Blogged confessions

In my two posts this week on Nicenet I have tried to collate and take stock of what I have learned during these two months and a half at Webskills – and I can say that I feel  - absolutely modestly but still – triumphant. Thanks to a great course and a superb tutor and my study mates, I think I’ve learnt a lot.

This post is now to reflect on where I failed or what I did not try at all. There are 2-3 major issues that I just did not somehow come to digest. These are, rubrics, the ABCD thinking and – last but not least, properly following and commenting my study mates’ posts on Nicenet and their blogs. Now the last little failure is just bad management of time and lack of inner discipline so let that one go without more saying - but the other two:  the rubrics thing I have written about earlier when we were working on it: this is something we do not really do much in my country where we are more formative than summative anyway in our assessment– but I admit using rubrics might add goals and accuracy to our teaching learning (and my work!) – but they should definitely be supporting learner autonomy and formative assessment in general. And lo and behold: the new curricula of 2016 that we are working on with basic education as our target at the moment and high school education very soon too, are in a way rubrics or matrixes with three columns: goals, content and criteria (of good proficiency). Have to think of that, definitely – are we going the rubrics way?

The other thing I never got to grips with was the Audience – Behavior – Condition – Degree approach to tasks. Is this “alphabet” simply something that pertains much more the learning and working philosophies in the US and elsewhere in the world – than in my country? Is it typically Finnish to host an aversion against rigorous paradigms within your daily tasks? Why do I suspect there is a Tayloristic mechanism under the ABCD?

Does it not make sense that while working, you look at your tasks, regularly, from the points who you are working with and for, what they are expected to learn or perform, under what conditions, and how much they should be producing by way of learning or other outputs? Have to talk to my colleagues about this - is this just me who am hopelessly vague about my working approaches? Can I just rely on my intuition?

Be that as it may, it is intriguing. So has been this path that I have walked through in the amazing world of web learning. Now I am standing at the end of it - and already looking forward to meeting my Webskills partners again on the web, only it will be different paths. But what else would be so agile an environment as the web - to guarantee that it will even be easy for us to meet again, some sunny day.

Celebrations this week

I would like to begin with music this time, perhaps you would you care to check this youtube clip for example: Friday was Finland’s 96^th Day of Independence and today, on the 8^th of December, we are celebrating the birthday of Jean Sibelius.  I was busy working on my Final Project on Independence Day which made me feel kind of solemn and full of self-criticismJ

 

It was good to learn about the learning styles this week, in a way a good mixture of theory and praxis. To begin with, I did the test http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/mi/w1_interactive1.html, to see what my key approach to learning would be (of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences). Well, to no surprise at all, I found that I was best at interpersonal skills and should be working as a teacher, human resource manager, cousellor:D:D  I did the test twice, same result of course. I sent the quiz to my boy, 19, too. He might find something there as regards music or maybe the spatial dimension. Anyway, fun as it was taking that little test, as I read further along our suggested list for this week, my suspicions were growing. Is this all about learning styles and personality types bringing us too close to stuff like – horoscopes?  But in the readings there was a little bit of scientific evidence also to motivate us to learning of these things – and I think the bottom line would be: you have to know your students and you have to give space to their personality as an entity plus the special talents and traits there are in each and everyone of us. Another key issue is of course that we have to know about and work on ourselves as learners and processors of information, in order to improve as teachers or “preachers” (which I sometimes think I am being a state official and with a job where informing of policies and best practices is what I do a lot!).

Some issues in our readings reminded me of the current topics in the educational discussion in my country too. To mention just two of different sort; first a detail from the multiple intelligences – a new type discovered by Prof Gardner are the naturalists, the ones who relate their learning best to the environments (learning environments). Here we found eg the tip about using geocaching to learn; quite popular already in Finland outside school and amongst geography teachers but I wonder whether it is so amongst the teachers of languages though. The whole thing is also symptomatic of our times as we should realise that the focus in learning and teaching cannot be confined within the four walls of a classroom any longer but we should encourage and recognise learning in a variety of settings, and everywhere – in our ubiquitous existence of the 21st century.

Another issue that came to my mind repeatedly while reading about learning styles: It is all about motivation (cf. the Montgomery and Groat article)! For Finnish basic education this is presently a major challenge, also reflected in our PISA 2012 decline: how do we motivate kids to study and work hard or at least in a goal-oriented way in the first place,  and then how do we motivate them to study math or Swedish which a famously problematic as subjects that cannot be learnt without some effort and which have – undeservedly  – a reputation as dull subjects. Well, tomorrow back to work which delightfully will take me again to our agency’s languages team and our work with the languages curriculum.

And alas - tomorrow will be the beginning of our last week at Webskills.

Getting the hang of it now

My second post this weekend: I am running a blog with three colleagues about the current trends in language education in Finland. It is also a new venture, even younger than my Webskills blog but already I am getting the feeling that I know what blogs can be used for. My yesterday’s post was, believe it or not, about encouraging Finnish teachers of languages to use the net and to be brave about testing the limits of what they can do as professionals: the net and the computers will not break down! It is in anticipation of the OECD PISA results for 2012, DUE TOMORROW! Finland won't  be at the top any longer and it is problems in teachers' webskills that will be blamed, among a lot of things.

 

In Webskills, I think, luckily,

I am starting to see the whole picture of it: I think this course of ours has a wonderful structure. It is a nice rather gentle incremental process, piece by piece we get the feel of selected samples of the myriads of things on the net and we start to see where these bits and pieces belong to in the architecture of the (educational) net. It is rather a comfortable way to construct webskills of our own. I just wonder how those study mates of mine see the process who are already quite experienced. It must be a very different learning path for them.

 

Off to see my doctor now, I think I may be coming down with a flu::(

PS: About the picture above, I picked it up from Clipart as you may have guessed. Clipart is just great when you need a smart(ish) picture and you do not want to worry about copyright issues. My Finnish language post was titled: "My dolphin armbands" as I wanted to show colleagues who are insecure about getting "webskilled" that you can always find ways to keep you afloat in this big ICT stream. You can lean on a more skilled colleague or just hop on a project that requires some web skills, relying on the help of more expert partners. Or, you should follow your intuition and grab the moment by the neck, like I did when I was offered the possibility of playing guineapig for an on-line course in elementary Estonian a dozen years ago.