Tag Archives: story

Rhizo15

Learning subjectives. Mr X loses his battle for objectivity.

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Good afternoon. Please take a seat. Mr X will be with you shortly.

Thank you.  (I take a seat and settle into the chair which is terribly uncomfortable. I am too large for the chair and always have been but I’ve accepted it with the appropriate …

So, Mr X will see you now. I assume you’ve brought your papers.

Er – papers?

Yes, your CV, your references, your learning objectives.

My…

Never mind. Please go down the corridor. It’s the first door to your right.

Er – thank you. (I walk until I find the door. I knock twice.)

Come in, please.

I enter the room. Mr X is sitting behind a large wooden desk, studying me.

Please, sit down.

I do.

So, you’re applying for the rest of your life, are you?

Yes.

You realise that you’re one of many millions of applicants – all wanting to keep learning for the rest of their lives, don’t you?

Yes. I understand.

Show me your learning objectives, please.

Well…I – um…

You do have learning objectives, don’t you? I hope you are not wasting my time.

N-not exactly.

Well how exactly do you intend to get through life without objectives? (His brow is seriously furrowed.)

Actually – I don’t have objectives but –

You realise that we are talking about the rest of your life, don’t you? This is no laughing matter.

Well – if I could explain. I don’t, as you’ve said, have learning objectives for the rest of my life but what I do have is learning subjectives.

Silence.

Silence.

I’m not sure what you’re playing at, but as I’ve already said, there are milliions of people applying for this privilege.

If I could just explain – I think you will understand that it’s possible to continue learning through life with learning subjectives in place of objectives.

Mr X lowered his thick rimmed glasses and peered intensely and unpleasantly at me.

I continued.

You see, subjectives are a type of objective … only seen from a different perspective.

A different perspective! Please explain. (eye rolling)

Well, with objectives you start from the end and work backwards whereas with subjectives you are free to move any which way and even simultaneously.

His look of contempt did not deter me.

You see, I’ve developed an allergy to things which support objectives. Things like preconceived ideas, data entered carefully into spreadsheets, dot points, the narrowness of finite theories, that sort of thing. I have an aversion to these things and I become so ill that I am unable to function.

Go on…

I swallowed.

I need to approach life in a less organised, predetermined way. I need to include the way I feel, for example, in the way I understand life. I need to include questions and doubts in the way I make sense of things, I need mood changes and I also need to be able to synthesize seemingly illogical things into a new way of seeing. I need to follow – what I refer to as learning subjectives.

Preposterous! His outburst moved the large desk forward and his family photos fell down.

What you are telling me is that you are rejecting good common sense and traditional values and insisting on this groundless faith in what can only be described as blasphemous nonsense. This is a NON-SENSE! Do you hear me?! You will not be able to go through lifelong learning clinging to these asinine beliefs. Get out!

There was only one thing to do. I wasted no time. In my mind I drew a cage around this dreadful man and locked him in.  His ranting and raving were repulsive. I transformed it into the sound of crashing waves. I left him there in his salt water turbulence, thrashing at the iron bars. I had more important things to do. I had a subjective life to lead.

P.S. I had trouble keeping a straight face while writing this. Just didn’t know how to approach the first #rhizo15 task set by Dave Cormier  – “Learning subjectives”. Decided to be a bit silly. I think I need a good gif or two. Any suggestions?

I do like a course that admits to not knowing where it’s going. A course with a history, however. The history of Rhizo14 which has crept into conversations in Connected Courses, on Twitter and other spaces where people gather to do what keeps them fascinated in a collaborative way as they teach, put their children to bed and scribble out course outlines. And so I begin the much awaited Rhizo15, knowing that we go where others have gone before us but we get lost intentionally so we can go our own way.

I might need someone to hold my hand.

 

 

 

21st century learning, flickr, Web 2.0, writing

Five Card Flickr – what a great lesson

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Teaching is such an up and down thing. I always hesitate to say ‘teaching’ because I’m a teacher librarian, and we don’t teach the same way teachers teach. Our role is so diverse, and we are sometimes seen in the classroom and other times seen at our computers, madly reading or researching and creating stuff for teachers and students. But teachers we are, so it’s teaching that we do.

Anyway, as I was saying, I think most teachers would agree that during a typical school week it’s common to experience ups and downs, and sometimes so many of these that you just want out.

This week just past was one such week. Most of the time it seemed that it would just be a downward roll but somehow the last lesson of the week was so enjoyable that it redeemed the rest.

Sometimes simple things can work so well. So it was when I joined a teacher and his Year 9 English class to give Five Card Flickr a go. It’s one of the writing  prompts in my new blog called Storyteller. It seemed simple, we both decided to give it a go. Secretly I thought it might bomb since this was the last period of the week, and after all, these were Year 9 boys.

But lo and behold! it was a success! After a brief explanation the boys were bent over their laptops typing away. And they kept typing! Now I have to explain that our lessons are over an hour long so I thought there was no way that this activity would take up the rest of the period. But it did! There’s something heart-warming when you see a room full of 14-15 year olds engrossed in something at school.

So what’s Five Card Flickr? Simple: you go to the website and you’re presented with five photos pulled from Flickr – so they’re photos people have shared. Real people, and you can check out a little about these people because their usernames are hyperlinked to their Flickr page. So you can have a look at what else they have been  photographing.

Ok, so out of these five photos, you choose one, and as soon as you click on it, a new set of 5 photos appear, and so it goes until you have 5 photos which you’ve chosen for your piece of writing. Then you add your username, a title for your story and write it directly into the box provided. You save and then it’s added to a gallery, and you can also share it as a permanent link.

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Valbusa on Flickr

As soon as the boys started writing, they peered across to the student next to them to see what they were writing. Mr T. was also writing a story and his was projected onto the screen, and it was cool to see it evolve as a process along with the editing. After they’d written their first story, the boys were curious to read everyone’s contribution in the gallery. And that’s the whole point of this kind of technology – to open up to the group; kids like the social aspect of writing. They like to compare and have a laugh at each other’s stories. The sharing becomes the most important, most satisfying part of the experience. Compare that to writing something for the teacher full stop.

I think they were also chuffed to see their stories on the Web; they liked the fact that other people – people they didn’t know – would read them. I think it made them feel like mini celebrities. Never know who will read your stuff.

Five Card Flickr could be used in so many ways – in English class, ESL, foreign language. You could allow any kind of written response – we said write whatever. So they could write a poem, prose, a song, first person, third person, etc. After the first one we decided to specify genre, so they had to write a horror story. There are as many possibilities here as your imagination allows.

Pictures are such a good prompt for writing, and Five Card Flickr is a winner. You should try it.

Here are some of our boys’ responses:

animation, art, play

Flip! literacies in animation

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[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=AYeTwfyx0nw]

Here’s a quirky and creative little flipbook animation called Kraak & Smaak: Squeeze me (source: Drawn).

Another example of the endless possibilities for creativity with technology. Literacies? The kinds of things that include storytelling, sequencing, playful possibilities, imagination, what-ifs and the like.

Education, photos, Remarkable

Japan Media Arts Festival: Ryukyudisko’s “Nice Day”

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I’m having trouble embedding the video; maybe I’ll figure it out later

I discovered a brilliant film in Frames per second in a post by Emru Townsend. Ryukyudisko’s “Nice day” was a stand-out in the 2007 Japan Media Arts Festival’s Entertainment Division. I can see why. This film begs multiple viewing. This is what Emru Townsend had to say:

‘The entire video is a progression of still photographs starting somewhere in the 1970s, with a couple getting busy under the covers and producing a young boy. We watch him get older, get a job, and then he hits the clubs and meets a girl–and the whole starts going into reverse, as we go back into the girl’s history. However, we find ourselves going back even farther than her parents …’

It’s staggering when you think about the time it would take to orchestrate such a skillful and dynamic progression of images. It makes you think about the power of storytelling, and the possibilities within visual media without speech or text. I think the inclusion of speech or text would have weakened the impact of the film.

I’m thinking of the way students could be inspired to create their own story using a similar stills technique. There is much to discuss here. Movement forwards and backwards in time is an interesting concept in the visual form. The speed of the film is not only a solution to the practical problem of covering more storyline, but creates a perspective that is very large, one you would normally not have, by whizzing through the characters’ lives, not dwelling on one thing more than another. I love how the intertwining of lives occurs, with the movement back and forth in time, almost like the tangling and untangling of string.