Learning Aesthetics

After the last couple you probably need this (you’ll probably want the full-screen button):

NSFW Warning!

I’m getting there, I really am, but sometimes you have to go a very long way out of your way to come back a short distance correctly, and life keeps interrupting.  The danger of leaving Twitter open on the back-channel: This from the Laughing Squid: When San Francisco Was the Smut Capital of America.  Given the current state of the the internet, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that there was no such thing as a legal porn flick before 1969.  That is 42 years but it’s the kind o sea change that makes you wonder about the real possibility of the singularity. What really interests me is the not exactly covert suggestion that this was somehow a gay thing; as though a couple of guys in San Francisco got tired of getting busted and figured that the out was to interject “perversion” into the mainstream culture, something like that.  Teh real point was that in 1968 we barely had tits and nobody said fuck (parenthetical note: I make it a general practice not to use phrases like, “the F___ word since the, shall we say, “semiotics” of shared understanding offends me, while today we have 4cahan.



SMUT CAPITAL OF AMERICA Teaser from Ben Leon on Vimeo.

I’m expecting LA to take a more art focus in the near future; see the next post, but I stumbled across the followingand frankly couldn’t resist a post. There has always been an intentional ambiguity to Learning Aesthetics. It intends to be both about the art of learning and the learning of  art. And yes careful  reader or, there’s a certain ambiguity about the phrase learning of art, but if things were simple we wouldn’t need art.  at any rate here’s a link to a really good article on the Validation of Competencies in E-Portfolios: A Qualitative Analysis. It’s a bit dense in both formatting and content, but then it’s from the German, so I should pose that’s to be expected. This from the introduction:

Along with the Bologna process in Europe came the paradigm shift from input orientation (what shall be learned?) to outcome orientation (what should students be able to do?). This change required a reorganization of examination performances which focus on the competencies that are to be acquired. While the conversion of course organisation has been almost completed, competence-based assessment can be regarded as an “unsolved assignment” within the European context (Stratmann, Preußler, & Kerres, 2009). Reinmann (2007) even refers to a “competence lie” (p. 13). Current examination practice in universities usually consists of a triathlon, in which written examinations, presentations, and research papers compete with each other.

At this stage, the conversion towards competence-based assessment has been realized only insufficiently. Methodological difficulties, which arise when measuring competencies (Erpenbeck & von Rosenstiel, 2003), are one reason for this lack. Weinert (2001) describes competencies as the cognitive abilities and skills to solve problems, which are innate in individuals or can be learned by them. In this sense, competencies involve motivational, volitional (intention-related), and social dispositions and abilities that allow the individual to successfully and responsibly solve problems in various situations. The interweaving of cognition and motivation is a characteristic feature of competent action (Weinert, 1996). A mechanism of competence development can then be expressed by self-directed learning (Knowles, 1975). The latter includes the learner setting goals independently, developing and testing plans and strategies in order to realise these goals, and learning from the resulting experiences. Accordingly, Erpenbeck and von Rosenstiel (2003) define competencies as self-organisational dispositions. Competence is therefore composed of knowledge, experiences, and abilities for the application and implementation of knowledge, strategies, abilities, and skills (Zawacki-Richter, Hasebrook, & Muckel, 2009). Similarly, Connell, Sheridan, and Gardner (2003) describe competencies as “realized abilities,” which is exactly to the point. This performance in new, unpredictable contexts can be documented in order to make competencies visible and therefore assessable as well. In this context the essential difference between qualification and competence becomes especially visible. Traditionally, qualification documents a performance in an artificial situation, e.g., an examination in which knowledge is tested. However, competent action cannot be measured in such simulated test situations.

if you’re wondering, as well you might, about the post title, I confess that the above language  nearly defeats me, which of course makes me think of: Thank You Mask Man (Adult Content Warning: the audio is NSFW, and if words offend you you’re better off leaving the link alone entirely; on the other hand is dang funny.)

Some things I want to keep track of:

Z-Type a really cool Improve Your Typing Game. And built on Impact.  All this by way of PhotoMatt.

This from circa 1986 or so; not exactly a story, but certainly an introduction of sorts, and historically interesting:

Chess from Donal Little on Vimeo.

Up-coming: Somewhere in this mix I heard something like, “Current (Web) technology performs (replaces) the function of (that was historically performed by) Art (Note the Upper Case).  Which raises the interesting question: “What you mean ‘function of art’ White Man?” q.v. Martin Heidegger.

Like I didn’t have anything better to do…

The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course is a potentially interesting development in on-line learning. I think. Anyway I’m about to find out.  I’ve signed up for two, no sense being timid:

CCK11 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is an open online course that over 12 weeks explores the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. Participation is open to everyone and there are no fees or subscriptions required.

Register Here

&

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer (none of those wimpy ass iPads), a hardy internet connection, a domain of your own, some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster (and we’ll spend time helping you get up and running with at least two of the last three requirements).

Nice thing about MOOC is that the only obligation you’re under to do anything is blogger-guilt, that’s unless you’re paying some one to assessment you, which is a possibility that makes the MOOC concept really interesting. CCK11 start’s Jan. 17th, more or less, and ds106 on Jan. 10, which means I’m already a day late, but like I said.

What part of “Bag of Gold” don’t you get?

That from Gardner Campbell whose “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure” ds106 reading assignment, and I confess that my main response to both the paper and presentation is, “…uh gee, why didn’t I say that?” Not that I’m that smart but rather that all this is that obvious.  This is all way, way bigger than we could possibly think it is; not just water, but an ocean.

Odd way to start the year? Many changes on the way; meanwhile I don’t want to lose track of:

Digital Story Telling Resources

Mashable on online education

The University of the People

There’s apparently some really good stuff happening that I’m just finding:

Learning Without Frontiers.

…which confounds past modeling, but that’s what you get from reading Gibson.

This is not a pipe. It is a reproduction of "The Treachery of Images," René Magritte’s 1928–29 painting, which is also not a pipe.

Which relates, somehow, to an upcoming discussion of social media, or at least: That makes me think of…

One of the things that we’re likely to hear is that, “Social Media is not new, or perhaps News; humans, being mammals, have always been ‘social beings.” Which is certainly true and probably a good antidote for the bandwagon virus.  It does, however, leave out the factors of time and scale.  Radio and telegraph are, in the same sense, only shouting, and the internet only television writ generally producible.  If the fact that you can send a message from Europe to America in seconds rather than months seems to you not to matter, then saying that there’s no news to social media is no doubt profound.  Profound or not, it’s undoubtedly important, because when you do factor in scale and immediacy you get sea-change.

In the late ’90s you heard a lot of ed-tech conversations about whether instructional technology improved learning.  Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be much point to that discussion; technology educational and otherwise is water.  It’s not good or bad; neither useful nor a waste of time.  It’s what we do, and you do or don’t participate at your own risk. Either way you’re making the culture, the world; you always have been, nothing new there. But if you think about it, it gets confusing:

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues inSimulacra & Simulation:

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.”  (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1)

Neil Gaiman makes it a little more human:

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

Is this what the “Classroom of teh Future” should look like?

Image by wrex

Could you learn “Photography” this way?

Is there value to this kind of conference; enough to pay for it?

16th Annual
TCC Worldwide Online Conference
April 12-14, 2011
Pre-Conference Dates: April 5, 2011
http://tcc.kcc.hawaii.edu

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
MAKING IT WORK

The real question is whether there’s enough activity & interaction, in something like real-time, to provide a value added?