Podding Downunder

Many years ago in pre-Internet days a friend (Peter) and I spent a week or two on the Greek Island of Patmos. Peter recently wrote up his diary entries of the time, and it inspired me to finally record a song I wrote as I left the island by ferry on a wet and windy night. It's called Lights Across the Water. The lyrics are printed below. I may elaborate on the background to the song at some later date. But for now, here it is.

References:

http://factmyth.com/factoids/liberals-and-conservatives-brains-are-different-on-average/

Turns out there's quite a lot of commentary around this issue in the American context:

https://braindecoder.com/post/politics-neuroscience-1282982492
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-conservative-brains-are-wired-differently-and-what-means-our-politics
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/29/secrets_of_the_right_wing_brain_new_study_proves_it_conservatives_see_a_different_hostile_world/

https://www.ted.com/talks/robb_willer_how_to_have_better_political_conversations#t-265472

Some not particularly eloquent thoughts about the work of Sugata Mitra (about 8 minutes)

The IATEFL reaction: http://leoxicon.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/to-confer-or-to-concur.html#more

Graham Stanley's blog post: http://blog-efl.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/the-rise-of-soles-part-2-at-heart-of.html

Creative Commons music from Lohstana David: http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/785426/petit-talibe-instrumental-version

Edited excerpts from the conversation between Nellie Deutsch and Mike Wesch in WIZIQ on July 25th. Mike shares his thoughts on being an educator in a media saturated environment, what changes may be occurring in our brains as a result of constant use of technology, setting meaningful assessment tasks, the Flipped Classroom model, and most notably, being a successful teacher by loving your students! (about 18 minutes)

This is the first draft of a song I wrote for my son who has just headed off to live in Europe. (4 mins)

NEW TIMES

CHORUS
Well my son’s away – our thoughts and prayers go with you
Travel far and safe – our love goes always with you

As you follow your dreams – remember those at home go with you
Though you’re far away we travel in silence with you
Hoping you’ll find what you’re seeking

There’ll be brand new faces – who will want to know you
Brand new places and some will no doubt test you
But I know you’ll find your way through
CHORUS
I have watched you change – from baby to grown man
I love who you’ve become – a man who knows that children
Can teach us lots of life’s lessons

And no matter how long – you roam the world afar
There are people at home – who you can always turn to
If it all seems too hard
CHORUS
BRIDGE
I wandered abroad to discover new seas
We took you away from this land that you now leave
So I well understand what now takes you away
And wonder alone what your new world will bring
And if this land.....will be home again
CHORUS

A wide ranging chat with Heikal Husin, from the University of South Australia (School of Computer and Information Sciences), about the challenges of implementing web 2.0 tools and approaches in the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) sector in South Australia. Quite long - 90 minutes - so maybe listen to it in sections. Covers the role of management, organisational culture, the opposing forces of innovation and auditing, and more. Recorded on May 24th, 2010

(Creative Commons image below courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaycross/)

Some thoughts (about 15 minutes worth) on 2 recent presentations by
Martin Westwell (Mind Over Matter), and
Virginia Carrington (Literacy, Identity and Culture in a Web 3.0 World)

Martin is an Oxford researcher specialising in Neuroscience and Education currently based at Flinders University.

Virginia is from the University of South Australia and has been researching the use of text in gaming environments and 3D worlds.

Materials from the Mind over Matter seminar available at http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/home/pid/646

Image courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/jef_safi/225429168/

Presentation given at the Wireless Ready event in Nagoya on March 29th, 2008. (http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp/) There is a short introduction from Michael Thomas (pictured), and some quieter spots near the end as members of the audience provide some feedback. About 45 minutes.

Accompanying slides at
http://www.slideshare.net/michaelc/where-is-the-m-in-interactivity-collaboration-and-feedback,
and a wiki for any and all to contribute to at http://whereisthem.wikispaces.com/

This is a conversation with John Nebauer, a librarian at the Croydon Campus of TAFE SA. John talks about the role of technology in his job as a librarian, with particular reference to social software.

John refers to

Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/view/
Delicious - http://del.icio.us
Cloud Tags - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
LibraryThing - http://www.librarything.com/
Twitter - http://twitter.com

About 12 mins long.

Presentation at the inaugural Conference on Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/professions/education/)

The audio is occasionally a little muddy as I wander around away from the recorder. The last 5 minutes is some useful discussion between audience members (including Dr Kaye Bowman)

The movie played during the presentation is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Accompanying slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/michaelc
(About 28 mins)

This is a long one – 55 minutes. A presentation at the ESL Educators conference in Adelaide. The topic was Developing Online Community, with particular reference to the Webhead community, but it grazes over a number of related topics:

• The appeal of online community
• The nature of online relationships
• Consequences of the ‘digital footprint’

Barbara (Bee) Dieu beamed in to contribute to the session from Sao Paulo. I suspect some (Stephen Downes?) may object to my interchangeable use of the terms ‘community’ and ‘networks’, but I didn’t want to get bogged down with definitions.

It was a good session I think.

Audio level of audience participants is a bit soft at times, but if you turn up the volume you can hear them.

Accompanying slides at Slideshare

A 30 minute recording of a presentation to Tabor College that tracks the history of the online, flexible, and elearning landscape. Mention is made of Learning Management Systems, the Salmon model of emoderation , elearning 2.0 and social software, models of delivery, and our responsibilities as elearning educators.

Adelaide residents will recognize this delightful old building as the former orphanage on Goodwood Rd.

The audio accompanies this
slide presentation .

This is a recording of a keynote address at the Third PacCALL Conference in Nanjing, China, on November 18th, entitled The Language Classroom in a Connected World. It is about one hour long and covers:

• The conference theme of Local v Global
• Notions of online presence
• The Personal Publishing Phenomenon
• Social Software/eLearning 2.0
• Connectivism
• Applying all the above in a language classroom.

The slides are available for viewing and download at http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/pd/PacCALL.htm

This is the audio from an online discussion jointly hosted by the EON Foundation, and the Future of Learning in a Networked Conference in Waiheke Island in New Zealand. It features Barbara Dieu, Teemu Leinonen and Alex Hayes (briefly), Moira from France, Damon from Vancouver, Tim from Napier and Ali and Amy from ? There are occasional references to the content that was on the whiteboard (the session was held in a virtual classroom courtesy of LearningTimes - learningtimes.org). About 1 hour in length.

A six minute reflection of the recent education.au seminar (http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/whatschanged); Audio in full at http://feeds.feedburner.com/eduauweb2

So what's changed? Technology, expectations, connections and collaboration...

Philip Adams:
Long time media commentator in Australia on politics, media, divinity and spirituality, etc! Compere of ABC’s Late Night Live

After beginning with a ritual shot at George Bush, “the silliest man to lead a country since Caligula”) Philip Adams urged us to teach in the new technology and use it to teach students how to protect themslelves from this self-same technology.
Data ≠ info ≠ knowledge ≠ wisdom
The new technology is both exhilarating and daunting, but beware technological determinism.
James: technology does matter!
Does the new publishing phemonenon give the ignorant undue influence?
James: ‘Citizen journalism’ about as much value as ‘citizen dentistry’
Traditional media reps (like Adams) are ‘gate-keepers’; he is a gatekeeper in a mediated world; in the unmediated world the content is more biased, but full of infinite promise.
“Every new technology breaks its promise.”
Self-censorhip is the most insidious of all censorships (eg when there is fear of losing job)
Censorship does not work – intelligence and a value/belief system works.
Students need to be taught the difference between “fact and foolishness”.
“We don’t send kids down the coalmines anymore; we send them into shopping malls as consumers.” – corporate paedophilia.
Media bombardment is not healthy or therapautic. Cause of ADD?
We must use the new technology to ‘vaccinate students’against the ‘toxic sludge’; it displays the best and worst (technology is amoral); we must build up their immune systems.

James Farmer: Online Community Editor editor of the Age (Melbourne), and founder of edublogs.org - http://edublogs.org/

Prefers to engage people not software.
Tech + education ≠ engagement + empowerment; principally because of the use of forum software (disengaging)
Edublogs: 16,000 blogs in the first year
Many roads lead to Rome

Conversations with

Peter Whitley (CEO GippsTAFE)
Jenny Dodd (Canberra Institute of Technology)
Brian Gepp (TAFE SA)
Margaret Scott (Gordon TAFE, Geelong)
Terry Marler (Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin)

At the GippsTAFE Staff Development Day (May 26th, 2006)
http://www.gippstafe.vic.edu.au/

Terry Marler’s Blog - http://travelswithterry.blogspot.com/

Length: 37 minutes

From a discussion on the TALO list (http://groups.google.com.au/group/teachAndLearnOnline/)

Machine Bits:

1) Leigh Blackall
Anyone else noticing how bloody slow Flickr and Del.icio.us is these days? Wouldn't be anything to do with those yahoos and their servers would it? Isn't this all our local IT guys need to say, "see, we told you so! You can't rely on Google and Yahoo, you should rely on me, Sam and our Microsoft servers instead!"

2) Peter Allen
Actually this is an issue that needs addressing.

If we build our "castles in the air" using web 2.0 resources - we have no control over the reliability or availability of those tools or teaching resources. If we use Ning to build some amazing mash-up that we want to use again and again. What do we do when Ning goes "bottom up"?

- or flickr disappears or gets replaced by a version that requires payment?

I like the idea of a distributing learning across a number of services available across the 'net - but it has its risks. - I think it also assumes a high level of competence from your students.

Webhosting sites eg hostrocket give you the ability to build a site that can supply your students the essential stuff (Moodle, payment gateway, blogs, wikis ) and then you could link out to other services. but you would need to have a backup plan in case your external resources become unavailable.

You could offer your students a range of choices on how a particular exercise in course might be done, this would perhaps allow you to cater for different learning styles , and, avoid a single-point-of-failure in your online./ blended course.

3) James Neill
I think its equally fair to ask what happens when school Ding or institution Zing goes belly up - where do the resources end up then? I would also say that in my experience overall downtime for learning institution-managed resources is greater than for externally hosted content - a broad claim and obviously there's exceptions, but I know which basket I prefer to put my eggs in and that's not under lock & key by a single institution. By making sure learning content is robot-crawled, Google cache at least gives pretty good access to text/image pages even when the host server is down.

Text of converted of text file:

Use of Computer Labs

Computer labs were born in the days when people studied computing. That’s why you went to the computer room – to study computing. It was a separate subject. Nowadays people study CALL, or computer assisted accounting, or computer assisted aged care. The predominant use of computers in schools and colleges these days is to use the computer as an aid in studying your area of focus. Your area of focus is not computing. But still we build computer suites as separate entities. What is far more logical, and manageable for the average teacher, is to have a few Internet enabled PCs in every classroom. In much the same way as well resourced schools and colleges have a TV and VCR in every room, there need to be Internet enabled PCs in every room to allow the easy flow from teacher input to computer based investigation and collaboration. Computers should not be located in a separate physical space away from the classroom. They are an essential tool – as essential as pens, paper and whiteboards – and should be available for use by students who have the skills and curiosity to use as part of standard lesson activity. In this model it is not the teachers’ responsibility to have to implement CALL or IALL approaches per se, but computers and Internet are there for those who wish to use them. As long as we have computer rooms as separate physical spaces we’re passing on an implicit message that this activity is not mainstream. And if 12 hours tuition a week is in a classroom, and 3 in a computer room we are marginalising the computer activity. Computers need to be in all classrooms in all lessons. This would go a long way to mainstreaming teaching with technology. (M.Coghlan, Oct 05)

Greetings to all those at the Hornby Summer School! I hope you enjoy this podcast (12 minutes) about using the Internet in language teaching. If you would like to read a short paper on the ideas discussed in the podcast go to http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/educause/shortpaper.htm
And feel free to contact me via email: michaelc@chariot.net.au

- Michael Coghlan (http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/)