Musings about life in retirement from academe
At first glance Rita might not seem to be the sort of teacher you would want for your child and yet she probably is that teacher. Despite evident character faults it is hard not to like and even admire her. Start watching and you probably will not stop.
Last week I attended the 2017 international conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) with support from the USQ Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts where I work in the School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood. I’m thankful for that support and for the patience of students in my classes who may have experienced...
Those of us involved with developing and teaching courses hear a lot about the desirability of consistency which sometimes seems to be interpreted as just short of uniformity. Historically that is based on student responses to a survey conducted a few years ago which was interpreted as students wanting to see the same features in the same locations in different courses....
It’s late January. I started writing this earlier in the month, soon after I was back in my office and thinking about first semester courses. After a couple of years working with the most recent iteration of assessment in EDP4130, a project-based design challenge, it was time to consider a change. In 2015 and 2016 students created teaching resources for the two...
I want to be a good corporate citizen but that can be difficult when the tools (like a web server) that enable you to do your job are withdrawn. Still that impulse got me thinking about using Moodle books to present study material. If that could be made to work, without subverting the quality of presentation of materials, it would get material in-house and offer advantages of being easily printed or downloaded as eBooks for use on computer, tablet or smartphone.
For one thing I’m about to go on annual leave for 3 weeks and plan to mellow out a little after I’ve dealt with a couple of tasks that just didn’t make it to the top this week despite my plans. For another, and the real point of this post, we are beginning our publicity push to recruit participants in...
I’m working on a project with a colleague from UQ and two others here at USQ to explore how we can open up practice and resources within and across institutions. We are each working on courses that address the Australian Curriculum: Technologies alone or in concert with The Arts. I’m feeling just a bit guilty that I’m once again late to the...
Coding has become a hot topic in educational circles. In a previous post – The second coming of coding: Will it bring rapture or rejection? – I responded to some comments posted by Bron Stuckey and concluded that a key challenge would be the limited experience that most teachers, and students preparing to be teachers, have of coding in any form. In...
David Jones (@djplaner) posted a piece, Teachers as designers of technology enhanced learning?, earlier today. Although he didn’t identify us, I am one of the colleagues he referred to in his introduction and I was tagged in his tweet about the post. I’ve been doing some reading of my own, intending to write with David and elsewhere, and felt a...
Coding, aka computer programming, made it into the headlines earlier this year when Federal Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, asked Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, whether he would “support coding being taught in every primary and secondary school.” The Prime Minister initially derided the idea with a comment about kids going to work as coders at age 11 but later confirmed that...
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