From some previous visits with excellent learning leaders in Australia and continued contacts with colleagues there, I was asked to be audio interviewed online June 2 (here) via the LearningTimes site “Live Session: RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning” (It is free, but you need to join LearningTimes):
Participate in this international live interview on “RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning” with Alan Levine of Maricopa Community College and Garry Putland of EdNA Online (Australia). Michael Chalk (Australia) will conduct the interview, supported by LearningTimes member Michael Coghlan.
This event coincides with the launch of Edition 5 (June 2004) of the Knowledge Tree e-Journal of Flexible Learning in Vocational Education and Training where Michael Coghlan’s eagerly awaited article ‘Finding Your Voice Online’ is available for download.
I am quite humbled to be billed as such (just to show that the reality distortion field is not just for Steve Jobs, but almost anything on the web), especially in the company of Garry Putland whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2003 MERLOT conference.
There seems to be down under, like elsewhere, a bubbling rise of interest in blogs for education, as well as tossing of of the litany of acronym soup RSS-XML-CSS-ePortfolio…. I am hoping over the holiday weekend for a flash of brilliance. It should be fun, and I was impressed with the quality of the audio chat from my first use of LearningTimes a month ago.
Blogs, RSS, all the technology are no magic bullets for learning, and I think we tend to look at each technology innovation as such, rather than just enablers, or just another tool among a collection to reach for when appropriate.
This is in conjunction with the electronic publication the Flexible Learning Leaders produce as the Knowledge Tree— which has some great publications and sharing of excellent work, but…. I always have the impression that the publishing notion is one of “paper”. A tremendous amount of work goes into a published paper (in a previous life I spent a year writing a 4 page published scientific paper), but these blog days I really value the quick and rapid exchange of “publsihing” in blog space. Perhaps they go hand in hand- blogs can be used to flesh out preliminary ideas, get feedback, launch trial balloons, that could ultimately feed into (or not) a polished paper.
But I leave that for the academics to sort out– I have zero interest in journal or academic publishing, nitpicking over word counts, reference formats, etc.
