Jamie Paterson’s eLearning Blog

Bricolage, is a term I can across in one of the first readings of my course, and I’ve become fascinated by the concept. John Sealy Brown (1999) bought it to my attention in postulating on the direction of web development.

So what is Bricolage?

Wikipedia offers the following description:

“It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – equivalent to the English “do-it-yourself”, the core meaning in French being, however, “fiddle, tinker” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)”.

Further down the Wikipedia page, homage is paid to that ultimate of bricoleurs, TV’s McGyver!!!

Sealy Brown (1999) explains it as the art or skill of designing by using some existing materials (an object, a tool, piece of code, document), but using them in a new way or in a new context. In short it’s invention by recycling.

I soon came to the realisation that I’d engaged in quite a deal of Bricolage in my domestic life without realising it. I’m a great one for hording, tinkering and reusing. I love Saturday morning garage sales, finding stuff from council street clean-ups, from markets and op-shops. And many of the objects I find I imagine how I can use them in some alternative context. Just a few examples are old printer key trays as coffee table tops, my bar coaster collection as wallpaper/decoration, odd storage containers and kitchen ceramic servers as plant pots.

I’d also realised that during my various travels I’d become somewhat of a bricoleur, in overcoming some awkward situations, notably once when I ran out of funds 4 days and two countries short of my flight home from Vienna. Without recounting the entire colourful tale, which I have probably embellished a few times over the years, a certain amount of resource trading and reinvention was required to secure my passage and accommodation over the period of those few days. So I also see bricolage as embracing the ability of resourcefulness as well as reinvention.

Also from that Wikipedia page, under the sub-heading Education, it reads:

“In the discussion of constructionism Seymour Papert discusses two styles of solving problems. Contrary to the analytical style of solving problems he describes bricolage as a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing, playing around.”

I predict that Bricolage will become a key outcome of putting these studies into practice for me. Already the first semester has been one of exploring with new technology, models and approaches to online learning possibilities. My head is full of all these new tools and how I might be able to apply them in various contexts:

• Firstly to my current work role, which I’ve already taken steps to do in creating Ning group for my global L&D team
• For my personal development in organising my studies and data collation (i.e. del.icio.us, edublogs, RSS)
• Hopefully soon to further my meaningful involvement with community and political organisations (social networking).

My Experiences with emerging technologies  

My experiences with the emerging technologies in the Horizon Report have been somewhat limited to date, but I look forward to seeing their rapid advance. 

Grassroots video

• As part of my development of eLearning modules in my employment, I have produced a number of Flash demonstrations, primarily using Adobe Captivate and Connect Presenter (formerly Macromedia Captivate and Breeze respectively). Read the rest of this entry »

What’s changed? 

John Sealy Brown’s predictions were ambitious in terms of what the web would do for learning. It certainly appears much more clearly now to be as transformative as he theorised in 1999. I think his analogy of the web to electrification is interesting. In the same way that electrification’s key transformation took place fastest and first was where the access to the infrastructure was established (cities / centres of commerce). Likewise the web has developed along the “build it and they will come” model – innovation has Read the rest of this entry »

Hi I’m Jamie and it seems this is my new blog… for eLearning studies at UTS!

I’m just going to leave some of these edublog links here for the time being until I get myself a little more sorted out. Read the rest of this entry »