Tuesday, March 08, 2016

Identity revisited. Exploring the boundaries of our online selves.

A few Internet years ago I wrote a post about my own identity online. I was trying to collect my thoughts around what I show and not show in various online spaces. I lingered on hyperlinked ideas of how up close and personal blogging can be as well as the certainty that you may be quite private and still reveal who you are. At least, the bits of yourself that can fuel these connections we make online, even nurture them into sincere friendships.

My mind was drifting along with some tweets the other night, when I felt this 2011 post and the idea of how I network online needs revisiting.

Alec Couros posed this question:

Further down the thread, Alec focuses his thinking camera lenses:
"well, perhaps not policy but tendencies over a given time that retroactively provide your usual limits."

I heard myself drafting a few responses in my mind, which I never got round to tweeting.

Why? -you ask.

My not responding fluently and confidently could be, at first, charged to some degree of shame or fear suddenly surfacing to silence me. Perhaps, this silence could be hinting at some gender issue. My guess -or my preconception- is that men tend to be more prolific and brave to speak their thoughts online. I lack serious statistics but, a bird's view of people I read and follow gives me the impression it is mostly men doing the talking. There are women bloggers I know who gradually post less, much less frequently than slow male bloggers. Of course, you cannot generalise.

Back to my own silence. I think it's due to a simpler issue. In order to answer that tweet I should've had to bullet point topics I do not mention online and break my own rules. Frankly, I feel quite good and safe sticking to boundaries of my own making whether online or not.

I do not regret those unwritten tweets. I am more fascinated by digging into a mysterious source of trust in myself that tells me something is very important in that question which definitely needs answering, yet -all at once- I feel something, at first elusive to classification, needs rewording to make sense. At least for me. So I go into pause mode.

When the ideas and words suddenly sound as if I were listening to music from the bottom of a swimming pool, that is the moment I know an important issue for me has been touched. I need not lose myself in the stream. I need out, out where I can do some slow thinking far from the twitter race track of responses. My version of slow thinking looks like a blank page, a proper keyboard and my cup of tea. Offline. And time, oh yeah.

Now.

What makes Alec's question so compelling?
Five years ago I pondered on what I post online. What you get to see of me as a result of my decisions. Alec's question points at how personal or professional you choose to be online. It was the slight perspective shift towards the process that kidnapped my thoughts the other night.

How you post is often taken for granted. If you become fluent online, you may easily skip this reflection and go straight to what should be discussed. It is important to mark the omission because what you skipped (hey, what you inadvertently silenced) could point to the cogs in a broken online machine that need assessing and replacing. How do you get to respond or not to important human issues online? What drives you? What triggers you? There's a starting point for fruitful conversations about topics still unnamed and hidden behind the hype, the flashlights of the tech being used. If we thought about alternatives to framing questions like...
Is (name the tool) good or bad for (pick your interest), what would we be discussing instead?

The tool is a mere anecdote, not the story.

People who do not have an existence in social networks speak of Facebook or Twitter as places you go to and contaminate yourself with the surroundings. Really? Are you a different self when you change online space? A simple Google search can be so telling.

How personal or professional you choose to be online and why is no doubt a great question.

Yet.

What kind of bells did the original question ring to trigger my suspicious mind and bring me to a response halt?

Now I clearly see it was the word Twitter that stopped me. Twitter used to mean a gathering place we go to. To me Twitter is just paper sticky notes, the Internet is the place.

Most people (me too) use Twitter for goofy stuff, Phatic function role in communication (I know, Roman Jakobson's theory is dated, but it helps my point here). That trivial, seemingly unimportant use of the platform is so, so human. Until Twitter first appeared, edubloggers were experts I profoundly admired and responded to in fairly formal blog comments. Today, a few of those experts are friends I hold very dear. How did that happen?

I see the point that if we can discuss important social issues on Twitter, we can discuss them on the blog. But why wouldn't the reverse also apply? The idea that certain media (social networks or good old letters) are a more appropriate means depending on the message is worth exploring. There is a huge difference between clicking a love button on Twitter or spelling out to the other person that you love them. Those are choices. It is not the tool but how you privately position yourself in front of it. Even before that, you may have already decided how open or reserved you will be on Internet mediated contexts. Through time that can change.

Common sense and literacy can help you in online interactions, but ultimately you decide how you involve yourself publicly. Self-awareness (or lack of) about your drive is probably at the root of understanding/misunderstanding intentions or telling honest people from scammers online. It is a safety issue. How we go online is probably what we should be talking about to our students. We will never be able to test how much they learn from it. Learning proof is probably not that important. Focus shift is. If we just focus on the measurable what and skip the subtleties of the elusive how we construct our experiences and relationships online, do we qualify for teaching students today?

Discussing contents to guarantee our students secure an employment in the future is far from enough. Most of our students are going to first meet significant others on the Internet. We do not want them to fall prey of catfish. We are not experts ourselves, we are learning. We need to discover and accept our retroactive steps and feelings towards the people we have friended online. Students google us. They crave for our own stories. The answer to that is not a power point with safety rules before you post. An honest account of what we believe are possible ways of building relationships across continents is ever so powerful. That's teaching, the kind of teaching we do when we simply open up and share ourselves in casual conversational style.

Can you do that? Lisa can.

***

Hey, if I had answered the tweet, I probably wouldn't have written this post. Ah... the carrousel a woman's mind can be while we stay behind a screen voraciously reading while still silent.

I find that fascinating.


Credit where credit is due, i.e. inspiration attribution:
This post was powered by the online presence of (the real) Dr Alec Couros, whom I strongly recommend following. You can count on his answer if you reach him with your thoughts anywhere he dwells online. Far from closing your thinking with irrefutable conclusions, he'll provide further food for thought, which can distract you from the job you should be doing. Consider yourselves fairly warned.




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Friday, August 24, 2012

Comment on Chris Lehmann's Blog


Here is a comment I posted on Chris Lehmann's inspiring blog post Genius vs Expertise.
I am trying to respond to Chris when he says,

"It can take some really smart people — maybe even geniuses — to innovate. Let’s be sure of that. But the true gift lies not in coming up with the idea, but in developing ways for others to own it. We aren’t going to get four million geniuses to teach in our schools. (I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t want them anyway, the teachers’ lounge would become even more insufferable.) We also have to understand that expertise can become a prison of its own creation if it locks out new ideas and creates a hierarchy of “expert” that causes resentment, stagnation of ideas and entropy. And in the end, what both genius and expertise need is a healthy dose of humility because we should never fall in love with our own ideas, no matter how we came to them."

My comment:

 I think I can see where you synthesis comes from. I would add that geniuses -moments of genius some of us could have- may just as well cause resentment among experts. Experts at their job as a result of having made a sustained effort over a number of years tend to feel slightly threatened by sparks of genius. Yes, I agree we should not fall in love with our ideas. Neither should we fall in love with our sustained effort. So humility does it both ways.

 On a side note, I can’t help enjoying the fact this post is written between two conversations with your f2f friend. I assume, perhaps I’m wrong, that your friend does not read your blog.

 When you friend says “The coming change in this country...”, the deictic “this” points to my own reality in Argentina as I read it. Perhaps we are not that far. East/West could be translated to Capital city and the provinces. I think we need to understand the coming change is unloading our speech from trying to decide which way is best for us, seen from where we come from, and making sure we provide students with a context to decide what is best for themselves, freed from our own dualities because we have solved them before taking action in front of them. If they can come up with dualities of their own making in the future, there’s an interesting change to look forward to.

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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The story of how I failed teaching social bookmarking

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.


Sales!
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.

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Monday, April 19, 2010

IWBs and the Fallacy of Integration

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.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Classroom Evolution


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/

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Monday, March 22, 2010

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

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.


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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The Sounds of Silence


What is an hiatus exactly?
A gap, a stop, a missing piece.
Note that each an every word you associate with it is always pregnant with negative connotations.

I suffer from being passionately interested in too many things, but surrounded by an indifferent offline standard-test-complying environment.

A chasm of sorts.

Result? A swarm of questions:
Why do I still blog?
Who do I write to?
What for?

Answers are not always obvious. Learning can be a long and winding road. I am re-thinking what I have long taken for granted.

Puzzles me.

The way out: my own blog. A tracing of my learning journey. When I need a hand out of the pit, there's my RSS.

Echoes of my own voice begin to creep up while reading others. I sense a post brewing in my mind. But to write, I need my own filter. When writing, I am just trying to connect with my own pleasure of writing. It's the only way I can find now to by-pass all of the puzzling questions and keep pumping words into my blog.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is 'getting it'. It's the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn't care about workbooks or long checklists.

Learning doesn't care about the blog. It's not the blog, it's 'getting it'.

There are times when you learn lots in silence. Away from the passionate voice of your blog. Much more in contact with those teachers who are reluctant to innovate. I listen to their voices and their reasons. How to bridge the gap between us?

Passion and passion-based learning is all very well, but short lived by nature. It consumes itself. Better to respect that.

Buying the illusion of perpetual blogging thrill opens the way to standardize passion. A prescription to kill the magic. Tell me, when would you say it is advisable not to blog or publish?

Something's missing guys. Something like embracing the gap.

I also want to read posts which are not so passionate. Saying it with passion doesn't make it true. Sometimes it is just as speaking louder and expecting to be right. I want to read posts written under less intense, calmer emotions. Posts that distill learning after the hype.

This is the chasm I must cross in my learning curve:
Passion, short lived.
Learning -we so claim- is lifelong.
So?

I think we are missing the hiatus in learning.



Image credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnett/2836828090/


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Friday, June 08, 2007

Open Education

Open Education
Reflections on the Future of Education.
(My own -that is).

Learning at University and on the Internet at the same time is hard for me to integrate. It is an advantage to have chosen a University specialised in systems. I have a course of studies coordinator who is open to new technologies. She asked me to post this profile page on her new wiki experiment. It took me less than half an hour (*excuse me Stephen) to briefly put forward my ideas. A year of learning, online artifacts creation and future hopes on one page. And I owe that clarity to blogging; not a university.

Some ideas written in that wiki might be left aside as I continue my learning journey. I think these will probably not:

My Serendipitous Learning
My attitude in front of a screen has changed. I figure our students will face a future of information and communications change for which we cannot fully prepare them. Yet, we can give them tools and a glimpse of the digital literacies they will need for lifelong learning.
What I look for at University
I expect this Materials Design II course to help me go further in the search of theoretical substance to investigate what these ICT tools enable us to do in our classrooms. I hope this year I learn to integrate knowledge gained through formal and informal learning experiences; for I have found that both paths can be powerful enough to generate meaning, reflection and learning.

In search of integration patterns
I cannot speak of the future of education without the word "open" playing a key part.

Via the FOE attendr map, I landed again on Daniel Craig's blog. His post Why Peer-Reviewed Publishing?
invites to reflection on ranking academic journals.

Daniel says:
I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last couple years, considering that I have a career ahead of me (hopefully) involving tenure review. However, I neither believe that traditional "high-quality" journals should have the power that they do over evaluation of academic prowess nor do I believe that they are the best place way to disseminate information. So, which direction do I go?

My comments (on his post)
Openness of publication and access can make results rather messy -not to say overwhelming. Spotting good quality is becoming a complex task.

For the time-being, an article saved 140 times in del.icio.us does not speak about its potential academic value. It just states that 140 people have read it.

Perhaps sites like diigo, with shared annotated bookmarks and the possibility to trace the note writer to its webpage, could open room to find diamonds in the rough outside the recognised journals in any given field. Yahoo pipes also looks promising as you mentioned in another post.

Still, as much as technology may simplify the finding process, much remains to be done about learning what makes a contribution valuable. To become more autonomous readers and not just wait until authorities decide what should be read.

Academy culture tends to change slowly. Authority and stability are at the heart of its existence. Should universities become more flexible, open, change altogether? Hard to predict their future.

Afterthoughts (or notes to self)
Where does that leave us teachers?
We will have to teach the separation of form, content and context if we want students to manage the changing nature of knowledge and information sources. We will have to model reflection in front of our students. Show them how we find patterns in what we consider quality value. Account for the reading selection we bring to class.

How to assess this process?
The key is, perhaps, again in openness. Who will have the power to change or review the syllabus? How open are we to expose our designs to criticism from colleagues? How much value can be given to students' self-assessment of their work?

I do not have definite answers. I'm afraid I never will. One thing is certain. Reflecting on my practice used to be rather lonely. The activities going on in my class were mostly private -except for the odd observation. I fear that all knowledge I did not share before has been lost in my mind. Those ideas did not grow.

Publishing my thoughts has led me to know like-minded people who take me further. Now, I am on the winding road of spotting the good, the bad and the ugly of the Internet. And then how it all integrates with academic contexts.

Sigh.

I hope I am on the right track.

....................
* I read Things you Really Need to Learn on Half an Hour last night. A gem indeed. My favourite post on the future of education. No comments. Just re-read and nodded.

Picture credits:
SimplySchmoopie
joannamkay (her edublog pic)
ChrisCampbell(last 2 pics)

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