Laura Proctor

Hi Everyone:
Some interesting topics have come up in this discussion and some new, more focused questions still to be tackled have become clearer. The wiki is a place we can use to summarise and formulate the next questions. There is a little structure in place, and everyone is invited to add to the existing pages - or add new pages if you'd like. Please visit the wiki!

regards, Laura

The "Exploring Our Boundaries" Panel discussion at ETUG Fall 2008 brought together three B.C. educators to discuss their experiences and approaches to education on the international dimension. The panelists and their presentations were:

Solvig Norman, Royal Roads University (presentation slides)

Lynette Jackson, University of Victoria (presentation slides)

Gina Bennett, College of the Rockies: (presentation slides)

Some of the "boundaries" mentioned in these presentations were:

Solvig noted that interacting with others in different cultures requires respect, patience and careful attention to our own actions to ensure that we are not imposing our cultural views on others. This can be very difficult especially in areas that we often may not think of as relative to culture rather than absolutes. Three of those dimensions are

• Food: What are "appropriate" foods? Are deep-fried scorpions on your list of delicacies? What would you do if offered such a treat?
• Language: How do you cope when you do not share a language with the people you are interacting with? Do translators do the whole job? What are the challenges to working in a foreign language?
  
• Time: Is 9 to 5 the only standard for the work day? What does it mean to be "on time"?
  

Lynette described the ECDVU program designed to build capacity in Early Childhood Development on the African continent emphasizing the importance of careful consultation to set goals relevant to each student's country, ensuring that course activities contributed directly to achieving goals important to their country. Again, avoiding the imposition of goals from outside. Technology is used to support course delivery with careful attention to the challenges for some students who lived in areas with unreliable of electricity and/or limited access to internet connections. In spite of the challenges with technology, with appropriate accommodation and careful attention to personal communication and support, the ECDVU program has been very successful.

Gina spoke with passion about opening doors to education and information to all people. For me, with the following quote, she gives us an empowering perspective to contemplate with respect to (online) resources and education:

"When is it ethically justifiable to deny people access to and dissemination of potentially useful information?" Reinking, 2001

These are the thoughts I took away from that panel. Can you share a story, a comment, a reading that can help us expand boundaries in our thinking about education in the whole world?

Hope to hear from you. :-)
laura

The ETUG Fall 2008 workshop stated off with a dynamic presentation by Brent Lee from Vancouver Island University in which he introduced many internet based services that are freely available and provide a way of moving beyond our personal computers or institutional data centres. You can get a list of URLs for all those services he introduced in the "Our workshop resources" section of the ETUG wiki, found online at:

http://etug.pbwiki.com/

Most of those links can also be found at the delicious social bookmarking (http://delicious.com) by searching for the tag "etugfall08".

These services provide a way to work and learn "in the cloud" - a lovely metaphor for the internet. Although I have been involved in many aspects of using the internet for over 20 years, this term had escaped my notice. If you are interested in more background, have a look at the entry in wikipedia for "cloud computing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).

Are these applications and services new to you? How do they or might they expand your boundaries? What possibilities do they offer you or your students to "Learn on the Edge"?

What do we mean by "boundaries"? and is that different than what we mean by "barriers"?

After thinking about this question, I looked up the words in a couple of dictionaries and thought about how I would decide to use one word or the other in various contexts. What struck me as similar about the meanings of these words is that they both refer to separation between things. There is an "inside" and an "outside" implied in most uses of both of these words. Using the word "barrier" seems to shift my focus to externally imposed obstacles whereas using the word "boundary" focuses more on limitations imposed from within. Is this a contrast you share? Do you think it is useful in this discussion of "learning on the edge"?

What are your thoughts?

Welcome everyone to this SCOPE seminar where we will have a conversation about the topic of boundaries and moving beyond them in our use of technology for learning and teaching. The B.C. Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) Fall 2008 workshop attended by individuals from every post-secondary institution in British Columbia last week was organized around the topic "Learning on the Edge: exploring our boundaries". That forms the context for my approach to starting this conversation and I will share with you some of the perspectives and information that I took away from that gathering in the "ETUG Fall Workshop reflections".

On a personal note, this is my first experience hosting an online discussion and I would appreciate all and any feedback you can offer me. I will start a couple of threads to get us started. The workshop reflections thread mentioned above and threads for the questions I posed before attending the workshop. I look forward to your perspectives and new directions as I "learn on the edge" in real time.