cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
This audio reflection comes close to the end of my cross country sprint from Arizona to Virginia, as I close in on Fredericksburg Virginia, where I am now, and not planning on driving away from for a while. Maybe it will become Hallowed Ground
Slices of Life 009: 90 miles from Fredericksburg
I had just listened to Scottlo, who inspired me to try this audio reflection, end his Slices of Life with number 47 “End of this Chapter”, his own path. It’s been remarkable to follow him from his start, when he was questioning everything about his teaching, to the torrent of excitement he achieved by number 47.
Many ways to fill in Scottlo’s blank:
Always Be _________ing
I am looking forward to first face meeting with my ds106 students, and plan to meet individually with students and review their blogs, get to know who is who. Tonight’s class plan to be hands on, with a crack “gentle” whip for some who had not yet set up blogs, reminder tneed to embed media rather than linking, and urge the writing in their own voice, not the school voice.
I plan also to how to set up categories in blog for organizing as well as setting up permalinks to have different forms of blog urls.
The next phase is making the space their own, starting with theming, but going into widgets, plugins, etc. As a great example rossannamarie.me has done an interesting restructure by making a landing page, and building a navigational structures to the blog portion and a separate update summary that journals how the blog grows
It is also time to turn up the heat on commenting and need to be linking more in their written posts.
The first round of reflection posts on Cyberinfrastucted were mixed, some just “I think this is cool” when really I want them to reflect on what it means to them,a nd to connect to other ideas, not write the general school report summary. I hope to have them circle back later to their initial Cyberinfrastructure post at the end of the term, to see if the class in which they are actually doing this has changed or evolved their first idea.
There is a fair amount of student pushback on use of technology, probably from Gardner’s quote about “everyone needs a cyberinfrastructure”
Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment. This vision goes beyond the “personal learning environment”5 in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides.
I rambled a bit on Beth Kanter’s post on content curation, citing the prolific Robin Good as an example of someone that does this to the nth degree (and I agree with what he does as being a flashlight into the bag of gold). I agree with the value of the recommended tools, but not as a total toolset (e.g. scoop.it) in that they are all *external* Both Beth and Robin exemplify the balance of managing their own digital space, much as the digital locker in Gardner’s talk, and what we are asking students to do in this class.
My last bit was an idea for the next This Week in ds106 live vide show with Jim, with me pretending to skype in, and apologizing for not getting there in time. Jim will get angry, and then I will walk on the set.
(later) We did pull it off that afternoon:
