WE/ME in epedagogy design

I am also giving a seminar, starting in the first week in April. It belongs to the seminar series “KnowledgeFormation” - with the focus on “Change of media - change of educational settings”. At wiki.christinaferner.de you find a description of the seminar.
There will be synchronous events on Tuesday, 14-16 p.m. (German time). The seminar will be mainly based on project work and discussions via Skype or Adobe Breeze. The project work will be based on building up a media-rich knowledge base in a wiki.

If you want to enroll, or if you have any questions, please leave a comment or write a mail to christina.ferner@uni-hamburg.de

Dear all,

I am sorry to have missed the Seminar in Helsinki in the beginning of June, but I was occupied with a PR campaign in Manchester, UK. I’m writing a bit off topic here, but hopefully our network can also function as a bit of an alumni, even if our graduated student rate is jet low .

The company I work for, Miltton, is arranging a PR campaign in Hamburg during the second week in July. Now we would need help from local people that are innovative, outgoing, social and who are interested in new approaches toward marketing and media. Naturally my first thought was my co-students in Hamburg. Do you think some of you might be interested in participating in the campaign? We need involvement for 1 - 2 weeks in July.

I guarantee it’s something new and fun. You can e-mail me (clindeberg(a)gmail.com) for more information and please spread this around your co-students in Hamburg, even if they don’t study at the E-pedagogy programme.

And to everyone: have a great summer and I hope I’ll see you at the next seminar!

The seminar ‘Knowledge Formation I + II’ will start on Thursday, April 5th, 4-6 pm. The last synchronous session will be on Thursday, July 12th, 4-6 pm. Please let me know in advance if you want to participate in the seminar this summer semester. Thanks.

Seminar description: The seminar deals with the history and development of means and ways of representation in art, science and religion. The consequences on the respective systems of thought, perception and action will be viewed, ranging in time from the Renaissance invention of central perspective to the application of contemporary media technologies. Cultural-sociological and formation-theoretical implications of the “historic Apriori” in the specific epochs (M. Foucault) are of special interest. The main focus of discussion will concentrate on the abolishment of the boundaries of central perspective and its impact on further developments particularly in art history.

The seminar addresses both students who have already participated in other seminars concerning KnowledgeFormation as well as ‘new’ students. The seminar will be organized mainly as blended learning concept with cooperating groups of students from Hamburg, Helsinki and Rotterdam. Inter-group-communication will be accomplished via webbased community system (Commsy), eMail, chat and video conferencing.

Type: Tutored self-study with synchronous events
Language:English
Kind:major
ECTS:4-6
Assessment: International credit points or ‘Leistungsnachweise’ can be obtained by contributions to the seminar’s topic, usable as Learning Objects within the knowledge discovery tool „study.log“ for fellow students.
Start: Thursday, April 5th, 4-6 pm

The seminar ‘Pedagogical Media Theory’ will start on Thursday, April 5th, 2-4 pm. The last synchronous session will be on Thursday, July 12th, 2-4 pm. Please let me know in advance if you want to participate in the seminar this summer semester. Thanks.

Seminar description: Pedagogical processes are unthinkable without media, this includes the (still) so called “new media”. The seminar will approach the problem, whether and how the modern understanding of subject, society, and formation (Bildung) changes or even has to be newly defined, caused by the development of new media technology and its effects on the meaning of ‘media’ and ‘mediality’. Encompassing a wide range of mediatheoretical reflectable subjects, a pedagogical mediatheory will have to be developed, which has far reaching consequences for pedagogy (and this is not restricted to media-pedagogy).

The seminar will be a tutored reading course organized mainly as tutor-supported open distance learning with synchronous events and in cooperation with groups of students from Hamburg, Helsinki, and Rotterdam. We will communicate via CommSy, use the reading and writing tool eMargo, e-mail and video conferences or chat. This seminar is mainly based on Torsten Meyer’s book: Interfaces, Medien, Bildung. Paradigmen einer pädagogischen Medientheorie, Bielefeld: Transcript 2002 (http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts110/ts110.htm)

Type: Tutored self-study with synchronous events
Language: English
Kind: major
ECTS: 4
Assessment:
International credit points or ‘Leistungsnachweise’ for Hamburg’s study of pedagogics can be obtained by writing several short essays.
Start: Thursday, April 5th, 2-4 pm

When we were talking in Hamburg Wey asked me for the urls to some of the more interesting blogs about life in Second Life, and I promised to send some to him.

I am now happy to say that my blog/wiki thing is now almost working correctly: it has tags and tag clouds and rss feeds all over the place (including, at Ralf’s request, rss feeds for the tags). It also has a blog roll on almost every page, and there are seven SL blogs listed there, as well as some more general ones like Clickable Culture.

It seems sensible to tell everyone about it, rather than send some private emails; and then invite any comments, criticisms, suggestions concerning owenkelly.net

By the way, some of the individual entries need reformatting, and some of the links in individual entries may not work yet, because I ported them all over from WikkaWiki and the formatting and links need re-doing post by post, by hand. Since this only needs doing once then I *will* get round to it, but I haven’t had time yet.

:)

It is not Big Brother who is watching you, it is Every Brother… In this note we start our research in “Transparency and Surveillance in ePedagogy and education.” As we had communicated at the seminar here in Hamburg we are going to make our process transparent to everybody - and therefore I have now set up a blog (panopticon.ferngespraech.net) and a wiki (due to some problems with my Server only having PHP 4 my provider has to move my data to another Server, so the Wiki will be online tomorrow…) so that everybody can follow our thoughts and the work in progress.

Please have a look at our work - ideas, questions, recommondations etc. are higly welcome.

Cheers,

Christina

Thanks for all your impressions concerning our seminar in Hamburg. I’d love to read more of them. To make sure that also the content is documented Ralf created a special wiki page to store the results, questions and topics. Please fill it with all your presentations (or links to them) and group plansand results.

These are not to be read as critics, but what apeared to me - the new student - as new and what I recognized to effect the situation and possibly how I acted in it…

Seminar-situation

At first I felt very strange, because all the time everyone seemed to be permanently working on their laptops and I was wondering what you are doing all the time and if it effects your real-life-communication. For example, when somebody told something in a discussion or gave a presentation, the other people that I thought were the listeners did something else but listening. I thought that you are either not very interested, capable of multiple action, or maybe just pay attention to the main key-words that mostly didn’t explain me a lot.

However it was very interesting to see how you work and that there is still a lot of outcome from this behaviour. I will try to bring a laptop and be busy the next time, too.

Free-time

What disturbed me a lot during the free-time was the digital cameras as I don’t feel very comfortable with people photographing me all the time, especially when it is again and again because the photos of me do not turn out to be nice, but thank you for trying. Now that I have seen the flickr-accounts with some really good photos I wonder what is going to be left when we remember the seminar and have these photos that emphasize certain moments, situations and of course the fotogenic people. Will I be part of the memory when there is no portrait of me available? Seems a lot like some kind of visual knowledge building…

What I enjoyed very much were the stories of your personal life and your thoughts that you shared with me. I want to thank you all for letting me get to know you a bit and hope very much to continue the discussions online, in a different environment that I still have to explore a bit more. So here are the first steps into a permanent-online-social-life.

Greetings from Antje*

On Saturday night the whole group went to the Dialog in the Dark performance where, for ninety minutes or so, we walked through a series of environments which were all totally dark. We had sticks and we were accompanied by a blind gide who talked us through the environments and helped those who got lost of stuck.

Several things occurred to me as I walked around.

Fistly my eyes were conjuring up phantom images and were not “seeing” the uniform blackness that was objectively all there was. At one point when we were sitting in a simulated boat being blown by simulated wind and splashed by real water my perceptual apparatus was inventing a rocky shoreline that persisted. By persistence I mean that I could follow individual rocks as we moved past them, turn away, and then look back and see them again.

Secondly, my experience of the safety of the different environments varied for no external reason at all, except for the audible noises and the textures of the surfaces. At one point I realised that I was quite confidently walking around what we had been told was an empty room, whereas a few moments previously I had been shuffling along in case I tripped over any obstacles or steps that probably existed only in my imagination.

The final environment was a dark bar in which you were invited to purchase drinks and snacks: a process that involved finding your money, paying at least the right amount and then possibly getting change as well as the glass and the snacks. I had a beer and a peperoni thing ( a BIFI to be accurate, fact fans). Nobody spilled anything, or at least I heard no smashing glasses.

We had a discussion later about whether the barman was really blind and operating using only his other senses. This arose because he was so fast and so accurate, even when he was handed banknotes. Certainly he recognised my note as 5€ and gave me the correct change.

Eventually everyone agreed that no cheating had occurred, which was itself an insight (if I can use that word in this context) into operating sightlessly in the world.

 Update:  thanks to Christina for pointing out the correct spelling of Bifi which I didn’t know because I received and unwrapped my delicious pepperoni-style snack in complete darkness.

It was interesting how our group get together, especially because everyone had quite a different idea about VKB. Now we want to connect our ideas together as it is promoted by our organizers here.
And we must say that the program here also gave us some fresh ideas and thank you for introducing us to eachother, we are looking forward to visualize the results of our topic, Visual Knowledge Building.

(Antje, Anneli)