Kakuta Haruo---Decoding Japan---

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Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Autumn, at last

Kishiwada Danjiri Festival has gone. The festival is said to bring Autumn to Kishu-ji, the southern part of Osaka Prefecture. So it does, rice plants along the street from Higashi-Kishiwada Station to the school have started ripening, bending their ears.

Kinofu koso sanahe torishika itsuno
mani inaba soyogite akikazeno fuku
(from Kokin-shu)
It was yesterday that we planted rice.
Time flies.
Rice plants are bending under autumn winds.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Management of Educational Technology (MET)

I'm starting researching on Management of Educational Technology (MET). I ought not only to learn from MOT (Management of Technology) but also investigate the processes of developing and/or introducing new teaching technologies. Teachers are professionals of teaching, and teaching needs technologies. Then teachaers should either develop technologies by themselves or learn them from others. To improve teaching/learning processes, we should vitalize the developing and/or learning processes of teaching technologies. That is MET.
In MET, how to deal with teachers is one of keys. In general, professionals are to be treated differently than other workers or laborers, whether you like the idea of such discriminative treatment or not. Treatment enhances motivation. Teachers are,first, to be motivated to introduce new teaching technologies into their classes. Motivated teaches, disatisfied with existing technologies, would proceed to developing new technologies. Enhancing teachers' eagerness for introducing new teaching technologies is, therefore essential.
Can teachers develop new teaching technologies all by themselves? There might be some dificulties: Teachers tend to be too busy to spare enough time to browse existing technologies and to find seeds for new ones. Some new technologies need infrastructures such as IT, and most schools other than colleges not noly lack that type of infrastructures but also are short of enough IT-related human resources.
Cooperation is what is needed to step up the promotion of new teaching technologies. The whole prosess can be understood as Management of Teaching Technology (MTT). Is managing teaching technologies enough? English, or any language at large, cannot be acquired without its active usage. Learning process is thus very important, and the importance leads to necessity for management of learning technology (MLT). MTT and MLT constitute MET.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Is September Autumn?

Clouds are telling that the autumn has come high above in the sky. How about low on the ground?Kishiwada Danjiri Festival will be held on 16 and 17 this year, on Saturday and Sunday. The festival had been held on KEIRO-NO-HI (Respect-for-theAged Day) and the day before, but the holiday was moved to another day. That decreased the number of tourists last year.TSUKIMI-MATSURI (the moon-viewing festival) held around MOZU-HACHIMAN Shrine near my neighbourhood is still following the traditional lunar calendar, thanks to its unpopularity.Those festivals around this time of the year are commonly called AKI-MATSURI (autumn festivals), which sounds odd in recent years.The severely hot tempreture of the last September caused a trouble on Izumi's sports day. That had us move the day to the first term. The heat which we still have here seems to be endorsing our dicision.

Aki kinuto. Me ni wa sayakani. Mie ne domo. Kaze no oto ni zo.
Odorokarenuru.
FUJIWARA TOSHIYUKI
(Has the autumn already come? None of its signs can I see here. Yet I'm
surprised to sense and hear the wind's whisper and sound.)