light in the shadows » Friends

In Greymouth

Derek Chirnside — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:52:54 +0000

Enjoying meeting a lot of new people and I am very hungry.

THat is all for now

Teachers from China

Derek Chirnside — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:46:20 +0000

I met David in March, and now he is helping with translation for my workshop. He has compiled quite a neat course: “Learning to Learn”. The message for students is “Take control of your learning”. The message for teachers is “Let go”. I was really impressed actually. He uses a learning style analysis – VAK. Here is one reference at random:

Learning styles can be broken into three modes: Visual, Auditory (also called Aural or Audio) and Kinesthetic, i.e. V-A-K. Most people have a preferred mode of learning, but we use all three to some extent. Some people can use more than one mode equally as well, and are referred to as Multimodal.

VARK model. (R=Read/Write) www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp

David uses this with his classes in an effort to develop autonomy. Really cool!!

Blogs: sorted. Wikis: not quite

Derek Chirnside — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:59:08 +0000

Wow, wordpress 2.3 is nearly out of beta. I think the decision is clear: if you need blogs for your institution, WordPress multiuser. The question is not too clear for wikis. I’ve been asking this question on the TALO forum: Is there an open source wiki that avoids wiki markup? (and has all the other features: permissions, notify, forums . .) I think the answer is at the moment No. At least not a complete solution.

Also, I’ve been eavesdropping on the course Bronwyn, Leigh and Merrollee are involved with in Dunedin. Fascinating!! They (and the participants) are struggling with some very real issues around social software, blogs, wikis, forums. ethics, public/private . .

I was thinking about this yesterday with regard to folksonomies and discovered an old post (2005) by Thomas Van der Waal with a side comment on wikis:

They are a jumping off point, not destinations. They are true conversations, which have very real etherial qualities.

I have had a feeling that for a while the wiki markup etc etc gets in the way of new users. I’m sure there is some reseach on this somewhere. But there is the other issue as well: what is a wiki? What is it really for? How do we best engage with a wiki?

PS. From the TALO list, I visited this wiki comparison site. Verhy comprehensive.