Building SDI Journal Posts

Your SDI journal provides documented evidence of your experience, skills and understanding of:

• project management
• communication
• project implementation
• research
  
• In other words the journal provides formal evidence supporting the four criteria for the course.

To achieve your desired final award it can help to structure journal posts so that they include four components:

1. Description
2. Analysis
3. Reflection
4. Connection

1. DESCRIPTION

• What have you been doing?
• How did you do it?
• What resources did you require?
• Who did you need support from?
  

2. ANALYSIS

• What were the results?
• How did it work?
• Which research does this relate to?
• What pattern or trend is emerging?
  

3. REFLECTION

• How do you feel about what has happened?
• Have the results met your expectations?
• What have you learned? What has surprised you?
• What questions have emerged?
• What planning, knowledge, skills, resources... do you need for your next step?

4. CONNECTION

• What connections have you made with people, organisations, theories, ideas...
• Reply to comments others have made on your post (come back later and check).
• Comment on other journals in the SDI class - or journals/blogs/forums related to your project.
  

Don't forget to include pictures, graphics, screenshots, video clips, audio, links to relevant sites to enhance your post. If you don't have any multimedia clipart such as the one in this post can help illustrate a point as well as make your journal more interesting for the reader.

Not all posts will include all these elements but over 2 or 3 posts you should cover most of them.

Heather and I will make comments on you posts to help you - and you can comment on each others posts to do the same :-)

Coaching for Success

Cognitive coaching is about helping a person get to where they want to be. It isn't about helping them get to where you think they should be - that's teaching or consulting or parenting or bossing. It's more about listening - active listening.

I'm doing an 8 day course in cognitive coaching - and although I'm only half way through I better understand how to ask questions that help people to help themselves - an ideal skill for Student-Directed Inquiry.

In fact the official description of cognitive coaching is

to produce self-directed persons with cognitive capacity for high performance both independently and as members of a community.

You couldn't get much closer to the aim of this course!

Cognitive coaching is about 3 types of conversation - planning, reflecting and problem-resolving. In those conversations the coach does a lot of active listening and uses a range of strategies to help the person being coached to use their own skills to think through an issue to reach their goal.

The second half of the course begins in June - in the meantime I need to practice what I know. Lucky students! :-)

While cognitive coaching is designed for face-to-face conversations I think I can also use it online - in the comments I write on journals. I have already begun to use my new training when writing comments and I'll be interested to see how the responses compare with those of last year's students.

On the Road...

Since completing this course and seeing the excellent results obtained by students - results that I partly attribute to our use of ICT to provide a flexible and personalised learning environment - a number of teachers have asked to hear more.


Uploaded on authorSTREAM by regor2012

I've prepared a presentation to help me explain why we chose particular Web 2.0 services, how students used them and why I think they contributed to higher than expected student achievement in the course.

Later today I'm hoping to get some feedback from teachers at another college during the presentation through Blogger and Twitter to show a little of how Web 2.0 services function.

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Growing Body Parts

Body parts are appearing all over the place now... We have had a fake severed hand for an ArtVid project, Bugs hand (on the left) created in Blender (hopefully not going into one) and various legs, heads and torsos across several game development groups.

Skoolaborators are also busy with bodies but mostly just dressing them. Several people have now uploaded their own T-shirt designs for their Second Life avatars.

This week's presentation on mentoring was more of a workshop. Everyone present had a chance to mentor and be mentored... Some people found they learned a great deal about other projects, others learned to be a little more structured when reflecting on their own progress and a few were not sure of the usefulness of the exercise.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by regor2012

The mentoring process is based on GROWTH Coaching and Cognitive Coaching. The latter in particular is designed to assist students with student-directed learning. I did my training in GROWTH coaching a couple of years ago and found the structured approach to reflection very useful - although my workshop was a few hours - not 30 minutes. Nevertheless listening in to conversations around the room I was very happy with the level of reflection I heard.
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A Buzz in the Air

The Interactive Media and Digital Projects classes are now buzzing! The students are great and the project work is of a high quality. Everyone is either designing or making or researching... and the ideas are fantastic!

And even better - many are now routinely documenting - updating journals and activity logs, commenting on other journals, taking an interest in other projects and being part of a supportive learning community.

Last week's State Quality Assurance Meeting reinforced how important it is for students to be recording their journey. While projects may race ahead or stall or take unexpected turns it is critical that documentation continues.

Most of the documentation at the moment is descriptive rather than reflective but we can focus on more on reflection after first term reports. Another thing we need to look at is questioning... students need to be much more skilled in asking key questions related to their project. This can have a profound effect on the quality of projects.

We are progressing very well through the mandatory content for this course - and in a fairly painless fashion. We are up to our 8th 30 minute lecture and it is clear from reading journals and looking at project work that many students have taken on board the material presented.

Online research and organisation skills have also improved. To be frank these were very poor at the start of the year - and while most still have a way to go in this area it is good to see the progress that has been made.

As far as my own skills go I'm getting better at managing such a large group - 42 students now - and I feel confident that those who are aiming for the top level course are on track to achieve it.

Some my project support work has not been ideal with many students having to wait too long for items or advice that is critical for their project work. But I've noticed more students asking for, and getting help from other students and teachers which is good to see.

Some issues have arisen with students who need high enough TE scores for universities but can't count the full range of pre-tertiary subjects they have done because they include different versions of the same course. eg Art Production, Media Production and Student-Directed Inquiry are all framework courses and each have multiple course options. Hopefully we can resolve this issue through the use of folios and negotiation. This issue is far from satisfactory when one can clearly see the wide range of different knowledge, skills and understanding that students are developing.

Top Tools for Learning

We're in the top 10!

OK it doesn't mean that much but it's interesting to see that many of the learning tools we are using in this course have been rated highly in a survey of 155 educators by the Centre for Learning Performance Technologies.

We use seven of the top 20 tools: del.icio.us, Firefox, Google Reader, Gmail, Blogger, Moodle and twitter.

Wikis also feature in the top 20 and this tool was chosen by seven members of the Glassbiscuit Development Unit.

Also of note is that in the top 100 tools Facebook now comes in at 28 and Second Life has risen dramatically since last year to be number 41.

Google Earth comes in at 48 and this is certainly reflected at HC where many classes used it in 2008.

Knowing What You Don't Know

Australian universities are calling for a new kind of learning, and a new kind of student - for 21st century success in work and life - personally, nationally and globally .

The new learning is about somebody who

• knows what they don’t know
  
• knows how to learn what they need to know
  
• knows how to create knowledge through problem solving
  
• knows how to create knowledge by drawing on information and human resources
  
• knows how to make knowledge collaboratively
  
• knows how to nurture, mentor, and teach others
  
• knows how to document and pass on personal knowledge

In many ways the TQA subject Student-Directed Inquiry on which this course is based is a response to this call.

The document New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education goes on to say that good learners are able to

• take the many different kinds of raw material in the world (culturally and location-specific information)
  
• work out the different interpretative frameworks within which that information sits (different worldviews, theories, belief systems— professional, cultural, technical)
  
• use these understandings to do something that works in the world (transfer of understandings, transformation of their immediate world, being a change agent, crossing a cultural boundary)

This week's 30 minute presentation introduced students to some of the beliefs, assumptions and worldviews that underpin contemporary western culture. It began with a quick online survey of the personal beliefs and assumptions of the class. The survey contained the following statements among others:

1. Thought is due to brain activity
2. Reasoning is the highest human skill
3. The best way to understand something is to take it apart
4. Love is mostly a chemical/ hormonal reaction
5. Ultimately there is little purpose to human life
   

The majority of the 30 students who completed the survey appear to hold beliefs and assumptions arising from positivism, reductionism and materialism. Have they questioned these assumptions? How will these assumptions affect their project and research methods? How do they affect their views of the future of the world?

While more than half believe that the planet does not have a positive future 87% believe that learning is a natural human activity and 94% believe that there is still much to discover - maybe the future will be more positive than they believe :-)



The presentation this week looked at the nature of a 'worldview' and then went on to propose that having a conceptual framework such as Four Quadrant Integral Theory allows one to look for what we may not be seeing...

While there was applause for an entertaining presentation some are not convinced that this discussion has anything to do with their project or research... I look forward to some interesting conversations...