VHSM October 2009 Podcast

CSSE 2009: Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will: Local Teachers to Distance Education Responsibilities

VHSM October 2009 Podcast Introduction

Okay, two months in a row is starting a trend I suppose (and hopefully I’ll have a few extra VHSM Podcasts to throw in over the next little while – with AECT, the NRC REC, and VSS coming up in the next three weeks). This episode is actually a recordings I made of one of my presentations at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education in Ottawa this past May (see CSSE 2009: Teachers’ Preconceptions Of Virtual Schooling [AND] Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will for brief descriptions of both my presentations).  The abstract for this particular presentation read:

Two decades ago Newfoundland and Labrador introduced distance education in the K-12 environment. The program focused upon providing advanced-level courses to rural school students, and worked largely due to the widely known, but rarely documented significant amounts of content-based assistance from school based personnel. In the past seven years the province has moved to a virtual school model of distance education and more rural schools find that they must rely upon this virtual school to offer academic-level courses to students with a wide range of abilities. This has created many new responsibilities for teachers that have also gone undocumented. This study will begin to document the duties and time required to provide support for this new models of distance education.

Finally, you can access the slides that went with this presentation at Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will: Local Teachers Distance Education Responsibilities.  A reminder that the actual podcast is in the entry that immediately follows this one.

Remembering 9/11

This day has been an interesting day for me over the past eight years.  On 11 September 2001 I was in the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland for professional development meetings associated with the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation.

Tonight the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) are showing the Pope Productions movie Diverted again at 8:00pm this evening (note that the Pope Productions website doesn’t appear to have been updated in about two to three years, so there is no information about Diverted actually located there).  According to the CBC blurp about the movie, Diverted is:

A fictional story inspired by what happened to the people of Gander, Newfoundland and the passengers on the planes on Sept. 11, 2001, when the Federal Aviation Authority shut down the skies over the United States. Suddenly, more than 200 aircraft flying over the Atlantic at the time had to find a new place to land. Thirty-nine of those flights made their way to Gander, Newfoundland, and on that day 6,500 people descended on a town of 9,000.

While Gander is probably the most remarkable story (largely due to the size of the community and the number of people that were stranded there – see some images and news stories here), communities like Stephenville, St. John’s, Goose Bay and others throughout Eastern Canada also accepted unexpected visitors.  In addition to the movie Diverted, I would also recommend the Jim DeFede book The Day the World Came to Town (see a review here or purchase the book from the publisher or on Amazon).

At the time I never knew that I would be driving through New York and Washington a year or so later and seeing the crash sites, that I would end up doing a doctoral degree in the United States, or that I would be working in the United States.  At the time I could only sit at a Jungle Jim’s restaurant with a group of virtual school administrators, online teachers, and school-based teachers responsible for their online students and watch the scenes unfolding on the television – like many across North America and around the world I would imagine.  We would all be leaving Gander later that day – as our professional development sessions ended.  I imagine that the rooms we occupied in the hotels and the space in the school we were using were quickly filled by those who were stranded.

So today, as I reflect on the events from eight years ago, I’m going to watch Diverted and the dramatization of turmoil that was happening just down the street at the airport, and what happened as I left the community without realizing the full weight of what was going on in the tiny community.  And today I’d ask my readers to spend a few minutes looking at the images from Gander on 9/11 and the days following, along with some of the personal stories that come out in this ABC news item and the write up that appeared on Snopes.

Killick Centre for E-Learning Research

I mentioned the Killick Centre for E-Learning Research on this blog in the past (see Killick Centre tag).  Basically, it is a project housed at Memorial University of Newfoundland that is funded by the federal Government through the the Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) Program of the the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which “aims to foster innovative research, training and new knowledge in the area of e-learning in the field of education.”  One of the main partners in this research is the provincial virtual school, the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation.

Anyway, I was poking around their website a couple of days ago and noticed some new links.

• Published Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters in Books
• Peer-Reviewed Journal Article and Chapters in Books (Accepted for Publication)
• Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters in Books (Submitted)
• Book(s) Under Contract
• Non-Peer Reviewed Items (Published)

While some of the items appear on multiple pages and I notice that some are out of date (i.e., I know the article has been published, but it is still listed as accepted or submitted), but it is worth promoting the research that is coming out of this project.

As there are very few folks doing good empirical research into virtual schooling, and even fewer in Canada, I wanted to post this quick update to keep this work fresh in everyone’s minds.

CSSE 2009: Teachers’ Preconceptions Of Virtual Schooling [AND] Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will

Well, today at the 2009 annual conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) I gave the final two K-12 Online Learning At CSSE 2009.

DAY 3 / JOUR 3 (Monday, May 25 / Le lundi 25 mai 2009)
Timeslot 15 / Période 15
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. / 11 h 30 – 13 h

15.11
446 Tory Building / Pavillon Tory
CATE/ACFE
Technology in Teacher Education  / La technologie dans la formation en  enseignement
Multi-paper session / Plusieurs communications

Teachers’ Preconceptions of Virtual Schooling: Challenging Myths & Misconceptions / Les préconceptions des enseignants au
sujet des cours en ligne : des mythes et des idées fausses dérangeantes
Michael Barbour (Wayne State), Kelly Unger (Wayne State)

Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will: Local Teachers to Distance Education Responsibilities / Le bénévolat et la bonne volonté
chez les enseignants : les enseignants locaux et leurs responsabilités vis-à-vis de l’éducation à distance
Michael Barbour (Wayne State), Dennis Mulcahy (MUN)

I made recordings of both sessions, which I hope to turn into podcasts in the next few weeks.  In the meantime, I have uploaded the slides for both presentations to my website, see:

• Teachers’ Preconceptions of Virtual Schooling: Challenging Myths & Misconceptions
• Teacher Volunteerism & Good Will: Local Teachers to Distance Education Responsibilities

In terms of the conference thus far, I have to say that I have been quite disappointed with the session chairs.  Yesterday, I mentioned how the session chair decided that she wanted to present second and switched the order to the presentations (which caused me to miss over half of the presentation I wanted to see even though I followed the published schedule).  In the session I presented in today, I was scheduled to present first and third (out of four sessions).  The first thing the chair wanted to do was switch that to first and second (and I’m glad that I didn’t as I had someone come up to me afterwards, who came in just before I started by second presentation, just to see that presentation).  Next, as there were four papers each person was supposed to have 15-20 minutes for their papers.  I took 15 minutes (14 minutes and 40 seconds based on the recording on my iPod) for the first paper.  The second paper was presented by a group of four people who included the session chair – and they took 27 minutes!  As I was giving my second presentation (i.e., the third paper of the session), at the 10 minute mark the session chair gives me the two minute warning and at the 12 minute mark she holds up her sign to wrap it up.  I continued and according to my iPod recording was 14 minutes and 48 seconds.

I guess this is my way of suggesting to CSSE that they need to do a better job of preparing their session chairs – and might I suggest not selecting people who have a vested interest in the papers being presented in that session (i.e., don’t select someone who is presenting themselves in that slot)!!!  Anyway, thats my beef for today…

Tomorrow I am participating in the panel Congress 2009: Academic Blogs – Connecting People And Ideas.  As a lead up to this panel, I wrote the following entries related to the questions we were given in advance:

• About This Blog
• Academic Blogs – Blogging And Academic Work
• Advice For Academics
• Advantages And Disadvantages
• Trade Secrets

Until tomorrow…