Like many, I’ve long created blogs for teaching, talking, and fooling around. But nowadays the technology is completely flexible and accessible, and I am learning that some of the best teaching and learning these days is being done while taking advantage of this flexible, moldable, powerful communications putty.
Creating web sites, networks, and communities is just about as easy as dragging and dropping images and text into the new applications: Presto! entire blogging applications installed in minutes! Presto! Dozens of websites linked by RSS and leading their users to rewrite for engaged, rapidly responsive audiences. Presto! Notes written up in class pasted to a web, viewed by dozens, and replies posted in days. It used to take months to get a handful of response for a journal article: now this happens in days or even hours. Students used to wait weeks to give a referat, one, and wait weeks more to hear their grade: now they publish short things, respond to each other, and by the time their instructor gets around to them, they’ve already got a pile of posts and responses and approach him or her with better questions and confidence. The hard part, I’ve found, is helping students break free of traditional expectations and create supportive learning environments.
That’s mostly what this website is about. For those of you new to this website and to me, I’m Bruce Spear, now Visiting Professor at the Berlin School for Economics and Law, and teaching in the fields of strategy and computer science — with special emphasis on the use of the web for research, writing, and working together. Send me an email and I’ll get back to you soon, and if you want to know more about me, bio-wise, read on!
I started off as a photographer. In 1978 I earned my Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and for six years taught photography and art history at The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. I’m fascinated by the process of discovery, putting myself into the way of discovery, working with what I find, and seeing how I might build on my body of work and see it new. It is not often that I sit, as photographed here, in front of a small stage in what used to be a cafe in the abandoned Russian hospital in Beelitz, because mostly I move forward, back, left, right, up, down, try to achieve “flow” as well as a moment when everything fits together.
For 16 years I set this aside to study literature and philosophy, receiving the Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991 and, having moved to Berlin to be with my wife, teaching American studies and philosophy in the universities in Berlin and Potsdam. From 1993 to 1999 I taught American Studies for the University of Potsdam in a special continuing education program for former teachers of Russian and leaders of the Young Pioneers all over Brandenburg, and to do that I commuted to classrooms in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Cottbus, Elsterwerda, Frankfurt/Oder, Eberswalde, Wittstock, and Neuruppin and so got to know the former East Germany during those first years after the “Wende”.
In 2000 I returned to my photography, found my subject in the backyards of Wroclaw, Poland and abandoned Russian military bases surrounding Berlin and had my first one man show in 2004 at the Galerie Taube, Berlin. These days I post my newest work on my Boylston website, and my next exhibition of new work will be at the gallery Dada Post in Wedding, opening 7pm on July 3rd, 2010.
I also post my favorite Berlin snapshots on Flickr, and when I have a bunch of photos from this or that adventure I post albums on Posterous or Picasa. I also occasionally teach photography, as you will see on my Berlin Today course website, and presently offer private lessons.
In my classes I invite my students to illustrate their websites and presentations with their own photographs, as you will see from this great collection by ‘da guys’ in my Creative Self class last semester.
I’m also a tango dancer. In 2002, my wife finally convinced me to take ballroom dancing lessons, and I soon found I enjoyed the movement, the music, making new friends outside of my academic circles, and the challenge of starting from zero: learning how to learn all over again, as if I hadn’t gotten it right the first time.
I was also soon attracted to the Argentinian Tango, asked my ballroom dancing teacher Christiane Görner to explain it to me, and as you see on the left, her husband Reinhard Görner, caught that very first step on film.
For six years now I’ve been taking lots of lessons and practicing whenever I can. My favorite teacher now is Angelika Fischer, but recently I have taken classes from Irmel Weber as well as from visiting dancers, many from Argentina, such as the very traditional Aljandro Hermida (here dancing with Anne Marie Arlt), the very modern Alejandra Heredia & Mariano Otero, and soon, I hope, the soulful Andres Sarasua and Cecile Boucris — all filmed over the past year performing at Tango Tanzen Mache Schön in Kreuzberg.
I love the stories people tell about how they came to the dance and what they find in it, such as those told by Robert Farris Thompson in his Afropop Interview and scholarly book, Tango: The art history of love. What we actually do on the dance floor is often described in more intimate terms, such you hear from the Argentinian psychoanalyst Sonja Abadi, as broadcast on the Tango Tales website. Sometimes I try my hand at writing about it on my own tango blog, Discovering Tango.
I started blogging in 2004 to report on the redesign of the forum feature of the open source learning management system dotLRN, where I served as Chair of the User Advisory Board. The post on the left describes our development team in Copenhagen.
I took up computer science in 2001. I started by following my polymath hacker friend Ed Tanguay, who got me started with hands-on programming books and then sent me off to study database administration. After a year of course work I enjoyed a completely fascinating second year as apprentice to programmer Manfred Krauss and his wonderful colleagues at the Free University’s central computer services, ZEDAT. It was 2003, I thought I’d leverage my teaching experience by getting involved in the design and implementation of learning management systems, became involved with the dotLRn project, set up a Linux box, installed dotLRN on it, sold my services to instructors in four departments — a story I tell in part in The Short, Happy Life of dotLRN.
Where “e-learning” at the FU and many other places is based on quantity, at dotLRN and now at the Berlin School of Business and Law, where I am a Visiting Professor, I am concerned with quality. Where “e-learning” is mostly about setting up centralized systems, bottling up “content” and delivering it in the manner of a “loading dock” or “mensa” and with summative testing at the end of it (and not incidentally, wiping out alternatives and those who would consider them), my colleagues — instructors — design web use in the classroom to better treat student as ends in themselves.
If I had to recommend only one article to represent my present approach to academic blogging, it would be Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, subtitled “Blogging is a way to make myself smarter”, because it describes how the timely presentation of “work-in-progress” offers a powerful means for clarification of thought, the solicitation of advice and the contributions of others, and a great way to build one’s audience, community, and public along the way.
I am completely happy to be doing this at the HWR, where my students, and those of Marcus Birkenkrahe, are doing excellent work! In the Evaluation Rubric for student blogging that combines the rubrics we have developed for our classes over the past year — with my particular emphasis on student writing and design and the special genius Marcus brings to project management and group work — I think you will begin to see why we think of blogging as a place of serious business, lots of fun, and offering considerable benefits to for teaching, learning and, well, life.
About
Like many, I’ve long created blogs for teaching, talking, and fooling around. But nowadays the technology is completely flexible and accessible, and I am learning that some of the best teaching and learning these days is being done while taking advantage of this flexible, moldable, powerful communications putty.
Creating web sites, networks, and communities is just about as easy as dragging and dropping images and text into the new applications: Presto! entire blogging applications installed in minutes! Presto! Dozens of websites linked by RSS and leading their users to rewrite for engaged, rapidly responsive audiences. Presto! Notes written up in class pasted to a web, viewed by dozens, and replies posted in days. It used to take months to get a handful of response for a journal article: now this happens in days or even hours. Students used to wait weeks to give a referat, one, and wait weeks more to hear their grade: now they publish short things, respond to each other, and by the time their instructor gets around to them, they’ve already got a pile of posts and responses and approach him or her with better questions and confidence. The hard part, I’ve found, is helping students break free of traditional expectations and create supportive learning environments.
That’s mostly what this website is about. For those of you new to this website and to me, I’m Bruce Spear, now Visiting Professor at the Berlin School for Economics and Law, and teaching in the fields of strategy and computer science — with special emphasis on the use of the web for research, writing, and working together. Send me an email and I’ll get back to you soon, and if you want to know more about me, bio-wise, read on!
I started off as a photographer. In 1978 I earned my Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and for six years taught photography and art history at The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. I’m fascinated by the process of discovery, putting myself into the way of discovery, working with what I find, and seeing how I might build on my body of work and see it new. It is not often that I sit, as photographed here, in front of a small stage in what used to be a cafe in the abandoned Russian hospital in Beelitz, because mostly I move forward, back, left, right, up, down, try to achieve “flow” as well as a moment when everything fits together.
For 16 years I set this aside to study literature and philosophy, receiving the Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991 and, having moved to Berlin to be with my wife, teaching American studies and philosophy in the universities in Berlin and Potsdam. From 1993 to 1999 I taught American Studies for the University of Potsdam in a special continuing education program for former teachers of Russian and leaders of the Young Pioneers all over Brandenburg, and to do that I commuted to classrooms in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Cottbus, Elsterwerda, Frankfurt/Oder, Eberswalde, Wittstock, and Neuruppin and so got to know the former East Germany during those first years after the “Wende”.
In 2000 I returned to my photography, found my subject in the backyards of Wroclaw, Poland and abandoned Russian military bases surrounding Berlin and had my first one man show in 2004 at the Galerie Taube, Berlin. These days I post my newest work on my Boylston website, and my next exhibition of new work will be at the gallery Dada Post in Wedding, opening 7pm on July 3rd, 2010.
I also post my favorite Berlin snapshots on Flickr, and when I have a bunch of photos from this or that adventure I post albums on Posterous or Picasa. I also occasionally teach photography, as you will see on my Berlin Today course website, and presently offer private lessons.
In my classes I invite my students to illustrate their websites and presentations with their own photographs, as you will see from this great collection by ‘da guys’ in my Creative Self class last semester.
I’m also a tango dancer. In 2002, my wife finally convinced me to take ballroom dancing lessons, and I soon found I enjoyed the movement, the music, making new friends outside of my academic circles, and the challenge of starting from zero: learning how to learn all over again, as if I hadn’t gotten it right the first time.
I was also soon attracted to the Argentinian Tango, asked my ballroom dancing teacher Christiane Görner to explain it to me, and as you see on the left, her husband Reinhard Görner, caught that very first step on film.
For six years now I’ve been taking lots of lessons and practicing whenever I can. My favorite teacher now is Angelika Fischer, but recently I have taken classes from Irmel Weber as well as from visiting dancers, many from Argentina, such as the very traditional Aljandro Hermida (here dancing with Anne Marie Arlt), the very modern Alejandra Heredia & Mariano Otero, and soon, I hope, the soulful Andres Sarasua and Cecile Boucris — all filmed over the past year performing at Tango Tanzen Mache Schön in Kreuzberg.
I love the stories people tell about how they came to the dance and what they find in it, such as those told by Robert Farris Thompson in his Afropop Interview and scholarly book, Tango: The art history of love. What we actually do on the dance floor is often described in more intimate terms, such you hear from the Argentinian psychoanalyst Sonja Abadi, as broadcast on the Tango Tales website. Sometimes I try my hand at writing about it on my own tango blog, Discovering Tango.
It is very satisfying to me to learn that many of my friends, colleagues, and students find disciplined study of dance, the arts, and sports to be very relevant for professional training, and especially, the creativity that makes professional life interesting. The books on this topic that I am reading these days include Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner, Debbie Millman’s How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, Dave Hoover’s Apprenticeship Patterns, Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity.
I started blogging in 2004 to report on the redesign of the forum feature of the open source learning management system dotLRN, where I served as Chair of the User Advisory Board. The post on the left describes our development team in Copenhagen.
I took up computer science in 2001. I started by following my polymath hacker friend Ed Tanguay, who got me started with hands-on programming books and then sent me off to study database administration. After a year of course work I enjoyed a completely fascinating second year as apprentice to programmer Manfred Krauss and his wonderful colleagues at the Free University’s central computer services, ZEDAT. It was 2003, I thought I’d leverage my teaching experience by getting involved in the design and implementation of learning management systems, became involved with the dotLRn project, set up a Linux box, installed dotLRN on it, sold my services to instructors in four departments — a story I tell in part in The Short, Happy Life of dotLRN.
Where “e-learning” at the FU and many other places is based on quantity, at dotLRN and now at the Berlin School of Business and Law, where I am a Visiting Professor, I am concerned with quality. Where “e-learning” is mostly about setting up centralized systems, bottling up “content” and delivering it in the manner of a “loading dock” or “mensa” and with summative testing at the end of it (and not incidentally, wiping out alternatives and those who would consider them), my colleagues — instructors — design web use in the classroom to better treat student as ends in themselves.
If I had to recommend only one article to represent my present approach to academic blogging, it would be Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, subtitled “Blogging is a way to make myself smarter”, because it describes how the timely presentation of “work-in-progress” offers a powerful means for clarification of thought, the solicitation of advice and the contributions of others, and a great way to build one’s audience, community, and public along the way.
I am completely happy to be doing this at the HWR, where my students, and those of Marcus Birkenkrahe, are doing excellent work! In the Evaluation Rubric for student blogging that combines the rubrics we have developed for our classes over the past year — with my particular emphasis on student writing and design and the special genius Marcus brings to project management and group work — I think you will begin to see why we think of blogging as a place of serious business, lots of fun, and offering considerable benefits to for teaching, learning and, well, life.