Category: Curious David

Originally Published on: Dec 11, 2008 

It’s amusing and edifying to revisit the last “Curious David” blog I wrote for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (JSOnline) before they discontinued (terminated) their educational community bloggers.

Pioneering Web 2.0 Learning Tools
By David Simpson
Monday, Sep 1 2008, 09:32 AM

I’m nervous and excited. Time to take
off my invisibility cloak. Tomorrow
(Tuesday, September 2, 2008, at 8:00 a.m.)
I meet in person for the first time with my
20 first-year students. What an immense
responsibility to be their first professor!
We’re going to explore 21st
century learning tools such as blogs,
wikis, podcasts, social networks, virtual
worlds, and YouTube. The idea for this
course emerged from my
experiences writing this Curious David
blog column. Last year’s opportunity
writing for JSOnline was transformative for
me as I learned from elementary and
secondary school teachers, high school
students, virtual school advocates, retired
faculty and readers about innovations,
challenges and successes they faced
promoting learning.

In this first-year seminar, we shall focus
on some of the 25 free learning tools
described by educator Jane Hart. As we
examine these learning tools, we hope to
answer questions such as these:

1. To what degree can these web
tools truly enhance student learning?
2. To what degree are they just
cool tools?
3. Could they be used to develop
critical thinking?
4. Do they improve or degrade
communication skills?
5. Might they be applied to fostering
cross-cultural or international
understanding?
6. Might they strengthen or weaken
writing skills?
7. What are their weaknesses or
dangers? Should they complement or
replace 20th-century learning
skills/tools?
8. How can one evaluate their
effectiveness?

We shall read two books—Little Brother,
a work of fiction (maybe it is fiction), and a
work of nonfiction, Dispatches from Blogistan.

I intend to assist students in the transition from

high school to college—and to
investigate Web 2.0 learning tools which
might be useful across classes and in the
workplace. I want to involve them in
educational experiences that will develop
and enhance abilities in reading, writing,
reflecting, presenting, thinking, and
producing. Writing exercises will include
papers, journals, blogs/wikis, and exams.
Presentations will be both formal and
informal; individual and in small groups.
Collaboration will be both with fellow
students and with me

I welcome reader feedback about
this course. I’d gladly share a course
syllabus in .pdf format, which has many
hypertext links. (Indeed, I’d welcome
reassurance that I still have readers after a
two-month hiatus!).
Still Curious,
David

Email me at dsimpson@carrollu.edu.

Tomorrow’s final exam may provide insight into what the students have learned. Interestingly, I received an email today from someone in Great Britain interested in the course.
I intend to begin (renew) serious writing in a blog format starting in January. I’ll most likely use Type Pad.

I’ve learned so much — and have so much to learn.

 

Curious how each piece of blog authoring software takes getting used to. I’m looking for something as close to what I used when I was writing the “Curious David” column JSOnline yet will allow me to share the many things I now know are possible.

I’m writing this on my Mac। I hope to make this blog useful and of interest especially to my students and former students.

Revisiting “Curious David in CARROLL LAND.”

Makes me nostalgic. Here is what a flipbook would look like:

 

This will be included in a series of blogs tentatively titled “David in Carroll Land” based on 4 decades of teaching at Carroll. 

As is my habit for the past 4 decades, I am sitting in my office this morning of Commencement — reflecting. I drive in early to ensure getting a parking place before the proud families start arriving. Even at this early hour, Carroll staff and administrators are working (unheralded) to make this campus even more beautiful and welcoming for families on this special day. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, babies, babies-soon-to-join-the-world — the campus explodes with sounds, colors, emotions, and celebratory chaos. Often, I walk around campus taking photos (or accepting an invitation to be photographed).

I don’t know this year’s senior class as well as I used to when I taught five or six different courses that drew freshmen through seniors. These last few years, I have been pretty much a one-trick grey mare, teaching Statistics and Experimental Design. But every Commencement is special, and this one I graduate with the seniors!

My Carroll lifetime friend and business partner, Greg Schneider, shared with me William Bridges’ “Transition Framework,” which I find quite relevant today. There are “Endings,”  a “Neutral Zone”, and “New Beginnings.”

Endings involve disengagement, disidentification, disenchantment, and disillusionment, but with time, one reacts to an ending, realizes that one is headed to the neutral zone, and finds new sources of stability and guidance that help one through the transition.

The “neutral zone” is characterized by confusion, resolution, and bipolar reactions. Moving through it involves embracing it, finding a regular time to reflect, and reviewing one’s life to put the past in context and move on.

New beginnings involve understanding, acceptance, hope, and fondness – taking bold new actions as one tests adjustments in one’s life. Helping others who are struggling with the transition is, in itself, healing. Thank you, Greg, for this guidance and support across the years.

A Carroll student asked if he could sit in on my last lecture. Alas, Antonio, I am still writing it, but here are my unfinished notes.

1. Be authentic
2. Be sincere
3. Be kind
4. Be charitable
5. Be generous
6. Be open-minded
7. Be resilient
8. Be reflective
9. Be attentive
10. Be playful
11. Be courageous
12. Be …

 

 

My emotions are mixed — no different from those of the soon-to-be-graduates. Joy—sorrow—elation—sadness—weariness—rejuvenation. At the end of the day — emptiness, and some poignant, positive residual reminders. I often tease my graduating research assistants that, upon their exit from campus, I “exorcise” our shared office space to better adjust to the temporary emotional vacuum left by their absence from “Dr. David’s Neighborhood.” When you graduate, you remain in my memories as I have come to know you, and forever that age! Forever young.

My sitting on the stage has its liabilities as I’ll feel that I must behave uncharacteristically well-mannered!

Each Carroll Baccalaureate and Commencement ceremony is special to me, just as each student I have gotten to know is special.  I have chosen (or been called) to teach and to learn, and though they (you) may not realize it, I genuinely do learn so much from my students and from the challenges of trying to teach them well.

Thank you, graduating seniors past and present (and for a few ever-so-short more years to come), for all YOU have taught me. Put to good use your many talents, your energy, your playfulness, your empathy, your resilience, and your creative ideas to make the world a better place. Come to appreciate (as I did upon graduating from Oberlin College in 1971) that you have been privileged to receive a good education due not only to your own sacrifices and hard work but also to the many members of the larger community whom you may never have met or whom you took for granted—Board Members, Administration, Staff, Faculty, and Alumni—who

.

deeply care about you.

I hear the sound of bagpipes, and the bells call me.

——-Simply David