Going Solo: a conference for freelancers January 31, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentOne of our current interest at the ZSI is to look into working practices of the Creative Industries and there especially at the small businesses, part of the digital boheme, so to day.
Now I saw Ton posting about a conference that is especially dedicated to freelancers who work with a network of peers over the Internet. Sounds like an interesting event!
Going Solo
What happened to andragogy? January 16, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized,andragogy , add a commentI am just coming back from a meeting where a number of people doing research in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) were discussing what might be some of the core research topics in TEL for the next few years.
What stroke me in one of the discussions is that quite many people think about teaching kids and young people when we talk about pedagogy. And of course if we take the Greek root of the term “pedagogy” it means “child-leading”.
However in TEL we also deal a lot with settings of Life Long Learning, workplace learning, vocational training, etc. where we are confronted with an adult learner perspective. Now some of us also use the term pedagogy in that context as the term has somewhat been extended to “guiding and leading” all sorts of target groups.
But there has been the term and concept of “andragogy” (“adult-leading”) around for many years now. I was just wandering why this term has not really found its way into the TEL community yet? Or is it around and I have just missed it?
It was mainly Malcom Knowles, who defined some theory around this term in order to describe some of the main differences between guiding children in their learning processes and guiding adults. Knowles came up with 4 basic principles:
- Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept and Motivation to learn).
- Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities (Experience).
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life (Readiness to learn).
- Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation to learning).
Although I suppose that quite a lot of researchers in TEL do consider at least part of these 4 principles I have come across this term very rarely. It makes us aware that when we are dealing with adult learners the challenges for designing learning activities are very different from pedagogical scenarios for children.
So why not use the term more widely again?
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Tags: andragogy, adult education, pedagogy, TEL
some artwork January 9, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentyesterday I was at an exhibition of the painter Max Holzapfel who comes from the same little village where I come from. He used to be a teacher for secondary school before dedicating his time 100% to his art.
Whenever I go to an exhibition and especially if I see a painting that I like I remember some of my own paintings. So I uploaded a few picture from my paintings to FlickR. Here is one of them (this one hangs in my kitchen btw)
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iCamp made a good finish for 2007 January 7, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , add a commentJust before the Christmas holidays we had the second EC review of our iCamp project. Same procedure as every year: independent experts get all the documents (deliverables) from the project that were produced during the year; they spend some sleepless nights before the review to go through all the papers (sorry again for submitting some rather long deliverables 
), and have a look at what is otherwise available in terms of prototype etc. and then we all meet and do some ppts to show the work; finally and luckily we also have some discussions;
It is really good to get the opinion of individuals who are not directly involved in the work, but who are experts on the subject and deal with similar questions.
And this time it has been especially pleasant as we have been congratulated on our good work. This review has been a nice finish for 2007 and it should be a good start for 2008.
One of the recommendations has been to improve our dissemination strategy and to spread the word about the nice things that we do in our project. So I hope that we will get together with some key people following similar approaches (e.g. the PLE approach) and join forces.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: icampple