A late session choice after I realising I was in the wrong room and the one I’d planned to see was full…

Claudia Ferradas – The certainty of uncertainty: meeting the challenge of change

Apparently we’re going to start with a song…  “The times they are a’changin” – the Bob Dylan classic, to which I would link to via you tube, but apparently the content has been removed at the request of the copyright holder…  so if you don’t know the song, rush out and buy a best of Bob Dylan CD – it’ll be on there somewhere.

While the song progresses, the lyrics are being flashed up on screen: you can check them out on lyricsfreak.  And we’re being asked who Bob Dylan was asking to pay attention and it’s being pointed out that “teachers” are not being asked to change!  Why Not?

So this leads into the following Ken Robinson video – Changing Education Paradigms:

(If anyone’s interested, there’s a lesson plan on teflgeek for exploiting this).

Key Words from the video:

  • unpredictability of the future
  • cultural identity – globalisation
  • ADHD
  • standardisation
  • artistic education
  • divergent thinking
  • creativity
  • non-linearity
  • collaboration

Just because we don’t feel comfortable in their world, doesn’t mean we should impose our world on them.

Challenges:

  • how to contribute to the change within the system that holds onto the old model
  • how to control stress and demotivation
  • how to be encouraging … (lost the rest of that)

Quotes Umberto Eco on life-long learning and the anguish of upgrading – the fact that everything keeps changing:  we are not longer living calmly in the present and are constantly preparing ourselves for the future.

Liquid Modernity – Zygmunt Bauman:  (pages 10 & 11)

The only certainty (says Bauman) is change:

Learn- unlearn – relearn  /  the anguish of upgrading  /  new habits  /  new thinking skills

The unholy trinity: uncertainty, insecurity, unsafety.  Why not bring these ideas into the classroom to show learners that we consider these things as well?

Michael Rosen poem:  In our playground.http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/poems.html

(editor’s note:  the audio keeps cutting in and out and I keep missing bits – apologies)

Stability is now out of favour – variety is in.

we’re now nomadic – we travel light.

Clifford: travelling cultures:  not so much where are you from, as where are you between.  Human becomings rather than human beings.  Moving from the nation, to imagined communities (Salman Rushdie) to “postulated communities” – what aspects of your identity do you carry with you online?

We’re always wired, we’re always connected – yet we’re always alone.  Because we’re so dependent on connections we don’t know what to do without it.  We exist in a “screen state” – not our bodies.  Physical interaction is often an intrusion on virtual interaction, not the other way round.

Ubiquitous / mobile learning:

What we are used to, we too often become used by and so we must begin to see ourselves in where we are…  increasingly where we are is on the web.  (Michael Joyce 1998)

Intermediality – the blurring of media boundaries.  The use of video in a text on a web page….

“you cannot, with the web, go where no one has gone before” (Tchudi 2000)

Critical Technological Literacy:

ACCESS  /  CONTENT  /  LINKS

Globalisation:

Conflict derived from the contact with the difference

Construction of multiple fluid identities

definition of  the intercultural learner:  Corbett 2007: 41

World englishes

Conclusion – again, I think this one is going to need some thinking about, some working through and some rewriting.  stay tuned.

 

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