Journey

As teacher, I often tramp the journey. Most of the way, I learn more than I teach, which is fortunate as I’m bored easily.

Even the well trodden-paths bear fruit. But I have to be more aware when pacing there; vigilant, else I miss what is to be learnt.

As teacher, most of what I learn on the well-tramped lanes happens as I watch others less familiar with the paths. This learning is the most enlightening, yet so difficult to pass on to others.

I’ve begun to understand why.

As teacher, all learning is a journey. How can a learner explain the destinations to someone who has never been there and seen what they’re like? There is often no measure to compare, no gradation to gauge against, and no foundation to build upon.

And so learning, once accumulated, is not necessarily always useful. At least, not as useful as we might think it should be. And so it is that the adage of teachers ‘filling jugs’ doesn’t really work, no more than their teaching does.

Johnstone’s Information Processing Model, a simplified version which heads this post, suggests that there is a real need to tread the ways often. It implies that learners may not be wholly aware of what’s to be learnt on the way, nor of its significance even if they were.

It also reinforces that perhaps filling jugs doesn’t work so smoothly, that much is spilt in the process – that many approaches may have to be tried before the jugs contain anything useful at all.

Elearning Patterns and Predictions

The Band Shell - ISTE Island

In 1972 I took my first permanent teaching job in an elite Edinburgh secondary school. Just the year before, it had been a private school. James Gillespie’s High School (JGHS) always prided itself on its high standard of education.

A maximum class size was among many standards that JGHS maintained. It strove to have no more than 25 learners per class. The belief was that a finer relationship between teacher and learner could be attained. Through this practice, significantly better educational successes were achieved.

The number of scholars who left JGHS to take up business careers, or went on to higher education, was proof enough of this accomplishment.

It was a fantastic start for me as a teacher to be with classes of this size. But it was certainly no preparation for the learning environments that confronted me in teaching positions I took up after that time.

In 1974, I had a form class of 36 learners in a school that maintained an average class size of 35.

An elearning counterpart

Almost 30 years later, research into educational achievement through elearning methods suggested that there was an optimum size for elearning groups led by a teacher.

In any group of elearners, there will always be those who can be considered ‘active’ – others who learn despite their apparent inactivity in engagement with a teacher or facilitator – and those who are neither active nor engaged significantly in learning. Time has to be distributed fairly in attending to the needs and wants of each these groups.

An e-teacher who has more than 15 to 20 ‘active’ learners in a group is always extremely busy. When the number of active learners increases much above 20, strategies have to be developed and practiced to cope with the constant learner-teacher activity that inevitably occurs in those environments.

Symptoms of stress and exhaustion are inevitable in any teacher who succeeds in engaging enough learners so that the active group comprises much above 25. My own experiences of this have been confirmed by those of my colleagues teaching in e-environments similar to my own.

A recent experience

The Band Shell - ISTE Island

Recently, I’ve been actively engaging in discourse with groups of people in Second Life (SL). In the months that I’ve assiduously studied in this networking environment, the number of ‘friends’ in my Friends List has slowly increased. The size of my list is now well over 60.

Within that group is a sub-group of 15 to 20 friends who actively use instant messaging (IM) to contact me whenever I am online. It is a great experience to network with people in this way. Not all of this is done locally – that is to say, my avatar is not necessarily appearing on the same screen as the avatars of those who are IMing me.

Of late, I have found it difficult to be online while following any intended single pursuit. Two weeks ago, I became an ISTE docent, as avatar Kallan. In adhering to the expected commitment that comes with this office, I discovered that my group of ‘active’ friends caused me significant concern when attending to docent duties on campus.

At first, I was torn between being seen to be ignoring my friends, while attending to a duty which I enjoyed. Even sending messages of apology to IMing friends was an activity that I found distracting while attending to docent duties.

I’ve since learnt from other colleagues in similar SL situations that they often simply ignore the incoming IMs during the time that they are occupied with more immediate activities. Obviously they too have difficulty reading and responding to incoming IMs when engaged in other cerebral activity.

Elearning environment

In translating this to the elearning environment, I can see clearly how a teacher can become stressed and overworked. There is the part that is played by commitment. There is also the aspect of prioritisation.

Who gets priority from the teacher in a learning environment?

When a teacher is actively assisting several learners together, how does she cope when a learner puts forward, out of the blue, a desperate plea for help?

What strategies can she employ to ensure that this learner, who may well be one who has never before communicated directly with her, gets the necessary immediate support?

What provisions must administration provide in a school to ensure that the number of active learners in a teacher’s group is kept to a manageable level?

How can administration ensure that teachers are not forced to adopt strategies to disengage themselves from needy learners in order to protect their own stress levels?

Odd Tails – a post for bloggers

Courtesy Google Analytics

It is usual for a blog post to attract nearly all its visitors during the first few days after being published. This is so much so that the term
‘the long tail’ is often used to describe the shape of the visitor profile of a typical post.

Courtesy Google Analytics

Now and again a blogger may spot an exception.

‘Digital Natives? Digital Immigrants?’ is a post I published in mid-July this year. It was popular and attracted a couple of comments.

Normally even the tail of a popular post would dwindle quickly over a period of less than a week. After two or three months, only the occasional visitor would be registered by visitor tracking.

I use Google Analytics (GA) to track one sector of visitors to my blog.
It gives a fair indication of comparative popularity.

The July post is an exception to the long tail trend. Its visitor profile is at the top of this post. It has received recent attention of a magnitude not unlike what might be expected of a newly published post, yet it was published over four months ago.

I first took note of its unusual visitor profile when comments started to appear, again, as if out of the blue. It has since attracted a significant number of comments.

Occasionally posts generate very long tails that never really dwindle to nothing. Working With Online Learning Communities is such a post, published 1 April 2009. Its visitor profile shows recent steady traffic.

Courtesy Google Analytics

Posts with visitor profiles of this type tend to have been cited and linked on popular blogs or web pages.

Isn’t it heartening that not all posts receive the same fate as a time-capsule?

Courtesy NASA


related posts - >> ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

The Ubiquitous Question – a reflection on learning

“. . . unless you speak up... you will not be learning . . .”

Judy Jacob’s comment on Working With Online Learning Communities

I often wonder if our current education systems drive us to make invalid assumptions about how learning happens. I’m talking about educators here, not necessarily members of their learning communities.

Curious though it may seem, I learnt lots as I bumbled my way through high school. Not because I was especially able or bright.

I had an annoying knack of being outspoken when I couldn’t understand things. I hated not knowing what was going on. I asked questions.

The teaching moment

Fortunately, I had good teachers. They recognised the teaching moments that I presented to them – on a plate. I gained the respect of my teachers, probably solely because of this attribute of asking questions, for I certainly wasn’t a model student.

Good teachers admire learners who ask pertinent questions. It makes them feel wanted. Hence their intolerance of impertinence, I guess.

Asking a question offers a teacher the opportunity to fulfil that so-often-difficult-to-attain goal of the pedagogue. The goal is to teach relevantly. While it’s true that learners tend to engage more in learning when they interact during a ‘lesson’, I’m not so sure that speaking up or even asking a question is necessarily exclusive for learning to occur.

Questions and answers

One dated definition of education is ‘the ability to learn from a book’
(this implies the educated is still learning). You can’t ask a book a question. Today, we like our educated learners to learn from the Internet, using searches, networking and the like.

It’s presumed that these media permit the learner to ask questions. The belief persists that asking a question – or even just speaking up – is so very necessary for learning to occur.

I’ve always thought of thinking as a stream of thought statements and questions, asked and possibly answered in the mind. My assumption is that a thinker asks questions of herself or himself and that’s what initiates further thinking.

Lying in bed, just awake, on a Saturday morning, having no plan pending for the unfolding day, my thoughts might go something like this:

“Shall I get up now? Or will I just lie here blissfully embalmed in the cosy bedding for half an hour?

I wonder what the weather’s like? Perhaps I could get the garden dug? Or maybe give the shed that coat of paint?

Ah, but isn’t it nice to lie in on a Saturday morning?”

This sort of discourse assists me to learn about how I feel. It can figure how the day that’s just beginning can become a part of my life. So yes, my assumption about asking questions still works. Even if I learn nothing of what’s happening outside my head, I can learn something about myself.

Assumptions on learning

So why do teachers assume that no learning happens without questions being asked? I think they are referring to what I call active questions, spoken or entered in a txt or email, or other such method of communication between two or more people. There is an assumption that the question has to be aired. But I am puzzled at how the idea fits with learning from a book.

It’s a point of view I’ve come across before, that of the lurker who never engages, never interacts and never asks questions. The inference is that the lurker never learns.

This is not the opinion of Nonnecke and Preece, who actually coined the phrase, Silent Participants for learners who lurk. They claim that learning can take place despite no participation from the learner. My own experience aligns with their research findings.

Etienne Wenger refers to community members who do not speak up as Legitimate Peripheral Participants. He recognises that learning happens even if the participation is only peripheral, that is to say, the learners don't speak up.

Teaching, learning and assessment

Teachers are geared to assessment. Often they feel compelled to possess written evidence that a learner has reached an objective before they are convinced the objective has actually been learnt.

Assessment is forced participation on the part of the learner. Without engagement at the time of assessment, it could be construed that nothing can be achieved in an assessment test. Yet not achieving is hardly unequivocal evidence that learning hasn’t happened.

A principle upheld by designers of resources for distance learning is that if the student hasn’t been asked a question about a learning objective, and responds with the correct answer, the objective hasn’t been learnt. Prompting the learner to respond in this way gives the teacher an opportunity to record that learning has occurred. It tends to subscribe to the tick-box mentality, but, at least, it is a recordable event.

Questioning a way to learn

I’m not entirely opposed to the suggestion that questioning is a way to learn. Nor am I questioning the idea that learners will learn nothing if they don’t ask questions. My hunch is that questions are asked in the mind all the time. The trick of learning relevantly lies in asking the right questions.

Students who always have questions, and put them, will learn. They can ask them out loud or online, to a teacher or to another learner. Or they can ask them in their own mind. As long as learners keep asking questions, there will be answers given in return and they can learn from those. This is especially the case if learners know a thing or two about metacognition, even if they don't know the word.

Do learners have to ask their questions directly? To a teacher, for instance? Do you think learners will not learn unless they speak up? Or can they learn without asking questions? What’s your take on learning and participation?

So You Have a Major Project! Where Do You Start?

I’m on leave this week. I decided to paint the bathroom. This was no small undertaking for me. Not the painting – the decision!

I’m no great shakes as a painter. I do the job thoroughly though, which is why I won’t get someone in to do it. But I’d rather watch TV.

This is the third time I’ve painted our bathroom in almost as many centuries. So I know what’s involved. But for me, it’s still a major project. Where do I start?

Around the scraping, sanding, swearing, stepladder and pots of paint,
I have to organise the family. That includes one loveable teenage daughter. Bathrooms are it for teenage girls, and we have only one bathroom. The strategy needed to coordinate even a small family around an arguably useful bathroom-being-renovated is a major project in itself.

Pale Sky Blue seems like a good colour for the walls – Oriental Bay, that’s the tint! It’ll match the nearly new shower and window curtains that everyone’s so fond of. We’ll get some new vinyl for the floor – replace the vanity mirror and everything will be hunky-dory.

I’ve forgotten where I put the old paint-roller and tray. Yes, I could really do with some new paint-brushes. There was a hardware sale advertised in the Weekender. Perhaps I should pay the store a visit and have a look. And there was the advert we saw on TV last night. Pity I didn’t take a note of the dates. Maybe there’ll be an ad on TV – now.

So you can see that I have a problem starting a major project!

Where to start?

At home and at work, I’ve had lots of major projects that I’ve deliberated over. One thing has come clear to me over the years. Procrastinating gets me nowhere when it comes to the major project.

So where do I start?

The answer is . . .

anywhere.

With a task like this, postponing the inevitable just runs away with the valuable time I need for scraping, sanding, swearing and messing about with stepladder and pots of paint.

So I get into town and buy the paint. Return home, change, grab the scraper and sandpaper and start preparing the walls.

"What about the family and access they have to the bathroom?" you say. Needs must. They’ll just have to make the best of a bathroom-being-renovated the same as I will.

So that’s it really.

Where do you start a major project? The answer is 'anywhere'. Oh, a bit of planning won’t go amiss. But it’s the same with planning. In fact, for some projects, just the planning becomes a major project. So you have to draft a plan.

Where do you start with that? Anywhere!

It’s the starting that’s the thing.

The weight on the mind of any major project can be profoundly burdensome. And a project doesn’t really have to be all that big for it to be considered major. Take writing this blog post for instance. I really wasn’t up to writing a post today. I’d just finished nursing my aching back after painting the bathroom ceiling. But where did I start?

Anywhere!

I just have to get started, that’s all. Sometimes starting a major project can be as difficult as completing the rest of the project!

GPS - What Got You Flying This Month

I am privileged to have hosted Paul Cornies’ Green Pen Society this month and to have been given the opportunity to choose the topic, What gets you flying when you feel you want to write?

Paul started the writers’ society this year over at quoteflections.

This month's responses have been wonderful and I appreciate the frankness the contributors possess in rationalising their reasons for writing.

Here are some extracts from contributions:

Blogging allows me to continue both formal and informal learning by working out and reformulating ideas that I have heard at school, questions from my students, read in blogs or the periodicals I read on regular basis (such as the Financial Times), and even analyze and come up with my own theories on what is going on in those areas in which I am interested.
Virginia Yonkers

What empowers me? In the old days before blogging I liked to write in a journal. I wrote stories and poems but I was not nearly as prolific as now. Now I am writing for an audience and most importantly for myself; it's fun and enriching most of the time.
Paul Cornies

The blog is a place I come to reflect, and even rave about things that have been floating around in my head. Very productive – you should try it. I believe that many ideas which would normally have no outlet are developed in blog posts. Seriously.
Tania Sheko

Ideas, feelings and stories that lie idly in my mind rise to the surface and glide when I write about them. Tangled thought-threads, perhaps diffuse and disparate, become less so and move more freely and succinctly when I do this.
Ken Allan

I blog so that those who want to be part of class and can't PHYSICALLY come into class can be part of what we are doing. I blog some of what we are doing, some of what we are discussing, any class newsletters and anything else that allows our community to be connected.
Jody Hayes



It’s learning how writing sometimes seems to flow, how words bubble up, how they flow up and back down to the ground beneath your feet, it’s learning how writing makes things possible and how words can make your mind feel more expansive and alive.
Joanna Young

What I write in my journal consistently is that I want my words to inspire the reader. I want them to come away from what I write feeling better about themselves and the world around them. I want my words to cultivate and plant seeds that will grow crops useful to this universe. I want them to open new windows of possibility and to raise provocative questions.
Kathy Stilwell

I was and am exploring the fun and features of the world wide web. I want to understand how it works, and what it can be used for. I write to save my ideas, play with avatar makers, learn to post pictures and videos. I enjoy hearing from people around the world and batting ideas around with them.
Susan Ens Funk

I give my sincere thanks to this month’s GPS contributors and special thanks to Paul Cornies for permitting this to happen on my blog.


A Green Pen Society contribution

GPS Updates Winged By Words

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things
Antoine de St-Exupery

The latest topic from the Green Pen Society has already gathered a flock of winged posts! September’s GPS topic is,

"What gets you flying when you feel you want to write?"

GPS, the brain-child of Paul Cornies at quoteflections, is a group of writers/bloggers who are developing their voice in writing about the world around them.

What brings you to write the things you choose to write about?
What gets you flying when you feel you want to write?

To participate in this month’s venture, tag your post with the label Green Pen Society and link back to this post. Put a comment here with a link to your post (important if you want me to know you exist!)

I've pasted my contribution at the base of this post.

Here is the flock of wonderful winged contributions to date.

Virginia Yonkers - Connecting 2 the World
Why Do I Blog?

Paul Cornies - quoteflections
What Empowers Your Blogging?

Tania Sheko - Brave new world
Why do you write?
What gets you flying?

Jody Hayes - Navigators
I Blog So That . . .

Joanna Young - Confident Writing
What Makes Your Writing Fly?

Kathy Stilwell - Stilwell Reflections
What Gets You Flying When
You Feel You Want To Write

Susan Ens Funk - What Counts!
Inspired by . . .

How do I know what I think till I see what I write?

Ideas, feelings and stories that lie idly in my mind rise to the surface and glide when I write about them. Tangled thought-threads, perhaps diffuse and disparate, become less so and move more freely and succinctly when I do this.

Even if I’m confused or baffled in trying to make sense of what may seem like nonsense, I try to think of a title relevant to the jumble of thoughts I have. I write to the title. It is rare that any title determined this way remains unchanged, but it is a place to start.

The original tangle of thoughts begins to change shape as I write. What was bound and knotted starts to unravel. Thoughts become more linear by writing about them.

During this unweaving, I find that related thoughts can be grouped – ideas can be prioritised. There is opportunity for differences to become apparent – comparisons to be made. Twaddle can be culled. Emerging thoughts take shape and make contributions to the edits.

The cycle reiterates in loops in much the same way as a gull soars in circles higher and higher in the warm updraft from a sunny hillside.

When the looping is complete, and my thoughts are brought to rest,
I can sleep on them.

A Green Pen Society contribution

SPAM – A Blogger’s Nuisance

How do you recognise comment spam?

Just over a year ago I started getting weird comments against a few blog posts. Not too frequently, perhaps one or two a month. Their occurrence was regular enough for me to consider using comment moderation. I didn’t switch it on as it happens, but the experience made the option very tempting.

The comments were not always posted on the most recent posts, which could have been a bit of a worry.

Luckily I enabled Comment Notification Email early on. This option in the blog settings is a splendid alert system. It’s just as good to know when valid comments arrive as it is when bogus ones hit the fan.

Cut-throat approach

When I get comment spam, I usually just delete it there and then. It's a minor nuisance. But in recent months I’ve noticed these infrequent occurrences are becoming more sophisticated. I’d hate to delete a valid comment from a well meaning commenter.

These days, it takes me longer to work out whether it’s spam or just a comment with odd diction. Some of them can be almost appropriate to the post, though usually they come at the blog from left field.

Tell-tale signs

There are usually signs that indicate something is dodgy. One comment that I deleted recently, Nice blog and have lots of stuff here, actually linked to what appeared to be a valid and reputable environmental site. However, a search on Google, using the parenthesised comment as search criterion, returned 1740 hits.

That was telling!

Here’s an example of a recent comment I got against a post published in July last year:

First time I have seen your blog and what a great post that was!Remember the saying “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”So once you have a great idea you have to work hard to turn it into a viable product that doesn’t just exist in your head. Keep blogging.

Plausible comment

At first reading, the comment makes some sort of sense, even with its idiosyncratic punctuation. But it linked to a commercial site, which is a tell-tale spam characteristic, rather than to a blogger’s account or about page.

Having jostled uneasily with comments like this over the past year,
I eventually developed a speedy strategy for putting them to test.

Perhaps you have a strategy of your own? Here’s my three point plan for nutting out an otherwise convincing spam comment –

Does it make any sense that’s appropriate to the post it’s posted against?

Does it link back to a valid blog or site that may be associated with a single person or valid group?

How many hits do I get in Google when searching using the text of the comment or any parenthesised significant part of it?

The last point sometimes presents the need for closer inspection, despite a low number return. 15,00 hits is unequivocal, but if the number is less than 10, as it was with the otherwise convincing comment featured here, I have to inspect a few of the destinations listed in the search return.

Tracing the origins

At the time of posting, the search criterion, which was the first sentence from the suspicious comment, "First time I have seen your blog and what a great post that was”, returned only 9 hits.

But it becomes clear, when tracing their origins, that the comments are bogus – check them out.

I’d like to learn more about how others view this growing nuisance.

Are you a cut-throat deleter? Or do you have a sleuth-like strategy up your sleeve? What checks on suspicious comments do you make before you delete them?

On Index Page

courtesy GoogleAnalytics

I’ve been nudged to review my stats this month, something that I normally do as a matter of course but I’m reporting on it here.

Tony Karrer’s post, Alternative Views of Blog Content, reminded me that the last time I’d reported on the Index Page Project was in March this year.

The Index Page for Blogger in Middle-earth was a project I embarked on in January 2009. It was initiated by Tony’s First Time Visitor Guide, which provides a brief description of what his blog is about with selected posts listed under general topic headings. I admired his Guide, and as I was already thinking about building a blog index, it prompted me to start one.

Initial novelty value

The new Index Page certainly caused a lot of interest for a few months after it was published, during which time it was the most popular post on the blog. I suspect that this was more its novelty value. The time spent on the page suggested that it was being inspected rather than used directly for the purpose I’d intended.

In recent months activity has settled with a steady flow of visitors who obviously use it as an index – its favourable bounce rate of 27% indicates this, as does the 1:17 time on the page.

courtesy GoogleAnalytics

There is a significant correlation between activity on the Index Page and the dates of new posts. This tends to suggest that those hits are made by newcomers to the site, though this is not entirely conclusive.

Maintenance

I'm inclined to tinker when it comes to some aspects of blogging. Perhaps I put more time into tweaking and trimming than I should – who knows? That’s purely my own judgement of how I make peripheral adjustments to posts. Part of it is curiosity to find out what works best.

For instance, I’ve found that putting in links to related posts like the ones at the base of this post, though time consuming, actually provides some access to posts that might otherwise become time-capsules.

When this activity becomes a chore, I’ll probably give it a miss. The time spent updating the Index Page is nevertheless much less, perhaps only a minute or so each time I publish a new post – a small percentage of the total time I spend on the hobby of blogging.

Usefulness as an index?

I’m probably the most regular user of the index. With now well over 200 posts on the blog, I find it increasingly difficult to locate one of my own posts unless I use the index. GoogleAnalytics has indicated that the latest category, the monthly archives, is being used by visitors as are the post-label links.

This last period it ranked 8^th in popularity, and attracted 3% of the total visits to the blog. Considering that it received more than twice the activity of hits in its first few months, the Index Page is undoubtedly the most popular post on the site this year. It does not have the long-tail profile of a typical post, which makes it quite unique.

courtesy GoogleAnalytics

Usefulness as a first-time-visitor guide?

The jury is still out on this one. Laurie Bartels gave me a lot of support in her comments in the first two months and I am grateful for those.

So far there have been no comments that indicate there’s any need for improvement! My suspicion is that the need is there nevertheless.

If you have a useful suggestion, why not nip over to the Index Page, check it out, and tell me what you’d like to see there? Go for it!

Nāu te rourou nāku te rourou he pai te iwi kātoa.

With your food basket and my food basket our tribe will prosper.

( 6 ) << - related posts - >> ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

You Never Can Tell With Bs

Sometimes I feel like Winnie-the-Pooh when I try something different in a blog post. Being a bit like his venture with a balloon, such trials can be launched into cyberspace, leaving me suspended in mid-air.

Nothing to do except hang about and wait and see.

It can turn into one of those things that numbs the mind with a nauseating tedium. It can be quite a while before anyone comes out to have a look. First one or two, then a dozen or sometimes more.

There are times I get the impression that, perhaps, just perhaps, they suspect something. That I’m not really a ‘legitimate’ after all. I think on the pros and cons of letting go the balloon. There’s no parachute when you post, you know. It just floats up and stays there and you’ve just got to hang on and wait.

These are the times when I’ve felt that maybe I should have blogged and posted under a disguise. Of course, no guise would be truly effective, just like Pooh’s small-black-cloud-in-the-sky idea wasn’t.

There have also been some unexpected adventures that surprised me with the yield brought forth by a seemingly bearbrained idea. Hmmm. That, I guess, is the secret of having great adventures.

Have plenty of bearbrained ideas.

You never can tell with Bs.

What Do You Do When You Find A New Site?

This morning I came across an unfamiliar site through a post-link I’d followed on a familiar blog. As usual, I did a perfunctory scan of the header and layout of the page. That took a few seconds. Then I got into reading the post. It was well written and the topic was fresh and interesting.

I was almost through the second paragraph when the inquisitor in me took my attention to look for the date of the posting. It wasn’t prominent nor was the post date easy to find. I flicked down to the comments section and picked the date of the first comment: October 21, 2008.

I resumed reading, having sorted in my mind the post’s place in time. About a third way through the text, I started inspecting intermittently the blogroll, names of commenters, checking out links to other sites, while continuing to read. I recognised that I was looking for links to sites or blogs that I might know.

Priority

It was then I realised that I was subconsciously prioritising my time, and my reading, by checking out the authenticity of the writer before getting further into what was quite a meaty post. In particular, I was scrutinising what I had gleaned from the post so far, weighing that against what I already knew.

I recalled doing this many times in the past when I had come across commercial sites and others that might waste my time while reading cogent story lines that amount to nothing - or worse, pernicious propaganda. The ‘trust’ mechanism within me kicks in fairly rapidly these days. It tends to be vicious if I suspect my time is being wasted.

Do young learners need this?

It also occurred to me that the routine I’d just accomplished was one difficult to explain to a young learner who may need to discover a thing or two about appraising the authenticity of information found on the Internet.

By flitting through what to others may seem a jumble of unrelated checks, I sketch an overview of where the post lies in relation to what I already know. This amounts to my knowledge of the topic and associated writers or sites familiar to me, as well as the possible up-to-date-ness of the information likely to be proffered by the content of the post.

How do you recognise baloney?

My usual reaction to bogus information, once it’s identified, is instantly to wipe all that I’d held in the temporary enquiry channel of my thinking to do with what I’d read in the post or article, and move on.

Over the years I’ve developed what Carl Sagan referred to as a baloney detection kit. It is only part of the routine I practice when checking out information or ideas new to me. It kicks in at an advanced stage for there is no need to use it if I’d already identified bogus information from perfunctory checks and judicious hunches.

What do you do when you come across a post on a blog new to you or article on an unfamiliar site on the web?

Do you use a routine to check out authenticity?

What would you do if you found that all your commonly used checks and routines returned insufficient information for you to form a useful opinion about the authenticity of an article, or of the information contained there?

4 R's Meme: Favourite Posts

Help! And I thought I’d sneak through July without being tagged!
Well it just isn’t going to happen!

Paul Cornies’ recent post, 4 R's Meme: Favourite Posts, asks those tagged to select 4 of their favourite posts from their own blog, one from each of the categories: Rants, Resources, Reflections and Revelations.

The posts are then listed with a brief summary on each describing:

why it was important,

why it had lasting value or impact,

how you would update it for today.

The intrepid bloggers are to tag all of their selected posts with the label postsofthepast and then select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.

Here are my 4 selected posts, not all of them directly related to education:

Rants – What Do You Do With A Fan Of Links?


Infowhelm is ubiquitous and can even exist within a single post in the form of numerous links to dozens of associated and not so related resources. This rant-category post raged about the problem and brought forth sympathy, further discussion and some solutions. I’d like to be able to write more posts like this one.

Resources – Ship-shape and Bristol Fashion
I needed to write 'Ship-shape and Bristol Fashion' to find out, firsthand, that bloggers have their own strong beliefs about their practices in publishing a post. I was aware that some readers may not have been familiar with the possibility of hazardous html and how it may be introduced. What I did not anticipate was that in the territory of other experienced bloggers, this topic could be hallowed ground.


Reflections – Collective behaviour


Group dynamics is a current issue that’s the subject of numerous studies at different levels in society. The behaviour of the group, as opposed to the behaviour of its component individual acting as an isolate, is a paradox. This was a popular post that didn’t really put forward enough questions to stimulate further engagement through comments.


Revelations – In Praise of Plaudit

Positive feedback is such an important encourager for the learner and especially the isolated distance-learner. It is one of the cornerstones of learner engagement.

'In Praise of Plaudit' sparked a discussion in comments that affirmed the need for teachers, tutors and elearning technologists to embrace the importance of learner encouragement through feedback.

What I didn’t take into account when I wrote the post was that every educator has their own perspective on the learner. It is perhaps unclear to those who have not experienced distance-learner contact firsthand, the important differences between learners who have face-to-face contact with tuition and the needy situations so often experienced by isolated distance-learners.

I tag the following intrepid and much respected bloggers:

Andrea Hernandez

Café Chick

Ken Stewart

Manish Mohan

Virginia Yonkers

Remember to tag your post with the label postsofthepast.

I Keep Doing This!

This keeps happening to me. My RSS Reader gets filled up in no time so that I have hundreds of unread posts. I have to have a read-in to clear them all. It’s not as if I don’t read posts, but it just keeps happening if I miss a day or so. I find it a pain to catch up.

Part of my problem is that I have an eclectic taste for topics – just check out my index and you’ll see what I write about.

500 blogs a day!

Just over a year ago I read about Kevin Hodgson and his amazing use of the RSS Reader – skimming 500 blogs a day. I even posted about it! At the time, I thought that this was something I might aspire to.
Not any more. I have 156 subscriptions in my reader at the moment.

Over the year I’ve been blogging, many bloggers have posted with disdain about their RSS Reader getting clogged up with unread posts. It’s often because they’ve been busy with a project, or been on vacation for a while. I’ve even been daft enough to try to give advice to some who may have requested it – but I was sticking my neck out - I’m certainly no expert at this. Here’s some of the things I (tried to) do:

Try to get real

I just get real and cull. But where to start is always the difficult decision. I recall Sue Waters commenting on how often a blogger should post. She wasn’t so much giving advice on the frequency of posting, more reporting on what she’d learnt about teachers and what they preferred when it came to a blogger’s rate of output – all useful information. Sue spoke of “readers in the edublogger community who unsubscribe if a blogger posts too frequently”.

She made me think immediately of a few bloggers whose sites I’d already subscribed to and who thump out more posts in a day than I could possibly publish in a week! No names mentioned here, but some of these sites are owned by ace bloggers. Their stuff is worthwhile reading, and I just do not want to remove subscriptions to their sites.

I’m always reluctant to cull blogs just because they happen to be on the list and haven’t posted in ages. Providing their stuff is good, I don’t mind the subscriptions staying where they are - no problem.

Syndicate sites

I subscribe to a number of syndicate sites and I also subscribe to the contributing sites. I could unsubscribe these individual sites, but I often find the individual subscriptions useful. Anyway, they are really just nuisance value, for if I’ve read the posts from one subscription it’s easy to mark as read on the other.

So what do I do? Develop some whiz routine for culling subscriptions? Ignore the counter on the RSS Reader and continue reading as normal?

What do you do to keep the subscriptions in your RSS under wraps?