The Resumption of Belief

So I asked on my Facebook what I could write about for today's blog with the theme of education in the new era. Ironically, the only response was the lack ICT in South African public schools. Abbreviated for Information, and Communication Technology, in short, it is the integration of education with digital tools and knowledge. Now that would seem a pretty simple and obvious endeavor in the contemporary world wouldn't it? Well, the project started nearly ten years ago, and only because of the pandemic in 2020 did we actually see a real integration of digital tools and education, because we were forced to. I think for many educators in South Africa the digital migration has seemed pointless, even now "post" pandemic, there has been a great regression in the acceptance of digital literacies. And I think this is where the issue really begins. The unaccepting of change and integration is something I'm sure stems from our segregated past, but it has seeped its way thro...

"Every day I live to dream, but in every dream, I dream of living." Shortened to: Live to dream. Dream to live. As it is inscribed on the unders of my arms. I came up with this quote many a year ago, inspired by James Dean's "Live as though you'll die today, dream as if you'll live forever", it was meant to encapsulate my life as I saw it, like a dream. "Awe cool!" you might be thinking, how cliched of me to get a tattoo about dreams. But no one ever stops to ask what it really means, they just see "live", "dream", and are like "Wow! Cool! Must be super deep!" and get carried away in their own cliched assumptions around the words and their meanings. But in fact, it's probably nothing like that, in fact, it may be quite sadly terrifying. And it all started with a night at the casino with my grandparents. It was a common occurrence, it was still the late 90's, and people could afford to go gamble a hundred ra...

Well, I said it never really ends, so this is me starting at the beginning again.  But this time a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit freer, a little bit clearer...  Or whatever thought-provoking cliche you think would fit in there. Watch this space...

...Or must it? What if it was just a realization that it was always there, Nesting in the soil, waiting for the right foundations for its fruit to bare Like a tree breaking free of the ground only to dig deeper and deeper Its root spread around as it seeped into the mycelium's message keeper.  Now if you know anything about trees, you should see the importance of their roots in any ecosystem in regard to the vast underground network of mycelium that connects all of them in an area, providing a network to communicate with, a system of conditions, and microbial transactions, that allows the trees to in essence talk with each other. Sounds like something out of Avatar right? Well, where do you think they got the idea? It was there all along! And it is very real and very important, and if you don't know why, have a look at this blog post from the National Forrest Foundation  called  Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath Your Feet to tickle your fancy. ...

This topic was an interesting one, unfortunately, I was plagued by lousy internet and piles of work, and missed a meeting due to this. But we produced an excellent topic outline and created something really special in the end. What I really noticed was how scaffolding works, This idea got me thinking about a lot of things, like when we design scaffolding we design it with the intention of delivering content, we try to structure the curriculum in a way that makes sense narratively and logically. This made me think about another concept that we use in Acting. Internal narrative. What about internal scaffolding? What if we build the structure first and then fill it?  I want to investigate whether there is a universal process that can be applied to all subjects. A way of teaching that can be used by anyone to teach anything. Maybe that should be the course that I create "How to teach anything". I have been teaching for over 10 years now. From a little container school not knowing...

In this reflection, I will be using my breakdown of the 7 "Implications for Practice" as discussed in "Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment" by Jane E. Brindley, Christine Walti, and Lisa M. Blaschke (2009) for a practical exercise for my students.  But first, a little bit of context about how "The Walk" came to be. As one could have guessed by now, I coach acting for film, and one thing that is obviously necessary for this field is believability. Something I noticed right at the beginning of teaching this subject, which one would assume is easy as stepping in front of a camera but far from, was that students lacked believability.  No matter how much I taught and shared and explained and showed, there was just this disconnection between them and the text, they just sounded wooden. I wondered if it had been maybe the setting of the class, and the context of it being an assessment, so as an experiment I decided to take th...

To be honest, when I first read the topic headline I started preparing a coffee and got ready to share my life story, but I soon learned that wasn't it...Or was it? Little did i know that openness and sharing was already a big part of my life. From my days in college, living in post-apartheid South Africa, I soon came to realize the inequity and inequality of our country, and something in me stirred. I saw the unfairness, the pain, and the sorrow of generations lost. Lost to poor education and inadequate access. I always felt that one way to repair the past was to open education, and allow everyone to learn, that way everyone could have a fair chance. I stood at the front lines of the students protests begging for free education, got shot at with tear gas and rubber bullets, dodged rocks and bricks from angered learners stripped of their promise of a better future, I experienced a war zone in my own city, students vs police. I experienced that oppression firsthand and to this day i...

 1. W ho are you as an individual in the digital age, and what characterizes your journey so far? Online I have been/can be many people. I have run multiple social media pages for companies across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. This included designing posters and creating content videos to even filming live events. My dad worked in IT from the '80s through to as recently as 2020, so I have been exposed to the digital world from an early age, from chat rooms to online games, but only in recent years did it really begin to play an important role in life. It was always a part of life, but never with such importance to the extent, it is now. Now I work online, play online and learn online. I have watched Google searches go from "we can't find anything on this random topic after years of searching" to "here are two million articles on this in 0.000005seconds". I was there for Facebook when it was just statuses that started with "So and so ...

This week we first got to know our PBL groups and it was very informative and fun, it was really nice getting to see everyone's different bits of their worlds, I enjoyed putting together the video and seeing and hearing everyone's interesting facts and subjects that they lecture in. I fell behind in blogs due to the load of work that popped up all at the same time at my own campus and then having to facilitate a house move. So it had been really busy. The course has lined up quite synchronously with everything currently happening, and I've always enjoyed that part of the job, where things make sense and you have an ah-ha moment, well I have had a few in the past few weeks and days, and quite a bit has been informed about the subjects we have discussed in ONL.  Little did I know that this connecting week would be more about me and my footprint, and coming to certain realizations that have informed my decisions both personally and professionally, thanks to new ways of thinkin...

It has been a busy month since I wrote my first blogs. It feels like only a week or two ago that I typed out those pages. And how much as changed since then. It appears the world is moving rate of several wow's an hour. It feels like it hasn't stopped. And it isn't slowing down. Who knows, next week the world could be even more different again. Everyday is something changing. Every where we look we see uncertainty, in the world, in politics, in others, in ourselves. And we have become so accustomed to fending for our own we kind forget that there are other people around. Forever preparing for the inevitable uncertainty. But we are raised in an era of instant gratification, and because we can't have our uncertainty delivered from us with understandable knowing in a moments notice, we feel anxious. So we cling to any remnants of our self and memory and repeat it over and over to try reinforce its affirming belief that it is real. But what is real? Especially now in a post...