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Thinking through Art: How Prior Knowledge Paralyzes
4th Figure Drawing Class. We warmed up with 10 gesture drawings. In one minute, I must capture the outline of the model. It is especially challenging when the model knows multiple unusual ways to contort himself/herself. I struggle to capture the essence of the gesture. The bodily muscles exert themselves in peculiar ways that I find difficult to sketch rapidly. Today, I also have to learn how to use new tools — it is Conte Pencils instead of the familiar charcoal pencil or vine to quickly build the “armature” that…
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The 4Ps of Co-Consulting
… subheading, The Promise and the Practice My colleague, Stan, and I have been working with two instructors to convert their face-to-face course to a blended course before it is fully delivered online. What makes this co-consulting distinctive in our case are the following key features: 1. People There are two consultants in this session interacting with two clients (at times 3!) in real time. This entails a negotiation of roles and the values, beliefs and behaviors that come with the enactment of those roles. I am an instructional designer…
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How to Embed Wow Slider into a Blogger Post
I spent a good bit of last night trying to embed a Wow Slider series of images into this blog, by Blogger. So I am documenting how I finally got it to work — to help anyone who might be looking for help like me. Wow Slider’s FAQs were confusing and not much help for Blogger users. WordPress has a plugin but for Blogger users, things are less rosy. I couldn’t solve the problem despite pasting and repasting the codes and tweaking with it. Googling didn’t produce many results. This…
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Preparing to Teach Online 2013 Wrap-Up
Top jQuery Slider by WOWSlider.com v3.4
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3 days at Sloan-C ET4Online 2013
As an instructional systems designer/education researcher, I attended sessions at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies for Online Learning with the goal to inform my professional development. In some organic fashion, my interests somehow coagulated into three main areas: 1. How do people learn: what’s the latest in educational psychology and how is it applied to online education? 2. How is instructional design and development enhanced by new technologies? 3. Scholarship of online learning and teaching: What interesting research is being done? Using what methods or instruments?Instinctively, I feel that these topics…
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Jodie Foster’s Speech
“Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.” There has been a lot of talk about Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Some good, some trashy, and some just silly; many were perplexed by her words. I was fascinated. Not that I watched the show. After Downton Abbey, I flipped channels, and lo and behold, it was Jodie’s moment. A Guardian Film writer dissected her speech and hailed it an oratorical marvel. For me, here are four quotes that reverberated with me and…
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A Reflection on Tribes the Play
“Tribes” by Nina Raine at Barrow Street TheatreI didn’t know what to expect from the play. I went with one goal: to watch border-crossing enact in hybrid spaces when a Deaf actor works with non-Deaf actors and to do “research” for my dissertation. So here’s my short reflective poem about the play: Clamor Of sound and silence Language Signed or spoken By them We live, love Or not Tell me Don’t leave me Out Speak my language Understand me By Whose terms? Two paths Onward we trod Center or edge…
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Vignettes: NYC 12.26.12 – 12.27.12
“No gum popping. Gum popping. Gum popping.””Zero tolerance policy.” We turned to look at each other, my fellow passenger, a black lady with a British accent. She rolled her eyes and gestured with her right hand, saying in silence, “What’s up with this driver?” The passengers obeyed. The trip to NYC passed uneventfully. I didn’t need a pepper spray after all, vanquishing an acquaintance’s hypothesis that I was headed for catastrophe by taking a Greyhound bus to the Big Apple. She didn’t talk to me during most of the journey.…
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Accessibility, Accommodations & Uniqueness 2
Cont’d from an earlier post… 2. We need to be more aware of how to accommodate learners who are different in our instruction. It starts with cultivating an open mindset and becoming informed. This is not a new idea but bears repetition because I encounter people who don’t have that awareness. I know that some people complain about the cost and labor of providing accommodations. It is a real issue that we have to work on. It involves changing some national and institutional policies so that support for access can…
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#CrashCreativity Thoughts Post 1
This MOOC, Crash Course on Creativity, is taught by Prof Tina Seeling (http://about.me/tinaseelig) of Stanford University and runs on Venture Labs’ e-platform. There is a lot of interest in this course with over 35,000 enrollees from all over the world. The platform is pretty minimalistic in a good way, with a menu bar that lets students navigate to Home, Lectures, Assignments and Community. I’ve watched a short course video intro so far and a week 1 TED talk by Prof Seelig on the Innovation Engine. Both were not captioned, nor…
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Soaring
“It’s an uphill battle and I come out scarred but victorious. If you clip my wing, I’ll grow a new one and fly higher.” – Fiona Xie
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Accessibility, Uniqueness and Accommodations 1
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – Anais Nin First, I don’t have a disability and do not speak on behalf of disabled people because I do not know what it is like to not be able to see, hear or not have mobility of all my limbs. Second, I do claim to be unique; I acknowledge that everyone is uniquely different, although some people may be more alike in several ways. Therefore, we each learn and process things differently through our filters.…
