The cone

Tigger, my pet, you are in discomfort.

How I hated to have decided to have others place a cone on you. It will only be a few days, I promise. It is meant to protect you, to restrict your movement so you don’t bite at your wounds. I know it restricts you from eating freely, from cleaning yourself, and from sleeping comfortably. I catch glimpses of your frustration, your eyes filled with pleading and anger, the thrashing of your tail,

Though I want to laugh, heaven forbid, I want to comfort you as best I can, and give in and tear that cone off you when you go into panic mode, twisting your head back and forth in distress, moving around backwards and sideways. I steel myself with resolve when I hear your meows as you struggle to eat and drink out of the bowls.

It has got me thinking how we all wear our own cones, metaphorically, often placed there for our own good by well-meaning others, to serve a higher good, and protect us from ourselves. But then we get used to the twisting and turning of our souls to accommodate the cones that bind us. I think of how the cones in our lives restrict us, hinder us, and though we get by, not quite free, we live in a state of anxiety, tolerating a difficult situation or state of mind the cone requires of us. Without the cone, we grow to believe, we might be doing things that damage us, so we live uncomfortably with the cone on, and come to accept it, to get used to it, and then never bother to take it off.  We forget about it, until we see the cones of others.

How funny the cones of others look to me! How blatantly obvious they restrict and bind and hold back these persons? Can they not open their eyes and just see? What the heck is wrong with them? I ask myself.

It gets me thinking further about how I place cones on my students, asking them to restrict their ideas and thoughts to accomplish a task not of their choosing, to finish an assignment bereft of personal meaning, to study facts and rules by rote. How much of what I teach my students a kind of cone that limits their perceptions, funnels certain ideas, and thereby blocking out others?

Tigger, my pet, the cone will be off soon, and you will be free once again to be the cat you are.

I wish I could say the same of my students.

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Generating Inspiration in Adult Literacy Learners

I have been working with a few students in the classroom the past few weeks on their essays. I have combined the regular classroom setup with tables and chairs with a row of computers.

I had also been encouraging learners to bring in their netbook, Iphones and laptops to take advantage of the wireless connection.

 

I found that students were more comfortable moving between pen and paper work and electronic composing and surfing when these activities were modelled by me first. It gave them a feeling, I guess, that it was in fact permissible for them to work back and forth as they needed.

For example, I found using BUBBL.US, a mapping site, very useful for guiding one learner to come up with ideas while working through the planning step of her essay writing. In this case, this learner needed to be guided through the process to generate ideas about symbolism used in Monkey Beach. After talkign with her, I mapped out a map connecting ideas.

I have also used Itools.com to search for a synonym and demonstrated this process with one learner to help her with creating her thesis statement.

An interesting development that came out of this was that this one learners set up her schedule to take advantage of two instructors and spend three hours a day completing her essay assignment. I realized that the student probably benefitted a great deal from being asked to look at the writing process from two different perspectives, guided by two instructors focussing on different elements. Alas, the student has completed the task in a matter of two weeks. There might be potential for researching team teaching efforts with literacy students to mentor them in advanced writing skills.

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All Student EduBloggers Welcome!

 

You have been told by your instructor to post ideas to a blog as part of the course(s) you are now taking. Why? You ask. Why now? How will this benefit me? What skills will it help me develop? How will it help me get gainful employment? How will it help me tackle my studies better?

 

As a young adult, you may have been already keeping a private journal, or jotting down ideas for projects, or coming up with new ideas, and jotting them down. Some of you have been actively involved in high school debating clubs, or drama clubs, and now look forward to participating in a new venue. Perhaps some of you love reading, and would enjoy sharing opinions with others on different articles or books. Perhaps some of you want to explore sensitive issues, and want to tackle ideas with others in a supportive space, without worrying your personal privacy is invaded.

 

EduBlogging can be used as a sandbox for drafting ideas, or as a sanctuary, offering privacy and solitude for deep reflection, depending on your reasons for wanting to write.

 

As adult learners, you might want to re-examine personal experience, cultivate your inner voice in written form so that it matches your strong spoken voice, or you might want to gain confidence complementing your verbal storytelling skills with matched written skills. Some of you might need private space to get your ideas down, or draft ideas, whether it be letters to your friends, family, or your community.  

 

Stephen Downes comments on the benefits of personal blogging in his post at

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-appeal.html

In general, blogging is appealing as it provides a digital legacy. It offers a public side to one’s self for others to witness. It acts as an online backup of crucial content in case one’s PC dies unexpectedly. Blogging is good for the writer and others to reflect back on and revisit. Blogging is great writing practice, a great way to present oneself to potential employers.

 

His comments were prompted by Chris Garret’s article, “Before I Forget” in the Blog Herald at http://www.blogherald.com/2009/07/10/before-i-forget/ who contrasts the personal blog with the public blog, and contrasts the motivations for maintaining both.

 

He explains that the emphasis changes for those writing personal blogs. The audience is reduced to oneself, and to one’s invited guests. He also explains the importance of blogging, more than any other tool, as a systematic method of contributing to one’s digital record, and uses a lifestream to describe the flow of seemingly disconnected, unrelated ideas.

 

“The stream is made up of many random bits and pieces but when you look back your memories jog and the fragments coalesce into an ordered history” (Garret, 2009, blog post).

 

The main reasons for starting your own edublog vary, depending on your own unique circumstances. Edublogging offers you an invitation to begin a personal, lifelong journey, in which you enter into dialogue with yourself and others. Instructors provide you with the tools for engaging self and others in your/their life-streams and become apprentices in lifelong learning.

 

Formal education provides you with the supports for you to gradually grow and master your blogging skills, so that you can make your own informed decisions on how to communicate with others. Formal edublogging offers you a range of blogging encounters,

And I can speak from my own experience that the safest route to take to learn how to blog and hold conversations within many differing blogging spaces, is to work with a learning mentor/companion within a formal schooling context. With the help of a mentor, a seemingly casual remark can spark your inspiration, a well-placed comment will spur you on to share more ideas, and re-think them in different ways. When encouraged by kind words, you will be prompted to try new things, move out of your comfort zones, and explore, and create, and blog to learn. A mentor can suggest resources, nudging you in different directions, and offer suggestions and advice on strategies for improvement.

Formal education provides a lasting, sustained link to a support network so your development as a communicator is extended and extended and extended further into different contexts: from the private blogger seeking solace and solitude, to the social blogger seeking interaction and participation, to the autonomous blogger seeking to present oneself to potential employers, funders, or educational providers, to the anonymous blogger seeking to discuss private ideas is safety, or publicly perform creative works, or publish satire and critique – all these cab be served through edublogging, which makes possible the mixture of the informal learning with formal learning.

 

I welcome you to the world of edublogging, a world of possibilities for self-making and transformational learning.     

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First Post in EduBlog (Sept. 2008)

This is my very first post last Fall. It began my professional journey into edublogging. The vision has changed considerably. I am now completing an independent studies course on edublogging theory and practice, and enjoy the flexibility and independence of working autonomously.

 

This stack of posts have been collected from Me2U at Athabasca University as well as from webskills.ca, a site I have now closed.

 

This Fall, I am taking the MDE 605 course from Athabasca University and the online connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes from the University of Manitoba.

 To focus my diverse but related development efforts, I have created a personal learning space called webskills.ca, to aggregate and showcase my progress towards a number of personal learning objectives:

1. The site will act as a drafting board for reflections and brainstorming for working through and chewing over ideas prior to officially publishing them to the MDE 605 members’ blog or the connectivism course blog.

2. To meet the MDE605 course requirements, the site will showcase a working model (in-progress) for an online DE start-up venture called web skills, to submit for scrutiny and feedback to potential investors and organizations. 

3. A section of the site will showcase a proof of concept for presentation to my employer (post-secondary institution) demonstrating the use of blogs and wikis for literacy instruction about ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) with adult learners.

4. Demonstrate the use of a collaborative wiki for generating/sharing/brainstorming ideas about the concept of liminality, the process of personal transition and transformation, and its impact on human potential in the emerging digital age of networked lifelong learning.

5. The exploration and sharing of ideas about technologies and strategies that encourage community-building and leaving an enduring legacy for future generations: collaborative journaling, digital story-telling, scrapbooking, path-making (making trails through the web’s resources, leaving it easier for others), meme creation and propagation (selecting five questions to frame an idea, reply to the questions, then post, and send off to others to do the same), and the use of digital story-sacks to encourage reading, and many other related ideas. I am especially interested in their impact on curriculum, and coming up with working examples demonstrating the use of the various instructional strategies.

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Addressing Critics of Blogs

I have been having conversations with colleagues, and I am getting interesting feedback on the use of blogging for instruction. Several comments have been made dismissing edu-blogging as useful. Blogging has been referred to by some educators as “past news”, “a waste of time”, and “time-consuming”.

I would like to address these detractors, and the purpose of this blog post is to engage in a critical discussion on the promises and perils of the edu-blog.

I am not a proponent of grafting established, efficient methods of instruction into blogging activities, and heralding it as the universal method that replaces all other types of instruction. I am interested in identifying compelling reasons for what edu-blogging can be used for, how it can augment and enhance learning in entirely unique ways.

One educator complained about the screens and screens of text that needed to be scrolled through, the overload from the glut of ideas that did not pertain to the readers’ interests at all. Is this an objection about the use of blogs? Or was it indeed about the legitimate beef of being compelled (as part of a course) to weave through the half-digested thoughts of others? Perhaps the objection was the way a discussion activity that was better suited to a threaded forum was grafted into a blog? You have to comment on the original post, as well as to others’ comments, and do this in a timely, meaningful way. Not easy to do in a blogging application.

Sifting through and responding to the deluge of ideas is time-consuming, especially if unstructured. This is very true. But I consider this not so much a criticism of blogging than the consequence of poorly designed activities.  One central principle for designing activities for instruction is: One should never waste a learner’s time.

As for blogging being a learning technology that belongs to the past, hmm, time will tell. But the issue that repeatedly emerges is whether learners want more control over their own ideas, and seek more ownership. The reluctance of students to “feel at home” within Content Management Systems makes blogs a compelling application for lifelong learners interested in cultivating a living voice that becomes a legacy, a roadmap of their learning journeys. I think more learners will prefer blogging, because it is easy to use, easy to set up, and easy to control ownership over.

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