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Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a worldwide phenomenon, as  interested folks from anywhere in the world can participate. Some MOOCs attract huge numbers of students, many coming from countries where access to higher education may be difficult or not available at all.  In some cases, students completing a MOOC are able to earn […]

The post Making MOOCs truly open appeared first on Communicating Across Cultures.

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I can only post a sort of ‘marker’ blogpost for this week; too busy for words: student conference – music improvisation event – all the usual work – started a new F2F course – finishing another MOOC - tons of marking. Hey ho.
But this CalArts course is so excellent, I need to capture it here; if I cannot do all the work this week, I can at least re-visit it later and catch up with myself. I foresee a very visual summer!




Art as story

We explored art as public storytelling, and history- and meaning making from the caves of Lascaux to Persepolis via Davide, Jericho, Monet, Picasso, Kerry Kames Marshall, Jeff Walls, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler …

A key implicit theme was power: who gets to tell the stories – who has access to the traditions, resources, vocabulary, training, tradition, time… the cultural, semantic and semiotic capital to make the meanings that count – that stick – that help us become who we are – or that deny us alternative ways of being who we might become.

Out task this week is to tell our tale of who we are in ten images with a very brief commentary: one for after the marking!! But a wonderful additional task for this week is to go back into last week’s assignments and to engage with another participant in a deep and thoughtful way. I have posted useful questions, suggestions and resources below – and these are definitely things that I will be embedding in my own practice as soon as humanly possible.

W2: Assignments

Optional Sketchbook Assignment 1 Follow Up

Regardless if you did last week’s sketchbook assignment or not, I encourage you to try this out. Some of you are already commenting on the work that’s been posted to date, but let’s make our first attempt at critique with the following prompt:

Visit the Sketchbook Assignment 1: My World and the Art World forum and choose an assignment. Try especially to spread your attention between assignments that may have already received a lot of feedback and ones that haven’t. Prioritize finding an undiscovered gem or two.

Look at the student’s submission. Don’t respond immediately. Give yourself at least a few minutes to really look or study what the student has submitted. 

In your reply, describe, in words, exactly what you are seeing or reading in the student’s assignment.

Then, select at least one of the following and add it to your comment:

a.                            What is one thing about the submission that immediately caught your attention?

b.                            What is one thing about the work that took you a little longer to discover?

c.                            What are three questions you would ask this student about their submission?

d.                            How does the medium/format that the student has chosen (drawing, text, chart, etc.) affect how you understand the meaning of the submission?

Repeat for another assignment. Try to comment on at least three assignments this round.


Optional Sketchbook Assignment 2: Mental Map (Tracks A & B)

It’s good to try to know yourself as an artist and visual thinker. And it’s interesting to learn from others. This week I’m asking you to tell your own story in images and words, and learn about things you might not know from other people’s stories.

1.                 In your sketchbook, assemble ten (10) images, books, films, or even music/songs that provide a history and context for your current work or interests in art, animation and/or gaming, whether as a practitioner, viewer or player/participant. Choose works that are important to the way you think, and just as importantly, works that inspire you in ways that you can’t always perhaps put into words. Reach back into your childhood (where you may perhaps find some unexpected sources of inspiration) and look around you to collect some contemporary resources. (This assignment is particularly well-suited to a digital sketchbook, like a Tumblr or blog, but as before, if you are posting content that is not your own, please cite where you retrieved each image with a link.)

2.                 Sequence your images/items in a way that makes sense to you, chronologically or thematically or some other way.

3.                 In this forum, start a new thread. Give your thread a title, write a short intro (100-200 words), and post your images/list of links, or a link to your digital sketchbook/blog where you created your sequence.

4.                 Click “Create New Thread.”

Further Readingand Web Resources:

See the work in fine detail, panel by panel.

A simulated walkthrough of the caves.

Marshall’s 2012 Elson lecture at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Importance of Being Figurative, is worth a listen (recorded March 12, 2012).

A list of some photographers working in a way similar to Jeff Wall:

Persepolis (the book), 2003, and Persepolis (the film), 2007

Marjane Satrapi’s 2003 graphic novel is highly recommended, and we encourage you to see her 2007 animated feature, too. It’s available on Netflix if you have access to it in your part of the world (membership required), or on video.

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painting of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1964.

Baudelaire’s seminal collection of essays has been republished widely. Check your library.

TJ Clark, The Painter of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985.

A revised edition was published in 1999.



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I have a couple THANKS to offer this week – one is to all those that have buoyed me up during #rhizo14 – and the other is to the student team who devised and delivered this year’s student-facing Get Ahead Conference. They are my answer to this week’s ‘what next’ question: we need a re-schooling rhizome and creative learning space!!

W8: Demobbing Soldiers (Mar 4-?)

“the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed [is] to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.” Paulo Freire via Maha Bali

Question: "How can we take people who've spent their whole lives believing that [BLAH] is 'learning' and MAKE them … [plan towards their obsolescence] ? (Remix of Dave's thoughts from week 2 and week 6.)

Demobbing soldier

W8 Challenge: Help us think more clearly (big challenge!). Do we demob soldiers? Do we de/re-school soldiers? Do we mob soldiers? Who needs soldiers? Who is we?

And Sandra says, Thank you to all of you whose blogs, poems, songs, voices and stories have made this such a special special rhizome. Many of you are in the auto-ethnography project – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mSrZFBt1cYjDSAaFc6Et-BAZ95oEEBMi-AvAX8Fz8Qs/edit- and you are in my mind and in my heart. 

My small rhizome…

… and one possible answer to this week’s question: keep fighting for creative learning spaces for students. Our non-traditional students especially need physical real world and real time spaces to be with each other to feel their power – to gain their voice – to SING! And that is where our Get Ahead conference comes in.

Get Ahead

Get Ahead is our conference by students for students. Ostensibly an event that promotes study and employability success – it becomes a student generated space where students have permission to be with their University and each other: to experience university as a place of opportunity, energy and excitement.

We sponsor one annually – and each year we recruit a team of students to design the day – to get students to present - to drum up interest – to run the day itself. It is hard work for a small team whose other academic work goes on regardless and relentlessly – and who may also have paid employment and families to support.

So THANKS to the Get Ahead Team! They were fearless in their attempts to drum up interest in the Conference – talking their way into lectures - talking about Get Ahead and talking people into the Conference. It was a buzzy, exciting and engaging event – and they were amazing: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/get_ahead_conf/

Where next - and how: Staff Buy-in to student as agent

For this student initiative to work, we need Lecturers to sign up to the Get Ahead idea and help to engage their students with the Conference.

One of the Education Studies tutors worked with a Team of Education Studies students – including a couple of our first year #becomingeducational students - to produce a session for other students. They chose ‘Networking’ and spread the rhizome! The Get Ahead Conference and that session were flagged up in Education Studies Team meetings - and those staff recommended the Conference as an Enhancement Week event. Our own 'Becoming an Educationalist'  students had Get Ahead as their Enhancement Week activity - they knew about it – we made time for it - and they attended with a sense of excitement and expectation.

Initiating big ideas like 'student as partner', 'student as producer', 'student as change agent', ‘student as rhizome’... takes investment of mind, body and timetable. We think that it is worth this time and effort...

But how?

One thing this year's Team suggested is that they build on what they have learned this year - and run next year's Conference. They have also suggested that the Conference is 'built up to' from the very beginning of the year - this way staff can write it into module handbooks - and the students can run pre-conference events - with *staff* and students.

The pragmatics

We would love it if staff substituted engagement with the Conference for one small piece of course work; we can offer a menu of possible 'buy-ins': students from one Module could put on a poster exhibition - perhaps students from Work Placement can present about that - perhaps Computing students could run something ICT - Maths students could run a Quants session...  Events Management students might still run the Conference - and if so - Events Management staff would ensure that attending the conference was either a module requirement or an enhancement Week activity for *ALL* Events Management students...

We could go International?

As a second year literature student our Tom ran the first ever International Dario Fo Festival. This event was a mix of academic symposium and Theatrical workshop and performance. Alongside an International Fo Symposium, to which students were also invited, there were theatre workshops for students and people from the local community... And there were big theatrical performances as well – including Fo’s ‘The bosses funeral’ (!!).

This mix of the academic and the theatrical or the more fun elements seems a great model - we can help students do better with their studies and with their job applications - but we also provide opportunities for some of the cultural and play events that the University also offers.

De-schooling society


If students are to embrace different concepts of learning – and the what – where – why and how of it – staff have to buy in to that as well. Or… ‘that’s all folks!’

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How hard is it to get people to change their beliefs? Really hard, even if facts are provided that refute those beliefs.  And even if those facts are accepted as true!  A recent study in Scientific American points to this conclusion. The study, by Brendan Nyham of Dartmouth College, dealt with the now-debunked idea that […]

The post Facts: irrelevant! appeared first on Communicating Across Cultures.

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Hello to my new art community, #LiveArtHistory: https://class.coursera.org/livearthistory-001/wiki/overview. I took PennState's Introduction to Art (#artmooc – from http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/artmooc-introduction-to-art-concepts.html) last year and loved a course that had me making art. This course seemed to have a similar angle... so here I am! I want to learn more about art history and make something a bit like art. I also try to take everything I learn back into my own teaching - and blog about that. 
To make this class happen, we all need to be friendly, welcoming and helpful: make a Comment, 'like' a post, 'Reply' where possible. We are the course - we all need to make it happen.



For me - art is fundamental to being human, we are art. Many of us are taught at school that we cannot 'do' art - that we are not good enough - and it cuts us off from ourselves.  I found myself again after hearing someone talk about doing a daily water colour to de-stress - a meditation to start each day. I took my unused water colour box to work (a very stressful place) and started. Soon my walls were plastered with pix - and I discovered joy and a new confidence. I try to build artwork into all my teaching - and helped put on a small conference to help others do this also: 
http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/look_make_learn/


These are the pictures that Chris O’Reilly took of our artful day: https://plus.google.com/photos/111292261919257411213/albums/5974268028746180785- and if you look at the very last couple – you can see that Raquel Duran, our Visual Scribe for the day, illustrated a bit of Tom Burns and my comment, ‘We’ve always been visual’ with an image of a cave painting. 



And that is art – the magical mystical boundary between us and what we see, hear, feel, believe, imagine, seek…
Art is not about money, big business, the stamp of approval from big collectors. 
Art is being human.

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So it’s a sort of goodbye to the wonder that was #rhizo14 – but not quite and not yet… For one thing we are taking forward the autoethnography project – so if you were part of #rhizo14 for any amount of time – we would love to have your experiences here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mSrZFBt1cYjDSAaFc6Et-BAZ95oEEBMi-AvAX8Fz8Qs/edit


For another – who could let go of a FB Group (Sarah, Simon, Apostolos, Scott, Dave… you know who you are!!) that sprouted wonderful discussions like this:

Heeeeelp! I have to write a piece titled: "What does the metaphor of the rhizome mean for collaborative learning. How would it impact on teaching methods?" and I am stuck. What the heck is this rhizomatic learning anyway? [How can learning] be structured, but still be spontaneous. 
Be still. Let em sing/dance/write/graft/dig and together make a show. This came to mind: http://youtu.be/xlvf1Jawg6E

It's all very woolly. My thesis might be about collaborative learning in undergraduates, it's up to me to make up some models. There's this thing called patchwork text that I am quite drawn to, also some comments by John Seely Brown that I have half remembered ... 
I suggest knitting.
I’m always knitting, fecking uni won't accept it as a PhD thesis!

Our Dave: What does the metaphor of the rhizome mean for collaborative learning - the rhizome challenges collaborative learning to allow learners to really be at the centre of the learning. If there is no beginning and end, and all is middle, then we need to allow for student to make their own map of the territory being studied. The facilitator sets the ecology for learning, tends the garden, but allows the rhizomes to spread, be cut off, and re-grow elsewhere. It also challenges the possibilities of outcomes as being seen as objectives. Goals can be shared as a community, in face, they shape the community, but objectives grow as part of the mapping process.

How would it impact on teaching methods - many teaching approaches start from the hoped for outcomes and work their way backwards. The rhizome challenges this as an artifice that is a child of hierarchy. Hierarchies for learning and knowledge that are legacies of a book driven, yes/no, final product history that overlays a deep complex human experience. If the outcomes are actually the coming together of the lines of flight that occur in the middle space, they will shape themselves differently for each learner, and the maps themselves will be unique (or close enough to it). This actually mirrors the 'real life' experience of professionals and more closely emulates our goals in that as educators to prepare students to be creative participants in their field of study: https://docs.google.com/.../1-Jqr08jT.../editThis course hopes to prepare the learner for dealing with uncertain situations with respect to educational technologies. The goal is *not* to teach any specific area of edtech nor to achieve a level of competency with a specific tool but rather to introduce and develop the literacies required for being able to make good decisions with respect to technologies in an educational context.
There are lots of tools out there, and, in some cases, they change all the time. The communication skills involved in being social... those are constant. The process of converting your existing skills in being social, in doing research, in project management, in information literacies - this is the focus of the course. And I expect that to work out differently for each student. We all come to this kind of course with different understandings and a different background and I expect we’ll all come out with different outcomes. That’s good. And expected. If I do my job in this course as an instructor, you’ll be working for yourself... not for me.  I talk about literacies. uncertainty. decision making. creativity. lots of nice buzz words. This year I'm going to be adding 'abundance' and 'permission'…

People like terminology. From what I was reading recently: Agent-Based Modeling ABM's (fits with shaken not stirred). "Thus relying mainly on experimental and descriptive approaches places limitations on a quest to seek understandings of the possibility space over which an emergent phenomenon may unfold." Dad, you're talking out your ass again. "...can reveal insights that may otherwise remain elusive..." (I love "elusive" much better than "slippery." … I'll keep slippery then. Goes with just having our car fixed. They took 3 days and claim it was because they were "short one seal and had to order another." I can see this as problematic for an active circus but not a car dealership. Having fish left over at the end of the day should have alerted someone? … Don't the slippery town fathers always take the badge away from in-corruptible sheriff in the westerns? Badge-less I stand on the side of honesty and the more elusive, justice.

If that leaves you a bit breathless and hungry – join the #rhizo14 FB Group – you will be welcome. Spread the rhizome. Be the fungus!



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Interesting piece in the New Republic about the use of periods in text messages and online chats.  It’s not something I’ve thought about or even noticed.  In text messages I rarely see any punctuation. The period in short-form electronic communication plays a quite different role than it does normally in writing. According to the article, […]

The post Periods? No. appeared first on Communicating Across Cultures.

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Serious shout out to my colleagues who nominated me for this award. And thanks to CATE! Humbled.

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After a very bad day of wondering if my students would EVER actually see what I'm doing for them, I decided to go back through my old Facebook statuses to see if I ever talked about how appreciative my students were of me. I was not disappointed.All of...

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Rarely have I been so time poor – sad that it coincides with my engagement with the brilliant #rhizo14 led by Dave Cormier. This one might be a MOOCers MOOC: there is no set reading – scant introductory remarks – no trail of video tutorials or lectures… just trickster questions designed to get us thinking – posting – commenting – blogging – FBing – Google+ing… and lo – the community IS the curriculum. It is emergent – it emerges – it is what we want it to be! This post is a little reflection - and an invitation - let us write some poetry as a collaborative means of researching #rhizo14?




Declare

My project – if you can call it that – for #rhizo14 has been to bring as much of this busy fizzy messy stuff as possible into my first year #becomingeducational module and see what it sparks in first year students who in the end want to become educationalists.

In the process I have shared DogTrax ‘Steal this Poem’ (http://dogtrax.edublogs.org/2014/01/16/rhizo14-steal-this-poem/) and with him used the concept of cheating as a tool to analyse the power structures of education. I have re-blogged several #rhizo14 blogposts directly to the handful of students who actually follow the class blog. I don’t know if the excitement sizzles through – but I hope so!

Research: Collaborative writing as inquiry

Some of us in the rhizome are exploring the idea of collaborative writing as a form of inquiry about #rhizo14. We are thinking about exploring (as radical un-content) the blogs that have emerged – the words that have touched us, weaving a paper in, around and through our own responses to the ones we choose – and our responses to the writing of our fellow flaneurs.

In this, I have been very influenced by Ken Gale – who has himself studied Deleuze through collaborative writing…  (see Ken Gale http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=222)

Poetry and Inquiry?

Given the power of the rhizome – and the huge creativity in this ‘wonder’ (my collective term for us all – rejecting community – network – group); do #rhizo14ers want to generate poems (in the broadest and most multimodal sense) of our experiences – either as our own collective mode of inquiry for capturing (dead word!) our collective learning – that could be posted on a #rhizo14 website for just that purpose???

OR - for the LinkedIn Group: Higher Education Teaching and Learning and their Call for poems and creative works. Confession – I haven’t performed a rigorous back check on all this – but it serendipitously appeared in my email in-box from a friend who knows I like this sort of this. I am sharing it with a community that I know also loves this sort of thing…


Anyway – here’s their invitation - Submission Deadline: June 20, 2014:
Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems
An edited anthology volume by Dr. Karen Head (Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication), and Patrick Blessinger (Founder and Executive Director, Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association)

Volume one of the anthology series, Contemporary Teaching and Learning Poetry Series, Patrick Blessinger, series editor.

Submissions should be submitted electronically to:

https://www.hetl.org/poem-submission-form/ 

Volume One Overview

The poems in this collection will deal with the real life-worlds of professors, instructors, and others working in education and it will cover contemporary teaching experiences in education. The poems will be written mainly by college and university professors, instructors, lecturers, and others in the field of education, and will cover the many roles teachers play, including instructing, lecturing, mentoring, facilitating, coaching, guiding, and leading. This volume will cover the manifold life experiences and perspectives of being and working as a teacher in education and the epiphanies (experiences of deep realization) experienced in that role.

This volume seeks to give creative voice to the full range of experiences by teachers, students, and others. It seeks to empower readers with personal agency as they evolve as self-creating, self-determining authors of their own lives, personally and professionally. In short, it seeks to expand our consciousness of what it means to be a teacher in contemporary life and within diverse learning environments and cultures. The poems will be based on teachers’ meaningful experiences in and out of the classroom and will provide artistic inspiration and creative insight to other teachers who work as teachers.

Submission Requirements

You may submit up to two poems or creative works per person. Any poetic form is accepted, but each poem should be limited to 300 words, unless the poem of longer length is exceptional in quality and highly unique in insight or style and appropriate to the poetic form used. Thus, poems and creative works expressed in a pure economy of words and that are able to distill the human experience down to its bare essence are highly valued as are creative use of voice, passion, imagery and the interplay of intellect and emotions.

The poem “Lecture” by Tami Haaland and the poem “Student” by Ted Kooser are a few examples of the type of work this volume seeks.

Submissions

We invite submissions of high quality poems and creative works for Volume One entitled, Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems. We are interested in poems by teachers (e.g., professors, instructors, lecturers, faculty) as well as other practitioners in the field of teaching and learning.

Submission Deadline: June 20, 2014

Submissions should be submitted electronically to:

https://www.hetl.org/poem-submission-form/ 

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ACÇÃO MISSIONÁRIA AURORA – AMA PROJECTO TCHUMA TCHATO EM PARCERIA COM TFI CARTA DE NOTÍCIAS 01/2014 – 20140131_TT2013/14_CN01 O sentimento era de pesar, a tarefa árdua de ser paciente, porque não havia mais nada a fazer. Mas, como diz o ditado, o navio tem que estar em movimento para que o leme surta o seu … Continue reading →

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AURORA MISSIONARY ACTION – AMA TCHUMA TCHATO PROJECT IN PARTNERSHIP WITH TFI NEWS LETTER 01/2014 – 20140131_TT2013/14_NL01 Feeling heavy in my heart for the gruesome task of being patient for there was not much it could be done. But, as the saying goes, the ship needs to be in motion for the rudder to have … Continue reading →

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How Handwriting Boosts the Brain - WSJ.com:

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What’s taken me so long to post this week? Partly – I came over all pithy and just wrote: The trouble with books in HE could be exactly that weight – that sense of reified knowledge – that implacability – and ... the Reading Lists. I have seen students on just one module (of four) expected to read 8-12 books per week before each new seminar. Of course the lecturer probably means ‘dip into’ rather than read in depth – but the task is impossible and makes the students feel like failures every week. It also leaves them in no doubt as to their role: shut up – read this – you have nothing to say here… So – we have this juxtaposed with the more fluid, potential space of the oral – and of the quasi-oral which is the web. It feels more participative, engaging and engaged. Unique among media it invites transmission rather than just consumption. We evoke the camp fire and the tribal elders telling their tales of a shared collective history. An ever-present. Cool. But who gets to tell the tales – and who gets to hear them? These societies also ‘other’ the inconvenient and rebellious…



Just a small point about the task itself: wasn’t Dave in his paraphrasing of the ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ question, not really posing an either/or question – but challenging the peremptory nature of such questions? And wasn’t he also challenging the arrogance of the book-bound with their dismissiveness of all things web? I cannot imagine how many right-wing politicians must have nodded their heads in self-congratulation when they saw the Google = stupid proposition. Nothing seems to terrify them as much as a free and risky web. No, no they say – we need to make it safe – wrap it all up – tame this thing. The only point of ICT are the skills needed by business. Books embody the safe and controllable for them – whilst we know they also ‘light a fire in the mind’… We aren’t the ones who burnt the books but we might be the ones to sail the web as Digital Vikings as Amy Burvall suggests… 

So Karen sang:

And Jenny Mackness said:


And so many replied… The rest is silence ;-)
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