Survey on bloggers

Here is an interesting recent survey summary of who is blogging and what they are doing thereDownload file
It is a general public survey, so not about education specifically but I was interested to se more than 50% actually tried to verify sources and veracity of links and references they added. It has a lot of data one might expect but also some surprises.

Video from 1608

Here is week 4’s movie–saved as a .mov as I am still working out compression to fit on the blog site and was saving it to quicktime at the time, but it should download fine. However, the quality may be lower as the video is longer this week. Download file

Here is a copy of the video of the week for Week 3 in my CTL1608f 06 course for those who need to, to download.

Download file

To blog or not to blog

I am always interested in how strongly people react to their online experiences in this course. I think using blogs is a way of writing and interacting with resources that one has to grow into in a way–I have certainly done that–and their value and potential as an educational tool changes for me with time. In part as a result of my own changing experiences that broadens my sense of what is possible and also as a result of watching my students’ process within these spaces grow and change.
I encourage you to read some of the graduate students blogs that are linked through the aggregator on this page but that are outside the 1608 course. You can do that by clicking on one of the tabs–GRAIL at the top of the weblog main page and checking out some of the entries there–perhaps select a category and view a seires of entries related to that category.
If you find the weblogs difficult or pointless, I would ask you to give it time. We are in the first week of the course, and I think they work best with the bigger goals–developing research ideas, linking ideas from different program experiences across courses and so on, but it takes a while to start to see the possibilities. You may never get to like them, but give ’em a try!

More graduations!

Another graduation to report. Rosemary Waterston successfully defended her dissertation yesterday. Her thesis title is: Interaction in Online Interprofessional Education Case Discussions, and her (large) committee included Lawrence Spero who joined us via videoconferencing from his island home in BC and John Gilbert (IPE, Interprofessional Education) in person, also from BC. Worthy of note is that the committee passed her thesis as is, no revisions, which was wonderful. Congratulations Rosemary!
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Graduations

I wanted to congratulate our most recent graduates. Doug on obtaining his M.Ed. degree–he convocated in June (and I want to apologize for my time lag in responding :), and to Bruce who successfully completed his Dissertation defence today–Dr Forrester will be in Toronto for the week as he is going to the IKIT Summer Institute. Well done, both of you!
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CHEERS!

I wish both of you all success in the future and hope you will indeed stay in touch and remain part of our community in your spare moments!! I am hoping to have a beta version of the GRAIL environment up this fall and would love to have as many people playing around in there as possible.

Technology and teacher education at CSSE

The last few days I have spent at CSSE, in particular at Technology and Teacher Education (TATE) sessions. We had a pre-conference day for people doing research in this area to share ideas and their research interests and so a beginning group is starting to emerge.

Wendy and Nobuko and I were involved in a number of presentations and discussions and the links to the presentations can be found here http://grail.oise.utoronto.ca/cbrett/archives/2005/03/presentations.html

One is: Freeman, W. & Brett, C.(May, 2006).

Designing weblogs using grounded design in an online graduate educational research environment. Paper presented at CSSE, York University, Toronto, May 30, 2006.

and the other:

Brett, C.,Freeman, W, & Fujita, N. (May, 2006). Affordances of individual weblogs and collaborative threaded discussion environments for critical refection, Paper presented at CSSE, York University, Toronto, May 28, 2006.

The theoretic frameworks that seemed to be popular among this group of researchers at the moment are Activity Theory and Communites of Practice and these are being used to inform central issues of building and sustaining communities to enhance both preservice and inservice teaching contexts, as well as potential planning and assessment-framing tools. The attraction of these theories makes sense because they attempt to understand, in a systemic way, learning situations in their broader, multilayered contexts.