Que Saco!

Laura is a tool

Summer 2008 is fleeting fast. It seems like an eternity since my wonderful time in Paraty, Brasil in the southeast of Rio de Janeiro last month. There I visited the Saco do Mamangua, clearly one of the most beautiful places that I have been in 50+ years….. So what if I capsized my canoe in the mangrove, all my valuables were safely in another canoe with  paddlers with skills. All I had to do was not move (or breathe) and I made it safely to shore in Paraty Mirim. Will never forget the hospitality of Dona Gracinha, the little barquinhos made of caxeta wood that I brought home with me, and the utter beauty of the Atlantic rainforest where beautiful orchids with their roots extending in the air were attached to the trees. I saw pioneer vegetation growing timidly on land being reforested.

On the way to the rain forest with biologist, Paulo Nogara.

I hope to be able to find the book by Paulo Nogara, our biologist in residence from the tour,  who paddled our canoe like a gondolier. His love for this country was so evident. He was an excellent teacher who raised our awareness of both the beauty and the fragility of our surroundings. In retrospect, it was a great exercise in self-control to surrender to the movement of the boat. I finally “got it” Type A as I am. Mentally, I can still go back to the peace of the setting sun in the beautiful sunset of Paraty Mirim.

P.S. The little painted caicara boat that  I brought home from that day is sitting on my dining room table today. It helps me go back there in my mind.  When I think about the locomotion involved in it all- bus, boat, hike, canoe and  the plane ride home, the barquinho gave me a real workout then and now a lot of peace.

Re/merge

I cannot tell you all how wonderful it is to attend an e-learning conference online, as gas prices hurdle to $4.19 at my local gas station and the comfort of my living room surrounded by my dogs replaces airport gates and runway waits. (Ha ha! sorry for the pathetic rhyme.)

At any rate, a number of us on the MAN (MERLOT Africa Network) are attending e/merge and I thought it’d be very interesting to leave comments on this blog about what we all learn there. Today, I listened to the narrated presentation by Irene Ficheman of Sao Paulo, Brazil who compares today’s learning environments to digital ecosystems. We are reading many of the same people- Prensky on Digital Natives, Paulo Freire on learning theory and some new names for me which I will look at soon.

At any rate Ficheman talks about how learners, teachers, content and software act and interact (or not)

so that students can gain knowledge in a dynamic learning environment. We have a good opportunity for reflection on the roles of teachers and learners as actors in this environment. For deeper learning, it seems that the more interaction the better. (So, let’s speak up.)

Anyway, I look forward to checking into this Digital Ecosystem discussion tomorrow and to hear the voices of MAN colleagues so that we can all later interact with the digital ecosystem that is e/merge. I am honored by the privilege to learn from colleagues, Bronwyn and Maggie, who taught us netvibes yesterday.  Earlier in the week, they showed de.licio.us and Facebook. During the de.licio.us  portion, I came across George Siemen’s  Connectivism presentation  from 2005 and, coincidentally, also his blog post about the recent e-learning Africa .

e/merge 2008

What a week!!!

I began it at Carnegie Mellon University for a workshop sponsored by the Open Learning Initiative. I got to know their French Online course up close and in person. It was a fabulous f2f experience and  I am thrilled about the prospect of continuing to connect with my new colleagues there. It shows the longevity and proves the utter logic of OER that after all these years of OCW and OLI, we are building a network that aims at providing more access. Even more important to me as an individual practitioner, this work provides us a forum in which we can discuss what really constitutes quality in online teaching and learning. I really need to have these conversations. To have them with  language educators was real ‘icing on the cake”.

One interesting point that came up here regarding instructional design of online courses was the study on the expert blind spot. (Nathan and Petrosino 2003 . Preconceived notions on how concepts should be presented can cause a disconnect between teaching goals and learning outcomes.  five days later, I keep hearing the message “You do  not think like your students and they do not think like you”. When we build and teach our online courses, we need to keep this difference in thinking in mind.

The rest of this week, I have been participating in a superb online conference sponsored by the Centre for Educational Technology in Cape Town, South Africa: e/merge. From the website:

“e/merge 2008 – Professionalising Practices is the third virtual conference on educational technology in Africa and builds on the e/merge conferences in 2004 and 2006. e/merge 2008 will take place online from 7 – 18 July 2008.”

So far, I really enjoyed a presentation by Howard Rheingold, whose work I have followed since his book  The Virtual Community years back. He now has a very interesting course going on at UC Berkeley called Visual Communications/Social Media. His class as explained on his online syllabus is super participatory with subheadings like “Participation mandatory”, “Leadership required”. He has students interacting in ways that immerse them in collaborative tasks while using all the new tools,blogs, wikis, etc.. .  Anyway, he was a keynoter at e/merge and his talk was followed by a robust discussion by educators around the world.

This virtual conference is employing every kind of new technology to connect participants. As much as I love to visit  places physically, it is wonderful to be able to experience so much collective  expertise without leaving home. This is particularly true since air travel has recently become so difficult, grueling and painfully inconvenient. (Hear my anguish??) I see no reason why we can and should not greatly augment the online component of all major conferences, partly as an access/inclusion issue for people who cannot attend f2f , as well as  for many other very good reasons.