Week 3 - slow time, phew!

Trouble is that I still am trying to enjoy the kiwi summer - having weekends away, or busy with outdoor stuff. Then there is work, which of course gets in the way… Feel horribly behind, and opened up the week 3 ‘Things to do’ page on the wiki to be vastly relieved at the thought of some slow time… Thank you Bee et al : ) 

Fragmentary reflections from week 2

• What are the differences you see between traditional learning systems(LMS) and open participatory environments? Control - who has it! I was intrigued by someone’s posting that I read a few days ago (apologies to whoever that I have forgotten!) which suggested that this workshop might be a bit fragmented because we don’t have a central discussion point. We do have the yahoo group to have discussions in of course. But it made me reflect on my class blogging which was quite similar - giving more weight to the individual end of the continuum, rather than the community. Is there a balance here to achieve, or do we necessarily come down on one side more than the other. Does your purpose perhaps determine which you plump for? Having to have an individual site certainly has made me take more responsibility - harder to be a lurker, as I think I confessed to somewhere else!

How do you think can you effectively promote open participatory skills in your teaching? Highly frustrated at the moment because I’m teaching an IELTS prep course with limited time and input to be able to use social networks. Grrrr! Getting students to take the individual responsibility that I mentioned above is tricky, for sure. Assessment seems contra to what open and participatory imply! 

What may be the benefits and the constraints that open environments bring? Laine’s skype experience (strangers in strange places) was interesting! I also wonder at what point the webheads become too big? How do you keep the intimate feeling of knowing everybody? This group is a nice size and yet a short time to get to know people… 

How do you think students will react when they are introduced to these new environments? So far so good - my students have been positive over 2005 and 6 with blog and wiki use. As long as they see a purpose they seem happy (like me)! And we need to accept that some won’t take to it like ducks to water…

Auckland lights

 No I didn’t take this, but just playing around.

West Harbour Dr

West Harbour Dr

Originally uploaded by khaines.

Not quite home sweet home, but just up the road at the top of our street. I put some photos in Everyday Scenes as requested. Nothing like ‘having’ to do something to make you spend time on it…

Bloglines problems

When I subscribed to several of our blogs - nothing happened. Georgina was the latest one and I tried several times. Is this just me?

Karen 

Stop press: For some reason, the blogs I couldn’t subscribe to all came up the next day when I tried again with a tick box for various RSS codes. Why didn’t most of them? Curiouser and curiouser… Am now subscribed to all!

Reflections - week 1: simply messing about online

So many new applications - so many communities. I seriously wonder how many you can actually belong to? And for what purpose? How much time and energy can you seriously put into these? Or remembering which user name or email account you used for each one. 

Perhaps I am a fritterer time-wise, but also a flitterer. I dabble and try out new sites and end up only using a few. To date, I feel comfortable with Bloglines and Blogger, both of which I have used before and with students. But realistically, I only use Blogger with my students and Bloglines I often don’t check for weeks at a time. Belonging to online communities takes time, and I belong to enough healthy f2f communities to find time far too precious. Playing global happy families for me is just a bit OTT.

But I decided to call my blog Learning Curve for two reasons.

a) because I can see that I am on quite a steep one. Flickr for example. Have had an account for ages and spasmodically upload photos but haven’t really got to grips with it.  Frappr has never worked successfully for me and Community Life seems similar. Second Life is time consuming and my computer slow and I get really frustrated with the controls taking seconds to respond.  Using WordPress has been time consuming but am starting to get my head round it - and I remember that it took me ages to feel facile in Blogger.

b) because my students and my kids are on different learning curves - and I do think that there is room in my teaching for creating more community, part of which can be online. My students embraced blogging enthusiastically - what else might they enjoy that we can discover together?

Anyone remember Ratty in Wind in the Willows. I think rather than messing around in boats,  perhaps I might actually like messing around online… : ) 

Open and participatory?

I tend to sit on the sidelines of discussions etc. til I feel confident to dive in. Classic lurker online I am! But I’m not particularly private - so personally I’m happy to be O&P. For my students anything that makes them participate in English is a Good Thing. Need to be sensitive to their feelings about the open part - to date the only problem that I’ve had from a classroom perspective is mega spam on Blogger.

Uploading photos

Still experimenting with this. In sad ‘digital immigrant’ fashion, I downloaded James Farmer’s ‘workshop’ notes and have them to hand to read! But I watched several videos as well, and thought it was a piece of cake. Will continue to practice. Don’t seem able to drag and drop which I’m sure he did on the video? And can I wrap text etc? Have sussed the categories, but want to be able to have different headings in my sidebar for links. How do I do this?           

OK - am learning. I like the snap feature on the links - that’s very cool. And have got the hang of the sidebar I think…                                                                                                          

Whoops - week 2 is here already!

Three days out of my normal week to spend with visiting friends, has left me feeling slightly behind. Also am still very unsure with how to format stuff in wordpress. I am used to Blogger. Is CSS similar to html?

But I did manage to get the picture at the top - taken just before Christmas on holiday at Waihi Beach here in NZ. The flower is the pohutukawa - our Christmas tree. Always makes me think of summer as it usually flowers Dec/Jan and all along the beaches are trees wreathed in red. This year it was nice and early…

Still summer

Humid, sunny days and sultry nights…

And I am sitting here on the computer - locked into not one, but TWO different EVO sessions. The learning curve on the gaming group is high, especially in Second Life. And getting my head round a variety of applications (not to mention having several different usernames) is somewhat challenging. And I am still on holiday… Start back in a week!