Question 47 of 365: To whom are we beholden?

I ask this question on the periphery of a lot of the questions that I pose. I would like to know just to whom we owe our talents and our learning. To whom are we beholden for our knowledge, for our engaged relationships and open-ended conversations. I believe that we are required to be beholden to one another simply by the structures that we create within our own environments. We construct a platform just so that we can rely on others for its use. We create steps forward that require us to use the hands of those that go before us in order to pull us up.

While this level of metaphor is nice, I would like to dig into the concrete. I believe that we are beholden to the people that offer us a taste. We must lean upon the people who give us the first introduction into an idea and then allow us to engage further. We are beholden to the early adopters, the fanboys and the mascots. We must believe in these people in order for them to give us their insights. These insights are non-negotiable fore us. We need them in order to survive. It allow us to not have to be on the bleeding edge all of the time.

We are beholden to the people who show us twitter, and how to use it in our own organizations. We are beholden to the people who show us how to screencast better. We ware beholden to those who show us how to remix (especially the ones who make us rethink our conceptions of what a remix can be… like creating a song-like discussion on Jamglue or do a remixed voiceover on a mathcast). We owe a lot to those who showed us how to not use bullet points in a slideshow. We are indebted to those who figured out backchannels before us.

We are beholden to these people because they have shown us what is possible. I want to contribute to this thinking. In fact, I want people to be beholden to me. I want them to look at me as a pioneer at something that will allow them to point a finger and say that I started them on the path toward better engagement or learning. While I don’t care why they point at me (even if it is to just laugh), for some reason I want that to be a part of something that can be an example of what to do next.

We are held together in a network and we are beholden to one another, but I think that we need to start working the tools and workflows back into their originators hands. We need to figure out just who the most important nodes of our network are and then work to figure out why they are so essential. We need to make ourselves that essential. We need to become those nodes. Those really hard questions about interdependence need to be had now, and we need to make sure that the answers we come up with do not take the relationship out of the picture. We need to be beholden to one another. We need to create the space for leaning on one another for what we need.

The real question is: Can I let myself be beholden? Today I would like to be beholden to @mwacker. I know that he will pick up where I leave off, but there is some part of me that still struggles because I can’t hand off the conversation and trust that there are other people who will take it up. I need to know that the people that I am going to put my faith in, will continue the work that I have started. But, I guess that is a part of being beholden. You don’t quite know what will come afterwards. You have to trust that the plans will be there. You have to trust that your engagement will be enough to draw out even the biggest skeptic. You have to engage in the process of coming together and learning from one another.

So,stated simply, we to figure out who the hubs are in our networks, become the hubs ourselves, and engage one another in the process of reliance and collaboration. We need to create networks where everyone is needed. We need to create spaces that actually have space for users. We need to have the facilitators spaces, and we need to have the back-channeling expert. We need to share far and wide about these spaces and who we need in those spaces to make them complete. We need to be beholden to others, but we need to pic who those “others” are.

How do you take attendance (or engagement)?

When the students are directly in front of you, it is easy. You count up the number of kids and see just who they are. There you go: attendance.

When you use wikis and blogs, but the kids are still staring at you during the day, it is still pretty easy. Count up the kids. Measure the contributions. Viola: attendance and participation.

When you do not see the kids every day (or at all) and your class IS the wiki or blog. How, then, do you measure attendence? If you had to report out on whether or not a student was present on any given day, can you turn to the edits that they made on the wiki or comments on the blog and say that they attended? If we start to measure the quality of the edit or the level of thought behind a comment, then we are starting to measure something different entirely. We are measuring engagement.

But, perhaps that is what we should be measuring anyway. Perhaps we should not have information systems that measure whether or not your body was there physically or your eyes were scanning the material, but if, instead, you were truly engaged and making substinative contributions to the classroom environment.

The reason why I am thinking about this right now is I have to decide if an LMS is truly worth the effort to set up for adult learners. Is it important to have courses held within a place that requires a login and allows for a lot less co-creation, or can I have a course held entirely in a wiki, producing a network of learners that are continually making the course and the learning experience better?

I came across this course the other day and I think that it describes quite  a little bit of what I am talking about. In this course, all participants go through the wiki’s activities and discussions as they co-create knowledge. But, who is to say that anyone actually attended? Would we be able to say to a learning institution (school, state department of education, university) that this list of people underwent professional development of the caliber that would advance their degree, their continuing education credts, or is it just a nice experience.

So, I guess my question is two fold:

1. Can we take attendence on a wiki/blog or do we need an LMS?
2. Do we need a different paradigm for tracking learners that focuses on engagement rather than attendance (and how do we get there)?

Live Blogging With AHS students.

On
Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of listening to some of the most
unique voices in the discussion over Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.
These voices did not come from an “expert” being paid thousands of
dollars for a breakfast engagement. They did not come from a literary
analyst who picked apart Pink’s prose with perfect clarity and wit.
They came from Arapahoe high school students that were eager to create a conversation, expansive and intense. Check out the discourse for yourselves.

We
took a look at one of Pink’s chapters specifically: Story. I especially
liked how the conversation evolved over the course of the hour that we
blogged. It seemed to start from a place of pure story, then it evolved
into something about the future of the workplace. Then we got very
theoretical. We started talking about how story can influence memory
and how memory influences story. Even though Pink devotes quite a bit
of time to this idea, I really like the way the students were able to
incorporate it into their thinking. It really got me to start
reflecting on what the purpose of crafting learning environments can
be.

If we create an environment that is ripe enough to learn
within then we are creating an experience; we are crafting the story of
that learning. In turn that learning becomes a memory, one that will be
told over and over as a story if it is good enough. So, in truth, we
are trying to create learning memories for students, ones that they
will hold onto long after they have forgotten the names of their
classmates or what day of the week it was on. We want to create
memories that are so lasting that the events take on mythical
proportions, they start living on as stories of their own.

Is
there a way of analyzing the ways in which we tell stories about our
high school experience to our friends from that time period? Is there a
way to know whether or not those experiences were learning based or
extraneous (not that they were bad things, mind you)? My question to
those students, and to anyone who reads this blog is what is a learning
memory that you have? What is the one experience in an authentic
learning environment that you will never be able to forget?

(Special thanks to Karl Fisch for setting up this amazing opportunity. More of this kind of collaboration and conversation is needed desperately.)

Parents as School 2.0 Stakeholders

Convincing parents that the skills of School 2.0 are important is going to be one of the biggest jobs facing all teaching in the very near future. I have outlined in this podcast three possible ways of accomplishing this goal:
1. Student exemplars of continual advancement.
2. Constant communication and reflection on learning between parents and teachers, students and teachers, and parents and students.
3. Parent and Student testimonials of engagement and achievement.

My hope is that by identifying the things that are the most convincing to parents, we can create a compelling argument for technological school reform.