Glenn Hardaker :: Blog

Interesting addition to Skype 3 (beta). Been testing and looks useful. Teleconferencing for free with text messaging. As with Skype distributed tool and therefore set up for long term contacts I feel. I expect to use it in the near future. Currently just tested https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/home. Just on Skype now as always and just noticed there is currently 4,633,745 users online!!

Just thought that as EmeraldInsight being online may be worth exploring opening an office in Second Life along with Reuters and News organisations. Speculative but the land is currently very cheap and expected to go up significantly in value!!

I like the idea of the pedagogical patterns concept... capturing practice through innovative ways... Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge.

A pattern language is a set of patterns that work together to generate complex behavior and complex artifacts, while each pattern within the language is itself simple. The patterns community has begun to realize that patterns in isolation provide only incremental improvements to software systems, organizations and processes. It describes how to design and deliver a short course. Little in this language (or any pattern language) is novel, but it brings together in one place expert knowledge that is often forgotten and sometimes overlooked

Interesting viewpoint led by a narrative enquiry perspective and from Denzin what he calls postmodern/poststructural perspective. Talks about quantitative, positive research methods and assumptions and how many researcher have rejected this approach. They argue that positive methods are 'telling stories' about the social world but just in a different way to qualitative methods. A science that silences too many voices. Narrative approach just chooses different methods for evaluating there work including: verisimilitude, emotionality, personal responsibility, ethic of caring, political praxis, mulivoice texts, and dialogues with subjects.

This is one of the most rich resources around I have visited in years. Massive potential and could make significant impact on HE/FE sector. http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ . It the Open University initiative thats moving fast and based on Moodle. The content is the main thing to check out. loads of it and increasinf fast

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Here is a useful quote from someone who has significant influence on my thoughts in the context of bilingual education - Professor Jim Cummins.

"Nowwhere in this anaemic instructiuonal vision is there room for really connecting at a human level with culturally diverse students. When we frame the universe of discourse only in terms of children's deficit in English and in phonological awareness (or deficits in any other area), we expel culture, language, identity, intellect, and imagination from our image of the child. In contrast .... an instructional focus on empowerment, understood as the collaborative creation of power, starts by acknowledging the culture, linguistic, imaginative, and intellectual resources that children bring to the school"