Podcasts I enjoy

I've recently started to dabble more in podcasts--listening rather than creating them, though one day I'll get into producing my own audio using Audacity and Podomatic.

For now, I'll just list those regular 'stations' I've listened to, with a thumbnail description. I shall try to remember to add to this page, so stay tuned!

To begin, here is my Delicious list with everything to date I've tagged with 'podcast'. To date there are 34 items, though I expect that number to grow, even in the course of preparing this post.

C-Realm is hosted by a very well-spoken American, KMO, who interviews people on his show. C stands for Consciousness. Discussions on topics focused on the coming Vingean Singularity, Entheogenic Exploration, the re-localization of community & agriculture, and Individual Conscious Autonomy. KMO is up to his 163rd episode, each of which is about an hour long. He puts them out once a week.

Then there is Stephan Molyneux who hosts Freedomain Radio. Stephan is a libertarian who is hot on the topic of Philosophy. He cranks out episodes almost daily from his car. His views are strongly aired, to such an extent that he has occasionally been accused of being a cultist.

Finally (for today) I highly recommend the TED Talks 20-minute-or-less lectures. These are videos but many may also be downloaded as audio files. You can search a list of about 400 world-famous speakers.

Since then: I really get a kick out of James Kunstler wittily discussing the tragic comedy of sunurban sprawl at the Kunstlercast.

We is who we is

About the best summing up of our human condition I've read in the several years comes from a colleague here at work (Otago Poytechnic), Anni Watkins who wrote:

Having spent an evening following blogs on New Scientist, I have reached the following conclusions (where 'we' are those responding to NS blogs worldwide)

1. We are extremely rude and offensive
2. We don't really care much about the planet, the future, or our children
3. We care a lot about now and about our own personal lives
4. We like 'moral' arguments, especially ones not based on any logic or science, like eat vegan / vegetarian because eating animals is barbaric, which gets heavily confused with eat less meat because its better for the environment (example might be an article on eating roos because they dont burp methane like ruminants, which descended into a slanging match including garbage about roos being shot and left to die slowly so that the meat stayed fresh..... farts (as opposed to burps), the right to eat meat, the concept that humans 'have' to eat meat, etc etc.... very little on ruminant methane production issues). We especially like the idea that God is gonna get us for being immoral (global warming is caused by adultery, must be all those hot bods!)
5. We don't want to hear anything we don't like, so we will side with the counter argument (and vice versa)
6. VERY IMPORTANTLY: Frankly my dear, We don't actually give a damn about the planet, we only care about our species, our race, our country, our neighboorhood, our friends and family and ourselves (probably in reverse order). So, is it gonna do me any good/harm or just curb my lifestyle? Is it gonna do other humans currently alive and good/harm? How much do I care about them? Will a bunch of people - in another country, of a different skin colour/religion - matter (esp.if they are too poor to respond by fighting to stay alive)? Do we care about wildlife? How much? We only see it on David Attenborough progs anyway. So, snow leopards in decline might catch our imagination, if the media serves them up to us. They probably matter more than starving children because we've seen so many of them on the media that they are beginning to make us feel bad, anyway, starving children aren't likely to go extinct eh?

On the other hand, maybe I can make a moral argument out of it. I'm holier than thou 'cos I drive a green car, make a small footprint (my green calculator tells me so), eat less/no meat/animal products (which I can be desperately holier than thou about because I don't live in an environment incapable of supporting much more than seasonal grass), etc etc etc. I think I (Anni) fit into this category actually, which is making me squirm somewhat.

So while I'm here in this category, I can safely say that when I went to uni, we were young people shouting into the void about all this. But now we are middle aged people living in oil crisis, pollution, social inequity, climatic uncertainty.... the problems really are happening now. Presumably this is why people are beginning to care now. Not about the future, the planet, the ecosystem, the children of tomorrow, but about the problems that are happening now, to us, to me. We ain't "all gonna die" (tho some people are, for sure), but we sure are going to be inconvenienced.

No, I haven't answered the question. I'm not sure I can talk to the 'we' I have discovered, but I thought you might like to know what that particular 'we' are thinking!

I concur with this view and have grave doubts that any form of sustainability initiative--even the Transition Towns Movement--can lead anywhere unless the fundamental separation paradigm (as espoused by Charles Eisenstein in his book, The Ascent of Humanity) is first addressed.

YouTube Star

Discovered myself on YouTube!

Portals ought to lead somewhere

From Leigh Blackall via the Networked Learning Group I followed the link to a talk on YouTube by Professor Michael Wesch called A Portal to Media Literacy.

I found it well worth viewing (in pieces--it runs to just over an hour) for what it says, and for what it assumes about the future.

Sound bytes that rung a bell:

• Students learn about what they care about, from people they care about and who, they know, care about them


• Nobody is as smart as everybody


• There are no natives here


• RSS taught us that information can find us


• Wikis are cool, but face-to-face can be even better


• Technology is secondary; collaboration is more important


• A platform for participation


• Folksonomy


• To learn is to create significance


• (School shouldn't merely be) an information dump

Wesch said that the new technologies should be used as a platform for participation. Research questions should be asked after which the students are in charge of determining the path they take. He speaks (at around the 36 minute mark) of a sandbox instead of a syllabus.

Nearer the end he gets a little "wild" and describes an exercise he had a class of students to to do a simulation of the history of the entire world. Absolutely mind-blowing! No matter that the world as envisaged implodes right about now.

Wesch makes a strong case for moving toward a future of ubiquitousness where all kinds of devices are everywhere and do anything for anyone. He asks "Have we prepared our students for this world?"

I don't know. But I wonder if we are giving enough consideration to the world that is likely to be. Consider this post from The Archdruid Report in which John Michael Greer writes:

It's hard to think of a subject [the ways that modern industrial cultures
store, process, and distribute information] that has been loaded with anything
like as much hype. Our time, the media never tires of repeating, is the
Information Age . . . can you think of a short-term trend that hasn't been
identifies as a wave of the future destined to rise up an asymptotoc curve to
infinity, or at least absurdity? I can't. The standard assumption is that the
future will be just like the present, but even more so, with more elaborate
technologies providing more baroque information products and services as far as
the eye (or, rather, the webcam) can see.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to
maintain the information economy actually is . . . the two big server farms
that keep Yahoo's family of web services online use more electricity between
them that all the televisions on earth put together. Multiply that out by
the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today's online economy
going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into
the Internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into
putting these words onto the screen where you're reading them

Wesch himself mentions the term 'Peak Oil' 53 min 35 sec into his talk . . .

A Bloke's Blog

This isn't going to be brain surgery or rocket science. I'm just going to show you a bloke's blog.

I've been keeping a blog for my classes since 2006. I don't think it's all that fancy, but Marc Doesburg asked me to talk about it. I've got about a dozen points to make.

1. Neat! (no bits of paper flying around)
   
2. Interface (Can involve your students)
   
3. Quick
4. Convenient (try writing on the whiteboard from your home).
5. Permanent (I hope!) and it can serve as a record, what they call an e-portfolio
6. Accessible (for any student who is ill, has an appointment . . . or has graduated)
7. Useful (a means of managing online resources)
8. Creative
9. Cheap (It costs absolutely nothing to try)
10. Fun and interesting (bells and whistles in the form of gadgets)
    
11. Recyclable (can 'hide' posts as drafts and reschedule)
12. Guidance (a means to prevent students being overwhelmed)
    

Is this who we are?

ESOL resources and other matters

The other day I received the following message:

Hello William

There was at our last staff meeting a mention of on-line resources for ESOL and we were reminded of the work that you have been doing.

Would you be prepared to give the School of Foundation Learning an update on your work at our next staff meeting, 5 May?

If so, I'll book a room with a data projector etc.

Many thanks,

Marc

And so today, the 5th, I'd better decide what to cover! I've blocked myself and hour or two out to prepare. I'll do so via this blog interface - I find it easier to draft on a keyboard, and it leaves a permanent record that others (you) can readily access. That's assuming that I' actually have pearls of wisdom to offer. I'm just not too sure how a data projector operates . . .

Being a visual learner, I quickly sketched out/brainstormed a plan on a piece of paper (recycled of course). Three arrows radiate out from the centre, so there are to be three sections in this presentation:

1. The nature of my (ESOL-related) work
2. The online tools that I use
3. Links to my ESOL resources

To me the Internet is like a fabulous, gigantic toy shop. There's a ton of stuff out there. Some of it is useful, some is not. It is half-pie organized, so if you know what you're doing you can find what you're after. However it all takes time. It is all too easy to get distracted. Sometimes you wonder how permanent or not it is, and whether it is worth investing the time and the effort to become conversant. And for certain people - and I include myself - its unstructured nature and technical gobbledy-gook is stressful to negotiate.

For me it would help if management acknowledged the input that is required for people to get up to speed (the same way that we know that hundreds of hours of English practice are required to raise the IELTS score by a single point). If a training programme along the same lines as fire warden, Jasper instruction, first aid, Treaty of Waitangi and computer safety was made compulsory, then that would develop a stronger collegiate network where everyone feels they are working in tandem. It is awfully hard for a small number of individuals to push against resistance using their own time and energies. There needs to be a concerted approach.

There now, that's my rant over!

What am I doing in terms of ESOL-related Learning Centre business? Three things:

1. One hour a week I see a group of four NESB students enrolled in Foundation Studies. We look at the skills that are needed to do their classwork well, and I often look up sites that they can refer to. I often find a link by searching another of my blogs.
2. I see Pariya's AM3 once a week for an hour (Mondays 11-12, H513). The level three students practice their listening, grammar, reading, writing - even conversation, at a different website each time. I try to write up what they will be doing for the day here.
3. Finally, whenever I come across a website that may be interesting or useful I make a record of it. It is most important to do that, otherwise it is swallowed by the ether! There are various ways of doing this, and they vary in terms of their effectiveness.

Let's say I search on Google right now for a good site - you know how to do that I presume. I'll enter the words 'interesting', 'ESL', 'news' and 'reading'. I'll be a couple of minutes . . .

I was wrong - it took me all of 10 seconds. Google provided me a list of just over 200,000 sites, and the very top one looks interesting because of its organization. I recognized the word concordancing, software, strategies and extensive reading. It looks like winner, right? And I'm going to give it to you for nothing. Ready?

Here it comes now . . . http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/Links/esl_reading.htm

Did you write it down? Are you sure you every one of those 63 letters and symbols correct? Your spelling skills won't work here. Make sure your capitals and lower case letters aren't confused. Is that a 'one', and 'el' or a capital 'eye'. Only one will do. Could you be bothered always having to type it in? Are you going to dictate it for your students, or write it out on the white board . . . when you run out of room and have to break the string in two. "Please, teacher, is there are gap?"

Isn't it easier just to click here?

Since you can't click on paper, you'll need to come get to grips with the technology. An easier way of remembering the web address is by saving it as a favourite or bookmark. However, you may soon accumulate too long a list. Also, these links are only available on the one computer. What if you wanted to work from home, or if the computer crashes or is replaced?

A good alternative is to use the social bookmarking web service called Delicious. Here Wikipedia tells you about it. I use it, and here are my bookmarks. I can access them from any (Internet-connected) computer, and so can you. As I write, I have 344 websites bookmarked on many topics of interest. I can search my own bookmarks. Type in the word English and 48 sites will appear. You can click on the site from the title. You can see who else has saved that site (and get an idea of its popularity). Here is Marc's Delicious list. He is part of my network. With a little luck you will find someone who had already saved all of the sorts of sites that you are interested in and simply import them!

As well as 'tagging' sites with keywords to help you find them again, you can tag the posts in your blog (or search your entire blog for a keyword). For instance, I remember that last year I used a good site but I can't remember exactly. It was about grammar, but if I search for that work I will get a lot of hits! Luckily I remember that it had the word zone in the title. I search using that word and these are the two 'hits'. Success!

Now, if all of us join up to Delicious and agree to tag good websites to do with ESOL using a common tag, say tekotagolangauges then all those sites will come up if we search Delicious for that tag. Collaboratively we can build up a fantastic resource!

This is just scratching the surface.

p.s. News just to hand: I was unable to be with Pariya's AM3 class today, so I quickly posted them something to read on my blog. Without being asked or prompted, 6 of them left comments on that post! Incredible!