This was a challenge I set out for myself . It was the first time I sent my work to a Brazilian university . Ironically, what I have been doing at school was first shown and recognized abroad instead of inside my own organization (school) – which does not even know about this paper…so closed it is inside its own processes.  The web and networking was an outward movement.  I am now coming back and trying to find my place in the local educational environment. Not easy.  Second challenge (minor and fun), believe it or not  – I had never made an academic poster before.  Incredible how fussy some people can be over standard, form and norm and how anxious you can get for fear of not being accepted if you do not “conform”.

I had already written about my experience in Portuguese for Praxis (a 30-page ) but needed to condense it twice  – first for the submission paper: “Ferramentas Sociais, Redes e Interação”  (webcurriculo – (thanks Neli for lending me a hand) and then later for the poster. In spite of my lack of experience in this field, I managed to make one after after a quick search on the web. It was a good exercise in synthesis and visual distribution/impact.  Once it was printed, and hung,  I immediately realized I should have done it totally different.  This how one learns – set yourself a challenge, go for it, do your best, verify results, adjust, lather, rinse and repeat…or is it the other way round? 

As I listened to the various presentations, I compared the reactions to mine and was reminded of the steps I have made these years towards trying to find a balance in my courses. At the language institute I first worked,  I was just an instructor, training people to develop their communication and linguistic skills in a foreign language, not really engaged in any reality but the service I was delivering.  However, when I moved to the secondary school, although the job profile was the same as before, I increasingly became an educator and as such, gradually much more aware of the social engineering  we are subjected to through the uniform, over-structured, inflexible and centralized programs imposed . While trying to implement these new technologies in the classroom , I was constantly confronted with the unresponsive wall of institutional bureaucracy.

While writing this post, I dug up this drawing made by the Time Project team and compared it to a sketch late Lee Baber asked me to check some time ago. There is so much talk about different curricula.  Education surely involves some amount and  quantity – skills and competencies -  but I’d say it is mostly about quality – values and a better understanding of action and knowledge in time – Chronos and Kairos. How do you achieve it on the Web?

1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes

2. Learning and Innovation Skills

* Creativity and Innovation Skills
* Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills
* Communication and Collaboration Skills

3. Information, Media and Technology Skills
* Information Literacy
* Media Literacy
* ICT Literacy

4. Life and Career Skills
* Flexibility & Adaptability
* Initiative & Self-Direction
* Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
* Productivity & Accountability
* Leadership & Responsibility

and four 21ST CENTURY SUPPORT SYSTEMS:

1. Standards and Assessment of 21st Century Skills
2. Curriculum and Instruction
3. Professional Development
4. Learning Environments

]]> http://beespace.net/1st-web-curriculo/feed/ 4 http://beespace.net/learning-to-interact-and-interacting-to-learn/ http://beespace.net/learning-to-interact-and-interacting-to-learn/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2007 19:23:04 +0000 Barbara Dieu http://beewebhead.net/?p=369 Continue reading →]]>

Barbara Dieu

Originally uploaded by Pentti Impiö.

Teemu Leinonen invited me some time ago to present at ITK2007, Interactive Technology in Education – the largest conference in Finland about information- and communication technology in educational use.

I got worried when I learnt I would far away from home on the day of the conference and without my own computer. When I first gave the title of my presentation “Learning to Interact and Interacting to Learn”, I told Teemu I felt that I should walk my talk. I wondered which tools I would be using and how much they would enable me to interact with the audience. It was a different setting than last year when I presented at Braz-Tesol to a live audience and to the webheads online on Worldbridges (Skypcast + chat) and Alado as I did not have control over the variables.

Here, I would have to present to an unknown public mediated by tools to be decided little time before the conference and not knowing how much support there would be on the other side . Teemu Arina sent me a mail a week before suggesting Skype, Zoho Show to share the slides remotely and their backchannel for questions. I was still in Barcelona and mailed Rudolf in London to check whether he had headsets and could download Skype to his computer. He reported back having pbs so the first thing we did on arrival was to check the settings and the sound. This was just one small part of the affair.

The most important, was the presentation itself and the ideas to be transmitted as simply and directly as possible in the 30 minutes alloted. What I wanted to find was something to illustrate the process of learning how to interact. Interaction is a complex business because it involves not only content (information) but also space, tools (among which language) and finally, the most complex equation of them all, people and their expectations.

I could not prepare the presentation before travelling so kept it in mind as I interacted with the different environments and people during the trip. You find the ideas coming but it is not easy to structure them into a talk without discussing them with someone. The moments of revelation kept coming during the visit to the village of Horta, la Pedrera in Barcelona and the aha moment during and after this crappy snippet I filmed at Parc Guell in the Hall of a Hundred Columns (86 in fact)

Maybe I should have stuck to presentations and illustrations I felt comfortable with aabout how to use social tools in the classroom. Somehow I was not in the spirit and the quote I read about Picasso when I visited Horta d’Ebro kept hammering in my mind : “constant experimentation and a fearlessness about discarding a style that he had already mastered”.

I decided to go for it even if the result was messy, which it obviously was. First, the snippet, which I thought of deleting from the camera at first, illustrates a painful learning moment when I tried to capture an emergent understanding and bring together the various levels of perceived interaction (and lack of) among the elements in the scene (Gaudi’s intention and result of his work; the violinist, his tool and how the music resonated in this space, the people coming and going busy with their own agenda and how I missed conveying meaning because I I shot it on the spur of the moment and was not in control of my tool (the video function of my camera).

The day of the presentation I was not on my computer but adapting to a new working interface (Ubuntu on Linux) and using a borrowed headset apparently not dealing well with the sound, which was as inconstant as the wireless connection. On the other side, the backchannel went dead for lack of wireless LAN and when I started presenting, although I had shared the Zoho show according to instructions, the slides did not move remotely, so Teemu had to move them manually for the audience when I changed them (somewhere in the middle of the presentation I forgot to call them out so people only had my voice). I had the impression my voice was resonating in the void. I did not have the sound or the acoustics of the pavillion at Parc Guell through which I connected to the music being played and I could not see or read the people I was talking to.

I chatted on Skype with Teemu A. earlier this morning when he was editing the tapes. I have not heard my presentation yet but suggested he gives an option to the unedited rough texture version as well. The smooth polished result may be more efficient and less trying for general consumption, but the process shows where things can be improved. It is from daring to experiment, to interact in novel ways and by making mistakes that one learns.

Hey, Zoho is a nifty tool but have just noticed I got my date wrong on the slide – the presentation was on 19th and not 20th. When travelling, I move into cyclical time and do not wear a watch.

Update on May 4th: this is what I should have done and used a wiki instead of Zoho…as Zoho does not allow you to embed videos or comments.