I love the internet (academics on youtube)

[Mathmo]

I am working on my thesis at the moment, and as part of that I'm trying to get to grips with various ideas about social learning theory, communities of practice, identity (and all of this with respect to mathematics). I have a very basic idea of roughly what things are but am really not at ease with it all yet, and not really ready to use it in my writing because I think my understanding's not quite there yet.

So I am really excited to have found video interviews with the very academics whose books/papers I'm reading on youtube!

I've been watching video interview segments with Etienne Wenger about what a community of practice is - http://www.youtube.com/user/239MikeO/vi ... ery=wenger if anyone's interested - basically as far as I understand it so far, his work (together with Jean Lave) has been on the idea of learning being something that happens in interaction with other people and in communities. And I have just seen that there are some youtube videos of Yvette Solomon and Laura Black at a seminar in 2007 on "Mathematical Relationships Identities and Participation" - which turned into a book that I'm definitely going to be heavily referencing.

You guys, we live in the future. Instant free access to talks by academics? So cool.

[Sonic#]

On the topic of scholars and teachers being available on YouTube, pedagogy has really come into its own again with new media. In many cases (like Pedagogy, the online journal; like Marc Bousquet and his ambitious student-driven media projects; like Stephen Greenblatt and his top-down media simulations for teaching Renaissance culture) the current generation of thinkers on teaching have developed side by side with more access to different kinds of media in the classroom. They've helped reorient how we think of people in social groups, and in the classroom in particular. I've just briefly looked up "communities of practice," and it's very much in line with some pedagogues teachers who I've been following in my field. So I'm not too surprised that they're building communities through different mediums - but I am overjoyed!

If I ever have a quiet moment to myself, I'll have to give the video a listen.