Pedagogy, Principles and the Personal

It has been a great week of discovery for me.

I share four resources here:
Stephen Downes posted his presentation on Pedagogical Foundation for Personal Learning. His summary of the talk is:

In this talk I outline the differences between learning using a personal learning environment (PLE) and learning in an LMS. I argue that a PLE does what an LMS cannot do – it is designed to stimulate learning through an immersion into a community, as opposed to learning via presentation of facts. Pedagogy thus becomes the facilitation of skills for participation in such communities, which I tie to my critical literacy framework.

Slide 25 (of 40):

After reading and listening to Stephen’s presentation I had the good fortune to hear a rebroadcast of a Radio National Life Matters broadcast with Lisa Sanders. She is a technical adviser to the TV program House. (“She’s the brains behind many of the fascinating medical cases you see on the program.” She is passionate about the ‘art’ of diagnosis and the place of physical examination in taking a patient’s case. She is the author of Every Patient Tells a Story.

My trawl through my Twitter feeds found a delightful post by Heather Mason.

She observes that:

While I am not really tech deprived, I’m also not on any list to get a 1:1 classroom, a set of handhelds or any type of interactive anything. I teach in Florida…we’re broke. We make due. So in defiance of the creed that tech is here to stay, I offer 8 indispensible tools that every classroom needs.

These tools are:

  • Post-It Notes
  • Highlighters
  • Notecards
  • Clipboards
  • Personal Whiteboards
  • An Easy Button
  • Large Plastic Tubs
  • Cleaning Supplies

I really enjoyed Heather’s post and liked her follow up post about her attendance at FETC.
Each of these three links gave me an opportunity to celebrate the personal in learning. Just as I was thinking about writing about them I found  a link to David Brake’s thesis in the LSE Library. David’s thesis is entitled ‘As if nobody’s reading’?: the imagined audience and socio-technical biases in personal blogging practice in the UK. With some trepidation I point to a section of David’s abstract:

(Firstly) a blogger’s construction of the meaning of their practice can be based as much on an imagined and desired social context as it is on an informed and reflexive understanding of the communicative situation. Secondly, blogging practices include a variety of envisaged audience relationships, and some blogging practices appear to be primarily self-directed with potential audiences playing a marginal role. Blogging’s technical characteristics and the social norms surrounding blogging practices appear to enable and reinforce this unanticipated lack of engagement with audiences.

His abstract underscored for me the personal focus of this post … the opportunities each of us has to make sense of rich personal lives and documented reality.

Photo Credits
MorBCN llibreria
Foxypar4 Please read instructions before opening
Heather Mason An Easy Button
Tom Stardust Ponte Veccio – Crowd

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