Question 173 of 365: What should an interview be?

I am on a panel to help choose the next Director of Online Learning at the Colorado Department of Education. The panel itself is an cross-section of interests, from higher education to non-profits to multi-district online programs, each of the people who are interviewing the candidates is looking for something  different. And, truly, that is the way it should be. If we were all looking for the same thing, there probably wouldn’t be any need for an interview at all. We could just decide based upon the resumes alone.

The interviews commenced today and all 9 of us were able to ask our predetermined questions. We listened as this candidate answered to the best of his ability, and we feverishly scribbled notes on the official document, our own personal notepad, or (in my case) typed in a few thoughts on a brainstorming app on the iPad. The hour it took to hear all of what this person had to offer was not an undaunting task for either side. I’m sure that he struggled in some of the questions more than he let on and I’m sure that there was some struggle on our part to really see how well we could get to know him in the short time we were allotted.

The more that I thought about the process we underwent and the process that happens in so many conference rooms every day is incredibly strange. We sit together and grill someone on questions that will ultimately decide their fate, but are incredibly inadequate to determining if they would actually do a good job in the position for which they have applied. The questions we asked, about vision and communication and specific data and standards, all of them were in an attempt to paint a picture of who this person is. But, what we really want to know (or at least what we should want to know) is who this person would be in this position. Because we had no crystal ball today (neither the candidate or the interviewers), no one could really see what it would be like to have him leading the department.

Even though we do not have such a gift of seeing into the future and predicting the fit that a particular person would have within a given position, I think that we have the tools for which we could create a much better process for getting the right person for the job. Here is what I have in mind:

• Day in the life: I would like the candidates to take us through a day in the life of what he or she is doing currently, showing us concrete situations that cater to their strengths. The easiest way to do this would be to collect some objects that are of significance to their work (reports, documents, presentations, etc.) and show off their workflow within them in a synchronous format (live or in a virtual setting0. I would also like to demonstrate a day in the life of the position they are applying for. This would allow them to get a feel for exactly what they are getting themselves into. I think the easiest way to do this would be to take a snapshot of the director’s computer screen every few minutes and then do a time lapse of activities. I could also see this working for the candidate’s demonstration as well.
• Real problems: Rather than asking generic questions, I would really love to see how a candidate would solve an issue that is concerning the current stakeholders. I think that the products from this type of collaborative work to solve a single issue would provide a much better comparison of applicants than simply asking them about a problem they have solved in the past.
• Learning Network: I would like to know more about who these people turn to for advice and learning. I would like to see who their learning network consists of. To me, each of these candidates should have to demonstrate just how they go about dealing with a question that they don’t know the answer to. I would actually like to watch them put in a request to their learning network and see how long it takes to get a series of responses. A decent set of responses in a short amount of time would say to me that this person actually has set up a system of support that will be of value to the whole organization. It says that we are not only hiring this person but also all of the people that she or he knows.

While these may be a radical shift away from current interviewing practices, I actually believe that an emphasis on these three things is going to allow us to compare apples to apples. It will also show just how hard it is to fake your way through actual work, rather than just being able to interview well. It will show exactly what we value as well, which I think is important in any economic climate, regardless of how desperately the candidate is for the position or how desperate we are to fill it. In the end, our values are what will cause someone to stay with a job long enough to create lasting change and sustained growth. Let’s make sure they match up.

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• Why I don’t do interviews (scripting.com)
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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?

Not knowing what I can share

For a week or more I have been conflicted about knowing what I can share from a class I co-taught this week on Best Practices for Online teaching and learning (yes, I know that I have blogged about there being no such thing as “best practices”). The reason why I am conflicted is because I do not own all of the rights to the content within the course and I have never tried to share the work of other adults amongst whom some are reluctant to have open classrooms. Because my district would like to take a look at running this course again and again internally and eventually running it for other districts as well, it would be hard for me to share the actual content of the course that I co-created (with my good friend Liz Walhof).

This saddens me because I am the type of person who has to share what is going on, has to add value to the work that is going on in changing the way education works. I really would like to share just how a hybrid course can look for professional development (we met on Monday, had asynchronous learning on Tuesday and met again on Wednesday with an extended skype session). I would like to share just how excited I am for people getting down to the business of making authentic learning objects with students and using Personal Learning Networks within an LMS. However, I respect the fact that I am not the only one who took part in the creation or learning of this class. I realize that I do not have all of the answers on this blog as well.

So, what I have decided to is to is to slowly take bits and pieces of things that I have learned from the course as well as things that were created during the course and share them on this blog. By doing this, I can satisfy my need to share as well as fulfill my obligations to show that there is valuable content within the course itself.

Here is the first set of objects, three visual representations of PLNs by members of this class:

I quite like how this activity turned out. I hope you do too.

No one else is neccesary…

I had a great conversation today with a fellow teacher and learner. We were talking about traditional elearning and what separates what we would like to do in the future. My contention is that traditional elearning consists of three things:

1. Learning Modules (Text and Pictures that make up the bulk of “the instruction”)
2. Learning Objects (Media files and hyperlinks including movies, presentations, audio, etc.)
3. Assessments (Formal checks on learning that are tied to a tracking system/LMS or informal checks that are just for the learner)

The reason why this is the traditional model is that it doesn’t require anyone other than a single learner to take part. The learning is the same regardless of if there are 3 or 300 people in the class.

Now, many people would say that traditional elearning also has an element of communication in the form of a forum/discussion board and e-mail. I would agree that this is indeed a feature of much online learning in the traditional mode. However, I would caution that only a good teacher that can model social uses of these tools. Forums and e-mail can very quickly become a space where there is very little collaboration, and much more question and response. In other words, it is very hard to build something together if all responses cannot live beyond the initial impetus for them (beyond the week of the course when they were asked… etc.)

So, what I am thinking that the only difference for connected elearning is the social tools we use to teach within it. These require someone else to be a part of the class, because otherwise, there is no one to create knowledge with. Here is what we came up with as the key features of a social elearning environment:

• Communicating, collecting, and commenting on knowledge from the users of the course (In a blog or wiki format it makes sense to have students repurpose the course content for their own spaces. The depth of knowledge becomes apparent very quickly when each lesson can be made their own)
• Learning Object Creation (Creating exemplars to be used again within future versions of the course)
• Learning network creation (i.e., How do I find other people interested in the things I am interested in? How do I find out more or go deeper? How does this knowledge live beyond this class?)
• Authentic Assessments (Projects that require their Learning Network through which understanding is proven. No project can be completed without resources and people from outside of the class itself.)

So, the question I ask is what else is missing? What are the other aspects of “new elearning” make it different from a traditional Powerpoint and quiz format?

Pilot with purpose

I want to make sure that I talk about this before I lose sight of the student’s faces when they started…

Today I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with many of the students in our online school for CSAP testing. It was the first time that I had seen them in a situation that required them to be a part of the school without their parents. While I really enjoy talking to the parents of our online schools students, I miss kids so much that I will take any chance to talk with them about how they are learning and enjoing their school experiences.

Today, I was able to pull the 8th graders aside and ask them if they would like a space to express themselves and collaborate together. Without hesitation, they said yes. They wanted to pilot the use of sites as a “facebook lite”, where they were able to create a page for themselves and receieve comments and attach photos, audio, and video.

Now, I am not asking them to pilot this use for my own purposes. I genuinely want students to be able to collaborate in a setting where they know (not hope) that only the people that are in the group can see it. I want to explore the possiblity of having a student generated portfolio where they are the ones that decide what is important enough to post.

So, as three students were using the computers after the CSAP test in order to create garageband tracks and then embedding them on the site, I was seeing the ways in which self-organizing collaboration is the future of online learning. I would like to see so much more of my students creating objects on their own and then creating spaces for those objects. All we have to do is give them the tools and model their academic use.

The goal is to show this space as an example for what is possible… I will definitely be checking in often with them and showing them how to continue to express themselves safely and collaboratively. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

A coalition of the willing: Online Learning in Colorado

One of the biggest things that I learned from CoLearning 2009, was that if the conversations about change in education are easier to have with people around the world than they are to have with people around the state, there is something intensely wrong about that. It also challenged me to think up new ways to connect with those immediately around me and to break down all of the barriers to those connections as possible.

One of the easiest barriers I see that needs to be broken down, is simply not knowing who the other people are who are working similar projects around my state. As much as I would like to think of myself as holding a unique position and looking for unique answers about online learning, I don’t know this to be the case at all because I have only talked with a few of the people that could possibly be a part of the process.

In an effort to rectify this, I have gone ahead and created a Google Spreadsheet of all of the Online Learning programs that were registered with CDE this year. I have populated it with all of the information that I could find on each program’s “change agent”. Now, I don’t necccesarily want to talk to the directors or chief academic officers of these organizations. What I really want are the people who would be most interested in sharing trade secrets and opening up the lines of communication within the group of people. I have highlighted red all of the people that I believe are already change agents within their organizations.

My hope is that by leaving this spreadsheet open to any editing (go ahead, edit it and add your own information), we will be able to get enough people together to have a good conversation about the best way to do Online Learning in Colorado. I have also put a second sheet in the spreadsheet to examine the timeline of all of the Colorado online programs. I don’t have everything in there, but I think it is a good start. Feel free to change the contact information, website, or even the name of a program. I have claimed no monopoly on truth here. I am simply asking for the network’s best effort. Have at it.