Clyde Street 2012

I wrote 260 posts on Clyde Street this year. This has been my fifth year with WordPress.

I see this blog as a way of capturing and sharing items linked to learning, teaching, coaching and performing. It is a public portfolio of my interests and one that I access wherever I am in the world.

I was surprised to learn that Clyde Street had 70,000 visitors this year with the Olympic and Paralympic months being the busiest time of the year.

The pages that attracted most interest in 2012 were:

The topics for my posts during the year were:

January (Olympics, Connecting and Sharing, Reading, Bruce Coe, Wikis, Communicating, QR Codes, Coaching, Megatrends.)

February (Open Learning, Women’s Football, Cycle Tourism, Performance, Rugby, Decision-Making, Mobility, Sport Coaching Pedagogy, Olympics, E-portfolios, Reading, Wikiversity, Canoe Slalom.)

March (Sport Coaching Pedagogy, Analysis of Performance, Wikipedia, Coaching, Presentation, Autism, Communication.)

April (Performance, Simulation, Autism, Open Learning, Crime and Sport, Olympics, Sport Coaching Pedagogy, Coaching.)

May (Olympics, Open Learning, Sport Coaching Pedagogy, Billy Cart Derby, Writing, Enterprise Computing, Space, E-portfolios, Coaching, Performance, Critical Care Nursing, Cycling Research, Educational Technology.)

June (Olympics, Writing, Transit of Venus, Euro 2012, Augmented Reality, Robin Poke, Procurate, Tennis, Charles Reep, Sport and Technology, Penalty Shoot Outs.)

July (Olympics, Euro 2012, Learning Design, Fandom, Cross Country Skiing, Pathbrite, Greg Blood Guest Post, Blogging, Goal-Line Technology, AFL, Tennis, Performance, 9.79, SOOC, Writing, Learning, Australian Art.)

August (Coaching, Olympics, Writing, Strategic Losing, Performing, Super 15 Rugby, Open Education, Chaos, Learning, Paralympics, Place and Space.)

September (Paralympics, Open Access, Coaching, R U OK, Environments.)

October (Grand Final Weekend, SOOC, Flipping and Connecting, Challenge Conference, Vocaroo, St George’s Park, Data, Conservators, Integrity, Honours’ Presentations.)

November (Australian Sport Technology Conference, Attention, OAPS101, South Africa 1995, Coaching, Performing, Notational Analysis, Einstein’s Office, Narrative, Winning Edge.)

December (QR Codes, Game Changing, Ecological Perspectives on Sport, Aggregating and Curating, Searching, Connecting, Drupal, Coaching, Goal-Line Technology, Data Analysis, John Stevenson, SOOC, Open Learning, Cowbird, Sport and Technology.)

I am looking forward to blogging in 2013. Thank you to everyone who found my blog this year.

 

Photo Credits

Year of Reading in Mongarlowe

Rain in Mongarlowe

 

Cowbird, Alex and Zadie

Each morning, I receive a Cowbird Story.

I have read a story a day since I my invitation to join Cowbird arrived earlier this year.

I think it is a great way to share stories within a community dedicated to personal stories.

Today’s story is from Alex Smith.

Her What is a life? story is about her grandfather, Zadie. In a short story, Alex has time to write this:

So what is it? This life. What is it when we leave this world behind? I thought about this over and over and a quote I’d come across just before I found out Zadie had passed. Words about living the width of life, not just the length. In Zadie’s case, his life is now breathing in and out in me, my brothers and sister, my cousins. We each have slices of him. Some of us givers. Others hard workers (sometimes too hard). Others too humble. There are his blue eyes in my brother. The thick glasses in a few of us. The ladies man is there. The adventurers and the gardeners are also thriving. And I definitely got the ‘talking to strangers’ gene.

Fresh from the weight of the weekend, I came back to Colorado and hung a windchime of Zadie’s on my porch. When the wind blows through it, it’s a reminder that each and every life we touch is the legacy we leave. Each story we take the time to hear. Each hug we give. Song we write. The story we create is our life… and it endures in those who are woven into it.

I like the idea that “each and every life we touch is the legacy we leave”. It makes each touch of each life very important.

Photo Credit

Bennett the Cleanser

Parallel Universes

WordPress has a world map in its Dashboard to indicate from where visitors come to view a blog.

I liked today’s map. At noon today I found a parallel universe!

 

Reflecting on the Art of Truth and Performance Narratives

NonfictioNow 2012 took place in Melbourne last week

It brought together writers, teachers, readers and students of nonfiction from around the world. There were three days of panels, readings and events that focused on the practice, thinking, communication and writing of nonfiction in all its forms.

I caught a conversation from the conference about The Art of Truth on Radio National’s Book and Arts Daily.  Helen Garner, David Shields, Jose Dalisay and Margo Jefferson talked with Michael Cathcart about re-presenting the truth in non-fiction writing. The trail for the program was:

If you’re a journalist or a historian, you are supposed to write truth. You may have a complex concept of the truth, you may acknowledge that in any one moment there are many truths however, the point is that they are all truths. You can’t make things up. But if you’re a fiction writer, you’re supposed to make stuff up; the more imaginative the better. But these simple distinctions don’t really help us make sense of the way in which we try to get at the truth through social media, reality TV, and film. Plus there are the works which are hybrid, such as historical novels like Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel. These books are novels, but they do, implicitly, claim to be truthful.

During the conversation David Shields read out a paragraph written by Philip Roth. I picked up on a separate quote after listening to that reading.

Philip Roth said:

As you well know, the intriguing biographical issue—and critical issue, for that matter—isn’t that a writer will write about some of what has happened to him, but how he writes about it, which, when understood properly, takes us a long way to understanding why he writes about it. A more intriguing question is why and how he writes about what hasn’t happened—how he feeds what’s hypothetical or imagined into what’s inspired and controlled by recollection

I went away thinking about how sport scientists might judge their work as fiction. We tend to talk about validity and reliability in research. Perhaps we could talk about truth too. I like the idea that we should account for what has not happened and how we re-present our experience to others who were not there at the time decisions were made about what data to include and exclude.

In my own case this post was readied by my viewing of a picture of Einstein’s office at Princeton and by the availability of a car journey that allowed me to listen to the entire hour of the Radio National program. Philip Roth was the pivot for my thinking about narrative as was revisiting this 1998 presentation that included ideas about narrative from David Polkinghorne and Elliot Eisner.

#OAPS101: Enhancing Performance

Introduction

(Vocaroo Summary of this post)

I have really enjoyed Week 1 of the small open online course Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport.

There have been some fascinating exchanges particularly about Seeing and Observing and Decision Making.

The numbers of participants enrolled in the course has increased this week. Shortly before the course started we had 155 and now it is 374. This means it is still a small open online course. I have discussed the approach taken in the course in a number of Clyde Street posts and in this Day 1 post on OpenLearning.

I have been keen to offer Open Badges for the course.

Conversations in the first week have prompted me to think about:

• Feedforward
• Performances of Understanding
• Personal Learning Environments

 

Will Oldham’s post Analysts as Educators acted as a catalyst for my thoughts. In a post that synthesises a variety of ideas, Will concludes that:

We must take be confident enough in our skills and abilities that we are able to provide assurance to those who require it that we can add value to established coaching setups and processes, that we’re not in the business of coaching revolutions, but simply the development of athletes and coaches.

I commented on his post and suggest that the value we add is as educational technologists. I should have added that wherever possible bring an interdisciplinary understanding to performance. I think this requires a sensitivity to a narrative of performance that is customised to athletes and coaches.

My three big issues for the first week:

Feedforward

What if performance analysts decide to share the world as it might be?

I think feedfoward gives us the opportunity to do this. In Peter Dowrick’s words “subjects see themselves not so much as they were but as they might be“.

Performances of Understanding

Last year I wrote about Sam Stosur’s victory in the US Open Tennis. In that post I noted that “I am fascinated by the process by which athletes prepare to perform. I am fascinated too by the realisation of the readiness to perform in actual performance”. My ideas about performances of understanding help me think about this readiness.

A decade ago I followed a Harvard University course online, Teaching for Understanding Using New Technologies. In that course performances of understanding were important indicators. Such performances:

… require students to go beyond the information given to create something new by reshaping, expanding, extrapolating from, applying, and building on what they already know. The best performances of understanding help students both develop demonstrate their understanding.

Personal Learning Environments

I am hopeful that many of the participants in the Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport course will write about their experiences as performance analysts or their interests in performance analysis. There is so much experience to share.

I am keen to find out about personal learning environments. My participation in the CCK08 course opened my eyes to the benefits of sharing openly. I have written about personal learning environments since that course. I see personalisation as one of the ways to offer a service to athletes and coaches.

Into Week 2

I am looking forward to Week 2 of #OAPS101. I am hopeful that this post might stimulate discussion that goes beyond the content of the course and helps address some second order questions about performance analysis.

Photo Credit

I received the photograph in this blog post from a friend. I have been unable to find a source for it. I am keen to learn whether it is a Creative Commons Licensed image.