Author: joanvinallcox

Joan Vinall-Cox, Ph.D. is a lifelong learner, retired communications professor, rabid reader and poet who has taught in both the college and university systems. Her Ph.D., in 2004 was an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry focused on moving from technophobia to technophilia. She is a widow from a happy marriage and a mother to a strong and kind daughter. Her interests include Centering Prayer, Multiple Intelligences, Attention Deficit Disorder and its connection to creativity, Jung, Campbell’s Monomyth, and Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry

Teaching and Learning

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George Seimens says:

clipped from www.elearnspace.org

Innovation requires experimentation. When our schedules are too full for experimentation (a vital activity for helping teachers/educators understand the affordances of social software), we end up in a role of validating the existing structures of learning…rather than pushing boundaries of education for the benefit of learners.

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I believe teachers should be actively learning the new media, as part of keeping our own sense of how challenging and difficult learning can be. We need to model how to take on the challenge of learning for our students,

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Learning on the Web

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I find the web a wonderful place for learning. While learning on the web, I have discovered that I like to see and hear how to do things using the web, not just read about it. When I find a new application that I might be able to use, I look for the Tour or for a video and/or screencast. I start from seeing and hearing; I read howtos, tips and Help later, when I get stuck.

As a result, when I read, in my Bloglines, about Scoble’s post about Ning having a new drag and drop set up for creating personal social networks, like Elgg, (my choice) MySpace or Facebook, I immediately watched the 12 minute video on Ning’s new and easy functionality.

Now I have my own social network and travel site! And it took me about half an hour! http://whatwesaw.ning.com/

How do you best learn using the web?

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The Growing Impact of Web 2.0

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Alja Sulčič describes the impact of web 2.0 on her daily activities, and suggests some questions arising from the changes the read/write web is bringing.

I’m really amazed at what big part Web 2.0 plays in my life (and I in its life). In just a few years it has entered our lives from different doors and it’s growing stronger and more powerful days by day. And for this reason I agree with what Michael Wesch pointed out in his video – we really need to rethink a lot of things. Among these things I think that rethinking ourselves is one of the key points. We are being linked in previously unthinkable ways and our lives are being changed. What kind of changes is that bringing us? Are the changes improving our lives or crippling the social aspect of our analogue real lives as some fear?

The answers to these questions are many – and there should be. For me the most important changes are the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of responsibility, the need to share and the trust systems that the users of Web 2.0 are building among each other (just take for example Wikipedia). These are the changes I find most valuable and that I hope I (and others) will be able to keep and use not just for a better and more useful Web 2.0, but also to build a better future – together, by connecting are ideas and constructing new worlds.

If you want to understand more about how web 2.0 is affecting people, both young and old, I recommend the whole post – http://ialja.blogspot.com/2007/02/living-web-20.html – and the comments.

Image – “Open Clip Art Library/Clip Art.” Open Clip Art Library. 24 Feb. 2007 .

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eLearning Explained

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If you aren’t sure what eLearning is currently, and want to have a richer understanding, I recommend Tony Karrer’s post on it – What is eLearning 2.0? – http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/02/what-is-elearning-20.html

We are in the midst of the biggest change in communications since the printing press, and it is affecting both the methods of teaching/learning, and the content. We need to learn what we can, and use it when we can.

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After the Crash: A Final Accounting

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Well, my computer is as back to normal as I can get it. Some stuff was recovered, some was replaced, and some was lost forever.

What was Recovered
Many of my Word files were recovered, Not all; I keep discovering that something I know I had is missing. But, thanks to the service people at Canadian Computer on Speers in Oakville, I have much to be grateful for.

  • most of my applications were recovered, so I have the work set-up I’m used to.
  • many of my Word files were recovered but not the files from the course that I worked hardest on. I might be able to salvage some information from the histories of pages in the course wiki, but …
  • my old poetry is gone and I only have some of it in hard copy.
  • and there’s more that I will discover missing in the future, I suppose.

Some Replacements

  • I’ve downloaded QuickImage again, so I can easily turn my screenshots into jpegs for uploading to Flickr
  • I’ve downloaded Audacity and Lame so I can make MP3s
  • I’m going to get my podcasts set up in iTunes again

Lost Forever

  • my pictures. Some were in Flickr, but I use that mainly to provide images for my blogs. Many of my personal pictures are gone.
  • As I mentioned earlier, much of my older poetry is gone, and much of my carefully collected and built course materials are gone.
  • My Address Book and all my email files are gone

Lessons Learned

  • Backup, backup, backup!!!
  • At least for now, I’m forwarding all my email addresses to my gmail account, so I can store my addresses and the messages I save online.
  • Using online services, like del.icio.us for bookmarking and Bloglines for collecting blog urls, is not just social, it’s a safety move. What I had online, I still have.

What I’ve Added

  • I now have a 120 GB hard drive, bigger than the one that crashed.
  • I now have a 640 MB RAM, much bigger than I used to have.

So I’ve learned a lot, more about the mechanics of computers, more about the wise use of my computer (did I mention you should backup your files?) and that my computer is my external brain, but that I can rebuild and repair it when accidents happen.

A Dark Note
I was going to add a photo of my computer that I had stored in Flickr, but Flickr appears to be closed down for now. Even online is not a complete safety net. Backup!

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After the Crash!

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Well the people who worked on my crashed Mac iBook G4 returned it to me with most of my programs on it, but with small things missing, like the Spell Checker in Word. Not really such a small thing, as I type quickly and need the backup. There were, however, no documents pictures or other data!

When I went into Finder and found everything empty, I couldn’t believe it! I felt shaky. I started to enumerate all that I no longer had – pictures, and poetry, and saved pdf downloads, and all my documents from teaching materials to business records. I was not happy.

I called the people who had replaced my fried drive and I think I sounded quite pathetic as I begged them to see if there wasn’t at least some data. They asked if I had back-ups; I confessed to being stupid. They said they’d try again, but it would take a long time. The other option was to send the fried drive to a lab and pay a couple of thousand dollars. I said I’d wait to see what they could do, and not to send it to the lab (’cause no way was I paying $2000.00, even if I had been really, really stupid.)

I ignored documents and data for a couple of days, just doing web work, and re-configuring what I needed to do that. Then, when I was looking for something else, I discovered a cache of backups from 2004. (I’m really bad with organizing material objects – I’m much better at organizing files, – and I will get in the habit of backing them up!)

So I took my 2004 CDs, which I hadn’t made, but a technician had made them at the school where I worked when my assignment changed and I’d had to move from an IBM laptop to a Mac. (I wouldn’t want you to think I used to be smart; someone else had done it for me.)

By that time, I was grateful to have anything. I dragged the files that were still useful over onto my new hard drive and began to put my external brain together again. And began to face the idea of re-creating work I had already done and lost. (Stupid! Stupid! Stooped!)

Today, I rewrote a consulting report on a website, and I think I actually improved it because I changed the structure and made it problem – suggested solution, problem – suggested solution rather than the more traditional business structure with all the recommendations at the end. This structure will be easier, I think, for the website owner to understand & implement.

Then – a reward for the virtues of acceptance and rewriting – the people with my fried drive called and said they got some of the document files off it. Tomorrow, I find out what has been returned to me. And I promise, promise, promise to back-up daily!

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