Work @ TAFE

It’s getting towards the end of my planned project time working on the tutorial:Getting Started with Blogging in Education. It’s been a great learning process for me in lots of different ways… next week I’ll write up my own summary + reflections, but for now just the normal droll (for my own record) of what’s been happening:

Teachers blogging to learn

After a few conversations with different people, I’m starting to think that it’s not so worthwhile trying to get educators to see the point of trying to use blogs in their own classes in a two hour workshop. People really need to experience the learning benefits of blogging themselves rather than immediately trying to use blogs in class.

For this reason, I’ve updated the activities within the Creating your own blog section of the workshop to encourage educators to begin reflecting on their own experience in the classroom and with technology - real issues that we can interact with there and then. Hopefully this’ll help people experience the social-constructivist learning that takes place when blogging - and encourage people to use their blog for their own professional development after class and continue learning (even if it was only once per month).

Helping others who want to run the workshop

Last week I finished the initial Facilitator Tips for the tutorial. These tips are just some ideas for how the Workshop can be used in practice (pre-workshop preparation, classroom setup, the workshop itself, and post-workshop communication). Ideally it really needs some contributions from others running the workshop… but that leads on to…

Getting other people involved…

When you throw your weight behind an idea (read pride, thought, effort & sleep) - an idea that you personally think will be useful to lots of people - it’s so easy to believe that everyone with any experience of blogging in education will want to contribute and join in. I’m currently trying to evaluate the reasons why this doesn’t happen… so far I’ve got:

1. The idea doesn’t strike other people as being as exciting or worthwhile (and perhaps therefore isn’t!)
2. The issue of perceived ownership - people want to contribute their time and ideas to something they believe in, not to a project “owned” by someone else (although in this situation, the idea isn’t owned by anyone - perhaps this is a problem)
3. People just don’t have time.
4. The people who would be interested don’t know about it yet
5. The project doesn’t meet immediate needs. Ie. there aren’t many people (in the circles we’ve contacted) who are involved in running similar workshops.

We emailed out to the Teach and Learn Online group (58 members), and out of those 58 only one person interacted by posting a discussion on the one of the pages.

That being said, Leigh and I have enjoyed working with each others’ ideas and taking the project in different ways using each others ideas.

Sourcing content for online learning

Leigh had a great idea for a page of recommendations for content sources - worthwhile links to information that can be legally sourced into your own material (i.e. licensed with a Creative Commons or GNU Public license). I spent some time formatting and adding information to this page as it’s a great idea!

A new icon for the site

I also took a photo of our hand-held blender at home to give the site a bit of a theme. Leigh pointed out that the icon could be confused for something else and might replace it with a photo that Sunshine has taken of their own blender.

And that’s it!