ELT notes

2011 365 Photo Project

2011-12-31T13:58:00.001-03:00

So here it comes to an end, or a new beginning. It's time to reflect what this photo project means and what it does, to me at least.

Here are the collected photos of the 365 photo project. I had reflected before about the Dailyshoot project in another post. That was more about technique discoveries. Now I have other questions on my mind:

What does this project say about learning? About photos in my day to day routine?

I think that the learning can go on daily as long as you make very, very personal. Technique goes to the background sometimes. It probably must do so, or perfection mania could take you to a photo paralysis.

As much as I like being kind of private online, at least compared to many of my friends, there comes a point where you simply show yourself (not literally, I'm not talking about self-portraits). I mean, if you have a keen eye and imagination, I guess you can see myself or even be here with me. Learning, the kind of authentic learning we passionately seek in edublogs cannot help but reveal the learner, it's the the process that remains elusive.

What do my photos say about me? Let's see.

I love food. I wish I were better at cooking. Registering the process or moments of success like this one keep me encouraged.

I simply cannot get enough of these tomato photos. My father takes care of these from his chair. They mean a lot to my mind, my heart and my mouth. Best tomato salads evah. Food for the soul.

I like football. Particularly at the Bombonera Stadium, the day Boca Juniors, my team, wins the championship :-) Anyway, there is always time to pause the cheering and look around to capture the faces of the most passionate fans.

Now, what new habits have I learnt? What has this year in photos done to me?

I have learnt to see beauty possibilities in the things I would normally simply throw away, unnoticed.

For the love of shooting, I have gone back to playing childhood games.

I've become more bold and now regularly approach strangers for permission to take photos of their pets. Particularly when their eyes are begging for making new friends. Wouldn't you?

I've learnt to interrupt myself from my lesson preparation and endless correction pile to mark the magic sunset hour and rush to the terrace on the 27th floor to see what the light does to my corner of the world. I cannot believe I used to miss this.

There is something I have learnt that does not come out in any photo. It's the perspective you gain when you switch your eyes to photo mode. It's a decision to watch things differently, under their real light, a pleasant obsession with details, a new perspective, something that had never before been seen quite like that. For a few minutes, nothing else is.

I heard someone say the other day that when you are on holidays, you cannot be taking pictures all the time because you miss seeing and enjoying being there by putting a lens between the scene and you. I think I get their point of being more concerned about having a record to show your friends, to prove that you actually were in, say, Paris, because you appear in a photo with the Tour Eiffel in the background. An artificial and over constructed photo. And yet, little do they know how much they miss out.

I think I haven't shot any of the examples here for an audience. Not even to exemplify a photo technique. I did not detour from my daily obligations or wait for the weekend to have time to do them. I have done this for myself and for being there in the flow of things as they happen, making a half-concious decision to capture the vision. I think I would have regretted not taking them, although I am not sure why.

So far, so good. I'll keep shooting. Expect more tomatoes, sunsets, dogs and food in my next excursion of 365 photos. I will probably not vary the photo subjects. You see, they are so worth it. They are intertwined with who I am as well as who I want to be. They are part of my overall learning, not just acquiring a few skills. This photos amount to something bigger than I can understand today. There'll be a day for pattern finding. Today I just want to pause before I go on.

There is a lot in the way I've learnt photography that I wish I had a clue about how to teach it to my students. All I can do is write it out and share. It feels so not enough although I know this is important.

Happy New Learning Year, friends. May you be surrounded by beauty and a camera to show me the way you see the world.

Look forward to your thoughts.

Voice as EdTech and a Poem

2011-11-12T15:22:00.008-03:00

This is a short reflection and a little story about the use of my voice in a poetry class. I felt like telling you aloud more than writing to you silently. It seemed a more natural medium for what I had to share.

Duration: 8:42

Audio Link

In the recording I mention my podcast Posterous site called Voice-Overs. Here is the direct link to the reading of the poem mentioned.

Why I Write

2011-10-20T13:23:00.002-03:00

I cannot resist the temptation to write about this. It's the national writing day in another country, but when online, those boundaries are blur. I'll join the celebration. Here are my thoughts on why I write.

I write to be and become a self that is nowhere else found.

When my mind thinks in 'writing mode', I become a more organized and hopeful self.

I write to make sense. I write because if I don't, bits and pieces of varied, so far unconnected dots, come to overwhelm me and intrude with every new idea. They have been waiting in line and look forward to coming into the light, shining and giving me a sense of peace and balance.

I write because it's a read write web. The gems I find in my RSS create an anxiety or positive stress that urges me to write or let it die unsaid.

I write in the here and now. I write in a way that cannot be left for later. Just like a landscape will yield a different mood and tone if photographed at different hours of the day, when I blog, I need to be an impressionist.

As much as I write to reach out and connect to others with my links, I also write to shut out all the other voices and be in contact with me. No music in my room, no peeping into the Twitter stream. In my silence I write in the hope of being genuine.

I write for my own selfish reasons. If they touch your own, if they erode a sinew of yours, then go on and leave a comment, o RT or write in your own blog about it (I'd much rather you did that). Otherwise, move on: it's all right.

I write because, whether it ends up online or not, I cannot not write. (Believe me I keep as many drafts as you do, or more).

I write to know where my mind is at and also, most importantly, where it is going. I write to know where my mind is before (before is the operative word) I read someone I admire, because, sadly, that could corrupt my own thoughts. It's a shame not to think for yourself. It's a shame to read somebody jotted down what you merely -lazily- thought about or hinted at. It's OK to find that somebody can articulate it better. I'd much rather comment "well said" than "I agree".

I write because if I left this post for later, you may never see the like of it again. I write and publish to make sure that words will not be marred by my over thinking and prevent me from being faithful to my draft conversation style with you, dear readers, as I do now and today.

Onwards and Outwords

2011-10-16T13:36:00.002-03:00

This is another chapter in my informal learning of photography. It could be called:

Looking for New Learning Paths.

The sudden come to an end of the Dailyshoot assignments has set me into looking for alternatives to drive my visual creative journey. As uncle Whitman would say,

All goes onwards and outwords

nothing collapses

And to die is different from what anyone supposed

and luckier.

(The word's are Whitman's; the line arrangement is the way I read it today).

I admit I do miss the Dailyshoot. I've learnt a lot with it as well as from the fellow players. Oddly enough, I welcome this end, because it is pushing me further into refining what I value about creating images and proceed to seize my learning in my own hands.

I've been exploring what other former dailyshooters are doing now and I've found the Scavenge Challenge to be a nice twist and trigger for those who found the repetition of the photo assignments was a bit of a turn off. I'm giving it a try.

Here's my first post-processed photo with Picasa. (Maybe one day I'll regret posting this for bad quality, but it's a start, a stepping stone.) The box of photo tricks wants to be opened.

Cubic-CC licensed shared by Claudia Ceraso @fceblog on Flickr

I kept looking for prompts. I found that Gwen came up with a project of her own creation. It is simple and powerful.

Her project is called a 100 Possibilities and it is basically to shoot a book in diverse creative contexts. Variations on a theme was also used by BZTraining , who solved every single dailyshoot assignment with his two dogs. It rendered great results in spite of (or with the help of) his self-imposed rule of the game. The most important thing is, as Gwen states it, to help yourself "push boundaries for a while".

Browsing the project, I came across a poetry quote that someone else provided in full in the comments. Funny that what had actually made me click on it was the image of the magnifying glass, which I thought I would use for one my own photos.

The interesting thing is that Gwen has found a way to prompt herself. She is to find new contexts for her favourite book for a 100 days. Talk about keeping it simple, with a constraint that enables creativity. Her take away from the Dailyshoot is not just about photography, but about autonomy.

Inspiring.

Why not? And why not combine it with bits of the poetry I love so much I thought of those long Song of Myself catalogues that could easily become postcards and then, perhaps a video. So in my fledgeling thoughts of mashing up interests that drive my passion, I stopped to think that it couldn't be me the first one to have come up with that idea. After all, Whitman is cosmic.

A quick search in Flick groups for Whalt Whitman led me to a group by students at a university with a link to the full project called Looking for Whitman. The site is full owesome bits of inspiration that can move a brain muscle or two. More about it later, for the project is worthy of a separate post.

I recently read somewhere that according to stats (so it must be true?), it would take three lifetimes to read all of the Internet content available today. Why do we stay on the same circles of friends then? Is it because they are the best curators we have found or because we are sometimes a bit lazy to push ourselves away from our comfort zone?

And yet.

Today, as I set my mind firmly into going away from the recommendations of my Twitter stream this morning, convincing myself that I am trying to pursue what I'd like to do with my creativity, I land on a project where Jim Groom, who is in my trusted network of curators and inspirers, has played a part.

Wait a second. I was on his website last night to create my first MacGuffin assignment! How come I've been going round in circles? My intention was to sail the vast open web, to go elsewhere, far out. This doesn't seem to follow the logic of serendipity. Six grades separation maybe?

I'd call it an online dream.

Over a month ago, I know Jim read and liked something I said to Alan about the mysterious nature of our connections, about the Internet being like a dream, only it's a real one.

Jim responded via Twitter:

jimgroom @fceblog Dream a dream for me :) 05 Sep 2011 from web in reply to fceblog

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Come to think of it, it might have been a disguised assignment...

Done.

Messing with the MacGuffin

2011-10-16T00:17:00.003-03:00

I have found this digital storytelling ds106 assignment interesting enough to stretch myself into learning some Picasa.

Wikipedia defines the MacGuffin as "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction." For this assignment forever change the plot of a movie, tv show, etc. by changing a single line of dialogue. Put this new line of dialogue below a screen-cap of the moment in the movie you're changing. Credit to Tom Woodward for posting an example of this idea in the #ds106 Twitter stream.

The moment I saw a few examples I got the idea for my own. I would have loved to have the fluency to create this as fast as a tweet, but I needed to get my fingers muddy in an image editor. Today I found the moment to play so here is "some art dammit!". Or so I hope.

What if...

Call me romantic for thinking Francesca had pretty good reasons not to get off the car and let Robert go away instead. I like the movie the way it is. I love watching that long, almost silent scene again. As if Meryl could surprise me by twisting the plot and doing a MacGuffin of her own creation.

My MacGuffin version is a stretch of the original assignment, for the words in the caption are not a change of any of the bits spoken. Granted. But hey, who hasn't thought of or even protested those words while watching The Bridges of Maddison County?

Curation Between You and Me

2011-10-14T10:22:00.000-03:00

The curator is as important as the information.

At least, that's the conclusion I can draw from my reading and bookmarking habits. It's a pattern: whatever is shared by one of my trusted learning buddies has far more chances of getting my attention, of being saved for later or getting links in my blog.

Nothing new under the sun in that first paragraph. What I wonder is:

a. How did that happen?

b. How valuable is that?

a. It happens one link at a time intertwined with bits that tell me who the reader is and how close we are in views. Or not. The healthy tension of disagreeing is a fertile learning ground. I like and welcome a complete opposite view that makes it necessary to understand my own in depth.

b. Value of curation. Lots of course. I'd say it has an "economy value" and a "rainbow value". When the same link starts pouring your Twitter stream as if it were a call for a fire brigade, it is good to see the different shades of colours in the views people you trust have about the same issue. It is instant. You get the main synthesis in 140 or even the questions that will need careful exploration in blogs. But the synthesis on its own might create a lasting impression in your view of the topic even before you decide to click on a well thought out analysis. This is how bias can shut your own voice up. Yet, I can confidently say I do not become my network, although I share many views. I just build my identity in their presence.

CC licenced photo shared by Gail Johnson

What concerns me now is the "economy" value. By economy I mean the time and effort saved by not finding the information yourself. The value you can ascribe simply because of the source of information. A lot has been said about the time it takes to create a (personal?) network. But when you don't have the habit of reaching out and following new people not followed by anyone else, you risk getting a choir full of echo. You easily become interested in what concerns the (massive?) network.

A detail I do not want to forget. Curation is mediated by tools. The tools we use come and go depending on the priorities of business people that have little to do with the idea that learning is a serious job. Anyway, we cannot even agree what learning is, so it is not fair to expect Delicious or Facebook or Twitter to facilitate it for us or help us to sustain it.

When we evaluate a new link or tool, when we need to assess it again after using it for years, how do you know to what extent the curation is done by the network, the tool or you?

In the meantime, who do you believe is doing it?

Should've Known Better

2011-09-24T20:47:00.000-03:00

This year I've made a point of quitting the use of the word 'should'. Seven months into the experiment, I can (almost) safely say it is now gone. Gone from my blog, from my everyday vocabulary. Above all, gone from my inner thoughts.

Why? How did I start this?

Because whenever I read that teachers should...(you fill in the blank)..., I've always felt a need to resist inside instead of engaging in conversation.

Coming closer to examples, I think we mean different things when we use 'should'.

Generally speaking, in affirmative form, I think it sounds like a disguised form of protest.

e.g. "Every teacher should blog".

Which probably translates to "I would like, I need, it would be nice if... I do, it works for me, why not you? Come on!"

Speaking more personally, it's a bit of a diminishing word.

e.g. "I should blog every day."

Which may well translate as: "I think that my not blogging everyday is not enough" or "I wonder if I ever will". These phrases invite to approval or disapproval. A pass or fail in a test. (Who needs another test, anyway?).

I could go on. A quick search in my RSS reader gives me inspiration, but I won't quote. You go search for yourself and write your own subtitles to the 'should' movie. There is a lot in need of translation written out there.

'Should' works very well in question form, though:

"Why should I believe that?"

See? That's the kind of blogging I want to read on without feeling an internal argument building up inside me to resist it. It engages me to find my own reasons. I may even blog back at you. So we both get a chance to learn.

The mind has a natural tendency to resist change at times. if you mean to create or lead change when you write, watch your use of 'should'.

I hear the word very frequently in my network; I do not stop reading people who use it. I just read between the lines knowing I cannot assume what they really meant until I read much more.

Excuse me for contradicting myself in the same post, but I don't think anyone should anything, be it change the way they teach or publish their minds in blog posts, until they find their own genuine reasons. Anything else is as attractive as thoughtless cut&paste of ideas.

About writing, I think that there are more powerful words than 'should'. Only the sentences need to be more wordy, you need to go meta reflective to create meaning, you need to put yourself out there in the open.

How? Here's a possible structure:

"I would like this to change because..." Paragraph. Concise.

Followed by,

"I shape my thoughts like this because of where I come from". More paragraphs. These are key.

That's more humble and also less pretentious. Bonus: that's is the way I can get to connect to you. Speak from your known corner of the world to the unknown world wide web who might read and write responses, if they feel so inclined. Your ideology need not be photocopied elsewhere. Finland is already taken. Perhaps, we need to do differently.

If you ask me, I like sentences with a deep structure grammar based on freedom, not authority. Freedom from the critic or evangelizer lurking in your voice. Besides, 'should' is a poor authority invoker, in my opinion. It tends to overstep it.

So consider cutting down on affirmations with 'should', please. I'll see for myself what I might do with your thoughts, if anything at all.

Engage me. Show me your learning. I'd rather you tell me your stories.

Time Long Past, by me on Flickr

What I've Learnt with the Dailyshoot

2011-09-21T00:13:00.001-03:00

As much as I love photography, it hasn't crossed my mind to go to a formal course. Maybe not yet. But with the wealth of information online and my enthusiasm to explore on my own I don't see room for a formal course in the near future.

I have been shooting photographs every day for about 300 days now. Following the Dailyshoot prompts has given me some pleasant surprises. I have learnt quite a lot informally and I think it is a good idea to continue documenting it. Here is an illustrated summary of my photo discoveries.

-If I let go of the picture I have set out to find, the one right in front of me may be even better than what I had imagined.

-Overdoing it doesn't always render a better shot. The first one may be your best one.

-Prompts make me take pictures I woudn't otherwise have taken.

-It's a good idea to priorize fluency over accuracy. Do it fast. It's not about the best shot ever, but a fair enough shot. Play on. You'll take another one tomorrow.

-The photographer is more important than the camera. People do incredible things with an iPhone. I don't have an equipment with plenty of options. So I tend to get more carried away by composition than by technical aspects of aperture, focus and overall quality of the photo.

-Think light, then shoot. Even when you've found the cutest photo subject.

-Be there. Your photo can be in that place you walk by every every day. Notice the details.

-The trivial is as good a photo subject as a work of art. Shooting daily, you learn to photograph anything in front of you. Point of view does it.

Re-reading what I just wrote, I find it sounds a bit like rules. I do not know if there are rules to learn informally. Certainly there are patterns shaping in what I do. Experimenting daily you find beliefs about learning emerging quickly. This post is about jotting down those ideas before they are challenged by future learning. This is what works for me now.

I do have one rule. One rule only I am sure to follow: keep it up.

Writing Phantoms

2011-09-18T18:37:00.001-03:00

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen..."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. T. S. Eliot

Expressing yourself. Online. Making connections. Learning all along. That's the common denominator of what we are doing here.

But there are differences. Huge.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/6054866372

What I enjoy about writing my thoughts online is that these posts give closure to a string of ideas and free me to turn onto things I had not considered before. Sometimes they are like a soup -cooking slowly and mingling what were merely ingredients, spin off ideas read in blog posts. This post has a network of ingredients.

My last post on identity made me realise that I write with a premise -or an illusion- of being understood. Actually it was Graham Wegner's comment that painted it quite clearly to me:

"Claudia, I'm never quite that confident that I have understood your intent in your blog posts, but I am confident enough to know that any written content is open to interpretation from the reader's perspective. Even text that is interpreted differently from the author's intent is valuable and pushes the reader to consider things from a new angle. And if they present those conclusions or ideas back to the original writer, it can open up new insight that wasn't originally considered. If all your readers understand perfectly what you are trying to say, then they may have nothing useful to add to the conversation!"

Interpretation is open source by nature. While my illusion of being understood probably springs from a genuine need, in a networked world, being misunderstood matters most.

Graham says more,

"Maybe in the online connected environment, we can bypass what is considered essential personal detail trading in the face-to-face world, and get down to the emptying of one's still embryonic concepts out to an unknown but open minded audience."

Hopefully someone will 'misunderstand' and leave thoughtful comments like these! And yet, we still long for those details. The unimportant things that make us human.

While slowly mentally drafting this post, making sense of my own need to be understood, David Truss alerted me of Amalia's post, Voice Found. Now What?.

There you have a voice struggling beyond whatever may be a stumbling block for me; for when I write, I completely trust a connection will be made. I simply don't see how it cannot. Unless I change my style to how-to manual writing mode. There's you out there. I know that for sure.

Amalia says,

"So, instead of saying that I’ve found my voice, the bigger truth is that I trust my voice. I know when I’m going wrong. My bones tell me. And if I can stay true to that, then I’ve done something. The problem now is choosing what to say. There are so many things I’m passionate about..."

Her need is different from mine,

"This blog is forcing me to choose. Well, let me put it this way. For the sake of a sense of community around my blog, I want to focus a bit more. Even if it’s only me and two other people, I want us to chew on some common topic together. (...) Show me what You want me to do with this voice. I want to be useful, I want to harmonize, I want to connect."

The post left me wondering and with a strange sense of sadness. I think it's important to find a voice, but it's not enough. Now I see it differently. I'm afraid I disagree with Amalia. The problem is not choosing what to say. The problem is trusting yourself enough to stand at the edge of the writing cliff and make a bungee-jumping leap of faith. Trust your voice to be neither right nor wrong. Connections? That's the easy part: they are the inevitable consequence of sharing your-self.

I am reminded of a lecture by Virginia Woolf: Professions for Women. Fifteen years ago, I would read that lecture voraciously.

Flashback. I remember a bicycle going by in front of Cambridge University on a cold January, sunset, organs playing -one clear, another one fading-, the walls looking like sepia-toned photographs. Me, walking and holding a copy of A Room of One's Own next to my heart. I was planning to buy a flat of my own in Buenos Aires, to be free of paying a rent forever. Maybe write. The Internet was not a dream yet.

I hear Virginia again. (Are you still reading me, Amanda?).

"While I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily (...)

I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex."(...)

Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time."

At that time? The lecture was written in 1931. The phantom was the impediment to say exactly what you think while being a woman in a man-writer's world. I could harry to say that the 21st century is different, that there are no such gender differences; however, I think we do have phantoms lurking.

I still see it is more likely for women to take care of the home than become prolific bloggers. I still find men more straightforward and less puzzled by dichotomies of online vs offline identity. Less concerned with having to open different blogs because they found new topics of conversation, which may cause worries about losing audience or clicks. I may well be over-generalizing, but men are more likely to be beyond all that. They would probably not write a post like this one. Or take as long as I take to write it!

I had a Skype call with my friend Alan Levine recently. A first synchronous talk after years of connecting online. I remember Alan told me about how he writes. He needs to get it said and published. He is fluent about blogging. I don't imagine too many drafts sleeping in his blog editor.

Alan left this comment on my previous post,

"We talk about 'going' online like it is a place, we never talk about other media like that. And given the way mobile connectivity enabled the communication, I hardly see my online and not online modes as being so cleanly split.

I exist as one Alan: there are things I don't put online but I do not see a neat division."

Perfect.

We are all sharing, connecting, learning. There are interesting differences, though. Amanda is struggling with the phantom of connecting; I am struggling with one of elusive expression. Meanwhile, Alan is being himself.

You need to find your voice and your purpose. And then, not to be tongue-trapped by anything. There's some learning job, if you are patient. After that, there is the most difficult of all. To react genuinely to every single blog post that stirs your mind, to every agreement or deep disagreement with the closest people in your network. For that, you'll probably have to learn to kill a few phantoms. Even when you think you have mastered that exercise, it would not be surprising to find yourself again back to square one in the network game.

Note to Self

Remember the basics: never ever assume you're that connected, well- expressed or understood.

Now make that as big or small as you want.

Carry on.

Some thoughts on identity -particularly mine

2011-09-01T02:47:00.000-03:00

I have never written posts like this or this. Come to think of it, I wonder what people think of me when they probably have little data about my offline life and self. It sometimes feels unbalanced that I know so much about them.

Who are we when we are online?

Maybe a better question could be,

What is it about you that surfaces in an online environment and would not come up anywhere else?

Things change depending on how you frame the question, don't you think? The first question seems to call for a battle of opposites between virtual and real. The second question could well ignore superficial dualities and deal with more important things, in my opinion.

I think it is not possible to hide who you are after having written for, say, four years online. If you pretend, I think you may fool a beginner, someone who goes for convenient quotables in your posts instead of consistency. Because reading, after all, is a choice between what you would like it to mean and what it actually means, seasoned with lots of tolerance for what you cannot tell clearly yet.

I think I need uncle Whitman to help me express what I mean,

"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch)..."#1

Things are there, if you want to read them. That simple.

Those who have been reading my tweets or listened to my mini-podcasts know that I love poetry and poetic prose fragments. You may find the most varied kind of poems there in English and in Spanish, but I know that there is an underlying theme in my choices. My search, my drive in finding them is an exploration of how different voices have managed the struggle of making sense of the world, while living in touch with the mysterious interstices between fantasy and reality.

So, for instance, for Borges, reality and dreams are really hard to tell from each other. His point of view is that of Leo Di Caprio's in Inception. (By the way, I learnt that the film director read a lot from Borges before writing the script).

Cortázar, far from the academic and classical allusions so typical in Borges, made his point speaking of objects that surround us everyday. Listen to him,

"Now I write birds.

I do not see them come, I do not choose them.

They are suddenly there, they are this.

A swarm of words

perching

one

in the barbed wire of the page,

screeching, pecking, rain of wings

and me, without any bread left to give them, just

letting them come. Maybe

that's a tree

or perhaps

love." #2

Cortázar is an ordinary man with an extraordinary predisposition to weave poetry with whatever signals he comes across. He is a feeler, a noticer, a dailyshooter.

When asked about where he drew the line between reality and 'the fantastic', as the genre he wrote in is called, he said:

"I don't. The fantastic is my reality."#3

Try it.

Juan José Saer, who would have probably argued with Borges, solved the reality versus fictional aspect of literature quite simply:

"By its mere existence, every story is real". #4

On a TV interview #5, Saer was asked to talk about the power of books, their relationship to life; he interrupted the interviewer and said:

"Books ARE life."

Those words go deep in the vinyl of my brain.

We are, we live, we can understand based on the many stories that were read to us, and the countless stories we have told ourselves of who we are.

Think of this.

When you write, and you try to be transparent about how each fledgeling thought of yours is tied to the words that another blogger has said, and you become aware of the hyperlinks between their experiences and your own life story, isn't that as real as it gets?

Right. No. How about close-up enough then?

How can I hide who I am in my choice of subjects for a photo, in my foreign tone of voice when I read a poem, in the rhythm of my sentences or the list of subjects that never ever get an account of in my blog? Something real and undeniable underpins the chaos of it all.

But.

You do not have my portrait. You hardly have a clue of how old I am. You cannot read my very own poems sleeping in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf. Most importantly, you do not know who I'd be ready to kill or die for.

I have long ago decided all that is my privacy.

And yet, I like to think that if you, keen reader of my online footprints, met me face to face, you would confirm you already know me. You would, perhaps, just add more accurate sources to this long quote of myself, which is my blog.

Let me ask you once again:

Who are you when you write online?

Think of it conversely. The offline-only people in your lives who have never ever cared to read what you passionately write about, who do they actually know?

I feel I could carry on writing like this, but this post is long enough and I need some sleep.

Notes:

#1 Whitman in Songs of Myself.

#2 Cortazar's fragment is from the poem "Cinco últimos poemas para Cris". The translation is mine.

I
Ahora escribo pájaros.
No los veo venir, no los elijo,
de golpe están ahí, son esto,
una bandada de palabras
posándose
una
a
una
en los alambres de la página,
chirriando, picoteando, lluvia de alas
y yo sin pan que darles, solamente
dejándolos venir. Tal vez
sea eso un árbol
o tal vez
el amor.

#3 My best recall of what Cortázar says in this long interview.

#4 Juan José Saer in his novel, La pesquisa (The Inquiry). I read a taste of it here.

#5 How I wish that existed somewhere online! It was in Channel 7 in early 2001.

Google+ Thoughts

2011-07-19T14:59:00.002-03:00

If you have a Gmail account, you're either on board or about to be invited. Like it or not. There is no thumb up or down button.

After spending some time exploring the tool, here are some random thoughts in no particular order of importance.

-Overnight you may find that you have a platform that allows you to think out loud instantly.

Plus: No signing in, no evaluating the tool, no time lost comparing it to others, no time convincing your friends to join. You do not need a YouTube account or UStream or Flickr or Ning (remember Ning?). Forget upgrades (Picasa offers unlimited storage if you have a G+ account associated, did you know?). Who needs diverse sources?

Minus: Just one company designing the kind of experiences you'll have. By the same token, never attempt to learn a foreign language that is not spoken by most of the world population. Disambiguation Note: I feverishly subscribe to diversity of content and means for learning.

-You tweet it; they plurk it.

Plus: Your audience is not trapped into 140 characters. They will decide whether your post deserves a near real time response as in Plurk, just a longer tweet, a forum-like troubleshooting thread, a thoughtful post (the one I wanted to link to has limited visibility- ouch) or merely a lazy +1.

Minus: You know how much time you spend posting. When do you end responding a circle?

-You could start blogging (by which I mean, reading, connecting, reflecting and getting comments while learning throughout the process) without knowing anything about blog engines or html. No need to ask people to identify themselves in a comment form, URL, email, captcha for each contribution. All done.

Plus: Fluency. Less stumbling blocks. More participants. Exciting. Short-term.

Minus: Many people rent before buying a home. It's better to have some home. Endurance. Long-term.

-You choose all: What to publish and who will view it. Taking for granted that old fashioned privacy is offline, near privacy is probably a G+ circle.

Plus: Control. At least you control sender direction. Wait for RSS-ing G+ tags. Or am I imagining too much?

Minus: Serendipity escapes control.

-Hanging out with people has never been simpler. No need to integrate video, usernames (Does everybody have an account? That's an old problem). Instant web conferencing platform? Maybe. Publish one. Search for one.

Plus: Anybody could be there.

Minus: Anybody could be there.

Shall we learn in G+?

Of course.

Think of the memoristic education we had and the blogs we write today. How has that been possible? Call me optimistic, but I believe learning rules.

Will it better or worse than (you name it)?

Just different. I don't feel any G+ hype yet, but I'm open to be surprised.

I'm there. Teach me.

Learning Italian and a poem

2011-07-17T20:43:00.001-03:00

I'm attending Italian lessons again after so many years. Back then, I only studied with books. Now I'm surrounded by connectivy and possibilities I have explored for my own students of English, yet not so much for my own informal learning support outside the class.

So I've done my little online research and collected my resources on a wiki. Today I felt the need to go more social about it. I came across a couple of groups in Facebook that surprised me for their content, participation and creativity. Yeah, it seems Facebook can do good!

The group Impariamo Italiano gives you a variety of prompts to practice. From pictures of Italy where you must guess and post answers (in Italian of course) to questions (using a Facebook app) to choose the right grammar of a sentence. They even answer you in a personal way in the comments. A very interesting model of how to use Facebook for staying in touch with the language in an environment where everybody is real and a learner.

This prompt caught my attention, translated into English, it says,

Write a brief story including these five words: Night, do, tomorrow, kiss and sea.

It caught my eye because I remember having to do exercises of the kind in English exams. As a student, I disliked being forced to use exactly those set words. But now something changed. Out of the +21,000 fans of the page, a few folks got inspired and wrote stories.

Here's my favourite by Antonio Buffon,

"Era NOTTE alta e DOMANI poteva essere l'ultimo giorno. Non avevamo nulla da FARE, se non aspettare il momento migliore per attaccare. Uno sguardo al MARE e un BACIO alla lettera dell'amata..."

Translated,

It was high night and tomorrow could be the last day. We didn't have anything to do, except wait for the best moment to attack. A look at the sea and a kiss to the letter for his beloved...

Wow. Isn't that beautiful enough for a quick post on Facebook?

I always wonder what it is that makes people participate guided by prompts that grow communities around them. I don't know. I do know what gets me inspired and writing. People like this being engaged and sharing openly without expectation of an answer. I like that.

I joined the group. Now it's my turn to try. Only my take is a

poem, not a short story. My first poem in Italian. Who would have thought it possible at level one? Hope the grammar is acceptable.

La notte è arrivata.

Niente da fare; allora il pensiero

diventa un mare

che mi fa ricordare

un'immagine di due pescatori.

Lascio un bacio al cielo

e dico il tuo nome.

Seguo a caminare.

Un giorno qualsiasi ti rincontrerò.

Per questo domani è la parola più bella.

Translated,

Night is here.

Nothing to do, then my thoughts

Become the sea

That brings to mind an image

Of two fishermen.

I blow a kiss to heaven

While I say your name.

I walk on.

One day -any day- I'll find you.

That's why tomorrow is the most beautiful word.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gennaroneaz/3768640909/

The image in my poem is a memory of my brother and father fishing in a pier in Mar del Plata on a cloudy day. I woke up much later that day and decided to do a long walk by the sea to go and meet them. I arrived in the afternoon. The colours and the stones in Gennaroeaz' photo, though taken in Italy, come quite close to my recall of those holidays.

They day students see us vulnerable, learning

2011-06-20T19:38:00.000-03:00

The question of being vulnerable and learning has been on my mind since watching Brené Brown's TED Talk. This time, it was a post by Bud Hunt that prompted me to write a comment, which, in turn, Bud used as prompt for teachers to write their reactions.

Edited links on July 17th.

Here's my question/comment:

Do your students know how you, the teacher, write? Can they catch you somewhere in the middle of your own learning process, doubting, wondering, as a vulnerable human far from the know-all/authority in the subject ideal?

I was wow-ed by reading the Google Doc with all its rich comments. Please go and read Bud's post on his own learning around this question.

Thank you, Bud for writing about this. And thank you Scott for listening. May one day our students catch us learning like this.

Blogworthy Tweets II

2011-05-22T16:00:00.000-03:00

This post is a sequel. Here's number 1 in 2009. This new selection was made from the list Twitter provides of my own tweets re-tweeted. They are mostly from 2010.

Why these?

-Because they are very telling of my own interests in networking.

-Because they are the result of dialogues with my learning buddies that sparked a synthesis.

-Above all, just 'cause.

With such three powerful reasons listed above, I can save you any further introduction and proceed to embed a few snippets of my thinking aloud.

Learning

If the learning experience is just for the student, if it is unidirectional, is it learning? Just saying.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyClaudia Ceraso
fceblog

Voices

@budtheteacher Blogger/writers face -at least- two problems: a) find your voice to express. b) not to get trapped by it.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyClaudia Ceraso
fceblog

Experts

@dkuropatwa Now seriously. If people *decide* you are an expert, there isn't much to control there.Keep your learner attitude with them.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyClaudia Ceraso
fceblog

Excuses

Both children and adults can find excuses for not learning. The difference is that children' excuses tend to be creative. Adults copy&paste.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyClaudia Ceraso
fceblog

People

@budtheteacher Networking is about choosing special people. What makes them special is you cannot avoid learning when they're around.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyClaudia Ceraso

fceblog

There.

It feels much better to know you have saved a few thoughts from ever wondering in cyber-outer-space.

It's a Flickering World

2011-04-24T16:29:00.006-03:00

The world is small indeed and Flickr can make it seem a small village. Early this month, someone in Austria emailed me with a republishing permission request for this picture:

Thumbed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79066620@N00/5558170700

The picture has recently been publised in a students' magazine called JAWS (journalists, artists, writers, students). You can see a taste of it here. Quite inspiring for any ESL or EFL writing class.

Mina, the magazine editor, was kind enough to send me a pdf with the article my picture illustrates. There I found a teacher's voice who could be someone working next to me.

Susanne Kopf writes:

"Another means of transportation, which helped me up my reading was the train. Having family and sometimes even visiting friends in a different city is a great motivation to go there. One train ride usually took about 3,5 hours, the equivalent of a third of a book."(1)

That's about the length of my train journey to visit my family. That's how I got most of my reading done while commuting daily to study in Buenos Aires a long time ago.

It goes on...

"Sometimes the line between private and school reading was blurred by me realizing that a book I had ordered just for fun actually fit a course I was taking. This should have thrilled me, as it meant that what I enjoyed doing just for myself was also valuable academically. " (1)

Blurring the lines. That's it. Borges in his prologue to Borges Profesor argued that 'obligatory reading' was a nonsense phrase. How could you obligatorily enjoy reading? (Quote source in Spanish)

Lots of coincidences with Mina as a node in the connection. She had no idea the picture in Flickr had been taken by an English language teacher. Mina works for a magazine which belongs to the English and American Studies Department of the Karl Franzens-Universität at an Austrian university.

What Mina doesn't know yet is what the book in the picture is about:

If there were any more coincidences that linked us, I would not be surprised. Perhaps this post reaches Susanne? I sense this story may have a sequel. For now, I just enjoy to see what these connections through our published content can lead to. As I wrote in my Flickr profile, take me wherever you are.

(1)

My Semester of Reading by Susanne Kopf. JAWS Magazine, KF University Graz. Issue 21, pages 20-21. April 2011.

The story of how I failed teaching social bookmarking

2011-03-29T17:01:00.004-03:00

The question of the value of using social tools is one I imagine my students asking when I present the lesson. I have no doubts that social bookmarking has a value, but many of my students have never heard of it. So how do I go about teaching -ok, showing- them how to use delicious or diigo?

I tend to think the need for the tool has to precede the adopting it. Identify the need and you get a teachable moment.

Last class I asked a small group of four students whether they saved bookmarks in their browsers. They all did. Some had already designed a complex folder system to organise them. So I asked: is it easy to retrieve a link from your collection? Does it ever get messy? One of them confidently answered:

-No, never.

End of my lesson.

Of course, I will show them what social bookmarking is on another class. The point is that my lesson, as I had planned it, failed.

I'm thinking how to go about it. I started using delicious when the folders were impossible to keep in my browser. Actually, how organised have I been with my own online bookmarks? Not that much. After five years of saving, I'm begining to create some quick access folders in -you guessed it- my browser!

Now, let me be authentic here. I do not easily retrieve bookmarks I remember saving. I may consider myself a very good tagger, yet I am not a good foretune teller. I cannot imagine how or for what project I will associate a long-ago saved bookmark. I generally get frustrated trying to find exactly what I want.

That was the case a week ago. I wanted to use a tool I had hardly explored for a vocabulary lesson. I couldn't remember its name; I just remembered what it did. The tag 'tools' in my delicious has some 300 items. How did I find it? I remembered who I had briefly discussed it with a year ago. I contacted the person and tried to search our chat in Gmail to no avail. She had saved the link in her own delicious. Success.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5351981824/

So, how do you authentically teach tagging and bookmarking without including a group doing it? What's the value of social bookmarking without a conversation around the findings? How do you go about not simply re-creating the conditions that made you adopt the tool five years ago?

These are the questions my new lesson plan will have to address.

On Connections and Vulnerability

2011-02-06T18:03:00.007-03:00

Last week I came accross this post with a TED Talk video by Dr Brené Brown. The talk is really a good way of spending 20 minutes of your time. Jabiz Raisdana got inspired (although I wonder when he is *not* inspired) and created a mashup with the sound of Brené's voice.

This is my response to his post.

I saw the video a few days ago and it still haunts me. I really like how her research and passion for it made her come to a crossroads in her life: the need to take a good look inside yourself before you attempt to make sense of the world. I think that is what we all do when our jobs are more than a means to make a living. For me, teaching is the viewpoint to grow in my life. It's the car I've chosen to do my journey.

But I digress from your post. Back to connections.

I've been thinking that sometimes the passion that makes us share has a blinding force as well. I think we are online to obtain not a just a connection, but its so desired effect. It's as if connections were a means to something, which is so difficult to describe and so distinctly personal that, for simplicity's sake, let's call it connection, or openness or sharing. I think those words are the underpinning grammar of learning magic.

The mash-up you made is like an entry to your mind making connections. It's so much more than "yeah, I love the talk". As I listened, I felt as if you had heard another TED talk. I was wondering if you had picked up the same traces that made me like it. Probably not. However, you left towards the end the line that sums it all up for me: 'our imperfections make us beautiful'.

We cannot take for granted that we all mean the same by sharing and being open. I think that most of us who have edublogs have the shared experience of not having had these dialogues so fluently or frequently in our f2f contexts. Finding interlocutors is the only way to grow, so here we are making connections, which are crucial to our learning. As much as it still surprises me that here I am in Buenos Aires talking to you -who must be sleeping- in Jakarta, I'd like go past the being wowed to move on to the topic of genuine connections.

I'm quite sure I don't get sharing and remixing the way you do. I don't think I would feel inclined to try to produce something like this in future. And you know what? It's not necessary. I'm here because somewhere in a stream of tweeted and blogged thoughts I felt quite at home in what you say. That prior connection makes me curious and willing to understand where you come from to mashup like this. I don't intend to find similarities. I'm not scared we may disagree either.

I think that many bloggers try to find sameness and then get their sensibilities tied up in offence. But validation seeking, though necessary, doesn't make us grow. That's not what openness looks like to me. I think we need to connect to go beyond the hype, the passion and look for something more profound. It's easy to pick up the jargon, the talk of technology in education and blog it out loud. We need to have the skill to tell the validation seekers from the genuine sharers. There are many more blogs today, but it's still hard to collect many more examples and models, let alone new meaningful connections.

I still read and comment in the same blogs. Writing hasn't become any easier for me. I spend a long, long time to produce a post. My teaching, what I do in class, has probably not changed that much outwordly, but it feels different for me and I see its effectiveness when my students get that discovery look in their eyes. How can that be assessed?

Vulnerability is not something I'm good at. Hence the many drafts posts I've written that have never seen the light. Sometimes I feel I cannot express it clearly, sometimes I don't know if, by passionately disagreeing, I disappoint people in my closer circle of connections who may have taken for granted my views. The point is that when I sense we can share enough core values, I need to disagree with you. Not in a reactive way, mind you, I think it's part of identity building.

You see, I reread this and I don't think it makes any sense. And if it did, again, it's so easy to misunderstand. It's (oh) so difficult to know another person. It's so tempting to assume we have found likeminds. It's scarily normal to close doors when we find differences. Yet I think that what we do with all those differences in the middle of so much shared ground is the learning that matters most.

A few lines from John Donne come to mind now,

"Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat."

If we could remain calm when the truth as expressed by our online friends does not match our illusions. If we could embrace the differences and strengthen the connection from there -without any need to call it literacy or hasten to shout that technology enabled it. Maybe we can leave technology in the back seat and drive ourselves with the self-reliance that empowers us to judge a sour face exhibiting little understanding and go for it anyway.

Thank you for triggering this Jabiz.

Bookmarking Mirrors (pun intented)

2010-12-31T08:23:00.001-03:00

In the last four years, I certainly haven't been able to blog about the wide range of my interests or the full spectrum of my curiosity.

However, once upon a time, there was a site called del.icio.us where bookmarks mirrored day by day the wonderings of my readings and my mind. Only closely followed by my RSS and Twitter starring habits.

A quick look at the figures of my account at http://delicious.com/fceblog shows that I've aggregated,

-4080 bookmarks since 19th August 2006.

-480 people in my network which make up a wonderful daily customized 'newspaper' view with a total database of 1,035,054 searchable links.

Not bad.

It only gets better when I look at myself in the mirror of delicious. Here is a picture taken 2 years and 6 months ago. Here is the view of my tag cloud today.

Why does this matter? Gardner puts a voice to what I mean:

"I had an epiphany last week when discussing project ideas with the class: if you’re not sure what you really want to do for a final project, just read your blog posts to date. There’s probably a pattern of interest there. Look at the traces of your own engagement! Enjoy the strengths and predilections of your mind at play in the fields of study. Turns out that the photo project was right there all along, hiding in plain sight."

It's that simple.Come to think of it, those delicious tag clouds make a great "About me", profile or bio post. Much better than any picture of my face I haven't yet published. Definitely far, far better thanthis.

A reply to Rabiz Raisdana

2010-11-28T12:42:00.004-03:00

Rabiz Raisdana has published the result of a collaborative project to create video. My story of how I got to know about this and why I participated is detailed in Addendus, my blog in Spanish.

Here is the comment I wrote to Rabiz in his blog (awaiting moderation):

Thank you for this, Rabiz.

Pleasantly surprised and speechless at first, I was able to articulate some words in my blog in Spanish about all this (linked to my name).

In a nutshell, I explain there how I've been following your posts lately and why I participated. I ventured to translate a paragraph from this post that, in my opinion, summarizes why I feel I sync with your idea of learning.

@wmchamberlain

I often used to ask myself how could these things be translated into classroom practice. Certainly a valid question. However, I've decided to put off thinking about it. I've found that it often leads to closing a learning cycle too quickly with practical imperatives. I couldn't let such a question deviate me from experimenting anyway. Perhaps it is someone else who can help me see how that is to be done.

For all I know, I could very well be losing some of my time. But important changes do not come in isolation. They tend to be a part of a continuum. So I keep at it. Who knows when I will create a successful classroom practice with my playing today? What will it look like? Definitely it will be some mix of this with new and unknown contributions from students or network.

Probably I will not even be teaching them. We'll be learning together seems more like it.

Image:

Dry, by fceblog

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5204662378/

Picture That

2010-11-15T01:19:00.003-03:00

Today I've spent quite some time on Flickr. I've been honouring the present of a Pro account I received from Gabriela.

I've had a Flickr account since 2007. A camera since 2008. Let's say I like taking my time.

It was only last month -again with a wink from Gabriela- that I noticed there are a few photography groups on Facebook where people decide to go out and share tricks, pictures and a coffee in Buenos Aires. Probably the best use of Facebook so far. Despite some anecdotes unworthy of a post, all in all, a pleasant experience that has taken me to a next learning and engagement level. I had been simply taking pictures of nice things and now I am thinking where the light is coming from. It's a start.

As much as I've found many of my overseas tweeps inspiring with their pictures, I realise I needed to be next to other amateur photographers to play with, to pull myself out of my private albums and start being there.

Outdoors, I move confidently with my camera and do not mind making mistakes. Every now and then, I need to show one or two pictures to the person next to me and get some instant feedback. This makes a difference for my learning. Once the picture day is done, taking a look at the way others have worked with the same objects is so revealing, both about photographs and their authors. Full learning circle.

Back at home, I spend a long time pondering which picture to publish. Does everyone go through this? Will I get more fluent or more obsessed with details? I look at my older shots with critical eyes, but I've decided the learning journey has to be registered. Period. Moving on...

The pictures at the Recoleta Cemetery are probably my best so far. I must admit, though, the place is so inspiring even a beginner like me can obtain something good.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5095226025/in/set-72157625195187444/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5176061055/in/set-72157625195187444/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5095223247/in/set-72157625195187444/

Everything I'm publishing now are raw pictures and some cropping. Just barely played with Picasa editor, but can't help feeling it's a huge time eater. Excuses? Perhaps.

Maybe I just want to learn by plunging into the informal practice pool. I'd like to wait until I sense my pictures point me to a need of technical advice, a few touches of editing or a little help from my friends.

Sharing

2010-10-21T19:10:00.004-03:00

I could simplify things by saying that I've just seen Dean Shareski's keynote for k12online, hence post. If you hear him speak, have a notebook at hand for he can compel you to write! But that is not the origin of this post.

Let me start by digressing, which is perhaps one of the most important things a blogger can do.

I was deep in thought in my RSS considering a post from Gabriela , who had just seen Dean's keynote, mentally linking it to a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago about our stagnant blogging and then, Dean shares Alan's post pointing the missing blogging link in his preso, so I watched the vid.

Mind you, these people are all what I call direct contacts. By this I mean I do not need anyone to tweet out loud that they write well. Yet, I have been reading them today because they have the habit of sharing side thoughts the moment this intimate Internet proximity of reading each other makes them tick and learn.

Dean starts his presentation with a quick series of screenshots from a few of the many blogs he reads and learns from -or should I say "with"? I know all of them. (I recognise my fceblog, by the way ;-) Thanks!) My first impulsive reaction was: closed circles. Echo chamber. A split second, because these thoughts quickly gave way to other jaw dropping conclusion of how closely intertwined our collective ideas can be. Each of us has a distinct style. We have diverse teaching contexts. Still, we seem to move ahead together when the collective message makes sense. All of this is possible via sharing. I have never met most of my key contacts f2f; so for me, everything I've learnt informally, everything that has made a deep impact on my practice, I learnt by simply sharing.

Back on track and on the post proper.

Half way down the presentation, Intrepid Teacher tells the story of the creation of a blog for his daughter. As a side note, he mentions the blog would avoid the need to answer or send some family update emails. Then, his sharing takes off and reaches new connections. The mention of email reminds me of the springboard for my idea of a blog for my class in 2006: avoid emailing long answers with private explanations that actually needed to be shared by the whole class.

I've never been surprised by this need to shift from closed email to public blogging. However, Gabriela, who knows her colleagues at school never land on her blog, decides to write them an email to let them know about k12online! To keep her mind sane, she decides that the email can be a good gem of a post and it is. I read it, can't help writing this, you get the point.

Yes, Alan. Blogging is alive. Blogging is long term and Twitter is probably an ephimeral passion. The tool choice is irrelevant when the sharing attitude is absent. Sharing is the love underpinning it all.

Ah, the edublogosphere. Talk about an amazing story.

A Talk around Language, Culture and Disagreement

2010-09-11T14:59:00.003-03:00

This is a comment I left on Bud's blog today. I invite you to read both, the post and its rich comment thread.

Bud asks,

How do you work to make sure that you stay kind, but avoid a case of the “yeah, yeahs” whenever disagreement arises? Who’s helping you to be thoughtful in word and deed while keeping you kind?

This is a question that sometimes lurks behind my writings in this blog. In my answer to Bud, I am probably reminding myself of how I deal with those choices. Or how I best try to.

Anyway, it is never easy to be an individual with ideas that touch other people's sensitivity. We are all passionate about our learning, what we consider best for our students, what makes sense, what is useful and worth trying. Expressing yourself in a widely networked context can become a challenging thing. Is this an unavoidable part of our teaching job?

My comment

Dear Bud,

I’ve been a bit offline lately and had missed the tweets you quote here. First, let me tell you those tweets sound kind enough in Argentina. I belong to a culture where an excess of kindness is taken as irony, so most people tend to fall off the cliff of rudeness. This takes long hours to explain to my students. I never get tired of insisting that even if they use correct structures and vocabulary, cultural codes need to be mastered at the same pace. However, I read you and I still believe you *are* kind enough. Maybe because I live in another culture and I cannot escape fully; not even with a lifetime of foreign language learning, or 4 years of blogging to ‘travel’ -as one of my close friends has described the purpose of my writings.

I’ve been reading your tweets in the last few months and I do notice a change in you. What I see is your learning is making you spot small differences. You seem to treat sentences or tweets as a detective. I say this in a positive sense. I feel like-minded and learn from your different style. After so much edu-talking, we all see people remaining in the high-sounding words and not posting about what actually happens in their classrooms or how they get from A to Z without a mention of a B. You are going deeper into meaning and that is part of your research spirit (I’m biased because I follow your writings, I know, but this is how I see you).

Now you obviously love a search for truth. There’s no such thing as ‘one’ truth, but authenticity to what you believe to be true in the light of your learning so far is important. You also care and respect. I understand you want to show consistent actions with these ideas. I think that the difference will be in what you decide will be proof of your succeeding in all this.

To me, truth is not always nice to hear, yet I prefer it. With family and close friends I value more being patient than disagreeing immediately. I simply will not risk hurting, let alone lose those people. At work, I want to innovate and to make things better in the ways I can. Resistance to the new is part of my reality and I accept it. I pull away when it stresses me too much and devise a strategie to come back to the healthy discussion. Sadly, I know I will lose some people on the way. Some temporarily, some for good. But when being authentic and consistent can suddenly go to second place on the value scale, I feel the earth trembling around me with mistrust.

I know I can try to be kinder. Outcomes and other people’s feelings are beyond my control.

Apologies for the length of this comment. Thank you for opening your mind and letting us in.

All very best,

Claudia

Learning Dimensions

2010-05-23T04:48:00.002-03:00

Some ideas around the social, the private and other learning lands. I am just trying to understand these concepts by spotting intersections with Connectivism. This is a remix of notes I left out of my previous post, Social Learning.

Take the notion of space and combine it with learning. Informal learning can occur in a variety of places. Incidentally, learning may happen with a teacher, without a teacher or in spite of a teacher. Formal learning happens when there is a school structure acting as an architect of a learning space. Yet, informal learning can take place in a university and formal learning can be seen in a social network. What does this depend on? Perhaps on the readiness to identify marginally relevant conversations in a classroom (residual knowledge). Perhaps some recognition that some instances of learning with networks we come across on the web are nothing but old things in a new medium.

Now take the social ingredient and add it to the learning soup. Social as the people factor. Social as someone who can be friendly with us should we need to pick their brains. Mind you, not your friends who like you or friends of a friend who send requests, but an ever shifting node in the network that can help you learn wherever your drive takes you in your knowledge quest. It may seem that the world is a small town. It does not matter if the node is six degrees away. It's not as much about access as it is about diversity of contribution.

How does this work?

One node at a time. At a learning ripe time. To me, the node is not there to simply share what they know or show you how they have been learning, but to learn together with you. Not social because they pressed publish to their thoughts. Not just transparent about their processes and sources. People learning right there and then, as a natural consequence of the connection and its current conversations. Something like "I can't help learning from you because you learn here and now with me".

This kind of learning timing does not seem to be liable to scheduling. It goes beyond having learning interests in common. I find it closer to personal values and attitudes to nodes and the learning process itself.

Now season it all with the Internet and what do you get?

Acceleration. Sparks. Too much to read in your RSS. Suddenly you affirm digital learning is different. Is the internal learning process (not the observable outcome) really different? Or is the digital dimension more clearly revealing or confronting us with the way genuine, long lasting learning has always been?

Think of a traditional classroom. Imagine students unable to interrupt a teacher's lecture and no mobile phone distractions. Then listen to teachers affirming that what is going on in there is knowledge transmission. Would you, digital citizen, say that the learning which may have resulted in such classrooms was due to transmission? Learning has probably never been too different. What has changed is perspective and description.

Digital learning spaces are providing new evidence. Learning is more complex than our preconceptions. The social and the space are the context of learning. Learning can happen outside context. Hard to keep in a cage called formal or informal. Is learning voluntary or involuntary? Not every student learns the same in one given classroom. Learning revolves around togetherness and individuality. Togetherness is ruled by social context and degree of synchronicity (same place, same time). Individuality is ruled by personal relevance.

Maybe the distinction between formal and informal learning is misleading. Informal learning examples are probably the evidence that formality in education is a fiction. A learning tale. I am not saying I have not learnt anything in a class. All I am trying to say is: what if it was not because of that class? Description as explanation is insufficient.

I see a lot of metonym talk around. The tool as an umbrella term for the venue, process and outcomes. Stretching an idea of learning, surpassing it or destroying it. Learning is not in the tool, but in its shadow.

Far from objective facts, my reality and truth about learning will spring from my unique perceptions and interpretations. To me, learning is experienced as social during conversations. That's how I feel it. However, our perceptions, as Dr. Carl Sagan teaches us, are somewhat limited:

Frankly, I find that most of us work on the outskirts of a true learning land. What we know is not automatically in sync with what we do. It makes me wonder whether authentic learning entails some disrespect for our most cherished illusions about difficulty grading, linearity of syllabus and hierarchies. The world is flat, we say. We are flat landers, busy building our flat classroom business, projecting our models on the dimension of learning spaces for our own individual purposes.

Social Learning

2010-05-16T04:11:00.001-03:00

The title of this post is arbitrary. I am simply choosing two of the most frequent words in a long trail of thoughts shared in Twitter. I transcribed the tweets (as seen from my end @fceblog) in a wiki page for reference and context.

Several questions emerged in that Twitter exchange:

-Is all learning social?

-How can learning be not social?

-Is social learning mediated by language?

-Is reading a book an example of social learning?

-Do learning nodes need to be human?

-Is language social? Is language socially constructed?

This post is not about answers. This is a post about the roads my mind goes through when I approach thinking about these issues. I cannot offer definite answers. Truth is something we attempt to aproximate through different learning grids. I just hope to be transparent about what I bring, as a node, to my personal learning network.

Language and clarification of terms can reveal subtle hidden differences in the way we view our networked learning experiences. I think we cannot underestimate the importance of trying to be clear about terms. Having a blog, a will to share, a number of coincidences and lots of enthusiasm with the topic is far from saying we talk about the same things. We often assume shared basic knowledge. Perhaps this belief partially springs from being in contact with some people for so long. This might be the drawback of echo chambers and preaching to choirs. However, the bell makes a new sound every time we touch it.

For the sake of simplification as well as to getting started in conversation, we are naturally inclined to take for granted the meaning of words such as:

-social

-learning

-language

-connection

-conversation

-reading

The idea is not to be prescriptive trying to define them. The point to me has little to do with finding the best definition, but simply with identifying what we mean when we loosely conjure up so many concepts. I am interested in finding contradictions between what I claim to know and what I actually believe. I find these intersections are a fertile learning ground.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, my learning grid has been influenced by studies of general linguistics, applied linguistics, literature and translation. I believe that good reading is very much like a conversation, whether the author is present or not. It is a kind of internal, unique dialogue where the reader is a co-creator of a text; that is, the meaning of that particular text. Widdowson, as cited by Bauri, resonates here:

"According to Widdowson, reading is an act of participation in a discourse between interlocutors. It is regarded not as reaction to a text but as interaction between writer and reader mediated through the text. This interaction is governed by the 'co-operative process', where encoding is a matter of providing directions and decoding a matter of following them. In this interactional exchange what is actually expressed is vague, imprecise and insignificant, it is satisfactory only because it provides the interlocutors with directions to where they can find and create meanings for themselves. Widdowson suggests that this kind of creativity is not exclusive to reading but is a necessary condition for the interpretation of any discourse. Spoken as well as written discourse, operate in accordance with this co-operative principle (Widdowson, 1979, pp. 174-175)."

The mention of learning happening in conversations or interactions is generally linked to social networking and the connectivist learning that occurs among nodes. However, to affirm that learning happens in conversations also points to the idea that learning involves some negotiation of meaning or object being learnt in aconstructivist fashion. Re-reading our Twitter exchange, I think I find a tendency to explain new phenomena with old terminology. There seems to be a stretching of a pragmatic definition of knowledge derived from conversation to explain learning as we experience it enabled by technology. This suddenly sounds to me as old things in new ways. We do not voluntary construct serendipitous knowledge, which simply emerges.

The crux of the contradiction is probably a confusion between constructivist and maturationalist views of knowledge creation. A reading of connectivist views quickly points to several analogies with neuroscience, not pragmatics. If learning happens within our brains, we cannot hurry to equal learning with social.

George Siemens writes in 2005,

"Research (particularly in the field of neuroscience) is beginning to indicate that the primary learning component of our brains is pattern recognition, not information processing. Stephen Downes (2005) extends this concept by offering a challenging vision that learning is not a direct causal interaction between teacher and learner. Replacing the causal model of learning (need highlighted, instructional intervention planned, measurement enacted) with 'network phenomenon':

“But with online learning comes not only a much wider, more diverse network, but also the idea that (a) the network may be based on non-physical (or emergent) properties, (b) that the individual may choose to belong to or not belong to a network, and (c) that an individual may assume multiple identities or memberships in multiple networks. The theory of distributed representation has a profound implication for pedagogy, as it suggests that learning (and teaching, such as it is) is not a process of communication, but rather, a process of immersion.”

This explanation of learning in a digital age is far from equating learning with social. I would be inclined to think that what we broadly describe as social learning is simply not connectivist. To begin with, the concept of social is elusive. Before going to the web to find a definition that may help us prove a point, I think we have to examine first what we are actually saying. In our Twitter exchange, the term social clearly includes two components:

a) people

b) language use

We are unarguably saying social means interactions mediated by language.

The term learning is also tricky. Do we mean that only people (alive) learn? Then, books do not. Do we mean that cells in our brains learn to make new connections? Then, the social component of learning is a trigger but it is different from affirming that (all) learning is social.

We are leaving out of the discussion any learning that does not happen in contact with people talking to us. We are assuming that language -with its social exchanges- mediates all the learning. This is not true every time. We learn essential things like eating before we can actually utter a word or fully comprehend our parents language. What is important to bear in mind is that we have unawarely decided to limit the object of our talk. So the learning we are concerned with is one that occurs between people and mediated by language.

Connectivism seems to suffice its arguments leaving linguistic aspects outside the discussion. However, there are some similarities between what learn fromChomsky's studies on universal grammar and the notion of personal knowledge as presented by Downes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. According to Chomsky, no amount of talking and teaching can make a child learn the principles and parameters of language. The distinction between internalized language in the brain as opposed to a particular language in use is key. So is the notion of personal and social knowledge distinction in connectivism (Slide 17). Learning, though socially triggered, is not a social outcome. Performance in a test does not necessarily show learning evidence. Learning needs immersion and exposure to models. Learning uses something external to the self to build an internal capability. Learning is mediated in the conversation, by language in use. Learning is not an object socially negotiated, but rather a new capacity (neural connection) in our brains.

Bringing the concept of language into the picture does not make a good argument in favour of social learning, because language is not inherently social. What is the difference between universal language in the brain and a particular language (English or German)? The level at which the abstraction is made. Now, abstractions like these are made for a purpose. Teachers may disagree with the need to focus on unobservable capabilities in the brain and prefer to focus on observable classroom outcomes. In my opinion, the oversimplification that learning in a digital age could be analogous to being a foreign language speaker and going on to say there are natives and immigrants is a good example of not making abstractions at the right level.

In spite of all this, I will most probably continue teaching my students with the metaphor that we can have a dialogue with the text. It seems to be an effective resource for a purpose. The danger lies in confusing the map with the territory, or abandoning cartography because we are comfortable with one map (ours of course).

To me, more than arguing language is social, what is useful for a teacher to understand is that the capability to develop language use to the level of Shakespeare is simply within human reach. We all inherit that capacity. Teachers have power to hinder inborn capabilities or let them emerge and grow. Certainly teaching has been a systematic attempt at controlling the construction of learning in contexts rich with language use. The problem with formal teaching is that it overlooks the reality that within networks knowledge can emerge quite unplanned. Through teaching we can collect evidence that learning is social. What we cannot explain observing teachers experiences or conversations in groups is the amount of learning that happens outside those interactive contexts.

Teaching is definitely social. Learning is probably not.

Now I want to read how Bud Hunt challenges my thinking.

An Aside

2010-05-09T13:41:00.002-03:00

Day: Friday evening, May 7th 2010.

Place: Colegio Las Cumbres, downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Scene: Stephen Downes had just finished his informal talk with teachers. Everyone is walking about the room.

I just wanted to say thank you when a small talk started. The fueling ideas after attending the morning presentation, the engagement of the teachers debating how far to guide students was all there. Stephen said something about noticing the enthusiasm among us. He added it would be even more interesting if people disagreed with him at times.

I deliberately took that as an invitation to voice disagreement. I found myself unable to do so, though. My own mind was a bit clouded with so much f2f blog talk. I tried to explain to Stephen why I could not disagree yet. This is my best recall of what I said mixed with what I meant.

When I hear an idea explained concisely, articulately organized and backed up by effective domestic examples, I find it hard to disagree immediately. I simply know that I will have questions. Eventually, at a later moment of the day, or perhaps some other day, I will find the points where inconsistencies with my own thoughts will provoke a need to challenge both his message and my previous way of thinking. I cannot help needing more time for disagreement to happen.

There were underlying assumptions to why I felt a need to explain this to Stephen. I believe that Stephen is an expert blogger who does not share these thinking or writing time limitations. He has learned a kind of fluency of expression regardless of the writing conditions. He can protect his mind from a hectic airport and decide to write like this. I admire that capacity. Yet, that kind of admiration is something I will need to question. Particularly if I find myself using it as an excuse to limit my own writing capabilities.

I said to Stephen that today I listen to him and give him the benefit of the doubt. For now, I am just taking my mind on a ride towards the message. Then, I'll take a few steps back to think further. I will try to post reflections or questions here in my blog. Sometimes, I need to write my mind out before meeting the lecturer. I find it is a blogger's advantage to do so. To write the here and now of my thoughts saves them from being taken ashtray or buried forever by a new glittering idea. I think I write to save my personal fledgeling thoughts. What I do not write today, I will never write again. Ever.

By then, a few teachers had gathered to listen to this. Stephen looked at them and concluded: "This is what we do when we blog".

Since last Friday, the personal pronoun 'we' has taken on a new meaning.

Liveblogging: Stephen Downes in Buenos Aires

2010-05-07T00:23:00.004-03:00

Edited on May 8th.

Yesterday morning I attended the presentation Stephen Downes gave at Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires. Slides, video and audio.

I had many times participated in other blogger's liveblog, but I had never experienced being the liveblogger. As the conference proceeded, I found myself shifting roles in the way I blogged.

At first, I had the idea of an audience in mind. Probably I had a memory of myself being a remote enthusiastic participant at the other end of a screen, curious about the experience inside the conference room. The first role was the reporter of the event. A window for a remote audience to peep into.

I tweeted the link. I realised people were probably lurking, pondering whether to join me to say something or not. I moved a step away from that in my mind. Having read Stephen since 2006, the talk was familiar at first; however, the wording of the message was new at times and it started to engage me. I tried to separate what I heard from Stephen from my own thought sketches by enclosing mine in parenthesis. I became a side commentator. When this kind of involvement with ideas happens -generally when I blog- I feel a need to turn off the music and make my room as quiet as possible. At this point, the thought that viewers could interrupt me with their own reactions to the video streaming suddenly made me uneasy.

I had to choose. Should I continue writing for an audience or just for myself? I stopped checking the Twitter tab on my netbook. I had a good view of Gabriela Sellart's screen sitting next to me. I could see her exchanging thoughts with Diego Leal from Colombia. I felt that was enough. I stayed in an inner network circle, an echo chamber perhaps. Most viewers were busily sharing tweets as well as noisy (by which I mean, uncommented) re-tweets and tagging them #downesba. A tag I had suggested in Facebook to join teachers who would like to meet Stephen for an informal talk, accidentally became the tag of Stephen's visit to Argentina, not just Buenos Aires. It conveniently became a stream to gather ideas separately from my liveblog. A place to visit later.

I went into blogger mode. Involved in semi-private reflection. Trying to extract new meaning to a message I had heard many times before. Obtaining meaning for me is like going for a ride on a carrousel (1). You go round and round seeing the same places from your own movable centre. Sudden changes in perspective make the known seem unknown again. The man standing and taunting the children with the key to a free ride prize is always standing at the same corner doing what he dexterously does. Going round and round is no guarantee you will get it. There I was sitting and blogging about connectivism again.

The value of this experience I share may probably be strictly personal. This liveblog documents the shifting focus of attention of my mind, from a word spoken to portions of Stephen slides, through emergent flashbacks of the days when I studied Chomsky's generative grammar and back to the speaker. At times, the tip of the iceberg of a question appeared. I was lucky to be able to relax at the brief question time. Stephen would meet with a few twitterers later in the afternoon for an informal talk, so I saved my questions for later. More about that, when Stephen shares the recording of that meeting.

Connectivism and Transculturality

View more presentations from Stephen Downes.

The following are my raw notes. Reflection posts will follow.

Stephen Downes in Buenos Aires

Note on the tool used. I unsuccessfully tried to pull in the hashtag #downesba into the stream of the liveblog. Just one tweet made it. Perhaps it was a limited feature in the free version of the tool.

(1) The metaphor of the carrousel is a stretch from the way the writer Juan José Saer describes the experience of writing. I've been playing with it in my blog in Spanish.

Success

2010-04-21T11:15:00.002-03:00

This post is about my wiki with EFL students. Actually it's a post about my EFL students after using the wiki for a month.

After a month using it, I would say we have just dipped our fingers into the wiki pool. The real time of wiki exposure in class has been 6 hours at the school lab. Our lessons are twice a week, 2 hours each.

So far I have been focusing on and hoping they learn three things:

1) They can publish their work. (Although there is a shyness to press the save button as if they could not edit again ever).

2) Tags bind same tasks together and allow them to quickly access a classmate struggling with the same writing problem. (Mind you, to edit tags, to understand the need to use a comma or hit enter to teach the machine exactly which tag they mean is taking... well, a month. The wiki even gained a "wicked wiki" fame because of mis-tagging/not-finding frustration).

3) The wiki is a heritage project. They can read what my students have been writing since 2007. They can find real models from the past and among present classmates easily. They have just tried opening discussions to chat about what they read and find worth mentioning in others work.

I consider this simply basics. A simple socialization of students writings. With a bit more work, it could have been done on paper. This is not yet close to my expectations of wiki use.

And yet, yesterday I learnt something. We went to the lab to listen to a manager who introduced the students to the LMS they will be using. This is basically going to replace practice tests and the use of past papers for exam preparation.

To begin with the talk, the presenter asked my students if they knew what a campus is. One of them answered very confidently:

"Yes, it's a place where we get in, we share and help each other learn".

That simple.

After the presentation, students understood that within the LMS they will be working individually, becoming responsible for their own performance, results and follow-up of the process. They liked it. Back in the classroom, though, they wanted to make sure the wiki was still going to be used as well as the LMS. I heard them detailing how much they valued 1 and 3 above (in spite of 2).

For the last two weeks I had believed we were being slow to adapt to the wiki. I felt the overwhelming sensation that more creative uses of the tool would have us all stuck at a misunderstood tag. I wondered how much more time would have to be spent on publish/tag/link basics. When will they get to explore the notify-me tab? How to strike up a meaningful conversation about RSS?

However, all of those are surface structure observations.

Deep inside they have been changing a mindset of individual learning to a socialized one. They have tasted enough to value it. They have been taking it slowly indeed. But they haven't done anything they were not believing in yet. Mindset before toolset. This is the important lesson I learnt yesterday. I need to be more patient for my wiki-fied dreams.

This is a post about my wiki. Wait, no. Our wiki. This is a story of how I learnt because they learnt.

IWBs and the Fallacy of Integration

2010-04-19T13:38:00.001-03:00

This is a reflection that started as a comment in Miguel Guhlin's blog.

Miguel asks, If teachers can't integrate computers into daily instruction, do you honestly expect them to embrace a complex interactive whiteboard?

I find a paradox there. At first sight, IWBs or LMSs are, in my opinion, the traditional teacher's promised land. How can a standard blackboard compete in motivating your students? IWBs are such a heads-up approach.

Take LMSs. You can administrate materials and check students actual use of them like never before. You can even tell the time spent on the platform. Look at how much they study outside class hours. Super. Let's buy that.

I can hear you Miguel. You have evidence of the contrary. You know that there is another use of the same technology. Far more meaningful uses. But that's a difference in ideology, not technology.

These two technologies have based their marketing strategies catering for traditional teacher's needs. Namely, two things: motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process.

But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.

The point is learning, unlike motivation, has a long-term consequence. We need students who are not seduced by classroom procedures which act like motivational fireworks. We need students who develop a genuine love of discovering, gathering data and discussing it with their classmates, teachers and real field experts that might join them via Skype, for example. We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.

So far, for the classroom level. But the classroom is inside a school. The tree is not the forest. And yet.. What happens when the school decides to spend money in technology?

If there is anything to gain from the acquisition of technology on the part of schools is the revelation that success is not tied to budget. Success awaits in the adoption of the new. And I mean far and wide adoption.

Last week, teachers at my workplace were introduced for the first time to an LMS the school has bought and expects them to use. My manager told me the questions at the end of the session were mainly concerned with a sensation of losing control by going paperless. I was puzzled. I asked my manager: Can you imagine if you had introduced them to blogs or any other open technology where the world can know how you teach and post unexpected comments to it? That is more like losing the control comfort zone, don't you think?

I find your question, Miguel, is fairly similar to mine last Wednesday. Now, after reading your thoughtful post, I see we are both wrong.

There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?

We already know it's about shifting power. Tight teacher control is a hindrance to foster empowered students who own their learning paths. We need to be aware of the old way finding its way to surface in what we question.

There are no levels, but purposes or procedures which are valid or not. Tech is tech no matter what it does. It's innovative in its nature. We can tell by the huge resistance to it. If there is no resistance in the process, we are probably facing improvements and weighing their gains in efficiency points. Good enough, only it is not an innovation. Innovation is not about "more or better", it's about "different".

Innovations need more company than just a pioneer teacher adopting it. I've learnt a lot with blogging in the last four years. However, I must accept that there is a limit to how much I can continue growing as a teacher if my school context at large bases decisions exclusively with top-down approaches. Success to me looks like a constant flow of ideas and implementations that do not need the red-tape approval process required in pyramidal structures.

What is the school picture today? What does my working context look like?

I see an illusion that technology is to be bought, taught, used in class and then we can expect everyone to be happy. This false assumption seems to be guiding managerial decisions. This is the same old story behind the idea of technology "integration".

The technology integration fallacy goes hand in hand with that of digital natives. It's hard to believe in one and not the other. If technology is to be integrated you don't need to ask teachers, you just buy it. Then you decide that training people is necessary. They need to catch up or they will be ashamed or powerless in the classroom unable to speak the language of their digital savvy students.

As regards training, I doubt formal courses can make people adopt informal ways of learning. Courses could change teacher behaviour and leave their mindset untouched. If people are not convinced, the model is not sustainable. So courses are just a piece in the puzzle. Courses cater more for the toolset, not necessarily the mindset.

What are students in my classroom really like? To begin with, students are not digital natives. They know very little about educational uses of the technology they have been using for entertainment purposes only. They are quite ready to resist thoughtful, time consuming uses of the same technology. Particularly if they have had no part in choosing or deciding together with the teacher how we would use it. On top of that, they love a traditional class, classroom friends and a teacher they can admire and trust. Good teachers who have never used technology know this.

Achieving meaningful uses of technology in education will take more than school investment followed by leveling or catching-up-with-the-hype courses. Yet this is what most schools do. Now money has already been invested. There we have the LMS and the IWBs used as bigger screens. So? What's next?

First things first. Stay out of the tug-of-war. It is not a moment to think if the school is wrong in imposing it and teachers are right in resisting it. It's probably the moment to get together and go ahead purposefully. This is short-term thinking, though. Somehow teachers need to communicate to managers that the buy-don't-ask is an unhealthy approach from now on. Managers jobs also need to learn from these experiences.

Ideally, we should envision a future where authorities engage teachers in conversations before buying. In top-down approaches, school leaders tend to ask editors and companies first. The quality of the decision-making process can and should be improved in order to save money in adoption courses as well as saving school manager's time and energy justifying investments.

Innovative teaching practices require innovative management practices. Let's think of adoption models that rely on having one-to-one conversations with teachers, experimenting together, asking them how far they feel they need mentoring, identifying what makes teachers happy at work. Although time consuming, in my opinion, these are more long-term effective adoption models than countless courses for each new gadget so as to keep up. To materialize this vision, we need managers who are committed to an idea of success that translates to people learning, not just tools working. It takes a deep understanding that these people are professionals whose current competences count.

I prefer to keep away from the idea of levels as we know it. People who have dedicated years to a teaching profession are committed to something. Let's find out what that is. They want to learn. They have a unique viewpoint towards whatever disrupts their teaching. Resistance is to be expected. Wouldn't it help if they had a say in the decision to buy new technologies? Sure. Just help, not solve. I imagine that implementing those conversations in a school context would unveil deeper conflict and resistances we cannot foresee today. Worth trying, though.

Classroom Evolution

2010-04-13T17:14:00.003-03:00

Back then...

Ten years ago this classroom situation was normal in my English as a foreign language lessons.

Student question: -How do you say "osteoporosis" in English?

My answer: -I don't know.

Student: -Sorry.

Sorry? Why?

Students found it hard to explain why they apologised for asking something I didn't know. I think it had to do with respect for the teacher being some kind of authority in their subject resulting from hard work . By spotting the language gap, they were exposing my not knowing (perhaps not being good enough?). They liked the idea of learning with a good teacher. They were demystifying the classroom hero they admired. They felt genuinely sorry for it.

I always made it part of my job to explain there was nothing to be sorry about. I would explain that medical terms tend to be similar in English, but I would look it up in my dictionaries and bring the answer next time. I thank them for their questions because they made me curious and helped me to learn more than I could on my own.

Silence in the classroom. They looked puzzled. The "Sorry" died hard.

In later years, I was happy to find surprised faces at asking something I could not answer immediately. I think they felt thrilled, perhaps powerful, at seeing they could make the teacher learn with their questions. They could even take it as a game: "Let's ask more difficult questions" or"Let's ask questions at the level of the teacher". I enjoyed this change. This is the classroom atmosphere I am most comfortable with, I thought. More vibrant.

Back to the present...

Yesterday something completely different happened in my class. I corrected a student who was using two words as synonyms when they are not.

-Are you sure? -he asked.

-(Why ever would I correct him if I wasn't? -I thought.) Positive. -I answered.

Next, he produces his Blackberry from his pocket and goes to an online dictionary to check.

At this point I saw the two roads diverging in the woods... and I determined to take it easy while I sensed my authority as a teacher being put to the Internet test.

Silence in the classroom.

I decided to join his efforts and look it up in my netbook as well. We ended up exchanging what we had found out.

He looked at me with a smile of satisfaction and admitted: -You're right.

That moment was a turning point in my lessons. I had read before I am no longer the most authoritative person in a connected classroom. Reading it is one thing. Going through it is quite another. The more travelled by road is soothing. New paths are challenging for the teacher not in academic terms, or new technology literacy, but in human terms. To flow in the current teaching context, you need to give your ego a sanity check.

Authority is not a given. It is earned. A student at a time. Everything you have studied for is not enough. The best tools used for the right purposes will not give you that either. Authority in today's classroom is a humble attitude towards the student and the subject being taught. It is about sharing how you get there as opposed to how you once got there. Authority is the result of transparent processes unhindered by the knowledge possession illusions of a distant educational past.

Do I like this new scenario? Frankly, I'm getting used to it. For starters, reading my two reactions to the previous situations makes me feel amused now. Clearly, I didn't get it back then. I barely hinted at it. You need your students to evolve enough for you to experience a comfort zone stretch. Then, we can talk about authentic, timely learning.

Image credit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edans/453998716/

Context is what context does. Or is it what you do?

2010-03-27T11:25:00.001-03:00

Written on November 25th 2009. Last edited March 2010.

A few days ago Gabriela Sellart asked to save a comment I made on a Facebook thread somewhere visible. Gabriela was doubting whether to pull Twitter statuses into LinkedIn. I said I wouldn't.

Pablo raised issues of context and transparency. He said you are who you are regardless of context. I assume I have no permission to reproduce what Pablo -who is not my friend in Facebook- said in a semi-private medium, so I just quote my answer:

"My Twitter does not have a padlock. It's wide open. Anyone in the whole world can read it. I can put my Twitter address in LinkedIn as a website of mine. I would not let it replace the status bar in LinkedIn.

Whether you are who you are is not for me to say. Although I see a lot of people creating a persona in their blogs. Meeting them f2f changes things a lot.

I am a language teacher interested in communication online. Two issues here:

1-Meaning is affected by context.

2-I wouldn't force the same info to different audiences. I like letting people choose."

I think choice matters. Who owns the choice? Those who are literate, which reminds me of a tweeted quote from a recent presentation by Michael Wesch:

Maybe a blog post is a better venue than Facebook to enlarge on the idea of transparency. I think Pablo and I are not using the same definition here. Transparency for me is not about showing it all. It's about showing everything that matters; that is, sharing the path for learning what you've learnt. How have you seized that learning you blog about? This is what gives a text online authority and validity in my opinion.

The idea of choice and context remained at the backstage of my mind until this morning. Terry Freedman published a post that set me commenting and wondering what is context when we are online.

So I dwell on those ideas...

The choice of context and how it affects the message. The power of context for creating meaning. To what extent does the medium make the message? This question seems to state a battle no one can win. We cannot fight RSS fragmenting all our conversations and distributing them everywhere. RSS per se is not against the law.

But reading in depth, what I sense Terry is worried about is a much more complex issue. That of how much will we let the machine do for us?

This is not a legal conversation topic, but an ethical one. A conversation worth having, by the way.

Meta-thought

The interesting thing is that I wouldn't engage in this conversation, I wouldn't have gone for more depth into it if it had not been written by Terry, whom I follow and learn lots from. I am here writing because it is in the context of Terry's blog.

Some things I am certain of (for now, this is beta, OK?)

2010-03-22T12:40:00.001-03:00

These are mostly notes to self. You see, I read a lot and I fear losing touch with my own ideas. So I jot down a few to go back to them when learning gets too messy.

Thought it might be useful to share. Hence, post.

1) Teaching English is hard, anything else is an adverbial adjunct of place, manner and time. In other words, teaching is worth discussing. Anything else can be found for free on the Internet.

2) Time can be an excuse. Few things are not done because of time constraints. (I need more time to explain those few things, though. Suffice to say time is money and teachers need jobs).

3) Technology in the classroom is an intangible. Or not. If it is there and needs cleaning, it is probably not an enhancer, but an extra time consuming obstacle, needy for integration. Good technology use in the classroom is transparent and intertwined.

4) Transparency fosters authority. Mind you, not because I say so. I am talking about transparency about processes. Blog posts about how you are -right now- developing ideas and action. If you post after, if you just communicate results, this is more valuable as history or (self) marketing.

5) Motivation is a drug. It is a short-term target. It needs more and more to be done on the part of the teacher just to keep it going (see #2 above). Better keep the eyes on the mission. Better make people "addicted" to learning, to the process, to the autonomy of it. There are intrinsic reasons why this is pleasurable, meaningful and long lasting per se.

6) There are no how-tos. There are purposes. Question is not how-to but to what foreseeable end you work for. Allow for the unforeseeable, yet meaningful to happen.

7) Mind the use of the word "enhance" when linked to learning. Mind the gap. Old things are just old things.

8) Online contact does not entail collaboration. Work together does not imply face-to-face. Anything in the middle is ambiguous and requires a clarification of terms. That's a good use of a blog.

9) Standards are for things that fit a pattern. When educators claim that creativity is a "21st century" essential skill, we need to accept the limitations of striving for standards. Assessment and standards are cousins.

10) Doubt, question and never, ever just assume. Particularly applicable to all of the above.

More brewing in my mind at the moment. I'd rather pause here and wait for your thoughts.

Learning Together and a Tribute

2010-01-07T13:38:00.005-03:00

Many times we learn from,

many times we learn after somebody

many times we learn with,

but none of the above sounds like learning the way we hint at in blog posts, those posts that breathe the phrase "they get it". At least to me.

Let me share where this comes from.

I remember when I was at the teacher's training college. Aldo Blanco, my linguistics teacher was mystified by Noam Chomsky. He knew his explanations were hard to bear; he admitted his teaching skills were not the best. All he was after was not our perfect understanding of the subject, but our learning to think. I remember him looking into my eyes and asking me if I felt something was wrong with the trail of thought he was exposing. I nodded without having a conscious clue at why the argument was dissonant. He agreed. He went on to say how newer theories had already found other ways. He knew the class time was not enough to go full circle in discoveries that had taken linguists years, yet he valued our intuition, our hinting at it.

The oral final exam of the subject Linguistics was super. I had a 'time-out' to think about a question and then go talk about it in front of the examination board. His questions were of the type "How did you get to that conclusion?" The tension of the moment was I knew all the while my conclusion path was incomplete, perhaps utterly wrong. He evaluated my process. He never flaunted the right answer.

Sometimes us students got puzzled. One of our comments to the topic of the class would set him thinking aloud -clearly going away from the original class plan. It was hard to follow his mind, his smile at getting somewhere was a poser to us. Yet he talked as if we could follow, as if we were not his students, but peer researchers in the localist theory of case. Other times he fell silent for long minutes, smoking, reflecting, right there in our presence. Open-ended lessons.

But I digress.

The memory that triggers this post is from the subject Grammar II the year before Linguistics. That was generative grammar, case theory, a bit of logic and long debates on prepositions -preparing ourselves to grasp Chomsky, he would say. It was in one of the early lessons about case theory that he asked us to define the lexical item together, to reduce it to its basic components. The long debate closed with Professor Blanco stating this definition/formula:

Together equals same place, same time.

The moment, the silence, the image of it are a footprint in my mind.

Before writing this post, I wondered on Twitter whether learning, or learning 2.0 as some would have it, can be a one-way street. I thought-out-loud:

If the learning experience is just for the student, if it is unidirectional, is it learning?

I do not have answers. I have implications. I am concerned with a traditional teacher's love of control and careful lesson planning. I am worried about a overly loyal treatment of the curriculum at hand. I wonder if a total prediction of the road or the outcomes is a good learning path planning.

Are you planning room to learn something yourselves when you design your class? How do you do that? Can you be surprised or blown away by a student's reflection or question? And if none of this happens, what did they actually learn?

We all have learning illusions underpinning our practice. We generally are more or less aware of them or how they drive us to prove them right. As much as we tend to impulsively agree that we all move in the direction of fostering life-long, autonomous learners, we are confident our teaching role is still necessary. That role means something different for each of us. I think we owe our colleagues and students some transparency. Before approaching the teacher's role, I think we need a clarification of lexical items.

My belief, my bias, is that learning happens in a meeting of minds with unequal knowledge backgrounds. A togetherness of sorts with a classroom or online scenario (see number 3) for a place and a time that need not be strictly the same, but more right-in-time for learning.

The conversation is the medium that enables learning. It involves a negotiation and some passing of meaning among the participants. All of the people involved are transformed by it. This is where it differs from a monologue. Mind you, you can still learn from or with it.

To get together, to make community, we have to be able to generate and be part of some constant knowledge flow. A river of news, a network. To stay together, we have to keep learning together.

What? Right. I'm discussing learning together and I forget the blog, and the wiki, and Twitter. How come? Well, to me, if we talk about genuine learning, those are just technical details. Or distractors perhaps.

Afternote

Looking for links for my teacher, I just learnt that Professor Aldo Blanco passed away last October 2009.

Let this post be a humble open tribute to one of those teachers who hard-wired my brain into reflection. A person who valued thinking over method. A teacher who would let us see the interstices between the marriage foreign language teachers sometimes force between general and applied linguistics.

I also pay a private tribute. I keep all of his legendary grammar class notes. Everyone who studied with him in the nineties remembers those heavy paper notes photocopied from a an original made in a typewriter -full of his tiny handwritten comments. No one ever got the complete works, we had to exchange the missing pages with his previous students. Truly unforgettable.

Image credit

http://biolinguistica.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/sobre-la-clase-en-homenaje-a-aldo-blanco/

Blogworthy Tweets

2009-10-04T14:18:00.005-03:00

These tweets of mine need not be noteworthy, except that I want to make a note of them. To make sure they do not vanish in cyberspace. They deserve a spot in this personal learning scenario.

Many an important idea, a moment when my thoughts take a new turn take place in Twitter. I should probably be blogging them out and state exactly what I meant. Probably. Perhaps their value lies in keeping its shorter original form.

These are not all of my tweets. Just the ones that were not, but could well be extended tweets one day in this blog.

Seeing the selection from the last two months makes the pattern of my twitter interests only more evident. Funny when I think those topics are not my most frequent blog tags. The people I reply to do not always get a link in my posts. Yet all this backstage underpins my blogging.

September 2009

About lurkers and their presence traces.

The "I like" in FB may not add to the conversation, but it does to presence. Maybe the one + thing compared to Twitter.3:56 PM Sep 30th from web

@cogdog Blopgposts need a sort of comment aggregator. But still, people comment in private FB or in Twitter without an @ . How to RSS that?3:15 PM Sep 27th from web in reply to cogdog
RT @budtheteacher: We can never know the totality of our influence in the world, or what conversations happen in response to our work.2:07 PM Sep 27th from HootSuite

About Twitter (why not).

Lurkville-There are so many untweeted thoughts, so many unwritten comments. Every time I shut up, who learns? How much have I missed?1:57 PM Sep 25th from web

I joined twitter 962 days ago - http://whendidyoujointwitte... ? Uso Twitter hace 962 días. Ergo existo. O algo así.12:17 PM Sep 24th from web
Considering my Twitter network http://tinyurl.com/ybqm6q4 . Linktribution @mweller11:55 AM Sep 24th from HootSuite in reply to mweller

Thoughts on audience affecting the way I write. The backchannel before the post Edubloggers Meta-conversation

@PhoenixDennis #2 Lately, I am struggling with this when I write. I understand I need to speak for a known and unknown audience.All at once.12:14 PM Sep 23rd from web in reply to PhoenixDennis
@PhoenixDennis #1 Granted. Audience affects choice of syntax in writing style. But the target reader of a blog may/will change.12:11 PM Sep 23rd from web in reply to PhoenixDennis

Thoughts on story-telling from tweets or comments:

I must say that when I chat with @gsellart my reflection levels soar. That's a sure sign I am close to one of the key nodes in my network.5:31 PM Sep 22nd from web
@aletorto e.g. This beautiful post in Spanish explaining the birth of a novel from chat and blog archives http://tinyurl.com/l8mym55:26 PM Sep 22nd from web in reply to aletorto
Tweeple: Would you say there is a distinctive blog post language style different from the way you speak in a comment? Wondering.5:24 PM Sep 22nd from web
@aletorto I wouldn't publish a private chat. But you're right. They make up a kind of story line. If your eyes are inclined to see it, sure.5:21 PM Sep 22nd from web in reply to aletorto
@aletorto Write that story? Maybe another one -Wink @gsellart.5:19 PM Sep 22nd from web in reply to aletorto
Note: The previous tweet is a line I almost add to a private chat with Gabriela, but then I realised it was worth sharing.5:07 PM Sep 22nd from web
@gsellart It's possible to make a story out of a few twitter exchanges. You just need a story-teller. Fiction everywhere.5:06 PM Sep 22nd from web
"an always updated 'world wide corpus' is changing the very nature of the language we teach" @carlaraguseo @petesharma Yes, yes, yes.3:38 PM Sep 22nd from web

A thought on web presence. The silence of lurkers.

@dkuropatwa So true. They may feel at a loss for words to comment. Maybe an "I like this" in FB when you tweet posts.9:17 PM Sep 16th from web in reply to dkuropatwa

Writers' block

@nancito Buen punto para tener en cuenta en la evaluación de herramientas/procesos. +potencial -practicidad = riesgo de dolor de cabeza!2:33 PM Sep 11th from web in reply to nancito
What is it about the preview of a post that allows you to see the necessary edits? Magnifying glass effect.1:53 PM Sep 11th from web
Taking a Twitter break. Post writing got stuck in the final para. Those things.12:23 PM Sep 11th from web

Where are the tweet-worthy comment threads?

@kalinagoenglish Checking out the tag now. So #ocp lists posts with great comments. Interesting.12:06 PM Sep 10th from web in reply to kalinagoenglish
@jenwagner Right. I'd like links to "good conversations" as well as "good post". Let's give the term 'good' some suspension of disbelief.12:01 PM Sep 10th from HootSuite in reply to jenwagner
@willrich45 The scarcity of admins to speak about the teaching of writing is thought provoking in itself.11:56 AM Sep 10th from HootSuite in reply to willrich45

Tweeple, just wondering. I notice lots of "New Post" announcements here, but few "I'm commenting here". Why is that?11:43 AM Sep 10th from HootSuite
Draft Posts- What to do?
@datruss Get that post drafted somehow. Posts have such a short-term head life.11:38 AM Sep 10th from HootSuite in reply to datruss
@glassbeed I've been through the long hiatus. Lost some stats I had. Learning value intact. Just my experience. (I'll read your post later).11:35 AM Sep 10th from HootSuite
Tweet sifting. Starring a few to come back to. Feeling more like going asynchronous in my reading than reading live or on a cloud.11:31 AM Sep 10th from HootSuite

@gsellart I remember the Tumblr we used for playing and quick posting. Not what I have in mind now.3:29 PM Sep 8th from web in reply to gsellart
Organising draft posts. Sort of.3:09 PM Sep 8th from web
@gsiemens "wiki technology" Has the speaker clarified terms for his talk? Or is that assumed as the sun rising in the East? Odd synecdoche.10:27 AM Sep 8th from HootSuite in reply to gsiemens
Anyone else keeping draft posts? Problem: my mind has shifted view point angle.Solution: a) publish untouched + edit note. b) re-write. c)?10:13 AM Sep 8th from HootSuite

Ah the faces of students discovering how much google can tell about them. Awareness shortcut.8:52 PM Sep 7th from TwitterGadget

August 2009

These were the exchanges before I wrote Content 1st, People 2nd

@budtheteacher You're right. I'll try to express it in a post.1:49 PM Aug 29th from web in reply to budtheteacher
@jenwagner How can we trust speakers or conferences which do not intend to reach out or be reached?1:44 PM Aug 29th from web in reply to jenwagner
@budtheteacher I get the illusion I have potential contacts nearby in BA. You've got to see their content in blogs before you connect.1:42 PM Aug 29th from web in reply to budtheteacher
@budtheteacher I think I sense a lot of people 'having to' speak about tech now among ELT teachers. The opposite of 2006 when I started.1:39 PM Aug 29th from web in reply to budtheteacher
It is not forced. Learning just happens. Forget about saving and classifying. When you need, it'll be there.1:32 PM Aug 29th from web
'One new super tool to revolutionize blogging'. 'This is a must-follow person' Says who? Nah, content 1st, resonate with me, then we'll see.1:30 PM Aug 29th from web
There's a point when you must stop looking for like-minded nodes in the web. If they've been blogging, content would've joined us already.1:15 PM Aug 29th from web
Just 1 speaker in a BA event who will talk on 21st century skills. 1st thought: Wow. 2nd reaction: check if they tweet. They don't. Sighs.1:09 PM Aug 29th from web

Thoughts on blogging trends and learning in counterintuitive ways.

Automatic reposting of delicious links into a blog. Frankly, I simply can't help ignoring those in my RSS. Thoughts?11:26 AM Aug 27th from web
From my inbox:Link exchange request. Says she reads and likes my blog. Wants a link to her on my sidebar. (There's no sidebar in my blog).10:57 AM Aug 27th from web

@elaws Personalmente no me gusta la idea de la división en capítulos. Si el tema es serio=1post. Blognovela=3, 4 o los que quieras.2:17 AM Aug 27th from web in reply to elaws
@elaws Digamos que algunos subtítulos en negrita en un post largo pueden ayudar a tentar una lectura parcial. Después decido si es completa.2:14 AM Aug 27th from web in reply to elaws
The things I will not learn now
Surprised at the sad news. RIP @glutzky Learned a lot from our different points of view. Shared others to the corehttp://tinyurl.com/24sm861:55 PM Aug 26th from web

Edubloggers Meta-conversation

2009-09-23T13:35:00.003-03:00

Today I have been visiting new blogs and reflecting on the many stages of conversations coexisting in the edublogosphere. We are all teachers and using ICT. It seems to bind us all, but that is a quick surface structure conclusion. Sense is made with deep structure parameters: "tools and pedagogy". I need to see which side of the pendulum they are at. Reading in depth, reading the discourse styles, I begin to draw quick conclusions about where they stand in education.

There are people who are still discussing things that, to be honest, I feel they are so last century. I find it very difficult to engage or say something to those posts. Shall I say: read this tag in my delicious? Provide links to the many posts that have already pushed me ahead? Certainly not the way. I give up reading them.

However, it just dawned on me the value of those conversations. The possibility to see how we have been talking while pioneers were overhearing us. Finding the same crossroads of filter/digestion/production through someone else's viewpoint. Whatever it was that took us in one direction and not another may be more evident reading them than your own PLE blogs. It is not just that some people "get it" and some don't. It's the process of getting somewhere. I just realised the value of seeing the trail of thought being born again and again. Another chance to assess the quality of the decision making process.

Disagreement pushes my thinking back and forth again. I struggle to write just what I mean. Trying to verbalize passionate ideas puts their core values to the test. Decisions to be made beyond the borders of my comfort zone.