Alison Johnson : Weblog items tagged with Conversation

The socially Critical Approach Adopted by the Course Design Module - a personal observation

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:15:05 GMT

During the wiki weeks I thought I would first take a look at the approach I was grappling most with - social critical and reading Shor's education is politics article - I found it very interesting due to the many parallels with this modules approach....

It seems our tutors are quite the libertines and problem posers! - and it all lies in the chat.......

here are the connections I could relate to:

' a Freirean pedagogy tries to develop a student centred dialogue'

Some values describing the 'Freirean pedagogy':

Participatory - learning process interactive and co-operative so that students do a lot of discussing and writing instead of listening to teacher talk

Situated - course material situated in student thought begining from their words and understanding of material

Critical - discussion encourages self reflection, how we know what we know, and quality of learning process -(why do we do what we do - what personal filters or biais or previous experience guides the way we are (holistically or at any one point in time), choices we make or how we act, react and interact - a lot of interpersonal, communication, rapport and building relatonship skills in the work place also covers this - for a commercial gain however rather than a socially driven libertine reason!)

Democratic - classroom discourse is mutually constructed between teacher and student - students have equal speaking rights in the dialog

Dialogic - basic format of class is dialog around problems posed by student and teacher. Teacher initiates process and guides it into deeper phases. Teacher invites students to take ownership of learning

Desocialisation - dialog desocialises students from passivity in classroom and challenges their learned authority-dependence and desocialises teacher from domineering teacher-talk socialised into - instead they are problem posers and dialogue leaders

.........

Affective - problem posing and dialogic method includes a range of emotions from humour to compassion to indignation - and we have seen many of these emotions already within our own discourse

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. In Paulo Freire: a critical encounter. P. McLaren and P. Leonard (Eds.). (London, Routledge): pp. 25-35

Digital Environments: E-portfolios; Musings on Metaphors and where that can lead..........

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:54:25 GMT

Atmospheric, emotive and deeply personal...

I have attached a transcript of a discussion our group had last week on the metaphor of stepping stones and pebbles - 'kidnapping them' in particular (courtesy of Tracy) in relation to E-portfolios. Several of our group related to this thread and added their own stories which enriched the whole experience. This experience deepened when we explored pebble pad, e-portfolio technology, with its related imagery and simplicity. I also came across the video below from Youtube this evening and have added it due to its imagery of streams, stones, stepping stones and reflections.

Finally, the discussion file attached demonstrates the connective power of collective thought and what can happen when multiplicity and serendipity meet, resulting in a link to another discussion thread 'seemingly relevant' to the fluidity of the web, 'web of flow' and Tracey's story of kidnapping pebbles........ Which leaves me wondering and questioning where the role of conversation resides if learning is truly social. Is there a place for it as artefact in an e-portfolio?

[You do not have permission to access this file]

Digital Environments: Exploring Assignment Ideas

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:33:10 GMT

In previous posts - see communities and collaboration or individualism and isolation, I have explored a possible assignment topic for this module.

Another has just occured to me, having particularly enjoyed our week looking at E-portfolios and following the discussion and emotive connections associated with something so deeply personal as 'reflection'.

In many discussions, not just this week's, the role of social learning has been considered and debated. If learning is indeed truly social, this has left me wondering where 'conversation' belongs in an elearning context; and how technology could facilitate the integration of this type of learning, - discussion board posts and threads, personal discussions/reflections in weblogs and e-porfolios. Is there a missing link?