Archive for category social media
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!
Global Poetry Project
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, learning community, online tools, personal, social media on May 13, 2011
This tweet came across the screen tonight and I just thought: YES.
Now I’ve joined the Global Poetry Project Ning. I figured tonight was as good a time as any to post a poem in a new place and this one promises ‘a space for members to expand upon their cultural views through the writing and reading of poetry’.
I penned this poem last week. I’ve been reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and that’s where the title and some of the inspiration came from.
The project aims to provide “a safe and open atmosphere for all visitors and contributors alike” and has many student contributers. So if sharing your poems and reading the work of others in a supportive environment appeals to you, why not consider joining the project, friending me and adding a poem of your own!
Motivation and Participation in Asynchronous Online Discussions
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on March 24, 2011
I was very interested to read the findings of Xie, Durrington and Yen (2011) published in the recently released issue of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Given my current use of Twitter in my own university unit for preservice teachers, I was glad to read that others were also observing a relationship between participation in online asynchronous discussions and students’ level of motivation. I have reproduced their abstract here:
This study investigated the relationship between students’ motivation and their participation in asynchronous online discussions during a 16-week online course. Fifty-six students participated in
online discussion activities as a normal part of their classes. Their motivation for participating in online discussions was self-reported three times throughout the semester. The findings continue to
indicate that students’ motivation has a significant relationship with their participation in online discussion activities at time two and time three. Students’ perceived value, autonomy, competence,
and relatedness have different levels of impact on their online discussion behavior. This study also found that students’ intrinsic motivation and their perceived value of online discussions remained at a moderate-high level over time, although the perceived value had a significant drop from the midpoint to the end of the semester.Keywords: Asynchronous Online Discussion, Motivation, Distance Learning, Collaborative
Learning, Learning Community
Reading this article has motivated me to collect my own data in the next week of classes, to gather some initial responses from my own students. I look forward to hearing their views!
Hunting for twits
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, social media, technology, university on March 23, 2011
Of the roughly 85 students in my English Curriculum Studies unit, currently about 62 are following our class twitter account @CLB_018
No mean feat considering it is only week 4.
However, it is week 4 of a 9 week unit, meaning we’re almost half way done (eek! I still have so much to SAY!)
Aaaand, I’m aware that a small handful of those followers may be spamish.
So today I am embarking on a twit hunt - hunting through my list of followers to see who has not tweeted anything (many only joined for class and only follow the class profile). I’m going to DM each of them individually and privately to encourage them to participate.
Am I going overboard in doing this?
On one hand this looks exactly like the kind of time-consuming ‘tech monitoring’ that teachers often tell me they don’t like about teaching online.
On the other hand, I see it as analogous to checking students’ workbooks a few weeks in to term and pointing out their missing work. Is this something that University teachers see as beyond the scope of their ‘job’? I don’t.
But please – please - tell me if you think this is too much, or if this seems like a good strategy to you. Especially if you do something similar – did it work?
Change agents – Pirates vs Ninjas
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, social media, technology, university on March 22, 2011
I was prompted by Binaca today to look for an old post of mine on giving feedback to students. In my search I was delighted to find it had been almost exactly one year since I wrote this post about the tension caused by curriculum change, especially in regards to integrating ICTs:
Let’s make sure we’re applying the ‘too much is too much’ rule across the board, and not just as an excuse/a reason for neglecting the new. If what we mean is ‘we haven’t had enough PD to use this right’ then by all means say that. But there are some things that would be good to drop out of our current practice to make room for the new. One thing that we know about teaching is that no matter what you are taught to do, as a teacher you will instinctively model your practice on the teaching you received at school. Fighting against this instinct takes concentration, and learning about new practices and tools takes a lot of work. Because of this, teachers who are embracing technology are feeling increasingly overloaded and burnt out - this is the real problem that needs managing.
In a later post I tried to be more generative than reflective by reframing the process of change, suggesting that:
…as educational leaders, if we want to help people come to terms with change and embrace it, then we need to recognise and validate their desire to stick with ‘the known’…Recognising that people are resisting change because they feel disempowered helps us to employ methods that give power back.
These lines of thinking manifested in the lecture I gave today to preservice English teachers on how to navigate change amidst all of the ‘theories of text and response’ that they had learned so far.
You may be pleased (dismayed?) to watch how I liken the characteristics of change agents to either the NINJA or PIRATE side of the popular theoretical battle, Pirates vs Ninjas 
I think I am mostly pirate!
Stuff I believe
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, politics, reflections, social media on March 21, 2011
It was interesting to follow the tweets of @BiancaH80 and @durk94 tonight, as they discussed the school funding data available on the MySchool website.
To be honest, in the interests of keeping myself in a positive and generative work state of mind I’ve avoided looking at the new MySchool site at all (and no, I’m not going to hyperlink to it because I don’t think it deserves the traffic). Next week I’m going to have to though, so I can talk about it with my students in class.
ohmmmmmmm…
Even though I now work at a university, which involves striving for curriculum excellence in schools in every sector, I maintain my firm commitment to the social justice agenda of supporting public education.
However, government departments of education tend to be clunky, inefficient, wheel-reinventing institutions. I know, I used to work in one. And if I returned to teaching you’d find me back there.
But while funding and resource benchmarks are a large part of the problem, a widespread lack of willingness to consider radically shifting our models of curriculum ‘delivery’ prevents the construction of a meaningful way forward, in my opinion. The composition of the local student ‘community’ and its relationship to the related local ‘campus’ needs to be significantly rethought.
So I’m posting my tweets for tonight up here, just for the record. I’d be interested in hearing other people’s visions for the school campus of the future. Will there still be a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’?
I hope not.
Alain de Botton’s University of Twitter
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, education, personal, reflections, social media on March 20, 2011
A delightful, insightful and helpful series of tweets on the 18th March from contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton.
I highly recommend his twitter feed, I find something helpful to me every time I visit. If you like that, you may want to check out the DVD or book of his series on Status Anxiety, another favourite of mine.
My PLN: working with Bianca
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, personal, social media on February 21, 2011
Part of the re-vamp I’m undertaking of English Curriculum Studies 1 to ‘make it my own’ is to use the first tutorial as time to:
- get to know each other and form reading groups, and
- start the students building their online PLN, or personal learning network
I have also been picking the brain of my friend and colleague Bianca Hewes as I prepare materials on project based learning, or PBL.
Bianca is a key node in my personal learning network, and her thoughts, arguments and resource links pervade my personal learning environment – we follow each other on Twitter, read each others blogs and are connected as friends on Facebook. For me this illustrates two important elements I have found to be instrumental in building my PLN
- that learning happens everywhere (even in ‘personal’ spaces like Facebook)
- that a good learning environment is ‘personal’ in a very literal sense – friendly, generous and warm
It’s worth recording some of the building blocks of our collaboration thus far. I’ll pick up the thread where I saw Bianca’s tweeting away while she prepared English lessons for Term 1 at the end of the summer holiday and started asking questions, to which she replied:
I had heard about PBL, but hadn’t used it well so far myself. So I asked Bianca for some help because…well, that’s one of the lessons of this story really. She’s in my PLN. I know she’ll send me what she can, when she can. As a learner, I’ve had an opportunity to personally ask her though about what it is I want to know. And because I want to teach PBL, I know I need to learn more about it, and draw on the expertise of others:
SUCCESS! A willing expert!
To maximise Bianca’s willingness to let me pick her brain, I emailed her some more specific questions about what I wanted to learn:
Now Bianca is back at school and has preparing materials for her ‘Innovator’s Workshop’, while I’ve been busy working away on thesis corrections and planning the learning sequence for my English Curriculum Studies Unit CLB018. This has included making a blogging ‘hub’ for the tutorial groups to compliment the QUT Blackboard resources and a twitter account for unit related tweets. She’s created a Prezi with the information she would like to share about PBL with my class (yesss!) and now even if we don’t get a video interview or link of some sort as I had originally envisaged, I feel like I have enough material to move forward and teach this concept to my pre-service teachers.
Bianca’s Prezi includes a Common Craft video about personal learning networks, which links to the website for bie.org , so now I also have two killer links to refer people on to who are new to PBL. Are you? Why not watch the common craft video now, you’ve come this far:
So, THAT is the story of how having a PLN that you love and put energy into building pays back in spades.
If nothing else I hope that giving my students this path and these tools for expanding their personal learning environments will encourage them to look forward to learning again. If they read this post they will see that learning done well doesn’t limit itself to one space, one person, or one network. I won’t be able to teach them everything I think is important about English Curriculum in nine weeks, and that’s why equipping them with the motivation and capability to keep learning beyond week 9 is priority number one.
Thanks Bianca for being in my PLN and for being part of this story 
The shape of the Arts curriculum
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, social media, technology, video games on October 14, 2010
For those who have yet to check it out, the draft shape paper for the Australian Curriculum for the Arts is now available on the ACARA website.
Given that up here in Queensland the school subject ‘Media Arts’ is separate to the subject ‘English’, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to intervene in the text and see if I couldn’t just find the crossover between the two subjects.
It wasn’t hard.
2.3.3 Defining Media Arts
Media ArtsEnglish is the creative use of communications technologies to tell stories and explore concepts for diverse purposes and audiences. MediaLanguage artists represent personal, social and cultural realities using platforms such as prose fiction, poetry, dramatic performances, television, film, video, newspapers, magazines, radio,video games, the worldwide web and mobile media. Produced and received in diverse contexts, these communication forms are important sources of information, entertainment, persuasion and education and are significant cultural industries in Australian society. Digital technologies have expanded the role that mediatexts play in every Australian’s family, leisure, social, educational and working lives. Media ArtsEnglish explores the diverse artistic, creative, social and institutional factors that shape communication and contribute to the formation of identities. Through Media ArtsEnglish, individuals and groups participate in, experiment with and interpret the rich culture and communications practices that surround them.
As I spend more time in Queensland I find myself having to wrestle with my identity as an English teacher because of this overlap with Media Arts. It’s not that media texts don’t still feature in the English curriculum – they do. But the culture here is that, while student might study visual language and analyse some/increasingly visual/multimodal texts in English, it’s Media Arts you have to go to if you want to make anything serious.
On one hand, it’s like Media Arts teachers get to do a lot of the fun stuff, which kind of sucks if you’re an English teacher from New South Wales!
But on the other hand, I have to admit, compared the rigour in the Media Arts curriculum up here…well, I have to admit that as an English teacher I always seemed to run out of time to ‘do the fun stuff’ anyway (do you know how LONG it takes for students to rehearse and record their own 10 minute version of Act I of Romeo and Juliet? Fricken ages!) And it would be nice, for just a short while, not to have to feel like I am dragging my English colleagues kicking and screaming toward increased multimodal study…now if I need to find a like minded media teacher, I can just go and, well, find one.
Leaving aside the ‘are knowledge silos good or bad’ debate, what thoughts do people have about the picture I’m painting here? NSW people, if you came up to the sunshine state would you want to specialise in English, or Media Arts?
Collaborating with the Boss
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, school, social media on July 20, 2010
My budding questions around how power operates in social networks and how networking constructs our identity are still on my mind.
I suggested in one post that the reality of using social media (“If you’re going to be a big boy and swim, and benefit from, these waters you have to be able to take it.”) means that teachers, who are often not in positions of power, need to be mindful of how they construct their identity online, and stop being naive about the ‘glorious, open sharing’ promised by social media being consequence-free.
These ideas were not met well by some. I suspect that such comments sound like an attack on ‘the boss class’. But this is an exact example of the very thing I’m talking about. It’s hard to discuss online practices without taking it personally if you think you are being criticised, because we invest our identities in what we do and say online.
So, I tried to take my thinking in a different direction, and came up with some generative ideas about how school leaders can better support teacher change by more specifically ‘diagnosing’ the reasons for resistance. People liked this. I liked this. And it’s a line of thinking that I know I’ll follow up.
But it doesn’t really speak to the original issue.
That’s why I’ve gone for a nice, clear, provocative title for this post. And I hope people will not take it personally (as so many people in my PLN are bosses!) when I say that there are real problems with inviting staff collaboration if you don’t have a plan for how to cope with dissent.
We can say that we ‘encourage dissent’ until the cows come home. We can say that disagreement is generative. Sometimes these things hold true.
But what support structures, what strategies, need to be in place for this to succeed, for all involved? (<– this is the generative part that I hope people will think about and engage with)
And what are the costs of making your identity known online if you are a dissenter?
When I write online, I do so in good faith – in the spirit of sharing my ideas and resources. I’d like to think I’m open to criticism, and change. But can someone like the NSWDET Director General afford to do so? Surely not – he is limited in what he can share because of his role, and so it should be. What about a school principal? As the most powerful ambassador for their school, there are limitations on what they can say too. What about classroom teachers? They are incredibly vulnerable to misinterpretation and misrepresentation, and as the lowest on the professional pecking order, the easiest to impose consequences on.
Please don’t misunderstand this post as undermining social networks – that’s not what I’m trying to do. And please don’t take the absence of all the usual ‘good news’ stories about how developing an online PLN increases professional development and sense of contentedness as a sign that I don’t fully support all of the wonderful work that is going on out there on Twitter, Yammer etc.
But I think we need to come clean about the need to tighten up our approach to professional discussion in the online world.
Because at the end of the day, if you are a ‘boss’ and you ask people to share ideas and collaborate with you (online or in real life), you are giving up some of your power. And things are going to get complicated if/when you find yourself having to reign that in.
NB: anonymous comments are welcome.
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