Why online PD must be better.

1. Right now, we are asking teachers to learn in an unfamiliar and, many times, unintuitive way.
2. Right now, we are asking teachers to teacher themselves without any connection to a network.
3. Right now, we are asking teachers to be experts in course creation without seeing any real examples of good online teaching.
4. Right now, we are dealing with “good enough” tools when we should be pushing for the right tools for the right learning.
5. Right now, we believe that everyone will need online learning in the future without really defining what we want our future to be. We are reacting to every new fad technology and not putting together our own vision for how things can and should work.
6. Right now, our teams are not collaborating.
7. Right now, we are not asking questions when we create learning environments. We are simply accepting the environments that exist and building within them.
8. Right now, we are focused on the tools and not the concepts we are trying to teach.
9. Right now, we are unable to isolate the skills from the technology.
10. Right now, we are telling one another that we are doing something great and that each of us is a pioneer, when all we have really done is translated an old style of teaching into 21st century formats.

If we can’t give context, meaning, and perspective to our teachers, how do we expect our teachers to be able to impart them to our children?

Two things I have learned from blogging

The following is an excerpt from an e-mail that I sent out earlier to a group of people in my district who are interested in using social media to get all people within the district to be a part of the decision making process (good idea, if you ask me):

The two key things that I have learned from blogging for the last 5 years are as follows:

1. You have to build credibility and authority by joining the conversation from a place of almost no authority and credibility. In the online world, your title doesn’t mean much. You have to build respect by creating a volume of content that just can’t be ignored, making sure that it is relevant and meaningful to some audience, no matter how small.
2. You have to make your voice searchable. Tag the heck out of your contributions on twitter, delicious, and your blog. If people can’t find your side of the story, they will simply assume that someone else’s is all that exists.

The Ripe Environment for Authentic Learning: TIE 2008

The process of creating a Ripe Environment for Authentic Learning is one that must be experienced rather than explained, so it is my most sincere hope that you experience The Ripe Environment today and that you take ownership enough of it to take it with you when you leave today.

Let’s start with the basics, though: defining our terms.

Authentic Learning: Learning for a Real Purpose and with a Real Audience.

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6. It’s the Content, Stupid.

• That is why we use blogs to communicate, not because they are easy, not
  because they are more collaborative, it is simply because they let the
  content speak for itself. Without content you are nothing. Without
  great ideas there is no hope for the future. It is the content that
  matters, not the format. That is why we do blogs, to pull content up
  through the rss straw, roll it around in our mouth-like readers,
  tasting each smooth milkshake post and swallow it down, totally
  satisfying our desire to fill our bellies with content.

7. The Marks of Collaboration

• The Digital Literacy Toolbox (521 revisions at last count)

8. Independent and Interdependent Questioners

• Ask a question here.
• Create something new here:

9. Change Cannot be Institutionalized

• Edupunk heroes

10. The Most Powerful Learning

• The typewriter vs. the fully connected blog post.

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?