I was inspired by the Bass article. It makes perfect sense to me that teaching and learning would be perceived as a iterative process of problem solving because learning environments, teachers and learners, and subject content are singularly dynamic elements which, when conjoined, intersect, interact and influence each other in unpredictable ways.

I like the idea of approaching education, teaching and learning, and subject content with an attitude of experimentation, where the teachers and learners are partners in exploring the best ways to present and represent content knowledge.

In a way, education must adapt to it’s own success. It appears more and more people are realizing the importance of education, including higher education, not only for the opportunity to earn a reasonable income, but also to engage in the economy through right livelihood. This includes the opportunity to participate in society and democracy in a critical, thoughtful way.

I’m excited by the idea of including data collection in my teaching practice. I like the idea of developing instruments to collect before and after snapshots of student experience, understanding and insights. I see this as a valuable way for me to grow as an instructor and an educator. It seems a natural extension of constructivist educational values.

Global citizenship. An interesting class. I’m always a little leary of an approach to global citizenship that suggests that I know what is good for someone else and it is up to me to make life better for that person. I’m thinking of Iraq.

I do know that I have a responsibility to be thoughtful about the decisions and choices that I make on a day to day basis. I have a lot of power, in terms of the consumer choices I make and the example I set for others. I guess it depends on where you are from. I live with a hidden disability, so for me, simply putting my life together on a day to day basis is a small victory. Perhaps that is why I feel primarily responsible to maintain a healthy lifestyle and support my children and grand children to the best of my ability. I can only do the best I can with what I have. For others, they might have the time, attention and energy to devote to a cause. I applaud them for being able to do that. I don’t think we can assume that everyone’s notion of social justice and what is possible for them to contribute is going to be the same.

Online course management. I’m noticing that having one face to face meeting a month needs regular online communication to maintain a sense of momentum. It’s not enough to have the web ct space sitting there waiting for contributions. The web ct discussions only come alive when there is an active community of participants using it to communicate. This means the communication is going both ways, that people are submitting their thoughts and gathering new perspectives by reading the other posts.

I’m noticing that when the instructors send out reminders and suggestions by email, it prompts me to go to the site and fulfill the request. Without the reminder, I am likely to forget I have anything to do for the course until the week before the next face to face meeting.

I like the email contact. I know some people find email overwhelming, getting too many emails. I don’t. Because I find the web ct site so fragmented and impersonal, I don’t feel a sense of connection to the class or the group process. When I get an email, I feel connected, that I am part of something that is happening in the digital space. It’s possible that by the end of this course I will feel differently about the web ct experience, I’m open to that happening.

Right now, I am noticing that the instructors have contacted us about posting to web ct and getting our reflections written up, and I am getting the work done. Maybe because it seems like someone is paying attention.

The web ct space.

These are mostly comments to myself, about how I would use this space, if I had to. I realize that it provides a space for course materials, calendars and conversations, and some modicum of security for the class. I have heard from other instructors that it is difficult to set up and they have had to resort to having an ‘expert’ take care of it. What I like about a blog is the way the conversation strings out behind itself, how the topics are listed at the side. In the web ct discussion space, I get a sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The content of the discussions is only seen (or as far as I have been able to figure out) as one post at a time and if I want to refer back to a previous post, I have to close the one I am looking at to do that.

I guess the strong point of web ct is that everything is in one place, even if it is a little confusing finding it all. My other problem with web ct is the interface. It is so dry and text based. Here we are in a course that is encouraging us to think about learning styles and teaching methods and the online interface is completely text dependent. For anyone that has trouble comprehending meaning from text, this would be a highly problematic interface. At the same time, the minimal visual content looks like clip art, generic visual representations that convey the impression of cookie cutter, a manufactured visual strategy. What does this say about the values or believes of the designers of the course?

I feel strongly about this, because we have an opportunity to occupy these spaces with our own visual content. We have an opportunity to expand our notions of communication and representation in education. When we use clip art, we are saying that is what we value in education. We have been passive consumers of radio, television and film because the technologies required to occupy those spaces were beyond the skill and resources of the average person. This is not true of these digital spaces. But if we don’t educate ourselves to value the development of our presence within these spaces, this opportunity is lost, to be able to communicate our teaching and learning beyond text only representation.

What I would like to do is create an online lesson space that was more identified with a sense of the course, as a visual and communication space. This might include populating the space with contributions from students of visual, audio, media pieces so that the identity of the course is a reflection of the learners’ interests.

My problem with something like KEEP tool kit is it constrains the possibilities of expression in the portfolio to a template. It also conveys the impression that making a website of your own is too difficult and the best and only way to do this is use the pre-set site. Folks, it’s not that hard to make your own. There are a few operations that you would learn, that are not that much more difficult than what you have to learn to use the templates.

This is a big part of what I want to teach. I do belief there are issues of democracy, citizenship, social justice, inclusion and diversity at stake. We cannot give up our ability to use communicative arts (text, visual, audio, media) simply because we have come to believe that we can only accept what is pre-fabricated.

It’s amazing how much can suddenly emerge through one catalytic experience. It was our second gathering at TAG yesterday. A number of things came up for me, from the class, so I’ll stream through them here as a way to capture my thoughts.

First, I do not like the WebCT site or interface. I do not feel comfortable with it, I don’t find it friendly or inviting. It seems very cold and rigid. I have a hard time finding things, knowing where to look, knowing where to put things.

Second, although the WebCT site is supposed to function as a communication site, it doesn’t necessarily inform knowledge of what is going on in the class. There was an instruction about signing up to provide food for the classes that came in an email. I figured I would get it over with early and put my name, as best as I could figure out how to do that, onto the course calendar. I did not check to confirm that it was understood that I would bring food. That was another lesson. Always confirm understandings, do not assume everyone is looking in the same place at the same time, online. It turned out that class already had people bringing food. Why didn’t I know that? I often miss things, especially verbal content in the classroom. After spending an hour shopping and hauling food the class, I realized I had got it wrong. Very embarassing. Now I haven’t signed up for food at all, because I just don’t trust the system. Not rational, I know.

Third, when using a portal, like WebCT, it is important to make sure everyone knows where they are supposed to go for course assignments and coursework. Somehow, perhaps because I am unfamiliar with the site, I missed a whole part of the prep work for the class. I don’t know how this happened, and it makes me nervous about making sure I have all the pertinent information for the next class. Another embarassing moment. I think I would include a reminder notice, perhaps a couple of days before the class, especially when it has been a month since the last class and everyone is getting used to a new system of communication and resource access. It’s important for me to remember that I can’t assume everyone has knowledge that I take forgranted.

We had a couple of powerpoint presentations in class yesterday, and I’m adding these comments about Powerpoint because it has come up from a number of different directions. First, the powerpoint comes up and the presenter starts speaking about what is in the slides. The students start making notes and the presenter says, “I’ll have the presentation available online, so you don’t have to take notes.” First, is the presentation really online? After the second presentation yesterday, I went online to where I thought it would be, somewhere in the WebCT site. But I could not find it anywhere. Second, getting a powerpoint presentation is not a substitute for note taking. Yes, it is true, the student doesn’t have to copy, verbatim, the text on the slide. What the slide does not have on it is the actual comments made by the presenter, so if the student has not made notes of the comments, they may not have anyway of making sense of the slides after the presentation. It is helpful to have a printout of the powerpoint presentation, so notes can be made at the appropriate slide. I have a big problem with text slides in powerpoint. I suppose I am supposed to be able to take in the information by reading it from the slide, as the presenter reads it to me, but I find this an extremely limited application of the resource, one that tends to cause my eyes to glaze over the moment I see the slide of text. What I would wish for, what would help me, because I have such a dominant visual orientation, is that there was a visual, image or video used for that slide space. I’m not talking about clip art, or other manufactured visual products. I’m talking about something the presenter has created, to elaborate their point from a visual perspective. This leads me straight into my strong feelings about visual language and visual literacy in education.

Education spends the majority of it’s efforts to school the student to read, write and critically examine text based material. This makes sense, because a main objective of education is to create a text literate citizen. What I think is important now, as we move into digital spaces and digital media, is the education of the visually literate citizen is as important as text based literacy. I find educators have this cavalier attitude toward visual content, using whatever is at hand to add a decorative element to their text. I think this is a huge problem, that does a real disservice to a very powerful source of information, our visual reading of the world. I find powerpoint presentations to be the worst offenders, or the best exemplars, of this attitude.

Enough of that rant. I promise to use visual media for thoughtful visual representations that I have created myself, if at all possible.

That is enough for now.