Work @ TAFE

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!