Signing off

Phew – a final post. I’m still getting my head around the realisation that work has stopped now until September. The second of four school terms began here last week, so a summer vacation (especially in winter) seems totally out of whack. I have hopefully signed up for Game-based learning and Digital futures. I filled […]

The assignment and my current thoughts on transhumanism

I think it would be helpful for me to reflect on my assignment here on the blog. It was a fairly significant learning experience for me. As a teacher, it is quite a paradigm shift to be in the position of learner rather than the expert ‘other’. I had high expectations for the finished product, […]

Larking about on Moodle

Hmm I think this will be my shortest post yet. I can’t take the LARC seriously, admittedly I opted for for the strict report and the wording is rather comical. What is it measuring? What is the behaviour that serves as proxy for attendance, interaction, engagement or performance? What unit of measurement is it using? […]

Falling in love with proxies

Data Power in Education: Exploring Critical Awareness with the “Learning Analytics Report Card” (Knox 2017) discusses, amongst other issues, the limitations of measuring proxies for learning (observable behaviour that is easier to measure than learning and thus stands as an approximation) (Godin 2012). In the literature that I read for my assignment, (which examined […]

‘Open’ Education and ‘Democratic’ South Africa – Shared vision, shared failing

It is a bit delayed but I wanted to respond to the week 9 discussion thread which highlighted the impact of the digital divide on the ‘openness’ of education. https://www.moodle.is.ed.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=21126 The aims of open education which were nicely outlined by Edwards are indeed worthy goals; “Extensive positive claims are made for extending the openness of […]

Power-hungry Brownies and Local Guides

After reading the ‘How to earn your skeptic badge’ article by Harry Jenkins (Jenkins 2012), I was glad to know that I’m not the only one who is skeptical about digital badges. I was in total agreement with Halavais that digital badges appear to be ‘little more than a visual conceit’ (Halavais 2012). However, after a […]

Unfettered freedom to learn vs death in the wilderness – my thoughts on ‘Open’ education

Seven days of relief teaching has put a surprisingly large spanner in the blog-production works. In addition to my busy days, I have also been rediscovering the joys of calculus on Coursera, working with the absolute nature of numbers has been really quite soothing after all this intense reading and writing. I am enjoying the topic […]

The spatial metaphor of the IDEL class; helpful construct or ‘luddite yearning’?

Teachers often talk about their classes as though they are an entity in their own right, complete with personality traits. “They are such a playful/hardworking/creative class.” In my experience, the group dynamic that emerges from the interactions and relationships among the individual students has a massive influence on everything that happens in the classroom, be […]

Ceci n’est pas un blog post

Please could you take a look at my assignment ideas and give me some pointers. What is good, bad and potentially very ugly? Thanks Ruth How can digital environments shape a community of learners? I’m quite interested in exploring the rhizomic learning experiences that can occur in digital environments. Which, I suppose, is […]

Ruth's IDEL chatter