For my interview I reached out to someone (acquaintance of friend kind of deal) who, like me, used to work in an offshore school in China. What interested me was that after some time back in Canada he’d moved back abroad and had eventually risen to admin-level while still holding down a part time teaching…

I’ve just reached the end of a student presentation cycle in my senior Social Studies class at work which was an intentional foray into project-based learning (PBL) with a focus on personalization… sort of. Students could choose their topics and I coached them on appropriate specificity (think of them focusing on interactions between climate and…

1. Platform choice and justification: for my social learning platform (SLP) analysis, I’m going to be examining the platform I’ve watched and interacted with the most of the given choices by far – YouTube. I’ve used the site for essentially my whole adult life after university (I graduated in early 2006; Youtube launched in late…

While reading C. Thi Nguyen’s piece this week on the difference between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, I wondered how this model would apply to my workplace as a teacher. In public school employment you will see the same people very regularly: you work in neighbouring rooms, talk in the hallways, and attend meetings. Especially…

I’ve never owned more than about 20% of a cat, growing up in a family of 5 and being a regular traveller of the pacific rim area for most of my young adulthood since leaving home. While cat-sitting for a friend on holiday, though, I was presented with a small dainty by one of the…

As a high school student in the late 1990’s I attended a medium-sized school – big enough to perhaps not know all of my peers’ names, but small enough to visually recognize just about everybody as also being in my school. This included many students that I would see in some places (for example, around…

How would you know if you were living through some kind of ‘end times’? You might look for signs of some kind of degradation: perhaps people lose trust in one another and the idea of the social contract, maybe the economy collapses and everyone reverts to a pre-commerce state … or maybe it’s something less…

I was early to Facebook, signing up when you required some kind of institutional email (in my case my Uvic one) to gain access. This isn’t a hipster statement (that’d be me pointing out that my original email address was doug@ some variety of warm email service before the spam became completely unmanageable and I…

I can remember it vividly: flexible ducting that almost reached my wrists, something approximating a papier-maché mask, a grey-painted cardboard box (including buttons), and some grey gloves. Perhaps most importantly there were also two bottles of beer, each on their road to completion. Nearby were two lengths of ducting that fit over the legs as…

Current coordinates: For this course I am looking at the impacts on and applicability of various social media formats to a secondary school learning environment, as a teacher currently working in the BC public school system. As an older student who got to watch the idea of social media rise through the hotmail/ICQ chat days…