foolfillment: the blog

Well, that was my last day of uni for a long while. On Monday I go back out to school, it’s snuck up on me quietly so I don’t feel prepared at all. We have a lot of work to be getting on with while we’re out on placement.One thing is to design a project that a 1st or 2nd year class could make in 4-8 hours and I saw a brilliant thing today that one of the 2nd years students had brought in from their last placement. A whale made of wood, with a turbine shaped piece of plastic on top as a blow hole, and with a metal mounting bracket - fantastic, it combines all three materials and a lot of processes, and the kids end up woth what I think is a pretty fantasic looking object. Completely useless but pretty cool nonetheless.

We had another lecture today about our final year project, I really want to get the ball rolling but I’m not sure how much I can really do, I need to work over summer but that will remove any chance of me getting time to work on the project. Here are my ideas so far. In a school, I collar a group of first or more likely second years and get them to write a weblog* about their work at schol (primarily) and encourage them to read and participate though comments on each others blogs. I would keep a blog as well to give them guidance about topics and also lead any discussions. I would try to guide them towards a more conversational, relective writing about any topic they like (the intention being that they would engage more in the project and enjoy writing their blogs).

Over the course of a term, say, I would try to get an idea of their performance in school against expectations (why second years might be better) or others in the year group, and also through discussion with them at the end of the project their ideas about the activity through interviews, more likely (nicer atmosphere, more conducive to obtaining views) focus groups.

The aims of the project being to investigate the benefits of new read/write web technology and the appliations it can have in learning, with a particular look at Vygotskyan ideas of scaffolding and peer assisted learning. It would be nice to link it in with ACE - successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, effective contributers if it were at all possible without making the scope too broad. Now all I need to do is put that in writing and see what any potential supervisers say about it. My main concerns are that there won’t be suficient reading material, followed by the difficulties in measuring/recording any findings - I’m a boy, I need numbers and statistics for anything to hold my interest!!

*Using edublogs.org - a fantastic resource I came across today through Ewan McIntosh’s blog

This entry was posted at 2:54 pm on the 17th of February, 2006 and is filed under PDF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.