Category: Research Ideas
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
In an effort to review my research focus, and to update what I know, I’m blogging my thesis. It’s more a reblogging exercise, if you think of the thesis as a huge blog, which it’s not. But the things I learnt while doing it are very important and in the 5 years since its completion, I’ve barely touched it. In some ways, I think it has become more important because we are much more engaged in many more forms of interaction. I collected my data nearly a decade ago and my concern was that we weren’t really sure what learners were doing while engaged in ‘online learning’. I’m still not convinced that ‘online’ is different from face-to-face but I’m also not convinced that it’s the same. There are different affordances available through each, and how this plays out in learning is still not well understood. There’s an insidious pedagogy (Lane, 2009) implied with their use, but that is also true of face-to-face. I’ll come to that later.
This is the beginning of my thesis – the background, the set-up. I don’t think there is much changed since I wrote this, but there is a broadening of issues. Read more of Learning and interactions
Tags: learning
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Friday, January 1st, 2010
Over the last few days, I have been looking at sections of my PhD to help me understand some of the processes that are happening with attempts to censor/filter the Internet as proposed by the Australian Government. One of the particular issues I have is not so much whether censorship is bad (I believe it is) or whether free speech trumps it (perhaps in a limited way), but what opportunities we forego in an attempt to protect children from ‘inadvertent’ exposure to ‘stuff we don’t like’. I use ‘we’, there, to mean society in general or at least the vocal portions of it. Read more of On being more interesting
Tags: nocleanfeed, research, teaching
Posted in innovation, Research Ideas, teaching, thoughts | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
While the Hedgehogs, Foxes and the Internet Filter Debate post directly related to Internet censorship or what has become known as nocleanfeed, I did not seriously link my last post, Revisiting activity systems, to that issue. I kept reading my thesis and realised the next section spoke directly to issues of the filter, learning and change. Transparency of technology involves the ways in which we no longer focus on the technology, but rather on the tasks and processes afforded by technology. That is, the computer fades into the background and becomes a means by which we achieve something else. Read more of Transparency of technology
Tags: censorship, nocleanfeed
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
A recent journal alert led me on a fox and hedgehog chase. I came across a paper called The Hedgehog and the Fox: A Discussion of the Approaches to the Analysis of ICT Reforms in Teacher Education of Larry Cuban and Yrjö Engeström. It’s a bit of a mouthful of a title, but as my interests do lie in the area of ICT reforms and education, I downloaded it and read it. What struck me most was this explanation of the first part of the title.
… Isaiah Berlin (1998) began by quoting Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (p. 437). Berlin used these words to describe people as being either like a hedgehog or like a fox. Hedgehogs are those people who pursue one idea thoroughly and who develop an integrated or universal principle. Foxes, on the other hand, are people who pursue many ideas and who seldom stay long with one before trying out another. These people are pluralistic; they move on many levels and draw on a variety of experiences. (p84)
While the paper does describe the reactions to reforms of teacher education using computer technology, the conceptualisation of foxes and hedgehogs lead me to consider other areas where computer technology approaches are dichotomised, namely the Internet Filtering debate we are currently engaged in within Australia.
Read more of Hedgehogs, Foxes and the Internet Filter Debate
Tags: censorship, nocleanfeed, research
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