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/tesol-wia-and-new-york/ http://beespace.net/tesol-wia-and-new-york/#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:02:43 +0000 Barbara Dieu http://beewebhead.net/2008/04/11/tesol-wia-and-new-york/ I am back home in São Paulo after an exhausting but delightful 10-day stay in the Big Apple, where I not only had the opportunity to attend some great presentations, meet up with the webheads in action, extend contacts and conversations but also talk to ex-students of mine, see my cousin, walk around, photograph and enjoy the city that never sleeps.

The first week was devoted to the convention, lively diner outings with the webheads and my own presentation on Open and Participatory Media in Language Learning, at 7:30 am on Saturday, an ungodly hour to draw even the staunchest enthusiasts. Thank you Nina and Rita for being there.

From the presentations I attended, I would like to highlight two:

• Suresh Canagarajah’splenary opening keynote “Worlds of Practice: in search of a community , which Carla Arena has documented in pictures

and

• Randi Harlev’s paper presentation: Challenging Assumptions: Tools for Tesol Teacher Education.

I had come across some of Suresh’s work and referred to him in my work and workshop before realizing he was Tesol’s Quarterly Editor !

Through an engaging personal narrative, spiced with humorous and irreverent comments, Suresh introduced and illustrated Etienne Wenger’s concepts of participation vs reification, designed vs emergent, identification vs negotiability and local vs global. He also mentioned the duality and tensions inherent in boundary practice (“introducing elements from one practice to another”), the multi-faceted identity of multi-lingual teachers and the role of the broker, i.e., multi-membership and action in different communities. Tongue-in-cheek, he challenged a number of current centralized practices and non-questioned Tesol mores.

Randi linked back to some of the same concepts in her presentation and urged teachers to bear in mind the role of assumptions in guiding teaching and learning so as to better understand specific choices in the classroom and how they can conflict with new learning or provide possibilities for innovation. She encouraged teachers to explore and examine their own assumptions and connect them to acts of meaning. Some of the authors mentioned were Edgar Schein, Michael Halliday and Devon Woods

We had three memorable powows with the webheads among the many other get togethers at pubs and presentations or conversations at the conference.

The first, called up by Michael Coghlan (staying in New York with Jonathan Finkelstein, president of Learning Times) and booked by Rita Zeinstejer happened at an Irish pub on Tuesday. It was a small intimate meeting as many wias were still not in town or had just arrived. Bronwyn Stuckey, from CPsquare, stayed in NY after the AERA convention especially for this meet up. I had met and been generously hosted by Bron during my stay in Sydney earlier this year so it was a pleasure to see her again, chat and share the room.

Nina Liakos opened the Wia in NY wiki and organized the second diner at Thai Ponsgri. More than 24 wias were there and the evening rolled on in shared laughter and heated discussions.

On Thursday night, Carla booked at the Becco, whose waiters tried hard to accommodate the increasing number of arrivals and orders. Dennis Oliver’s roses were the high point of the diner, from which Moira, in her shiny black vampire coat, “led me astray” with the invitation to join Roger Drury and his partner David for the jazz show at the Blue Note and a late drink at the Slaughtered Lamb. I felt definitely bleary-eyed and washed-out the following morning…lol

I used Twitter to arrange a meeting with Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim f2f at the Satellite Academy, where they invited me to take part of their weekly Writing Project encounter. Vance Stevens decided to join us at the last minute and we also had the pleasure to meet Gina Moss and Ken Stein.

Paul had interviewed me online for Teachers Teaching Teachers, a weekly webcast on the EdTechTalk channel of the WorldBridges network. My 8th grade students also interacted with some of their classes during the Edubridges Elgg project in 2006. He and Susan are presently experimenting with Hypertextopia and how students’ writing changes in this online environment.

On Saturday, I visited João and Daniela, two ex-students of mine from the Lycée who got married, had a baby and are now installed in NY, working and doing their PhD. I had not seen them for at least 10 years, so it was nice to listen to their impressions and stories. I also spent a good many hours in Central Par that day, walking and photographing , enjoying the balmy spring weather, flowers and activities and, finally exhausted, sat down for lunch at the MET. Sunday was family meeting with my cousin who drove me around and took me for lunch to a typical immigrant Polish restaurant in Lower East Side.

Through Twitter, I also learnt George Siemens happened to be in NY (with his wife Karen) for a conference. We arranged to meet on Tuesday night for diner. Michael Coghlan, with whom I did most of the sightseeing tours on Monday and Tuesday, joined us as well at the French Toast uptown. After acknowledging men often employ war metaphors in their discourse, we embarked on a dense conversation on what it takes to make a revolution and how the wider access to information brought about by the Internet requires new approaches to how people interact with it and connect with each other. According to George, what is known is a function of how it’s connected/related to other known elements and the value of this is not inherent but contextual. Information becomes knowledge through our connection with others. This is nothing new, however, the revolutionary idea is that it is now open and extended to a larger number of citizens and not just an elite. This will lead to systemic changes which will affect how we view teaching, determine content and curriculum and how we accredit learning.

This was definitely an event jam-packed with activities, meetings and connections, which may spark new action patterns.

long gaps of time without writing make you feel guilty and now the gap has stretched so wide that it’s almost an ocean…

So eaasy to insert a gap!

My thoughts have been swimming, my mind going through some cognitive restructuring, checking and re-checking my assumptions and plans since that spring in September 2006 when I flew back from the FLNW event in New Zealand.

An unfreezing process started, the seeds were sown, the wheel was put to motion and the ideas started germinating. Uprooting the existing mindset takes time though, and it has been difficult to document the transition process, which is most of the time blurry, unfocused and messy – some threads take time to unravel.

The picture illustrates this well. Here I am, still tangled in my habit and ways of seeing the world, trying to rise and emerge, shed off the trappings of the traditional institutional values of learning and structure of employment and as Edgar Schein points out, suffering from learning and survival anxiety.

The first steps towards change have been taken – a meager retirement pension (still better than nothing), a sabbatical that can be extended for two years and some traveling around to talk to people and view different options.

Both Road Dahl’s and Stephanie Booth’s Going Solo have inspired me. The former, through the chronicles of his war experiences with lots of humour and sensitivity to others’ feelings, and the latter, a Swiss ex-middle school teacher gone tech, through the energetic and frenzied multilingual and multimedia narrative of her first steps in the free-lancing internet industry environment.

However, the Economist article about entrepreneurs in Brazil warns that in addition to risk-taking,

what determines good entrepreneurship in Brazil is the ability to navigate around the bureaucracy.

What will I accomplish or change by leaving one system to get into another which looks exactly the same? Is there any chance of survival and progress for highly connected, networked and enterprising people to work in education and technology here?

Time and experience will tell. Scary but exciting to envisage flying on your own

This video made by Privacy Commission of Canada complements what Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, defines as the goals of her mandate and her growing worry of “governments and businesses (which) have a seemingly insatiable appetite for personal information.”

Many educators and bloggers have already warned people about what happens when they want to close their account in some of these sites. The information is not really deleted but kept there just in case people change their mind and in case they don’t, there is no way they can recover it or transport it to another site. Users do not know how their data is being used either.

What is the message behind the video? Can and should openness/freedom be an issue? We should we have the right to protect and have the ownership of our personal information/content being able to retrieve it whenever we see fit.

UPDATE: A good article on First Monday that goes along the same way : Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0

Teachers, students, researchers, scientists, artists, journalists, entrepreneurs and all those interested in the latest technological trends will attend the event to freely exchange content and share their digital experience.

I will be involved in a presentation about blogs and also helping out and participating in the Campus Barcamp.

There is a general livestream covering the event. I will try to keep you updated (in English) twittering, flickering and posting here.

Today, however, I am not going back to school. After 24 years of uninterrupted school routine, the time has come for a sabbatical. Revise trajectories, re-think attitudes and behaviours, identify weaknesses/strengths and above all, give myself time to enjoy time.

The summer trip to OZ was the blaring glare, the first step outside the familiar comfort zone. The diary, calendar, survival kit and canvas bag came in handy and are ready for the next round. Ideas that have been floating in and out need to be put down on paper, studied, weighed and discussed. Planning starts today.

| View | Upload your own

For those who did not manage to see in SL the slides sent to the Sydney e-learning 2007 organizers. Answers to the questions asked as appetizers can be found on the wiki.
Updated: The recording here.

My first question is:

If you could invite 5 people from the past to join your table at the E-learning event in Sydney, who would those be and what would be the topic for conversation?

I will be interacting from my desk here in Sao Paulo both with the live audience in Sydney and in-world through Second Life and Adobe Connect, which will be hosting a session for those who cannot make it in-world.

This has been an interesting process. Alex and I have been Skyping regularly and he suggested I invite some guests so I kept chewing over how to make the whole thing more interactive using the tools shown during the various workshops. After a very fruitful brainstorming session with Robyn, Alex, Donna Hensley and JoKay, we came up with the title and the idea of mirroring the meal at the live event in Second Life. What could be more convivial than receiving people for lunch/diner around a table?

I invited some guests so that I would not be the only voice dominating the space. Alan Levine (a.k.a. CD Barkley), who will be home after almost two weeks touring AU with his kit of 50 tools , will have more than 50 stories to tell about what he has seen happening there and how social tools help connect . Josie Fraser (a.k.a. Josie Oh) has been doing incredible work on digizen cyberbullying and recently made an interesting post on the limits of homophily. Dave Pollard might want to share how Second Life has stirred up his imagination, creativity and sense of connection and Nancy Whitewill link the threads and bring the event full circle – prepare yourself for a generous serving of virtual and real chocolate

JoKay has used her talent, a load of prims and some of my Flickr photos to build the reception area for people to mingle and talk in-world. It is set in a tropical environment with an incredible view of the sea. Congrats Jo!

For the keynote to be less formal and more interactive, I suggested a back channel through Twitter, with a panel projector on the virtual terrace so that the live audience can have the possibility to send their messages through their mobiles to the guests and people in-world.

We will also be posting some questions on to the various channels (Twitter, blogs, social networking sites and lists) throughout the week so all can throw in their two cents. It will be fun to bring together all the contributions – a collection of artifacts representing our emerging open educational partnership and collaboration culture.

Bon appetit!