Work @ TAFE

From EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2005, Volume 40, Number 5:

Is covering content enough? Content-focused learning has a relatively short half-life, particularly since most learners’ careers will span a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. “Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).”

I love this quote (originally from George Siemens) we were just talking about this idea in our web design class the other day. I’ve been trying not to give “the right answer” lately in class but instead get students thinking about where they can find the answer themselves…

In my typically stimulating fashion, I asked one student the other day “So how can we find out how to do it?”… and he replied with a grin: “we can ask you”.

While taking part in some workshops over the past 6 months I became aware that there’s heaps of (edit: my exaggeration) teachers in TAFE who log in to their email once or twice a week just to delete all the unread email - without reading it! My initial reaction (as someone who loves technology) was “That’s crazy… irresponsible even??”. But when I thought about it from their perspective (as people who don’t use a lot of technology), I wondered if I’d do the same thing in their situation? (…I think it’s even sensible in some circumstances!)

Working for a large organisation in the public sector, with lots of people who need to let lots of other people know about stuff, the sheer volume of email that people have to deal can be a huge barrier to effective communication. When you combine this with the fact that some teachers are only in the office for half-an-hour once a week (and don’t check email from home for various reasons), checking your inbox for relevant information becomes near impossible.

And here inlies the problem… a lot of information that ends up in our inboxes is irrelevant to many individuals.

Irrelevant emails…

Looking at the last two days of email that I’ve received at work, there are 29 emails in total. That’s not bad (in fact, from what I hear from some managers, I shouldn’t be complaining). But of those 29, only 6 are relevant to me.

There’s lots of email that comes to me that I don’t care about. I personally don’t need to know that the Sharepoint service is unavailable, or that it is back online… I’m not part of the target audience for this email… is it possible to reach the target audience (i.e. those who are currently using Sharepoint services) without emailing everyone in the organisation? Perhaps a more effective communication would be to setup the Sharepoint web-server so that when Sharepoint it is taken off-line the web server simply responds with a web page describing the situation to those who try to access it…

Not to single out Sharepoint… we could instead talk about Expressions of Interest emails or Teachers Federation emails (yeah, that’s you Gary ) - the bottom line is that by bombarding people with email, we’re inevitably reducing the effectiveness of our communication (’cause people will stop reading it!)

Of course TAFE isn’t alone with this problem, a quick Google search for Drowning in email shows the extent of the problem. The issue for us end-users in large organisations is that we can’t control what’s sent to us… but we can control what gets to our Inbox…

“Managing your Inbox!”

After chatting with a number of people, I reckon lots of workers would benefit from a short (1hr) training session that got participants actively involved in setting up Rules to manage their inbox… Even in the unlikely scenario that people didn’t feel confident after the session to create rules on their own, they’d have some basic ones setup by the end of the session to help them on their way.

This kind of learning is great ‘cause real examples can be used for activities during the learning session, and participants can obviously use their real email Inbox. The facilitator could send five emails to the whole group with “Expression of Interest” or “EOI” as the subject… just to demonstrate the typical scenario (just in case anyone was unclear!). These emails can then be used to create the new rule automatically (see the Microsoft Assistance article: Let rules help clear out your crowded Inbox), which can be tested with a few more EOI’s from the facilitator.

The facilitator could then play the role of the friend who sends at least 3 emails per week promising love, happiness and money if you just forward it on to everyone you know - giving the participants a chance to create a rule based on the sender’s address. Followed by the spammer etc. - it could be lots of fun, quick and snappy, and completely interactive! Participants come away with a great outcome - a more manageable Inbox!

Enabling people to control what gets into their Inbox might just help some people to read the relevant emails (and Big Brother can always see who’s filtering their bosses emails to the Trash).

Andy Budd has just posted Blogging in Government - a reflection on his experience speaking to Government officials at 10 Downing Street… the topic? “Blogging in the Public Sector”. Kindof relevant to those of us blogging within TAFE or other public institutions here in Australia!

Andy and his mates talked about:

how governmental weblogs could give a human face to often monolithic organisations and mentioned how Robert Scoble had helped change the public perception of Microsoft

Lots of great stuff in there, such as:

Tom suggested that rather than taking a draconian standpoint, organisations should have clear usage policies in place and treat staff weblogs like any other public conversation.

Although Andy doesn’t think the UK government will start public blogging immediately,

I do think the seed has been planted and as the internal culture starts to change over the next few years I see the potential for some very interesting and useful weblogs to develop.

Andy has made the slides from his presentation available (See Blogging in the Public Sector). Slide 11 has some very relevant points on “Institutional Problems”, a few of which I’ll reproduce here:

• Culture shift is necessary
• Start small, with several blog champions
• Many organisations fear frank and open discussion and criticism - however open discussions are healthy
• Control culture needs to change

I’d like to know how these factors have been overcome in organisations such as Microsoft (I mean, it’s a huge organisation, bigger than TAFE I would think?). What strategies can TAFE or other organisations in the public sector take to begin such changes?

It’s interesting to do a Technorati tag search for TAFE and see what people are writing about their TAFE experience… of course, it’s not always going to be posititve… One student, ‘unwritten’ wrote recently in a post entitled “bored *sigh*“:

Man, i should really get going on my TAFE work, but tis soo soo soo boring, ive been trying to put it off for as long as i can. I mean seriously, this is what we have to do: we have about an A4 sized, 111 paged text book, yea i know it doesnt seem long but we have to summarise each frikkin paragraph of the whole thing! I mean tell me how were supposed to actually learn from that?

Tell me if im wrong and overreacting, PA-LEASE. Cos I sure as hell am learning nothing from it…

…i confronted him about it and the reason he sets the courses up like this is so we fill up the time requirement which is like 40 horus on each module. I mean COME ON! Thats no excuse, it makes me so frustrateddd!!
GRRRR…

I personally think it’s great that this student is reflecting (validly) on the ridiculousness of the learning activity and has tried to talk to the teacher about it (you’ll have to read the whole post to see this). Why is this teacher not changing the activity??

Imagine how much we could improve our learning and facilitation if students were tagging their reflections on TAFE like this student has, so that we could read raw feedback and improve our methods! I reckon the transparency would be a good thing for us as teachers/facilitators…

Forget social constructivism - even connectivism - Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has posted The Smackdown Learning model:

“Whether you’re writing user instructions, teaching a class, writing a non-fiction book, or giving a conference presentation, consider including at least some aspect of the smackdown model. It’s one of the most engaging ways to cause people’s brains to both feel and think — the two elements you need for attention, understanding, retention, and recall.”

As Duncan Rawlingson observes from Canada:
“I couldn’t help but notice how different my media consumption has been surrounding the terrorist attacks in London from September 11th. When my girlfriend came and hammered on my door on the morning of September 11th I turned on CNN and just watched. When I heard about the bombings in London I looked it up on Flickr, Nowpublic, Wikipedia, Wikinews to mention a few.”

Our society’s media consumption habits are accelerating away from centralised commercial sources towards a distributed set of trusted networks… people are learning from the networks that they trust. Knowledge is being created through global collaboration efforts. In this environment, how can I as in individual facilitator of learning, develop and maintain up-to-date resources for learners of Web Design? The bottom line is that I can’t.

As part of my involvement in the AusTafe2005 conference, I’m keen to demonstrate how network learning is changing the way I learn and facilitate learning.

The Read/Write Web

Over the past few years the Web has begun a paradigm shift towards Web 2.0 - an Internet where everyone contributes. Anyone can create their own website for free and publish their own thoughts and contribute to the thoughts of others.

At first this is a scary thought… for example, I can read what random people are writing right at this moment about TAFE - a public institution that I want to promote - and I can’t stop them from writing for better or for worse.

Writing as a Learner

Yet as an educator, I can learn about the new online environment and provide constructive ways to use these online networks for learning. Recently I attended an excellent professional development activity in my institute, “Assessment with Confidence”, and wrote up my own reflections of the event afterwards. Not only did I benefit from the process of writing reflectively, but by publishing my thoughts of the day on the Internet I was able to learn from further contributions of other attendees and even the main speaker herself, Berwyn Clayton.

In our Web Design course we maintain a free web-log, Design Websites as a way of demonstrating and encouraging students to use build their own learning networks. Most students create their own blog early on in the course and use it for a variety of reasons, from reflecting on their learning through to contributing back to their own learning networks. We use a tool called a NewsReader to track all the students’ blogs without having to visit each site individually.

Global Collaboration…

With the read/write web, learners can also contribute to the work of others without needing much technical knowledge - building knowledge together in a world-wide collaboration effort! The most famous example of this is Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit…

Sound dangerous? Consider this: twenty days ago on the 7th of July, there were reports of power surges on London’s underground. Within hours, the original Wikipedia article on the reported bombings was contributed. Twenty days later and nearly 5000 modifications by Wikipedians has developed the article as it is today (20th of July 2005, or view the current article). Is it trustworthy? Does it include links to verifiable information? These are questions that need to be evaluated for all sources of information, but the information itself is incredibly impressive - as are nearly all the mature articles on Wikipedia. Try looking up an article in an area of your own interest…

…meets Education

But will this type of openess and collaboration reach the realm of Education? While browsing the Personalised Learning Project on DET’s Centre for Learning Innovation site, I came across a publication by David Hargreaves (UK) “Working laterally: how innovation networks make an education epidemic” (published by David Hargreaves in conjunction with the UK Department of Education and Skills). David argues that education will be transformed only when

teachers embrace the ‘hacker ethic’ - a passion for developing new practice and a readiness to share the results freely with colleagues through innovation networks.

David’s obviously not the only person who’s thinking along these lines - at the turn of the millennium MIT decided to “provide free, searchable, access to MIT’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world” through their OpenCourseWare program. More recently (January 2005) the South African School Curriculum was contributed to the WikiBooks project, so that “if [educators] come across a learning objective that they feel they can explain or give examples of how to deliver these (learning objectives) to students, they would hopefully write a article about it, and link to the learning objective in the Curriculum Statement.”

In a variety of ways, different learning institutions are trialling world-wide collaboration and sharing of resources - with a variety of results. Learners are developing networks of sources that they trust and contribute to. In the field of Web Design, my students can learn much more 1st-hand knowledge from the myriad of professional web developers who share their thoughts every day on their blogs.

How can I compete with Network Learning

…or do I need to compete? I could try to “write content” such as my own Top 10 Tips for Freelance Webdesigners, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as relevant and authorative as Andy Bud’s Top 10 Tips for Freelance Webdesigners that attracted nearly 50 contributions from other professional web developers within his network (or Interview Questions for Web Developers, or Top 10 Tips for Web Content)

Instead I’ve started asking myself: how can I join the learning and contribute myself? I see part of my role to be linking students into the learning networks that are already there and modeling how to learn from them - but this is only possible if I’m learning from my networks myself. Currently we’re modeling this learning through our DesignWebsites blog as well as trialling a new WebDesign collaboration project where students, facilitators and professionals can improve and update the resources themselves.

Network Learning is changing the way students learn and therefore the way I facilitate learning. The Read/Write web provides a platform that allows learners to interact with information as they reflect, write and contribute to the learning of others within their networks. Instead of creating ‘content’, I now see part of my role to be introducing students to networks of learners and professionals where they can become involved in learning themselves… The great thing is that fulfilling this role has provided me the opportunity to get in there first and form my own learning networks!

Every now-and-then you come across an article that is worth reading over and over… the kind of article that you want to come back to it in a months time to reflect on how you’ve changed since reading it… so it is for me with post Ten tips for new Trainers/Teachers on the Creating Passionate Users blog (Thanks Ian for the link!)

As well as some expected tips on learning styles, cognition, minimising lectures and using games, the post also has some unexpected tips like:

Know why–and how–good stories work.

Consider the learner to be on a kind of hero’s journey. If Frodo is your student, and you’re Gandalf… learn as much as you can about storytelling and entertainment. Learn what screenwriters and novelists learn. Know what “show don’t tell” really means, and understand how to apply it to learning.

… something I’d love to work on! And this one:

Most classroom-based instruction can be dramatically improved by reducing the amount of content!. Give them the skills to be able to continue learning on their own, rather than trying to shove more content down their throats.

If your students leave feeling like they truly learned — like they seriously kick ass because they can actually do something useful and interesting, they’ll forgive you (and usually thank you) for not “covering all the material”. The trainers that get cricism for not covering enough topics or “finishing the course topics” are the ones who didn’t deliver a good experience with what they did cover.

… and something I’ve been struggling with for the past two years:

For classroom trainers, the greatest challenge you have is managing multiple skill and knowledge levels in the same classroom! Be prepared to deal with it.

followed by some great tips for dealing with this situation, such as multi-level hint sheets.

And here’s another pearler:

Designing exercises

The best execises include an element of surprise and failure. The worst exercises are those where you spend 45 minutes explaining exactly how something works, and then have them duplicate everything you just said. Yes, that does provide practice, but it’s weak. If you design an exercise that produces unexpected results… something that intuitively feels like it should work, but then does something different or wrong — they’ll remember that FAR more than they’ll remember the, “yes, it did just what she said it would do” experience.

oh… i can’t stop… go and read the article before I copy the whole thing in here…

Leave your ego at the door. This is not about you.

Your learners do NOT care about how much you know, how smart you are, or what you’ve done. Aside from a baseline level of credibility, it’s far more important that you care about how smart THEY are, what THEY know (and will know, thanks to this learning experience) and what THEY have done. I’m amazed (and horrified) by how many instructors don’t ever seem to get to know anything about their students. You should know far more about them than they know about you.

and to finish off:

Your passion will keep them awake. Your passion will be infectious. It’s up to you to figure out how to stay passionate, or quit teaching until you get it back.

And finally, don’t think of yourself as a teacher or trainer… since that puts the focus on what YOU do….

If you’re interested in facilitating learning experiences… go and read Ten tips for new Teachers/Trainers!

After reading David Hargreaves piece dealing with sharing knowledge in education (created together with the UK Department of Education and Skills) I’ve been thinking more and more about how innovation and collaboration networks within TAFE might enable better courses and further learning amongst it’s facilitators like me!

I’ve since tried to contact other Web Design facilitators within TAFE NSW and we managed to form an email group with around twenty members. But when one member (Tony Lorriman) suggested collaborating for resource development (using Moodle), there seemed to be only one other member who was keen on the idea (that one other member being me ).

I did try setting up a “TeachingWebDesign Wikispace” to see what might be involved, but given the amount of work involved in creating something like this, together with the effort of keeping it up-to-date (webdesign grows and evolves at quite a rapid pace), I started to realise that it’s not feasible for the two of us…

What if it was possible to create a ‘course’ with a much larger collaborative audience (ie. worldwide) while still linking this course to our own qualifications framework? All the hugely successful collaboration programs (such as Wikipedia or CSSZenGarden) allow everyone to be involved (still enabling editing and controlling vandelism). What if students and professionals could help educators to keep such a course up-to-date (like Leigh’s PayItForward Learning idea)?

According to David Hargreaves, networks of educators should be more like the internet - sharing innovative ideas without boundaries of institution, or even country:

the path to system transformation requires every school to be willing to give away its innovations for free, in the hope of some return, but with no guarantee of it.

Enter the Web Design Wikiversity course:

Given that everything you need to learn Web Design is already freely available online, the purpose of this course isn’t to provide you with yet more content. Instead, this resource aims to provide a flexible learning path linking to excellent online resources together with fun learning activities that can be updated and improved by you - the participant.

Each module of the course includes suggested activities and may also be linked to qualifications within your country, helping you to demonstrate your skills or build a portfolio that you may be able to use towards assessment.

Although it’s only in its beginnings, I’ve tried to structure this Wiki-course so that it might attract a world-wide collaboration effort by separating the ‘course’ from the ‘qualifications’ so that the course can map to different national or even state-specific qualifications. Given the nature of Web Design, the course isn’t intended to ‘contain’ much in terms of content but rather provide a structured framework for learning Web Design with links to the excellent freely available online resources.

Each module might contain something like:

1. Module Aim
2. Suggested (learning) activities
3. Your Learning Resources
4. Related Qualifications

(for an example, see the Basic HTML and CSS module.)

I don’t expect this to take off too quickly, but it has been encouraging to already have some significant input from someone overseas! Hopefully I’ll get time to keep building on it together with others. Perhaps some students might be interested in being involved this semester - it would be great to get their feedback and learn from the experience myself.

Check it out at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design

On Thursday afternoon I had fun for 2 hours with another group of fellow TAFE staff, as we saw how easy it is to create our own website on the Internet. Judging from the feedback, most people were suprised at how easy it was!

We spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of our workshop chatting about the nature of the new read/write web - a web that has moved from being read-only (except for the technically-elite) to a read-write medium for all of us! As an example, we were looking at Wikipedia and chatting about whether this type of “Open” encyclopedia was a good thing or a dangerous thing for learners - in terms of reliability of information. It was great to hear a bit of debate from both sides… I’d encourage everyone to check out some Wikipedia articles in their professional area and evaluate for themselves the information they find!

In the end we had all updated our own websites with information, although nearly everyone identified on their feedback forms that it would have been good to have more time to practise this process. I reckon it would have also been good to spend some time investigating how other people are using blogs in education in our specific professional areas.

Attended a great training event today: “Maximising Confidence in Assessment Decision-making”, down at TAFE Kingswood campus, which started with a presentation by Berwyn Clayton from Canberra Institute of Technology on “Building confidence by minimising risk in assessment.”

The most practical tips to come out of the day for me were:

1. We can’t sample everything when assessing a competency (or group of competencies), therefore
2. We need to determine what is critical - often the best way to determine this is to visualise what competence looks like.

Of course these aren’t new ideas, but helpful reminders nonetheless (I think i’ve started falling into the trap of trying to “check-off” everything.) It was also helpful to think about how learners can gather their own evidence, even how learners can determine how they will demonstrate their competence themselves - this would be great to put into practise (it’d make a great problem solving activity in class too !).

One question I didn’t get to ask was whether Berwyn saw competency-based assessment as something that is here to stay for the long haul, or whether something else was on the horizon…

Some companies have recently been scrambling to get their employees blogging in a bid to unleash armies of evangelists out into the community. On the 16th of May James Snell of IBM writes:

IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of “blogging”

Other companies such as Microsoft have been working on their blog strategy for some time now and already has over 1200 employee bloggers. Robert Scoble (a.k.a Scobleizer of Microsoft) wrote up his influential Corporate Weblog Manifesto back in February 2003. You only need to look at the number and scope of the public blogs on http://blogs.msdn.com/ to get an idea of how this openness is benefiting Microsoft (I counted 26 uses of the word Evangelist or Evangelism - not that MS employees are forced to write about technical evangelism).

But why would companies want to risk their employees blogging their own thoughts and opinions? Sun’s policy is pretty straight forward about this:

By speaking directly to the world, without benefit of management approval, we are accepting higher risks in the interest of higher rewards.

Sun’s dedicated blog site (with over 1000 employee blogs) uses the catch phrase “Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything”. IBM’s policy is similarly straightforward, to learn and to contribute:

As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning — between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of blogging and online dialogue are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning. […] it becomes increasingly important for IBM and IBMers to share with the world the exciting things we’re doing learning and doing, and to learn from others.

Will educational institutions such as TAFE take similar risks for these higher rewards? The risk is that employees might not always write things of which the PR team would approve, but the benefits seem to be worth the risk to the big technology companies and I for one see no reason why they wouldn’t also be worthwhile risks for TAFE (although a friend’s experience in a different educational institution here in Australia seems to suggest that freedom of opinion is still viewed as dangerous and too risky for some.).

Whichever road educational institutions in Australia end up travelling down, one thing is certain: we’ll need to develop or adopt guidelines for employee public contributions (i.e. blogging and wikis). Nearly all the guidelines and policies that I found are not so much set of rules, but rather just guidelines for being a successful and responsible blogger. In fact, the one set of Blogging ‘Rules’ that I did find was then updated 9 days later as Guidelines with the comment from the company director that “after all, we are trying to promote blogging within our company not stifle it”. IBM’s Vice President Jim Finn echos similar thoughts:

We do not tell people to blog or not to blog or what to say. We don’t control them. … It’s more like, ‘Go explore.’

So how can we at TAFE develop our own guidelines for public discourse? IBM developed their own guidelines over a period of ten days using an internal wiki, drawing on their own experience as well as the previous work done by Sun, Microsoft and other companies in the same area. So the obvious next step for any educational institution would be to learn from those who have gone before us, since they’ve made it all available:

• IBM’s blogging policy and guidelines titled “Responsible Engagement in Innovation and Dialogue”
• Sun’s policy on public discourse - straight forward and easy to read
• Microsoft’s guidelines for successful blogging - straight-forward and also easy to read. Also from Microsoft’s Robert Scoble is the Corporate Blogging Manifesto (or as a pdf).
• Jeremy Zawodny’s Yahoo! Employee Blog Guidelines: The official version and my own advice - an interesting read from someone who likes to bend the rules…

Of course you can find these and more with a simple Google search for Blogging Guidelines or Blogging Policies, or even a del.icio.us search for blogging guidelines (or blogging policy).

Some other sites that might be useful to consider:

• http://www.corporateblogging.info
• Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal guide for bloggers - straight-forward advice for a variety of situations that Bloggers might find themselves in (US-based).
• A Brief History of Corporate Blogging at Microsoft

So, where to from here?

Yesterday I had the chance to spend 2 hours with a bunch of TAFEies from Baulkham hills and Nepean…We had a great time seeing (and trying) some of the free and easy tools out there on the web!

We started out by looking at Wikipedia, and seeing how the web is changing into something that everyone can contribute to. I’m hoping that this is a good way to introduce a great free resource (Wikipedia), while also highlighting how the Web is moving from “Read only” to “Read/Write”, but am waiting for feedback from participants to help me understand whether it was helpful or not!

I think most people were suprised at how easy it is to get their own website up, but ideally we needed more time to practise using our sites… A few people identified this on their feedback forms. It’s great to see that everyone found the workshop to be very useful (on the feedback form anyway!)

Here’s some snippets from the sites people created:

Sandra reflects on one of the highlights of last week’s teaching:

Relief on our students faces! As students start to complete their final external exams this week, one of the great feelings as ateacher is to watch the transformation of students. Last week they were nervous, demanding and tired.

While another person seems to be beginning a novel where CLAMS plays an antagonist! . JforJules points out that technology introduces a “fantastic new world of interest and rubbish. how to discern is the trick” - how to discern… a good question! (Relevance, relevance, relevance)

Jill notes that “Another aspect of technology and learning is the ability for students to use online tools” - an incredibly important point! We always need to consider carefully our target audience when choosing to use a technology in some learning activity!

Well, I certainly enjoyed the two hours! I’m still struggling to re-jig this workshop so that people can have a website that they want to continue to use after the workshop… even if it was only reflecting on teaching experience once a month or something. Ideas?

It’s getting towards the end of my planned project time working on the tutorial:Getting Started with Blogging in Education. It’s been a great learning process for me in lots of different ways… next week I’ll write up my own summary + reflections, but for now just the normal droll (for my own record) of what’s been happening:

Teachers blogging to learn

After a few conversations with different people, I’m starting to think that it’s not so worthwhile trying to get educators to see the point of trying to use blogs in their own classes in a two hour workshop. People really need to experience the learning benefits of blogging themselves rather than immediately trying to use blogs in class.

For this reason, I’ve updated the activities within the Creating your own blog section of the workshop to encourage educators to begin reflecting on their own experience in the classroom and with technology - real issues that we can interact with there and then. Hopefully this’ll help people experience the social-constructivist learning that takes place when blogging - and encourage people to use their blog for their own professional development after class and continue learning (even if it was only once per month).

Helping others who want to run the workshop

Last week I finished the initial Facilitator Tips for the tutorial. These tips are just some ideas for how the Workshop can be used in practice (pre-workshop preparation, classroom setup, the workshop itself, and post-workshop communication). Ideally it really needs some contributions from others running the workshop… but that leads on to…

Getting other people involved…

When you throw your weight behind an idea (read pride, thought, effort & sleep) - an idea that you personally think will be useful to lots of people - it’s so easy to believe that everyone with any experience of blogging in education will want to contribute and join in. I’m currently trying to evaluate the reasons why this doesn’t happen… so far I’ve got:

1. The idea doesn’t strike other people as being as exciting or worthwhile (and perhaps therefore isn’t!)
2. The issue of perceived ownership - people want to contribute their time and ideas to something they believe in, not to a project “owned” by someone else (although in this situation, the idea isn’t owned by anyone - perhaps this is a problem)
3. People just don’t have time.
4. The people who would be interested don’t know about it yet
5. The project doesn’t meet immediate needs. Ie. there aren’t many people (in the circles we’ve contacted) who are involved in running similar workshops.

We emailed out to the Teach and Learn Online group (58 members), and out of those 58 only one person interacted by posting a discussion on the one of the pages.

That being said, Leigh and I have enjoyed working with each others’ ideas and taking the project in different ways using each others ideas.

Sourcing content for online learning

Leigh had a great idea for a page of recommendations for content sources - worthwhile links to information that can be legally sourced into your own material (i.e. licensed with a Creative Commons or GNU Public license). I spent some time formatting and adding information to this page as it’s a great idea!

A new icon for the site

I also took a photo of our hand-held blender at home to give the site a bit of a theme. Leigh pointed out that the icon could be confused for something else and might replace it with a photo that Sunshine has taken of their own blender.

And that’s it!

…a 21st-century education should prepare students to be knowledge creators - not simply receptacles of existing knowledge.

Educause Review published an amazing book exerpt this month, chapter 12 from Course Management Systems for Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy (this chapter is written by Van Weigel).

I say amazing mainly because I had so many ‘aha’ or ‘yeah!’ experiences while reading the chapter. Generally Van Weigel analyses the failure of the current generation of Course Management Systems (CMS, a.k.a. LMS: Learning Management Systems, such as Janisons, WebCT, Blackboard or Moodle etc.) to engage participants in critical thinking, knowledge creation and discovery based learning. Van Weigel links the reason for this failure to the adoption of the familiar classroom categories of lectures (content), discussions, and exams (”with the occasional opportunity to chat with the professor or other students ‘after class’”), leading to the “classroom on steroids” model of e-learning.

One of the great weaknesses of the contemporary CMS is its facile acceptance of behaviorist approaches to learning, which emphasize parceling up knowledge or skills into bite-sized chunks that can be easily digested.

Van Weigel then identifies four learner-focused capabilities that he would like to see in the next generation of learning technology platforms to counter these issues. A critical thinking capability involves the learner in understanding and managing his or her own learning processes. This might be achieved by providing the technology/communication system that allows participants to explore a problem or unfamiliar knowledge domain (alone or in a group) and then reflect on their own experiences and the experiences/performances of others (peers or experts).

The second capability highlighted by Van Weigel is the Self-confidence Capability which is linked to the absence of meaningful challenge within face-to-face and online learning (”What is the challenge of a video game if you can reach level ten in the first couple of tries - or if there are no levels of difficulty to begin with?”).

One promising aproach in the development of self-confidence skills is to encourage students to grapple with complex and ill-defined problems in the context of collaborative “think tank” groups.

Linking to Van Weigel’s third capability for the next generation of CMSs: a peer-learning capability. Of course this already occurs in the classroom as well as the online tools of today, but usually the focus of this “peer learning” is to discuss and digest the presented material, rather than discover the material. Van Weigel is proposing a different peer learning, one that “raises their overall awareness of the value of tacit information resources (through skill inventories and the formation of virtual communities)”.
A Knowledge Management Capability is Van Weigel’s final capability for the CMS of the future:

The skills required by knowledge-based economies are not absorption and recall, but discovery and discernment.

The ability to filter the important from the insignificant will become one of the most necessary skills for avoiding information overload!

Van Weigel goes on to define how these capabilities might be made possible using discovery-based learning (restoring the adventure of learning!), incorporating community educators, team teaching and cross-disciplinery education, knowledge creation tools such as Wikis and Web publishing, and Teaching to learn - involving participants in the teaching process.

Can any single CMS package - in this generation or the next - embody these capabilities? Probably not. It is more realistic, at least in the near term, to speak of CMS “solutions” that involve the integration of two or three “off-the-shelf” applications […] The key is to craft solutions that are elegently simple and do not impose a substantial tax on professional time.

I can’t help thinking how class and student blogs, perhaps a class wiki, an email group and, most importantly, interactive, fun activities both in and out of the classroom might help us move towards this exciting future of education - one that enables learners to become knowledge creators rather than knowledge receivers!

Just had an unreal presentation by Russ Weakley (WebStandards Group, MaxDesign and WebEssentials05) demonstrating a real site being designed step-by-step using CSS. Apart from being an incredible opportunity to witness the process and thoughts of a design professional in action, Russ’s presentation has also challenged me to rethink they way I facilitate at TAFE.

I think what struck me was the diversity of the audience (in terms of background knowledge) and therefore how it would be difficult to meet everyone’s needs, but nontheless, the way nearly everyone came away from Russ’s presentation motivated to find out more. I wonder if I spend too much time trying to make sure that everyone can follow what we’re doing so that the motivation and excitement of what we’re doing drips out into a big puddle …. Yes there is a difference between a one-off presentation and an 18week semester, but nonetheless, a demonstration/seminar session each week could be really effective.

…Methinks this needs more thought and interaction with other peoples ideas and experience…

With workshops, skype calls, content-restructure, new content creation and some marketing thrown in on the side, it’s been a busy two weeks!

Evaluating the Blogging in Education resource

I’ve had two opportunities over the past few weeks to run Getting Started with Blogging in Education as a face-to-face activity within TAFE, and it’s been great fun! Although this work isn’t actually part of the resource development, it’s provided an excellent opportunity to see how the resource works in practise. I’ve started recording ideas about running the workshop on a new page, Blogshop Facilitator Tips, to help anyone who wants to facilitate a similar workshop (although it’s far from finished).

Overall, it’s been great fun running the workshops - people are always amazed at how easy it is to publish on the Internet themselves - and we’ll hopefully be running follow-up workshops! The structure of the Getting Started workshop has been great too, getting people to investigate blogging in groups themselves, rather than just being told what blogging is about. Unfortunately we’ve been running out of time to investigate educational blogging thoroughly, but we’ve been able to discuss lots of ideas for classroom use (communication, contributions, etc.)

One aspect of the workshop that needs refining is the example blog that participants create - this needs to be something useful that they can continue to use after the workshop. I don’t think it’s feasible to create something in the workshop and feel confident to go ahead and use it in class. Instead, maybe we could create a professional development journal - participants could use it to learn in their own professional area, linking and constructing new information as they find it… we could even practise doing this as part of the workshop. I feel that people need to practise blogging first to appreciate the incredible learning implications before thinking about using blogs in class?

Restructuring the Collaborative Resource

I’ve been revising the structure of the main page a little, but after a Skype call with Leigh Blackall - another contributor - we’ve decided to broaden the original scope of the resource to better fit the title of Blended Learning. Leigh’s currently working on the restructure to include other aspects of Blended Learning.

Marketing - or raising awareness

In an attempt to interest others in contributing to this resource (currently there’s only three of us who have contributed anything), I’ve started commenting on relevant educational blogs with a link to the resource. It would be unreal if other people who also saw a need for such collaborative resources were keen to contribute and add their bit! Or even just saw the benefit of using the Getting Started Blogshop! The more interest we can generate, the more successful the resource will be.

We have rated as a link on the Wikispaces hompage (without putting it there ourselves! Viewed 1st June 05), but need would like to invite more participation by creating a structure for something that people want to contribute to (ie. people need to see the benefit).

Related to this, we need to create an About BlendedLearning page, describing the purpose of the site and the main contributers (people and organisations - anyone else who contributes can add themselves too). This is often something that helps people decide whether they want to contribute or not.

Other related news

After having considered using Drupal as the technology behind this colaborative development (see Weekly report 4), I came across a Drupal-based resource called Weblogs for Educators that is very similar in purpose to our Getting Started with Blogging in Education workshop - a collaboratively-developed resource to help educators get started using Weblogs. It seems that our thoughts about Drupal being inaccessible to most potential contributors might be right - I could only find one contributor to the resource. I’ve added a comment asking for some feedback on their experience but haven’t had a reply yet.

Aims for the coming week:

• Finish Blogshop Facilitator Tips
• Create and work on an About BlendedLearning page.
• Continue re-organising to invite more participation
• Continue trying to raise awareness of the resource

While browsing through the Personalised Learning project at the Centre for Learning Innovation yesterday I came across some excellent reading from Working laterally: how innovation networks make an education epidemic:

David Hargreaves argues that schools will be transformed only when teachers embrace the ‘hacker ethic’ - a passion for developing new practice and a readiness to share the results freely with colleagues through innovation networks.

(… “but who is my ‘colleague’”, asked the rich young ruler?)
There are a few gems in this one. David argues that like the Internet, networks of educators sharing innovative ideas needs no central authority; “the role of government would be to help it flourish as a system that knows how to transfer innovation”.

The irony is that I had to log in to the Teaching and Learning Exchange (TaLE) - with my Department of Education username/password (which required a help-desk call to obtain) to find the link to David’s freely available article… I wonder how many educators don’t make it that far? This is quite related to something David challenges as a necessary transformation for education: The fifth transformation - making an open source culture:

A […] practitioner who creates the knowledge behind a powerfull innovation faces four options over what to do with it. They are:

• keep it to yourself;
• sell it for profit;
• share it with a partner; or
• give it away for free to anybody who wants it

After dealing with the alternatives, David concludes that “the path to system transformation requires every school to be willing to give away its innovations for free, in the hope of some return, but with no guarantee of it.”

It’s great that our Department of education is taking steps to foster innovation among it’s workers, it will be even greater when they open their innovation networks to give and receive from the wider education community… at the very least, this opening-up will make it easier for DET workers to access/contribute to these innovation networks without having to make a help-desk call to obtain a password to login!

The Personalised Learning project looks like an exciting project and I’m looking forward to seeing where it leads!

Been reading lots lately on other people’s blogs… it’s so easy to get carried away reading while forgetting that one of the most powerful things about blogging is the ability to write and learn.

I’m not sure how other bloggers deal with this, but it just takes me soo much time to process and write about the things that I’m reading! I know that that’s why it’s such an incredible learning process - joining the global conversation - but I seriously struggle to write, let-alone write well… yet another skill I’m trying to learn.

I was comforted recently by Jason Santa Maria’s response to the frustration of constantly having to learn new tools just to keep up:

How are you supposed to get ahead when there is practically something new to consider every time you turn around? Well, you don’t. There are only so many hours in the day. You learn as much as you can and, most importantly, as much as you can retain without drifting too far from your core specialties.Meaning, I love design. It is my specialty and my craft. I can learn how to program Java if I want, but what’s the real purpose? To pad out my resumé? I would rather cut away the fat by trying to be as good as I can at a few things than just adequate in many things. It’s different for everyone though, some people can chew gum and walk at the same time, and some can’t. The trick is finding the balance that works for you and avoiding waking up one day to the realization that you are spread too thin to be useful in any arena.

I love education (and learning) and I love technology… I just need to keep cutting away the fat and focus more on fewer things…

After evaluating and using Drupal over the past month or so as a possible package that could be used to facilitate a collaborative resource development, we’ve ended up going for something simpler and cheaper: A free solution hosted by Wikispaces - check out the beginnings of our resource at http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/ - you can even edit/update it yourself - it’s almost as easy as editing a word document!.

Away from Drupal

Drupal is a fantastic open source collaborative development environment, that certainly lives up to it’s name: “Community plumbing”, but there are some inherent drawbacks for our idea of building a simple resource to help educators start using the free and easy tools of the web.

1. It needs to be hosted (costing money). Although James at IncSub has generously given us our own drupal hosting for free… it may not be a great long-term solution if the traffic increases etc.
2. Drupal takes quite a bit of setting up and configuration, which leads to the next point:
3. The medium is the message: We don’t want to use a system to deliver the resource that other teachers/educators can’t easily use for themselves.
4. Drupal doesn’t currently provide a great revision-tracking system of pages, which effectively means that we need to get potential contributors to create an account and login to make any changes to the resource. One of the ingredients to the success of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can edit a page, without the hassle of logging in.

…And on to Wikispaces

These four points led us back to the excellent free resource: Wikispaces. Wikispaces allows anyone to create their own domain (ours is http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/). We can create and edit any number of pages, include pictures etc., all for free. Anyone can come along and improve/build-on the resource with ease - encouraging participation - yet there is a also great revision-tracking system that allows us to monitor the changes being made and revert them if necessary.

So I spent a large part of the past week or so transferring our work to the BlendedLearning Wikispace area. Thanks to Jude Cooke and Ian Bailey for there work on the Blog bar image .

I’m hoping to use a TAFE WSI logo for the site, instead of the default pot-plant, but need to find out a bit more about this. So, for now we now have the beginnings of a resource that can be continually improved and updated by its users. I’ll be using the resource as part of a training activity this Thursday (and, most probably, updating it afterwards with improvements!).

Previous ‘weekly’ reports:

• Weekly report 3 - 5th May 2005
• Weekly report 2 - 21st April 2005
• Weekly report 1 - 31st March 2005
• Initial outline of project idea - 22nd March 2005

We’ve made some good progress with the initial resource: Getting Started with Blogging in Education after some great feedback from a couple of TALO contributors.
All that’s remaining for this initial resource is to update the final page: Where to from here, and create a pdf resource “My Blogger Cheatsheet” for use with the Create your own Blog! activity. It’s been a great experience building on someone elses work (under a creative commons license), rather than starting from scratch!

I’m hoping to have a go at using the resource during a professional development activity on the 19th of May.

After using the resource and incorporating any feedback, it would be great to advertise it a bit to see if there are others who might want to use and/or contribute to the resource. Although we might want to consider whether it’s worthwhile setting up our own site at that point and planning the scope/focus of the site.

I’d like to look at using standard Wiki pages for other resources on the site too (such as a “First steps with RSS”), as it’ll allow resources to be updated much more freely than the current book format. We’ve used the ‘book’ format for this initial resource, as it is very structured and hopefully helpful for newbies, but other resources could be simply a wiki page outlining the best links to, for eg, take your first steps with RSS. I still haven’t had a chance to see if Drupal can support Sean’s idea of a categorised rating system for elearning links… it’s definitely possible, but I’m not sure whether there’s already a Drupal module for it or not… hopefully we’ll get a chance to research this soon!