Expansion with a difference - Batmania

in contrast...

3 March 1837: 'Melbourne' it is...

The history of the founding of melbourne is one dominated by a man who was either a hero or a fraud. History is divided.

John Batman, was a fellow who tried something different and 170 years later the dispute continues. What ever way the arguement goes, he shall go down in history as the man who founded the site of Melbourne - and he has statues and plaques to support his memory.

For, me the interesting thing about him is his deed/treaty with the local Aboringinal people in the Port Phillip Bay area in what is today the Melbourne metropolitan area. Whatever his real motive, at face value he wanted to achieve access to the area, to settle, without bloodshed. This is in sharp contrast to the events read about in Blood on the Wattle.

If only more people had tried to talk to the locals.

To discover more about John Batman go to the National Museum of Australia's collection on Batmania. Batmania home page Included in the collection is the transcript of the deed and much more beside. for the FLASH version (Flash 6 compatible)

Whatever the outcome of the discussion, at least he appears to have had some respect for the locals in that at least he appears to have accepted the fact that they had claim to their country. The fact that he talked to them in British legal terms and they in their local country law, misunderstandings aside, at least it was peaceful.

An interesting website:

Worth a visit, virtually and physically

Depressed - 150 years of injustice

Last Saturday I had a fairly relaxed day, that is till I took to finishing the reading of Blood on the Wattle (Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788, 3rd Edition; Bruce Elder; isbn: 174110008-9). This spoilt my day. It is depressing, really horrifying what was done in the name of so called civilisation.

I think the real shock was reading about people I thought had been the "good guys" in early (white) Australian history. William Cox built the the road over the Blue Mountains without losing a single convict labourer. We have always seen him as a humane person - he looked after his workers.

"William Cox took six months to complete the construction of the 101 miles of roadway. It was a great engineering feat for that time in history. He had convicts and soldiers assigned to him and although justice was hard in those days, the men were pleased to work for William, which resulted in their freedom, on completion of the task"

Reference: BLUE MOUNTAINS ROAD FROM PENRITH to BATHURST PLAINS

However, that image is shattered by reading of his life in the Bathurst area, land given to him as a reward for the road. On page 58 of Blood on the Wattle is a quote attributed to Cox: "The best thing that can be done is to shoot all the blacks and manure the ground with their carcasses..." disgusting.

Then to read that William Lawson (one of the 3 explorers that crossed the Blue Mts) had similar sentiments. Too much!

On talking to a friend as we wandered along a track in Faulconbridge that was possibly an Aboriginal highway in times long gone, we discussed the horrors that were perpetrated against these people. The feelings reflected the major injustices that were dealt against these people just wanting to survive in their country.

In promoting better times from the past:

Circles in the Blue Mountains.

A possible meeting place?

ten canoes - a story about life ... and death

"One hundred and fifty spears, ten canoes, three wives... trouble"










I just watched ten canoes. A very powerful movie. It is about a story. Well 2 stories - it is a story within a story.

The story of the ancients told to a young man.
A story of how to live, how to behave.
It delves into what it is that makes up the people.
It is a story of the people.
It was simple yet complex.

It tells of the connection to the land, and in someways of the circle of life (and death) eg from the little fish in the waterhole, to a person, to return to the waterhole.

Of one with the land, of the law of the land.
The story was both parable and history.

It was captivating and begs to be taken further.

a story to teach ... to learn about a nearly forgotten culture ... to continue to understand the link to the land

...and the filming was truly amazing...

A film worth watching: Ten Canoes *****

ACEP - 4 More on Stories

Today I had an interesting discussion about what is a story. So just what is a story. most dictionaries have a similar definition which is along the lines of:

A narrative or story in its broadest sense is anything told or recounted; more narrowly, something told
or recounted in the form of a causally-linked set of events; account; tale,: the telling of a happening or connected series of happenings, whether true or fictitious. http://www.stevedenning.com/What_story.html

other definitions can be found at answers.com, or google's definitions.

From thse we see that the story is just a collection of events. My Oxford dictionary has 3 meanings; two of the relate to the telling if events or factual information.
However, many people have this veiw that a story is the telling of a fictional account, like a novel or fib (as in a child telling stories)
This had led to a down-grading of the word story.
Most cultures use story telling to convey their history, their law, the social mores, etc, to the next generation. Generally these are not stories of fiction.
Interpretive guides and teachers also make extensive use of stories. They use them to tell the history of locations, about events about how to do things using examples.
So, in our society there are those who suggest that the term "story" should not be used but rather terms such as histories, lore, mores.
Personally, I think that these terms miss the point.

The term story also conveys a sense of how it is told.
A history can be a string of items , like dates; whereas a historical story is something people are more likely to want to hear, than a string of dates.

So, in using the term story I want it to convey the full sense of the word: the way it is told, the factual content, a way in which information can be conveyed such that the listener may have a comprehension of what is being told and hopefully remember it sometime in the future. It is a means to get an audience to get a sense of feeling about what is being told.

As I said before remove the story: remove the life.
Life would be pretty ordinary without the stories.

acep - 3 About Stereotypes

One of the topics of discussion on day 1 was something like: "think about what you think an Aboriginal whould look like". Then the group was asked to tell the rest what they thought.
Most people had in their mind something like the "typically scrawny or athletic, dark skinned, curly-haired native in loin cloth" as so often shown in early colonial art works. These are the images, often taught at school in social studies up to the mid 1970's, that have shaped for many what an Aboriginal should look like.
How far off the mark is this?
OK, so the there may be a couple like this, but the person can be as different our 2 facilitators. There is no one size fits all desciption. I had trouble with the question, as I have worked with, taught and known Aboriginal people from all over Australia. I could not come up with single image. But then I have had the opportunity to work in much of this country with many different people.

Consider the differences between Lionel Rose (boxer) and Evonne Cawley (tennis player) as an example. I only know the former from images in the newspapers, etc, but I know Evonne Cawley, not just through the media, but from personally meeting her in 1976. One just an image, the other, a larger than life person. Sitting, writing this I recall the tragic comment often used by commentators about her when she was struggling in a match: "could she hold it together or would she go walkabout?" 30 years on, I find it such a horrible thing to say, displaying an ignorance we need to educate people away from.
Many people I know have not left the "safety" of their own environment, so have not been exposed to the diversity of people I have seen around Australia.
Their view of the Aboriginal is that displayed by their teachers, and by the media in its various forms.

Today, I stumbled across this article in the Sydney Morning Herald. "It was about the World Press Photo of the year, by Spencer Platt, of Getty Images, which has become 'controversial' since it was announced. The problem, it seems, is that the image is not what everyone wants it to be ..." The article "its_all_in_your_mind" is worth a read. But after you get to the page, look at the image. What is it about? Consider this before you read the article .

It seems stereotyping is alive and well

Book of the day: Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788, 3rd Edition; Bruce Elder; isbn: 174110008-9

Thought for today: stereotypes have no place in dealing with people and cultures

ACEP - 2 Stories are about life

The other day Annette (another teacher doing the course) and I had lunch to discuss some of the ideas that had been put forward last week. We looked at the stories in the work book: A Gammon Dreaming Story, The Whale Song and Jinni.
It is good when you can sit and talk to some one about common ideas.
The main theme is the connectedness of the people to the land and how stories are used to pass on things to the next generation - some times without the young person realising it till later. Remove the story - remove the very essence of the culture.
Anyway, yesterday Michael Nelson posted a thing about a great paper about story centred curriculum by Roger Schank. (read about the dragonslayer course). It is about using stories to deliver courses that relate to the outcomes that students require. Great that people are thinking about this as being educationally sound - a few thousand years after other cultures started the same.


Book of the day: Blue Mountains Dreaming: The Aboriginal Heritage Edited by Eugene Stockton

Aboriginal Cultural Education Program - day 1

Last Thursday I attended day one of this program that is running in the college.
it is about understanding aboriginal culture, and as a consequence some understanding of their link to the land, each other and the relationships and spirituality that goes to to the make up these people and their country.
from the first it was interesting just how some people saw (or more probably did not see) the importance of The Dreaming stories. Some were very aggressive about showing a distinct lack of understanding and at times an unwillingness to accept was the 2 facilitators were trying to put across. So, as in many things I have attended, it really warmed to being an interesting time watching the reactions to people who appeared not to have been involved with the deeper side of aboriginal culture, and its importance to the very essence of who they are (past, present and future).

To the content: we spent much of the time considering the importance of The Dreaming to the people. Its centrality, and interconnectedness between the people, the land, the law and the lore.
This importance starts to give rise to thoughts about how learning is undertaken and a way of life maintained. Not surprisingly the learning is through stories, public and private. Stories that pass on things like who am i?; why am I here? to how did every thing begin? how do we live in this land and the relationship between all things.

Thought for the day on this: there is a need for a respect for the culture, to acknowledge the importance of The Dreaming. From here the relationship exists.


Book of the day: "Prehistory of Australia" by John Mulvaney and Johan Kumminga; isbn 9781864489507









A web site to consider: Lore of the Land

A thank you to our facilitators: Cheryl and Maxine

A small problem called size

well whoever said doing videos online was easy was making an understatement. It is easy but when you have bulk videos that only shrink to 400 mb it becomes a loading nightmare.
The other frustration is the DET network and its bar on youtube and google video. Currently it still only lets us use bliptv, in my view a poor 2nd to the others.
However we will continue...

a new year - some new ideas.

The joys of Life and DVDs

as part of our web course last week we had a guest speaker Russ Wheatley. The students videoed the 1 hour session. The joy now is to make it into usable form that can be uploaded to YouTube or Google Video. At the same time I have been playing with the video files from the outdoor rec people and have a 37 second movie of a skill sample ready to roll. tie-in for climbing

Learnscope Postcard from the field

Edit 28/2/2007 - to see the real postcard go here: http://www.nswlearnscope.com/?p=204

The LiFE team is an amalgamation of groups with a common goal: to improve the lot of our student's experience by investigating, and playing with, new (and not so new) tools to improve the learning experience.

So we have been out and about: on cliffs, in paddocks, in the field looking at plants, in computer rooms, students scattered all over the place, in libraries, and out and about, participated in workshops, joined with other teams, helped facilitate training sessions in related areas to other groups - and generally had a good time.


Outdoor Recreation Instructor, Gil, demonstrating to Laura how to tie-in before a climb. An example of a skill set that will eventually make its way to an instructional video. (Taken at Mt York)

We have taken the opportunity to learn new techniques/tools for our selves and then try them on the students. In one instance, Michael's web group got right into it using gmail chat to conduct a session that had been set down for a lab, but due to electrical problems, the students were scattered in and out of the college. The class went ahead - reinforcing what we knew - a college based class group don't have to be in the same place at one time to be an interactive group.



Michael Nelson running a gmail chat session with his Web students.



The major focus of part of the team has been on how we can take teaching/learning material out of the classroom environment. Often into places where there is no wireless internet, where there is no mobile phone reception (this really upsets some students), where there is no power (sometimes for several days at a time). We have gone forth with laptops and pdas, digital cameras and video cameras, (seen them run out of power), to take ideas and capture ideas about teaching and learning in the field.



Student doing plant identification in the field

But not to be left behind, our librarians, got together to work on how they, too, could come to the party and support those of us rushing around outside. So a word from them:

Life library team members are exploring technologies such as blogs, RSS feeds, sharepoint and (all the) wikis to share information between institute libraries and support teachers and students in their learning. We are also considering the implications of these technologies in the wider world of library services in VET when learning and information access is virtual, mobile and immense. Eg can libraries use social technologies to help people engage with the information explosion by being aggregators, filters and by weighing the importance of information for our clients? The workshop with NSWtox and Leigh Blackall opened our eyes to the exponential potential (!) of the web: first films filmed actors on the stage ~ look film technology now; first internet delivered text ~ now we are beginning to communicate and learn in totally different ways.

Our lessons: not enough time; and the technology doesn't always want to keep up with our ideas.

From

The Learning in the Field Effectively Team October 2006

due to technical problems I will put the images up soon

eBusiness Course 2/2006

Last night saw night 3 of our current eBusiness course. It is about doing an intro to the world of eBusiness, and so has people from various small business from around the Blue Mts.
Last night we had a visit from a representative from eBay. She was great and also had one of her eBay shop owners (who just happened to be part of the group). They enlighten us to the way it works and the things that can be done as well as the management of the eBay store (thanks to Janine and Charmaine).
As part of the discussion during the course has been the issue of being seen on the WWW, and the importance of having links on other websites. We have also discussed the use of blogs in helping to increase traffic to the ebusiness site. So... I said Iwould put a link to the participants website on this blog.
The links will be in the side bar till the end of the year but I have also included them in the post.

Summit Gear
Resort House.Wandene
Wooldancer Yarn Designs
Wooldancer Yarn Designs blog
Entice Photography
Tortoise Tehnologies
Renostop
French Dressing
French Dressing (eBay)
Blue Mountains Holiday Lets
John turner Gallery

Digital stories

Last Tuesday saw Jude C, Michael N and I descend to Penrith for a time of playing with digital storytelling with Robyn Jay and Alex Hayes from the NSW Learnscope team. It was a great day with people from other teams based at OTEN. See the digitales wiki for mor info.
I played with making a walk through of a cave at Jenolan whilst Michael did a story of the first 12 (?) months of Miriam's childhood. All this in the name of learning.
As aways I wanted to stretch the limit of the software - not to be content with a frame by frame narrative, I want a continuous talk with music background across the lot. Well it is getting there. The finished version with sound will premier on google videos sometime in the not too distant future.
This was followed up with Alex showing us the uses of de.li.cous and other tools.
We even watched some home movies.

A great day - thanks Robyn and Alex

the last post

The last post (as opposed to a military one) was done to show a group of "intro to eBusiness" students how easy it is to create a post in the compose screen without knowing any form of html.
It took about 1 minute including logging in.
Some of them then started to think about the potential of the Blog to futher their business.

today is brought to you by the colour purple....

this is how i do a post

Tagging in Flickr

I finally got around to playing with flickr. This was another of the things I had listed as one of my learnscope objectives.

So, now my flickr account has images in it. And tagged - one for the caving club I am a member of and one for the Jenolan caves trip from the beginning of August (also tagged bmspeleos) and one for Annelise's textiles major work

So now to get my Outdoor Rec guys to upload their pics to flickr with a tag that they can all use for the groups pictures.

Quikmaps

My Learnscope goals include the use of a personal learning environment and the things that can be used to enhance learning. (This blog is also a learning tool and journal of that journey). From Sean FitzGerald's PLE session wiki came the link to quikmaps.
A top little tool.

So ... here is my first go. It shows the first two locations in my forays into the field with Outdoor Recreation.

This is what the map looks like. The tags have a comment about the site and activity undertaken there. If you want to try it, the link is: my quikmaps map . Opens in a new window.

Project time - otherwise known as cool tools stories

Today saw another day to play with toys ==> the digital video camera and mp3 player.
The plan: go to Mt Wilson where the continuing Certificate 3 students were in day 2 of a 3 day camp. The game plan was to video some of the activities being run by the students and to use the mp3 players (1Gb iRivers) to record some of the activity debriefs.
Mt Wilson was surperb - lots of sun, almost no wind and mostly enthusiastic students. Videoing went well but when we tried the mp3 players all we managed to get was the sound of a couple of RAAF Hercules flying overhead and some muffled sounds that may have been people. O well back to the learning board.
Lessons learnt:
the students appreciated seeing themselves on the screen (dvd is finalised in the camera and then shown on the notebook) and they probably handled me filming because most of them were in my group last semester.
need to have a spare battery or 2 for the camera - 108 minutes is not long enough for a day out
need to have really good playtime with the tools before field time
with the mp3 player - Gary and I found the control buttons confusing and did not always respond in the way the manual stated.

Results: still a good day with teachers still interested in the use of technology.

(pictures to come later when I process the dvd)

As another part of the project I intend to plot the locations of the filming/play locations using quikmaps

The blues...

Annelise (my daughter) is currently doing her HSC. She read the last post and said "learning should be fun? tell that to this stupid HSC thing."
She is more than slightly stressed because she has to finish her textiles major assignment by friday. A mighty work. A dress and amazing big black cape - complete with silver cobwebs.

It really is amazingly good.

Go Anna, go

The the teaching process - she did it through the Sydney Distance High school- left a lot to be desired. A way that certainly didn't suit her at all. Minimal support from the school and lots and lots of time with Judy (her mother and my wife (25 yrs in 2 weeks) ) doing lots to help.

:-(

learning should be fun

Carmen (see comments to New Toys) makes an interesting point. People (including teachers) often have preconceived ideas on where and when you can use elearning techniques. So....
Why not for rock climbing? or even canoeing? In a cave may be a bit hard but I haven't considered how I can do that - yet. (me in Deep Hole, Walli - June 2006)

but lets have fun, anyway!!

eLearning can be used anywhere, any time. As part of the LiFE learnscope project we are going to look at various things in various situations: for our web students, in horticulture/land management, in outdoor recreation (obvious by the pics and comments) and by librarians to improve the lot of their clients.

As part of this, I attended a LearnScope learning day last Thursday (3/8) to improve my personal learning space. This was lead by Sean FitzGerald . Well, thanks Sean. It was a good day - and apart being somewhere to play with technology, I actually achieved some customisation of this blog.
Then on Friday, the ICVET Powerhouse of learning and the showcase of Cool Tools for elearning. The last post was about the trials getting the videos to work - well at about midnight that night I got the images into MPEG4 format and on a DVD. Those that visited the stand on Friday got to see some movies... and to talk to me about just where and how "cool tools" can be used. How far (or maybe deep) can we go? ... the imagination is the limit.
As an aside - I showed the Cert 3 students some of the movies on Monday in class - certainly gee-ed them up for the afternoon session. The next step - Google video here we come (well - when I get time to try it out)

Tomorrow - Mt Wilson. Another group of students and a few more teachers who have become interested in using some technology in differnet ways.
The issues: the camera only lasts for 108 minutes fully charged and the notebook around 200 minutes.

New Toys

Over the past couple of weeks I have taken possesion of a few new toys as part of the TOL2 (TAFE OnLine 2) project. These have been HP Notebooks, some iPAC pda's and some MP3 players to be shared around with the project team.
For me - a notebook, pda and some times a couple of MP3 players. I will be using these in the field with the outdoor rec section at varying places in the field to determine how we can utilise the technoly to help the students.
Yesterday afternoon was spent at Mt York with the new Cert 3 as they had thier first go on the cliffs. I had the college's new Handycam. Some of the students wanted to be movie stars! Anyway, about 45minutes of footage later (about 1.75 Gb) I went home, thinking time to play with the movies. Didn't work - put the discs in the dvd player - but no luck. Nothing. File systems said no files! But I knew it had something.
So...as a matter of last resort...read the manual.
But I had the wrong manual. Had I lost it all?

Rolling on - found an online manual - It said I had to finalize the disks - so the images survived to be made on to a single DVD for showing at the ICVET Powerhouse of Learning on 4/8/2006 at ATP.
So - step one has been solved - I can get the images.

Picture shows Gil showing Laura how to tie a figure-of eight knot attachment to her harness in preparation for a climb.
Mt York. Certificate 3 Outdoor Rec. 2 Aug 2006.

Now to find out about manipulating/editing them to be small enough clips to ship up to something like Google-video or youTube.
The objective: short training clips of required skills for outdoor rec activities eg climbing, abseiling, canoeing.