With this great LinkedIn Tool, via Stephen, I mapped my rather meager Linkedin network and was a bit amazed at the results. I seem to be the boundary spanner between two international schools, technology in India and the USA and various thinkers. Now how can I leverage this in the course to get an A? 
Here’s the map; the link is above.
Thanks to Thomas Baker, I found Touch Graph and mapped my more respectable FaceBook Network.
QUESTIONS
One of my early influencers when I started really studying academic technology was Jamie McKenzie. Jamie is very interested in questions within the role of learning. In fact, so much so that he started a second website just to cover this issue, https://questioning.org
In “A Questioning Toolkit“, he suggests that every school/district should develop such a toolkit composed of over a dozen types of questions. In that light, I have some (undifferentiated) questions about this assignment.
I was looking at the responses to the suggestion that we introduce ourselves. Replies came from Australia, Chile, UK, Canada, USA, Malaysia, unspecified multi-national, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, New Zealand, etc. My initial question was, “How do MOOCs like this moot or refocus the United World College mission”? “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future” What does UWC offer that these don’t? It’s important to place MOOC’s and social learning in their context. We are still human beings and face to face contact provides valuable feedback that is unavailable in any other context. So it stands to reason that at least some of our learning should and will come in a face-to-face context, or in the UWC experience, mixing students from 60-90 different countries on the same campus for two years. MOOCs provide an opportunity that brings together people who would normally not be able to meet in the same space and time. So both modes have their benefits. My deeper question is how can we leverage these modes for a greater benefit?
If learning is anytime, anywhere, anyhow, life-based and non-institutional; how in the short term do we modify our institutions to encourage this? What will be the long-term effect? What does learning in an institution look like? How do we change our classes to reflect this? What do we do about curriculi and assessment?
What is the actual biology of learning? Is the linguist (Lakoff) correct in his notion of the biological/neurological basis for frame building? In that case, does more communication make people smarter? Is this why my wife, who communicates on a scale that’s vastly different from mine, is smarter than I am?
Do modern communication tools lead to ‘skimming’ or eventually does networking promote ‘deep thinking’? As many have pointed out it’s possible to spend hours on the internet, in twitter, in facebook, etc and not find out anything more than what folks had for lunch. Just as television can fill time and rob our Cognitive Surplus (Clay Shirky), aimlessly browsing the net can do the same. When we get more intentional and begin actually using a MOOC, does this more or lesss automatically, assuming genuine interest and involvement, lead to deeper thinking?
Just asking…
If we ever really understood the amount of work entailed in turning an idea into a completed project, there would be fewer projects in this world. Something about the human psyche helps us to minimize the realities of the project for which we are volunteering. Such was the case, when a small group of Technology Directors sat in Chris Bigenho’s office last April and talked about putting our words into action. Eight months later, we’ve pulled it off. Yes, it was a lot of work, but you can see the results for yourself.
Our idea was to create a showcase for students from schools accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest to present on a theme of ”initiating innovative ideas”.
The whole idea came together rather organically. One of us said, “Let’s do something to showcase appropriate use of our technology in the educational context.” Someone else replied, “Hey, we just participated in a TEDx event and it really excited our students.” Another person found TEDx Youth Day, a celebration of the UN’s Universal Children’s Day, scheduled for November 20, 2010. It was a natural for us…a chance to work with TED and a geographically distributed event based on social networking technology. Thus was born the I-Cubed experiment. Someone, I don’t recall who, said, “Having an idea is the first 2%. The rest is blood, sweat, tears, and bruised knuckles.” I haven’t heard about any bruised knuckles, but the rest was certainly true.
Eventually, we came up with
If you’ve ever tried getting the attention of your Technology Director, you might have an idea about how hard it is to coordinate half a dozen of them in a weekly series of meetings. After some false starts, we got into the groove, and things started taking shape.
We were breaking new ground here and constantly found ourselves in a quandary about where to focus next. With TEDx Youth Day in start-up mode, we were flying blind. While, as Technology Directors, we understood our concept of a physical-virtual conference, it was hard to translate this into ‘sound bites’ that our faculty and students could understand. Time kept on ticking and we all committed ourselves to multiple planning levels to bring the project in on time.
This was the inaugural year of the TEDx Youth Day event. Guidelines from the TED people of what to expect were missing until very late in the planning process. In the middle of the registration process, for some unknown reason, TEDx decided to upgrade their registration system, taking it down for about 6 weeks. Some of us were pretty worried about having put a fair amount of work and publicity into an event that we were not sure was going to happen. TEDx got their registration system back up the first week in November and added a live-stream capability to the event.
How does one get faculty and student attention to such a new idea? Anyone who has been involved with education might think that it would be easy to get the students’ attention. After all they are always checking out the latest fad, right? Unfortunately it has to figure as a fad before they are interested. Faculty, in general, are overtaxed with their classes and other assigned tasks. Even the cheesy pitch video that we produced had only a slight affect on sign-ups. As a result we got farther and farther behind our planned timeline. However, timelines are fungible and we switched to a just-in-time tactic that probably saved the show.
Eventually, some students signed up and began working on their presentations. As I browsed through the videos that have been posted, I was constantly amazed by the sincerity with which these student presented. Whether they were talking about their modeling career, sustainability on their campus, or the effect of gravitational noise on planetary orbits, they really got into it. It was obvious that this event provided an opportunity that they were waiting for.
Another difficulty presented itself in a lack of sufficient planning personnel. People on the planning team were taking on at least two roles, planning team membership and school liaison for their school, and some also acted as host school liaison also. This pressed some of us to the limit beyond our standard tasks at school. However, everybody involved committed themselves entirely to the experiment and we believe that we’ve achieved some measure of success. Next year, we’ll add some personnel at each planning level and hopefully improve the experience for everyone.
One thing became apparent as we got further into planning. The self-inducted planning team brought all the skills, experience, ideas and follow-through to do the job. To the original team of Chris Bigenho, Dolores Gende, Jason Kern, Larry Kahn, Steve Ediger and Susan Hopper, we added ISAS representation in the persons of Rhonda Durham and Laura Brown and school hosts Jill Brown, Chris Chopin and Ann Rai. For every task, someone volunteered with the requisite skills and everybody more than pulled their weight. Some of those are listed as follows:
Planning Team: The following individuals not only did the core planning, but also filled addtional roles as hosts and/or school liaisons.
Rhonda Durham, Executive Director at ISAS, negotiated the ISAS involvement with her Board of Directors and lent us her support directly and with her staff, Laura Brown and Allison Rose.
Dolores Gende and Susan Hopper were involved in the early planning stages. Ann Rai also lent us her support in planning meetings. For various reasons, none of these were able to participate in the actual event, but they all gave their best when they could.
Jason Kern pushed us all with by setting a great example and ran initial interference with TEDx.
Larry Kahn provided a backbone of administrative assistance with our Google Docs Planning worksheet and taking up the slack in facilitating meetings when Steve was late or unavailable.
Jill Brown picked up the communication with TEDx and made them aware that the ISAS participation in their event was more than just individual schools. She also provided the student registration application.
Chris Bigenho, our webmaster, created the website and provided excellent technical assistance where needed.
Steve Ediger chaired the core planning team and produced the two pitch videos.
Hosts: These folks provided the necessary venues for hosting the November 20 event. They are joined by all of the people at each school that worked with the students to create and hone their presentations Jill Brown (Albuquerque Academy), Chris Chopin (St. Paul’s Episcopal School), Jason Kern (The Oakridge School) and Jeff Ritter (St. John’s School
The result was a set of 4 great physical events with 13 schools participating and about 33 students/student groups presenting. We learned a lot from this experiment and intend to continue it next year. We hope that you can join us.
In http://www.justmeans.com/Eliminating-Bad-Teachers-in-Education/41845.html, Lauralee Moss maintains that the pay structure in public education has, in part, created a safe haven for teachers that want to do nothing and then collect their retirement benefits. She outlines states that are eliminating fat pension benefits and asks if this will be sustainable. Perhaps it could, however, I would take a different tact.
I believe that our policy should be to shed some light on the practices of bad teachers. As peers, we need to constructively criticize our colleagues that are in need of change. Unless they hear it from peers, nothing is going to change. Collaborative professional development, making friends with a needy colleague and taking an interest in their classes would go a long way.
As parents, we need to be involved in our children’s education and confront teachers that are not up to the mark. As a parents of a dyslexic, ADHD teenager, my partner and I have spent hours each night helping with homework and additional hours each month touching base with teachers, asking why the assignments were framed in the way that they were or why they assigned obviously busywork instead of thinking work.
As administrators, we need to offer professional development, tender counsel and if necessary our presence in their classes consistently to demonstrate our requirement for improved pedagogies.
Finally, we need to be teaching our students not to accept shoddy teaching practices. One of the mantras that my generation grew up with was “Question Authority”. Questioning authority should be a firm principle for students. Of course, administration does have to protect against backlash for this to work.
I want to emphasize that this has to be done in a manner that gets results. Constructive criticism is a technical term for offering criticism that changes behavior. Dissing someone in the faculty lounge will get the opposite results. If we illuminate the bad practices, give them opportunities, and motivate them to change, we’ve turned someone with experience into a great resource. That’s a price worth paying. Eliminating the bad teachers just means less bad teachers and a gap to fill.
Let me start by saying that the word “Personal” in Personal Learning Networks has more of a connotation of me than it does of close-knit community. I’ll probably never meet 80 plus percent of my PLN. However, I constantly interact with them in direct, indirect and even tangential manners.
Rod Lucier, The Clever Sheep blog, has this to say about We are Smarter than Me, with remixes of Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly
Scenius (a tool to describe group genius) is comprised of
All of these together ensure that either we are maximizing our return on learning investment or we’re all going over the cliff together (ha ha).
I can vouch for this viewpoint; it seems to be a valid representation.
I’m always impressed with Will Richardson’s posts (a lot of people are, he deserves the credit), and his latest, “Personalizing Education for Teachers, Too” has me nodding my head once again. I don’t equate personalized education with dignified education; however there is a large measure of commonality in the two. Click here to read more
I fixed a problem that I’ve been working on for three and a half weeks today. That was elapsed time but I probably spent 5 person days on it. Too bad all I’ll get is flack for not moving ahead on other projects quickly enough. It’s not a problem that I can even explain to my users; they lose interest and eyes glaze over before I am finished with the first sentence of three paragraphs.
Poor me…lonely IT Director…nobody understands me. Why is there such a gap between those of us that create and maintain technology and those that we serve? I enjoy working with, thinking and talking about technology…not just the toys aspect but the social and educational impact. My non-tech friends, and I’m not in a place that is blessed with local tech friends (never have been), have no interest. They can’t connect their email and browsing with the societal changes that are on the way.
However there is hope, hope in our students. They are curious, unafraid and eager to explore. This doesn’t come with a bunch of knowledge and experience. It’s necessary to scale down their ideas (this one took a couple of years to realize) and do a lot of background training, but it’s worth it.
I have a set of IT Interns each semester. We’re an IB School, so this counts as part of their CAS Service hours. Part of their duties are to ensure that the dorm labs are working, have paper and report student feedback on the wireless system, etc. The other part is to assist the IT Department in projects that are about building and adding to our capabilities.
For several years, I tried many different tactics to get some finished product. It always seemed like the interns were just not up to what I wanted them to do, no matter how much instruction I provided. We tried inventorying and sorting software installation disks, fixing hardware, researching and evaluating CMS systems, rewriting the Intranet. Nothing worked, except the brilliant student who repaired a dinged up interactive white board.
Finally, this year, we hit on a formula that seems to be working better. Firstly, I turned over the facilitation of the Internship to my Help Desk Technician. He’s taken a serious interest in it and provided me relief to attend the myriad of meetings that always seem to arise during the CAS time period without cancelling that week’s internship.
Secondly, we hit on a project that is doable. We’re rebuilding obsolete systems for redistribution in the community. With a four year workstation replacement policy, I have a number of old but still working systems to deal with each year. I’ve tried this in years past, but with a linux rebuild and it never worked, because the learning curve was too steep. However, my Network Administrator suggested that we use the OEM Windows software that came licensed with the systems and install a Windows version of Open Office. This flattened the learning curve and in the two weeks, they actually built the first prototypes. They are now working out the package of other FOSSware that we’ll put on the systems and will be ready to Ghost the whole inital lot of 35 systems within the next two sessions.
So my tech life is not quite so lonely as I might think. Yea students!
I’m reading All Rise; Sombodies, Nobodies and the Politics of Dignity by Robert Fuller. Rankism, as he describes the abuse of personal power, pervades our society, including our educational institutions. Others, including Claude Steiner and Thomas Harris, have described this in terms of social relationships as one-up, one-down, Parent-Adult-Child crossed communications, etc. However, Robert Fuller really nails this as a major societal problem.
This directly impacts our educational institutions, and causes powerlessness and apathy. It’s built into our institutions with hierarchies of rank and privilege. Staff ranks over students, teachers rank over students and staff, administrators rank over everybody. Having these ranks is not the problem in itself. However, the fact that they exist ensures a power differential in relationships.
Sometimes people use their rank to get their way, just because they have the power to do so. Putting our own interests first, without considering its impact on someone who may not be able to or feel free to contradict us, treats him or her with indiginity.
How often do we treat our students as less than human, because we are the experts and they are there to learn? How often do we treat our faculty and staff as mere employees, because we’re the ones with the budget to balance? These acts whether proactive, reactive or in-active, whether considered or unconsidered, have a tremendous impact on the victims.
Of course, as Fuller says, we move between roles all the time. At work we may be real somebodies and in very powerful positions, but come home to a situation where we are nobodies and have no real power in the family. So we all proably understand the victim side of the equation. It makes us feel misunderstood and powerless.
How can we give our schools dignity? I would propose the following:
[Note: this is a rewrite of a blog that I started over a year ago. My goal is now to post once a week.]
Despite my tenuous relationship with academia as a student, I have somehow acquired the propensity to learn every day. Perhaps having been involved with microcomputers since their development has something to do with it. However, my desire to learn has far exceeded learning for my career’s sake.
I find that there is not nearly enough time in my life to pursue all of the things that I’m interested in finding out more about. When I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Coming Singularity, I got excited about the possibilities for increasing my learning capacity.
What motivates ‘life-long learners’? One thing that I’ve noticed about educators that I have admired is that they are all very curious people. They are always asking questions, kind of like living in permanent state of learning. Last year, we got a new puppy at our house, the very first for my son. ‘Strider’ is intensely curious. When he found a beetle crawling across the floor, the ensuing learning session was hilarious. He tried relating to it in every possible fashion and used all of his senses in the process.
I agree with Abraham Maslow’s placement of learning above the base of physiological, safety, belonging/love, and esteem in his ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. If you’re struggling to meet your daily necessities in order to stay alive, this probably consumes most of your attention (although you may be learning how to meet these needs more efficiently).
As I alluded to earlier, motivation is a key itself. In my job, I’m motivated everyday to learn something in order to solve problems that arise. In my personal life, it’s gone beyond problems needing solutions (although I still address them) to interests, explorations, etc. I think that when constantly exposed to learning, one simply gets into the habit.
I’m thinking about life-long learning because I sense that we’re coming into an age where learning will increasingly be the key between our survival and our extinction…but that’s material for another time.
© 2012 On the Learning Curve Theme: Pressrow by Chris Pearson
Provided by WPMU DEV -The WordPress Experts Hosted by Edublogs.org
