Friday, February 08, 2013

Explorations

I really enjoyed the post by Brendan Murphy on rhizomatic learning. He talked about deep learning and how to encourage that both for himself as a learner, but also for his students.

I am experimenting with a variety of tools - feeling a bit like a groundhog - popping up to read and get ideas and then back in my burrow to experiment. Maybe rhizomatic learning for me is also "groundhog learning"


I played a bit with Haiku Deck, a free presentation tool for ipads. It was not quite what I expected - more of a visual powerpoint for ipads. It exports as a powerpoint so I had to turn my 6 word story into an image



I visited Susan Angel's blog. She inspires with her incredible visual sense. My quick attempt at an animated gif using Gimp can be seen below.


What you don't see is the back story - this was part of a concert - with the two in the back singing an aria. I'm thinking hard about how I want to create a meaningful story - what tool would work best for it and why  - about a place that changed my life.

I enjoyed Darren Kuropatwa's session today and really appreciated his parting words - that the most important thing is the story. It doesn't matter how many bells and whistles we add - a story without substance is a bad story.

In these two weeks, much is about playing and experimenting. Erin Luong commented on my last post who said "....however sometimes when we are learning the tools our stories may be more shallow. Thoughts?"

My reply: "
I do agree that as teachers when we play with these tools, often the stories will be shallow. That is because we are concentrating on the tool and thinking about how we can use it with students. Our purpose for using the tool is not about the story but in seeing potential. But when we ask students to produce digital stories we need to emphasize the story and explore together how the tools can make the stories powerful. Students also need time to play and explore - but final products should demonstrate that good choices were made because the story speaks for itself.

I also think that this is about scaffolding. When students are young, we introduce fewer tools. But as part of the process we talk about why the tools are good for certain things - developing a critical sense in students. Later students need to have more leeway to select the tools that best fit their needs and be able to justify why they chose a specific tool."

So above are a few explorations about tools - not so much about story. Writing a good story, deciding on which tool to use, which layer will tell what part of the story requires serious work - time that will have to be spent when I am not in the flurry or reading, exploring in the fast lane of etmooc.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous10:36 p.m.

    Hi Susan

    Thanks for your fantastic post and response. I agree that at this point as we are building out learning experimentation is important and that you need to understand the tools to use them effectively.

    Do you think that small children would be successful at moocs, or is this something that needs to be reserved for more mature audiences?

    Thoughts

    ReplyDelete