Based on the ideas of Daniel Pink in “A whole new mind“, a good presenter should have the following six aptitudes:

Presentation is definitely NOT reading what’s on the slides. Presentation is the transfer of meaning and emotion. It’s about making others to adopt your views. In this light, presenters are like sales persons. Creation of a presentation is drastically different from crafting a paper. A presentation resembles story-telling in many levels.

Preparation Stage

THE most important part of the presentation is the MESSAGE you want to deliver. Thus the central questions are: What is your point? Why does it matter? Besides, other factors to be taken into consideration include time, venue, audience, purpose of the talk. Avoid slideument. Slides are NOT documents or handouts.

Crafting the story

Six principles to make sticky messages -SUCCEs (From book Made to Stick):

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness: surprise people (show the gap in their knowledge), stimulate their curiosity
• Concreteness: not abstractions.
• Credibility: put cold numbers in terms people can easily visualize
• Emotions: Use images to arouse emotions
• Stories: we love stories

Storyboarding is helpful to craft the flow and feel of presentation. This can be achieved by slide sorter view in PPT or light table view in Keynote. Here is the steps to follow to create storyboard:

1. Brainstorming ideas for each slide (flow of messages), don’t worry about images.
2. Grouping and identifying the core /main theme, that message audience will take away
3. storyboarding off the computer

LaBoskey (1993) maintained that there are two types of impetus: internal and external. Impetus or motivation for reflection come hand in hand with the purpose or the focus of reflection.

• Internal

Internal Impetus to reflect is influenced by one’s cognitive ability and propensities including attitudes, beliefs, values. Not all students will be inclined to or be able to reflect on their own. For those reflection is not part of innate propensities or habit, external impetus become important.

• External

In the context of preservice education, external impetus for reflection is often provided by teachers explicitly or implicitly. The impetus can be reading materials, cases, et al. coupled with reflective tasks with structure of various types.

Another source of external impetus, according to Dewey, might be a ‘felt difficulty’ ranging in intensity from mild uneasiness to intense shock. Dewey (1910) delineates reflection as a three-step process: 1) problem definition; 2) means/ends analysis; 3) generalization. The problematic situations are likely to arouse the cognitive disequilibrium which lead to reflection on one’s previous experience or existing knowledge.

So what?

The implication of this for teacher educators is how to better design or provide better support to activate students’ reflection. During teaching practicum, there should be ample external impetus for reflection since student teachers inevitably bumped into problems or difficulties. It’s naturally for them to be engaged in reflection. However, during the in-class teaching, such external stimulus is greatly lessened. In this case, teachers need to elicit students’ reflection through case studies; give them a nudge over what to reflect about and how to reflect.

• Twitterrific: I am not that avid user of Twitter, but iphone make it a great way to kill some commute time.

• Posterous: a quick way to post photos took with iphone online by sending emails to post@posterous.com. As simple as that. Here is a test page I sent. You can also make posterous to automatically sent stuff to your blogging accounts like twitter, wordpress.

• Instapaper: it has a free version, a great way to save web pages for offline reading.

• Younote: take notes in text or audio form. Can be simply used as a recorder.

During lunch, watchsnow mentioned that she felt blogs at Hong Kong started as personal journal type. She herself actually didn’t have any expereince with the fiter type of blogs. We then did some research to confirm that.

From wikipedia:

目前，很多香港互聯網使用者都熱衷撰寫網誌。然而，網誌的主要使用方式及方向亦有異於其他地區，香港使用者主要將網誌服務當作日記使用，亦不會把內容公開。未經查證的資料指，香港最多人使用的網誌服務是Xanga或Yahoo BLOG，其他如Blogger、MSN Spaces、無名小站等在其他地區流行的網誌服務則較少香港人使用。

Based on another interesting webiste watchsnow recommend to me

隨著Xanga的興起，香港不少青少年均以Xanga作為網上日記，而Xanga的留言及blogring功能等亦令它可作社交和聯誼用途。及後Yahoo blog吸引了不少藝人開blog，由於藝人網誌多以相片為主，加上網民以為可藉此與偶像交流，故這類網誌的點擊率普遍較高。

I couldn’t help but wonder what implications this blogging culture has for local students. Is it possible that many students perceive blogs mainly as a channel to broadcast personal events? Will students jump to the conclusion that blogs are not for them once they exclude themselves from the journal-writing type? Or does it mean that HK students might have more difficulty adapting to academic blogs – blogs more on ideas and critical thinking?

The image encompasses the seemingly paradoxical mixture of private and public that is evident in weblogs. They are enclosed and private spaces that allow the writer to cultivate an autonomous voice, And yet they are visible, open spaces that encourage linking and conversations.

Thus there exists a tension between what’s private and what’s public. However it is still not clear how these two dimensions affect each other, and more importantly, how the interplay between the private and public spheres affect the thinking and writing process.

They also pointed out that compared to formal academic work, blogs are concise, spontaneous and timely. They usually presenting half-thought, naked ideas without thought-out arguments or structure. However, blogs can serve as a great writing tool since they could “elucidate the constant flow of thought”, capture and store the fleeting sparkles of thoughts otherwise might be lost. I can’t agree more on this one. That’s why I name my blog “intellectual flakes”. To me, these blog entries are fragmented and light-weight.

The process of visual thinking consists of look, see, imagine and show.

• Looking = collecting and screening
• Seeing = selecting and clumping
• Imagining = seeing what isn’t there
• Showing = making it all clear

Four automatic looking tasks: orientation, position, identification and direction

Four rules to make thinks look better:

• collect everything you can
• lay it all out where you can look at it
• establish fundamental coordinates
• practice visual triage

“… when blogging is used by teachers in a prescriptive way, such as, ‘write a blog on the subject of XXX’, the value of blogging is very much constrained and it becomes another writing exercise. As many writers have noted, blogging is, at its best, a conversation and needs a purpose and an audience, but not prescribed topics.” ( Mason & Rennie, 2006. p. 15)

Downes (2004) also maintained that compulsory blog-writing was at odds with the spontaneous and authentic nature of blogging.

I agree with them. I also want blogging to be sustained and continuous. But the reality is making blogging voluntary and giving students freedom and control don’t guarantee the sustained and continuous practice. Without a suggested topic or areas, students’ writing can be lack of focus and purpose. Yes, the conversation needs a purpose and focus, that’s what glue the community members together. Of course it will the great if the focus and purpose emerge naturally. But a question arises here is how about it doesn’t? What we as educators or researchers can do to facilitate and promote it?

References:

Downes, S. (2004). Educational blogging. Educause Review, 39(5), 14-26.
Mason, R., & Rennie, F. (2006). Elearning: The key concepts. London; New York: Routledge.

We often hear teachers say, “I want students to have free discussion, to articulate whatever they want to say through online forum or the like.” At first glance, this senses perfectly fine. Students are give a lot of freedom and control; they are granted the opportunity to direct learning to their interest or in their own pace. Then I begin to wonder, what’s the pedagogy behind the “free discussion”?

The arguments for the “free discussion” might be that the topics forced onto students might not be interesting or meaningful for them. That will confine their opportunities for self-directed learning. The compulsory online discussion, inevitably, will generate empty, meaningless and shallow pieces.

However, empowerment itself can’t guarantee the quality of students’ work. Students will not become intrinsically motivated once they get more control. A problem associated with the “free discussion” is the clueless students. They might have no idea what to write about or to discuss about. Or the online posts might be on such diverse topics that it was hard to have a focused and on-topic discussions. In many cases, voluntary participation is equivalent to no need for participation. Students usually will not interpret the voluntary participation as an opportunity for them to take initiative and ownership of their study. They interpret the task as something less important or unnecessary. Otherwise, why the teachers make other assignment required, but not this one?

All in all, something “nice-to-have” is very hard to sell to students. They can be too busy or to lazy for something that is not “need-to-have“.

For members in an online community, they take on the roles of writers and readers at the same time. The interesting thing is that although they are like comments as writers, they also seldom comment on others as readers. This is easy to be interpreted as just selfish act. but I think there should be something deeper. For example, it can be associated with

• knowledge ( e.g. I don’t know much about what he/she is talking about, so better keep my mouth shut.)
• habit ( e.g. I prefer to write commentary on my own blog. )
• technology threshold (e.g. I need to log in to comment? Why bother.)
• perceptions (e.g. I simply have nothing to comment on. )
• preference (e.g. I don’t want others to see my comment. I will shoot the write an email.)

On the other hand, there are some motivators for commenting act:

• rule of reciprocity ( e.g. This post is really useful. The guy left me a comment, I’d better leave him one as well.)
• clarification (e.g. I don’t quite understand, better ask. )

I have had this debate with myself for a while and my perspective on this matter changed over time. A discussion with Nicole after a seminar we went to ignited it again. I guess it will be worthwhile to record my change here.

I used to be a quite strong opponent of forced participation for students. I believed in that students will benefit more if they are engaged in the authentic activities to their genuine interest. The ideal situation is that students are driven by the internal motivation instead of the external motivation. I used to feel it was kinda pathetic or sad to force students into online discussion.

On the other hand, we all know that the online community will not take shape just by creating an online forum. Social infrastructure such as goals, rules and facilitators, can play an critical role. A case I was involved in my work set me to rethink about this required participation. A teacher in our faculty is a very experienced online facilitator. She is dedicated and skillful. The course she taught in the past had successful online discussion when the online participation was given extra point. When the online discussion became voluntary, she got the participation problem. So here, we have similar students population, same great online facilitator, but the online discussion failed to take off.

There are many factors that influenced students’ online participation, some are related to individual student, some are related to the course. To form a self-organizing online community, or having online discussion out of free will, there are many conditions to meet. For example, students need to be mature learners who believe in peer learning . On account of this, maybe such self-organizing online community will be more possible with post-graduate students who are more self-initiative, resourceful and reflective.

But for those teachers of the undergraduate students who wanted to promote online discussion among their students, what can they do? If they don’twant to leave the online discussion to chance, assessment might be an effective measure. It might be argued that the best solution might be to promote the inner need for peer learning. Then it comes down to how to make students willing and ready for online learning? In this respect, there are several barriers. For example, it takes time to change one’s epistemology. It’s impossible to change students’ perception and attitude overnight. In addition, the subjective teacher can’t spend much time on this as well. So to show students that peer learning might be useful and valuable, one way is to get them into it and try it out themselves. So the means might not be graceful, but the ends might be good.