Welcome to Weekly Rapts
Every week I come across some exceptional articles, books, videos and other stuff that captures my attention and inspires me to action which could be to write about a blog post; have a conversation about it with someone; create something from it; escape down a rabbit warren to learn more about it.
These have enraptured (‘rapt’) my imagination and attention for the week so I’m going to share them here as (‘wrapped’) gifts to you too. A pathetic attempt at word play. 🤣
Top Tools for Learning
It’s that time of the year again where Jane Hart runs her annual survey where you can send her the digital tools that you use to learn. I’ve been submitting my Top Learning Tools since 2012 so here’s the recent post I wrote about what I use in 2022. Submit your entry here.
Conspiracy Theories Outta Control Doing My Head In
There’s a lot of conspiracy theories out there and I come across some who tell me all sorts of wild ideas such as Bill Gates buying up huge masses of land to take over the food supply system of the USA; or, Zelensky is a neo Nazi or that COVID vaccinations are the result of the fertility problems and reduced birth rate in the world. Give me strength.
Most of the time, I sit there and listen – in one ear and out of the other – with a vague listless look in my eyes – as I’m seriously not interested in getting into arguments. Yes, I know the world is in a tenuous state at the moment; yes, we are all over emotional; yes, I’m trying to do my best to navigate this world and make sense of it myself but no, I will not engage with this BS. That’s all I have to say on the matter.
Please fact check.
No, not from some dubious YouTube channel or Fox news. Some great news about Alex Jones today. and the FBI investigation into Trump. 🤣 👏
Navigating Complexity
In this post, Harold Jarche incorporates both the Cynefin framework with his PKM framework splitting in half each model to take on both the informal, semi-permanent and temporary aspect of each of them. Quite a timely piece especially as I grapple with questions in my workplace around ‘what constitutes a team or a community’ and how they are defined. I’m seeing that they can be fluid – not permanent; open and closed; temporary and fixed.
All organizations need to look at how they will deal with complex challenges. Do they have the flexibility and forward thinking to shift from ordered domains to the complex domain? Are professionals proficient at informal learning? Is it part of their work? Supporting informal and incidental learning at work means working smarter.
Harold Jarche
The Hackathon as a Form of Professional Learning
I’m presenting a module on Community Building to a university in my day to day work and one of the things that I recount in it is the value of stories as a way of showing value of learning and communities. In particular, a story that uses Wenger-Trayner’s framework of Value Creation:
- Outline the Activity
- Describe the Output
- Tell Us about the Applications
- Describe the Outcome (Personal and Organisational)
- Describe how this redefines Success
What I liked about this post A Hackathon as a Form of Professional Learning: Reflections on Organised Chaos, (HT Stephen Downes) was that it captured all that and it’s an example of the importance that such reflections have in our work.
IMHO people in organisations simply don’t do this enough.
The story telling of value creation – not the hackathon (although hackathons are important too).
Are Personal Academic Blogs a Thing of the Past?
I hope not!!!!!! Here’s a great post by Mark Carrigan who talks about the value of blogging.
Blogging has been the central means through which I’ve developed a distinctive outlook as a researcher, providing me with an open-ended invitation to reflect on what I’ve been reading, analysing, organising and teaching. I’ve been doing it for so long that I find it hard to imagine what it would like to be an academic without a blog.
Mark Carrigan
It benefited my career to be a blogger, both in terms of supporting my research productivity, as someone who has rarely been employed as a researcher, as well as in the more nebulous sense of increasing my visibility amongst academic communities. There was a virtuous circle between blogging as personal knowledge management and blogging as a personal web presence: little fragments of my thinking would circulate round the internet and bring people to a site where they could learn about me and my work.
Mark Carrigan
On Reshaping: Tooling WordPress with Nothing Other than It’s URLs
What an awesome post by Cogdog OR Alan Levine! where he talks about some ways to be able to do effective searches in WordPress. What the? I had NO idea about this. Consider me now edumacated.
Crap, I had no idea I could search for all my posts using the methods he set out in this post. This one JUST SAVED ME HEAPS OF SEARCHING TIME.
I wanted to post this just as another bit of my appreciation for how much WordPress does/can do that is invisible from 98% of its users.
On Blogging
In this post Clark Quinn also shares his thoughts about wanting to continue to blog. YAY!!! Blogging is NOT dead.
There are myriad reasons I want to continue to blog. First, it’s for me. With a commitment of one post a week, it causes me to search for things to think, and then write, about. Not that there’s a dearth (to the contrary!), but there are ups and downs, and it’s good to have a driver. Blogging has caused me to do more than skim, and actually synthesize things (it’s led me to have thoughts on just about everything!). It’s also a place to lob my other way of thinking, diagramming.
I Tried 500 Years of Haircuts
OMG I LOVE what she’s done with her hair through the ages! She even buzz cut her hair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[…] something that others might consider.“ Mit nützlichen Links zu weiterer Literatur! (via Helen Blunden) Clare Gormley und Fiona O’Riordan, DCU/ National Institute for Digital Learning, 2. August […]