Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Writing this post was as fun as...

This is me officially throwing in the towel at trying to write some profound synopsis of the event that was Northern Voice 2009. I give up. I tried. I really tried.

I tried to capture how, inadvertently, a presenter from a consulting firm that shall not be named clue’d me into how important it is for us trying to create change (whether it be through learning or social action) to not uncritically adopt social networks explicitly framed with commercial motives.

I sought, but failed, to capture an ever growing sense that not all boundaries are created equal; that there are groups bounded not by firewalls and passwords, but by relationships and trust,  and that, far from this being an exclusionary thing, because of conscious acts and the intent to invite with a welcoming heart, they grow, are inclusive.

I struggled, and lost, with my growing understanding (born in part firsthand through my own thumbfisted ‘facilitation’ of WordCampEd - sorry!) of the importance of messiness, not just in teaching in learning, but in resisting reductive rational ‘frameworks.’

And oh how I wanted to tell you how I’ve given up asking for the secret sauce to becoming a good teacher and instead just to keep trying myself, everyday (but still watching and learning from those who can every chance I get to be around them).

But I failed, and all you get is this poor excuse for a post. To everyone I had the pleasure of learning with at Northern Voice, THANKS. You are the reason I keep coming back. The relationships we form, the trust built, is what helps me take bigger chances when I’m sitting here writing on my own. Although…apparently not in this post - SWL

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/AStudentFeedbackToolThatL/48087.

I was pretty conflicted whether to post this at all - you may have noted the frequency of posting on anything LMS-related is WAY down on edtechpost, ever since I got born-again, and the vision of learning here seems, well, problematic at least (which is why I removed the title “A Student Feedback Tool That Links CMS Use with Good Grades” from the original link).

But…this is interesting and does deserve some attention both for its steps towards transparency and some of the ways in which transparency is being used to engender positive faculty peer pressure. I can already hear all sorts of howls from every direction - about faculty rights and independence, about the shallowness of this as a ‘ratings’ scheme, of students gaming the system, of… Yeah, I get it.

But if you find yourself charged with supporting and promoting a campus system (and don’t actually feel like answering for yourself the soul destroying question of why you have to sell something if it is actually as valuable as it’s supposed to be) then maybe this will jog some ideas loose. While I will continue to suggest that simply being fully open is ultimately a better way to address many of these issues, until that ideal situation pertains, sometimes we gotta take our ‘openings’ where we can find them. “There is a crack in everything…” - SWL