http://moodlenz.net/ No left menu, two top navigation menus
Based on Ardvaark theme: http://e-bhp.wszechnica.com/ (you can hardly tell this is Moodle)
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My study bar. Lawrence told me about this. Tools (all free or open source) to support learning.
From http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/mystudybar.php Why is this good? It’s the high aim: “Together, these have been designed to support the complete study cycle from research, planning and structuring to getting across a written or spoken message.” Oh that more High Schools supported these goals. I had a brief meeting this with several people from an organisation looking at how to help move the organisation into a future as a ‘learning organisation’. I don’t think it is as clear cut as this: the group does have a significant history and has acheived some good things. They have some capacity to learn. They already have done a lot of learning – but it’s like now “How can we build for the future and improve our learning?” and in particular, the reason I was there: “What can some sort of virtual environment do for this?” I said the electronic tools are only part of the question. It’s the habits of people that count. So we ask: What do you do before you learn? What structures and disciplines can be put in place to build institutional habits? Good questions. Individual knowledge locked up in individuals is not enough. Some sort of shared disciplines are needed to benefit from this. And how to manage the inward (personal learningO) focus, the outward service and keep the personal and corporate goals in balance. I’ve tried to put a few of these thoughts in a simple diagram. Not quite there yet, but here it is:
As well, in the current climate: knowing we can do it is also not enough. Certification and meeting of standards is also an issue: this learning also needs to be formalised. Somehow. The Learning OrganisationFrom a search: About 473,000 results in Google – another 173,000 spelled with a z. Senge (www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm) has his definition of a learning organisation:
Characteristics of a Learning organisation: (Senge)
He sees people as agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of they are a part of. These characteristics are ‘concerned with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future’ (Senge 1990, p69) OK, so we note people AND systems Another definition:
Referenced in gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/learning-organization-2 REF: Senge, P.M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline. London: Century Business. One of the many internet summaries of this work: gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/review-of-the-fifth-discipline/ OK, what does all this practically mean?After the Systems and the people, pay attention to Tools + Habits Possibly some sort of online environment in the organisation with around collaboration, communities. Access to the formal qualifications needed. Gentle shepherding, facilitation of the learning communities. Unfortunately, organisations have an appalling track record with choosing the right tools. A little quote from blog post from How to start a small business
Making the change is hard. Not all of us have seen the tools really working, and then buy into something quickly. And I agree with the quote from Alex. Design has a lot to answer for in some products. Where to now?I guess my questions after the meeting are: How to clarify the return on investment? Demonstrate the advantages, and clarify a value proposition . . not simple, but definitely doable. In some respects (from the point of view of management) it’s all about ‘Improving performance’. A need of management, central funding provider pressures and all that. How then to then help management support the staff and let them, the staff, manage the learning they need to do the job. I have not been quite sure of the future of this blog. Personal or Work? Business? Personal learning? Probably a mix. I have moved on from the University of Canterbury. Below is my old bio. (From uctl.canterbury.ac.nz/derek-chirnside which is still there as I write this). I’ll be sorting a new version soon. If I had bothered to update it for 2009, it would have said: “Moodle is in, we now are making the transition to using Moodle. We have a model for the transition: dividing up the faculties, each with a UCTL contact, introductory workshops and specialist follow on workshops. Hundreds of courses making the transition in one way or another. Now I’m doing a contracting work, mainly around workplace learning, staff development and organisational learning – all with an online aspect, and all involving some form of Learning Management System. (Organisational Learning: there’s a surprise – I’ve been interested in this for a while, but never really had a chance to use any of this except more at a personal level) (My Old) ProfileI have a background in Physics teaching, having made a switch from Chemistry and Maths. Since 1977 I have taught in a range of schools and settings including intermediate, High School and one year (1998 – at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and CPIT) in Tertiary. In terms of Educational Design, prior to 2000 I did not even know such a field existed. However I found I had been doing it for years in a range of teacher professional development projects (including Denis Chapman’s wonderful Riccarton Project) and many national science and physics education conferences. in December 2000 I took over from Alan Cutting at the Christchurch College of Education working in quite a remarkable context: the POLO distance education programme. In the distance education side of my life I am indebted to Prof Mike Wells (now Professor Emeritus, Montana State University-Bozeman) who taught a distance course I was part of in 1998 (“Real World Problem Solving”, via First Class) Here he modeled many of the practices I later adopted as my own. I was ready for 2001 when the courses at the College moved to having a serious online presence with the development of Interact, our home grown learning management system. In 2002 I was part of the establishment of Learning and Information Services at the College of Education: one of the few institutional restructures I have seen that produced an unequivovably better result than what was left behind. With Maureen, Rosemary, Kerry, Glen, Bruce, Donna, Rob, Fiona, Angie, Des and Tim we sought to integrate services and support around flexible and distance courses. This was conceived over some wine and cheese during an Educause conference in Adelaide. In 2005 I shifted to the UCTL at the University of Canterbury, first on secondment and later as part of the merger. My role here at UCTL mainly centres around course design, both online and in flexible or blended courses, with some staff development and policy involvement. My specialty areas are blogs and wikis in knowledge management and learning, communities and e-learning. I use ICT, but I resist people defining me in this light: I am interested in teaching and learning strategies, particularly those that assist engaged or active learning (both online and not). Learning theory has traditionally been classified in three: behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist. I see a fourth as significant: social practice and situated learning. Online learning, using online tools: should help improve learning outcomes, save time and help us feel better about our teaching. Current ActivitiesRecently: Moodle trial, podcasting workshops, using video clips in online courses. December 2008. Currently: I am working with Moodle transition (Gradebook, Groups, Forums and wikis), getting StudentNet set up for another year, helping with some case study approaches to classes and a new project with Massey. Recent Presentations2007 Oporto, Portugal. Workshop with THEKA (midway through a three year professional development project): Communities of Practice: leadership practices and planning. Link to Blog Post on this . 2007 Chuxiong University, China: Teaching Strategies to Support Active Learning October 2008: Podcasting Workshops (Tai Pe Tuni Polytechnic, Greymouth) November 2008: The use of Web 2.0 tools (Blogs and wikis. tagging and RSS) to support ongoing Professional Learning. Karero Learning Centre, Greymouth. More on UnConferencing: UnConferencing meets Teacher Professional Development In the posts on MirandaNet about the axing of BECTA one of the contributors, Leon Cych posted this comment:
From the TeachMeet site:
In other words, PD by the people for the people, what’s happening now, presented by the people doing it. A great structure for an UnConference. A final comment from Leon:
A way ahead maybe? Effectiveness, lower cost – and fun. Claire Donald has just shown us a nifty new visualisation tool developed by IBM: Many Eyes
This is from the guys who brought us Wordle. I didn’t know about all this other functionality. I have several times wondered what had happened to Kathy Sierra. We used her blog post Crash Course in Learning Theory with several courses to try to break people out of merely parroting “Constructivism, Behavourism and usually one other” with poorly examined definitions and application. I stumbled upon this post from Gardner Campbells blog Gardner Writes: Kathy Sierra Lives. A little quote:
We are still in a time delimited workshop training session mentality in many respects. In the dreadful staff development 90 minute sessions, can we find better ways to engage and focus without imposing a pathway, a straitjacket, a lack of mystery and magic and taking the minds in the room off creativity and originality? A post worth reading. I’m sure there are more seeds of Kathy’s recent thoughts floating around on the net. The top of the Google search produced this from just 11 days ago, a nice 6 minutes that obviously includes some of the ideas in the presentation Gardner comments on: She didn’t call her blog “Creating passionate Users” for nothing. Things have been a bit quiet at work on usual activities. There have been other things on the agenda. The VC has announced serious planned changes. UCTL to be broken into several chunks, splitting Teaching and learning policy from operational (ie academic development), moving Institutional research into another section away from Academic development, putting the learning Skills centre somewhere else (maybe back where it was 22 months ago). About a month for submissions. OpenEd09 was a great conference. Possibly one of the best I have been to. Sharing is very powerful. In Leigh’s circle, people have sought to develop stuff, posted it as a work in progress to find other people working on similar things just down the road. Bingo: collaboration, synergy, time saving and dare I say it, saving time and feeling better about things. Oh and doing a better job. What is an OER (Open Educational Resource)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources The term comes from a UNESCO conference in 2002. There is a LOT of work in developing countries at the moment, building synergy between institutions. Resoures currently being used are worked up and improved. or new resources created. Often funded by some group. Some think this is a new form of colonialism. http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/08/looking-into-sky-open-ed-oh-nine.html A quick history of Open Education (from one perspective)Norman Freisen: wikieducator.org/Open_Education:_Precursors I presented on day one: http://openedconference.org/program/program-schedule-at-a-glance OK, of what value was this conference?
That’s it for now. If you want to meet: Friday 28th, 12.00pm at Okover house. But check in with me in case the venue changes. I’ve been a very very itinerant dabbler in Twitter. Twitter emerged at the OPenEd conference complete with conference tag: #opened09. Not as a trickle, but a steady stream. I wondered a little at how people kept up until I saw they used some other applications. Moving into using TweetDeck instantly quadrupled my productivity and ease of use of Twiter. In other words, if you dabble just using the regular Tweeter interface it takes too much time and there are too many overheads. But when and how do we learn about these new things?
Aside: The buzz word is microblogging. I stumbled on this little romantic piece about twittering from Richard Smith who we met last Saturday: Is twitter the latest thing? Or is it an ancient thing, writ new? I argue the latter. It seemed to me there was not much blogging about the conference during the conference, and that many people were putting their energy into tweets and personal conversations. Probably a good thing. Here is Tony Hirsts’s post on visualizing Twitter and the connections at the conference: Long term I’m not sure how I will cope with Twitter. There is such a flow of information, the responses and the follow up often are so fragmentary. But we shall see. I’ll get a plug in on this blog. Which one? To be decided. But, during the conference it was stimulating, sparking off many side conversations. It favours the quick typists, then the people who can think two things at once, or quickly change from a moment, send their tweet and then return. Several observations: Lost gems: Some passing comments seemed to just disappear into the flow of posts. Others got picked up and retweeted. I notice in the help documentation the abbreviation RT for retweet is not regarded as a standard Twitter phrase but is extremely popular. Democracy (or not): In some respects, some voices are louder than others. On the other hand, there is a democratization process at work and a comment from somebody, even a non-attender of a conference via Twitter, can help bring a new thought into the conversations. Unfinished conversations: Just like some things can get lost, some things can be just unfinished. An example of this, in particular, is the final session on Thursday with David Wiley looking at the quality of OERs. The question of voting, metadata, personal recommendations, tags and so on was completely unresolved at the time, and there were a lot of half-finished conversations. There were a large number of diverse threads to this particular discussion. Personally I was finding it difficult to decide what to give my attention to. Often it came down to a case of what was personally interesting to me at the time, versus what might have had specific long-term value for my work situation back home; after all they have helped to fund this trip. The serious blogging came after the conference. |
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