Posted on

Tweet: Personalised Learning, Gardner Campbell interview

via IFTTT

Having come across this video by chance, it really spoke to me regarding my themes of connections and student data. During the first section of this interview Gardner Campbell speaks of how personalised learning is when your teacher really knows you. The difficulty being how to scale this ‘thick, rich experience‘ up to hundreds of students.

One possible answer is to ’empower the individuals to scale their own meetings on the network’ and here the meaning of ‘meeting’ is ‘spaces in which humans encounter each other in particularly rich meaningful ways‘.

This desire for connection is something that the web was built for. Yet Gardner asks ‘Is higher ed ready to tap in, in very meaningful, deep ways to students dispositions to connect?‘.

So why the continued resistance? Why the avoidance to teach and integrate communication processes effectively online? Again and again the response to blended or distance learning is to create resources, put them online and let the students work through. The culture mountain is tall and we are still near the bottom as a sector.

Posted on

Going manual

My applets for Pinterest are stubbornly non-visual so this is how my #mscedc board actually looks by week 7. Seeing it all together it is a lot less messy than it probably should. It is a mix of people and visual data. One of this weeks aims will be to add to this board as much as possible.

Posted on

Tweet MOOCs

This was a quite an odd article starting with an odd photograph of a line of children sitting staring at screens for a story about MOOCs, the vast majority of which are designed for adult education. Also adults wouldn’t be sitting in a row in a classroom participating in one! Is this just laziness or a way of trying to subvert thoughts around MOOCs? The summary article for a piece of research then goes on to describe how those who comment are most likely to finish the course. This is then followed up with the admission that most commenters are  older/retired/not working etc and therefore have the time to comment. Also, surely engagement is a sure sign of possible completion. Lastly, those non-commenters who are younger/working have no drive to complete non-accredited courses – they are getting what the need, literally on the run! Are we continuing to apply the same metrics to MOOCs as formal courses and if so why?

Posted on

Ethnography, MOOC, Design and Serendipity

When it came to choosing a MOOC to join in order to conduct our micro-digital ethnography I made the pragmatic decision to check the weekly email from the providers that I normally ignore. Next I checked the start dates and finally I skimmed the titles to find one that was most relevant/attractive for my work. This seemed important considering I am working full time, studying on a formal course and now studying on an informal course whilst researching it – a stretch by anyone’s imagination. After this sophisticated process the winner was: Designing the Future on the Future Learn platform by RMIT University.

Continue reading “Ethnography, MOOC, Design and Serendipity”

Posted on

Unexpected connections

Working through this week and thinking about the film festival I realised along the way that I am saturated with robots on a daily basis, but do my utmost to filter out this presence.

Why? Each day I work on the sofa with a backdrop of back to back episodes of Transformers Rescue Bots. For someone who has never watched Transformers I am assuming that on some level there is a connection to this version for much younger viewers.

Continue reading “Unexpected connections”

Posted on

Cyborg me

Working through our readings I thought I would apply the characteristics of human-machine relationships in the Millar paper to myself to bring the whole concept of cyborg into perspective for me. It was also a good chance to have a play at creating an artefact.

Continue reading “Cyborg me”

Posted on

Going manual

So after a morning of frustration and wrestling with my IFTTT applets I am opting to put down a few words manually. This allows me to both vent and introduce some much needed imagery into my stream. Last week I focused on just my thoughts, added to Tweets, and although plain it resulted in a pretty streamlined stream (pun intended), however, as the links weren’t working it was hard work to see what I was commenting on.

Now I have sorted out the links to the original content but still no images and it all looks a repetitive mess so it will be back to IFTTT after I finish this. I next turned to Pinterest as an alternative method to add pictures, however, for some reason this is failing to display the image. A quick search highlighted that IFTTT needs the actual image extension to display properly but when I linked directly to the .jpg it still didn’t show. The perfectionist in me wants to delete my failed attempts as it destroys the aesthetic of the blog in addition to visually publicly showing my incompetence (which as a learning technologist is proving amusing) but it is an important part of my story as I have lost several hours on technical details rather than reading course content and other blogs.

So I stepped aside from the digital for a few moments and turned to my older pen and paper technology and made some notes from Jeremy’s week one welcome to refocus me. Our family robot says ‘hello’ to you all (he actually plays music and dances so he might appear again later in my artefacts). Thank you Jeremy for the suggestion.

Posted on

A new journey

Education and Digital Cultures is my third module for Digital Education and probably the one that I feel least prepared for. The only direct experience that I think I have is from the #edcmooc back in 2014 and thinking about assemblages in the Digital Student Experience module last semester.

My natural tendency is to put the human before the technical and I wonder if this will change over the course. Is the boundary between the two going to blur?

Finally,  I am wondering along with other fellow students how I am going to ensure that I make sense at the end of each week of my (compulsory) lifestream of consciousness via IFTTT.  We haven’t stated yet but already new technologies explored and still more to go.

Let the adventure begin…