Imagine this … The medical scenario may be laughable but, transferred to the context of many schools and classrooms today, quite … (in)conceivable? The anecdote in the presentation is an extract from a classic and wonderfully dangerous book titled ‘Teaching As A Subversive Activity‘ by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, written in 1971 (!). If …
Category Archive: 3. Change?
Sometimes a deeper look at changes (not) occurring as a result of growth of digital technologies.
Jan 31
Nobody asks
Last week, I was invited to a high school as an ‘expert’ on using Moodle in the classroom. I had a series of 45-minute sessions to, as my brief read, ‘inspire’ each group of teachers (average size of about 15-20) over two days of PD to use their nice local Moodle & Mahara setup in …
Nov 05
And it starts in kindy
Source: Cosmic Kindergarten http://www.flickr.com/photos/hexholden/3374990171/ Yesterday, I did a couple of hours of ‘parent duty’ at my 5 year old son’s kindy (abbreviation for ‘kindergarden’), helping out with learning tasks, minor cleaning and a few other bits. It was wonderful to see this group of 4 and 5 year olds loving being there, playing, sharing, inventing, …
Oct 26
Lessons from Dazzling Daz
Daryl Howe is a runner. He has completed a number of marathons around the world – London, New York, ‘Two Oceans’ in South Africa and many more. He usually makes the 42.2km long course in just over five hours (elite athletes do it in just over two, majority around four hours). But he is a …
Oct 19
Give a
Yesterday, I stopped at traffic lights and watched an angry old man telling off a kid of about 16 trying to eke a few cents by washing windows. I’m sure you’ve seen the sight alike. Shoulders dropped, expletives exchanged, and move on – to my car. I wound the window down to tell him that …
Oct 18
Fear
If you’ve been around the ed-tech universe lately, you’ve probably heard’em all: it is imperative we change education from the industrial revolution paradigm to a more creative, collaborative, connected endeavour digital technologies afford us to do it so easily – just look at us and so many kids doing this ‘Web Two Oh’ stuff and …
Mar 27
Three shakes
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dariuszka/374750916/ Shake one – Friday afternoon A beer with “Michael”, a friend, teacher at (one of) the most ‘exclusive’, expensive, ‘high-achieving’ girls school in Perth. I have just explained what I do at Moodle these days and touched on my deep conviction against spoonfeeding students and instead giving them real responsibilities, real problems, …
Feb 17
Making Moodle boring
Since starting to work at Moodle HQ as Education Researcher, a number of people, including my family, have been curious about what is it like at Moodle HQ, what do I do in my role and so on. Well, here are the pictures, the rest are words… In short, I borrow Martin’s words from the …
Jan 07
My f*#!%ing goosebump story (a reminder)
Now on the new site, I am re-posting something I wrote as a catharsis in 30 minutes, a year and a half ago. This is the post I am most fond and proud of, and has always reminded me of two things: why do we teachers (with an ed-tech bend) do the things we do …
Dec 30
Sacred cows
While thinking about my teaching plan and the challenge for 2010, I sent out a tweet this afternoon: Conceiving & justifying a 2010 teaching plan… keywords: rhizome, Moodle, community, challenge, ‘sacred cows’, ‘we’. Excited. I will post details another time, but let’s just the say the “rhizome” part is informed by the original ideas of …
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