Testing…testing…test 1-2-3.
I’m up and it’s working!! Yeah!!
This is a past EDDL WordPress Blog site I used last semester, that I successfully set up to coordinate with the current EDDL 5141 Moodle site. I feel pretty smart right now.
Name: Delano Ducheck
This is what I look like now (minus the soul patch and plus twenty pounds).
Currently I am a TTOC for District 67. I get to fill in for all types of teachers and see how they use technology. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some classes that are doing really cool things with technology. The students love it, and have no fear, because they can always go back and delete it. But with the technological courage also comes a dark side. Every year our district brings in a social media expert to give the students some guidelines for using all the social media available to them.
I prided myself on being “old school” and held out on having a cell phone and laptop until a few years ago. But with taking two EDDL courses last semester I was “forced” to open up accounts with Flickr, WordPress, Diigo, and signed up for several English specific newsletters and RSS feeds. Now I’m amazed with all the resources educators have at their disposal. It’s become a practice in FOCUS and LIMITING resources because it can get overwhelming.
Many of the ideas in the 2016 Online Manifesto were over my head, like “openness is neither neutral or natural, it creates and depends on closures”???!!!!! or how about this ominous warning “online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance.”
I’m in the battle field and I’m not too concerned with theoretical tactics. Give me something tangible like:
- A digital assignment can live on; it can be iterative, public, risky, and multi-voiced.
- Assessment is an act of interpretation
- Online teaching should not be downgraded into “facilitation”
- Contact works in different ways; face time is over-valued
I’ve added some of my own Manifesto ideas in the continuation of the list:
5. Generations of digital content can be re-worked and re-edited and re-imagined
6. Interacting with digital content is a creative act of high learning
7. Keeping up with the evolution of knowledge requires a community of learners
8. Learning is not linear, but a messy process of sifting, sorting, analyzing, testing, daydreaming, stumbling upon etc. Devices are just another tool.
2 comments ↓
Hello Delano,
Sorry, it took me a while to find your post as I am still muddling my way through Moodle. I haven’t worked with Moodle in a long time and, along with all the rest, I find the whole PLN overwhelming… too much information. As for my own Blogging, outside of course work I let it go a long time ago.
Your #5. “Generations of digital content can be re-worked and re-edited and re-imagined.” is very interesting as it gets into the question of authorship. Without crediting sources, I have a problem with mash-ups, as creative as they can be, because of what seems to be the appropriation of intellectual and/or creative property. I’ll have to look around and see if I can find something on digital ethics.!
Hi Delano,
Thanks for the great post. I really liked your additions to the manifesto – particularly “Learning is not linear, but a messy process of sifting, sorting, analyzing, testing, daydreaming, stumbling upon etc. Devices are just another tool.” The sifting, sorting, stumbling is the fun part, and devices are just a means to get there – and they change so fast. As you also pointed out earlier in your post – we need to keep focussed and try to limit our resources – and that is also where the community of practice comes in (point 7).
The surveillance statement does seem ominous – but as Google and Facebook and many other sites track our online habits it sometimes like we are constantly being watched. The Learning Management System also allows teachers to monitor student learning processes – access points/times, time on tasks and activities, can all be tracked. Using these learning analytics could help improve online course design, but it also begs the question of who should own that information and learning data? My interpretation of the statement is that we just need to be cognizant that online environments (both open ones on the web, and closed ones like an LMS) are places where we may not always get to choose how visible we want to be.
Michelle