Blog 7: PHOEBE, or: When a goddess becomes a community tool.

Blog Thing 7

1. What do you think of the ideas behind Phoebe? What was your impression? THE IDEAS behind the radiance of Apollo/Phoebus: "this is exactly what our tool sets out to do: provide timely and informed guidance on designing learning experiences that make appropriate use of technology.
   However, we envisage Phoebe above all as a community tool, owned by individual departments and colleges who will supplement the advice and examples that we have supplied with material directly relevant to their own context" ("Phoebe" site).  
   
   
   The "idea" behind the use of the term "appropriate" appears to be <serving the interests of our departments' own context>.  But did the departments themselves ask for technology's help?  Is Phoebe's vision ("we envisage...") shared by my department?  Or is the vision in question a product to be sold to departments that otherwise would see (and indeed have) no need for it?  
   
   
   I cannot help but doubt whether a divinely neutral or pure tool descending upon departments of academic learning uncalled-for from the summit of the mount of bureaucracy might not prove, upon careful reflection, to be fundamentally unhelpful.  
   
   
   Can any universal "form" meaningfully "supplement" the particular "matter" of any field of investigation UNLESS said form is first shown to emerge out of the real needs of this or that field of investigation itself?  I see a need for our new Phoebes to show me before all else why my department would need to change the way it has been or currently is presenting course outlines.
   
2. What template(s) did you think were (most) useful? Or did you think there weren't any useful ones and would you consider creating one yourself?  The BASIC DESIGN TEMPLATE (cloned as "Template for 1066"), which came across as the simplest or most straightforward.  As the "tool" becomes complicated, it comes to distract from the educator's end--especially when the tool is constructed in vitro, instead of arising out of the field in which it is to be used.  Unless the tool is to serve as a Trojan Horse...                   
3. What are your thoughts about using this to share Cambridge (or your course) specific templates and designs; as a tool to share your learning designs? I suspect some general suggestive guidelines would suffice to support educators in preparing course outlines.  If, on the other hand, the goal is to synchronize/monitor all educators within a network of bureaucratic expectations, then I am left with asking if educators will have the choice of sticking to antiquated course outlines?  Or must these, too, be digitalized?  Finally,must it be paranoia to suspect that Phoebe's "tooling" is a covert step in the direction of online courses--the ultimate bureaucratization of education?
4. How do you compare it with learning design tools or systems you're already using; is it better or worse? In what way? Compared to others we have been presented with, this one seems to have the greatest potential for obtaining its goal.  Here, a menu of templates for course outlines is (or can be) presented for an educator to select and fill out one template, just as he would with most other online forms.

Thing 6: Bring Your Own (Tool)

Blog Thing 6

1. What is your BYO curriculum design Thing that you choose to share with us?  White chalk on blackboard is my main teaching tool, aside from printed handouts possibly placed on cam-tools.  Exceptionally, I rely on projectors for images directly related to texts under examination.
   Describe what sort of Thing it is (tool, resource, guide, system etc), what it aims to do and how it's being used.   The white chalk is used at its best in order to illustrate thematic or conceptual relations, or more generally to create a visual "poetic" platform for students' reflection.    
2. How did you find out about this (via a colleague, through training session...)? N/A
3. Why is it particularly useful for you? What aspects are less useful (for you)? The simplicity of the tool contributes to a positive education/distraction ratio.  Keeping tools at a bare minimum has its often underestimated advantages.  Even projectors can become more distracting than illuminating, especially to the extent that the image they introduce appears ex machina, rather than being formed "live" (out of the blackboard's surface).  (N.B. Alas, many classrooms now have whiteboards that have a decisively negative effect on the mystique that drawings on blackboard are capable of possessing.)
4. In what way do you see it being useful for other course designers? My BYO tool invites close coordination of image and speech whereby the former serves as "frontispiece" for the articulation of the other.
5. Add a link / image / upload a version so it's clear what the Thing is and other participants can try it out as well. The image pasted above originally served as frontispiece to a XVIII book that students might examine for a course.  In this case a projector would be used to present the image, although an analogue (or parts thereof) could be drawn on the blackboard.

Thing 5 - Pedagogy Profile Widget

Blog Thing 5

1. What do you think of the idea of 'pedagogy profile widget'? A further attempt to digitalize learning environments.  If the tool at hand serves the interests of "authentic learning" (cloudworks), then to what extent if any does the expression in scare quotes indicate something other than "marketability" or "fitness in the ongoing stream of productivity"?
2. What do you think of dividing the rows into 'modules', 'terms' and so on; or do you think the original idea of using 'weeks' works best?  Perhaps a colored pie-shaped graph for every week could be used, instead.  Something resembling this (first sample off the internet)...

3. How does it compare with any other methods you're using to balance learning aspects across the spread of activities etc?  The tool at hand adds sophistication and complexity there where I would rather seek simplicity and flexibility.  As far as I can tell, the assigned categories for learning-aspects are strictures justified only relatively to institutional demands to set up a system of pre-emptive responses to students' doubts concerning assessment criteria.  In other words, the digitizing may serve to mask, rather than reveal, the real Art of Assessment, which, if properly exercised, remains "off the chart" insofar as it has its roots in the student's strength of mind or intellective virtue.  Thus I would find it more helpful to ask: is the student really thinking?  To the extent that he is thinking rigorously about the course subject, he will be able to give evidence of this thought to the teacher who has ears to hear; and he will be receptive to the assessment given by the teacher who knows how to speak to students who have ears to hear, as well as to students who remain rather dismissive of the art of listening.
4. Filling out your own pedagogy profile, did you find it illuminating or frustrating? Are there any ways you would change it to better reflect what you do? Simplify!  Fewer "numbers." Convert the "profile" back into prose-form.
5. In what ways do you see this being useful to you as a course designer? Alas, N/A.

If you're interested...

• Add the .jpg of your own 'Pedagogy profile' to your blog post (hint: use the 'save as .jpg' button and afterwards upload it to your blog post using the 'image' icon in your blog )

...TO BE CONTINUED

• Look up 'Pedagogy profile' on Cloudworks (here's a link) and share your response directly with the OULDI team there

Thing 4

Responding to:   Blog Thing 4

1. What do you think of the idea of Course Map?  
2. How does it compare with any other representations you have of your course?
3. Filling out your own course map, did you find it illuminating or frustrating?  Are there any ways you would change it to better reflect what you do? 
4. In what ways do you see this being useful to you as a course designer?

1 and 2. The map resemples a computer flowchart.  As such it tacitly invites students to approach their course of studies as a digitally compartimentalized entity, rather than as a place for serious, "organic" thinking.  For courses spilling out of any mechanistic network of instruction, I see no reason to abandon the prose-style of a more traditional Course Outline.
3.  "Frustrating" in the respect that genuine learning resists digitalizing/marketing devices, just as an honest course of learning discourages the habit of approaching subjects of learning piecemeal as merchandise. 
4. After considerable thought: None.

P.S. I would have pasted my personalized "Map" if only I knew how to.  Tried to save it first as a "Picture" but could not find the precise option (I am given the option of saving the powerpoint as GIF, JPEG, TIFF, etc. but none are accepted).
UPDATE: Finally managed to upload a sample Course Map (for whatever it is worth).

LTS: a Socratic Phenomenology

Questions on the initiative denominated:Learning and Teaching Support.

1. What did you expect from LTS initially?  I approached it rather open-mindedly, assuming that it would offer mostly bureaucratic instructions and commonplace instructions.
2. Having explored the LTS resources, were your expectations borne out or were you surprised? In what ways do you see this being useful for your own curriculum designs? The system certainly reflects--and thereby helps discern--institutional expectations in conformity with national criteria for social integration.  In this respect, LTS is helpful.  The "Student Feedback" was especially intriguing insofar as it begs the question as to where the demand for para-disciplinarian learning/activities converts into a distraction detrimental to substantive learning.  But in general the resources I explored gave me the impression of concealing an agenda (esp. pertaining to "learning" and "success" or so-called "material culture") behind a gloss of false transparency (cf. e.g. the promise of "authentic learning"). Eerie.
3. What would you like to see from the LTS initiative? A less (or not at all) instrumentalist approach to learning.  As a monitoring system (esp. via feedbacks and questionnaires...such as the one at hand), LTS might be more effective if it were introduced by a formal clarification of the raison d'être of LTS, including an exploration of the general problems that LTS was set up to respond to (vague intimations are given in various places, e.g., in the section on ancient-language learning).
4. How do you think about the model of peer-sourced support for curriculum designers? Is it comparable with other institutions you are familiar with? I know of no instances from other institutions, so I am not fit to make inter-institutional comparisons.  In general I remain weary of the project of abstracting means from ends so as to set up an aseptic system of pure means ready-at-hand to be applied to all disciplines of learning for the sake of realizing their respective ends.  The problem here is that once the means (viz., anything that may contribute positively to the success of a discipline of learning) are imposed back upon particular settings from without (e.g., from the alchemic laboratory of a "curriculum designer"), the ends they now point to are no longer "natural" or indigenous to the settings (i.e., to the particular field of investigation).  For means necessarily point to and presuppose ends that reflect the substantive background or immanent form (occasion/motive) of the means.  Once the means are cut off from their original occasion/context, they become means to a necessarily new end, no matter how closely it may resemble old ends.  Thereby the clinically "processed" means serve as Trojan horses for new ends to be injected surreptitiously in principle in every discipline of learning, leading to its radical subversion.  In order to avert this scenario, curricula should be shaped as much as possible from within disciplines themselves, in recognition of their inherent virtue (lest the disciplines be justified merely in function of social approval).  And wherever this were to prove a failure, i.e. where one discipline were to fail to discover its justification independently of foreign demands, then the discipline should be deemed plainly unjustified, instead of being justified ex machina and ad hoc.

Cloudworks: a Socratic phenomenology

Reflecting on the internet application <Cloudworks>.  As all technological tools,* Cloudworks serves the primary--hence underlying, hence tacit--aim, not merely of "connecting" users, but of "grounding" them, or rather of "re-grounding" them, i.e., of transporting/translating them from a defective or inadequate platform (viz. the uncontrolled arena of nature) onto an adequate (because systematically or clinically controlled) platform, which is as controlled as it is abstracted from the natural condition of man as man.  Only thus is it possible to set up a network of "pure tools" systematically concealing their essential aim or "inherent value." 

         The value of the tool is supposed to be assigned, not merely by the virtue of its user, but by the number of users or the degree to which the tool succeeds in connecting the greatest number of users (likewise, the "meaning" of the tool is supposed to be determined by the "power"--impact, relevance, etc.--of the audience, rather than by the "quality" or inherent worth of the audience).  What is crucial here is a mechanically quantifiable datum directly dependent upon the essential aim of technological tools simpliciter, namely the regrounding of mankind onto a purely quantifiable (ergo, controllable) platform.  

     Here art does not merely imitate nature (or the essential working of nature); art--the new "technological" art--replaces nature.  Or rather, wanting to replace nature, technology eclipses nature, which is to say, first of all, human nature.  Only thus could a "successful" blogger connected to Cloudworks invite "'Socratic Tooling' to solve your learning problems and issues" (http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/04/free-learning-tool-for-every-learning.html).  Here "Tooling" is a verb.  Its "user" does not appear to be aware that the proper import of his verb is essentially anti-Socratic; he does not appear to be aware that Socrates was not a Deweyan pragmatist--that Socratism was opposed by Dewey, no less than by Machiavelli, for an "essentialism" tying means back to their original ends ("the Ideas").  With respect to modern technology, there is hardly anyone less progressive (and thus at once less reactionary) or revolutionary than Socrates--that eminently untechnological concentric artist.

___________

* Modern "technology" is essentially distinct from mere "technique".  Antiquity has "tools" intended to solve solvable/definite empirical problems (sealing a leaking roof, crossing a river, building a house, etc.).  Modern technology in its very idea "expands" technique in function of a new guiding principle, namely that of "infinite progress," entailing the promise to overcome, not merely this or that particular obstacle to human survival, but the very natural horizon on which man's survival is threatened.  In this sense, technology is essentially the Way through which modern man hopes to overcome (via control) nature.  But, as such, technology is at once also the Aim of modern man qua modern: technology is intended in its ideal perfection as the self-realization of a world in which man--via collectivization--is absolute master of his destiny.  Conversely collectivized-man can be master of his destiny only where nature has been fully replaced by art, i.e. only with the consummate incorporation of nature (including human nature) into Technology.

Thing 1

Responding to:

1) what your experiences are with curriculum design, and 2) what you would like to get out of the programme.

Re. (1): No experiences aside from setting this blog up. 
Re. (2): I am here to discover what the programme has to offer, whilst exploring the possibility that a "blog" escape the fate of a blob.

Setting this blog up was a rather impersonal, tasteless matter, reminescent of some modern philosophers' attempt to ascend to political/human life by beginning from the pre-political life of cicadas (not to speak of Democritean atoms in the vortex/void).