Tag Archives: life

Imagine never being born again. Mike Wesch reminds us why we are teachers.

Mike Wesch can easily collapse your constructed view of learning and teaching to clear a path for a clear vision of what’s essential.  Watch the video below.

Click on “The Syllabus” link below to see Mike’s trailer for his upcoming course. Dr Michael Wesch is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

The SyllabusI got so excited about my new syllabus that I decided to create a “trailer” for it. Here’s how I introduced it on the first day of class. For more information about how I created my new syllabus, check out http://myteachingnotebook.com/index.php/2015/08/28/rethinking-the-syllabus/

Posted by Michael Wesch on Friday, 28 August 2015

How can I sign up for Mike’s class!

As Mike Wesch says at the beginning of his video, “we create our tools and then our tools create us.”

In a way the curriculum is a tool. It’s a carefully constructed document, a program, a set of criteria and outcomes designed to capture what we want our students to learn and how we should teach this.

The intention is good but what about the outcome? As a tool that is meant to guide us and ensure that we address all the aspects of our subject areas, has it in fact shaped us, and what does this mean?

Are we slaves to a once living conversation and collaborative debate about learning and teaching that educators felt passionate about – now a dry document with boxes to tick and outcomes to begrudgingly limit our teaching to?

Are we imprisoned in a cocoon which prevents us from evolving to our natural and more colourful role as teachers who directly pass on passion and excitement to students, freed from predetermined outcomes which prevent each student to follow his/her learning path as if it were the first time anyone had experienced this journey?

Does our curriculum leave us, as educators, with our hands tied, and thus prevented from being who we could be for students – experts and learners ourselves who can inspire our young people to be fully involved in their own learning journey?

Weren’t we once totally besotted with our subject areas, passionate about learning within our chosen fields?

Do we even have the time and head space to keep  learning, that is, to keep the flame burning in ourselves?

Think about it: how has the curriculum, as a tool, created us as educators? How has it shaped our behaviours in the classroom and affected the way we teach?

What has become of schooling?

School, like college, should really be about ‘learning all kinds of stuff so that the world comes alive’. Let’s keep that at the forefront of the way we teach kids.

Is life a game? #CLMOOC Week 3

Will you play?

Photo source

Here is the thing. Below you will see the link to a Google Doc. This is your invitation to reMEDIAte this thing. I can do it myself but then I would be playing on my own. Please put on your safety belt. Put on your hard hat. Press play. There is no time limit. Thank you for playing.

Is life a game?

Take a card.

Are you playing the game?

Who are you?

Take another card.

How long have you been playing?

Did you ever win?

How many times did you win?

Can I start playing now?

Are the rules difficult?

Will it take me long to understand the rules?

Who else is playing?

How many people?

Answer the question.

What was the question?

Answer the question in the box provided in less than 25 words.

Shouldn’t that be fewer than 25 words?

Just answer the question. Then sign on the dotted line.

What’s your favourite colour?

Is this a game?

What is your favourite colour?

Is that an open ended question? Weren’t we supposed to have multiple choice?

What if I get the answer wrong?

Can I draw my answer?

Take another card.

Are you happy?

Is that an open-ended question?

Who else is playing?

What did they say?

Are they happy?

Just answer the question.

Can I dance the answer?

Are you alive?

Are you asking me if I’m living?

Just answer the question.

Can I take another card?

My favourite colour is blue.

Are you alive?

My favourite colour is green.

Take another card.

Is life a game?

Is that another open-ended question?

My favourite colour is red.

Is that your final answer?

I am living.

Are you alive?

What did the others say?

Are they happy?

Are they alive?

Who is asking the questions around here?

My favourite colour is yellow?

What is your favourite colour?

Are you:

  1. alive
  2. yellow
  3. barely living
  4. whatever the others said

Put a cross in the correct box.

I am not able to answer within the current limitations.

Please answer the question.

Can I speak to a lawyer?

Your favourite colour is red.

You are living.

Nobody you know is playing.

Life is a game.

Take another card.
Here is the link to the Google Doc. Please play with me. My favourite colour is white. Is this really a game or is it a load of

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Confessions of an online junkie

In leaving a comment in a discussion about the balancing act between actual life and online life, I quoted Lauren O’Grady in her blogpost “Hyperconnection!! Arggh this changes everything.. for me anyway” where she talks about a time when a friend made her realise how much her hyperconnectedness was affecting her relationships with family and friends. She also talks about Ariel Meadow Stallings whose addiction to the internet you can read about in her blog. After going to a workshop about finding balance between technology and soul, Ariel decided to unplug one night a week for a year – and then blogged about it (as one does). Her blog includes a video of her 52 nights unplugged on the Today Show. Kind of ironic. Like compensating for internet abstinence by embedding the experience online. Online therapy, if you will.

I have to admit that, since plugging in, my life has also been undeniably affected. I go to bed later, am less fastidious about housework, rarely bake, read less fiction, and never answer the phone! And I’ve started to develop some disturbing habits; I find myself scuttling furtively from blog to Twitter to Facebook to gmail to internet, and so on. And at the end of the day (well, yes, it’s already the next day by then) I find it almost impossible to disconnect cleanly, at least not without a final few rounds of furtive scuttling. Now I ask you – should I be looking at therapy?

I could justify my dependence on being online by saying that there is so much online that is interesting and important for my professional and personal development, but then I would only be saying a half-truth. Not everything I read online is absolutely essential; there are too many tempting forks in the road, and not so much forks as capillaries branching out like fractals. That’s why the question of balance is, for me, an important one while I still have my husband with me, and while I can still get out of the chair. I know I have to do something about it, but I don’t know what. And if anyone says moderation, let me say that I know that I should only eat chocolate in moderation, but how??

Stephen Downes, in his Seven habits of highly connected people, suggests that we should stop wasting time in order to make way for meaningful online time. Surprisingly, he includes in his definition of time-wasting such things as reading and telephone conversations. I had to re-read the paragraph about ‘connection’ a few times to make sure he wasn’t being facetious. I don’t think he was. We should be careful with our definition of what is a waste of time. There are always unproductive periods or times that could be labelled as time-wasting. But these times are hardly insidious. They might be essential for germinating ideas. Creative people – artists, musicians and writers – are not being productive all the time. We all have our ‘down time’, and I’m certain that this is some sort of ‘pause’ mechanism which gives us the break we all need. A reflecting time, a processing time, a human time….