Miriam Tanti

I am presenting this afternoon at the ACU Learning and Teaching Conference. As a national university, we have five campuses scattered around Australia, the opportunity for all of us to get together to share, collaborate and explore possibilities is few and far between – so what better way to ensure that we are ALWAYS connected than Twitter.

Leanne Cameron and myself will be presenting “Using Social Networking in Higher Education buy kamagra online”
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Happy New Year everyone! This is my favourite and most sacred time of the year! I feel energized, reflective, inspired and creative. I feel full of pride, a little relief and a lot of fatigue for the year that was. I have big plans for this coming year and those plans each have a thousand little steps, which I discovered in 2011, is best to approach one at a time.

I also love this time of the year because it is the time when I look back and congratulate myself on a pretty good year. Pretty good because I made it out the other end with all of my limbs still attached and still somewhat sane (although I am sure many would disagree). If I had to give 2011 a letter grade, I’d give it a C with the comments: strong work ethic, conscientious, spasmodic, a procrastinator and at times needs to be encouraged to listen and pay attention (I acknowledge I have a short attention span and easily digress from the topic/task).

As I re-read through my goals of 2011, unfortunately I didn’t experience the euphoria you get from crossing achieved goals off your list as many times as I would have liked (in part due to distraction). So working with what I have I have realized that long-term goals don’t really work for me, so this year I’m not making yearly resolutions, I’m going to make monthly ones.

Having unfulfilled goals doesn’t mean I didn’t achieve anything or have a great year, because I did. It just means that my priorities may have changed as the year progressed or I established new goals and direction.

So this year I have a new and flexible approach to resolutions – monthly resolutions.

My resolutions for the month of January are:

Have you ever stopped to wonder about his hyper accelerated state we appear to be caught in? How much faster can we get? How much more could we pack into our burgeoning days? I pass colleagues in the corridor who tell me they have never been more busy and chat to students who are exhausted and overwhelmed. What will the long term effects of our worship of the cult of speed do not only to our health, but our future? Sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed this problem as ‘temporal exhaustion’ – if we are mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.

The future … a future that if we continue on this trajectory will be even more techno centric, an existence where we go about our day in a zombie like trance, going through the motions – even more so than we already do today. Never stopping to smell the roses or explore anything with great depth or purely for enjoyment.

Those of you who know my research interests already know that I am an advocate of ‘slow’ (published papers can be accessed via the Publications tab at the top). Whilst I write this 35 000 feet in the air on my way to present at the Vision To Reality Conference, Brisbane – I haven’t quite mastered slow in life (still working on that) However, I believe that slow in education is a must … NOW.

Why? There is little doubt of the increasing reliance on education to generate innovation, wealth and boost the national economy. One need look no further than the National Curriculum and Digital Education Revolution, both initiatives developed from vocationally and economically driven rationales – a concentration on helping students become skilled and employable.

So how do we shift the existing educational paradigm that centres technology, the economy, politics and the immediate present to one that favours people?

In ICT rich education it involves identifying that the technological system is an infrastructure that we use but are not controlled by to transfer the focus to a slower setting (see publications for more on origins of slow), one where deep thought and action are closely connected, one where insight can be gained from unpredictable and unexpected experiences and collaboration is fostered. Students need time to discuss, argue, reflect upon knowledge and ideas and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit.

So what does slow look like?

Google Earth is a great application that enables a direct connection between students and the context. The application has the ability to draw student in to the experience where they long to explore, discover, pursue their curiosity, touch and learn more.

Here is a Google Earth Quick Guide to help you get started. Click Here

Part II of this post will be uploaded after the Vision To Reality Conference presentation, where I will share the many innovative ideas the conference delegates were able to come up with – suggestion on how they would use Google Earth in their learning environment.