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I have had a few attempts at running a blog “for work” and each time I have hit a bit of a brick wall. There has been a lot written recently on blogging, what it is about, and whether it has an important role in a formal teaching-and-learning context. I have been stimulated to update this blog via a web-forum email asking about blogging at UniMelb …

My current thoughts re blogging as a genre of writing:

1. Blogging software provides an easy information architecture for “episodic writing” … especially of things that are loosely topic based, but become “topical” at a particular time for reasons that are not easily encapsulated, and are likely to be relevant again at a later date

2. Blogging tools are only useful for people who write prolifically, have regular access to the internet, do most of their writing at a computer rather than in a notebook and are comfortable with public scrutiny of their writing.

3. Blogging is essentially personal even when it’s work-related. I write to a blog as a convenient place to store ideas that are forming so that I can edit them from anywhere and I can refer to them easily if the ideas come up in conversation. I write to a publically-accessible blog to challenge myself to write more coherently than I would in a notebook – I operate from the premise that articulating an idea clearly is part of the process of thinking clearly, and that if I can’t express what I mean then I don’t actually know what I’m talking about yet. Feedback is always good when clarifying ideas.

4. Blogging has inherent dangers in the workplace – point 3 identifies that I am blogging ideas that are not necessarily fully formed. So a blog entry is a bit like a draft of an idea, or a “Dear Diary” type letter. There is a reason for drafting things and often it is because partially formed ideas that escape before their possible endpoints have been fully thought through can be dangerous. So I censor much of what I write to a blog. And because I do this, my blog ends up with very few entries and those that are written are not particularly interesting.

5. Blogging as a writing genre relies on students having a desire to write. Use of blogging software has some merit in a range of situations irrespective of whether the genre of writing is “true blogging ” (according to the blogging gurus in favour in any particular week …) My take on this is the most academics I have worked with are only just getting comfortable with discussion forums, and that blogging and RSS is beyond their comfort zone to use and support.

Re blogging software:

1. My first impediment to work-related blogging was lack of infrastructure and lack of server to install blogging software.

2. I tried using Bloki (http://www.bloki.com) for a while and it’s a pretty nice combination of blogs, forums and wiki-like website. I specifically used it to store information about web resources I happened to come across with annotations about what they were and why they looked interesting. My idea was that people with similar research interests would be able to follow what I was looking at on my blog, and might be inspired to make a similar resource available of their own reading so that we could share our research lives more effectively … I ended up becoming a bit wary about committing too much work-related stuff to a random server in a random location over which I have no control. I have to say, the site is still there 2 years later and there has been nothing but good service from the site.

3. I then installed MoveableType, PhpWiki and Moodle on my own personal website (http://wisebytes.net/research/blog/) to try them out and because it was the only place I had access to a shell account on a *nix server along with scritping and database services. I set up a research blog to take over from the Bloki site, but never managed to move my Bloki material to MoveableType. I used the PhpWiki quite a bit and liked it although I’ve never been game enough to leave it open to the world, and I never got around to publishing a read-only version of it either.

4. I finally got access to a server at UniMelb and installed blogging and wiki software. I used WordPress rather than MoveableType because it was just at the time where MoveableType introduced a licence fee which I didn’t want to pay. So I was again in a position of moving all my stuff from Bloki to MoveableType to WordPress. I also had great trouble with the authentication module in PhpWiki so that pages kept locking people out of editing them. I got Moodle working which good, and spent a bit of time playing with that too.

5. Having failed to inspire my academic colleagues to have any interest in starting a blog or using a wiki for drafting research papers or documentation and having spent a lot of time trying to get the infrastructure sorted to support wider spread usage of blogs, I actually ended up losing interest in writing blog content since most of it relates to a) things that none of my colleagues seem to find particularly interesting or b) things that are politically sensitive.

6. I have used BlogLines (http://www.bloglines.com/) as an RSS aggregator until I got swamped by the amount of stuff out in the world. I have ended up taking the lazy option of subscribing to Stephen Downes’ OnLineDaily newsletter as my primary source of keeping up with the world of edublogs. RSS has huge potential in teaching and learning but I’m waiting for other people to sort out the tools etc.

The biggest disincentive to maintaining a work-blog is a subtle shift in academic culture such that I am no longer confident that the university supports freedom of expression over corporate image, or substance over process, or content over style.

The biggest disincentive to supporting blogs in teaching and learning is an apparent lack of in-built passion for writing. Maybe moblogs or vlogs or Flickr will take off instead !!!

I have been thinking about a range of relationships between taekwon-do and my own discipline area of psychology. Today’s thoughts are built around the idea that fundamental movements are the words of taekwon-do, sequences of fundamental movements form phrases and sentences (e.g step sparring, where there are small structured conversations through to free sparring where there is an ongoing dialogue) and patterns are exemplar formal writing – the sonnets of taekwon-do, where choice of movements, the way they are put together, the underlying symbolic structure, the philosophical tone, the grace and coreography are all part of a carefully crafted and deeply meaningful story.

In considering fundamental movements as words, it occurs to me that the movements within fundamental movements are like phonemes and syllables – so that the way we turn our foot at the execution of a turning kick or side kick, or the way that we move our hips through various hand techniques are like pronunciation of individual syllables or sounds. If I lisp, it will affect the way I say certain words, how I put together certain sentences, and whether or not I am able to speak in a way that is correct or easily understood. If I don’t turn my foot properly on executing certain taekwon-do techniques, it will permeate through all my taekwon-do movements.

Another parallel with language relates to the concpet of universal generative grammar.

Reinforcement – can only say things that have been said before
Generative grammar, abstract rules – can say an infinite variety of things that are understandable by other native speakers who have the same ruleset.

Syntax – the way things are put together – applications can lead on or can be sterile

In understanding foreign languages – the difficult part is to identify word boundaries. When you speak word-by-word, it is very stilted and often doesn’t make sense. When you speak fluently, the words flow together so that the boundaries between words are indistinct. If you look at the sound spectrum of spoken speech it is still the greatest challenge in speech recognition software to recognise word boundaries. Speaking to a speech recognition system requires you to calibrate the system very very closely to your own speech and to use a very closed vocabulary.

Through my involvement with the USMA Schools Program, I have recently had an opportunity to watch Sabum Cariotis teaching young kids who are completely new to taekwon-do. This has given me cause to consider my own approach to young kids and how this fits with the message that Sabum Cariotis has been expressing lately that “Adults are easy, but until you have taught young children, you cannot call yourself an instructor.”

One thing that has always intrigued me is that in a martial art in which “discipline” is paramount, Sabum Cariotis does not enforce discipline on young kids in the straightforward way that I would approach it. I tend to say “Do this!” and then stay and wait until it is done. I am reasonably good at this form of “crowd control” and have assumed that crowd control is a necessary pre-cursor to “learning readiness”. In other words, I have implicitly been operating from the assumption that before the kids can learn anything, they need to be quiet and listening but I haven’t considered whether it matters at all how they got to be quiet and that once they are quiet, how you actually get them to listen actively rather than passively to what you are saying. Although in my professional role as an educator, I spend a lot of time considering teaching and learning strategies for adults and I have always argued that understanding how to talk to kids is one of the best preparations for teaching adults, I actually haven’t spent much time relating what it is that kids are “listening to” back to the teaching situation – I teach in the tertiary sector, I teach concepts, and I am very much a person of words, so I automatically think of listening as being focussing on what I am saying despite being aware personally and professionally that “active listening” involves a whole lot more than that. I am also aware that younger kids in particular will naturally understand the inflections in speech which carry the emotional content of what is being said irrespective of whether they understand the semantic content (ie the meaning of the words). They read “body language” in its natural form in a way that many adults (sadly) have been taught to filter out.

So although I might think that I succeeded a bit in teaching kids by ensuring that they are under control and doing as I say, what I see Sabum Cariotis doing is capturing his students from the inside out. He captures their attention and motivation from within themselves in contrast to my approach of trapping them in a corner and forcing my will onto them. It occurs to me that the essential difference will be in terms of “ownership” of what the students learning – when I force my will on someone in a teaching situation, they might “learn the basics” much more quickly because of my enforced discipline than if I try to achieve self-motivation for learning first, but I have probably stifled their ownership of learning, their willingness to seek out knowledge on their own and, in the longer term, their creativity. This loss of creativity is hugely important and is something that can’t easily be rectified.

When Sabum Cariotis talks to children (and adults) about taekwon-do, he tells stories and these stories are constructed at multiple levels. He tries to place the taekwon-do story into a context that matches the level at which the students can comprehend. Within a multi-age class, each story has strands that are accessible to each different level and many stories are told simultaneously in choice of words, in emotional tone, in choice of analogy and metaphor, in physical demonstration. Very few instructors have the depth of knowledge combined with passion for the content combined with respect for their students to engage with people in this way. I see many parallels in what Sabum Cariotis does and the way that a passionate academic teaches in their discipline area. What I haven’t really thought through before is the skill involved in inspiring passionate interest in young children for something (eg biology or history or even cooking and gardening) … it is easy to get kids to do activities relating to these things copy-cat style, and it is even straightforward to get them to be excited about bringing their work to you for your praise. But it is a wonderful and entirely different thing to inspire a passion that can feed their creative spirit throughout their lives so that they do things for themselves.

A very common theme for people who excel in a particular area is that a single great teacher stands out as their inspiration. This is unlikely to be the teacher that sat everyone in straight rows and made them follow the lesson plan to the nth degree!! It is far more likely to be the unconventional teacher who reached out to them in their world and built their self-belief and creativity while sharing their own passion for learning in their discipline.

The thing that is emerging for me in writing this is not directly related to taekwon-do, but relates more to the tertiary sector that I work in. In the mid eighties, before the huge and rapid expansion of the university sector, it was considered quite inappropriate to lecture even at first year level in a discipline area in which you were not an active researcher – if a topic was outside your core area of expertise, who were you to think that you could teach in it?! But as student numbers and teaching loads increased (and $$$ became critical), it sounded a bit precious to say you needed to be an expert to teach first year. These days it is unlikely that even at third year level it would be considered necessary to be an active researcher in an area to lecture in it. But what is lost is the depth of knowledge, the multilayered “stories”, and the passion that experts have for their domain. The subtlety of how things are put together to lead into a capacity for creativity in an area is lost if you don’t have the depth of knowledge to understand how an area is structured and how it relates to other areas and other concepts. The subtlety of good teaching is replaced by “process” around things like learning objectives, lesson plans and a need to be very explicit about assessment. With structured lesson plans, people who don’t know the content area think they can teach, and worse still, that they can judge quality of expert teaching even though they are not in a position to judge the actual content … this approach is very misguided and depressing and spiritless, and probably says a lot about our current social, cultural and educational values and the lack of passion and creativity in our lives – and this uplifting thought is probably a good place to stop writing for the moment … it can only go downhill from here !!!