Epimetheus

10.30 on Grand Final morning. The sun's shining now, but just twenty minutes ago it was bucketing down. I'm feeling well, and vacuuming the house (I can always see the dust bunnies more easily in the morning when the sun shines!)

I've stuck up the Brisbane Lions poster that came with this morning's Age onto Martine's window, which is the one that faces the street. My prediction? Collingwood by twelve points. Groan- it will be unbearable. The only way to face it will be to think "This one's for you, Uncle Jim" (because he died earlier this year).

The grand final tomorrow. The city was teeming with Magpie supporters yesterday: all flocking (pun!) to Victoria Park for the last training session. I feel a little sad that they’re moving from Victoria Park- it seems like the last gasp for that grainy, black-and-white 1930s view of football. My uncle, who grew up in Collingwood, said that the Collingwood and Fitzroy (and North Melbourne) teams were closely tied up with the industries nearby. MacRobertsons Sweets was a big employer in Collingwood, and many workers played for the Pies, while Fitzroy had all the shoe trade, and similar links between the shoe factories and Fitzroy. The abattoirs in North Melbourne had a similar connection.

The replacement of Anthony Rocca with that young player brings my niece’s husband to mind. He used to play for Fitzroy, in its last dying gasps (he never once got to sing the club song, because they didn’t win a single game while he played). He then went to the MIGHTY Saints, in their swift ascendancy and equally swift fall from grace in about 1997 (???). Everitt couldn’t play in the Grand Final against Adelaide, and so he was called up from the seconds. I was so proud, as the camera swept along the players- there he was, standing tall, with his arm around the shoulder of Nicky Winmar (whose father had just died and whose inclusion in the team was uncertain right up until the last minute). That was probably the only few minutes of pride I felt, mind you, as it was a thoroughly forgettable grand final and it’s been downhill for quite a few years since. But I’m setting my sights on 2006. Yes, 40 years since our first and only Grand Final- there seems to be a fitting symmetry in it all.

Tomorrow? All those black and white jumpers in the city yesterday decided it for me. I’m going for Brisbane. Go Lions!!!!!

Spent some time this morning catching up on some reading. I’ve gone back through the course notes where it talks about strategies and tactics. I’m still not convinced that there is a difference between them- I think that it IS just a matter of grain size (.e.g. naming the person, identifying the actual activity). I’m a bit perplexed by the diagram they use- why is there an arrow going from the learning outcomes (located within the student, I assume) to pedagogical tactics? And where is ‘knowledge’ is the educational setting? (or is - it part of the environment- which is perhaps a bit unsatisfactory?) Is a “strategy” a tool, and a “tactic” how to use the tool? That works with the examples – except perhaps for the reflections example, which doesn’t seem to fit.

Under Section 2.3 in the notes, it warns that in the future constructivism may be viewed as more suited to particular education and training contexts e.g. adult learners who are predisposed to reflective and experiential processes. I wonder if the type of knowledge and how it is utilized also affects the suitability of constructivism -.e. g in training contexts where there is a RIGHT way of doing a particular thing, and variation and critique is discouraged and even dangerous?

Then on to Laurillard. She’s one of the biggies- you see her quoted in nearly every bibliography you pick up. Given her guru-ness, she doesn’t seem to publish much (although she does the traps quite regularly in conferences- she spoke at RMIT a couple of years ago). There was this 1993 book, then another one about learning conversations in about 1998 (which I want to read); I’ve found one paper on the Internet and that’s about it. I read a lot of this stuff when I was doing some research for work-integrated-learning, but that was almost coming from the opposite perspective: how to draw the learning out of a situated environment, rather than how to construct learning from an derived, abstracted, second- hand environment.

When I read it as part of work-integrated-learning, I was reading it more as a justification for situated learning. This time round, I’m reading it more as a justification for thinking about how to teach abstracted, knowledge-of-knowledge-of-the-world; and that this is a legitimate activity.

So, how did I find the assignment? I still don’t know how useful I found Gunawardena and Zittle’s framework. It seemed to me at first to be rather derivative, and then later, to draw distinctions that were hard to sustain in practical terms, even though in theoretical terms they were quite sound and even useful – e.g. collaboration/interaction. But when I tried to add an extra element (just as an intellectual exercise, really, to see if I COULD), I found it harder than I thought it would be. I went for “multi-voicedness” (which I know isn’t even a word), wanting to pick up on the post-modern view of truth, and the need to be conscious of debate. Trouble is, it was a bit of a motherhood statement, and I really couldn’t find a definitive theorist to attach it to. It seems that the bigger the idea is, the harder it is to find its origin.

I read FAR too much for this assignment. It’s so seductive, being able to browse electronic journals and databases and collect information here and there like a magpie. But the act of collating and DOING something with it- there’s the rub. I was embarrassed by the length of the bibliography.

I had a bit of a crisis of confidence when reading it over before submitting it last night. I looked at that principles column, and starting wondering how it differed from the definitions column. I thought back to your contribution to the discussion, Nic, where you mentioned that a principle would remain intact even if the actual methods changed, and that helped. I’m really glad that we were in the group that discussed the nature of a principle, because it’s probably the most intangible.

Pacing and chronology in an online course is difficult, isn’t it. When we were asked to do that group activity to support the content map, I hadn’t really got my head around what the assignment was asking us to do. At the time it seemed a rather obscure exercise, but I found myself going back to the final contributions of all three groups quite often, and combing through the virtual chats as well.

Well, I finally sent off my assignment last night, somewhat late. I LOVE U.S.Q.’s policy on late submissions!! (although I do find myself wondering if having additional time leads to a superior product. On the other hand though, eventually one has to put pen to paper…) I’m often struck by the incongruity of our MBA subjects which purport to encourage time-management which then have such a ridiculously punitive late-submission policy. Sometimes time-management involves deferring something, working around things or reshuffling priorities. I know that penalties would factor into your decision about how to structure your priorities, but very few things in life have this completely arbitrary “do or die” consequence.

What I'm listening to: Anne Sophie van Otter and Elvis Costello "For the Stars"- at this very moment, a track written by the guys from ABBA. Not so sure about ABBA any more, but brilliant songwriters

What I'm reading at the moment (or will be reading once I get off this computer): "Homage to Catolonia" by George Orwell, and "The End of the Twentieth Century" by John Lukacs

What I'm wearing: jeans, very daggy slippers, a very stretched white long sleeved top. I'm an absolute hornbag, as Kim would say.

Who's here: no-one. Just me. Steve's up in his house, with all the dogs. Martine is at work down at Coles. There is a blowfly buzzing against the blinds, if that counts as company

Uh. (blush) I’ve just read a bit further on, and the author is explaining it. (Serves me right for being so quick off the mark to comment!)

He reckons:

• the exam questions were derived from the weekly discussions and instructor notes, which low interaction students may have read, even though they didn’t contribute.
• The assignment was a case study which was designed to determine ability to integrate multiple perspectives and different point of view- an activity similar to the discussion board activities.
• Perhaps the discussion board rewards a students’ facility with ad hoc discussion (rather than reflecting knowledge of objective content, as in an exam).

I find myself thinking though, that the low participation students would have read and witnessed the multiple perspectives and different points of view too- but perhaps the rub lies in actually DOING it.

Another interesting little thing in this same article! They used an Inventory of Presence questionnaire (there’s a link to it) to define people as having low, medium or high social presence, and then compared the level of presence with their performance in the course.

I don’t think I can do tables in this blog- well, I could with HTML but I can’t be bothered. Anyway:

Low social presence.- Mean examination score 87.5% Mean written assignment score 55.5%
Medium social presence- Mean examination score 87.% Mean written assignment score 70.1%
High social presence- Mean examination score 80.0% Mean written examination score 80.0%

The overall mean for all students on the exam was 85.4%.
The overall mean for all students on the written assignment was 70.0%

What do you make of that? Poorer performance on the exam (even below the overall mean) for those who had high participation. I guess that an exam is a very individual, time-based event, and that studying for it is essentially a solo activity (is it?). Assignments often ask for wide-ranging access to sources and development of a cogent argument, and I can see that participation with other people would probably enhance that. Quite a strong effect on the assignment, really. Although I wonder if the moderator him/herself had been swayed by the participants’ strong presence in the online discussion and ascribed expertise demonstrated on the boards to how they perceived the assignment when they were marking???

What do you reckon?

I really don’t know why I’m still working on this assignment. I’m feeling more and more washed out, and my walking is getting worse and worse. But if I’m just sitting reading a book, or catching up on emails, then that seems close enough (at least in observable terms) to doing coursework reading and working on my late assignment. Don’t know if it works that way, though. I know that I can only manage about four hours of concentrated work when I go into work, and I often forget that anything I do at home has a similar limitation- until I’ve pushed too far and made myself feel dreadful.

Anyway, I’m reading an article on social presence at the moment: Picciano, 2002 “Beyond Student Perceptions: Issues of Interaction, Presence and Performance in an online course”. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol 6, No. 1. http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v6n1/pdf/v6n1_picciano.pdf

He distinguishes between presence and interaction: you can interact by posting a message, but not feel that you “belong” or have presence. He picks up on social presence research by Lombard and Dillon, who speak of presence as being the “perceptual illusion of non-mediation” – in other words, that if you have presence, you’re not aware of or do not acknowledge the existence of a medium in your communication environment, and respond as if the medium were not there.

Now, I’m not sure if I’ve understood this correctly, but I think about telephone usage. I don’t know how old you guys are and if you remember the black bakelite telephone standing on its own little table with a fluffy stool attached to it in the hallway. There was always a tentativeness about answering the thing- a timorous “Hello??????” You would consciously shut the door and sit down at the little table to “make a phone call’, and there were protocols for when you would ring: certainly not between 6.00 and 7.00 p.m.; not too early in the morning; not after about 9.00 at night. Sometimes people would shout on the phone so loudly that you wondered why they bothered with the appliance and didn’t just go onto the back step and bellow up into the sky; or else you would adopt your “telephone voice”. People were very conscious that the telephone as an appliance was mediating the conversation.

I think now, too, of people with their mobile phones. Do any of you travel by train?- that ubiquitous mobile phone conversation “Hello….on the train….Rosanna…..ten minutes….See you then”. There are often no boundaries of appropriate time and place for phone calls; the person on the end of the line whose call has interrupted your conversation is just as present as your conversational partner is.

I think this is what they mean by presence, and the effect of mediation. Perhaps some other examples- crying at a movie (even though it IS only a movie); my daughter dressing up in scarf and beanie on a stifling day when she was about 18 months old because she was watching a snow theme on Playschool, and perhaps- in online environments, a feeling that I “know” a person I’ve only met online.