My dear colleague and comrade/comadre in blogging, Barbara Ganley, has been chiding me via Twitter about how long it has been since I have been here on the blog. She is the queen of slow blogging (borrowing the term from the slow food movement.)Her posts emerge as multimedia feasts to savor and to ponder (I know of people who print out her posts and read them off line because they feel the screen does not do her eloquent compositions justice; of course then they miss all of the lively “intertwingling” that her writing does via the blog…connecting medias and words in one single spot…). BG is a crockpot cookery blogging goddess in a world of microwaved, convection-cooked fast food nation writing. Her blog is a guilty pleasure to many and a welcome change to the microblogging madness of Twitter (which I will admit has its own special and seductive appeal) and yes, she is damn good at it.
The Knowledge Tree Lead Article: Making Ground: How have transformed teaching pedagogies taken advantage of participatory media to increase learner engagement?
We Barbaras carved out a few months this summer to work together on a paper, and I am pleased to say that it has been published as the Lead Article for the Knowledge Tree e-journal out of Australia. From the introduction to Edition 15: Making Ground
In each contribution, teachers have not only provided learners with more participatory tools but have made subtle shifts of focus to engage learners in ways that respond to the contexts within which learners find themselves, both in their local communities and in broader communities accessed through the Web. Greater freedom to use tools that are more culturally and contextually appropriate and which allow them to participate in the creating their own learning, are in evidence.
We invite you to go in and read what we wrote about being classroom teachers in the 21st century. Please leave your comments!
You are also welcome to download the paper and read it offline too. There is a link to a .pdf of the paper off of the site
We read our paper outloud and you can click here to hear us should you so desire.
But here is where we need your help and your participation: The Knowledge Tree folks also would like for me to invite our LLU readers to the Elluminate session on November 8th at 8:30 p.m. EST (Eastern Seaboard US) BG and I will be online and ready to answer your questions about the paper.
In order to participate you need to register for an account with them on Elluminate. Once you have done that, please go here and join the multimedia, multimodal conversation.
LLU will be broadcasting/simulcasting the audio of this conversation as well. So if you just want to listen in via our site, that’s possible too. After the broadcast, sloth blogger Barbara will host a follow up chat with graduate students from the University of Connecticut’s Department of Modern & Classical Languages. We plan to talk about teaching with social software and the joys (and pitfalls) of moving from theory to practice in the classroom…please join us! It will be webcast and the chatroom will be open.
All this alongside the very important work of running a language center too (I need to return to this topic very soon and I have some posts percolating in the draft bin).
Not bad for a critter with only three toes 😉
The sloth and the crockpot, eh? Sounds about right with me and the crockpot, but the sloth for you? Naw–you’re more like the tortoise who beats the crank out of the hare in the home stretch. I always know your posts are worth reading, worth waiting for.
I’m looking forward to Thursday evening’s extravangaza, for there is an arena in which you are a whirling dervish and I the clown bumbler as I try to type (without too many mistakes), talk, change slides, paste emoticons, and pay attention. I just like to sit back and watch you at work…