SWIMNEWS.com - The premiere swimming news and information website on the internet. says that my sister, Cats, is 4th in the world in the 50m breast stroke for 11/12 year olds... Go CATS

I did a presentation for RCAT: Courseware Tools Revealed todayâ?¦ here's my rough notesâ?¦ you may find them interesting. Let me know if you have any questions.

Educator Driven Design
Who am I. I am the technology/
â?? Classroom teacher (secondary, post-secondary, grad)
â?? Not a programmer
â?? I make tools that are meaningful for my teaching
â?? I know technology like I know my subject area specializations
Environmental Studies, English, Curriculum Theory... and tech
o Online learning since 1987, used just about everything courseware wise.
o Collaborative Virtual environments since 1994: Achieve, VASE, Edublog
o Speaking to the morning, not the afternoon.
o Afternoon is still IN academe, part of specific pedagogies and depts
Engineering courseware for engineersâ?¦ good metaphor!!
Knowledge forum: includes wide metaphor of scaffolding -> learning model driven
Governance Tools
o little to do with teaching and learning,
- if used as portals for non-teaching/learning info, fine,
- but they impose on your best practices for teaching...
- the university is no longer about faculty in a community.
- it should be about community of teachers and learners in an environment
- functionality and product and marketing, first and foremost
- nightmare of building our own tools... vs selling out teaching
- product suite, delivering product, global solutions, repackaging for the market for the client
- eg. genesis in students making web sites for faculty... more metaphor of not doing it themselves
- easy to use, without thinking... is this a model for faculty development?
- Can you hack around it at any point? nothing included to facilitate that
- The language you use controls what you can think.
- This goes for technology.
Lack of Pedagogical Tools - implications
- Corporatized learning model &
- Business model for learning
- still imposes a non-academic, non-teacher design
- at best learner centred design NOT learner designed design
- the corporate model knows what you need to teach
- superficial social community model
- still western design in terms of social issues of power and governance
- Faculty learn how to use the system, they don't learn how to reconceptualize and relocalize their pedagogy into new and diverse environment
Course management tool
- is courseware what university teaching is about?
- central to our system for learning?
- Courseware keeps you dependent
on your university to use the stuff
- you can move to other course-wares, but you never developed the skills to do it yourself
Courseware is often a rigid content delivery and testing environment,
what about narrative?
constructivist learning?
creative methods of completing assignments?
testing that is not content regurgitation?
Sometimes courseware is good, but when and how, and under whose control?
- Limits the ability for educator to bring specific pedagogical aims to class, or technology
- can't bring in teacher and student work.
- makes people think that they must use technology to do things that are best done face to face.
Courseware divorces course creation from pedagogy...
- loss of pedagogical roots when courseware goes corporate
- loss of autonomy and flexibility
- can't modify their environment within the purview of the corporate model.
- teaching as a marketting tool, webCT -> "Marketting Efforts"
- observability and the panopticon, unquestioned.
- unproblematized.
- evaluation is content based, fast question/answer
- textbook centric
- some faculty are only interested in delivering content
- not considering the pedagogy and problematizing issues of power
and control over learning by non-educators (corporation)
- how do you get diversity when 900000 people use a suite of tools
- online will take over the classroom, we'll tell you how to do it
- we are no longer useful as educators when we give over our governance of technology to techies. They're hijacking education.

Conclusion
- are universities making money off elearning?
- MIT gives it away... so?
- pedagogy is not developing with it
pedagogically driven models like KnowledgeForum or CVE or specific tools like edublog
maintain traditional and new learning models localised in new technologies, with new possibilities that are more than corporate
- universities ARE THE location and the faculty and the students and the curriculum
tech that takes this up is more valid.
- technology was about individual autonomy, not big business
- the model is that you're not intelligent enough to do tech
- making you lazy and dependent
- faculty are smart, and can learn how to do it themselves
- we already have greater tech just for communication, we can do the tech ourselves.
Courseware folks scare us with marketting... and never talk about pedagogy.

Opening Night - this thursday is on Dracula, with Elizabeth Miller who, among billions of other things, lectures in my ENV321 class. Can't wait.

The Bridge CD by Iain Banks and Gary Lloyd is too cool to mention. I have more than one copy of this book. I now need the CD. There's an audio on this link too.

Jim Flaherty is too stupid for words.Flaherty vows to sell Ontario's liquor firm, going back to the future in campaign promises and resurrecting a party pledge from 1995 to sell off the LCBO liquor stores, the TV Ontario government television network and several other assets.

After its election in 1995, the Conservative government spent several years considering the feasibility of selling the LCBO and TV Ontario. It concluded that it could not risk reducing the $900-million a year that it receives from the LCBO and that private investors were not interested in buying TV Ontario.

The LCBO is the largest retailer of alcohol in the world and uses its purchasing power to ensure low wholesale prices for its products and widespread availability of specialty brands, said a government official who has examined the possibility of selling the board.

Mr. Flaherty said he believes the government could sell the LCBO, increase choice and competition.

This is ken emig. He lectures in my ENV321 course next week. He's standing in front of his sculpture. I forget what it is called.

Varsity Arts & Culture -- Getting the General Idea Getting the General Idea By Mika Bareke

General Idea

MoMA | press | Releases | 1996 | Two Installations by General Idea Are on View for the First Time in New York at The Museum of Modern Art General Idea was formed in 1968 in Toronto by artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal and was prematurely dissolved due to the deaths of Zontal and Partz in 1994. During its prolific twenty-six years of professional and domestic partnership, General Idea created work marked by elusive meaning and poignant wit in a range of mediums, addressing both popular culture and mass-media formatbeauty pageants, television shows, popular magazineas well as the work of other artists such as Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, and Marcel Duchamp.

General Idea Editions - Traveling Exhibition Information After presenting the first definitive and complete retrospective of General Idea Editions in January 2003, the Blackwood Gallery will be offering the exhibition for touring in Canada (2003-2004) and in the U.S.A. (2005-2007).?

Art Education - General Idea - The Art Vault - The Fine Art of e-Business

I have a new review up...
The review of following book is now available in Educational Technology & Society,
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2002:

New Learning: Invited Articles of the Conference "ODL Networking for Quality Learning
Armando Rocha Trindade, Editor
2000 Lisbon Portugal: Universidade Aberta
ISBN 972-674-325-7, 448 pp.

The review can be accessed in HTML and PDF forms at:
http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_1_2002/v_1_2002.html

Jasonnolan.com Expires on..............: Mon, Mar 25, 2002.
I'd like to buy it. We can hope.

"pollenation: the garden of fucking paths " is the new collaborative program betwix myself and Katherine Parrish to study, explicate, and get our YaYas out with the works of Jeff Noon. Those works, including Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice and Cobralingus are making us thing fast and hard and deep, a fucund intertextual riot of post-victorian pomology. Watch and worry and the pollen count rises, Boda gets a full body tattoo, and John Barleycorn must die.

Well, I am happy about my DVD of Dead Man. It is the first and only DVD or VHS I've ever bought for myself. I have a couple of dozen movies, but they've all been presents or something like that. I gave away the only other DVD I had, that came with my player. Nothing like William Blake in the west, and Iggy Pop in drag.

Oh, what a wonderful world. Read the final proofs for my book chapter "Learning Cyberspace: An Educational View Virtual Community" that I wrote back in 1999 with Joel Weiss. It is FINALLY going to print this year, with Cambridge UP. No mistakes, but some minor stuff that will have to be changed, because it is not 1999 any more.

Then went, with Salmon, to see David Noble talk about "The Rise and Demise of Online Learning" as part of the KMDI lecture series.

Then salmon and I went to Pho Hung for dinner and a beer, to talk about Pollenesque, Borges, Blake and coyotes. And I stopped in at Norms on Baldwin to get my DVD of Dead Man that he picked up for me, also got "Ghost Dog", anther Jarimush film, and the one I've not seen. Met Norm, who is Norm's cat, as well. Amy, from John's Italian Cafe, was there too. Her harddrive blew, and so I'm going to give her a spare one... in exchange for inviting us over to show her cats to Yuka.

Great day, until I got home and read the letter from Michel Fullan saying that I was not shortlisted for the English position I wanted at OISE. SHIT! That was something I was sure I was going to get. It is a conspiracy. Scotch then sleep.

I just got back from the Toronto concert. I have no time to gush about it, but I've put up 26 images at knightisland that some of you may like. They're dark, shot without flash. But they're great. It was great. Everything's great.

Johnette;
Nothing could have prepared me for the Toronto concert. The warmth, the gentleness, and the raw beauty of fragile power all springing forth from a single woman, almost as if in a single timeless moment. You sang not just to us, but for us and with us, in a lullabye of innocence and experience.
Thank you...

I'm going to see Concrete Blonde tonight with Katherine... wooohoooo!

Now this is a sport...Skeleton Plunges Face-First Back Into Winter Games Skeleton Plunges Face-First Back Into Winter Games

Took some pictures in Kensington Market today. End of Chinese New Year.

Phyllis Zee gets the Saturday Sleep-in award for having a name that is totally synchronous with her job as Associate Director, Center for Sleep & Circadian Biology.

Not the best of news today. I didn't get my SSHRC Post-doc to do blogging. Bwaaaaaaa... I scored low on both my 'track record' and my 'program of work'. That's somewhat funny, in light of 20 page CV, my publication record, and the funding I've already got for my blog topic. SSHRC always scores me low when I apply. I'm rather convinced that they just have no understanding of what I'm doing, how cool it is, and the fact that you must be poly-disciplinary. And I guess I just fall through the cracks. Such is life. Three more job applications in the pipe. But it is a bummer. I would have liked to spend the next two years blogging.

It is my mommy's brithday today! Mom is 64. She lives in kingston. She skis every day, unless she's cycling or jogging. I get tired listening to what my mom is doing. But I know she gets tired to all my complaining, and that must be more tiring. She's my mom. I love her. And it is her birthday today.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Bryce Camp Sedona is where KAT should be going. Don't you think?

This is emiko.

Emiko is the patron saint of Shinchan stuff. She's holding a box of the rare and oft praised "Chokobee". It is a candy that Shinchan always ate on his show. And the outcry from kids who wanted some too forced candy manufacturers to invent it. Who's wagging the dog?

I'll be on a panel for Courseware Tools Revealed: Understanding the benefits, features and future of courseware presented at UofT. Check it out. Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Martha is VERY Wise.
In Ohio School Hearing, a New Theory Will Seek a Place Alongside Evolution "It's a shrouded way of bringing religion into the schools," said Martha W. Wise, a state board member who is the lone opponent of intelligent design on the standards subcommittee. "Personally I'm creationist: I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," said Ms. Wise, a retired business executive. She emphasized, however, that her belief had no place in a science lesson. "I think intelligent design is a theology, and it belongs in another curriculum."

I just hit the gold mine. Our friend Emiko Kanemichi brought me some more shinchan stuff! This site has 8 sets of mint shinchan patches. And she got me a whole box of Chochobe, shinchan's favourite! My office has lots of shinchan stuff too.

Review to come shortly.

Bear is where it is at. I'm telling everyone.

Hand disorder linked to vibrating console controllers
. More danger for Kat.

Doesn't this look like Catspaw? I thought she was responsible for it all.

Toronto Dark Writer's Group page is up and functional. With commends and counter. Now lets see if we end up with any content.

Room of Ben's Own says, "But you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction ? what has that got to do with a room of one's own?" Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

Not enough pizza in the world. Here's one of my better attempts. A mock-traditional cheeze, onions, peppers, kolbassa, and pesto.