Learning is Change

Whenever I see somone talk about their brand new LMS, CMS, or collaborative learning product, I tend to be very skeptical. No matter how good it is or how open the architecture is, if it doesn’t have the community built around it, it isn’t worth it. Drupal isn’t powerful because it has so much flexibility to expand into any organization, it is powerful because of the community that supports every single module that is created. Google docs isn’t powerful because of how much collaboration can happen when you share a document, it is powerful because of all of the people at Google and around the world that are using the product and thinking of new uses for it.

I don’t need to see a demo or know how well integrated with our other systems it is. I just want to know who will be there when it breaks. I want to see the wiki where I can add to the learning that I am a part of. I want to know the people in the forum. I want to believe that the learning product I am using will be there tomorrow, not because of how well the company is selling it, but because the community invests enough in it to make sure that it grows and becomes better each day.

So, while I will check out this “open source product”, I am not going to hold my breath because I don’t know the community, because my network hasn’t mentioned it (although, other networks have apparently). No product is worth a lack of community (even blackboard has a community around it, even if it does seem to be self-loathing). So, while I will be open to using something less than community-driven  if I have to, I will say to you, it is only almost the same as a well supported open resource, almost.

It is so strange how links seem to be related to one another when you have a single idea in your head. The tweets seem to come together in a way that makes you think that “the network” pushes you into a certain direction, just so that you can take the time to synthesize what you know. Well, that has definitely happened to me over the past few days.

To get right to the point, for some time I have been thinking about the stages through which an adult learner becomes a connected learner, someone who knows just how to find the resources and people that will support them in thir own learning. Well, I don’t think that I have it all figured out, but I will say that one of the stages that has struck me the hardest is The Collaborative Instinct.

When I say Collaborative Instinct, I mean the compulsion that exists whenever a learner creates something (a word document, powerpoint, well worded e-mail, etc) to share it with others. The simple act of sharing your resources openly, as an instinct, is something that changes the way in which you learn. By saying that your ideas and contributions are valuable enough to be available to others–that others might see their value–can transform your expectations about receiving feedback on your work, the process of revision, and the long tail of learning from others. A Collaborative Instinct is one of the easiest ways to create a community of learning around yourself. Others will want to create around your content, comment on it and remix it. They will use their own collaborative instinct to publish their own works that are related to yours. However, even if you never see these things, even if your Collaborative Instinct stops at sharing your own words, the community is being created. It will wait for you until you are interested in further connecting your learning.

Now, why did I start off with a paragraph about the links that have informed this post (and what will likely be quite a few others)? From Will Richardson’s blog, I was introduced to this study that finds those who contribute online are the ones who have the power to influence others, they control the debate about education, finance, science, and nearly any other field that values contributions from a community. I would go further to say that those who have A Collaborative Instinct are the ones who can make their own decisions. If you are not adding to the world’s knowledge, if you are not sharing what you have to offer, you are letting others make learning decisions for you. Influence and pursuasion only come from action, and yet it can be the simple action of putting up a word document on a wiki.

The next link is just a beautiful blog post. Steve Hargadon has simply hit it so clearly on the head, that I’m not sure how much commentary it requires. In this post, he recounts a story of heaven and hell which is a perfect parable for The Collaborative Instinct. Hell is where there is ample content to go around (the stuff that is saved on hard drives, carried around on flash drives, and hoarded in email attachements), but no one can feed themselves because they only have very long spoons tied to their hands. In heaven, there is the same amount of content, but no one goes hungry for resources because they are feeding each other.

The Collaborative Instinct is about knowing what nourishes us. It isn’t the heavy collaboration that lasts weeks and requires tons of planning. It is in the simple handing off of a resource that we have created which is valued by another learner. We are nourished by the long spoon of the teacher who blogs about a better way to do classroom mangement or who has an activity that explains how you can use voicethread in math.

The Collaborative Instinct isn’t hard or a very big idea, but it does require a shift in the way that we create things. If we are creating documents in Word and then saving them to the hard drive, we need to be able to submit them via e-mail to a sharing space. If we are creating things in Google Docs, we need to be clicking the share button immediately after we have finished a first draft and either publishing them as a webpage or sharing them with the people in our built-in networks (schools, organizations, other face to face collegues). Or, better yet, we should be adding them to a collaborative space and building value on top of them like this.

The preceding wiki is a new place for people at Hope Online (an Online Charter School) to share their work. I introduced the topic of The Collaborative Instinct using these simple questions:

1. How do you share with others?
2. What is your first instinct when you create a learning resource?
3. What is your tool of choice?
4. How do you leverage the learning that exists on the web?
5. How do you organize what you create?
6. What are your next steps.

Through these questions we are getting at the Collaborative instincts of all Hope teachers. We are questioning just how people share resources and whether or not there is a better way to do so. It is my greatest hope that every one of them starts to think about “the next step” after they create something. That they won’t simply be sharing the resource with the one person that needs it now, but with everyone, so that they will inform the discussion of that topic and nourish those around them.

The next post in this series will be The Reflective Pattern, but I don’t think that I will be able to do that one today as well, so stay tuned.

Although I have been a member of gmail since the good old days of invitation-only status:

But, up until this week, I did not use it for anything other than signing up for every web 2.0 service I could find and for giving people access to my google docs. I knew that it was powerful and that it was making everyone else’s life more productive, but I just didn’t see how I could get away from the incredibly proprietary FirstClass email that my district uses. Well, with all of the research that I am doing for Google Apps integration at eDCSD, I stumbled upon this single post that changed everything.

The following string, when typed into Gmail, will allow you to move all of your old mail from your inbox into a folder of your choosing (the fact that you can store things away and label them is also a nice addition to gmail):

in:anywhere before:2009/1/1

If you type that in and then select all of your conversations:

Archive them away. Draw a line in the sand. Start over in gmail. Reboot your life (okay, maybe that goes a little too far).

After I got my inbox down to 4, I started to think about how I was going to put all of the other pieces together.

In gmail, you can now add other e-mail accounts to send and receive from. This means that you can use gmail to be the gateway for all of your mail, not just the single account. While this has been around forever, it was a revelation to me:

This alone didn’t solve my workflow issues, though. I now had to make sure that my firstclass e-mail would redirect completely to my gmail account. Well, it turns out that it pretty easy to do within the Firstclass preferences, but it really isn’t intuitive. You have to go into “messaging” and then under “mail rules” you need to have your e-mail forwarding set to redirect to your gmail account:

I also wanted the ability to do something that I never had within Firstclass, which is write e-mail while offline. It is not often that I am without an internet connection, but whenever I want to reference something in an e-mail and I don’t want to fuss with getting the password at the coffee shop, I need a way to do it. Gmail offline is a great new way to do email.

Another feature that I would like to highlight is the labs addition of the “create google doc” from an e-mail button. It does just what it says… It creates a google document that can be shared and edited directly from the e-mail that you have open. I can’t tell you how many times I have copied stuff over from my e-mail to google docs just so that we can start working on something there. This will not only let me collaborate better, but it will also let me archive things that I want to come back to and work on later:

While all of this doesn’t seem to have an immediate pedagogical impact, I would venture to say that if we are interested in creating the most change within a system that loves efficiency and squeezing the most time we can out of every waking hour, we need to be thinking about ways of taking all of our closed communication channels (proprietary e-mail and calendars, files stored on one hard drive, and even archiving systems that are not searchable to the extent that gmail is) and shifting them to more open ways of learning.

So, I guess to all that are going to tell me that they knew this already, I would say to them: Why didn’t you tell me?

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

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Although I didn’t really want to string this piece out for two posts, I think that thinking things through is really important for me. I guess that I really needed to talk it through as well and put some links behind the theory.

A year or two ago I would have said that those who were talking about PLN’s were simply blowing smoke. For a long time, I  thought that twitter and other social networks were just something that I did. I thought that the process that I went through to create Ripe Environments was the only way to do it. But, networks are about the other individuals, not the group that I see as mine (the connections that we all make, not the connections that I have made). Networks are about asking the right questions. Networks are about aggregating and archiving what is truly important to each person.

We just have to make sure that creating them is a priority. Any thoughts on how?

Learning Networks and PD from Ben Wilkoff on Vimeo.

I am in the process of putting together a presentation that will be used to convince others that Learning Networks are a feasible and healthy part of a professional development plan. I have to make sure that it is concrete enough to be realistic but theoretical enough to apply to all stakeholders and in all learning situations.

While, I understand how learning networks function, they are incredibly hard to explain. I have tried using this presentation, though, and I am looking for any feedback possible. I mean, how can I show the value of a learning network in a presentation without getting feedback from a network that I am trying to emulate in all of my professional development, right?

While I was doing some searching over at Tweetgrid (my absolute favorite way of looking at twitter in real-time), I came across these notes from my Educon 2.1 Session, The On Button: Instant and Always on Collaboration.

I figure that now is as good a time as any to put up the archive of that presentation and to highlight just how good Live Blogging can be. Sarah, a teacher in “midcoast Maine”, did a wonderful job of capturing the questions and ideas from the conversation that we had at Educon.

I love the idea of being able to archive not only the video of a conversation, but also the conversation that happened about the conversation. Here is a list of links that also were talking about this session. I can’t wait to hear where else this session goes:

1. List of Sessions
2. Twitter Feed for the session
3. The original Wiki page

What I am more interested in, though, is how are you aggregating the conversations that surround a learning event? How can we make sure that the supports for our sychcronous environments do not go by the wayside.

The last two posts that I have written have talked about ideas vs. Tools. I didn’t realize it until after I had written them that I had not used the word pedagogy once. I was speaking of ideas in education, concepts, schemas for how learning works now.
 
At some point I would like to figure out a new word, though, for what I would like to see happen in schools. Pedagogy is too small and idea is too large. Pedagogy is all about the art and science of teaching. It is about best-practices and research in the classroom. And ideas are simply the supporting structures that allow us to carry on a conversation.
 
What I would like is a word that describes an understanding of connected learning, a word that explains the use of a tool for all stakeholder’s learning, not just the student’s. I want a word that keeps a network in focus at all times to show that learning is not an isolated act.
 
Well, I will be thinking about this for a bit, but what I would love to know what your word for what you would like to see within people in education. Do you want them to know the pedagogy? Do you want them to have a schema? Do you want them to just get a clue?
 
I’m interested in moving this conversation along.
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My last post was excited about the fact that my district is now interested in pursuing the idea of Personal Learning Networks (although they want to call them Personal Work and Learning Environments), and not a particular tool for technology integration in the district. I wrote (again) about how the tools don’t much matter, it is getting across the ideas that counts.

However @mwacker made me think with his comment that went something like this:

True, true… but when the tool triggers ideas that’s a winner too though. i.e voicethread triggering spec ed. reading responses, conference tools extending walls outside a classroom (palbee, dimdim, twiddla), RSS feeds, blogs, motivating and inspiring teachers, TED talks, Youtube, Schooltube, etc inspiring kids to publish. Wikis, envoking global collaboration, PLN’s lifting spirits and sharing ideas.
There are so many tools, we can’t forget that sometimes this is the carrot that sparks motivation..especially in a K-6 environment.

It made me think of all of the tools that have opened my eyes to possiblities that didn’t exist before I knew about the tool. I remember when I first figued out what Blogger was in the fall of 2004. It allowed me to create blogs for all of my students in less than one day of classes. When I found Voicethread, I immediately realized just how engaging a digital convesation could be.

But, I don’t think of Blogger anymore as the important part of my learning. I think of blogging as an idea for how to communicate, collaborate, and create commuity. Even Voicethread or DimDim, which are very specific tools, I don’t think of them as the only tools for those jobs. I think of voicethread as a collaborative presentation and DimDim as a web conference. Putting these pieces together into a workflow is what is important. It doesn’t matter which tools are actually used, just that you know the benefits and learning potential behind each one.

So, I guess I am revising my previous statement. There can’t be any great ideas for the future of education without great tools to support them. But, if they remain only a function of those tools, then we are not teaching teachers and students to think about their learning. We are only teaching them to use the tools. If we aren’t constantly questioning what works best, we can’t truly call ourselves reflective practicioners.

We can’t really know what can be done in our classrooms until we know what is possible. The tools show us what is possible, but the ideas that extend them and the conversations that crop up around them are essential.

You can hang your hat on a tool, but you will never go out into the world and apply the tool without the ideas that support the tool and the metacognition to apply those ideas to other tools.

So, for a while in our district has been very excited about certain tools that they have invested in. At various times, they have been excited about SchoolCenter, iWork, Garageband, Powerpoint, Smart Notebook, and quite a few others.
 
While I have never been a real big fan of this type of technology integration, I can understand it. It exists so that most people have something to hang their hat on at the end of the day. It exists because it is so much easier to implement a tool than it is an idea. An idea (at least a good one) requires rethinking every tool and its usefulness; it requires questioning a strategy that is based on tools.
 
So, I have to say, when I put together the presentation earlier this week on asking the really big question of “what is the web for?” I didn’t think it would be taken seriously. I thought that it would be looked at only for the tools that are behind creating learning networks and role-specific portals. Well, at least so far, I have been proven wrong. All of my conversations this week have been without the specific tools that have bogged us down so many times before. I have actually heard other people say that tieing together all of the project-specific tools is a much better way than tying us to any one tool. I’m not sure how long this conversation is going to last, but you can bet that I will be riding it for all that it is worth.
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