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Creativity, Innovation & Change
My fourth module and some 12 days before we officially start.
I neither hang back, nor do I wade in; I appreciate that the person who finally makes it on 1st November may feel left out or left behind.
I leave nothing in the cafe area where no fewer than two course tutors have introduced themselves. Elsewhere I am one of four to have made it to the door.
There will be books, though thus far I am downloading PDFs are reading them off the iPad.
In order to take motes it strikes me that a second tablet would be an advantage so that I can have two screens. Two hinged like a book?
I sense a different tone, a sense that there is a team present to supervise our first moves rather than a single tutor.
The print-like lay-out of the texts lifts the words away from the VLE too, subtle yet recognisable differences. Already the reading impresses: I could spend the next ten years giving the many creative techniques a go and not get to the end.
This is something that has impressed me with each OU module that I have done, you could never want for something to do, ample to fill 12-15 hours a week, yet room to spend 20 or more hours if you wished.
On a totally different matter I agreed to complete and submit my old Swimming Club’s Swim21 application, something that I had done for the last three years. In this way I can at least keep my interest in swim coaching alive even if I am no longer poolside (for now).
And then in my inimitable way I go to the Harvard Business Review, as invited, to download ‘How to Kill Creativity’ only to spot ‘The Rise of the E-lance’ instead which takes a 1998 look at the opportunities then arising for the freelance in an IT rich world.
I download this into iBooks only to find a 2011 PDF on Webinars of most immediate interest, afterall I am this week an next seeing people about putting on Webinars for us. Some self-discipline is required, getting the required reeading done first during time I set aside to do so, rather than last.
21 ways to persuade others to blog
I should add what research is showing, the obvious really, that ‘like minds’ aggregate around each other’s blogs. The paper is called ‘Birds of a Feather’.
Reference
Birds of a Feather: How personality influences blog writing and reading. (2010) Jami Li and Mark Chignell. Science Direct. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 68 (2010) 589-602
6 reasons you may be able to call yourself a digital scholar
Alerted by a Tweat, I bought the book in minutes.
There’s never a better time than ‘Now’.
Purchase your copy here.
Unwell, so having it read to me on the Kindle, while taking notes on an iPad.
When I wander off I pick up the thread on the iPhone.
It’s surprising how much can be read while the kettle boils.
In due course and I’ll have my very own 3,000 word interpretation of this 50,000+ worder, far more once I’ve added my notes, thoughts additional references and illustrations.
My web 2.0 sensibilities are for the online equivalent of the Illustrated, hardback coffee-table book, with video and podcasts, interactivity and links.
I’d have Dion Hinchcliffe’s graphic designer do some colour diagrams, Steven Appleby provide some cartoons, while I would interview the author for YouTube and set it all to something suitably camp like Mike Oldfield with a Roger Dean poster decorating the set.
When do we get the webinar?
And I pre-emptivelly wrote a review in Amazon on the basis of the first two chapters, hearing the author debate and speak the subject and reading his blog (as well as his earlier book that he brings up as a way of looking at how things have changed since 2006).
P.S. Buy you e-book version now then return here to discuss, or find you in Linked in or Google+ …
Or for some blended learning if you live near Lewes, East Sussex, over at the Needlemakers for a coffee.
My ‘take-aways’ so far:
- Digital, Networked, Open.
- Fast, cheap and out of control.
- Why students choose one university over another.
- The ‘good enough’ revolution. Wired (2009)
- The unpredicatable use of technology.
- (and Martin Weller’s daughter, he writes on page one, didn’t think, based on his ‘ellevator pitch’ that the book would do very well. This, with a bit of ‘airplay’ on the blogosphere, need not be the case. Get to work tweeting, noting, sharing, putting into Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Xing and Viadeo. I can’t see a movie in it though).
Sometimes only paper will do
Whilst I read books and papers using an eReader there are at times when only paper will do.
Reading course notes in H800 of the Masters in Open and Distance Education, WK25.
Once again, MindCreator, an App for the iPad is rather useful. Updating this Personal Learning Environment mindmap perhaps suggests I spend very little time ‘on paper,’ and a good deal of time ‘online’. I post this thinking it is up to date; having joined Google+ yesterday the interplay of tools here may change again.
Have we ever lived in such a fluid world?
Created in MindCreator
Finding meaning across the fluid and complex world of e-learning
H800 wk23 a Activity 2
Stepping over the edge
‘A key characteristic of these new technologies is “learning by doing” – users need to be immersed in and “play with” the affordances that these new digital environments offer, and hence over time get a sense of how they can change practice.’ Conole (2011:403)
Whilst I may highlight and annotate, doing do on paper isn’t the easiest way to share; using a screen reader is worse because I find myself not enjoying having the obvious affordances, such as cut and paste, disabled.
I have an iPad to learn from it and to share what I discover.
It is both the angle and the devil on my shoulder.
Does it super-size my mind?
It thrills and engages it, indulges and expands, but also risks loosing me in its labarynthine tangles.
Saved for now by a To Do list that I refresh and follow.
But then I find an idea from Conole (see above) that is key.
The internet is a trip to the sea, it is somewhere to play and discover.
We may require Lifeguards and laneropes but it remains largelly an environment that can only be understood through engagement.
You will get you face wet,you may get bitten by a crab.
To share this thinking I must go online, and cannot help myself. For the last three months I click through Linkedin, reading and responding.
For the next three it may be Stumbleupon, which through tricks and traits I find increasingly insightful, feeding me like a favourite aunt or uncle , the weirdness of the http://www.
Serendipity would be a better word for it.
I am rewarded by 25 minutes of browsing with ‘new finds’ that becomes stuff that I recommend which in turn obliges me to update my profile, might I even say ‘brand tag’ the finds as ‘mymindbursts’. (I need two days off to take stock and write up some ten ore more blog entries.
Draft I know will do, from my experience as a diarist, just enough to trigger a more expansive and reflecive entry)”.
To remind myself:
Monday 11th
Livestream on Social Media Metrics from IET. Five presenters. All to write up from my notes and screengrabs, cushioned or suffocated by the ‘official’ word and slides that have since gone up.
Tuesday 12th
Picklejar Social Media for HE in which Tracy Payle shares insights from a number of Universites and through activities tips my thinking upside down and shakes it out onto the conference room table. I come away enlightened and as I had wanted, more confident if mot emboldened.
Thursday 20th
Faculty discussion on VLE and my experiences of The OU VLE to date. I take a look at the poster in the Post Room and discover a ‘common room’ I had been unaware of.
‘And so to bed’. Learn to blog with Samuel Pepys and this wonderful BBC dramatisation of his diaries
This first episode is a wonderful interplay between domestic and civil life, the prospect of joining the ship that will fetch the King from exile, while the ‘wench’ who works for them refuses to kill the turkey they’ve been feeding up because it’s her friend.
On the 1st of January 1660, the 26 year old Samuel Pepys decides to start keeping a diary.
How many of us have begun on the 1st of January never to get beyond the month? Or choose to pick it up again after an absence. Don’t let this be an excuse, start now. What did you have for breakfast? And if that’s too mundane what’s you solution to the debt crisis?
In the first episode Pepys is behind with his rent, he gets drunk and both he and his wife wish for a family. Pepys reflects on the great events of the 17th century but he also tells us what people ate, wore, what they did for fun, the tricks they played on each other, what they expected of marriage, and of love affairs.
In this episode some house guests play a game after dinner called ‘Getting Married’. By all accounts it sounds like a 17th century invitation to do some wife-swapping.
This BBC radio drama is on every day at 10.45 and again in the evening at 19.45. Episode 2 today.
You can follow Samuel Pepys on Twitter. You get regular 140 characters or less updates.
Read his diary, offered on a the basis of ‘on this day 350 years ago.’
Nothing’s changed much, the most important things in our life are loves, family and friends.
Our lives may touch on the politics and events of the time, they may not. Pepys got through the restoration of the King, Plague and the Fire of London.
He so often ends is entry with, ‘and so to bed’.
This reflects the typical keeper of a written diary, you tend to use the evening to catch up. I have to wonder if he had given up the diary he may have produced some children. I stopped keeping a diary on getting engaged after 16 years of writing – I had better things to do in bed than prop myself up on one and scribble secret notes into a hardback book. In any, there is no longer a best time to ‘blog,’ Twitter like you can post an entry whenever you like, as the events unfold or as a thought crosses your mind.
For radio for boring bits have been left out; it therefore reads like a novel.
Not a recommended style for these pages, but great for an external blog in WordPress (HERE), Blogger or LiveJournal. Or my favourite, Diaryland.
One way to compare social media platforms – use metaphor
We each have our own metaphors.
For Facebook I go with a family weedding (family and friends).
For Twitter I go with a rain. Sometimes you need an umbrella.
Overused, overhyped, over-whelming noise. It depends on if you like going out in a thunderstorm on monsoon.
And as a rainmaker do you go out with a water-pistol or do a rain-dance?
I’ve observed Twitter misused drown discussion groups (Oxford University) because it is being used like DIY direct mail or spam. Everyone sticking their heads out a window and blowing a trumpet about stuff that very few people have any interest in at all. So instead of being used as a way to talk with a niche audience, it is used as a way to spam millions.
For Google+ so far is a handful of OU students who happen to be studying the Masters in Open and Distance Education and are joining this lab together. Its appeal is obvious – control. Though nothing I don’t recognise from Diaryland which has something called ‘rings’ and was live in September 1999. No such thing as a good idea then?
Just someone coming along and doing it better?
Linkedin is where the real networking occurs, between professional like-minds.
Not forgetting blogs, where a specialist interest or three is the best place to pull-together and associate with people whose comments and opinions you value.
We can make these platforms anything we want them to be, indeed turn the recieved thinking or common practice inside out if we wish.
Why not draw professional contacts to Facebook as a creative workout in a different context?
If Google+ replaces Facebook AND Twitter I’ll be happy.
But the idea that I’ll get used to Google+ over the next 18months and then need or want to change to something else fills me with dismay. It reminds me of how the privatisation of the bus services meant you could get three busses all arriving at the same time, each from a different operator, each wanting you to use their bus.
Micro-moments, micro-places – mobile learning anytime, anywhere? Learning in a sneeze?
As a professional swimming coach when working with disabled swimmers I was taught to play to a person’s strengths.
When Agnes Kukulska-Hulme (2011) talks about the inequalities of access, on the one hand she mentions the affordances of such devices on the other … we find a way to play to their strengths – is it not these developments that drive advances?
Woman needing and wanting to study favour learning via a mobile device (smart-phone or more likely a standard mobile) as it can just look as if they are on the phone. There are cultures where learning is liberation and where liberation is not something the men want ‘their’ women to have.
I wonder how many others can now take their mobile device into a ‘space of their own’ (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf), so that they can Rita-like (as in ‘Educating Rita) ‘improve’ themselves.
Bed, bog and bath. You can take an iPad its contents and links wherever you would take a book or a pair of nail-clippers. Walking the dog, up a tree, over a coffee, in a traffic-jam. Waiting for the kettle to boil, the laptp to boot up, the toast to pop?
micro-moments and micro-places.