Nancy, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the collaboratory and the other things that are happening at your centre, particularly as you are moving into university status.
As a Program Director in the Learning and Instructional Development Centre at SFU, I've always been a fan of your work and the initiatives you've undertaken on Vancouver Island. I look forward to learning from you...again :-)
Thanks for starting this new thread, Jennifer, because it opens a discussion of the purpose of VPD. I'd like to respond to your last question with a question of my own: Why would we want to promote "pedagogical instruction" in any mode and under any circumstances?
The etymology of "pedagogical" is rooted in the Ancient Greek word for the slaves who took little boys to school—girls didn't go to school in those days. Although pedagogical is commonly used nowadays to describe the instructional endeavour in general, I personally prefer to avoid the P-word and refer to teaching and learning methodologies. It's my small gesture to signal that I am not interested in ancient paradigms.
Also, I think one of the problems with our educational systems in crisis is that we are still talking about "instruction". I prefer to think in terms of co-construction of meaning through the interchange of knowledges in the plural. The online world is an ideal environment to foster these interchanges. Many contributors to this seminar have given excellent examples of the platforms and processes they favour. Although I can't claim to be as connected as many of you, I use my somewhat neglected blog to develop my theories, if it's of interest to anyone: http://knowledgesinterchange.wordpress.com/.
Jennifer, I hope you don't mind if I reframe your question so that it reads something like: How can we use VPD to promote interchanges which will help to construct new teaching and learning paradigms?
After I stopped worrying about protecting my work, or ideas about my work, etc. I had a very pleasant surprize. I found that the more I shared, the better it was. More feedback, more awareness of my work, more opportunity to discuss my ideas, and that makes me happy. Mind you, I'm not in the million dollar club, so I admit I didn't have to worry as much as the people who created Scrabble!
Here's a current commentary on the Scrabulous scandal which suggests that Hasbro and Mattel should be happy too:
http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9852054-36.html?tag=cd.blog
Hi Lawrence:
I'd like to throw out one idea for you (and others) to consider, and that is the concept of knowledge in the plural. Spell check hates it when I refer to knowledges, but from a critical perspective I'd suggest that we should always think that way.
I'm sure I don't have to explain the rationale behind the concept. Each of us possesses an unique set of understandings/experiences/cultural biases that we call knowledge (not that I'm daring to provide a definitive definition of knowledge!) I would suggest that the aggregation of that individual knowledge should lead us naturally to thinking of knowledges in the plural, and to the idea of sharing and exchanging them.
Many of us in this forum are educators who are comfortable talking about the need for learners to acquire skills (in the plural) and attitudes (in the plural). There are a few souls who have published on knowledges in the plural, but not many. My neglected blog at http://knowledgesexchange.wordpress.com/ references some of them.
Lawrence, you could be one in a million if your model embraces the pluralistic dimension of KS!
Liz
Thompson Rivers University hosted a gathering of about twenty representatives of the UCIPD member insititutions on Friday, Sept. 21st. Many thanks to Penny Heaslip and our other TRU hosts for making everyone welcome.
The agenda is attached and resources from the meeting (e.g. Norm Friesen's PowerPoint slides) are being uploaded to this SCoPE site in the next few days.
This is an invitation to the members who made the journey to Kamloops to post their institutional updates in this SCoPE forum, to provide links which will connect us with information, and to attach any relevant documents. This is also an opportunity to continue the discussion of issues raised at the gathering, and to build the capacity of UCIPD to play a leadership role in educational development in BC.
A reminder that this Special Interest Group (SIG) is private at the moment, If you agree with that, or if you believe it should be publicly available (we have 1300 registered SCoPE members and hundreds more surfers) please indicate your preferece in the poll at: http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/course/view.php?id=22
In order to keep the info and resources from the meeting all in one place, I suggest you reply to this message so that we have it all in one thread. If you prefer to start a new thread, use the "Add a New Topic" link. My usual reminder that you will be prompted for a password if you click on the links below to reply or see the posting in context. Unless you changed it, your ID and password are taken from the first part of your email address (e.g. ewallace, ewallace).
As some of you know, I had some car problems and had to leave the meeting early, so for selfish reasons, I'm really, really looking forward to reading your postings :-)
Liz