Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The teacher as action researcher : using technology to capture pedagogic form

Push to understand the educational problem and then use analysis to target a solution from technology.

Start with the problem? Problematise teaching ....
Need to become action researchers who colalborate to produce their own development and knowledge about teaching.

Good point that ' how best to use technology to support education' not technology led as this is sub optimal' ( p139) not technology first......... as tendency to just move from technology to technology when nothing much is changing.

Call to put the focus back on LEARNING and to ask what is the best way to support life long learning?

Conversational framework : way of capturing iterative, communciative, adaptive, reflective and goal orientated actions with feedback....COMPLETE LEARNING PROCESS

2 levels : discursive - talking./
experiental level - students in learning envir constructed by teacher learning by doing....

linked by adaption and reflection - change....

FOCUS ON LEARNER - good

looking at relationships between theory and practice, principle and applciation,concept and substantiation.................

Framework that has the learner at the centre and the teaching/learning process - not technology FIRST

'Rethinking of teaching ' ......... is it feasible ?

call to be a reflective practitioner who can cope with change ' .... reflecting and learning about how to do heir job; learning with others, experimenting, learning from users, and articulate and dessimiante what they have learnt?

Likened to role of academic with a research load...... ?????

'How often do we talk about teaching'......?
'teaching needs to be problematicised, exploratory,apprentiied, building on work of other experimental, subject to revision, sharing of ideas./solutions. communitarian in approach ( p144)

'scholarship of discovery; ;scholarship of engagement . teaching as professional learning
TIME

teachers who want to innovate want control over the process, not the uncritical adoption of others products. tools,reousrces, and environments to access each others ideas/etc.

Not having the conversations about ' designing, exploring,experimenting ,adapting, reflecting and collaborating. ( p 144)

Not talking about what we are learning about learning to use some tools.......

how to share findings ??????????????

Not hacing conversations about learning, numbers and outcomes,........ clear expectation..... uncritical and unquestioning ....... constantly asked about impact >>>>>

Learning design as a transferable

'the form capturing the pedagogy' (p145)

Argues generic pedagogical forms in education and what teachers do is customise it.

Content repositories - content strippped of pedagogy may be more easily transferable.
TaLe, Podserver. etc etc etc ntis...

Good point that use of repositories remains LOW ..... (P146)....

'sharing, resuing, and repurposing' materials..............

should be transfering both chunks of content and pedagogical forms......

LAMS ( 147) captured the form and content in a learning design that can be used and reused...... basis of community of learners/researchers.




Can learning design

Saturday, October 4, 2008

LEARNING /EDUCATION/ Changing ways

Education is generally confined to institutions. Learning, on the other hand, is a continual, ongoing experience, running a range from formal to informal, organized to emergent, self-organized to planned. As institutional lines continue to blur, concepts of learning communities and learning cities become more attractive (and realizable): "Neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or regions that explicitly use lifelong learning as an organizing principle and social/cultural goal in order to promote collaboration of their civic, economic, public, voluntary and education sectors to enhance social, economic and environmental conditions on a sustainable, inclusive basis." It could probably be better said with less words, but the idea of entire communities and related webs of libraries, museums, and other societal institutions forming the basis for a new integrated view of learning is quite attractive.

SIEMENS POST

ASSESSMENT : THOUGHTS

TAFE 21st Century

1. What paradigm is it situated in and how is this shown, discourse, language

2. model of consultation - changes and inclusions.

3. Use of words technologies - technocratic perspective?


BREULEUX

Impertive for differences ?

Are we missing something important - ??? relationships and differences

Current framework : OUTCOMES - use of technologies - call not to reify it as being the end in itself but to recognise the complex interplay......... purpose/contexts and perspectives.


1. Are we asking the right sorts of questions : relationships ?

2. Need to find emerging practices and present and tell ............?

3. Deeper questions about the goal of learning - VET ? and deeper foundations for learning?

4. What difference does networking make? what is the learning that is needed to participate in networked community?

5. We have the impertive ( policy) the hard work is done..... what of implementation??

Imagining the present - Breuleux

complex reality of ICT education in VET is that it is the educators decisions and action

Technology is not what boosts education is it the 'collective project of educational communities.

Need to move beyond asking about the impact and outcomes .....

this is an expression of the current paradigm and different versions reflect different emphasises and different perspectives ....... it is about discourse

Need to reconfigure

Current convergent of support for social construction of knowledge ie knowledge comes from active collaborative process .....

MORE POWERFUL OPTIONS

'if we integrated well designed technologies in context of meaningful, projects, pedgogies, acces s to resources and tools and support for technological maintenance

Changes for leaners

Speaks of sets of transitions : ???

Current alignment of reform and technology offers array of learning experiences

Difference of networks - more people, different voices and perspectives, inside and outside,

LEARNING IS A PROCESS of DEVELOPING THE COMPETENCE, THE ROLES AND THE RESPONSIBILITIES TO BE A FULL PARTICIPANT IN A SOCIALLY MEANINGFUL COMMUNITY, ( P4)


What do educators do?
new technologies are meaning constructive pedagogies - renewal???

Cointerpretation - CoP

Notion of impact - misleading - different kind of relationships between technology and education.

Better to talk about EMERGING PRACTICES ' coming from the reciprocal relationships between new technologies and the actural uses that people develop for these tools' These practices need to be seen, recognised, cultivated and interpreted ' . ( p6)

Strong call for imagining the present ' which can offer us glimpses of how things can be...
Develop a capacity to read and tell the present

Call for it to be everyones responsibility - COLLECTIVE,COLLABORATIVE PROJECT

Case studies that look at context and perspective

RESEARCHERS TEND TO UNDERESTIMATE THE KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED TO IMPLEMENT - FULLAN QUOTE

Constructive dialogue

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Learning about LMS - Initial Steps

Step One
  • prior knowledge it was hot
  • looked at horizon to informed judgement for directions
  • who is pushing this one in org?
  • 'sniffing the wind'

Step 2

  • glanced at the easy guides - in the nut shell in particular - new features - words about non technical - familiar and the novel
  • tried for download to experiment - blocked by firewalls
  • at same time approached by Orga innovator in web that he had found it.... link up to company. he put our names forward
  • next thing - networking skills - access to trial copy using their server for indefinite period of time.
  • David - personalised service to ensure access from home without problems

Step 3

  • did tutorial demo - dont usually do this stuff- excellent - aussie voice, quick, useful
  • scanned around and skim read - like a new text to get the gist of the LMS - broad sweeping overview
  • Talked to David - background information on development and countries using it.... future.
  • Playing and exploration - series of sessions ' popped in' and rapid fire looking around.
  • looking at visual impact and ease of usage.

Step 4 - organisational readiness

  • Anand supporting but very political activity
  • David supporting and trying to suss out organisation
  • Boss supporting but not knowing
  • More reading of informational leaflets
  • Building knowledge and linking into wider organisational constraints and limitations and advantages.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Social Constructivism

Social construction of technology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Sociology
Portal · History
General Aspects
Public sociology · Social researchSocial theory · Sociological theorySociological practice
Related fields & subfields
Comparative sociology · CriminologyDemography · Social movementsSocial psychology · SociolinguisticsSociology of: culture · devianceeconomics · education · genderknowledge · law · politics · religionscience · stratification · work
Categories & Lists
Journals · Publications · Topics
This box: viewtalkedit

This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate.
Social construction of technology (also referred to as SCOT) is a theory within the field of Science and Technology Studies (or Technology and society). Advocates of SCOT -- that is, social constructivists -- argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action shapes technology. They also argue that the ways in which a technology is used cannot be understood without understanding how that technology is embedded in its social context. SCOT is a response to technological determinism and is sometimes known as technological constructivism.
SCOT draws on work done in the constructivist school of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and its subtopics include actor-network theory (a branch of the sociology of science and technology) and historical analysis of sociotechnical systems Thomas P. Hughes. Leading adherents of SCOT include Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch.
SCOT holds that those who seek to understand the reasons for acceptance or rejection of a technology should look to the social world. It is not enough, according to SCOT, to explain a technology's success by saying that it is "the best" -- researchers must look at how the criteria of being "the best" is defined and what groups and stakeholders participate in defining it. In particular, they must ask who defines the technical criteria by which success is measured, why technical criteria are defined in this way, and who is included or excluded.
SCOT is not only a theory, but also a methodology: it formalizes the steps and principles to follow when one wants to analyze the causes of technological failures or successes.

Determinism and Social Constructivism

Technological determinism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

To comply with Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten.Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions.
Technological determinism is a reductionist doctrine that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history. This is not to be confused with the inevitability thesis (Chandler), which states that once a technology is introduced into a culture that what follows is the inevitable development of that technology.
Technological determinism has been summarized as 'The belief in technology as a key governing force in society ...' (Merritt Roe Smith), '... the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an "inevitable" course.' (Michael L. Smith), 'The idea that technological development determines social change ...' (Bruce Bimber), '... the belief that technical forces determine social and cultural changes.' (Thomas P. Hughes); '... a three-word logical proposition: "Technology determines history"' (Rosalind Williams)
The term is believed to have been coined by Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), an American sociologist.
Most interpretations of technological determinism share two general ideas:
that the development of technology itself follows a predictable, traceable path largely beyond cultural or political influence, and
that technology in turn has "effects" on societies that are inherent, rather than socially conditioned or that the society organizes itself in such a way to support and further develop a technology once it has been introduced.
Technological determinism stands in opposition to the theory of the social construction of technology, which holds that both the path of innovation and the consequences of technology for humans are strongly if not entirely shaped by society itself, through the influence of culture, politics, economic arrangements, and the like.
Technological determinism has been largely discredited within academia, especially by science and technology studies.[citation needed] However, it remains the dominant view within most news media and popular culture.[citation needed]
Pessimism towards techno-science arose after the mid 20th century for various reasons including the use of nuclear energy towards nuclear weapons, Nazi human experimentation during World War Two, and lack of economic development in the third world (also known as the global south). As a direct consequence, desire for greater control of the course of development of technology gave rise to disenchantment with the model of technological