So it went. I changed the style of my slides completely and communicated mainly with images. Thanks to Garr Raynolds for some advice. I talked about the meaning of reflection in relation to organizations and how social software could help people cope with all the changes. I stated that in education, the worst thing we can do is to hang on in best practices. Reflection creates future practices, while best practices are just past practices. It was not flawless: a half-empty room as it was the last session (although it was about 70 people or so) and I configured my timer incorrectly, ending up rushing the ending a bit. Otherwise I think I did a fairly good job, although I’ve done better recently.
Well, a lot of people asked for the slides after my talk, so here they are. I also recorded my talk and I will post it online later on.
Slides:
Teemu Arina @ OEB: Blogs as Reflective Practice [PDF, 1.7MB]
The short paper I wrote for the presentation months ago has a bit different viewpoint, but still relevant:
Arina, T. (2006) “Blogs as Reflective Practice”
[:UPDATE:]
Mandy Schiefner has the story. It seems I can still read German. I lived two years in Germany at the age of six. Later the 13 years of learning German in school detoriated my German skills, another example of the importance of context. I think assessment is a huge problem in successful social software driven courses. The size of the group when it exceeds 100 students can easily overwhelm teacher’s capacity to cope with the ammount of information. I’m not sure if we should even try to fix the problem. Assessment might as well kill real interaction by being present. Just let go, and give yourself to the flow.
I also pointed to an idea from Stephen Downes when discussing the components of reflective practice, on information as a flow.
Tags: Conferences, Presentations, Social computing