Live from Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington… Barbara Ganley is tasking us about how we use web technology– responding to some of the opening panel remarks of reluctance to blogging about their project.
She asks us
What is the correlation between your own personal use of web technologies and the way you use them in classroom?
Her start- “Slow-blogging” a Course- a reaction to her students urge to accomplish work as quickly and directly as possible. “My students are getting awards for this work, getting jobs– ‘bringing the house down’.”
Blogging as the process – “To Send Letters to the self”. Failing publicly is okay, in front of my students, my readers “who kindly pick me up out of the mud”. Slow blogging is both “powerless and pleasurable”
Expresses difficulty of presenting about a blog on a flat screen “I wish I could be one, have hypertext in my voice”
Students cannot see their blogging as messages sent out a a bottle. “We learn to participate in our own learning,”-family and friends take part, teachers of other classes. Learn about our own biases and cliches.
“There’s links on the internet that don’t exist in real ife” – from a student comment. “Blogging gives me a sense of infinity” another student
Builds grading rubrics with her students, students participate in own evaluation. Involve invited experts…. They expect to write hypertext papers in their other classes.
Shares her decision to start blogging about her father’s recent passing away -his decision to stop teaching.
Weaves together 4 blog external blog posts that have given her confidence- closing with Gardner Campbell’s podcast from the Kemp Symposium on the “caravan”…
Quoting and recommending from book Generation Me – is it “New Narcissism” “how do we bring students out of this interest in themselves?”
“Contact Zones of Travel” – Speaks of power of travel to “open our senses”- her trip recently to Scandinavia… “I saw people hide in their guidebooks, their carefully chosen restaurants- ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ with the books and music took them with them”
Power of “bumping into each others perspectives”- makes analogy with birds nests! You’d need to be here to catch it, cannot properly capture beauty of this in blog words.
“We have to use the tools of the time to teach to the time”
Woot! Such passion and energy.
