EC Container 4
school
16th March - marching up the hill
16/03/10 06:32
March 16 marching up the hill experimenting again with my walking blog thinking that over that three weeks of the Easter holiday I might do this every morning just the recap on the idea that I should to a recording every morning on a walk up the hill near my house with the dog between two gates one at the bottom of the hill one of the top of the hill and a walk I guess about err 8 minutes maybe the idea is that while I'm walking I should attempt to empty my conscious mind of thoughts and let the flow of speaking bring the ideas up from under the surface from the subconscious so that I can examine them in the light of day I was doing this last year and the year before last year recording my thoughts on life and and then transcribing them later when I got back home which was really quite a time-consuming process now with new software I'm hoping that when I get home I can simply plug the iPhone in and the entire mornings and thoughts will be transcribed for me either software and I don't know how it will cope with my breathlessness as I walk up the hill or with pauses for that matter and I found last Jeff has now I guess an awful lot of what I was saying as I walked up the hill is irrelevant padding and now really the ideas that come out are very few and far between are very small but sometimes quite remarkable I was thinking this yesterday talking to parents about the work I'm doing in school an aside talk the idea seemed to flow in the way that they don't when I'm just trying to think with a conscious mind lots more constant surface when I'm talking to someone I'm not sure what difference it makes if I'm talking to a machine that is not responding that we shall see anyway nearly April nearly 3 weeks when I am planning to work like crazy on this master's degree get the bulk of the writing down and I've been looking a lot at the ideas of flow and aren't what is art yesterday talking to parents err I was talking about working possibly on the edges of acceptability in relation to school working with blogging social networking and to me personally though I didn't say this with the images of young people that I am manipulating and although I don't find it I umm a problem for me at all I do see that it's a bit of a problem for me in relation to school and my job as an art teacher it's not safe but what I said to this parent is along the lines of if it isn't pushing the limit if it isn't on the edge of acceptability and it probably isn't art hand or certainly aren't as we've known it in the last century so much of which is pushing boundaries and pushing barriers as far as I'm concerned although Roy would take issue with this he says the students at each company artists or maybe I'm not an artist but in school if I'm not pushing the boundaries then is it art and if it isn't not what is it is it just skills is it the groundwork of the basics how can I do that thinking about the book the zen of seeing and the quotes there if you are just learning the technique from someone else what are you learning you have to learn that too do and I think maybe you learn it through doing art anyway second gate so I've got to stop here and get myself back home and to the dentist
metaphor
13/02/10 21:02
Thinking that teachers at school have only just started using email - the metaphors being used, the letter, posting, one to one - is all very much based on the victorian post model - as is the desktop metaphor, based, obviously, on a desktop, and documents. In a similar way the IWB in school is just a posh version of a chalkboard - and in many cases the chalkboard might be just as good.
While the students are using the technology in a totally different way - with social networking and mobile devices, text speak and instant messaging.
While the students are using the technology in a totally different way - with social networking and mobile devices, text speak and instant messaging.
digital natives
27/01/10 07:16
Here is another plea - just for a bit of comfort...
I downloaded the voiceband app, and was in the staffroom attempting to show it to our director of music - who didn't seem interested, even though she has an iphone, but she was rushing off somewhere... but another teacher was looking on, and said words to the effect - how much time do you waste on that? I was stung, as she said it in quite a vicious and righteous tone, not at all pleasant. And this teacher is our head of ICT.
I was also a little surprised by one of my art teachers - I gave her a macbook several years ago, and she still has not got the hang. Yesterday, after days of frustration, she said that she was going back to her PC. I had no idea that she was feeling this way, otherwise I would have helped her much sooner. She had spent hours and hours making collections of downloaded images in iphoto - firstly using cut and past to copy images from google onto her desktop - so the were not jpeg files for a start - but then, after creating albums - including many of precious family albums - she was deleting what she thought of as the original photos from the library. And wondering why they then disappeared from her albums.
She was literally in tears of frustration and rage.
In the meantime I have my year 7 logging on to the Voki site, and sending me their comments on their photoshop creations via a speaking avatar.
Just to illustrate two huge gulfs - that between the digital native speaker, and the struggling foreigner, and between the pc left brain spreadsheet mentality, and the wonderfully creative, exciting and extraordinary potential of the iphone for learning.
Here's to the ipad...?!
I downloaded the voiceband app, and was in the staffroom attempting to show it to our director of music - who didn't seem interested, even though she has an iphone, but she was rushing off somewhere... but another teacher was looking on, and said words to the effect - how much time do you waste on that? I was stung, as she said it in quite a vicious and righteous tone, not at all pleasant. And this teacher is our head of ICT.
I was also a little surprised by one of my art teachers - I gave her a macbook several years ago, and she still has not got the hang. Yesterday, after days of frustration, she said that she was going back to her PC. I had no idea that she was feeling this way, otherwise I would have helped her much sooner. She had spent hours and hours making collections of downloaded images in iphoto - firstly using cut and past to copy images from google onto her desktop - so the were not jpeg files for a start - but then, after creating albums - including many of precious family albums - she was deleting what she thought of as the original photos from the library. And wondering why they then disappeared from her albums.
She was literally in tears of frustration and rage.
In the meantime I have my year 7 logging on to the Voki site, and sending me their comments on their photoshop creations via a speaking avatar.
Just to illustrate two huge gulfs - that between the digital native speaker, and the struggling foreigner, and between the pc left brain spreadsheet mentality, and the wonderfully creative, exciting and extraordinary potential of the iphone for learning.
Here's to the ipad...?!
play and puritanism
26/11/09 05:50
This is an as yet unsubstantiated thought that our schooling is a direct decedent of our puritanical past. Schools, the army, the class system: control, categorise, regiment. Children to be seen (if that) and not heard. A Cromwellian nightmare of grey work pray serve. Anything colourful, fun, dancing, playful, banned as frivolous, not serious. At times I curse my puritanical upbringing, with it's work ethic. Artists are often seen as subversive, bohemian, selfish, reclusive, perhaps even not useful. Why are the head of sciences and maths at the school where I teach paid more than the heads of the arts and the humanities? The school will say that all students have to do these subjects, this is why they are paid more. Why do all students have to do maths and science, but not art, especially as we live in a society where the arts employ so many? Art is playful, often not serious, and therefore less important. There is also the thought that our education system, mechanised and industrial, is a result to an extent of the generation lost in WW1 - all the teachers that died, so classes were taught by specialists, in much greater numbers, on a conveyer belt of learning.
EC Container 5