Facebook always provokes strong emotions; some people love it, spending their entire lives on there, and others hate it and will not go anywhere near it.
There is an interesting article in today's Guardian which suggests there is a growing body of evidence that social networking can have an isolating effect on people. People are getting more and more drawn into the 'social' media itself and so spending less and less time actually interacting with real people.
I love Facebook and spend quite a bit of time on there, not playing games, just reading the trivia about my friends lives and sharing my own, along with sharing interesting things I have seen or read. To me this feels like real, meaningful exchange, which increases my sense of connection with my friends. So, how come other people end up feeling that they are isolated observers of other people's lives?
I think the answer is to do with tacit knowledge. When I spend 'live' time with my friends I see their facial expressions, hear the nuances in their voices and can gauge their subtle reactions when we talk. After a while we build a tacit understanding of each other that then carries through to our online interactions. I can read between the lines of their posts or understand a whole lot more than was written into a brief text.
Looking back at my model of learning developed in my PhD, I would say that when I get to know somebody I have moved to the 'expert learner' stage where I can observe their online dialogue and understand without needing the 'bridges' provided by face-to-face interaction. So, for me this virtual contact is really meaningful, is often the starting point of conversation when I meet friends, and is a vital point of contact with friends who live far away and I see rarely.
For those who find it isolating, I guess they need more balance in their lives. They need to try to spend as much real time with people as they do virtual time, and to narrow that virtual contact to include many more real friends and to cut out many who are just virtual friends. My personal Facebook rule is that I am only 'friends' with people I know. Some of these are people I don't know well and am never likely to, but it would have been rude to refuse. So, I file them into a category where they do not see the personal things I post and I do not see theirs, they have had the satisfaction of adding me to their list but nothing more.
The same goes for so many things in life - a little in moderation is good for you - but too much of anything usually has negative side affects!
Showing posts with label web 2.0 resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web 2.0 resources. Show all posts
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Saturday, 1 May 2010
A vision of students today
I am not sure this video tells me anything I didn't already know and it certainly offers no solutions, but I LOVE the way it has been made. I also shows interesting use of Google documents to gather student opinion and experiences. (My thanks for fellow Open University tutor Derek Jones for posting that on our course forum.)
Saturday, 24 April 2010
More understanding of "the crit"
A small 'aha' moment about what is happening during "the crit" I described earlier - two things:
Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.
I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?
- The teacher(s) assess the student's work, tell them what is good about it and where it can be improved. (That bit is obvious!)
- The student experiences this process for their own work and sees it happening to other students. In this way they learn about how to critique generally; the sorts of criteria their work is judged on, things which tend to be praised, things which tend to be frowned upon, different ways of solving different problems. (That was my 'aha' moment!)
Again, during the H&S training session I observed, the small group of students who attended got to see a range of common problems and solutions to them which would have been much more limited if they had been alone. They clearly did not understand this and had a tendency to wander off or be looking elsewhere whilst the others had their go.
I wonder if simply making this explicit to the students would make a difference, or if something more sophisticated with group work and peer support needs to be done?
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Craft learning and "the crit"
"The crit" is central to traditional design education and I sat in on one this week as part of my current research at Sheffield Hallam University. It brought back memories of doing it myself, it is a fairly scary experience, and it made me think about the Japanese craftsmen's apprenticeship experiences described in Edo craftsmen : master artisans of old Tokyo.
Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.
It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!
Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.
This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!
I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...
via my kesurokai blog
Firstly let me describe "the crit" for the uninitiated; it's a little like X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, but the audience are also putting on the show, they are students each showing their latest work. One by one they go to the front of the room and show images of their work on PowerPoint and hand around things they have made. The 'judges' are a group of lecturers who sit around a table making notes, discussing, asking the students questions and offering advice.
It is only three weeks until the students hand in their final projects and they need help knowing what to do to get it finished satisfactorily. Quite a few haven't made good use of the Easter holidays and are going to have a busy few weeks. The atmosphere is a bit tense, the lecturers at times have to be quite blunt to the students about their work, but whilst they are tough, they are also very fair and very supportive. There feels to be a close bond between the lecturers and students. At the end of the session another student drops into the room to give a little box to one of the lecturers; it contains a cup-cake and pinned to the top is a handwritten thank-you note!
Whilst the students go through this many times during their three years at University, the old craftsmen in Toyko had often started at a very young age and continued under the critical eye of their master for many years. For some it was clearly a positive experience, but others spoke with perplexing pride of the fact that their masters never praised their work and they were reluctant to praise their own work themselves. I can't decide if it is false modesty or a genuine feeling that they ll never be as good as their masters. Either way, it doesn't strike me as healthy.
This somehow joins up with my other major project with Open University where I have been part of the team writing a new course in Design Thinking which is entirely delivered online and all the students study it remotely. I am tutoring one of the first batches of students through the course and also moderator on the student forum so party to a wide range of online interactions. In this situation it seems to be quite difficult to "crit" the students and even getting them to do critical analysis of their own work is not easy. This too is not healthy!
I feel that for online / distance learning to be successful there needs to be a way of getting the right sort of "crit" into the arena. It needs to fall into the 'tough but fair' category, which partly comes from the attitude of the teachers (those I observed clearly worked well together as a group), and partly from their relationship with the students. Fostering all this online is very different to dealing with face-to-face relationships and so much of it falls outside the scope of the sorts of learning resources I have been designing, however it is clearly vital to their success. Hmmmm ...
via my kesurokai blog
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
The peapod
I recently had a meeting with a small group of lecturers from some of our different design degree courses to discuss possible applications for my research to help with their teaching. Jane from our fashion design course highlighted the problem of many students lacking very basic sewing skills when they start. They struggle to undertake what should be simple making projects and there is limited time within the current curriculum for this level of teaching. John from our furniture design course said they had just the same problem.
As the discussion progressed, Jeff from metalwork & jewellery came up with "the peapod" as an analogy:
So, we have this idea that students need a repertoire of basic skills, that's the pod. We need to identify a set of key skills to teach them as a basis (the peas) and these will provide the students with a foundation from which they themselves can expand and fill out their repertoire.
It sounds like potentially a good application for a multimedia learning resource and I think it will fit in well with my next research proposal. I also very much liked Jeff's concept of "peer leakage" and will have to work that one in somewhere too!
As the discussion progressed, Jeff from metalwork & jewellery came up with "the peapod" as an analogy:
So, we have this idea that students need a repertoire of basic skills, that's the pod. We need to identify a set of key skills to teach them as a basis (the peas) and these will provide the students with a foundation from which they themselves can expand and fill out their repertoire.
It sounds like potentially a good application for a multimedia learning resource and I think it will fit in well with my next research proposal. I also very much liked Jeff's concept of "peer leakage" and will have to work that one in somewhere too!
Monday, 13 July 2009
Vacuum casting
The folding knives research project demonstrated that well motivated independent learners working in physical isolation but supported by an online community could acquire complex new skills and use them in creative ways. This project applied our existing methods of eliciting and representing skills to a process used by undergraduate design students in University workshops and resulted in the production of an online resource and a set of proposals for how such resources could be developed in a more widespread manner.
In the creative disciplines, where learning is often based on practical projects, the craft skills of each discipline are both a crucial prerequisite for successful learning, and a learning problem in themselves. This tends to create a complex situation in which teachers and technicians are supporting both skills learning and intellectual development at the same time. While this can be very productive, pressures on resources can lead to concentration on skills at the expense of advanced thinking.
The vacuum casting process was chosen as a pilot project to test the feasibility of producing multimedia learning resources to enable students to work more independently in the workshops. A series of workshop sessions were arranged to enable a technician with expertise in the process to teach an expert learner, one of the design lecturers.
These were observed and video recorded by myself working in collaboration with the expert learner to generate prototype learning materials. These were developed and tested by two further learners who had no prior knowledge of the process and ultimately made into an online resource which would allow students to preview materials supported by selected video then print out worksheets for use in the workshop.
The online resource developed during this research is available here
This research was carried out with Prof Chris Rust and funded by Shefield Hallam University.
In the creative disciplines, where learning is often based on practical projects, the craft skills of each discipline are both a crucial prerequisite for successful learning, and a learning problem in themselves. This tends to create a complex situation in which teachers and technicians are supporting both skills learning and intellectual development at the same time. While this can be very productive, pressures on resources can lead to concentration on skills at the expense of advanced thinking.
The vacuum casting process was chosen as a pilot project to test the feasibility of producing multimedia learning resources to enable students to work more independently in the workshops. A series of workshop sessions were arranged to enable a technician with expertise in the process to teach an expert learner, one of the design lecturers.
These were observed and video recorded by myself working in collaboration with the expert learner to generate prototype learning materials. These were developed and tested by two further learners who had no prior knowledge of the process and ultimately made into an online resource which would allow students to preview materials supported by selected video then print out worksheets for use in the workshop.
The online resource developed during this research is available here
This research was carried out with Prof Chris Rust and funded by Shefield Hallam University.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)