Communal living

I never realized just how important community was to me until my wife
and I asked our best family friends to come and live with us while
they are saving up to buy a house.
 
For many years I have written about online communities as being an
essential part of authentic learning. Yet, I have never lived in such
close quarters to another family, and thus did not know how much is
learning by being a part of a close-knit real-life community.
 
Daily I learn what actions by my children and theirs “really mean”. I
now know why personal space has so much value. I know what to expect
from our community and what my community expects of me.
 
The reason for this post is that it has gotten me thinking about our
need for a nurtured real-life community that supports everything we
attempt to change in education. While I would like to think that the
twittersphere is all that I need for support and community, I need the
people that I can look straight in the eye and brainstorm the greatest
learning activity with.
 
I guess I will just state this idea as a challenge to myself: if I am
not cultivating my real community as hard as I am doing so for my
online community, I will never be able to accomplish all of the things
I would like.
 
Or, to put it another way:
 
The number of people you can touch with your work depends upon how you
work with the people you can literally touch. (Although, that sounds a
little creepier than I wanted.)

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The cost of not doing anything…

I was in a great meeting this week where we were considering whether
or not to go ahead with a full scale implimentation of the Moodle LMS
for assessment purposes in our district. It was a great meeting not
because of the topic but the way it was being handled.
 
We were talking about the absolute costs of an open source LMS and of
staying with a custom-built assmessment solution. We were really
looking for a venn diagram moment when one of the curriculum and
instruction representatives said something really smart: “There is a
cost to not doing anything as well. It may not be a dollar cost, but
it will cost the teachers the ability to know more about their kids’
knowledge and it will cost the kids some learning opportunities.”
(Paraphrased by me.)
 
Too often we do not think about the cost of doing nothing or of doing
things too slowly. Does appathy in the face of huge choices cost our
kids the best learning years of their lives?
 
So, it got me thinking: What are the costs of doing nothing (or doing
very little) to change school?
 
Share an idea if this makes you think as much as it has made me.

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New Responsibility

I was thinking about waiting until I got a little further into the
project to start blogging about it, but since I made the choice to
start blogging daily, I have really found that this forum let’s me
think through all of the things that I need to.
 
So the new responsibility is this: I have been put in charge of
administrating multiple moodle installations in our district. The
reason why this new charge I have been given is so strange to me is
that up until 2 months ago, the only “official” moodle installation in
our district was at a high school in parker, which I had little to do
with.
 
 The reason for the shift is nothing short of an economic and
pedagogical perfect storm. Our district had slowly been building the
capacity for more and more teachers to start asking for a way of
teaching and engaging with their students online, and with the failure
of our bond election, the only choice for an LMS was to have someone
who was already working in open source to implement and support a
solution like moodle.
 
The best part is, however, that no one I have talked to thinks that we
are settling for something. From all of the initial conversations, all
stakeholders believe that professional development, online learning,
and blended learning fit well within a vision of moodle that includes
outside assessments and google apps for communication.
 
I guess the only reason for this post is to ask for advice. If you
were asked to design and implement learning environments for an online
school, a professional development program, and a blended model
(online and in centers/schools) using moodle, what would you make sure
to do (or not do)?
 
While I have a definite vision for the way forward, I am not the
smartest person in the room (considering that I have no idea how big
this room is). I want to know more… Always more.

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Bigger than pedagogy

The last two posts that I have written have talked about ideas vs. Tools. I didn’t realize it until after I had written them that I had not used the word pedagogy once. I was speaking of ideas in education, concepts, schemas for how learning works now.
 
At some point I would like to figure out a new word, though, for what I would like to see happen in schools. Pedagogy is too small and idea is too large. Pedagogy is all about the art and science of teaching. It is about best-practices and research in the classroom. And ideas are simply the supporting structures that allow us to carry on a conversation.
 
What I would like is a word that describes an understanding of connected learning, a word that explains the use of a tool for all stakeholder’s learning, not just the student’s. I want a word that keeps a network in focus at all times to show that learning is not an isolated act.
 
Well, I will be thinking about this for a bit, but what I would love to know what your word for what you would like to see within people in education. Do you want them to know the pedagogy? Do you want them to have a schema? Do you want them to just get a clue?
 
I’m interested in moving this conversation along.
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The educon 2.1 opening panel.

Idea one: The purpose of school is not to churn out a finished product. Innovation doesn’t come from a place of completion.
 
Idea two: If we mean 99 percent of the places that we call school, I would say there is no purpose.
 
The purpose should be to be THE place to go and create, learn, and build real things.
 
Idea three: The purpose changes. Does the purpose take into consideration of all cultures and ideas. It can’t just be the transmission of values, other than inquiry.
 
Idea four: The purpose of school is to create community.
 
The best thing you might be able to do in a day is getting the students to talk to one another.
 
Idea five: The purpose of school is to learn how to communicate.
 
You have to be able to present arguments and convince people that you know what you are talking about.
 
Calibrate what students know as important, difficult, and original.
 
Idea six: The purpose of school is to expose kids to people who are actually doing what is possible.
 
Perhaps it is in finding out how things really work. Perhaps it is in not knowing everything. Perhaps it is in knowing exactly what you want to do with your life.
 
Idea seven: The purpose of school is to be the great equalizer. But the system can’t keep up.
 
We need to fix it so that schools are what they should be.
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A wiki spreadsheet.

I have to say that up until recently I didn’t see what was so great about spreadsheets. I have been using them for years to analyze student achievement data and present findings to others, but the didn’t seem like the “killer-app” that so many others seem to be thinking about.
 
On the other hand, my wife speaks in spreadsheets and she can really make them sing. She can have fields reference across fifteen different sheets and set up a budget in a matter of moments.
 
This is extremely cool if all you want to do is present information or figure out what makes sense in terms of data, but as a collaborative process, I just didn’t see it.
 
That was until Google Spreadsheets started opening up anonymous access to spreadsheet using forms and protected links. I started using google forms in order to record interest in our district’s online school (http://edcsd.org). This proved an effective way of collecting specific information and storing it in a place that could be accessed from everywhere. So, in this sense, it was a mass collaboration that was added to with every entry. No one really is able to see the scale of the collaboration, that is, except for me.
 
Well that was a neat trick, but it is nothing compared to the idea of a spreadsheet wiki. One feature that was just added to google spreadsheets is the ability to share a link with others that will let others edit it without having to sign up for a google account.
 
This means that students could record data on the same spreadsheet without having to sign in. It means that achievement data (not on specific students, though) could be aggregated in one place, all without having to teach an entire staff about a new service. It means that you could keep track of all of your school’s goals with everyone adding their notes, never having to go through the extra hoop of remembering a password.
 
Perhaps best of all, it would allow all of those who do not yet see the value of massively-collaborative projects to participate in one without ever knowing about it and by using a tool they already recognize as important: spreadsheets.
 
Perhaps I am making too much out of this. Perhaps there are other tools that do this already, but as I am on a search for ways to eliminate as many logins as possible, this is one great step in the right direction.
 
Do you see any new ways of using this? Are spreadsheets more valuable now?
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The Ripe Environment: Change cannot be Institutionalized

Well, when I first started blogging about The Ripe Environment, I didn’t know that I was being edupunk, but now that I have read the powerful thinking behind the theory (Students 2.0, Stephen Downes, Bavatuesdays, D’Arcy Norman) and I believe I was. I don’t know that I really want all of the baggage that goes along with labeling myself, but I truly believe in the idea that change is about people not processes.

It takes a person to create change because vision isn’t enough. It is great to create documents and blog posts and do research projects on creating change, but unless a teacher in the classroom does something differetly or a student asks for more in the classroom, there is no way that things will shift one iota.

I happen to love the nitty gritty.

I like talking about working through significant roadblocks to change. I like convincing others that change is worth their time, that it is important.

And not just any change, we need to be moving toward Authentic Learning with such passion and ferocity that it cannot be boiled down a powerpoint presentation. Passion doesn’t come from such things. Passion only comes from a place of specific experiences, not a generic goal of creating change.

The Ripe Environment should not be about creating a hope among people that there is a movement afoot, that technology is the silver bullet or that golden jargon will save us all. The Ripe Environment is about personally expressing a need to do things better and focusing on what better really is.

I have to constantly tell myself that learning is sacred. I do it for myself. I do not share because I know what is best. I share because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is only through this act of rebellion that change will occur within others.

(I may be abstract in talking about this concept from time to time, but I really do want to talk about the personal stories and experiences that create change. Share yours in any way you know how.)

The Ripe Environment: The Markers

The “I know it when I see it” form of collaboration is no longer valid.

We need new ways to tell if learning is happening through group contribution. We need to be able to assess collaboration, but we can’t do it the same way that we assess writing or proficiency. Those skills are much easier to boil down to a continuum or rubric. Others have tried, and we have been for the most part satisfied with their traditional, enigmatic, and mostly non-educational continuums for collaboration.

These forms, however, are not worthy of our cause. They provide us with a way to see things in an abstract sense, showing a fictional path to collaboration that is just as hopeless as using the term as a buzzword to show that change is occurring.

Instead, I would like to outline the types of collaboration that occur in The Ripe Environment. These are the markers that we should be striving for and looking for:

1. Learning objects to be used by multiple learners, created by multiple learners. (This does not include one person writing or creating and the others supplying their input. True collaboration means that everyone has their fingerprints on the potting wheel.)
2. Collaborative asynchronous lists. (Never underestimate the power of listing. And yet, the power is not in the listing. It is in the reordering, reorganizing, and reconstituting a list. Think of wiki collaboration here.)
3. A followable thread of discussion (This can be through linking, commenting, or something like voicethread)
4. Shared Space with over 10 revisions (Any object or space that has been edited or revised more than ten times by multiple authors can be considered a respectable work of collaboration).
5. A mash-up or remix of anything (This type of collaboration marker is the halmark of true collaboration. The best examples are when the masher doesn’t know the mashee. That is when the unintended (but most amazing) concequences of sharing and collaboration kick in.)

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. What are the other markers of collaboration in The Ripe Environment?

Community requires tending.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story mostly about tyranny and the corruption of utopian ideals, but in the very beginning there is a passage that means something very different to me. It deals with the leadership of Mr. Jones before the rebellion, before the animals decide to take the farm into their own hands.

“The fields were full of weeds, the buildings wanted roofing, the hedges were neglected, and the animals were underfed.”

This quotation represents all of the things that happen when Mr. Jones gets too distracted to work, to maintain his environment, and to make life better for all those involved. To me, this is about not tending the community. It is about letting things lie fallow which must be uprooted and overturned to see what is underneath them.

Our communities are just like this I think, both in our classroom and outside of them. The communities within our classroom, especially the collaborative ones that we are all striving for, require an immense amount of tending. The Discovery Utopia wiki that my students are working on (and the reason that we are reading Animal Farm in the first place) is not an exception. If I do not constantly draw attention to the great things that are going on there, the community seems to just pass right on by them. If I do not look for the troubling points, the issues that nearly every student seems to be struggling with, students stop using the community. They find other ways to occupy their time. And that is one of the most interesting parts about our communities. They are communities of choice.

All communities of choice are ones that can be thriving in one minute and vacant in the next. So, how do we tend for consistency? Well, we feed the animals (is it weird that I am referring to my students as animals). We put up new buildings for them to play in. We design the space so that it is inviting and provokes the best kind of authentic creativity: their own.

I think that the lesson is pretty clear. If we do not tend to our communities, they will fail. The inhabitants will rebel and either stop using them, or turn them into something that rejects their purpose. And, if Animal Farm is any indication, the inhabitants of a untended community will become just like us and not tend to their communities. I mean that in both a virtual and real-world sense.

I hope this comes across as something other than a Language Arts teacher’s metaphorical analysis.

Observation with teacher.

I had the pleasure of observing another teacher in my school today who teaches the 8th grade. We are creating a partnership of practice (or something with less alliteration) so that we can find out exactly what good teaching looks like from different personalities, in different classrooms, with different demographics. It is something that I really don’t feel like I do enough. I know what my own teaching looks like and I know what the teaching of teachers looks like. But, how connected am I to the practice of other teachers when I can’t be in their classrooms? I must constantly remind myself that the answer to the question that authentic learning presents should not always look like MY CLASSROOM. It is the approximation of an ideal, the learning environment as work-in-progress. Plus, it gives me so much more time to reflect upon what I do that it seems ludicrous that I don’t make more time for it. No matter what my future job description looks like, I always want to observe classrooms and be a part of this. It amazes me.

1. 
• I really like the ways in which students immediately were proud of solving the puzzle. Does it approximate success?
2. 
3. 
• I like the idea of a more relevant poem.
• Is there a greater purpose for this kind of thinking/writing?
4. 
• Do kids settle for just those answers when they are enumerated?
5. 
• How can the bigger questions be answered in the student discussion as well as the teacher-led discussion?
6. 
• The relevancy to student life is easy to see. Is there any way for students to be as critical of the lyrics as they are of the news article?
7. 
• I love the modeling. What kind of modeling works the best (student created, teacher created, discussion created)?

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