Just Differently Intelligent...

SWIMNEWS.com - The premiere swimming

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

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

Educator Driven Design
Who am I. I am the technology/
’?? Classroom teacher (secondary, post-secondary, grad)
’?? Not a programmer
’?? I make tools that are meaningful for my teaching
’?? 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 engineers’?¶ 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.