I’ve spent the week (well most of it) finishing off the design of the Campus Club website.  It’s the first site I’ve designed since early in my PhD (aside from this one and it still needs work).   I love playing with web design but I just don’t have much time.  And because I don’t have much time, it takes me ages to remember everything.  Someone suggested I have an eye for design, but I’m not sure.  It usually takes multiple insights from other people to get it to a point that really looks good.  Which is ironic, because I ask people what they thing and they say yeah, that looks good.  My niece suggested on an earlier version that it needed more black.  I think it wasn’t MySpace enough, but we ended with more green to evoke the bush feeling around the club.  It’s a great place to have a few on Friday arvos.

The design still has to be passed by the committee, and it’s anybodies guess whether they will see it in the same light as Laurence (the manager) and me.  Laurence actually had a lot of input into the colouring, which I think finally works well.  Very earthy.

I’m also trying to finish the last few changes on a paper that’s been accepted to IJOB.  I’m pleased the paper was accepted, but I’m not still not sure of the contribution it’s made.  I suppose it’s mainly that it brings some disparate views together and highlights processes and strategies that could improve the use of email in organisations.  I’m not sure why, but that’s the part I always get stuck on … my contribution to knowledge.  I know I struggled with that in my PhD and just about all the other papers I’ve written (except for Wiki Pedagogy - see Wiki Pedagogy in colour that one was easy).

The reviewers want to see that part more clearly.  Now if only I could see it myself.

I was told after my guest lecture yesterday, that I had ‘lived up to expectations’.  Gee, I’ll have to try harder, I really wanted to exceed expectations.  Seems people expect a lot of me.

I’ve actually tried to make a movie/animationy thing of my slides, but I haven’t quite got the settings right.  I think I need to play with the new version of Keynote a bit more.  Nevertheless, I am going to upload the smaller version, even though the effect is not as good as it was IRL.  It’s a click through movie, so you need to click for each new slide.  That’s not something I knew you could do.

E-learning lecture

I had fun doing it, and some of the students were very engaged, so that’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned.

I wonder if there’s a better way of getting these things uploaded with a smaller file size and better resolution.

Today, I’m introducing HR&Training students to kewl stuff in e-Learning.  Not sure how I’ll go, but I’ve been instructed to include the newer things that are happening in the area.  I think this will be fun!

Actually, it’s not dead.  It’s alive and kicking.  Mike talks about it here.  We do not like to be offended.  We do not like to be different.  Ken talks about being different here.  Yeah, but no.

I suppose we should be grown ups, as Ken suggests.  I suppose we should protect the children, as Mike suggests ironically.  But why is being offended so negative?  It’s a part of life!  And why is being youthful so negative?

Edupunk has been described as being anti-authoritarian, as DIY education (pejoratively) and people have taken offence and told us all to grow up.  We need maturity to be teachers, to be in authority.  But what people see as immaturity, particularly in education, I see as  a joy in learning.  It’s the excitement of the new and the unknown that gets us, gets our blood boiling and spurs us on to greater achievements.

So too our offendedosity (and that is a real word).  It allows us to see other perspectives.  That’s important.  Very very important.

If we protect ourselves from offence, from being different and from new words, I think we well end up poorer, less enriched, no different, zombies in a huge melted pot of sameness.  I like edupunk (now that is a real word, it’s in Wikipedia (and that’s another new word (and how many levels of parenthetical asides can I achieve?)))!

I’d like to see a reverse of this trend to attempt to get sameness.  There used to be a song.  Actually, there used to be many songs.  But the song I’m thinking of was a call to difference, a call to be ourselves.  That song?  Australia, don’t become America![1]  I fear we are headed in that direction, the direction of easy offence, of sameness.  Reactions to this trend, our anti-trend, need to be heard more.  We need more edupunks and more offence, if only to keep people thinking.

And look on the bright side.  At least I didn’t call anyone a Nazi!

1. But I can never remember who sang it [↩]

I’ve been writing a paper about literacy online, and I keep getting really really cross at attempts to censor the internet.  There’s all this talk about ‘protecting the children’ and blocking unsavory images, or anything that offends someone’s sensibilities. But I really don’t think that censoring these things will do anything to protect children.  I mean, yeah, there’s this sexualised image of a child and it’s offensive.  But it’s not offensive because it exists.  It’s offensive because some complete and utter pratt has abused that child.

And what do parents do when they find these things?  They panic, and try to protect their child from that image.  But it’s not the image they need to protect their child from.  It’s the photographer and their gaze.  It’s the gaze of the sexual adult.  I’m no expert in this, but I sense that we get uncomfortable precisely because children shouldn’t be sexualised. Our initial reaction is to hide the image, pretend it does not exist.  And yet, it does.  And so does the child in the image.  The child who could be our own.

I’ve been reading up on road safety because I think the analogy between road safety and internet safety is a powerful one.  Most of us (my generation, the parents) grew up with cars and trucks and motorcycles.  We learnt the ebb and flow of them.  We learnt physics[1] from them.  But most of us don’t really understand the internet.  We don’t know how to protect our children from the ‘information superhighway’.  But superhighway is not really a good analogy because we don’t let our children on highways, but we do allow them on the backroads.  We feel safer when we know that there are controls on traffic.  But, again, we don’t let them out without clear instructions on what’s safe and what’s not.  That’s our job as parents.

Why then do we allow them unsupervised on the so-called information highway.  Our highways are not going anywhere.  Well, they go somewhere, but they also stays where they’re put.  We know where that highway is, and we train our children with how to deal with that:

• Stay away from moving cars
• Look both ways
• Cross at the crossing
• Walk, don’t run

All these simple rules begin a process which prepares our children for navigating the roads of our neighbourhood.  But we don’t ever ask the Gubmit to ban cars from the roads.  We don’t demand that other people give up things to protect our children[2].  We accept our role in educating our own.  I know I did this.  I’m not giving up my car so your child won’t be hit by it[3].

So, tell me why I need to give up access to information to protect YOUR children?

1. or at least, momentum, movement, speed [↩]
2. except perhaps speed where speed is unnecesssary, and stupidity, yeah please give that up on the roads [↩]
3. I will, however, drive slowly where children are known to behave in less than responsible ways. [↩]