Chantelle Meckenstock

It has been a while since I had time to write a blog.  My little girl is taking up all my spare time these days.  At six months she suddenly became even more demanding as she started to indicate through babbles, sounds and eye contact, what she wants, how she wants to be held and which direction she wants to go.  As a parent, my role is to respond so to encourage further communications. She is excitedly exploring the world through her ability to communicate her needs to her mother. While her movements are still restricted due to her inability to crawl yet, she is actively showing us how motivated she is to get somewhere and to obtain her prized gadgets such as the mobile phone, keyboards and remote controls.

Being responsive to a child’s early communications is key to her language development and understanding of social interaction. Ignoring  a babies’ cry or sounds will send a discouraging message to her.  So what can we learn from babies?  In truth, nothing. I say this because being responsive is reflective of our everyday communications with each other.  The only thing I might add is that sadly, we grow up and sometimes forget about the element of turn taking and two way communications, and many times, we find that we no longer respond to messages, and emails and someone sharing about their life or part of the day.  Instead, we queue our responses, or when we are physically present, we may be preoccupied with other things: we are not there for people.

Being there, I think,  is the essence of communication: being there for your baby, your child, your husband, your colleague, your friend, your acquaintances and your neighbour.

I recently have a new addition to my family:  A little girl who is now nearly 8 weeks old and she has had numerous skype video calls meeting relatives and friends from the States, UK, Malaysia and Singapore. At her age, she cannot see where the voice and picture is coming from but she can [...]

It is all too confusing a picture to compare the riots in London to those countries where young people are fighting against nepotism and dictatorship.  Here in the UK, it is mindless accusations of those who are in business – not even the rich.  There is looting, mugging and burning down of properties.  Where social [...]

It never fail to amaze me how effective Reading Reflex is.  I have recently used this technique with a five year old, and after ten sessions, the little boy is reading words like ‘roast’, ‘note’, ‘though’ and ‘host’.  Given another eight to ten sessions, this child will have a reading age of seven or eight. [...]

I have been trying some Indian restaurants locally in the UK, specifically those outside London.  I usually go in with the hope that the various offerings will not look and taste all the same.  To the discerning palate, curries are not gluey, sweet and spicy yellow mustardy gravy.  Unfortunately without fail,  this is what is [...]

It seems to me Dreyfus is making a distinction between embodied and disembodied nature of the World Wide Web, not the Internet, especially in relation to hyperlinks. He is also romanticising the era of thinking that gives prominence to the idea of Cogito ergo sum, that thinking and existing is related, and also the mind [...]

In the last five months since my last blog post, I have been through a lot of reading and discussions about digital technology.  Interacting and exchanging points of views with fellow colleagues and participants of the eLearning course at the University of Edinburgh have been a fascinating journey for me. I am now mulling over [...]

I am on to my second book, “Brace New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet” edited by Joe Lockhard and Mark Pegrum. It is like clearing the cobweb in my mind.  Having developed my teaching and education career  along with the world wide web, and the ideals of a knowledge worker, and knowledge creator, it [...]

I have been reading the book entitled ‘Challenging E-Learning in the University’ by Goodfellow and Lea (2007). Goodfellow and Lea, with background in linguistics, bring interesting perspectives and raise pertinent questions about what constitutes learning in University.  They focus on the academic literacies required with the introduction of technology driven learning management frameworks which have [...]

“Which era in history would you like to be born?” I asked my tutee. After much thought, he said during the Stone Age! While he is constructing his arguments, I ponder about our era. This time, the dreaded arctic wind in the UK; some schools have been closed for a whole week now. Many school [...]