Mc² = E Learning Reflections

As a researcher you're told to consider your positionality in relationship with ethical guidance and in relation to the people, the organisations and/or the institutions that you're researching.  You spend a lot of time journaling and thinking about your own research practice and you're warned about gatekeepers.  But I don't think anything quite prepares you for the experience of discovering that people begin to see you differently.  Inside you're the same person you always were.  But I learned there's a naivety to that because what others see is someone who has changed in status, someone who has grown in power and someone who has the potential to do considerable harm which, from their position of being researched, is a frightening realisation.   ("You've Changed" by Michael-Albert Herrera is licensed under CC BY 2.0.) The thing is, I can pinpoint the memory of when I realised that people see me differently.  I was at home and I contacted someone t...

Education is a field full of acronyms and I remember having a bit of a giggle to myself when I first saw these two.  Lower order thinking skills (LOTS) or Higher order thinking skills (HOTS) are were made famous in Blooms Taxonomy, a model that really helps educators to create learning outcomes which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound (SMART)... there's another acronym.  It gets especially confusing when we try to support our students as they develop lots of SMART HOTS.    But, as with many teachers, generative AI (artificial intelligence) has caused me to pause and rethink.  And I don't generally think about AI that much beyond teaching my students to address the question of: (a)  Should I use it?  (b)  How do I use it?  and (c) Should I trust what it tells me?  However, in this blog post, I wanted to explore something different.  I wanted to explore my big fear - are students using AI to cheat?  Or ...

  Just reading an extract from Etienne Wenger's (1998) Communities of practice (page 151): "Who we are lies in the way we live day to day, not just in what we say about ourselves, though that is of course part (but only part) of the way we live. Nor does identity consist solely of what others think or say about us, though that too is part of the way we live. Identity in practice is defined socially not merely because it is reified in a social discourse of the self and of social categories, but also because it is produced as a lived experience of participation in specific communities." Wow - this is a humbling thought! On a personal and professional level this really hit home and I wanted to take a moment to document this. When I think about all the things I've said to people, said about people, said about myself, not to mention all the things other people have said about me that I know about, all the things people say about me that I don't know about... It ...