Monthly Archives: October 2014

2 Comments

Sport in general has always been a paradoxical attraction for me. I grew up on a farm where my father didn't believe in the value of sport - it was more important to be watching the sheep on a Saturday or chopping weeds in the back paddock or collecting the eggs than to be hitting a tennis ball back and forth, or chasing a red leather ball around the local oval. To be honest, I didn't even really know that orgnaised sports even existed until I was about eight or so. I went up to stay with my aunty up at the nearby town of Booleroo Centre, where my much older cousins played Aussie Rules for the Roosters. I remember her taking me to see the games on a Saturday afternoon. My memory is hazy but I think my older cousin Andrew played for the Seniors while my younger mid teen cousin, Timothy was playing Junior Colts. My aunty also told me that the A grade team used a brand new ball for every game. I couldn't believe that!

"What do they do with the ball after each game if they get a new one next week?" I asked in my isolated naivety.

"They use them for training or the B grade games, and sometimes they give the old training balls out to young kids if they want one," was her reply from memory. "I'll get Timothy to get you one."

She was as good as her word. I got a well used football and it was the first one that I had ever owned. The hide got roughened up pretty quickly in those days so the trick was to give it a coat of brown shoe polish to restore the leather back to a better feel.

I went to a small parish school for the first four years of primary school where the numbers peaked at about a dozen kids and dwindled down to six before it was decided that it needed to be closed. The school was run by an old fashioned disciplinarian who also was in on the traditional Lutheran headset that sport wasn't worth the bother. We won a brand new football when I was in Grade Three from the Savings Bank of South Australia for being the best small school in school banking participation or something like that, but we never got to play with it. No, it stood proudly (and pristinely) on display in all its red leather glory as a testament to our savings discipline. When the school's imminent closure was announced, the teacher relented and actually let me and other remaining boy in the school take it out for a kick.

So, the school closed and my sister and I then went to a new school in the nearby town of Appila. This school was not much bigger than the first and had thirteen students. I was the only Grade Five in the whole school but I did become friends with the local builder's son who asked me for the first time in my life, "Who do you barrack for?"

I didn't know what he meant but he patiently explained about the SANFL and how if you liked footy then you had to barrack for one of the big teams in Adelaide. My sister and I talked about this serious decision, and in the end I decided I would be a Port Adelaide Magpies supporter just like my friend. It turned out that he played mini-league for the local Jamestown-Appila Magpies who wore the same black and white prison bar jumpers as their elite counterparts in the big city. That's how he had made his choice. My sister, for reasons known only to her, chose Sturt, the Double Blues who were another popular team of the mid seventies era.

I still didn't get to play any organised sport right up until I was sent off to boarding school in Adelaide at the age of twelve. That was an intimidating experience and funnily enough when I got there, I was told that all boarding students were expected to participate in sport! What should have been a dream come true wasn't quite so easy though. I had acquired glasses and my parents had told me that playing football was too dangerous and besides, your glasses might get broken. So I opted for the less perilous choices of tennis in the summer and squash in the winter. My oldest son has had issues with low muscle tone and I suspect that I may have had undiagnosed issues like that growing up because I never really got the hang of doing sporty stuff. Probably not playing any organised sports growing up was another contributing factor.

But probably because of my lack of aptitude for sport, my interest and love of sport grew. I watched the school's footy games on Saturday mornings and went to some SANFL games with my fellow boarders. I really liked watching televised footy matches as well - the VFL Winners show was great on a late Saturday afternoon as they broadcasted the last quarter of the Game of the Day from Melbourne and showed highlights from the other games. Dr Geoffrey Edelestein had bought the South Melbourne Swans and moved them to Sydney and every second Sunday afternoon, the boarders could sit down in their common room and watch the onfield exploits of Mark Browning, Silvio Foschini and Paul Morwood.

When I was in Year 11 and 12, I volunteered to be the runner for the school's B Grade senior team. I had a few mates on the team, and the coach needed someone to run the water bottle and the messages out to the players. I felt important and close to the action. In an era where all of the best SANFL footballers ended up heading over to play with the best in the VFL, a friend wrote in my Year 12 Yearbook a message that gave me pride - "Weg, champion footy runner. Will he go to Vic. next year?"

I went off to teachers college and sport took a back seat to socialising and going out to live music venues instead of footy games. But a mate of mine had his own set of golf clubs and we would occasionally head out to North Adelaide public links for a hit instead of going to lectures. I bought a starter set so I wouldn't have to pay for hire clubs each time and I was hooked. Golf was a game where anyone could participate - you didn't need a team, there was no organised practice and no opponent except for the course. I remember going out with my friend one day and having the course to ourselves while the Australian Grand Prix (still in Adelaide in the mid-eighties) could be heard buzzing in the background. Golf then helped me break into the community when I got my first teaching contracts. I played at Port Broughton and got my first handicap of 36.

Then I got sent out to a little town on the Eyre Peninsula called Wirrulla and my sporting involvement bloomed to my greatest involvement ever. I played football for the first time ever (without my glasses) in the B grade because being involved was important, not if you were any good - they needed the numbers. I played golf, became club treasurer and kept a plastic bucket of change under my bed until I could get to the bank during the week. I played darts during the week, had a go at asphalt basketball in the summer, and played No 5 in the Wirrulla tennis team.

In 1990, I was given my first permanent job at Port Augusta, right at the top point of the Spencer Gulf. As well as getting heavily involved in the local golf club, I had a go at social volleyball and social basketball. One of the teachers at my school and our Aboriginal Education Worker were right into basketball and tuned me into checking out the NBA, which had games and highlight packages on late night ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). It was right in the middle of the Michael Jordan era and the Chicago Bulls were the team that everyone wanted to watch. I remember the New York Knicks being a pretty cool team and I liked watching John Starks, a no nonsense player whose style of play appealed to me. The basketball card craze hit Port Augusta schools pretty hard, and every upper primary kid had their big 3 ring folders with plastic card sleeves with their collection of cards. I had one child who was a particularly hard case in my class, who the police were constantly picking up in the streets late at night or finding him shoplifting down at Woolworths. He was hard to engage in class, and would just leave the school if it looked like I was going to pressure him into doing the learning that the rest of the class was doing. But he had a massive basketball card collection, and although I'd like to say it was a bridge for him to engaging with our learning, he would at least be content to thumb his way through his collection without doing a runner.

The ABC also featured a weekly American Football show hosted by an Australian TV icon, Don Lane. His American accent was just perfect to host this show which showed highlights from three games each week and showed the last quarter of the best one. He explained the important concepts to the curious Australian audience, and I loved it. He would have weekly prize giveaways - a Giants cap, a Raiders hoodie - all showcased with his catchphrase, "Who wouldn't want one of these?" He promoted a book called The Australian Guide To American Football which I bought along with the follow up book The Other Side Of American Football. Now I knew what a blitz was and that a tight end wasn't a bowel problem. I bought a Los Angeles Raider pennant as the team that I decided I liked but my girlfriend (now my wife) bought me a 49ers Starter cap which was pretty cool as well.

Eventually, the ABC took these shows off the air, I got married and moved back to Adelaide, and I lost my keenness for American sport. I still loved to watch Aussie Rules and as the VFL had become the AFL, started following the progress of first decent non-Victorian football team, the West Coast Eagles. I tried to like the new Adelaide team, the Crows, but there was something not quite right about them. When Port Adelaide finally got the chance to field an AFL team in 1997 as the Power, it was time to switch my loyalties full circle back to the team that answered that question back in primary school, "Who do you barrack for?"

Professional sport is a strange sort of beast. As a society, and generally as a worldwide phenomena, humans place sporting expertise on a very high pedestal and disproportionally reward these individuals. And when I decide to spend my time watching a team of multimillionaires play a game, or buy a team product like a cap or t-shirt, then I'm helping to bankroll the whole sideshow. Yet, does professional sport really contribute that much to the betterment of human existence on Earth? The flip side of that is that humans like entertainment (those of us in the luxurious position of being able to, as so many people on our planet are starving, living in poverty or facing a dire future. Why would they give a toss about Lebron James' latest colorway on his signature basketball shoe?) and professional sport is entertainment in a very primeval form. A pro athlete is only as good as his or her last game, one injury could end it all, and we so often see that total life dedication to becoming elite in sport leaves some unable to do anything else when it comes to life beyond their sporting expertise. There's certainly elements of gladiatorial Rome in any sporting arena.

It's also a form of classic escapism. Pretending for an hour that the next goal is the most important thing in the world and that your loud cheers (even from the edge of your lounge chair) could be the thing that pushes your team or favourite player to victory. Sports journalism has perfected the art of using an athlete's life journey as a metaphor for humankind's struggle for purpose, for redemption, for meaning.

So, me, I like sport. Having my youngest son play basketball has re-connected me to watching more of that on TV, and reading about it and caring about what is happening in that disconnected_from_everyday_humdrum_life. Getting pay TV last year has me watching NFL and NBA again even though I can't take to baseball or soccer. And now thanks to videogames, I'm enjoying watching the NHL which could turn out to be the most compelling one of them all for me. So the irony is that I am one of the least talented sports person around, but it doesn't take talent to appreciate the pure escapism and spectacle of sport at its highest level.

2 Comments

We've had our MinecraftEDU server running for over a year now, and I thought it would be a good idea to document some of the initiatives that are starting to bear fruit. I am lucky that one of our technicians is an experienced Minecraft user and enthusiast, and setting up our server and giving me remote desktop access was a breeze for him. It has taken me a while to cement the process of starting, saving and creating new maps but essentially we can have as many Minecraft "worlds" as needed, but only one of them can be running on our network at any one time. This is useful because I can designate worlds for specific purposes, give classes their own world and have some free time lunchtime worlds where the action is more free flowing and less purposeful.

I have a Digital Leader program where students volunteer their time to come along to help assist the lunchtime Minecraft sessions. I have a trolley of laptops with suitable graphic capabilities, and every lunchtime I am a travelling roadshow with 5 different buildings hosting Minecraft @ Lunchtime on their own allocated day of the week. The Leaders help with setting up, troubleshooting and technical advice. One Leaders also looks after the Teacher Controls and monitors activity, reminding players about respect and fairness. Originally we had sign up sheets because the whole concept was so popular - and it became a really good option for some of our students who struggle to make good choices out in the yard at break times. Now, we generally take the first dozen kids who are asking, balancing it up if we see someone new and asking some super regulars to take a break to fit them in. It seems to organically work without over-organisation.

Slowly but surely, a few curious teachers have asked for some support to see if MinecraftEDU could be used as part of their learning program. Our Vietnamese teacher was the first, using a new world with a Year 2 class to build Vietnamese temples and other buildings as part of cultural learning. He didn't need much support but has remarked about the engagement with the task and how the students have looked at architectural features from images from the web and sought to incorporate them in their designs. This has also made them open to the information sharing around the purpose of the temples in Vietnamese culture provided by the teacher. Another teacher wanted her students to showcase their learning on animals (I think she was doing information reports) by reproducing a habitat or enclosure suitable for their animal to live in, along with providing key facts for visitors to read on a Minecraft sign.

Another teacher wasn't sure what she wanted to do but was impressed by the engagement factor she saw during her building's lunchtime session. She saw the collaboration and design, and thought that maybe we could tie it into Mathematics. For this class, I created a perfectly flat world and got the students to build their own house and fence it off as a way for everyone to experience some initial success. This was a Year Five class and it ranged from highly skilled kids who use Minecraft daily at home to students who had only ever heard of it. I set the task and reminded them that they could learn from each other and that sharing skills was something to be encouraged. The engagement was amazing, hooking in all students even the ones who could be described as quite disengaged. The sharing of knowledge went well, and there have been some great examples of working together that I did not anticipate. There is one student who has limited English skills, having missed the opportunity to be part of an English-intensive New Arrival Program class because of where the family initially settled in Australia who finds it hard to succeed in a traditional setting because the way instruction and tasks are delivered. However, in this task, she worked with three other students (and friends) who are bilingual (and proficient in her first language) and together they scaffolded the task with her, working collaboratively to produce a co-located set of townhouses, that also included new features like a linking pathway to other students' buildings. Our plan is to link this to Mathematics by exploring the mathematical properties of each building - shape, measurement including perimeter, area and even volume.

frontviewmc

Front view of a house under construction in the flat world.

birdseyeviewmc

Bird's eye view of houses under construction - perspective is another concept easily explored in a manipulative way in MinecraftEDU.

It is great to have as many worlds as needed but I discovered a pitfall last week. I was working in my office when two students from the Year Five class burst in with agitated looks on their face. "Mr. Wegner. Some other kids are in Minecraft and they're destroying all our stuff! All our work is getting ruined - we need help!"

I went to investigate and found a teacher had given her students some "free time" to use the MinecraftEDU server without really knowing what it all entailed. The Year Five class had been working in their world the previous afternoon while I had been at a meeting, and so I hadn't had the chance to save their map or change the world over to one where collateral damage wouldn't be such an issue. In one way, I was pleased that the Year Fives viewed their Minecraft work as learning that they valued and were upset to have destroyed. But I had to work out how to minimise the damage. In the end, I got the offending (unwittingly and an apologetic teacher who didn't know that there was more than one world) class to stop, and change over to a lunchtime world but chose NOT to save the Year five class map. That meant that it would revert back to the last time I had worked with the class on the Tuesday. It did mean that any changes made on the Wednesday when I was out were gone but it was preferable to saving a world that had the effects of rampaging Year Twos thinking they were in a fun zone, not realising that they were messing with other students' work and learning. So, monitoring which world is up and when is key to ensuring that students' learning is preserved.

2 Comments

I'm not a big fan of the food at the Adelaide Convention Centre, so during the lunch break during the past two days at ACEC2014, I wandered off to Hindley Street in the nearby CBD in search of a quick and tasty takeaway lunch. And tonight when I got home, my wife suggested that we get pizza for a treat so on my way down to the local pizza outlet, the idea of ACEC takeaways came to me as an alternative way of reflecting on the important bits from the sessions I've been to over the past few days.

File:Pizza Port Melbourne.jpg

So apologies in advance to any of the speakers if this feels a bit odd and a touch disrespectful to your work but I am trying to tap into my creative side here and ensure that I commit to debriefing my brain.

Alec's Web Cafe
Proprietor: Alec Couros
Menu includes: Canadian insights, digital identity donuts, hacked teachers

This charming eatery features a wide open dining area with glass partitions fronting the kitchen ensuring that the whole place is entirely public. Retro posters (Apple Macintosh, Napster) adorn the walls but the menu is ever changing to reflect the dining habits of today's web consumer. Best of all, diners can walk right into the participatory kitchen and cook their own versions of the menu offerings.

@murcha Twitter Pantry
Proprietor: Anne Mirtschin
Menu includes: Wholesome country food, small nugget links spiced by influences from around the world.

The reviewer was flattered to be recognised and then cited as an inspiring factor in this fine dining establishment by Anne, which was both surprising and humbling. The Pantry featured sharing of multiple recipes, plus handy tips for preparation and cooking catering for all comers from the first time diner to the regular with their favourite table. A tasty backchannel was also available.

Humanlit Cafeteria
Proprietor: Georgina Pazzi
Menu includes: Generous serves of inspiration, new terminologies.

This cafe manages to balance the palate between classroom practicalities and leadership vision, which is no mean feat. Menu focuses on a number of tasty literacies with #humanlit being the signature dish. Cuisine is influenced by NMC2014 and personalisation. Diners will feel "in the flow" when eating here and are encouraged to scrawl their personal motto on the feature wall when leaving. I seem to remember this establishment winning awards in the past as well.

GGG (Greg Gebhardt's Gastronomy)
Proprietor: Greg Gebhardt
Menu includes: Double serves of both safety and glimpses of the future.

This restaurant is divided into two distinct dining areas, one sponsored by the Federal Government and another solely funded by the owner himself. The Government section seemed to be populated by numerous young people on multiple devices, but the engaging menu kept them all in a safe and focussed environment. The trick seemed to around referring to the customers as Digital Citizens as the mention of Cybersafety seemed to have them seeking out more risky locations. Meanwhile, the other area is very futuristic with the menu containing many beta items, and even a few dishes that have yet to be made! Many teachers have found dining in this area to be an intimidating experience but some hardcore educators are always willing to try the hottest and newest thing on the menu.

Schrock's Diner
Proprietor: Kathy Schrock
Menu includes: All drinks served in Google Glasses, and a wide range of tasty apps.

This place is fast paced with a seemingly endless menu of digital delights. The theme of the diner is Story as it relates to learning, with numerous videos playing on the wall projections while waiting for my meal. True to expectations, the simple treats are likely to stick in my memory for a long time to come.

The Observation Deck
Proprietor: Paul Herbert
Menu includes: Liberal doses of self deprecating humour, practical processes.

Technology plays a role here but took a back seat when I settled in for my meal. Practical nourishment for leaders is the specialty here but don't expect to be able to dine alone. You are encouraged to give feedback to the staff here, but they will also take the opportunity to rate you as a customer. My key takeaway here was to ask diners (students) here - what were you eating (doing)? and why were eating (doing) that? That will tell you most of what you need to know about any restaurant!

--------------------------------------------------------

I also enjoyed sessions from Stephen McGinley, the staff from Cowandilla Primary School and a grounded, thoughtful session from Rebecca Davies that will have me rethinking my own approaches to my role at school.

With all of this dining, I'll take a while to think off the digital calories, but it will help me fuel an improved approach to my work and my own personal learning.

By the way, if you went (or are still going) to ACEC2014, what were your takeaways? Share them in the comments, on Twitter or your own personal patch of cyberspace and send a link back this way.