Wildfire teaching

Celebrating CETLs 2009

Image courtesy of “Superjew”: accesssed 13/12/09 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Party_explosion.jpg

TT280: Web basics: design, development and management

Teaching online: using very fleeting contacts with students to enable more effective activity

and learning.

Wildfire activities – a terrain

Wildfire activities – a terrain with trails

Wildfire activities – a terrain with trails and TT280 path

Wildfire activities – a terrain with trails, TT280 path, and students' trails

Features of wildfire activities (Engeström)

- swarming that crosses boundaries and ties knots between actors operating in fractured and often poorly charted terrains

- building mycorrhizae communities. It blazes embodied and lived cognitive trails and social bonds that make the terrains knowable and livable. The mechanism of stigmergy

- constructing collective concepts that stabilize the trails and may serve as platforms for expansive restructuring of the activity

- experiencing highstakes personal involvement, risks and critical conflicts, and shifts of identity.

- combining quick improvisational adaptation and long-term design

- holoptic monitoring. It is oriented toward gaining a global view of events while engaged in intense local action.

Example: Coding Queries 2-34 1 of 2

Charlotte Wednesday 3.54 p.m.: [...] It is very frustrating as the code validates but has this warning, {200 words]

Delaney 4.31 p.m.: I think this is the same issue that Edgar answered down the page. [...]

Charlotte 4.39 p.m.: Terrific..thank you for that, in my frustration I missed the earlier postings.

Mr Black 4.47 p.m.: You won't be penalised for the warning, but it occurs to me that the reason the validator is giving the warning is because it's checking the document against UTF-8.

Emily 11.11 p.m.: I am using utf-8 and get the same warning. It seems to be just using direct input that is generating the warning.

[...some technical discussion...]

Example: Coding Queries 2-34 2 of 2

Charlotte Thursday 12.54 p.m. replies to Mr Black: Thank you, I am now testing with File Input before closing the file as well - belts & braces as they say!

Edgar 2.45 p.m. to Mr Black : I wonder if you could confirm please... To me there seems to be be no obvious advantage between using UTF-8 and ISO8859-1. So is there a preference as far as TT280 is concerned?

Mr Black 2.59 p.m. Either will do, Edgar.

Example: ECA 101

Dolores Friday 9:45 p.m.: I am checking one of my templates and the validation services comes back with strange errors. For example: [...]

Mr White 10:48 p.m. [...] the message is telling you that your paragraph element <p> is causing a problem.

Dolores Saturday 7:02 p.m.: Thank you for looking into it.

I double checked.

I treble checked.

I didn't close the <p> tag in the middle of the text block.

Kindest regards,

Dolores

Rules and tools

Rules:The RockyThe BirdThe Cubitt

FAQ forum

Snagfroid

The classical ZPD

The wildfire ZPD

The PLN – personal learning network

Issues around “community”

Image compliments di Mola: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50327830@N00

Implications: high stakes involvement

Implications: improvisation and long term

Image courtesy: Caesar: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Özz_Nûjen_at_Skrattstock_2006.jpg

Implications: holoptic

Conclusions: structure and ethos of courses

Conclusions: focus work at two levels

Theory theory concept practice blah blah blah

Conclusions: awareness of constantly changing terrain

Conclusions: the course as a living object