Teaching to Power and Powerful Teaching July 22, 2008

Teaching to Power and Powerful Teaching:: Consequences of Extraordinary Enhancements of Abilities to Construct and Communicate Ideas

Whether you’re a teacher or a researcher the combination of weblogging and the proliferation of incredible knowledge-making/communicating tools is causing, I believe, a knowledge and power explosion.

We’ve barely accounted for the change in communication content that derives from the removal of corporate and governmental stranglehold on what information and knowledge is disseminated to whom. The internet, we are seeing, does quite a bit to equalize access to information and to forums in which one can, if one’s argument and information are sufficiently compelling, move public opinion. It’s a big, No!, HUGE, topic but not the one I want to talk about at the moment.

My emphasis is upon the tools for thinking and communicating that are now available that were unavailable, say, twenty years ago. Let’s look at what a professional educator and communicator had 30 years ago: chalk, blackboard, overhead, book, movie. S/he was bounded both in what was learned or constructed and what s/he disseminated by those tools.

We’re only indirectly talking about machines. Yes, this thinking and communicating is done on machines and with the aid of thinking devices made possible by machines. But all of this has magnified our ability to know, to teach, to communicate and to organize– as I will explain below:

The addition of tools for thinking and communicating thought

Now add personal abilities to

• construct and manipulate data-bases,
• converse, with anyone, near or on the other side of the planet, at length and in depth (via discussion groups, blogs, chat rooms, etc),
• access and/or collaboratively construct complex knowledge systems on wikis, and
• construct concept/mind maps (FreeMind, (NovaMInd), or specialized thought mapping systems such the construction of timelines via (Dipity).

With these tools we’ve considerably aided our ability to think and communicate as individuals.

It’s not just that we’ve empowered groups of people to think and decide as a group. We have! (Bravo!!)

It’s that we’ve given tools for thinking and communicating to individuals which considerably enhance each person’s processing, organization communication of complex ideas to others.Individuals with enhanced idea processing and accessing power are working with others who have been similarly transformed.

We should expect a magnified ability for learners to conduct self-directed learning and for teachers to communicate information directly and, more importantly, to aid individuals in their quest for information and skills that give them the power to manage their own life spaces.

If part of the ability to rule is to control information flow and to minimize subject peoples’ understanding and organizing power, then government that aims to benefit the few off the backs and lives of the many will be crippled by
this change. Former stooges will do an end-run around ignorance and become empowered.

I eagerly await new developments. There will be lots of adjustments

In the meantime, Teachers! Get busy learning and communicating using the new tools of enlightenment.

Choices and options involved in teaching and learning: 25 tools. July 21, 2008

So much has happened to the potential to teach in 6 years since I started blogging.
At that time my choices were limited to just one two system which was leased to and controlled by institutions . Subsequently open source tools have been developed and made freely available to all who have the interest and skill to teach and an audience, or the ability to recruit an audience.

25 tools (from the introductory page at 25 tools):

1. Web browser – Firefox

   More than just a browser with 100s of extensions available to provide an enormous range of extra functionality not found with other browsers.

2. Email tool – gMail/Google Mail

   No more worrying about an email client on your desktop and dealing with spam and viruses – and tons of free storage space.

   * Resource gMail/Google Mail: Mini Tutorial

3. Instant Messenger – Skype

   An easy way of not only text messaging your contacts but also free voice calls – with low charges out to landlines.

4. Social bookmarking tool – Delicious

   Store your bookmarks online, tag them and share them with others, students, colleagues and so on.

5. RSS Reader – Google Reader

   Subscribe to website and blog feeds and the news is delivered automatically to you. Effortless!

   * Resource Google Reader : Mini Tutorial

6. Real-time messaging tool – Twitter

   If you want to stay in touch with people no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

7. Online calendar – Google Calendar

   Don’t keep your calendar to yourself, share it and make scheduling events an easier process.

   * Resource Google Calendar : Mini Tutorial

8. Office suite – Google Docs

   An online suite of office tools for personal use or to collaborate with other. It can read in Microsoft Office documents too.

   * Resource Google Docs : Mini Tutorial

9. Mind mapping tool – FreeMind

   For organising your thoughts or just brainstorming

10. Start page tool – iGoogle

    Aggregate all your resources, mail, RSS feeds, etc, in one place.

11. Blogging tool – WordPress

    Use it to create a personal or professional blog

12. Web authoring tool – Nvu

    A versatile web authoring to build web pages and web sites.

13. Wiki tool – PBwiki

    Create editable websites for collaborative writing and working.

    * Resource PBwiki : Mini Tutorial

14. Photo hosting and sharing tool – Flickr

    Host your personal or professional picture collection, and share them with friends, colleagues and others.

15. Presentation hosting and sharing tool – Slideshare

    Upload presentations, tag them and share them with others. Synchronise them with an audio file to create a narrated presentation

16. Video hosting and sharing tool – YouTube

    A large collection of shareable videos – host your own there tool.

17. Collaborative presenation tool – Voicethread

    Create a slideshow around images and invite comments (audio or text) from others.

    * Resource Voicethread : Mini Tutorial

18. Podcasting tool – Audacity

    Record and edit audio and, with the extra encoder, convert your audio files into MP3 podcasts

    * Resource Audacity : Mini Tutorial

19. Screen capture and screencasting tool – Jing

    An “always-ready” program that instantly captures and shares images and video.

    * Resource Jing : Mini Tutorial

20. Polling and survey tool – PollDaddy

    Want to get some quick feedback? Set up a poll, and track responses.

    * Resource PollDaddy : Mini Tutorial

21. Web meeting tool – Yugma

    For small meetings of up to 10 people, to whiteboard, annotate and share files. You can even use Skype.

    * Resource Yugma : Mini Tutorial

22. Live broadcasting tool – Ustream

    Live interactive video broadcasting to a global audience. All it takes is a camera and an internet connection.

    * Resource Ustream : Mini Tutorial

23. Social networking tool – Ning

    Create and customise a private (secure if required) community for a group of like-minded people, large or small.

    * Resource Ning : Mini Tutorial

24. Course authoring tool – eXe

    Create SCORM-compliant learning content that doesn’t require you to be proficient in HTML or XML markup.

    * Resource eXe : Mini Tutorial
    * SCORM/AICC eXe Tutorial

25. Course management tool – Moodle

    Host a complete course or program or simply provide user authentication for other training materials.

    * Resource Moodle : Mini Tutorial

eXe: IF you design lessons, teach and type, THEN online teaching is now a snap! June 15, 2008

Oh!, how huge my frustration, no doubt shared by millions of other teacher-types, who are quite incredible interactors! Back in the early nineties, say 1992, my original frustration surfaced when I realized the potential of the web and also that web technique was not within my reach not without a major mindset operation and lots and lots of training. Now, with eXe, we can take our teaching online orders of magnitude less of both sweat and radically different skill acquisition. And, in the bargain, eXe allows the learning of good lesson and course principles which will serve both online and in the face-to-face classroom.

The real difficulty is to find people who have both the wish and the ability to teach. I’ll leave that very large topic until another time. Abandoned, for the moment, so that we can talk about the already competent face to face teacher [another time, remember] and the web.

But at least a preface about the the teacher as an existential “type”. There is, as far as I can tell, no theoretical limitation to human capabilities and inclinations as they are parceled out to us as individuals. In my own experience, however, there are existential and developmental limits on this special combination of human abilities and inclinations.

For example, the wish to interact with and nurture the becoming of others is relatively rare as a primary, or close to primary, individual drive (I am not here discussing the “wired-in” protectiveness that seems to be part of the human and mammalian package). Also, the wish to and ability to communicate effectively in multiple situations with varying ages, genders, groups and personalities is also fairly rare. While related, these two skills are more rarely found in one person. For a “teacher-type” add to these two, wishing to support/nurture the achievement/becoming of others and comprehensive set of one-to-one and group communication skills two other skills, the ability to “sense” and/or “deduce” the conceptual processing of another, and the ability to communicate about and structure situations such that the learner can move from their own position on something like a learning ladder of skills to a next level of learning . This, based only upon the teacher/student transactions and the information and learning experiences and informational materials provided to the student.

As you can see this is a relatively unlikely combination of human skills, having one may increase the motivation to develop another in the set but does not guarantee that that skill will develop.

I hope you now see that nothing in this teacher disposition (my reference to this set of motivations and skills) relates directly to mathematics, logic, technology. And, one could argue, for personalities inclined in this direction, the development of such skills would require a distinctly different set drives and predispositions than those which drive the teacher we have described above.

In short, I would argue that it is a very rare combination indeed that finds both in depth computer language skills (html among them) and teacher skills in the same person. Particularly in adults who received elementary, secondary and postsecondary training prior to, say, 2000.

It is far more likely, however, that such teaching inclined adults, those born before 2000, have acquired lesson design skills, and even curriculum development skills, on top of their “package” of skills and inclinations that move them to teach. The gift of eXe is that it allows such a person to put lessons and teaching online by means which are in reach. With eXe the face-to-face teacher can reach out to construct for her/himself a teaching and learning environment which can work work her/his live classroom or even for students who we will be doing online learning alone.

————–
Links
eXe blog
25tools for eXe and other online learning support applications. (All are Open Source, incidentally. There is now much less
in the form of technical or fiscal limit that stops the teacher type from trying to reach out online. Hooray)

Grantwork: May May 13, 2007

Ray and I have met and planned. we’re working for board participation and extension of ideas.

We’ve prepared what we call the 15 pager: a prospectus of our five year plan

In it we’ve specified major goals, budget, personnel, classes.

We’re eager to hear the response from our approx 15 heavy duty alternative educaors.

Projects in Motion December 31, 2006

Serious and extensive recent training and action with PBS, SET, SWIS and now Heart. Swis Technical Assistance, SET assessment, SWIS school assignment (which is probably forthcoming. Also doing heavy lifting with Alternative Education, Evaluation and Grant Writing. Many fine people to collaborate with in Iowa and nationally. I am sincerely looking forward to it.

I would like to be able to insert podcast and Freemind products into the middle of entries–and naturally jpegs. Will learn how to do this in short order, I hope. More, tomorrow on major goals for the upcoming year. As a preparation for this “big goal stating” I have been doing some ontological sketching of the materials and issues I am presently (or have been “traditionally” involved with over my years of professoring, evaluating and consulting. Those sketches have already been helpful in the framing of what I’m up to in some larger sense.