2014 Kiwi Tour: Round 2 of 2 at AUT

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

It’s Thursday. I have presented every day last week and this week, and here is the finish line. Today we returned to downtown Auckland for a followup to Tuesday’s talks at Auckland University of Technology.

A good start was a flat white with Thom Cochrane and Vickel Narayan at Remedy coffee house. I could see going to a spot like that on a regular basis.

The first session was actually only half mine; they asked me to give feed back to some project presentations– they were billed as Pecha Kucha style, though none of them used the format. Those nice Kiwis, they let it slide. And its okay because I got a lot out of hearing about these other projects. More than I get by yacking.

I’m relying on my tweets for notes.

Play Interactivity and Games that's the PIG in Pigsty https://t.co/jfz5P9Xbze

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 8, 2014

First up was Ben Tuhoe Kenobi, who is part of the AUT Colab — I bet he relies on the middle name to try and dispel the Star Wars puns. But he’s really into games and hacker culture and share with us his efforts on creating community and opportunity around games with PIGsty where that’s Play Interactivity and Games Studio. He told me the story over lunch of the unintended way the acronym developed, that it was almost a joke but his supervisor said go with it.

@BenTuhoeKenobi presenting #pigsty_aut project #npf14lmd @cogdog https://t.co/5JWRhkJMtu pic.twitter.com/sucv9PT2iY

— thomcochrane (@thomcochrane) October 8, 2014

Ben had so many projects to tell, and many of them, because of being highly interactive, don’t convey themselves in a slide deck. I suggested opening with a demo or using more video — like the Colab live drawing timelapse video

Or this one demoing a face tracker (The MOA is the name for the mobile video rack they use a lot to bring into spaces)

Also it’s really hard to get info from PIGsty in Google+, its not really organized.

Next Adrienne Moyle @AdrienneMoyle from the Auckland University shared her efforts as part of a large multi-institutional AKO project (Aotearoa National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence) Learners and mobile devices (#NPF14LMD): A framework for enhanced learning and institutional change:

There are two significant gaps in current knowledge about learners and mobile devices. Firstly, ‘net-generation’ learners do not automatically apply the functionality of their devices to the attainment of deep learning outcomes. Secondly there is a lack of studies on integration of findings from m-learning research into sustainable change in curriculum, policy and infrastructure. The project will address these gaps through a range of methods and approaches as outlined below. The key deliverable for the project is a range of practical strategies for students, teachers and leaders to utilise the affordances of mobile devices for pedagogical transformation and empowering learners.

There looks like a lot of community building forming going on in this project and it will be interesting to see how they use mobile/social media to loosely connect it.

The next presentation was by Hugo Goodson on the use of social media in paramedicine

Now hearing about mobiles and simulations in Para Medicine https://t.co/nwfqCtbXUA

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 8, 2014

This tied in nicely to a question I had about open sharing from a nursing faculty at Victoria University Wellington about how paramedics can share what is most valuable from their real experiences without it infringing on privacy of patients. What they do in the field is so useful for teaching, and Hugo is experimenting with encouraging parademics to use Google+ and Facebook as a place to do this.

I was wondering if instead of capturing live action in video, if they did something like professional sporting events, where athletes can give commentary like a post game show — they can talk about the experience almost in the moment without necessarily filming it all. I also shared the Microsoft innovations on Hyperlapse video where long drawn out shaky go pro can be made smoother and more of a consumable experience. Maybe a GoPro that could be silenced by voice command?

It’s encouraging to see how much R&D is going on here at AUT!

Then it was my turn to open up the StoryBox

Someone put a photo of my showing the Storybox IN the Storybox

As usual, I sent the audience out first to collect media and waited until they were back to have them connect to the box and upload. It really would take at least a 2 hour session to get to the remix and creating from the box, and I am going to be thinking about how that can be done.

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

After lunch and as my closing act for this trip, I got once again to talk about the best thing on the internet.

Of course people love it, especially when you show a lot of examples of student / participant work. They seem to grasp the idea of a course structure that mimics the form of the internet. There were the questions of copyright, and how to get students to understand it. My two approaches in talking about is are:

Students are not going to embrace Creative Commons based on my extolling its virtues up front. So I weave into their work assignments that call for them to both provide attribution for their work and use resources that are licensed. The hope is, and sometimes the outcome, that after benefitting form the richness of what is shared, they might get the idea about giving back. A few do.
And rather trying to scare students about “getting in trouble” or “sued over copyright”, I share how my hope is that students get a takedown notice from Youtube. It’s a prime moment to talk about this situation. I want them to ask if its right. And then I can make suggestions- they can of course circumvent by posting on vimeo, but that does not address the problem. I think its worthwhile to file a YouTube appeal. It’s actually easy. I’ve been way more successful than not. And then its a point to ask them how critical the song/clip is, about ways to express the message w/o copyrighted stuff. But yes, to me its a golden opportunity when students get hit by the issue, rather then us trying to “protect” them from it.

And that was it for the day! We had a lovely dinner at Thom’s country home, so far south I felt like I was going back to Hamilton. He makes an outrageously good pizza. Amazingly, I was so busy eating pizza, I never took any photos.

The next day was another sunny stunner, and I had a good trip down to Auckland via a ferry to spend some time city wandering (and have a nice lunch with a sibling of an ed tech friend)

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog