Starting to make some contact with my bunkmates and other folk, some amazing folk here. Still trying to find my minecraft feet. Lots of kindly help.
So for week 1 we had to:
Watch and Review Mike Wesch Videos Michael Wesch at UMW Faculty Academy Part 1 and Part 2
The main point of this week’s reflection is to connect the concepts described by Wesch to your own experiences on the web, and project how this might play out as you develop your own online space for this class.
I am not going to reflect much on this here, but I though some workflow/playflow notes might be of interest.
I, like any other teacher interested in Web 2, am aware and have nodded along to Mike Wesch’s famous youtubes. I was keen to watch these ones, but 2 hours seems a long time to spend. I downloaded the videos, ripped the audio, converted to MP3s and stuck on my dropbox:
I then made them favourites on my iPhone so that I could listen to them away from wifi. Yesterday (Sunday now 2 days ago) I was driving an hour to go for a walk, so listen to one on the way there and one coming back. This is one of the reasons that I am a podcasting fan, as a consumer I can multitask. As a producer podcast has needs fewer media skills, so I like that too.
Listen to someone with a powerful presentation that includes video is not ideal, but this worked, I’ve seem some of the material before and imagined the rest. The problem was, it is hard to take notes or mark time when driving (Ideally, I’d like a voice controlled app that I could pause a podcast/audio and record my own audio notes).
One of Mike Wesch’s big points is how learners are disconnected from the classroom, a familiar refrain from lots of educators across the sectors. He clearly demonstrated how he had overcome this by involving the learners more fully in the teaching & learning process. Of course he tells it less baldly than that, his examples are beautiful. This is the way mainstreak Scottish education is developing through the curriculum for excellence. It feels right, there are now lots of great examples (plenty of recent Scots one on pedagoo.org) and on a tiny scale I’ve occasionally seen it work in my classroom.
I am still left wondering if this will work longer term. I do worry that the best example of this depend on really outstanding teacher connecting in unique ways with classes. The proof might be after a few dozen DS106 the question, how many daily creates and assignments do I have to do? no longer exists?
My week 2 daily creates:
Please specify a Flickr ID for this gallery
and
That was five tdcs in one week. I find it easier to try and do as many as possible, last session once I slowed down I stopped.
The Wäscälly Wäbbits are lucky to have you to help set our our arts and crafts bar high. I appreciate all these helpful tech accommodations from the RSS aggregation/twitter list and now audio of Wesch’s keynote. I also have a hard time sitting and watching 2 hours of video and enjoy the multi-tasking that audio brings. I have noticed, however that it’s also easier to tune out and end up taking notes to keep focused. That’s kinda hard while driving!
I love your daily creates and again you are correct, best to just get in the habit, make it a part of being. I’m just getting back into the flow of it too. Keep up the great work and thanks for letting me drop in 🙂