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For the last few years some colleagues and I have been watching the rise of managerialism within higher education, and more recently in K12 education. ...more...
And now onto weeks 5/6 for the PCK course I'm studying. Within two/three weeks we'll be heading out into schools, so the content for this week is starting to become fairly central. i.e. what is the curriculum and how are you meant to plan teaching/learning around that curriculum....more...
So, only two weeks to catch up on this course....more...
This post draws on this article about Google's Talk Guru to argue the need for systems that support people at the point of them carrying out some task. ...more...
And now begins a couple of weeks catch up, and hopefully getting up. The following is reflection on weeks 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the course on Supportive Learning Environments I'm studying....more...
It appears that there is an increasing, ERA driven trend within Australian universities for placing greater emphasis on teaching scholars. These are academics who are no longer expected to do research, apart from engage scholarly with their own teaching practice. ...more...
Week 4 of the literacy and numeracy course....more...
I'm biased, for other reasons I'm in the process of becoming a high school teacher of information technology/maths. That said, it's given me the opportunity to think about a problem from a previous live as a University academic in information systems/information technology. ...more...
So, after a delay due to an assignment in another course and organising a new car, it's time to catch up on Week 3 of this course. Just as week 4 is starting and the first assignment is due. A few late nights coming up....more...
This is version 2 of an attempt at the first assignment for the ICTs for Learning Design course....more...
The following is a first draft of Assignment 1 for the ICTs for Learning Design course I'm taking. Am wondering how much it will change by Friday (submission date). If only to reduce it by about 1500 words to meet the maximum word count....more...
Looks like I'm going to be away in coming weeks and the first assignment is due soon, so time to get a little ahead. So the following documents/reflects week 3 of work for the ICTs for Learning Design course....more...
And lucky last. This is the course I haven't gotten into as much yet, hopefully that can start to change. And today's topic is "A Workplace Focus"....more...
Two courses down, two to go. The following summarises study and thoughts for week 2 of the Supportive Learning Environments course....more...
The following is intended to be an illustration of one of the potential origins of the gap between learning technologists and educators. It picks up on the idea of schemata from this week's study in one course and connects to my point about the dissonance between how educational technology is implemented in universities and what we know about how people learn....more...
Okay, so now it's onto the second course for the week. The topic for this week is "Learners and Learning". Looks like we're learning about the brain, how it works and the Dimensions of Learning (That this link for DoL is on the institution's website, but with a strange title is interesting. Sure there are some stories behind it)....more...
Another task for the ICTs for Learning Design course. This one is described as...more...
During week two for the ICTs for Learning Design course we are required to post a reflective blog post on the "Mobile phones wiki" exercise. This is mine....more...
Work for week 2. The following is a diary come min-reflection for the work I'm doing for the 2nd week of the ICTs for Learning Design course....more...
This is the second of two reflective blog posts associated with the ICTs for Learning Design course for week 1. Each of these will follow much the same format as the first....more...
The following is a reflection on one activity required during the first week of the ICTs for Learning Design course I'm taking. Over the next few weeks there will be a number of these reflective posts and then, eventually, a post that synthesises these posts into one reflection....more...
It's the start of week 2 of my studies in a post-graduate teacher education program. Time for a bit of reflection and planning....more...
A tweet from @rgesthuizen pointed me to this article which argues that only weak students are ending up as teachers because education programs lack intellect. This is of interest to me for two reasons. First, I'm currently enrolled in an education program and I'm not sure my experiences match 100% what is claimed in the article (perhaps an interesting US/Australian difference). Second, because the fatal indicator of a lack of intellect within education programs seems to be in direct opposition to the positions I've seen in my first week of study....more...
And another weekly reflection of tasks and learning associated with a course. This one is for the Literacy and Numeracy course....more...
So the practice is established, I am aiming to write a single blog post per week, per course as part of my studies to become a teacher. This post if for week 1 of the supportive learning environments course....more...
The Australian government has launched version 2 of its MySchool website. The sites is meant to hold a profile of all Australian schools and enable people to perform comparisons. There has been some significant criticism of the data included in the profiles and find the site to be technically quite flawed (e.g. its been down and when you do get access the method you use to examine and compare data is poor). There has also been the first round of media stories using the availability of the data to draw conclusions (e.g. Elite schools don't excel)....more...
To some extent this post is a cop out. Rather than take the time to looking into what, is for me, an important and interesting question I am going to post this for two reasons. First, to remind myself to follow up later. But mostly and second, to see if someone within my PLN (why do I find the use of that term somewhat troubling?) can offer some suggestions....more...
This is the fourth of these weekly summaries/reflections - perhaps learning log is a better description - but only 1 is complete so far. Hopefully this will be #2. The course is titled Pedagogical Content Knowledge and appears to aim to use Schulman's ideas of PCK to frame the necessary learning about both pedagogy and the content for the pre-service teachers in this course....more...
The following documents some reflection on output of a learning task associated with a course on ICTs for Learning Design I'm currently taking....more...
This post is sparked by a combination of recent personal experience and recent discussions on the interweb. As part of current studies I'm reading a lot about e-learning theories, especially constructivism, and seeing the student perspective of the reality of institutional e-learning/resource-based learning. At the same time the last couple of weeks have seen various media articles, blog posts and commentaries around e-learning. I'll point to a few of these below, but I'll probably miss a few. Most have been highlighting or commenting upon the significant difference between what is known about good learning and teaching (i.e. something along the lines of constructivist) and what is being done/what academics expect to do....more...