follow your thoughts much as the mind follows the breath in some forms of Zen meditation.

Simon (@sensor63) created this video in this tweet in response to one of my tweets. Did he know he had created a poetry machine?  Probably.

Her mouth an “O”,

Like a criminal, I have  accepted,  routinized,  and implemented them without moral revulsion  or political indignation  or resistance.

“Am I committing evil in my world?”

Your first thought might be denial: you can’t mean that grades are evil banalities?

While research supports both morn

nib…..

to pitch

I don’t give up.

gain an edge

goods

owe money

cash flow.

a bookkeeper or lawyer

dealing with

handle

to fall into the trap

to resort to bribery

shares

purchasing

f company

to make a profit.

it must be run—and run

leeway.

supplier,

competition

sway others to your side

making an improvement

collateral

to put the odds for success more in your favor.

eager

deal with

a mindset

angel chasing

bootstrapping

marginalia

If your university has Google Drive and you use Dropbox instead, you have no justification. In fact, if your institution doesn’t have any cloud based file storage agreement and you use Google Drive, Dropbox or anything else, you have no justification.

transferring student assessments onto personal devices for that regular occurrence of ‘marking at home’. Assessments will contain personal data (even just exam numbers) and mark sheets tend to hold more personal data.

educators may be under pressure to conform to institutional services that provide equivalent learning processes, deeming third-party sites to not meet the criteria of ‘necessary’ for performance of contract.

Indeed, being conscious of your students’ perceptions about using third-party online services is important to avoid divided cohorts and false assumptions about willingness to engage with a learning activity (Wenham and Cornock, 2012).

The University of Cambridge’s working group for GDPR produced a very useful document which looks at linking legisliation to actual practices taking place in the organisation, with actions to amend these practices based on GDPR.

By ensuring an institutional approach, educators can get on with teaching and supporting learning without trying to come up with processes themselves that are compliant with legislation

reuse of captures in subsequent years, which does sometime occur due to staff absence, shouldn’t be permitted if student contributions are captured

then including this within the university regulations as to how that data will be stored and managed should be something to celebrate, rather than shy away from.

Therefore (and this is what I believe Glynn suggested), lecture recordings must be part of the contract an institution has with the student in the delivery of education

it is precisely the imprecision in understanding about all these legal and policy contexts that lead to defensive and protectionist approaches that appear too risky for educators to even consider.

If a student contributes to an online space under a creative commons license, their moral rights of attribution may be in conflict with how those contributions are stored anonymously if anonymity is the approach used to conform to GDPR.

If a student says something in a lecture that is recorded, do they have rights under GDPR if that contribution is interpreted as data about them as an individual, does that depend on the content of the contribution, or does the fact they have made a contribution act itself as data about their engagement with the course

How we navigate between personal data (“any information relating to an identifiable person”), intellectual property and associated rights that may be transferred and exploited in some way, and moral rights is resulting in a rather complex web of ifs, buts and maybes

“any information relating to an identifiable person”

What about more complex data, such as contributions in class?

If an individual student shares something in a class that is personal and (and is the important bit here) is personally identifiable, then immediately we’re into GDPR territory. How is that recording controlled? How can the individual student enact their eight rights? Do we need to enlist an army of lecture recording editors? Oh no!

Where do they speak about the ups and downs of human existence in academic publications?

Clavier has been part of that unexpected sequence of events and the network which has stretched around the world has seen me working with colleagues in Egypt, Poland, Sweden, Australia, the USA, Spain, Finland, Canada and the UK! 

Having found my voice in the academic community and a means to engage in the meaningful deployment of my abilities across institutional and national boundaries thanks to the open internet, I have made yet another career "modification" - one where I can pass on a new perspective to students considering teaching languages.

. This internal event about teaching excellence at Warwick saw staff exploring physical and virtual spaces, connecting virtually with Marcin Klébin @makle1 in Poland; the doors to the EuroCALL conference were opened this year thanks to collaboration with Maha Bali +Maha Bali and Virtually Connecting, my students have created open educational resources and even contributed to online conferences, the WIHEA #knowhow project (see https://storify.com/WarwickLanguage/warwick-window-on-teaching) produced resources and connections to help others decide on a path to opening up their work.

The Clavier experience had ignited a spark which fed an intellectual curiosity. Central to this was a realisation of my own agency in progressing educational opportunity for all. I decided to be an open educational practitioner and again my network - an international collection of educators in many different contexts - were reliable in getting involved

The serendipity of networked practice together with a heightened attention to the importance of protecting the place of human interaction in education resulted in many conference presentations and publications

However, taking a more critical stance we need to challenge that underlying assumption - what do we value about education that needs to remain in place?

When you look at the literature around the use of technology in education you will soon come across references to disruption. Having been an early adopter of technology in language teaching I have experienced this and my Master's research (on the user perceptions of voice over the internet) also identified that embedding technology in learning design does require a return to first principles if it is to be embedded successfully. As such it is a useful mechanism if you need to focus teacher attention on why we do what we do. This perspective from IMS Global on disruption clearly assumes that there is something inherent in the existing status quo in education which needs a shake up and gives an industry insight into learning technology in the business of education

More stories of connection

The learning was further extended through becoming part of the Association for Learning Technology where I have increased my technical and theoretical perspectives in learning technology. 

this inspired me to research through my teaching and this community

I reconnected with the EuroCALL community finding Graham Davies online (sadly now passed away but not before he agreed to deliver some staff training through his Second Life presence, a real highlight for me) and this inspired

I had been an early adopter of learning technologies and when I returned to Warwick I was able to complete further learning including an e-learning award and a Masters in Post Compulsory Education which had provided lots of opportunities to reflect through blogging

Language teaching has been my career since I left university, I completed my Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) back in the 1980s at Warwick and I had worked for 15 years in secondary education rising to a leadership role before joining the Language Centre as a part-time tutor when my children were still young

My background coming to this project was quite different from that of Simon.

the connected approach to learning and teaching has been overwhelmingly positive for me

negative physical effects of all the time spent sitting working on a screen (which I should have counter balanced more actively through resistance and greater emphasis on physical wellbeing

This serendipitous meeting on Steve Wheeler's blog back then was the spark that led to the creation of connected network at a point when I had recently developed an online space using moodle for supporting the teaching of languages at Warwick's Language Centre. The opportunity therefore to connect our student cohorts meant that we could set about creating a shared, large scale virtual exchange. 

At that time I was working with this umbrella group for languages to support communications using social media and to raise awareness of the need for better government support for languages in the UK.  I have always been a passionate advocate of language learning,

CLAVIER is more difficult to define than the acronym may appear, as I recall Simon and I discussed the choice of letters as I traveled back from a trip to London for a UCML meeting

The paths we take as we travel through life are sometimes the result of conscious decision making, sometimes the inevitable result of our behaviours, sometimes directed by others, often a complex weaving of all of these and more.

None of my students made the leap of understanding that connected this concept with an earlier one from the article, “concept creep”.

for whatever reason my students didn’t get it.

The little discovery about how students ignore what they don’t understand is a small opening into that black box of learning.

Unless you have a good understanding of how the technique

the car won’t start, or the driving conditions become dangerous

It’s like being told how to drive a car without being given any understanding of how the car and its engine work.

The result is that teachers are constantly being encouraged to try out new ideas or new methods without understand how they might be affecting student learning

here is no explanation of the underlying learning principles on which the methods or resources have been constructed.

why it might work.

There is a potential problem with ideas and models about how to teach. I

I know this will be imperfect, but at least I stand a better chance of knowing the ‘why’ of my students’ learning struggles.

I need to exercise my pedagogical imagination so that I can be active in unearthing the blindspots in my teaching practice.

perhaps an expert’s failure to be aware of who his audience is

“culture of victimhood”.

More and more I feel like an anthropologist in my classroom.

Blackbird.

Finally, after the feedback had been incorporated, the revised version of the ques-tionnaire was pilot tested by 103 school practitioners from secondary schools, and further refined. The internal consistency reliability of the whole scale was .93

The Questionnaire about the Use of Research-Based Information (QURBI) w

With respect to organization, problems seem more likely in the surveillance of an individual by an organization (and one that is minimally accountable) and when data collection is nonreciprocal and initiated by the surveillance agent. This is related to power and resource imbalances within stratified societies and organizations.

This involves the inherent and/or applied characteristics of the means and the competence of its practitioners. In addition, ethical assessments need to consider the conditions of data analysis (including merging with other data apart from that directly collected) and storage and uses of the data.

to be sure workers behaved in ways considered appropriate by the company

Consider the explicit merging of social control and social research in Henry Ford’s 1910 Sociology Department.

"make your voice heard.

Survey and surveil

1 La société comme domaine de réalisation des actions.2 La classe comme domaine de réalisation des tâches.A La classe comme lieu de conception d’actionsB La classe comme lieu d’actionC La classe comme lieu de simulation d’actionsD La classe comme lieu de préparation [12] aux compétences langagières et culturelles qui devront être mises en œuvre dans les actions sociales ultérieures

citizen

Fight the blindspot

3. I think the ultimate blindspot I am finally seeing is that engagement is risky.  It is a risk you choose to take or not.  I am used to giving away my self and go hang the risk, but when confronted with the roadmap visualization above I have to ask whether or not to keep on down this road with this map.  When you reach 60, this is not an idle question.

63/ A roadmap that does not evoke emotion is not a roadmap.

Is reciprocation a central principle of being a good citizen online?

Your roadmap is simply the landscape of upcoming known-unknowns (including, crucially, around people/trust) made legible enough for your instinctive management behaviors to kick in. 

60/ Uncertainty shows up as felt emotions: anxiety at being late, exhilaration at beating odds, felt freedom at being early, anger at being betrayed, gratitude for being unexpectedly aided.

it doesn’t take into account emotion.

Is this visualization good enough to be a roadmap?

s much of what happens in a “citizenship space” hidden just like much of nature is unrevealed and often an unknown unknown? Or is lurking one of those known unknowns that we fail to account for, that is impossible to account for?

Does the visualization measure reciprocation?

I assume that because someone doesn’t reciprocate, that they are not a good #digciz.

this feels risky,

like I am doubling down for no good reason other than stubborness (and the few folks who are engaged).

 I think this reveals a profound blindspot–if I put the food down where the goats can get to it, they will eat.

on my end,

the gif  above shows I am engaged with people who already know me and are engaged with me.  According to the gif above, I haven’t engaged with any of the principals who have organized #digciz.

Here is a gif that shows what? Connectedness? Engagement?  Frequency? All of the above or none?

Quelles formes d’accompagnement de l’étudiant ?

Les utilisateurs du CL peuvent avoir des motivations différentes et venir d’horizons divers, certains désireux de s’ouvrir des perspectives à l’international, et d’autres nécessitant une formation ou une certification de leur niveau pour intégrer le tissu économique local.

we can describe dimensions of openness. 

already all too often talk about education as something to be acquired

To do so risks reifying both pedagogy and education as something that exists independent of the students and teachers engaged in it.

checklist definition of open pedagogy is possible.

It’s about the degrees and ways in which a pedagogy is free and mutual.

any pedagogy is primarily about power relations and therefore freedom.

That means that pedagogy is not just about some instructional design strategy, it’s about power relations

A process, like a pedagogy, can be conducted in isolation removed from any other activities or parts of life

then what makes pedagogy open?

pedagogy, makes use of resources.

As educators, we intend to help students to have some kind of particular experience: learn something, change perspectives, grow, mature, create, collaborate, etc.

a method of creating a desired outcome.

It’s a process.

Thus the definition of “openness”, according to Wiley, has OER and its property use permissions as prerequisite. If there’s not explicitly CC licensed OER involved, it’s not open.

“open pedagogy”

Open Education Resources, seems relatively clear and agreed. David Wiley has defined Open Content and OER

They then went and did a marvellous job, networking for themselves.

Some of the students were busy working out how to extend our CLAVIER networking to all students on the campus. 

It was lovely to smell the toast in a university classroom.  

Today we were having synchronised breakfast with our partners in Warwick University. 

before they stuck a concrete university here.

I wandered out of the classroom into the nature on the campus.  I felt the warmth of the Indian Summer on my back, I sat down on the grass.  

I was able to take time, to chill out.   I read Tania Sheko's post 'The art of slowing down.'

students with developing information literacy. 

I arrived in class to find our partner librarians ready to teach our students. 

Rather than learning from #ccourses to develop #clavier, I am beginning to understand that #clavier and #ccourses and #ds106 and the whole caboosh is actually the same thing.

Rather than feeling under pressure, I felt rejuvenated.

Rather than blogging, (I was tired with blogging), I spent my time doing drawing. 

I joined #clmooc for fun. 

Rather than slowing down my learning, my learning accelerated.  Rather than having less time to do things, I was finding I had more time to do things. 

I was loving teaching as never before. I was experiencing less and less frustration doing what I loved.

Meeting new colleagues with whom I could have fun teaching was high up on my 'would love to' list.

Search before death all means to eliminate all aspects of my life which I hated. Search before death all means to amplify all aspects of my life which I loved.

The teacher in front of me was also clearly in a hurry "Do you have many more copies to make? I have a class in five minutes?"

With every second passed, my stress level went up. With every minute passed, my anger level went up.

I might have spent my time learning a new song, practising origami, watching a Humphrey Bogart movie, going for a walk with the kids...

I stood in the queue for the photocopier, looking at my watch. As time goes by.

I stood in the queue in front of the photocopier.

I bid them well with their renovation work of their crumbling edifice. I am on the beach listening to the waves

I have been accused of being hyperbolic and of wildly inflating conditions on the ground. I really do call them like I see them

On my farm I see the hope of a rainy August. I see all kinds of forbs for my sheep to eat. Deep rooted docks and Queen Anne’s lace, plaintain weed and hop clover and red clover and white clover. Fescue and chicory. It is a meadow fit for a ruminant. Usually it is pith dry. Sometimes the fallen and broken branches get trampled further by our sheep and as they walk through they sound like marimbas being janked around by a hyperactive eight year old. Yes, this August is rare. I hope that #ccourses is a rainy August.

Thanks for letting me take this feldgang. A feldgang is what farmers do all the time. Fieldwalks

He continues to fight against the architectural forces that value the modular over the adaptive, the global over the local. His project, the Eishin School, continues to be under fire by the powers-that-be in Japan. He continues to fight back. He is still the consummate outside. He believes in design from the folk up. I will use that yardstick to measure everything I will be trying from this course and in my courses. Is everything I do designed from the folk up? Is everything you do designed from the folk up? Is it humane and regenerative and sustaining, and alive? Or does it just serve the status quo ante bellum?

I am older than most of you. I don’t have time for this if it’s just another System B in disguise.

Is it even possible to have a System A that arises from our own or other’s codings? How will we know that we have not deluded ourselves, that we are so invested in the time and energy and pride of creation that we fall into the sinkhole of bias and blindspot?

So…will the tools we are using and advocating generate System A or System B spaces?

This paranoia has some pretty deep roots

I am still an outsider running an underground railway and I am needing folks to guide me: is this connectedcourses System A or a well-disguised System B.

I am an outsider who thought that perhaps I could lay a set of parallel sidetracks next to the well-worn ones of System B, an underground railway designed to lift up, carry forward, and sustain those fleeing the plight of System B.

the crank and the zealot. Whatever. I am an iconoclast in a job that values lockstep

I started teaching at age 39 in a rural setting of intense poverty and dying culture. The culture that was dying was agri-culture

I am an outsider as many of you are. I came to teaching late after fifteen years of farming and running a couple of businesses (taxes and chimney sweeping). I came to teaching through substitute teaching. WTF.

What I do know is that I get the very distinct feeling that certain systems I use are not convivial. Google+, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter while full of humans, feel closed, feel like templates to be filled in not spaces to be lived in. Hence, the need for outsiders more than ever to raise the question especially in this week of connected courses where we are talking about the why of why.

I have a lot of questions about whether any of the web-based tools we are using actually fit the mold of System A. I don’t often feel those spaces as convivial and natural. Behind the artifice of interface lay the reality of code. Is that structure humane? Is it open, sustainable, and regenerative? Does it feel good? Does the whole idea behind code generate System A or System B? I really don’t know.

System A is all about integrity and health and the folk not as nodes in a machine, but as a growing, adapting, distributed and living whole. It is the difference between a neighborhood and a housing development.

System B is oppressive, closed, degenerative, and exhausting.

System A and System B. System B is all about efficiency and hierarchy. It is about power and control and productivity. All of which is well and good within its proper context. I want the centralized control systems built into the flying and landing and taking off of airplanes. I don’t want it nearly so much in the ‘ergonomic’ fascism of bathroom design or of learning management systems.

Yet I have to ask: are they (including Mike Wesch, Cathy Davidson, and Randy Bass) enough outside to pull the center to the margin?

Perhaps Jim Groom’s abandonment of edupunk and Alan Levine’s disdain for the word “lurker” are part of a growing outsider movement. Perhaps Howard Rhinegold has always been on the outside looking in.

I feel the same issues with the materials of modern university life, online and face-to-face. They (the insiders) are killing the good that universities do for learners.

Outsiders in Academe

his emphasis has been upon local, humane, sustainable, and intelligent design. In his latest book he really takes on the role of outsider, pariah even, when he blames those in his own profession for the death march that is modern architecture and design.

a gadfly

My idea of the consummate outsider is architect

Question: are the facilitators and leaders and participants here outsiders or are they ‘rearrangers’? Are we cozy web makers or are we punks? Fuse lit.

the best chance for legitimate change comes from outside the discipline

Feel free to check your various personal learning networks, but …wander back please.

I freely admit that this is a mess of post

Pulling here, pulling there and giving a broad grin to a band of fellow urchins.

I want to us to have all sorts of biographies, all sorts of photos of unknown urchins with whom we may connect.

The Academy won't save us. 

I am terribly uncomfortable with badges, labels, official sort of stuff...

As we are talking about TRUST this week here in Connected Courses, I feel the need to come clean.

I wasn't too sure about the BMW.

"We shall miss Simon's way of... er making his position...er his disagreement...clear."

"No, I think it is ridiculous that older boys have power over younger ones, I think the idea that monitors are the only ones who are allowed to wear brown shoes is...ridiculous."

Artful...as in Dodger

One minute left. Terry, Keith, Kevin, Susan, Maha, Mia, Jim, Maritta, Marcin, Paul, Teresa, Maxime, Alexis, Camille, Clarissa, Blaise, Leena, Jurgen, Jose, Alan, Howard, Alec, Laura, Christine, Marie Christine, Dave, Bonnie et al -

two minute video which gave him hope.

He chose to live, to believe in himself after watching a short video on Youtube which somehow connected with him in his moment of despair.

Survival my friends is a pitiful option.