 15 minutes before I lose the connection again. I shudder to think of my phone bill. I'm keeping a record of how long each session lasts before I lose the connection. I'm finding it really frustrating, and I can now see why connection difficulties are such a hassle in online learning.

I've put a link to the website I made in Introduction to Web Publishing earlier this year. I know that it doesn't work- but I think that, because you have access to Garage builder through USQ, you might be able to access it that way. It was my first assignment, done in HTML rather than Dreamweaver, so it's a bit primitive. Nonetheless, I thought you might like to see the maniac who's writing all this. Are you able to access it?

I'm on a roll! I actually fixed up the date and time so that it resembles reality, and I've stopped my pages coming out as haikus. I did both of those on "Settings" in Blogger. Perhaps all this is a dream and I''ll wake up tomorrow and the comments won't work, the dates will be wrong, and the sentences will all come out as haiku again.

Mayes, Dineen, McKendree and Lee "Learning from watching others learn"

I liked this article- not the least because it gave good examples of a constructivist approach within a traditional learning model. I think that there's a real danger in learner-construction that we discount completely the effect of authority and experience. Why do I read books, newspapers, watch documentaries, listen to interviews?- because they know more than I do, and I want to hear what they have to say, weave it into what I know, and make up my own mind. I really like the idea of a learning dialogue (I assume that's the same as Diana Laurillard's learning conversation framework?) which has action -and intent- from both the teacher and the student.

"...dialogue is central to the learner's "enculturation" into the patterns of language and thought, discussion and criticism, that are characteristic of an academic discipline." Ooh, yes. Something we've allowed the information-deluge of the internet to swamp is the skill of thinking like a historian, or thinking like an educator, or thinking like a physicist. My supervisor for my M.Ed was Dr. Pat- a fearsome, white-haired battle axe. I noticed that whenever she got her hands on a reference, she would straight away say "where are they from?", then flip to the bibliography to look at who they'd read. It was only later that I realised what she was doing: placing the work into its academic context, working out which "camp" the author was in, knowing where to place it in terms of debate.
I've recently read Inga Clendinnen's "Tiger's Eye"- fantastic. She is a historian- in fact, she was at Latrobe in the 1970s when I first went there, and she taught South American contact histories e.g. Incas, Aztecs etc. In "Tiger's Eye", she writes about her experience of becoming very ill with liver failure, eventuating in a liver transplant. As part of her recuperation, she decided to move right out of her specialty area to look at George Augustus Robinson's journals. He was the protector of Aborigines in Victoria and Tasmania in the 1840s, and roamed around the state documenting the condition of different tribes, leading to their removal to missions later on. Clendinnen was still pretty frail at this point, I think, and trying to work her way back into her profession without any of the pressure of her published-work, so she chose a self-contained historical document, and something closer to home than Mayan contact in the 1600s!!! What was interesting was watching her working as a historian, which is a skill-set separate from the content being studied. It was also fascinating watching the way that her ideas of history, and what a historian does, had been altered by the humbling experience of being so ill. She was far more willing to let "the person" into her historical imagination.

Anyway- the idea of learning dialogue being a form of enculturation- yes!

- I liked the point Mayes et. al made about "delivery of learning". Come to think of it, can ANYONE deliver LEARNING? Encourage, elicit, bring about, yes.....but deliver? The point they made about the primary presentation is a good one, and picks up something I've been thinking about Powerpoint slides. Many of our (worse) online courses put up Powerpoint slides, but I wonder what the purpose of them is. If, for example, I got locked out of a lecture room and could only peer through the window to squint at the Powerpoint overheads, would I say that I attended that lecture? When kids miss a lecture and "get the overheads off the internet", is that the same thing? I think- or rather, I hope- not. I thought that it was interesting that both a teacher-generated and student-generated commentary along with the presentation improved performance over those who just received the diagrams. A good reason for including audio with Powerpoints- I must remember this reference!!!

- I wish they'd given more examples of the Task Directed Discussions. e.g. named a concept and what they did with it in each type of task.

- "...learners are helped to develop their 'epistemic fluency' by being asked to communicate their understanding when it is still incomplete." Hmmm. Interesting idea in terms of pacing. I wonder if Glen's doing this at the moment. I feel as if this Task 2 (the principles task) is too soon- I haven't read enough and feel underprepared to write anything. But they suggest that the most fruitful discussions come out of this incomplete, foggy stage. It's emotionally risky though.

- it seems that they deliberately structured the dialogues so that they would be reusable. That goes a bit against the findings of WestOne in Perth in relation to reusable learning objects, where they found that it was better to keep a learning object intact, but keep in a repository all the different uses it had been put to (rather than try to consciously develop a generic, stand-alone object).
(Anderson and Mah) Keeping it relevant: An object approach to training package content development that facilitates workplace contextualisation

Course reading

The course notes for Module 2.

Just started reading these, but a few observations:

- "Constructivist approaches to learning and the high value placed upon learner-centred or learner-managed learning have found a 'friendly context' in the online arena.". Yes. And mass tertiary-education is an unfriendly place for learner-centred or learner-managed learning. We've taken over the Capitol theatre in Melbourne (a very large 1920s cinema with a spectacular ceiling by Walter Burley Griffin) as a lecture theatre for our Business faculty. I know personally of a lecturer- a skilled, wonderful teacher- who just broke down at the idea of walking onto a darkened stage with the spotlight on her (to make the Powerpoints easier to read) who had to literally PERFORM in front of about 700 students. Another school presents seminars to 60 students instead of tutorial groups. Where's the learner-centred and learner-managed there? If being learner-centred is important to you as a teacher, then you'd embrace online learning with relief in comparison.

- "What we are suggesting is that the online context requires us to change our strategies and tactics and that seems to lead to some rethinking about the nature of teaching and learning." A colleague at work often talks of "spaces" where we can challenge academics' views of teaching and learning. Perhaps I'm not very good at making and exploiting these spaces: perhaps I'm too compliant in just doing what the academic wants- and inwardly seething, judging and criticising- because I'm not sure of my moral/ethical/positional authority to challenge?
As the notes say on p. 5 "Is [philosophy], and should it be, an individual ethos or is it, or should it be, a collective ethos? If the latter, can it be imposed from above, or can it only emerge through shared beliefs and understandings?"

- Steeples diagram on p.4 of the notes. Knowledge isn't shown there. Perhaps it lurks in the background and informs the tasks?? Interesting omission.

- Strategies and tactics p. 5 "Strategies are directly concerned with action...The point is to promote a shared understanding of intentions and permit co-ordinated action." I DO like "intentions". We are purposeful beings- both teachers and students. Perhaps this is a principle for learner-centredness for Task 2- need to think more about this. How about: "learners have their own goals and intentions which affect their approach to their own learning"???

Although, having said that, look at this quote I found today from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:
You seem certain that man himself will give up erring of his own free will...that..there are natural laws in the universe, and whatever happens to him happens outside his will...All human acts will be lsted in something like logarithm tables, say up to the number 108,000 and transferred to a timetable...They will carry detailed calculations and exact forecasts of everything to come...But then, one might do anything out of boredom...because man...prefers to act in the way he feels like acting and not in the way his reason and interest tell him...One's own free, unrestrained choice, one's own whim, be it the wildest, one's own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy- that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table...A man can wish upon himself, in full awareness, something harmful, stupid and even completely idiotic...in order to establish his right to wish for the most idiotic things.

(This is from Niall Ferguson's "The Cash Nexus", which is my current read. I'm not really sure how this fits in, but I thought it was interesting!!!)

A last bit about paradigms

This is the last bit about paradigms, I promise.

I was lying in bed the other morning thinking about Nic's comment of paradigms being treated as a holy cow. I don't know whether my stance is the same as his, or the direct opposite: I think that things are called paradigm-shifts when they're not. For example, that Paulsen article talked about the "one-to-one paradigm", and the "one-to-many" paradigm. They're not paradigms- they're models, they're approaches- but they ain't paradigms.

I think that the actual number of paradigm shifts is relatively small, and they're BIG in terms of ripple-on effect for the individual and the society. Here's what I came up with:

1. Heliocentrism. From memory, this is what Kuhn used as the basis of his book. Once people no longer viewed the earth as the centre of the universe, it changed peoples' perspectives of God and his relationship to humankind; it changed astronomers' perceptions of what the stars and planets were doing; it gave rise to a different view of causality.

2. Horses. I was thinking about transport more generally, but once you get people moving faster and able to carry more than their two legs can do, it's more a matter of degree between different forms of transport. For example, is there a qualitative difference between a car and a train in terms of world-view?

3. Currency- ie. using something inanimate to symbolise wealth.

4. D.N.A. I think that the current pendulum swings between nature/nurture are more a matter of degree. I think that the paradigm shift involves seeing a universal building block and the fact that it's chemical??? in nature ( I think-my biology/chemistry is pretty inadequate here)

5. Evolution.

6. Something about warfare, but I'm not sure what: the idea of fighting over an -ism rather than territory or personal allegiance perhaps? Not sure when it happened; not sure about this one.

7. Something about religion- thinking about the shift in world-view, allegiances, priorities etc. that occurs when a person is "converted". Although, this happens on a personal basis, enough people who've made this shift affects society at large too (e.g. fundamentalism and its effect on politics in Middle Eastern countries, and the Bible Belt effect in US)

8. Global warming- or at least, the consciousness of the finiteness of resources and that actions directly influence the environment.

9. Technological communication- perhaps Edison?

10. Post-modernism- plurality of viewpoints; no objective truth

Now- some that I'm not sure about:

1. September 11?? Although is this a US-centric perspective? How important will this be in 200 years? How has it changed things?- awareness that non-combat things can be weapons (like planes); attack on urbanisation. But there's continuities here e.g. the neo-conservative view of who "the enemy" is; Bush calling on language of evil/against us or for us/ crusade. I don't know if this constitutes a break with the preceding world view or not.

2. The internet? Uncoupling data from a physical location.

3. Constructivism in education. I'm not sure about this because I think that both the transmission and constructivism approaches have co-existed for a long time. What about Socrates (quite seriously- I don't know much about him except that he asked a lot of questions and gave bloody long answers!). From the little I know, he made his listeners WORK mentally in terms of developing their understanding, and he himself built on and learnt from their constructions too. Piaget, Vygotsky, too. Is this a paradigm change or a swing of the pendulum? Not sure.

Ah! Flushed with success I am! I was feeling very little and stupid because I couldn't get enetation to work, and now I feel INVINCIBLE!!! (LOL- it won't last!!). It reminded me a bit of my earliest days working with computers, back in the mid-1980s. Remember how the computer used to show the prompt "Are you sure??" It always seemed such an onimous prompt- a bit like a parent looking over the top of their glasses disapprovingly and saying "Are you sure- because it's a big mistake....". But the only option was to say "yes" (no matter how unsure you felt) because otherwise it just looped you back again. My colleagues and I used to gather around our ONE computer in the office, and if it asked "Are you sure?" we'd open up a book, put it on our heads like a tent, and press "Yes" then squeal with delight if it worked.

You've gotta give me credit for trying to get these comments to work. I'm trying BlogSpeak this time. It seems to be the same principle - ie. put code in the header, then code in the blogger section, but I still can't work whether I need to put code in each separate post. But the instructions suggest that it's just in your template. oh well, lets publish and see what happens.

Tuesday morning, and I'm back online after a bit of a pause. My stepson has boomeranged back home and seems to have commandeered the computer I'd been using, so I decided to buy a used laptop that I could use in my house. (My husband and I have adjoining but separate houses). Unfortunately, the laptop's modem is faulty, so back to the shop it goes...... I can't get the comments function through Enetation to work. I'm wondering if RadioUserland has a comments function already built in? I should download a test version, but I'd rather wait and download it on my new repaired laptop, where I can have unlimited access to it! Off to swimming in a few minutes. I go to a swimming session for the old and infirm (only joking!) run by the MS society, because my health's not good enough to even broach the over-50s water aerobics session. Not that I'm fifty yet. I must admit that I'm not really looking forward to it- I had a long day at work yesterday, and feel really tired today. Then off to lunch with my long-time friend Lynne.

Saturday August 23

Big worlds and little worlds; people and the sweep of history

Just a few thoughts on reading the paper this morning.

Paul McGeogh in The Age was writing about the big picture and the little picture in Iraq. He wrote:

"The US does have access to a textbook example of how Iraqis see and live their lives. If they looked closely at Saddam's years in power, they would see his horrible big picture did not intrude on the day-to-day, little picture existence of most Iraquis. Like Saddam, the US administration here is preoccupied with the big picture. This does little to assuage the anger in millions of households that were robbed by the war of services they usually took for granted under Saddam- civil security; power; water; telephones; cooking gas, petrol and diesel; an economy and jobs; and more. Iraquis got around Saddam by hunkering and turning a blind eye to his big-picture emasculation of the nation. The US big picture is just as remote for them, but they bear the brunt of the little-picture emasculation every day under the gaze of an ineffectual puppet administration installed by the US."

This whole thing of the personal/political I find fascinating. I've also been thinking about the broad sweep of world events that often seem inexorable and uncontrollable, and then the place of the individual in all this. One man's death means nothing in the big picture- but then sometimes there are certain deaths that seem to change the direction of the tide. What will be the effect of Sergio Viera de Mello's death in Baghdad this week. How will the UN react? What will be the effect on other governments in the world. And David Kelly's death- will Geoff Hoon's predicted offer to resign to be enough? Will Blair go too? If so, what does that mean?

I read a book recently by Barbara Tuchman called "The Proud Tower" that looked at Europe prior to the outbreak of WWI. In particular she looked at the final "noblesse oblige"-type Government elected in 1911; the rise of Anarchism across the world; the Dreyfus case in France where a government had to keep on lying to protect a previous lie; the increasing militarism of Germany; the United States change in foreign policy that saw them taking over islands in the Pacific. She argued that, just as a fever is a symptom of illness, and not the illness itself; so a triggering event (e.g. the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand) was not the actual cause of the war: the causes were far longer-term and inexorable. She was talking more about broad sweeps; and individuals were just bit-players. An interesting thought.