Artichoke

Molecular magnets and the qubit

Feel dislocated this morning, think I am experiencing a kind of magnetic hysteresis, a lag between the event and the emotional response, is this Lunaboca's "dreamhouse"?

But then again perhaps I am suffering the long term effects of my qubit lifestyle ...

Had a lot of fun working yesterday unpacking "inquiry" with some Wellington teachers - we worked into the evening and caught the late flight home - an airport experience worthy of it's own post - attracted another poem. Dylan Thomas might have described himself as a "magnet for moths" but I am currently falling over poets and poems that appear without warning.

You cannot pretend that you are involved in inquiry learning unless you allow freedom - and I guess in the use of the term "allowing" - the essential deceit in "inquiry learning" is exposed -

"Allowing", intellectual freedom and inquiry learning require above all things observation - is why the gift of Hone Tuwhare's poem was a moment of synchronicity, was so connected with the day.

Rain by Hone Tuwhare

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain

Grabbed a kid and asked him ...

Colouring between random cracks: A student conversation about the future, technology and learning.

What would you like to learn now, so that you can more easily become a successful person?

I dunno, computers are a very big thing and they are just going to get bigger and bigger. At school we do like nothing with computers, we don’t really use them at all. If you do ICT you get to learn how to make a document in Microsoft Word. What I’d like to learn is more computer programming stuff, more researching skills, especially specialist internet researching skills, and how to use computers to better sort and analyse the stuff I find out.

Depends on how you look at it I suppose but technology has a big role in learning and communicating – it makes lots of stuff easier, but because it makes everything easier it can make bad things – random hate sites, viruses easier. It is always a balance. At the moment there is more good than bad – finding information about stuff, new ways of thinking, its just fun. I have a symbiotic relationship with my computer … I learn so much from thinking with my computer and it learns from me - eventually we will swop brains.

I’d like to learn mathematics that you can actually use in the real world. Like in Warcraft 3 there is this good map written, totally random, Cubeman - you are trapped inside a cube with dialogue. The maths you need to know is challenging, you need to understand coordinate geometry to reach the exit point and there is heaps of math problem solving involved in figuring out what you should do and how to avoid the traps. You need to make good analyses of information and make judgements like – should I go into this room and risk seeing if my theory is correct. You have to figure out mathematical patterns, like the first line has 2 numbers then a space type thing, the first two changed each time the second two didn’t so I assumed it was the exit point coordinates - the second line of stuff had two numbers, sometimes the number has no decimal point, or its an integer – we assumed that if this is a full number it might be safe. You have to take risks and you have to think quickly – every 10 minutes all the cubes move around –You have to teach yourself the maths because we don’t do this sort of maths thinking at school.

And more physics and stuff, about spaceships, yes spaceships, other planets, other worlds – in the future we will be exploring this and then time travel, they’ve nearly perfected it – instantaneous transportation of particles - teleportation of photons and that particle entanglement stuff with information – no one talks about this at school and it is going to be so important.

Information pumps – just stick them into your head and that’s school for you. You can do that stuff without going to school – often do it with better information too -

I think that “future schools” if we have them should be a social place – a place where you go and learn how to speak to other people and stuff and learn about other cultures and ways of thinking and stuff - you can’t learn this through an information pump –

Learning about people and culture is probably the best , the only thing schools do at the moment – probably the only thing actually. You need something like a social place school to learn about talking to people – unless, unless every voice box explodes in the future. The information pump stuff can happen anywhere.

By the time I leave school there will be a whole assortment of new jobs that’ll require new skills, one could be good for me, who knows – I don’t want to limit myself for one job in the future anything might happen, schools should be less about subject specialization, more flexible, more about connecting with people, more about the future.

A prisoner of contemporaneity

I like the idea of listening to and responding to student voice in education, so was pleased to check out The New Zealand Curriculum Project - Students Views on the Curriculum page on TKI.

However, I became increasingly bewildered and despondent as I read about what students don’t think about education, and don’t think about the future.

We may well be flailing around in the world of eduspeak over NCEA scholarship results but reckon agitated flailing would give way to flight in a "That's it! Dumbo, you flew! Your ears--they're perfect wings!” moment if enough people bothered to go online and read the New Zealand student responses.

The Curriculum Project asked students to grapple with "Big ideas" about learning

Thinking about the future and the things you would most like to do, imagine yourself as a successful person. What is a successful person?

• What would you like to learn now, so that you can more easily become that successful person?
  
• What will you need to know?
  
• What will you need to be able to do?

And the responses? Well must be some relief to the ICT strategists in the MoE that technology featured significantly in students' views of the future. But what will be a source of much discomfiture is the following

Many perceived the advancement of technology as negative, especially in terms of making people "lazier". One student commented: "With technology, it seems as if things are automatically done for you... you won't go the extra mile to do things for yourself." Another said: "...the Magic Pen ... will tend to switch people's brains off during class because it can download the information given during a lesson. Students and/or people won't have work they produced themselves."
Other perceived disadvantages of the increased use of technology were that people would become less literate, less able to communicate at a personal level, and socially isolated or disjointed. The convenience of technology was seen by some students as encouraging obesity.

Does this mean that all those ICT initiatives and ICT professional development programmes focussed on improving teaching quality and learning outcomes for all students and strengthening communities of professional practice have made squat impact on some students and a negative impact on the rest?

Have we created a whole generation of “Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future. Camille Paglia fans in the system?

The responses depressed me – they also intrigued me – I get to talk with and listen to a lot of young people and I found these reported responses unusually limited, strangely muted, unfaithful in truth to the verve in discussions that go on when young people gather and talk together. And they don’t reflect the educational comments of the school age bloggers on modblog.

They sounded much like a "guess what the teacher wants" interviewee response - a giving the interviewer what we think he/she wants to hear stuff. Wonder how they conducted the interviews, individual or focus groups. Have issues with the validity of focus group interviews.

Grabbed a passing kid today and asked him the questions over fish roe and freshly baked bread … it is quite different stuff …

"so tell me your defects and i'll tell you mine

Perhaps “mind slippage” is a defect, mine allows massively random connection, and synchronous and asynchronous sog and sag and I must admit considerable chafing and tension …

But that burned up dreamhouse of yours doesn’t dislocate my thinking ….Perhaps because although I feign isolation – though I pretend to live in boxes that must not be opened, though I claim the dreamhouse - in truth I am recently cut loose, out of control, abandoned of reason …. Escaped in my mind, always, if not in my deed.

The Ferlinghetti refrain playing on repeat loop in my mind -

• How was it for you?
  
• Were you constantly risking absurdity on a high wire of your own making? ….
  
• How did you cope with the balancing on eyebeams? ….and
  
• Did you, did you perceive taut truth at any stage?

Forget Perkin’s mental management strategy, forget Mrs Potter’s questions, forget Guy Claxton’s distillation time – these are perfect questions for metacognitive reflection.

Wonder if we might better understand teaching and learning if we framed it as performance art. Think that if we look at school communities as venues for constantly risking absurdity we just might increase teacher and student engagement in the educational process.

Then how would we see our role in the principal’s address? What happens to our perceptions during the departmental planning meeting? And in the classroom who gets to play choreographer?

Know, just know that some of you will fret lest we mistake a teaching and learning installation for rubbish – that “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation.” all over again. But reckon it is worth a go.

And just want you to realize that I was spreadeagled in the empty air of existence for a moment in time, and it felt just fine.

Is that a defect?

Constantly Risking Absurdity
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
for he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

Sucking up and the catfish of eduspeak

You know how the conversation goes, its like ”Yep some people just insist on sucking up to ....... ...well anyone.” How smart are they?

We spend a lot of time in schools exhorting students to persevere, to seek cognitive challenge, to excel in a domain. There is a sense that faithful effort and academic achievement will be rewarded in life after school. Alas misrepresentation and dissembling is rife in the land of eduspeak – feel compelled to reveal that all is error and illusion. Our framing is flawed and is founded on a deceit.

Will be of no surprise to the catfish of edupeak; will be of no surprise to those of us weaned on Machiavellian politics that a recent University of Texas study has shown that sucking up rather than effort and ability is the best way to get ahead.

“Aching to get yourself named to a board of directors but don't know how to break into that elite crowd? Don't waste your time proving how smart you are or flaunting your listing in the social register. Instead, try another classic corporate strategy: brown-nosing.

In their new study, "The Other Pathway to the Boardroom," the product of a survey of 1,012 senior managers and CEOs at 138 major companies, James D. Westphal, professor of management at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ithai Stern, a doctoral student there, show that exhibiting "ingratiatory behavior" toward your chief executive does more to help you get a board appointment than does brandishing a passenger manifest from the Mayflower or an Ivy-covered sheepskin. Put simply, sucking up trumps a noble birth.

We do not need paradigm shifts, constructivism, authentic experience or inquiry learning in our classrooms. When we ache for something, we need courses in catfish.

The catfish represents – the high point, the apogee, the climax, oh yes the climax, the crown, the culmination, the height, the meridian, the peak, the summit, the top , the summit of what it might represent to be a “sucker upper” .

The catfish is designed for sucking and clinging, just look at those sensitive sensory fingers lining the mouth – and the high oxygen requirement, well that is a bonus feature when it comes to sucking up - requiring frequent visits to the top for a quick breath.

• Catfish 101 - Epistemological Breakdown of Ingratiatory Behaviour
• Catfish 102 - Action Research Topic: Distinguishing between sucking and sucking up
• Catfish 103 – Moodling and Sucking Up – Myth, metaphor and misrepresentation.

I know you think I made “moodling up” but I didn’t, I didn’t …. is worthy of a post of its own

The Open Source Courseware Initiative New Zealand (OSCINZ) has, after intensive testing, selected the Learning Management System Moodle as the Open Source Solution for its collaborative partners (Link: http://www.elearning.ac.nz/ ).

A “Ringmaster day” …

Ringmaster: Have I got an idea! What an idea!
Timothy Q. Mouse: He never had an idea in his life.
Ringmaster: Just visualize: One elephant climbs up on top of another elephant, until all seventeen elephants have contructed an enormous pyramid of pachyderms. I step out. I blow the whistle. The trumpets are trumpeting...
Timothy Q. Mouse: Yea!
Ringmaster: And now, comes the climax!
Joe: Yeah, what is the climax?
Ringmaster: I don't know.
Timothy Q. Mouse: I knew he didn't have nothing.
Dumbo 1941

Teaching and Learning is a little like this. You spend half your day strutting around screaming “What it is to be alive …. I step out. I blow the whistle. The trumpets are trumpeting...” and then, and then you take a nudge from Timothy Q. Mouse.

Yesterday was a “Ringmaster day” – a teacher cluster day that saw the distribution of the CINZS gifted_ict issue to the teachers who wrote the articles – so very cool - and then the cluster teachers working with AU’s amazing Dr Rawlinson on identification through responsive learning environments.

Tried to play Timothy Q Mouse and challenge Bandura’s causal link between academic self concept and academic performance because all sorts of things in the “responsive learning environment” argument hinge on whether it is a valid or even reliable assumption.

The "I knew he didn't have nothing" is an essential scepticism to hold onto in eduspeak land.

BUT if Sternberg is right, if Sternberg is right and “abilities are forms of developing expertise” then I have a new framework, a new landscape for thinking through ICT.

Was an exciting and provocative day – a real Ringmaster: “Have I got an idea! What an idea!” kind of day.

Food of the Gods

Paralysed by Indecision
Doing nothing with verve, the new reality in education.

Are your students drowning in a culture of “niceness”? Is indecision rampant in your school? Do you have classrooms of cognitive complacency? The Best Evidence Synthesis (Alton-Lee 2003) encourages us to seek cognitive conflict, to encourage students to teeter on the brink of their competence. If we do this, how can we best prepare students for those moments of teetering? Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick 2000) are effective dispositions for confronting the unknown. Habits of Mind allow us to behave intelligently when we don't know the answers. Habits of Mind are 16 effective behaviours for surviving the teetering. Workshop participants can expect to leave this workshop with a new sense of how to avoid paralysis by indecision, and how to maintain verve.

Incoming email: I need from you a mini-blurb about your Key note and presentations (to advertise to teachers when they select Workshops). Will J be working with you as well (for name tags....)? I also need to know whether you have any equipment requirements...... and catering requirements. Looking forward to your reply.

Realised today that I quite like “looking forward people”, they are so much more fun to play with than all those “looking backward people”. Though I suppose even “looking backward people” are less demanding than those angst ridden “looking over (a shoulder) people”.

And I am in absolute denial, I refuse, refuse, refuse to acknowledge the “looking under people” in my life.

Admit that I became quite excited by the question about catering requirements. At the last place we worked, when we broke for lunch they pointed out the garage across the road, where it was possible to grab a mince and cheese pie and a can of coke.

Know, just know that some of you eschew the mince and cheese pie and are captured instead by the root vegetable, but the following extract should persuade you of the essentially egregious and cannabalistic nature of the root vegetable

Undertaker: (calling) Fred... get some parsnips.
Man: I really don't think I should.
Undertaker: Look, tell you what.... we'll eat her, if you feel a bit guilty about it after, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it.
The Undertaker Sketch, Monty Python

A mince and cheese pie and a can of coke in contrast are “Food of the Gods, Food of the Gods”. They encourage verve and they ensure teetering will be survivable. Much like Costa and Kallick’s Habits of Mind.

its like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron.

Am playing with the McAlpine Reid Teacher Observation Scales in preparation for a workshop tomorrow. The identification of giftedness through observation scales – such a vexing field. If only I could think of the first line …. If only …

Scales - such a versatile word – can refer to mapmaking [those ordered marks], to music [those rising and falling bits in bad karaoke at the Learning@School Conference] , to measuring variables in social studies, and to those arbitrary spatial divisions [micro and macro, meso and let us not forget mega divisions].

I must also acknowledge the space in my mind that I have reserved for those other scales; the scales of the lepidoptera, memories of my little sister pinning living Monarch butterflies to polystyrene trays, memories of the scales on the wings of the desert locust we kept in tanks in the dining room – the scales of the insecta, and then crowding these out are memories of the fish scales on J’s bread roll in Okaihau.

And then, and then there are those trays of chickens’ feet in Foodtown, white trays crowded with feet, beak, and heart. The pangolin I hear you cry, well the pangolin is fortunate to find mention at all in my mind – is a much misrepresented species the pangolin, only a biologist would remember to include the pangolin.

Is no wonder that I forget … my mind is so screamingly busy

Collins says it well

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins in Questions About Angels 1999

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbour
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorise the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not posed on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down some dark mythological river
whose name begins with L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Hagiography, the Blue Sonic and the Pot Noodle.

I tell you one thing. I've been to a parallel universe, I've seen time running backwards, I've played pool with planets, and I've given birth to twins, but I never thought in my entire life I'd taste an edible Pot Noodle. Red Dwarf

Have been challenged to discover an edible Pot Noodle and write about it in my blog. I have been confronted and gently slagged off by someone who believes I have been captured by the Dark Sonic and fears that my blogging future lies in a continuing descent into enduring cynicism and nihilism. They have obviously never read the life stories of a true nihilist like Francis Bacon. Have a short way to go before I ping between the gutter and the Ritz. Well alright then – only because the Ritz escapes me.

Think discovering an edible Pot Noodle shouldn’t be too hard to do since I have spent time at the Learning@School 2005 ICT_PD cluster conference in Rotorua this week. I have seen some formidable presentations about teaching and learning through ICT and some improvements in the development of interactive whiteboards that would excite even those that run backwards over sand.

So why did I find the conference so valuable when in truth all it represented was a continuing commitment to the ubiquitous screen?

The power of tasting an edible Pot Noodle lies not in the presentations per se. The power comes from the cognitive challenges faced by the presenters and the interconnectivity that cut across the zones of respectability each evening when delegates drank wine over Pot Noodles and laughed and talked about teaching and learning, aching and yearning into the dark hours. The dancing at the conference dinner was pretty edible Pot Noodlish too.

Loved, just loved it that three schools from our ict_pd cluster presented on their work at the conference and were feted for it. With the right sort of cognitive challenge and the wine charged interconnectivity it becomes easy to recommend the Learning@School Conference2005 as the best ever – as an edible Pot Noodle of ict eduspeak.

Will this do? Is this the kind of thing you want to read?

Yours sincerely

One who acknowledges a new interest in shrubbery design.

There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history. Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975

Transform and Open through Immobilisation

“It can transform the way that education is delivered and open the way to a new pedagogy.”
Schools: achieving success (White Paper), DfES, September 2001 (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/index.htm).

Read in New Scientist 12 June 2004 that the universe may have started with a hiss and not a bang. Was a bit of a worry because the “big bang” analogy is fairly entrenched in our communication toolbox – for example I have an agenda for an ict meeting next fortnight where one item is described as “Bang for Bucks” Will have to check around but don’t know that we are ready for analogies formed around “low moans, building roars and deafening hisses” …

If we were ready, suspect the “deafening hisses” might be reserved for the punchy claims about ICT from the DfES White Paper – mimicked I hasten to add by educational ict rhetoric in New Zealand.

Have been thinking about these punchy claims, and want to unpack all this “transforming and opening” stuff. Am old enough, and surprisingly given my recent lapses into cognitive sog, I can remember other technologies which have promised to improve teaching and learning for students. Wonder if it is “promises made” and “promises broken” time all over again?

In truth I kind of like promises made and promises broken. Think that an exposure to promises made and promises broken ensures the emergence of a collective distrust, a maturing paranoia which has to be a “good thing” given our vulnerability to “weapons of mass destruction,” “Diana - Madonna or whore?”, and “trans fats, fatty acids and partially hydrogenated oils” media controlled and manipulated thinking.

Can quickly come up with seven promises about technology that would open and transform educational pedagogy – you can probably come up with more.

Remember the ViewMaster™? - am still profoundly affected when I see a colour faded Dumbo separated from his equally colour muted mother. Lantern slides had their edu-moment as did those Encyclopedia Brittanica filmstrips about sexually transmitted diseases – I continue to think of vd as an equilateral triangle of dots moving across the genitals of adolescents. Movies, videotapes and DVDs have had their educational lobbyists – check out "Duck and Cover” 1952 – my absolute favourite educational movie. Is such an audacious attempt to educate the young of the “bewildered herd” in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of atomic attack. - surviving THE BOMB. Teasing out the pedagogical strategies in “Duck and Cover” ought to be compulsory for every pre-service teacher trainee.

You could argue that all these technology initiatives “transform and open”, in the same way that we currently argue for “transform and open” when using computers, laptops and Palms but if you look more carefully you just might uncover another refrain running through all these seven technologies.

If you need help with uncovering I suggest you do a Google image search to find out what all this “transforming and opening” is really about – the refrain you will discover is that each of these "transform and open interventions requires Manovich’s Institutionalised immobilisation of the learner through the ubiquitous screen

Wonder if we might develop a new eduspeak word that captures “transform’, “open” and the presence of a screen?

Email exhortations and asking for help ....

Check out the Learning@School 2005 Conference blogsite! To access the blog area, log in using your conference username/password at: http://www.learningatschool.org.nz. The conference website, run by Interact Community Software, has inbuilt blog technology. This enables participants to publish their own contributions online, and also comment on the thoughts and ideas of others. The blogging area is intended to be a place where conference participants, keynotes, presenters, and exhibitors alike, can share, meet, discuss, and record thoughts and information about their learning journeys, conference experiences and opinions, learning, teaching, ICT, or even life in general!

Or even life in general! or even life in general! Do not believe for a moment they want thoughts and information on life in general.

Life in general is full of “like I said” and “like he said” … a celebration of inane - a turgid meander through unsupportable generalisations and unwarranted assumptions that help ensure we limp through life without engaging – Bigwigonfire is alert to the lack of impact of "life in general" - check out his latest post "Whoop de fucking doo, prince charles is getting married. The pope is out of the hospital, and someone save the children because michael freaking jackson is on trial. Does anyone see any note-worthy news up there?" Nope but it captures the genre of "life in general"

We need protection from expressions of “life in general” – protection from existential angst, protection from flawed insight, vegetarianism and the lifestyle of the battery chicken. Do believe that descriptions of “life in general” should never be encouraged or given an audience. Is fortunate that I have lost my password else I a might be tempted to record a faithful account of “life in general.”

So what is it about “life in general” that is attractive to a educational blogging community? And how does it differ from blogging “a life specific”? Is it all about “subduing all her impressions as a woman, to something more general” (Virginia Woolf), or does it require a post on a life spent reflecting upon the correctness of decisions; perhaps posts on a life in paralysis, or a life experienced through an excessive reliance on systems thinking and rescuing - arghhh Dunno but reckon “life in general” stuff should come with health warning.….

The strain of being acceptable is beginning to take its toll, -must be the heat and irritation from the incompetence of the past revisited today, but at this point even blogged comments on life above lieutenant general would be acceptable.

Still have wondered - “How long will it take?” Was uncertain but can now can tell you – we were rewarded today by “the call.” – Now know that it takes from November 9th to February 11th. Three months, ninety five days, 2,180 hours before anyone wanted to know enough to ask – the spirit of inquiry is moribund.

Long live revisionism and the ladling of blame.

Shall I .... shan't I ...

Keep meeting people today who suggest that I might like to start training for "Round The Bays". Been struggling to find the right level of muteness for a response. Jogging around the waterfront with 10 zillion other sweaty Aucklanders in athletic shorts has never captured me. Am instead eaten up by preparations for Saint Valentine's day - Leunig frames my thinking rather well .... just need to find the training schedule and the exercise video

Thoughts about Saint Valentine's Day
Leunig

Firstly do not under any circumstance attend something like a women's writing workshop on erotic fiction.
Secondly do not wear underpants.
Furthermore, drink lots of fluids , and do not skimp on balms, exotic oils and emollients.
Remember do not get bogged down with the preamble and beware of carpet burns.
and last but not least, the poor, the outcast, the downtrodden, lifes cruel injustices
- just put them out of your mind and leap on each other.
Those things are with us always, but you are with each other but a little time.
Wild Figments 2004 p91

Then again might be easier to squeeze myself into a pair of athletic shorts.

Transparent, translucent and opaque

To wander mazily?

The Hunt

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country
that lies beyond speech
Noah Webster and his assistants are moving
across the landscape tracking down a new word.

It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,
one that will seldom be used by anyone,
like a synonym for isthmus,
but they are pursuing the creature zealously

as if it were the verb to be,
swinging their sticks and calling out to one another
as they wade through a field of waist-high barley.

Billy Collins - Questions About Angels 1999

Tracking and capturing "dyadic interaction" must have been something ...

ULearn05 Conference

Have lost myself in the Best Evidence Synthesis – the MOE quality teaching for diverse students document – a study in new ways to make simple matters more complex. Could not have read it properly last time - or else my mind has developed cognitive sog - have had to struggle so hard to make meaning that I have neglected my family, my friends and my blog.

Was interested today in how cooperative group work would be portrayed – I am a sceptic especially in relation to highly able students but cooperative groups have been favoured with fervour verging on fanaticism in many New Zealand classrooms. My efforts today have been rewarded for I have noted some interesting reservations and disclaimers for use in future conversation with the cooperative group zealot ….and ....and ....and I have learned new words.

Check this passage

“However, dyadic interactions that effectively scaffolded student learning, dyadic peer and child-adult tuakana/teina (shifting junior and senior learning-teaching roles) interactions, and personalized interactions, were also integral to the participation and learning of these students.” P62

Have checked www.dictionary.com and reckon in plain speak that this states “students also learn from one-to-one interactions with others”

Explains why a deep despond settled over me when I read of “transformative change” in the Ulearn05 promo www.ulearn.org.nz – Is hard to ignore the rhetoric of redundancy in eduspeak, impossible to lightly dismiss the unnecessary duplication of “transformative change”- when you have been struggling with dyadic interactions.

Who decided that notions of “transform” and “change” held enough shades of difference they should sit so closely together – and how ever did they persuade others to join them in this folly?

From “past experience” suspect the involvement of a “unique individual” whose “previous history” “I thought to myself” indicates a “knowledgable expert” “At this point in time” I will admit it remains an “unsolved mystery”. Find myself “surrounded on all sides” by dyadic interaction – am tumbling into an “empty hole” where my “proposed plan” must be “postponed until later”. Must go back and explore the “basic fundamentals” of redundant redundancies, must “ask a question”.