Concept for my final project

I'm jumping for joy today because I've finally got a solid concept for my final individual project. It is meant to be a resource for teachers to learn about constructivist uses of technology in education, and I've been struggling with how to use stories to tell about different kinds classroom experiences with technology in a way that lets readers construct their own knowledge and perhaps build upon the website and tell their own stories.

I've loved the term bricolage (referred to by educators such as Seymour Papert, Gary Stager, Mitchel Resnick) which I think can, in this case, relate to what holistic educators believe about uniting the parts of a learner: body, mind and soul....hands, head, heart. Bricolage is defined as a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things, and aptly describes the idea that technology, in it's widely varied forms, can be used flexibly and purposefully by learners in order to construct knowledge. The idea of making something, called Constructionism by Seymour Papert, has been an important one to me, and will be reflected in my web project.

And so, I've got a title Bricolage: Connecting Playfully. Now, the scary part is to put my text (which I'm really good at collecting) into a story that somehow reflects me...my holistic attempt at constructing a product from a variety of available things! Yikes!

Group Project Completed!

This was a challenging project for our group, but in the end I think we've created an excellent construction of what we feel is important about Community and Collaboration. We created a website called Professional Learning Communities and we addressed this quite academically, which doesn't really surprise me, given our group members: Denise, Deborah, Sarah and Allison. We're a rather committed (in a good sense), knowledgeable group interested in learning and committing to doing our share and following timelines.

The assignment began exploring the larger issue of Connections and my part was about the Social Networking connections that students are making as Net Generation learners. Somehow our title then morphed into Professional Learning Communities, but I hope my part still fits okay. Social Networks are Learning Communities, especially if teachers use some of the recommended ones like http://www.iearn.org or http://www.takingitglobal.org.

Anyway, it was too late as things went on to discuss the change with the group, so I'm living with it as it is...an excellent resource that I know that I'll use in the future.

We had a few aggravations with issues like browser problems. For some reason when you view the site you may see ? marks instead of "quotation". This, in addition to the ads on the page, finally helped me decide to use iWeb rather than Freewebs. There are a lot of great features in Freewebs, but the browswer issues were problem.
You can check it out at http://www.freewebs.com/seeirwin/ if you like.


I wondered too, whether I should have volunteered to take on the technical side of things on the website, although Sarah did a fantastic job and she volunteered to take it on early on in the project. It was hard to help without a login to the site, and I would have done some things a little differently, for example, linking our audio and video using the template links for media to avoid them looking just like another weblink.

My proofreading could have been done a bit better as well. In my hurry to make the content deadline, I neglected to proof my work well enough, which led to a headache for Sarah I think.
The onslaught of email for her must have been frustrating from the 3 of us and some messages were missed which created some confusion. Next time I would proof better and suggest revisions by section and more communication (probably IM would be best) between the writer and the web editor.

All and all a successful project, and a great learning experience!

Mentoring and Freewebs....some thoughts

Well, it's been interesting to be a mentor during my CTL1799 course, although I'm not sure that being known for technology aptitude is helping me 'break out of my box' and explore other areas of holistic approaches. Instead of exploring the art, music or spiritual sites provided by my instructor and countless classmates, I find myself doing what I'm already quite addicted to doing...searching the web and learning how to debug little (oh sure...they never are!) problems.

I've finally decided NOT to go with Freewebs as a web tool, although it's really easy to use and there are a lot of very cool add-ons. The issue that has finally decided that I'll using iWeb is the browser issues. Tonight I went back to one of my pages on the site to copy a link, only to find that all of my quotation mark are now question marks. Arggghhh! This is not okay! I can't believe how long this decision has been in coming...but iWeb it will be. I also maybe consider purchasing RapidWeaver that integrates with iWeb if I need more flexibility.