TAFE NSW : MEC&T’s Use Of POV Technologies
Mar 20th, 2009 by alexanderhayes
[ image : mobology ]
It’s been a while since I’ve been over at this blog / community and thought that it would be high time to talk about some great things happening across the VET sector at the moment.
Let me give you some background then I’ll lead onto what happened yesterday that has really inspired me to keep up the good cause.
A year or so ago I caught up with an old contact from Pilbara TAFE who had for a while been championing the use of mobile video related technologies as part of teaching and assessment. My first contact with Geoff Lubich was five years earlier ( in the Engagme project days ! ) and at the time YouTube hadnt yet taken off and I had my head buried in readily acessible mobile technologies so was more than a tad distracted.
Anyways, recently Geoff Lubich and I got to speaking about the potential for what he termed then as point-of-view technologies and I could then see where he was coming from. I was at that time working with TAFE NSW MEC&T in Orange with Sandra Gray, Michael Gibson and Charles Turnbull on the instigation, implementation and professional development support of their online learning MEC&T Moodle platform.
The learning journey had been a steep one with gaining the trust and actual use of networked learning technologies beyond that of the trade and none more so than in a climate of a pending economic downturn.
A turning point came in mid 2008 at the MEC&T 2008 Faculty Forum where I was invited to speak of what was at that time my interest in the use of POV technologies in the trades and how it interfaced or connected with that of user-generated learning resources, assessment, RPL and online learning platforms. I remember being confronted in one of my many workshops by a challenged individual who proposed that what I was speaking to was no more than a low grade, poor quality and unsustainable technology that would never cut the grade in a teaching & learning scenario.
How wrong that individual was but how right was his challenge !
Armed with some attitude and smarting from a rebuff after rebuff of other formal employment opportunities I declared my commercial interest in POV technologies and we havent looked back since.
Anyways……..the moral to the story is as follows.
I owed MEC&T some time to conduct training etc. with the head teachers and other MEC&T staff and Charles & Sandra mooted that they’d conduct a faculty wide training day on the 19th March 2008. My role was to take off the EDUPOV hat and put back on the TAFE NSW trainers hat with the staff with respect to a hands on experience involving the use of POV.
Sally Brownlow, Strategic ICT Co-ordinator at TAFE NSW Western Institute was invited to assist in the co-ordination of the day and in fact we worked in tandem in the prepartion of material to support the process and to ensure the success of the day…..and what a success.
We covered a great deal of ground including;
- hands on actual dismantaling and demystification of the POV kits themselves
- navigational hints and tips for operational use of the MEC&T POV kits
- hands on paired instructional recordings of scenarios using the POV gear
- conversion and adaption of the POV files for re-aggregation purposes
- badging using TAFE NSW templates for POV creations
- editing of POV data for resource creation
- conversion for transfer to iTouch mobile learning resources
The reaction from all staff present at the workshop was positive and attentive. Previous cynics of the ideas and the use of the technology had become the first to demand my time to see their creations !!!
Whilst undertaking the workshop I discovered that a number of staff had access to the kits prior to the event and had created quality resources and had ingeniously adapted the equipment for their own personal use. There was even talk from a number of burly tradies of how their own sons had grabbed the technologies and run with it for their own use at secondary level.
What has become apparent to me is that there is a growing awareness of the organisation that to lead business engagement with learners, to build capability in teaching, learning and assessment as well as to support innovation their is a direct need to let staff have access to current technologies and to strategically align themselves with e-learning initiatives such as this.
Gone are the days pf PD being a bludge.
What I saw yesterday was a explosion in the engaged use of technologies to complement core teaching practice. For me it’s a dream come true and in my many discussion swith Mort the next step in that dream is in how to share those resources across the Faculty, the WIT organisation and of course through the greater mother-ship of TAFE NSW.
I’d like to thank the MEC&T Faculty and Sally Brownlow for availing me the opportunity to realise that dream of inspiring staff to employ networked learning principles in their core delivery. The next challenge will be next in showcasing such great resources across the world wide web and making best use of that oppportunity to connect with others doing similar things elsewhere.
Truly an inspiration all round 
