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Visible Thinking: Land Mines for Explosive Learning
Those who teach know that on some days we question if what we do is making any dent in our students’ armors (shields some put up, unintentionally, maybe). This week had one of those days, and several others that were not so. Those good learning-teaching days? They are not of the kind Tim Slater wrote about. The kind where students sit passively to just watch me, watch videos, take notes (or not) and listen (or not). No, a good teaching/learning facilitation day is when the students speak, a lot, with focus…
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Grids and Gestures: 6 Learning Takeaways from Exploring Comics-Making
[Note: It’s about a week since I finished the last doodle. Here are some key takeaways from this collective exercise. Learning is a complex phenomenon and occurs in varied learning conditions. Learning takeaways abstracted from this collective exercise may not be applicable to ALL learning contexts.] 1. Make learning doable. When Nick Sousanis, cartoonist, scholar, teacher, art critic, author of Unflattening, put out a Twitter call for participation in a collective comics-making exercise, I knew I could probably do it. Unlike other projects which typically took longer time, and which…
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Why I Write
In response to Kevin’s prompt (@dogtrax) on the National Day of Writing a few days’ ago, I thought at a meta level about why I write and why I love writing. I write because I love to hear the sound of words (or Chinese characters :)) reverberate in my mind. To trip the light fantastic… In twenty ways could he trip and dance. – Chaucer Come, knit hands, and beat the ground, In a light fantastic round. – Milton I write because it’s a privilege to write. To have the…
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Modalities, Me, Kevin, Anna and More
Our conversation is enlarging in scale and ideas. First, I asked Kevin an innocent question about which modality was his favorite one for expression of thoughts. He responded with a blog post, embedding within his post my initial question. Some time before this dialogue with Kevin, I got to know Anna Smith, scholar-educator, who writes about literacies and writing, and more! I myself had been creating my Seeing Your Thoughts course from the ground up, looking for resources to make it a worthwhile learning experience. I sought out Nick Sousanis’…
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Response to Kevin’s “Which Modality”
Wisdom begin in wonder. – Socrates. @yinbk I answered your Q with a blog post: Which Modality? Making Music http://t.co/oVxJ8uDD5Y #rhizo15 #clmooc #literacies #nwp Thanks! — KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) June 7, 2015 Curiosity got the better of me. I posed the billion-dollar question and Kevin Hodgson responded in a reflective post. Just as he couldn’t use Twitter to express his thoughts in 140 characters, nor could I. To provide a bit of background, I think a lot about the different ways people articulate their thoughts (After all, I’m teaching a course…
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This is How I Work
[Questions: LifeHacker] Current Gig: Learning Innovation Design Specialist at VCU ALT Lab. One word that best describes how you work: INTENSE. Current mobile device: Samsung Galaxy S6 for most of my on-the-go stuff, blue-tooth streaming of playlists, long-distance communication on Whatsapp, spontaneous photo capture of special moments. Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (8 inch) for reading Kindle books, and other web resources. I had an old MacBook Pro for consulting with clients but have recently upgraded to a Dell XPS 13 Touch which is much lighter and syncs with my…
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Reggio Educators’ Training at Sabot Institute
Are you learning forward or backward? … Do you attend conferences or workshops year after year, yet rarely adjust your teaching or leadership as a result of what you learned? – Frederick Brown, Education Week Teacher. Voila! A Reggio-educator professional development opportunity surfaced in town; courtesy of Jon Becker. I jumped at the opportunity. These events are short in supply. Event: The 2015 Sabot Institute As a visible deliberate action of learning forward, this blog-post is a reflection of my learning experience. I’ll try along the way to provide some information…
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Truthseeking: Onward to the Next #TJC15 event
To Laura, and all potential truth seekers, Some preliminary thoughts. Having read how your experiment first started (the background, your own journal reading club experiences), I understand better why you made the choices you did. I have had pretty positive experiences of journal article reading with my peers in grad school. In a few classes and during dissertation writing sessions, there were some fine debates with “a disputatious community of truth seekers” (Donald Campbell cited in Shadish, Cook & Leviton 1991 — THE Evaluation book every evaluation student must read?).…
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Thinking about Student Blogs and Community Building
“So you mean we are sharing cyberspace?” Seven words that offered a glimpse into our client’s thinking. I will refer to her as Ms. Z. [Stan and I met with her.] Some background information before I continue. She had come to ALT Lab, bogged down by barriers to blogpost-editing and seeking some assistance on how to integrate Timeline into a blogpost. From her instructor’s [Dr. Halo, pseudonym] course site [BEY 500, fake course name], Ms. Z was able to “jump to” and “see” her own blog site. Happily, she has also been blogging on…
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The Making of a Course Trailer
The course trailer is up on YouTube. Although it runs for less than 2 minutes, it entails a tremendous amount of work. Many people chipped in to help out given the tight time-frame we had to churn it out. To them I owe a debt of gratitude. Their names were not mentioned in the credits and I would like to use this space to express my appreciation to them.Thank you, in no particular order, Alice Westerberg, Suzie Fairman, Molly Ransone, Emma Gauthier, Aditi Jain and Arianna DeCastro (both the actresses), Marcus…
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Bidart Lipsynch and Imagery
[This post is still under construction.]The last few weeks have been a blur of activities. Does your brain hurt from non-stop mentation? Mine does and did. As Countess Dowager [Dame Maggie Smith] spouts in Downton Abbey, “All this endless thinking, it’s very over-rated!” But poetic imagination is not. To the uninformed, I’m learning to use metaphors in poetry writing, hence this Bidart draft. To Randy and my poetry friends, here are my practice drafts: 1) Here’s my Bidart lipsynching draft 1. [Homonym: Lamp/Lamb] The Poem is a Lamp L A…
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Learning Organization
“… a project’s relative degree of success or failure may change over time. The Sydney Opera House is a good example. The original 1957 project plan called for the project to be finished in 5 years at a cost of $7M. In the end, the project cost $110M and took 13 years. By any measure that was a severely troubled project…” – Calleam Consulting Ltd. I am taking time to reflect on the projects I’m working on, mostly to sort out my understanding about this topic of project success. Thinking…
