Learning is Change

Here is an e-mail that I sent out just a few minutes ago to the team that is helping to decide the fate of Google Apps for Education in our district. Please comment as you see fit:

Something that came up in our meeting today has stayed with me all night and really got me thinking about the purpose of our work toward using any collaborative suite within DCSD. It was the simply asked as “What was the question that Google Apps is the answer to?” Or, to put it another way, is there a need (stated or unstated) that exists for this toolset, or are we simply introducing an unnecessary complication to the process of our overall strategy.

It is clear to me that there isn’t a mass of people people clamoring for synchronous collaborative tools. It isn’t exactly on the tip of everyone’s tongue in our district, and in many ways, I believe that many people would say that there are lower hanging fruit or “bigger fish to fry.” Even in many of the needs assessments that have been conducted for Project Click [our overall strategy for leveraging technology for all stakeholders in our district], the synchronous editing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations hasn’t been overwhelming. So, if the need doesn’t exist (or if the need is only voiced by “power users”), of what value is pushing forward with a rollout (whether in a few months or much later)?

It is my belief that the toolset that Google Apps provides is in the cliched quadrant that exists where many users “don’t know what they don’t know”. The reason why the specific question of “how do I write a document with other people at the same time” hasn’t been asked by many people, is that they don’t know that it is a possibility, or that they haven’t seen how it can shift learning.

So, my guess is that the questions that Google Apps (or some other collaborative suite) is an answer to are as follows:

1. How do I maximize a small number of computers or short times on those computers so that all kids/adults can participate on a single project?
2. How do I plan a unit’s worth of lessons (or do create a grant proposal, or outline job responsibilities) with the person down the hall (and in another school) in the hour before I have to teach the first lesson (or give the presentation, or submit a recommendation)?
3. How can I avoid sitting through 120 presentations on a given topic without resorting to group work without individual responsibility?
4. How can I make commenting, peer review, and reflection an integral part of the writing process?
5. How can I better conduct action research on the fly with others in an easy place to keep track of it?

These are questions I have heard and questions that I have had. For each of them, Google Apps has been “an” answer. This does not mean that we won’t hear the specific needs request for all of the tools that Google Apps has to offer, but I believe that we are more likely to hear things like this that really speak to needs of pedagogy or process. They speak to a lack of knowledge for what exists, but a willingness to find out more.

Perhaps it took until today for me to figure out that the use of a Google Apps for Education domain (or a like-tool) is not meant to be a stop-gap at all. It isn’t really meant to be for the current needs of our district. It is meant to reach for the future needs of our community. It can be used to answer the questions that we haven’t been able to provide answers for, yet.

Anyway, this is what I have been thinking about tonight. Thoughts?

I have been a part of way too many meetings recently when there haven’t been any current teachers present, yet teaching decisions were being made. True, one of the reasons why I wanted to move into my current position was because I wanted to be able to make decisions in our district regarding learning spaces and tools. But, I believed that everyone shared my level of respect for teachers. However, this is definitely not the case.

I cannot stand to hear long stretches of monologue about the ineptitude of teachers. I cannot handle it when teachers are reduced to knowing nothing. I cannot wait to leave places when others are complaining about the rogue teachers who are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in the district.

I love teaching and teachers, and the majority of other teachers that I have encountered feel the same. It is only when I get outside of a school itself that this view changes. But, why?

Why is it that the perspective changes so drastically when kids are removed from the situation, making someone believe that they know better than someone that is with the kids? This kind of viewpoint makes me believe more strongly every day that all stakeholders in a district should teach at least one class at all times.

That bears repeating:

All district employees should teach at least one class to students at all times.

Can I get an amen?

I woke up this morning to this e-mail:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

I can’t say that I was surprised. Although, 12 or so months ago I would have been.

I’m not sure what made me believe that all of these free services would just continue without any sense of a business model or support from their parent company. I think I had a special kind of naivete  that allowed me to believe that Web 2.0 would all just sort itself out without anyone really taking responsibility for millions dollars spent in development without any return on the money.

I don’t think that I can be so naive anymore. In fact, in the hopes that I will no longer be duped by the all flash and no substance of a new tool, I am writing down some rules that will guide my tool choice and promotion.

I wrote this impassioned e-mail in response to a discussion about using Google Docs within our district. You may be able to sense the passion, but I hope it is at least somewhat of a restrained response:

I only know that I have seen and experienced for myself, my students, and for the adults I have worked with closely (in both real and virtual environments), but I thought that I would share a few thoughts.

I do not believe that we should consider Google Docs as a replacement for Word or as a competitor for OpenOffice. It just can’t compete, and I think that telling teachers and students that it is a good replacement for those tools would definitely blow up in our faces.

The only reason why we should be considering Google Docs is because of its collaborative toolset. It isn’t about creating the same thing in a different space, as OpenOffice or StarOffice would be. It is about changing the paradigm of creation. Although having things stored in a cloud is nice becasue you can access them from anywhere, this is something we could do in a decent way when Universal Content Management is up and running.

Although sharing a single document/presentation/spreadsheet and working on it together does not seem like a game changer, my experience has been just the opposite. When I introduce the idea of live-collaboration on documents, both adults and students shift their thinking. They no longer consider doing everything by themselves. They start to have an instinct of clicking on the share button first, even before there are words on the page.

Concretely, when students have access to this tool, they plan their own projects. They are able to own their learning much easier than with trading files and keeping things separate. For example, before I left the classroom, I used to do a National Novel Writing Month project where each student tried to write a novel in one month. We wrote these on google docs and then shared them with one another for commenting. We also had a single document for planning and keeping track of numbers of words (a short novel being 50,000 words). It was a terrific success, but that isn’t what I found valuable. After I left, my kids wanted to do it again the next year. Although they had no class that was asking them to do this, and no formal after school club, they set up the organizing document and started linking their own novels into it. They were able to organize writing a few hundred thousand words simply by having the tool to do so. (Although this may sound like wikis would fit the bill here, but on many occasions, students would use the Google Docs as a defacto meeting place when they were at home or in different parts of the school. They would ask questions of one another and make comments while 3 or more people were looking at the same thing.)

As for adults, the shift comes in when work is actually done. Putting Google Docs (or a similar synchonous collaboration tool) into the mix allows the work to get done in the meeting, rather than after the meetings. It allows for teachers to collaboratively lesson plan. It allows for the best ideas to come together without having to wait until “you do your revision”. To include a real-world example, when our Language Arts department was trying to come together on non-negotiable verbage in the classroom, using a Google Doc allowed us to all put our initial ideas on the white space (including the shy members) and then publicly comment on them. It shifted our conversation from debating words on butcher paper, to actually crafting the best language to use with students.

I know you can all tell that I am pretty passionate about collaboration. However, I also believe in the security of data surrounding that collaboration. If it takes longer to get a Google Docs integration right, so be it. But, I am not interested in having adults or students create in the same ways that they always have. We need to move them forward because these are the tools of the modern workplace. If we are not teaching them to collaborate as an instinct then I’m not sure that we are doing the job we are here to do.

I just want to say thank you to **** for “throwing these things out for discussion”. The best plans I have been a part of are when smart people get together and debate things out. I think that there needs to be a lot more serious discussion on whether or not other collaborative tools could perform the work of Google Docs for sure.

Thoughts?

I was trying to figure out a very specific question today and I have been pretty much stumped ever since.

The question is this: Is there a free webtool that I can use to create interactive drag and drop activities to illustrate a point (The kind of stuff you would have a kid go up on a Smart Board for, where they drag something from one side of the screen into the correct category)?

So far I have come up with these not quite right solutions:

1. Draggable – a Java Script library that allow for some pretty cool interactive objects on a site, but requires a pretty hefty familiarity with html and web servers.
2. jClic – a Wonderful Java Webstart program that allows you to author and save a java application for drag and drop (and matching too) activities. This is specifically designed for the elearning crowd.
3. Dragster – By far the most robust tool that I found, but it costs and it is more sophisticated than I would ever wish on someone who is just wrapping their head around wikis.

So, while I am still looking for an answer (I’m looking at you network), I will be playing with easily the coolest thing I found all day: Produle. Produle is an extremely easy to use interface for creating flash applications (without any programming). I couldn’t believe some of the stuff it would let you do, like add rss feeds, map buttons to data, and even publish your flash anywhere you would like.

While I have never liked the idea of having content trapped within a flash application, I think that it does make sense… it does have some uses. I had a great conversation with an online school colleague earlier this week, during which he said that there was no way that we were going to be able to compete with corporate elearning outfits because of their slick flash objects and project teams. Well, with something like Produle, I think we may have taken at least one feather out of their cap.

We need to be able to create learning objects of all types and share them across any learning management system. No matter how closed flash is, it is a universal format for the web. It can be played by any machine and any LMS. We would have to be pretty foolish not to at least use a freely available tool to create some decent content.

So, I guess my post has two purposes tonight.

1. I want an answer to my original question.
2. To ask this question too: What are the things that you have seen in other learning spaces that you would like to be able to do in your own? What is holding you back?

For the longest time, I really thought that getting content for an elearning platform was the hardest part (or at least the most expensive). Now, though, I really think that getting quality content for an online school is getting easier and easier. Now that I have the option of using all of the moodle and SCORM resources that are available, I think we may be able to focus on the actual teaching part rather than just writing curriculum and having to settle for something that is second rate. Anyway, here is what I am looking at right now:

1. OpenLearn – Here is a large list of entirely downloadable and importable courses for moodle that are of good quality and are built for asynchronous. They are creative commons liscensed, so let’s share alike.
2. The Moodle Course Exchange Portal – This is a starting place to get at many courses that have been made in moodle. I feel as though this site is really in the early stages (they are going to start promoting more heavily after Moodle 2.0 comes out), but it does have some good links to quiz questions and scorm components.
3. The Moodle Commons – This is also a site that is just getting started, but there are some high quality courses there (only about 5)
4. Moodle Share – Again, not a whole lot going on here, yet. But a resource, nonetheless.
5. OER Project (from New Zealand) – Really nice courses that are ready to go. Again, only a handful as of right now.

Alright, so it isn’t everything to everyone, but I think that there are a few places to go to start building a good online school. Please let me know if you know of any other repositories that put their content into moodle backup format.

I realized that my last post lacked a little context, so I am giving it now. Yesterday, an online school (http://twitter.com/iHighVirtualSD) decided to follow me on twitter. It got me thinking. How many other online schools are already in this space (either as entities or as representatives who put their virtual school into their own profile)… I used http://tweepsearch.com/ to find these:

• http://twitter.com/EDgal
• http://twitter.com/Micki_Wingate (hasn’t posted since July 23rd)
• @virtualparent
• @Connections4U
• @MsLivFLVS
• @Carrie_Jean
• @julie_rose_
• @jennobles
• @baldy7
• @bb915
• @kurquhart
• @magzmom
• @glad2be
• @schultzem
• @crescentprephs
• @onlinehigh
• PennFoster
• LaurelSprings
• @unkwillow
• @Online_Courses
• @catalyst11

I am sure that there are more out there, but my point is this: Some of these twitter accounts are people, and some are representing an organization. While I may want to pay attention to an organization’s updates, I am not intersted in engaging them in a conversation. The schools that use twitter most effectly are going to be the ones who realize that it is a two-way medium and not something to simply broadcast whatever PR sounds good to the person holding the keys to the account at the moment.

I guess I am still looking for a good twitter profile that speaks for many, speaks to many, and listens to even more.

I have had quite a few people follow me on twitter recently that weren’t exactly people. They were organizations and schools. They were large groups of people that all somehow are tweeting with the same account. This, is a little unsettling to me and I’m not sure why.
 
I guess it is partially because I believe it is a little less than genuine to have a single voice represent an entire entity. I also believe that many groups are joining twitter simply to advertise that they are on twitter. This is even less genuine.
 
To me, an organization should encourage all of it’s members to become a part of a learning network. It should ask all of it’s employees to have heir own voices and then stream them all into a single place. The school should aggregate the conversation about learning in their space, not merely give updates as to the merits of their latest program changes.
 
You raise the level or discourse about any topic by giving that discourse an official channel. By asking all participants in an organization to tweet on behalf of that organization, you can actually find the pulse of what is going on. Which is, after all, the major goal of Twitter.
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

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?