blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for Teaching with Technology
August 26, 2007 at 9:25 am · Filed under Teaching with Technology, reflections, second life
Just reviewing Hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, both of which focus on the humanity of teaching. I think most of us involved with technology and teaching get the importance of “keeping the humanity” alive. I’m concerned that the folks who are a bit skeptical about technology, or a design approach to teaching and learning will do more harm than good when they get their hands on new tools. I’m seeing in the Second Life educational community a lot of projects and approaches which mean well, but really aren’t effective because of a lack of understanding about the technology, the context, how people learn and how to design learning. These are more important than in a Hooks’ kind of classroom because when things don’t go right, the humanity can only go so far at appeasing the frustration, boredom, confusion, etc.
Only the most highly motivated learners will slog on through. DE (distance ed) is a case in point. Lot’s of miserably designed DE programs have given the approach a bad rap. The unfortunate thing in the case of DE, is that it can be a viable option for many learners, not just those who’ll slog through poor designs.
December 5, 2006 at 5:04 pm · Filed under Teaching with Technology, critical theory, education, educational technology, multiculturalism
Second Life and Pedagogy of the Oppressed seem to be two very different worlds at the moment for me. The people, the themes, the points of departure are incongruent and I don’t think they have to be. I don’t think I’m missing the point when I argue that liberating educational practices might be achieved with the aid of emerging technologies in ways that may not have been conceived of before. Participatory culture, the ways in which social technologies enable us to express, share, create and use artifacts and ideas, is one of those ideas that seems new, but in fact is an old notion recast to convey what is happening in our connected world.
July 9, 2006 at 3:25 pm · Filed under News, Teaching with Technology, gaming and narrative
The corporate gaming industry is justifiably criticized for producing primarily “shoot ‘em up” games. It’s nice to see that there are conversations and resources for social-change games.
In Tim Lauer’s post I came upon this article: Can Social-Change Video Games Tackle Divorce, Poverty, Genocide? and I thought yes, ok, let’s hear what game developers are saying and doing.
I always appreciate the “yes, but …” voice. S/he is usually experienced and sophisticated in wisdomed way. S/he brings up those ugly things, the practical things, the idealist can’t or won’t seem to hear.
I just started a class at Claremont University. The other students are primarily k-12 teachers, in and around the LA area. Claremont is about equity education and social justice themes. It’s telling perhaps, that in a class of about 15, me being one of “oldest” by far, from the looks of their faces, I was one of 2 people taking notes on my laptop. Notebooks? Pens? But you’re 25, you’re supposed to be a net -gener?
“Other People’s Children” by Lisa Delpit and “The Schools we need and why we don’t have them” by E.D. Hirsh, introductory readings to a class on learning theories and pedagogies gave more words to my typical “yes, but…” voice. Or should I change that to “yes, and …”?
“In the end, Koster proved to be knocking the legs out from the Games for Change movement in order to champion what he cherishes most about games: their levity. It wasn’t a happy kind of levity he was praising as much as it was the fact that games are good at making no situation seem altogether dire — nor outright intractable. The problem with the world’s real-life issues, he said, is that the crisis of Darfur and the squalor of Haiti seem insurmountable. People throw up their hands in a way they don’t with problems posed in a video game.”
I’ve got big gaps, isolated dots looking for connections because I see these issues from several angles. Teaching and learning social change, being social change, being a victim, being completely isolated from poverty, or completely consumed by it. “The biggest thing social change is mostly lacking is worldwide will.” That’s probably the biggest gap. We’ve got the money, the ideals, the knowhow.
May 24, 2006 at 5:44 pm · Filed under Teaching with Technology, emergingtrends/pICT workhshop
Moving from the cool tools to the not so cool stuff of blended learning, student learning outcomes, I wasn’t sure if we’d hold everyone’s attention. I think though we’ve turned the corner because I noticed many fellows embracing the concepts and ideas. Some were even going home to work with the student learning outcome tutorial. It’s been very satisfying.
May 22, 2006 at 6:37 am · Filed under Teaching with Technology, library, social computing
Read more about it at Academic Commons
And at the Institute for the Future of the Book, there are some interesting posts in their blog If:bookblog–”the life and after life of vinyl records” & “interactive books are closer than we think.”
