Archive for category social media
TeachMeet Brisbane
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, social media, technology on January 23, 2012
During 2011 a range of TeachMeets were held throughout Sydney. A central wiki was set up to coordinate the events and the hashtag #TMSydney ran hot during the meets.
The events were great successes, described by participants as welcoming, supporting and positive. This is not surprising, when you consider that the ethos behind the event is that it is strictly free professional development run ‘for teachers, by teachers’. What I thought was most attractive about the TeachMeet structure was the short presentations – either a 2 minute ‘nano-presentation or a 7 minute micro-presentation (or Pecha Kucha). It sounds like an ideal way to hear a little bit from a lot of people.
You can therefore imagine how stoked I was to hear that someone was organising the first ever TeachMeet in BRISBANE!
#TMBrisbane
TEACHMEET BRISBANE will be held from 4-6pm at Moreton Bay Boys’ College on Thursday 1st March 2012.
If you would like to register or get more information, you can visit and join the TMBrisbane wiki: http://tmbrisbane.wikispaces.com/
Of course, I was so excited to see the event come to Brissie that I had to volunteer to present. It will also be a great chance for me to refine my pecha kucha style!
(I also look forward to the #TMBrisbane hastag drawing together more of the Brisbane edu-community)
Pass it on
If you would like to be involved in TeachMeet Brisbane, or to support the event, take a look at the flyer available for download on the wiki.
In the Twittershpere you can participate in the backchannel from anywhere (not just Brisbane!) on March 1st by adding #TMBrisbane to your tweets.
Finally, this video about TeachMeets made for Sydney West is a great one to pass around to folk who are new to the TeachMeet concept…enjoy!
A transformative digital literacies pedagogy: Thomas (2011)
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, Lit_Review, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on November 17, 2011
Thanks to @malynmawby @benpaddlejones and @Vormamim for engaging in tweety-chat today about play-based learning and transformational play.
There was an article that I wanted to post the full reference to – this one by Angela Thomas (@anyaixchel)
Thomas, A. (2011) Towards a transformational digital literacies pedagogy. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy. Vol. 6 pp. 89-101
You can see the abstract for the paper with my own annotations, above.
In it she argues that there are:
a number of significant characteristics of digital literacy that are imperative to include in a pedagogy of digital literacy in order to make it a transformational pedagogy. These include: explicit understandings of multimodality, opportunities for play and experimentation, participating within communities of practice, and critical engagement with text.
I had picked this article up to read Angela’s findings about digital pedagogy, but it was a timely read. I am a big fan of the work of Paulo Freire, and of his work to empower communities through literacy. By bringing in Freire’s notion of ‘transformative pedagogies’ this article reaffirmed the need for critical, participatory and dialogic practices to be woven into the digital learning landscape.
I’d love to hear of other readings and resources along these lines, if you know of any…?
Use #etaq21c to ask me things tomorrow!
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, learning community, online tools, personal, social media, technology on August 19, 2011
More specifically, use #etaq21c to ask me questions about Digital Literacy and electronic text practices in English curriculum. The conference theme says it all: “English and Generation Next”
ETAQ’s Annual State Conference will be held atLourdes Hill College on Saturday 20 August. The theme is “English and Generation Next”.
The program will feature a keynote address by Professor Peter Holbrook from the University of Queensland’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History, a Q & A style panel session [that's where I'm presenting!!], and a range of supporting workshops. Professor Holbrook’s address is entitled “Literature, Literacy, the Imagination, Freedom”.
So, if you are an English teacher, or if you are interested in digital texts and the future of the book, please, shoot some questions our way! You can post them here as a comment, but if you use Twitter then posting a comment or question there with the hashtag #etaq21c would Really Make My Day 
I am soooo looking forward to this panel presentation! The full list of people in the panel session are:
- Professor Catherine Beavis (Griffith University and ETAQ Patron)
- Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland)
- Kelli McGraw (Lecturer, QUT)
- Janina Drazek (Executive Director, Teaching and Learning, Education Queensland)
I’ll be talking about ‘acts of reading and writing’ and ‘digital pedagogy’.
JOLT: Balancing Quality and Workload in Asynchronous Online Discussions
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, Lit_Review, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on August 17, 2011
Of interest to teachers struggling to keep up with online discussions with their students!
Goldman, Zvi (2011) ‘Balancing Quality and Workload in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Win-Win Approach for Students and Instructors’. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 7:2 pp.313-323
ABSTRACT: The challenge addressed in this article is how to achieve a win-win balance between quality and workload for students and instructors participating in asynchronous online discussions. A Discussion Guideline document including minimum requirements and best practices was developed to address this need. The approach covers three phases: design and development, setting up expectations, and launch and management. The goals of the approach, based on a commitment shared by all full time and adjunct faculty, are high quality of education as well as retention of both students and qualified instructors.
Further explanation of the research challenge from the introduction: “When discussions are regarded as critical components of learning, and administered as such, they impose a significant workload on both students and instructors. In applicable programs targeting practitioner adults, discussion sessions, during which much of the evidence-based learning and experience sharing occur, can easily consume half the course workload (Goldman, 2010). The reality is that neither students nor instructors can afford to dedicate an unlimited amount of time to fulfill course requirements or teach a course. Therefore, as a matter of practicality, discussion sessions should be carefully implemented to balance pedagogic quality and workload for students and instructors alike.”
Foucault THAT.
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, education, english, learning community, Lit_Review, online tools, politics, reflections, research, social media, technology, university on July 28, 2011
I have a confession to make.
Lately, I’ve been cheating on my blog. (In a good way, I promise!)
A colleague at my university, Clare O’Farrell, has an established Ning that is home to members of the Poststructuralist Theory ‘Special Interest Group’ of AARE. Established it so well, in fact, that it is one of the few Nings I know of (along with the English Companion) that continued to have happy users after stupid-Ning made its stupid-serivce un-free. Hmph.
Anyway, I use my space and profile on the ‘Ed Theory Ning’ to brain-vomit about (on?) theory that I don’t understand yet.
And it’s proven #very illuminating.
Increasing my activity in various groups on the Ning has also proven fruitful. Particularly in the ‘Daily Writing Club’ (we have to do exactly as it says…!) and now also from browsing the ‘Foucault reading group’.
That’s where I was reminded to check out Clare’s actual blog, Refracted Input, which I hadn’t done for ages. This month she is discussing a quote by Foucault about ‘race and colonialism’, and in it I can see a relationship to contemporary discourses around changing technologies.
The term ‘folklore’ is nothing but a hypocrisy of the ‘civilised’ who won’t take part in the game, and who want to hide their refusal to make contact under the mantle of respect for the picturesque…
Man is irrevocably a stranger to dawn. It needed our colonial way of thinking to believe that man could have remained faithful to his beginnings and that there was any place in the world where he could encounter the essence of the ‘primitive’. (trans. Clare O’Farrell)Michel Foucault, (1994) [1963] ‘Veilleur de la nuit des hommes’ In Dits et Ecrits vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, p. 232.
You see, I’ve been worrying about the ethics of what could be seen as meddling with teachers or students who are comfotable in their print-material ways, trying to prod them along to explore new technologies. I have wondered, ‘am I being selfish?’, ‘what if they have it right?’, ‘what if I’m destroying something important?’, and ‘am I wrong to advocate for my view, should I just wait and see what happens instead?’. But then, Clare’s wise words:
One cannot buy into the romanticism of the primitive – which is assumed to be so much closer to pure truth and ‘nature’. Conversely one cannot make the colonial assumption that one civilisation or one period of history (now) is more advanced and more evolved than another.
That’s right. I don’t need to worry about whether I’ll ‘wreck’ anything, unless I’m thinking of the people I’m meddling with as OTHER. And I was using pronouns to construct myself in opposition to other through all those damn self-doubts. I don’t need to do that. FOUCAULT THAT!
*Sigh of relief*
NB: Clare also curates a website on Michel Foucault, which includes a glossary of KEY CONCEPTS and other wonderful gems (thanks Clare!).
Google+ by Molly Rocketboom
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, online tools, social media, technology on July 26, 2011
If you’re still not sure how Google+ fits into your existing world of Facebook and/or Twitter, let Molly of Rocketboom break it down for you. Approx 4.5 mins:
Challenges to developing a blended learning course
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, Lit_Review, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on June 17, 2011
This extract is from the article Development and Implementation of a “Blended” Teaching Course Environment in the most recent issue of JOLT:
Roadblocks/challenges to Developing a Blended Course
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to developing a blended course is the student fear factor. Many individuals in my class had never crafted a PowerPoint presentation, much less navigated in an online
discussion. Despite their familiarity with Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, MySpace, and instant messaging, the thought of being graded for online participation was somewhat threatening and intimidating. It was also difficult initially for students to understand the rationale for some assignments (such as Second Life). In future classes, more emphasis on business necessity, future usage, and SL current applications will be incorporated into the course pedagogy. Because there were many different types of assignments in this course (including group work, both on and off line), some students also expressed dissatisfaction with having to rely on team members. Use of the Team Agreement did however help to coalesce groups, and to give members a framework for expected behavior. Instructor feedback on the Team Agreement is essential in providing guidance regarding conflict resolution, assignment schedule, and interpersonal interaction among members.The blended model is a student-centered approach that allows the instructor to behave as a coach, a facilitator, and a cheerleader for his/her students. It is a way to let students lead in an environment in which they’re guided to success. In the words of Singh (2002, p. 476), “To be successful, blended [teaching]… needs to focus on combining the right delivery technologies to match the individual learning
objectives and transfer the appropriate knowledge and skills to the learner at the right time.”by Jacqueline Gilbert and Ricardo Flores-Zambada
Development and Implementation of a “Blended” Teaching Course Environment
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2011 pp. 244-260
This interests me because I have been considering including an assessment of online PLN participation in my unit next semester.
Given that this study found that “the thought of being graded for online participation was somewhat threatening and intimidating” for students, I’m going to avoid actually grading their participation per se. Rather, I’ve decided that students must show (in an assignment appendix) participation in their online PLN for the unit to achieve a Distinction (Grade ’6′) or High Distinction (Grade ’7′). That way, they either do it, or they don’t. They don’t have to feel anxious about quality.
Has anyone else done something similar to this? Making students demonstrate their PLN building? How can I do it – get them to attach a screen shot of three blog comments and five tweets? Would that suffice? Hmm…
List of Artistic Media
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, digital storytelling, english, Lit_Review, social media on June 9, 2011
Some more thinking about what we mean when we say ‘medium’ in English curriculum…this list of artistic mediums has been helpful in contextualising English as a subject area within a broader notion of ‘arts’:
In the arts, a media or medium is a material used by an artist or designer to create a work.
- Architecture
- Carpentry
- Digital
- Drawing
- Film
- Light
- Literature
- Natural World
- Painting
- Performing Arts
- Photography
- Printmaking
- Sculpture
- Sound
- Technology
- Textiles
Wikipedia ‘List of Artistic Media’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artistic_mediums
Within that list, the medium of literature appeared with the following explanation and links:
Literature
Main articles: Literature and Writing implementThe art of writtenwords and typography is traditionally an ink and printed form on paper or is creatively written with many forms of media.
Common writing media
- Digitalword processor and internetwebsites
- Letterpress printing and computer printing
- Marker
- Nib (pen)
- Pen and ink
- Pencil
- Quill
Common bases for writing
This is food for thought.
The investigation into medium continues…
Media – Definition
Posted by kmcg2375 in english, Lit_Review, social media, technology, university on June 8, 2011
Was looking for a good defintion for ‘medium’ in English and along the way have found my new go-to definition for media:
MEDIA as a word derives from the plural of Latin medium, meaning ‘middle’ or ‘between’ (hence ‘mediator’ as a ‘go-between’, also medieval, coined in the nineteenth century to label the age between the classical period and the Renaissance). From the early twentieth century, however, it has become increasingly common to talk of ‘the media’ (definite article and plural). The media thus understood mean two interrelated yet distinct things:
- those specifically modern technologies and modes of COMMUNICATION which enable people to communicate at a distance, characteristically through print (especially newspapers and magazines); the various telecommunications (‘tele-’ comes from the Greek word for ‘far’, hence telegraph/’far-writing’, telephone/’far-sound’, television/’far-sight’), as well as film, video, cable, satellite and the Internet;
- by extension, the institutions which own and control these technologies as well as= the people who work for them (e.g, newspaper proprietors, TV and film companies, advertising agencies and governments, as well as reporters, camera operators, editors, producers, presenters, etc.).
Pope, R. (2002) The English Studies Book: An introduction to Language, Literature and Culture (2nd edition)Routledge, London. p.68
Evolution of storytelling
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, digital storytelling, english, social media, technology on May 25, 2011
I just came across this excellent illustration posted by Dan Sellars of the way that storytelling traditions have evlolved over time to reflect and utilise the technology available:
If you like that, you will no doubt also like another image he posted (in 2009) ‘Characters for an Epic Tale’. Check it out!
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