Learning is Change

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.

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.

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Well, when I first started blogging about The Ripe Environment, I didn’t know that I was being edupunk, but now that I have read the powerful thinking behind the theory (Students 2.0, Stephen Downes, Bavatuesdays, D’Arcy Norman) and I believe I was. I don’t know that I really want all of the baggage that goes along with labeling myself, but I truly believe in the idea that change is about people not processes.

It takes a person to create change because vision isn’t enough. It is great to create documents and blog posts and do research projects on creating change, but unless a teacher in the classroom does something differetly or a student asks for more in the classroom, there is no way that things will shift one iota.

I happen to love the nitty gritty.

I like talking about working through significant roadblocks to change. I like convincing others that change is worth their time, that it is important.

And not just any change, we need to be moving toward Authentic Learning with such passion and ferocity that it cannot be boiled down a powerpoint presentation. Passion doesn’t come from such things. Passion only comes from a place of specific experiences, not a generic goal of creating change.

The Ripe Environment should not be about creating a hope among people that there is a movement afoot, that technology is the silver bullet or that golden jargon will save us all. The Ripe Environment is about personally expressing a need to do things better and focusing on what better really is.

I have to constantly tell myself that learning is sacred. I do it for myself. I do not share because I know what is best. I share because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is only through this act of rebellion that change will occur within others.

(I may be abstract in talking about this concept from time to time, but I really do want to talk about the personal stories and experiences that create change. Share yours in any way you know how.)

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For as long back as I can remember we have squashed the questions that only help out the individual and focusing only upon the questions that benefit the most students. The tangential question is not allowed because it is a distraction to the learning, rather than an enhancement. The student who thinks divergently is allowed to do so only if she doesn’t speak. An environment such as this is not ripe for learning. In fact, I would make the case that it is rotten.

The students that are dependent upon one another to guide their learning may learn in an environment where only one voice is heard at a time. But it takes so much longer to get to true point of significance because each of the learners can only move as fast as the question or the answer. The backchannel allows many students to ask questions, but the learning doesn’t happen until those questions are answered. Backchannels inherently are also not very searchable or friendly to going back through and pulling out the most important elements. Rather, they are representations of the thinking going on in the background of a session or class period.

Rather, the Interdependent students need a place for an organic question and answer that they can all edit and work within. They need a collaborative document or wiki that is a constantly reworked FAQ for the content. Each student is able to learn from one another and save that learning. They are dependent upon one another for their learning, and that is the way that they wanted to be.

However, it is something so much more amazing to allow the independent questioner to come into the mainstream of the classroom or session. The Ripe Environment allows for this type of learner to engage in the experience without feeling like an outsider.

Traditionally, independent questions are a challenge to authority… and they should be. They should challenge what is truly the most important content being presented. But, rather than having students distracting everyone with a question, they will be creating learning for everyone by proposing a solution. The independent questioners most times do not really want an answer from the presenter, teacher, or workshop facilitator. They would much rather answer the questions themselves; they just need the okay to go and research it themselves and the opportunity to present what they find.

So, my proposal is this: Let learners get engaged by a divergent question. Let them find out what they can on the answer. Let them have time at the end (or middle, or beginning) of a session to present their findings. Let them be authentic. Let them create something new.

Maybe this isn’t revolutionary. Maybe this is simply building and letting the learners come. Regardless, we aren’t doing it enough, and for that I am regretful.

Although the podcast (which was somehow not recorded because I had the device set for line-in rather than mic… I am quite mad about it actually) for this post explains this prerequisite for The Ripe Environment pretty well, I would like to further outline it for those of you who don’t have 15 minutes to listen (or who can’t imagine all of the things I would have said, had the microphone actually worked).

I would like to start by saying that I do not actually have any problems with conferences, meetings, or workshops. In fact, they are one of the premier places that The Ripe Environment can exist. However, my contention is that The Ripe Environment cannot simply stay in that space. It has to transfer over into the times when no one else is around. It has to transfer into the individual mind, so that your own mind is a Ripe Environment for Authentic Learning. I know that probably sounds a little hokey, but I believe that there are many ways of thinking things through, some of which are more productive than others.

On the podcast (which, once again, is only in your imagination at this point) I use the metaphor of class time and conferences being a typewriter. Conferences exist in one particular place and time, as does the typewritten words on a page. They cannot be copied and disseminated in the ways that a blog post or wiki edit can be. There is something quite beautiful about words existing in only one place and an experience only being a singular event. Even in the capture of the backchannel, live-blogging or streaming of an experience, the experience held in one time. However, the true learning happens when one reflects upon the process, upon the environment.

The Ripe Environment does not end when the session is over. It never ends. The learning extends over the boundaries when it is made personal. When the singular experience is built upon with an eye toward a personal set of circumstances. Learning occurs when a resource is appropriated for your classroom. Learning occurs when a link is made (hyperlink or a synaptic link) to a website or person. Learning is occurs when an e-mail is sent off requesting a follow up or an invite to a google document is sent out.

These moments are not held in time. They are ongoing. They make sure that the Environment stays ripe rather than withers.

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?

Whether we provide students or teachers with a backchannel, one will form. So long as there is more than one voice in a learning environment, the need to be heard will be undeniable.

Students may pass notes or they may text message in their pockets.

Teachers may point to a highlighted passage or simply make a face of disgust.

These things are not meant to stay in the background. They are essential, and as such, must be elevated to their rightful place in the classroom. The backchannel must influence the front-channel and must become the front-channel if the discussion and learning going on there is more important.

But, before I get too ahead of myself, let me set my definition of a backchannel:

A backchannel is the running commentary (critiques on, questions about, distractions from, references for, resources under) the dominant information stream. This dominant stream could be a lecture, discussion, video, or any other attention getting activity that would normally occupy the majority of the learners.

This may sound like quite a distraction. Why should we bring the note passers into the discussion? Why should we encourage distraction? Because it is how we learn.

Kelly Christopherson does a really great job of highlighting how a backchannel actually functions in a Ripe Environment, but I think the hardest thing to understand about a backchannel is balencing the two things that inherently have to go on within an classroom, but are not always so center stage. He says it this way:

Watching the crowd made me realize that we have a long way to go as educators. Many people in the room seemed to be having difficulty with the two things going on at once. Maybe that is why so many educators become frustrated with the use of cellphones or laptops in their classes; they don’t see how the two things can be going on at once.

The rapid fire writing down of resources, texts, or quotations is all well and good during a class or PD session, but what about questioning those things. When does that happen? If all learning is conversational and requires relationships, when are those relationships born and when do those conversations occur? They occur during the backchannel, if and only if one is set up and is relevant to those in the audience.

The experience that Kelly describes above is one that happens far too often. Those who do not find the backchannel relevant write it off as distracting, or worse, destructive. They want the front-channel to be the only channel, even though their brains and pens are commenting non-stopped on what is being said. We need to teach the value of commentary, fact-checking and questioning. We need to construct The Ripe Environment for the backchannel.

I sat at the over-long table, as I always do on Mondays and thought about the next time I would meet my students for Extended Learning Time (our version of a multi-discipline course without any set curriculum or standards to give guidance or restrict us).

“Well, it is earth day in a couple of days.”

Immediately, my colleague and I started a Google Document called Earth Day 2008. We started dropping in links to pages we found.

“Oh, I did hear something about an event on the National Geographic Channel. Did you hear about it. Something about the human footprint.”

We were pushing hard now, 25 minutes before kids arrive. Link after link being proposed as a starting point.

“What is the question we are really trying to get our kids to answer here.”
“Is Earth Day important and why?”

And we we started writing out a discussion, a plan of attach. We eventually came to the conclusion that there were others who were interested in asking this same question, experts even. And yet, within 30 minutes we created an authentic question and activity around it. Our instinct was to create and collaborate, rather than offer worksheets as an attempt at lesson planning. This is our Ripe Environment, and the class that the students came into that day was Ripe too.

They couldn’t wait to see who had the bigger footprint. They couldn’t wait to collaborate on their own weekly or monthly collection of soda cans or milk jugs. This process of not waiting to be told, of instinctively knowing that it is the right thing to do, that makes it truly authentic.

So, how do you foster this instinct for collaboration. Well, by saying yes to it as often as possible. It is my personal belief that there is never too little time to create, too little time to collaborate.

If you have only a minute:

1. Put a request for a resource out on twitter.
2. Do a delicious search instead of a google search (it is a community of people waiting to help).
3. Link to someone who is talking about it.

If you have a half-hour:

1. Start a google doc and invite a few others to join in.
2. Search technorati for new blogs, videos, and people who are interested in the same thing.

If you have a longer:

1. Start a wiki and get people to contribute.
2. Start a blog and get people to contribute.
3. Start a movement and get people to join.

There is a severe lack of time in the air. It pervaides every conversation I hear on many days:

“No, I don’t have time for that collaboration right now. Maybe after this quarter is over.”
“Are you sure that it has to be due tomorrow. I really think that having the weekend when I don’t have games or practices or school would make more sense.”
“I don’t even have time to think.”

Hyperbole aside, this lacking is palpable. I think it is one of the only times that a lack of something can be more heavily felt and deeply understood than the presence of it. Many people, though, have just gotten used to having no time to connect the disparate parts of their working or waking lives. It has become the film upon our skin that always coats our interactions but can’t be rubbed or cleaned off.

I am not one of those people, however. I believe that connecting the dots and creating time for that process is possible. I believe that it is all about creating a Workflow of Passion (requires a better name, but that’s all I’ve got).

When I say passion, I do not mean that you must be equally in love with every assignment or task that you come across. Instead, I mean that there is something meaningful within each thing that you do. There is some meat there, no matter how hidden it may be in the luke-warm soup of “other stuff.” The only way to craft the time to connect that meat to something else equally meaty is to plunge your spoon in and not be satisfied with the carrot or water chestnut you come up with the first time. (I would like to apologize to both the literary crowd who sees the metaphor being stretched thin and the vegetarian crowd who beleives that no one should be looking for meat within a vegetarian soup.)

So, what does this spoon plunging action look like. Well, I have recently taken to a maxim for resolving the issue of time suckage and distraction in the classroom and out.

“Use the tool that has everything you want, and nothing you don’t.”

Although the different image settings in Photo Booth are cool, the distraction factor is so high that it is nearly impossible to use it as an instructional tool (for kids or adults).

Wikipedia provides a cornocopia of educational resources, but blind searches are still stabs in the soup that lead to less than appetizing results.

The Ripe Environment is anywhere that makes information clickable, that sets the path of least resistance to learning as the norm. The Ripe Environment is a place that doesn’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. It is a place that the workflow always works for the user, according to their needs and passions.