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I am very proud of the fact that on June 19, 2005, approximately 3 years after beginning my journey in taekwon-do, I was awarded my 1st Dan Black Belt by Sabum Spiro Cariotis. I have trained at least 3 times a week for all but the first month or so of my training, and I trained almost daily in the 6 months leading up to my grading so it was a big commitment in terms of time and energy. The blackbelt was certainly a motivating goal to keep training, but it has not been the endpoint in itself - I have continued to train 3 times a week since my grading and am still as passionate and as enthusiastic about taekwon-do as when I started. I suspect that I haven’t updated my blog until now because I needed the evidence (for myself and maybe for others) that it would indeed be the case that I would keep training with a passion. My blackbelt as an achievement in isolation is actually meaningless since in physical terms I am only just beginning to feel comfortable with moving and thinking as a “martial artist”. I am fully aware that to think in terms of expertise takes at least 10 years, so I am still in the early years of that journey. What I am convinced of is that it is possible to learn new physical pursuits at any age in life so long as you are prepared to put in the work and I still have a lot of work to do !!

I really enjoyed the grading itself - I was surprised at how smoothly the day went for me. My patterns were quite passable and although I was initially intimidated by the idea of grading alongside two girls who perform patterns with exquisite grace and skill, on the day I felt reasonably comfortable and confident and on reviewing the video afterwards, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I also surprised myself with how comfortable I felt with fundamental movements, step sparring and self defence under the pressure of grading. Sparring was physically taxing but I was pretty confident of my fitness level and my ability to survive if not to star. The most challenging part of the grading for me was always going to be the board-breaks - I have trained for them since whitebelt level, but I am small and technique and timing are not my strong points so I have always been concerned about what might happen on the day itself. You can’t fake board breaks. As it turned out, I was very focussed and completed all the breaks asked of me. I was pretty stoked by the fact that I did a flying sidekick over 4 people (it was originally going to be over 2 people given my size and age :-)) - unfortunately my designated cameraman was so enthralled in watching us that he forgot to turn on the camera to preserve my effort for prosterity … so there is no photographic evidence of my feat !!

So I am now a black belt in taekwon-do and I’m proud of it, but it is only the first step in a longer journey to be comfortable calling myself a martial artist.

My blackbelt thesis - this is a link to my blackbelt thesis on the structured curriculum of taekwon-do and why it particularly appeals to me.

I’m playing around with the combination of Wordpress, Feed2JS and Blackboard in order to use the corporate LMS, but get around some of the annoyances of Blackboard and some of the difficulties of collaborative content being locked inside a password-controlled environment.

The Announcement Tool in Blackboard is pretty annoying in that you have to go into the Control Panel in order to use it, and you have to have staff level access, and there are some non-intuitive things about the permanent vs non-permanent listing. There is also no capacity to have the Announcements pushed to students rather than making them pull them from Blackboard.

So long as Announcements are not considered “secret” (should not be seen by anybody not enrolled in the subject), they can be posted on a blog and “fed” into a permanent Announcement.

1. Make a blog, for example at http://www.edublogs.org
2. Find the RSS feed from the blog (see the button labelled RSS on the left navigation under Meta)
3. Go to Feed2JS and put the URL into the appropriate text box
   1. In the settings, decide whether you want students to know where the “real site” is - ie whether you want them to find the actual blog to read information directly.
   2. If you don’t link to your blog anywhere in the feed, you may be able to keep it relatively secret
   3. I’m going to play with whether we can restrict a blog to inside UniMelb so that the blog itself would only be viewable from a Unimelb ip, or via Blackboard outside of the Uni
4. Generate the javascript using the generate button
5. Use the style preview to apply different CSS styles to the feed
   1. Note that the CSS will apply to all previous announcements too because of the way that the Announcements page is generated
6. Paste the CSS and javascript into the Announcement, and make the Announcement permanent

Now all you have to do is update the blog site, and the permanent announcement will update itself.

It would also be possible to use Wordpress for collaborative work with student groups, who could then publish their work via Blackboard. I’m still trying to work out if this is as much trouble as setting up groupwork within Blackboard itself.

Having waxed lyrical about the possibilities afforded by fanfic for encouraging creative writing in school kids, my next foray into harnessing the power of popular culture is to suggest replacing the Problem-Based Learning curriculum in Medicine with a requirement to critique a few episodes of House.

Not only would you get the evidence-based, hypothesis-testing scientific approach to practising medicine, but you would also get to analyse motivations from doctor, nurse, administrator, patient and patient-social-circle context.

And you might even get a good laugh as well …

I have recently been reading many things on blogs, blogging and blogs in education. What has come out most strongly to me is that:

a) blogging *software* provides an easy way to make a website;

b) blogging *as a writing genre* requires that you have something to say;

c) mandated blogging is unlikely, of itself, to inspire people to write if they don’t have any intrinsic desire to express themselves in words, and is unlikely to promote a sense of community because the motivation for participation derives from a requirement to be involved rather than a personal choice.

Yesterday I discovered a writing community / writing genre that had previously entirely escaped my attention but was fascinating to me as a parent and an educator. I realise that not everything that’s new to me is necessarily new to other people (I am not immersed in gaming or popular culture …) but I have not seen “Fanfic” before, and maybe there are other edu-bloggers who haven’t either.

There are fanfic sites for all sorts of things such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek etc - in fact one of my colleagues assures me that “where there are geeks, there is fanfic”. I was directed to a Harry Potter fanfic site to read a story written by a teenager well-known to me. This teenager has consistently failed to submit any written assignments at school in 2 years. Here I found at least 3 chapters of a story amounting to over 3,000 well-crafted words … with reviewers comments to which the author had responded. So not only was this teenager reading extensively and immersing himself in the ideas from the story, but he was (and is) writing creatively himself and opening his work to interactive peer review. He is doing it because he wants to, not for any other purpose, and the main reason he showed his work to his parent(s) was in order to support his claim for a later bedtime because he was “working” rather than gaming.

The potential of these sort of sites to encourage literacy in teenagers is fairly obvious, as is the sense of community and the peer interaction (peer in the sense of shared interests / values rather than the age-group sense) that can happen purely online. I guess I see it as a bit like blogging, except that it is set in a creative framework rather than an “opinion piece”, “serious commentary”, personal monologue framework.

Then again, maybe I’m just impressed at what a teenager can do when they want to and when they do it for themselves rather than when they are told to “be creative” or to do things as “work”.