January 24, 2006
Visit to Michael Nelson in the Blue Mountains
This is one of those post I should have done a long time ago, but I've been avoiding
teaching work during a massive long 5 week break. Back in December I went to
the Blue Mountains to meet Michael Nelson .
(this was also a good excuse to do a day trip to the Blue Mountains with Zac).
Michael teaches web design in the IT area at the Western Sydney Institute. A
while back I discovered his live and let learn
blog and his teaching blog and a while back he discovered some of my
stuff as
well. What is really interesting about meeting Michael face 2 face was the way
we seem to be on a similar wave length, we teach in similar content areas and
have been teaching for a similar amount of time. What is really interesting is
that this linkage with Michael was formed via blogs and sharing stuff !!!
The IT team a Wentworth Falls Campus has a great flexitrain style center, eg large room with lots of computers and then some break out rooms at the side with data projectors. What I love about these types of spaces is the that it makes it impossible to do "monkey see monkey do style" software training.
We talked quite a lot about Michael's move away from using an LMS. This combined with the new version of webCT has really inspired me to move more stuff outside of webCT. We also talked a bit about coaching and the good and bad things about an approach that is based around coaching.
We talked a bit about the wikibook on web design, which I would really like to start contributing more to this year. What was really exciting was talking about some join projects like the online roleplays that I've been dreaming of for a while and an online design student conference. As yet I haven't done anything to get these moving be I hope to get started on those projects in the next couple of weeks.
I hadn't planned on doing a interview, but I had my laptop with me and I used the time as a bit of a chance to do an interview with Michael. The audio is not great because I used the builtin micro in my laptop. Here it its (8.2mb)
Posted by robin at January 24, 2006 01:20 PM