Learning is Change

As I am working hard to roll out Google Apps for Education for our online school, I am struggling to find the community that supports it. With all of the great things that Google Apps has to offer, it is mind boggling that there wouldn’t be a single community spaces (or even a series of well-developed communities) that would be talking about best practices for collaborative document creation or the easiest ways to communicate with students using global contact lists.

Does this place exist?

Well, this is what I have found so far:

• Wissahickon School District’s eT » Google Apps

• teamherricksweb20 » Google Apps

• cybercamp » Google Apps Education — MyraG

• Google Apps for ePortfolios

• 339 Tiger Den ?(339 Tech Tiger Den?)

• Welcome ?(About Google Sites?)

• Kellyville Public Schools: Kellyville and Google Apps.

• YouTube – Teachers and Principals Talk about Google Docs

• Techspo Google Docs And Sites

• Google Apps and Email- Parent Letter

• Google Apps – Education Editon ?(Google Almanac?)

• The Google Suite

• Home ?(Google Apps Center?)

• Google Apps For Education

• Google Apps implementation – Independent School Educators network

But, these sites are not enough to me. I want a conversation about student learning with Google Apps. And the way that it will start is by stating in one place just who is using Google Apps for Education and how to contact them to ask questions. One of my favorite bloggers, presenters, and teachers (Lucy Gray) has taken us in that direction quite a bit by offering a Google Form to identify yourself.

Please go and add yourself!

And, here are the results (some ussual suspects, but many potential collaborators that I have never made contact with).

The next step in this process of creating community around the topic is to tag every blog post, presentation, and wiki edit, tweet and video with “GoogleAppsEd” or #GoogleAppsEd.

I want to see us start tagging ourselves as GAE users, not because we love Google or because we believe that they are best thing to happen to education since the invention of erasers. I believe that the conversation is important because if we would like students to collaborate using these tools, we must be using them to collaborate.

The last step, that I would like to figure out is setting up a series of online meetups to talk about the issues inherent in rolling out Google Apps for Eduction. Here are the ones I would start with, but please add ones that you woud like to discuss in the comments:

1. The legality of giving students e-mail adresses as young as Kindergarten.
2. Using Google Apps as a wharehouse for our data.
3. The Google Terms of Use
4. Advanced uses of Docs (forms, turning things in via sharing, etc.)
5. Advanced uses of gmail (academic uses of chat, system-wide groups, etc.)
6. Advanced uses of calendar (student and faculty calendars meshing)
7. Labs for google apps including Moderator.

I think that there is a lot more here, but I just want to start the conversation. Please spread the link to Lucy Gray’s spreadsheet and form and the tag for spreading the conversation. Let’s talk soon.

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)?

I am trying to create a learning environment worthy of my kids. That’s all.

I am working feverishly every day so that by the time my kids need more education than I can provide at home, an environment will exist that I would be proud to show to my son and daughter. For all of my hard work, though, I do not believe that it exists yet. I do not believe that a single school out there has gotten it right in terms of balancing pedagogy and technology or in terms of getting all of the right tools into the hands of the kids and asking them the right questions so that the tools actually get used.

I feel terrible about the fact that someone else’s kids have to settle for “the best we can do right now.” The fact that they can’t log in once and find all of their classes, all of their connections in their PLN, and all of their created works (or access these things at all) is shameful. All we can provide them with now is, at best, a set of tasks that will approximate a truly connected world, and at worst, a set of tasks that is simply helping to purpetuate an outdated form of education (disconnected learning).

In the interest of making promises and then keeping them, I am going to challenge myself and everyone else around me to create a learning environment that I would be proud to introduce my daughter to by the time she is of school age (3 and 1/2 years away from now). I guess I have been inspired by Obama’s moonshot rhetoric during his speach last night.

I’m not sure what the learning space looks like yet, but it is starting to take shape a little.

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.

As much fun as I will have reflecting on CoLearning 2009, I am too burned out to do so tonight. I am too burned out on conversing with anyone but my wife about anything but my two children. And I am glad for this burn out. I am glad that my brain can and does reboot from time to time on matters of educational importance. My wife is glad too.
 
But, tomorrow is another day, and I plan on starting the work for CoLearning 2010 (or even a fall version of the conference, if I am reading the wind right). I encourage you to burn out sometime soon too.
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Posted via email from olco5’s posterous

I am sitting in a session at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation on Remixing in the classroom and I was drawn back to an activity that I did with my kids to teach them about remixing. I think that it allowed them to own the topic in a way that telling them the rules does not. Does this activity still work?

 

   Write-on: Create the following diagram on a piece of paper (or computer if your prefer… Notebook or Word would probably be quickest) to show your

      opinions of what should and should not be allowed of the following

      remixing or mashup situations:

Isn’t Illegal Is Illegal

Should be Illegal

Shouldn’t be Illegal

   1. Creating a collage using a famous piece of art and some of your own drawings.

   2. Hacking someone’s computer game and making it better then selling it.

   3. Taking someone’s direct quote from a book without citing it.

   4. Taking someone’s ideas from a book and listing them as one of your biggest influences in the bio.

   5. Using two pieces of different music to make a new one.

   6. Creating a replica of a building in Google Sketch-up.

   7. Creating a parody of the latest blockbuster film and putting it up on YouTube.

   8. Typing out a chapter of someone’s book and putting links to pictures of all of the places it mentions.

   9. Taking the beat or melody of a famous song and looping it to create

      something new to sing or rap over, without asking for permission to use

      the sample.

  10. Using a well known movie clip, and dubbing you and your friends

      making up funny, rude comments over top of it so that it looks like

      they are saying what you want them to.

Discuss each situation with your neighbors when you are finished.

    * Use the these definitions and real life situations and in order to complete your 30-minute-expert blogging session on the following debatable topic: Solved: Any idea or work that you create should be able to be remixed, modified, and repackaged for the purposes of another person.

Also, if you are interested, here is the podcast that my students did with their debate after this activity.

 

 

 

I am sitting in Anne Smith’s classroom listening to students talk about the ways in which students believe they are seen vs. the way they see themselves (her student teacher is actually teaching the class at the moment, however). I really enjoy listening to students talk about their own identities. They are so definite and expressive, questioning and purposeful.

The part that grabs ahold of me, though, is the fact that everything that is done in this classroom is in the pursuit of the question: What’s the point? Today I am not sure that there is any question that is more important. I asked it this way about two years ago:

The essential question for 21st century learning is “How is this meaningful?” and the only way that students are going to be able to answer that is to collaborate with one another to create that meaning.

I like the rephrasing of this question as “what is the point?” It is beautiful in its simplicity.

So, with Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation staring me directly in the face tomorrow, I would like to ask that simple question during every session. I would like every speaker to ask themselves the question before they speak. And, I would like for all conversations to answer that question question passionately and with gusto.

Because I really want to know. What is the point of all that we are doing in education?

I have my idea, but what is yours?

I wrote a single thing on the back of a paper at a meeting today:

Scaling a system that exists vs. Creating a different system that includes networked learning.

What I meant by this I am not exactly sure (nor can I talk about all of the good and hopeful things that transpired during the meeting, either). All I know is that we shouldn’t be looking to make our current teaching model work in more and bigger ways. We should not be extending traditional pedagogy into online environments. We should not be taking something that no longer works for one school and then trying to emulate it for all schools.

I guess it makes sense to say this as well:

Just because a system can scale doesn’t mean that it should. And just because a system can’t scale, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to someone. While I believe that all of our learning should be scalable, that doesn’t mean that we need to have every learner doing the exact same thing. Creating multiple entrances makes sense. There is no one ring to rule them all. We need spaces that work for every single one, not “everyone”.

Forgive my obtuse discourse tonight. I am having trouble with getting concrete at the moment. I hope you glean some meaning from the words. If not, I will try again tomorrow.

This Saturday, at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, we will have the privilege of hosting a student panel. During which , we will be able to ask the burning questions of intelligent and engaged students. I didn’t realize it until today, but it is so rare now that I take the chance to ask difficult and reflective questions of students.

I can’t believe that is rare. I never thought it would be when I left the classroom. But somehow, now that I am no longer in the classroom, I am starved for answers from students. Why should it be rare to ask important and big questions of students, for any educator (in the classroom or not)? For example, I want to ask some students about how facebook is changing the way that they write a research paper. I want to ask them why they aren’t using twitter. I want to ask them what they want to preserve from their school career into their working career. I want to ask them what matters in learning.

Does it makes sense to have a place to ask questions of students, to have them engaged in a larger learning network with adults (not as a selfish way of simply asking and not answering anything, I would like to give back to students in a wider network too)? I am struck that this may sound weird and kind of creepy, but I’m really interested in the idea of where the space is that adults and students interact. I know that Students 2.0 did a lot of work around this topic, but I am not sure that they/we have come up with a real learning environment that includes both adults and students.

Where does this exist?

Perhaps it starts with asking those questions of our panel on Saturday.Perhaps.

Submit the questions you would like engaged students to answer.