We are moving to the end of the Writing Week in the Faculty of Health at the University of Canberra. Today staff had an opportunity to attend a workshop facilitated by Coralie McCormack.
Coralie’s work in the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University includes advising staff about Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) programs and projects, working with Associate Deans of Education in ALTC related work and supporting staff in the preparation of applications for the ALTC.
Coralie’s role in bringing people together to discuss and explore learning and teaching resonates with another event today. Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of the not-for-profit online news service, Global Voices, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was a guest on Radio National’s Future Tense program presented by Antony Funnell.
Creating the opportunity for colleagues in the faculty of health is a microcosm of the Polyglot Internet discussions stimulated by Ethan Zuckerman:
One of the things that I’ve been noticing in my work through Global Voices and my work at Berkman Center, is just the proliferation of different languages online. We started referring to this as the polyglot Internet. And it seems to me that much of what we’d like to be able to do with the Internet, which is to say build communication between people who don’t already know each other, how do the trends perceive what people are thinking and feeling in other parts of the world, getting other people’s perspectives and views of events and such, requires us to take very seriously this problem of translation. Because people are putting up content in all sorts of different languages, and while there’s more on the Internet every day, for every one of us we can actually understand a smaller percentage of it.
I wonder if this approach can be used as a way to discuss the disciplined insights that are generated in a Writing Week. It seems to me that we may need a Reading Week to explore the output of a Writing Week and that this may lead to writing workshops. Louise Ada gave the Faculty a great lead in this regard earlier this week.
For those of you have time for video workshops here is Ethan Zuckerman video on the ‘history of the Internet in 5 minutes’
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2QdEj8UjBc]
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