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!

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?

…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…

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!

No, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m the essence of wisdom… or that I’m a great leader… (or good at art for that matter!). A friend of mine (John) asked me recently to participate as a guinea-pig in a course that he’s preparing to run called The Arts of a Wise Leader, which has forced me yet again to consider how crucial conversation is - not just for leadership/management - but in all spheres of life!

The Queensland Education department has had some involvement with this course, you can read about it on the testamonial page.

The arts

The course provides a completely refreshing view of leadership/management, focusing not on cold processes, tasks and resources, but instead on the more humane ‘arts’ of leadership: Story, Brilliance, Promise and Grace (as depicted in the graphic above).

Using them is a matter of art not science, of subtlety and humanity, not process and formula.

The arts carry a very different focus from traditional management methods. Rather than focusing on efficiency or control, the arts focus on enabling people (employees) to live (and work) well. That’s not to say that traditional management methods aren’t useful, but rather to emphasize that people are at the centre of leadership/management, not tasks, processes or outcomes.

For example, it’s through story that we all understand our own situations - we know our own (hi)story and our current situation. Through conversation we build a story of a future that unites our own individual stories with shared meaning or purpose. Interacting with each others’ stories (irrespective of position or rank) allows us to discover brilliance in each others lives.

The use of the word ’story’ confused me at first, but I think it’s just being used in place of ‘communication’ to emphasise that people/characters converse to create ideas and meaning, rather than just communicate meaning. This is captured really well in the course with the statement:

Communication is the sharing of created meaning.
Conversation is the creation of shared meaning.

I won’t go into detail about the other ‘arts’ but just to tickle your curiosity, to lead with grace could mean to subvert systems that create distinctions between people just to hold rank, spending time with the workers at the coalface, getting to know them and discovering their brilliance. Leading with ‘promise’ entails realising the effect that our words can have on others and therefore speaking with intention and integrity. All of us are leaders in certain situations and all of us are followers in other situations, but it is important to remember that when we are leading, we are leading on behalf of others.

I guess these are the things that stuck out to me during our discussions (and some reading/reflection) - the course is not itself about providing nice definitions of leadership/wisdom/etc., but rather it uses heaps of individual and group activities (mind-maps, presentations, discussions, videos etc.) to create conversations about leadership.

Reflections and feedback

As we were just guinea-pigs in our group, we only had a 1-day taste of the 3-day course, so although we got a taste of the different aspects or ‘arts’ through the group’s interaction and conversation (as well as through John’s facilitation), we didn’t get to see the full course.

There were many things that stood out as useful to me. For example, identifying someone who has had a big impact on my life - in leading me - and creating a mind-map based around that person’s influence was really helpful for me to identify what was important in leadership from my own perspective (relationship).

Another interesting part of the day for me was looking at why we in western society try to fill projects or systems with lots of facts, processes and tasks without considering the stories of the people involved. It’s as if we think by breaking everything down to the n’th degree we can define the pure essence of management or devise the perfect management strategy, but at the same time we can lose much of the human creativity and brilliance through the process. We become so focused on getting the process right that we don’t often take the time to see how individuals might be able to create and contribute with their own brilliance. Again, the course was not trying to imply that traditional management techniques are bad - but rather to highlight a possible imbalance.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the biggest point that was reinforced for me was how crucial the ‘art’ of conversation is, in all spheres of life. I think this is particularly pertinent to me as it’s an area where I feel I need to learn from people around me… I can so easily sit and stare out a window at breakfast, or be so focused on work while colleagues are chatting over morning tea, or try to keep a meeting so focused on task that conversation is stifled. I’m starting to see that I’m often missing out on the real learning - the conversation and creation of shared meaning. That’s something that I’m now beginning to enjoy…

So thanks John for the opportunity to be a part of such a worthwhile course!

(Ad: you can read testimonials from people more important than me on the course’s website )

Seems to me there’s been a whole bunch of articles and blogs lately putting forward the idea that the LMS will be a thing of the past… well not exactly, but perhaps not so… central to student learning.

After arguing that we’ve been pursuing systems to impose bureaurocratic control rather than empower the learner, Parkin’s argues on his blog that:

Learning software vendors still doggedly pursue their vision of reusable learning objects that integrate via a central standards-conformant LMS. Meanwhile, trainers who really want to encourage experience-sharing and dynamic learner-created content are scrambling to understand blogging, RSS, and peer-to-peer networks.

Many LMS vendors don�t �get� learning. Can it really be that they don�t �get� the internet either? Are they so afraid of being non-intermediated that they will fight real progress every step of the way or are they about to help us evolve?

I came across Parkin’s article above, from an elearningspace.org article “Learning Management Systems: the wrong place to start learning” (which I found from Leigh’s blog). In this article, George Siemens argues that (from the intro):

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often viewed as being the starting point (or critical component) of any elearning or blended learning program. This perspective is valid from a management and control standpoint, but antithetical to the way in which most people learn today.

In this article George is not arguing that LMSs are bad, but just pointing out their disadvantages - they are Learning Management systems, not necessarily effective Learning Environments.

The more I think about these arguments, the more I think that a Technology course (such as Website Design) should empower learners through the use of freely available distributed tools (e.g. www.blogger.com) to continue learning after the formal course ends. Just need to find out how we can use a good combination of blogging, websites and LMSs.

Attended a great workshop/training day at Nepean TAFE yesterday called “Learning for the Future” as a part of the Networking 2004 conference.

The day started with a talk by Richard Neville (entitled “Engaging the Future”) that pulled a few interesting thoughts together about the future of technology, kinda looking at the effects of globalism, the acceleration of technology and sustainability. Although I’ve already been told to “get out of my silo” for saying this, I’ll say it again: I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t put just a little bit of effort in to talk about the future of education and learning. But it was interesting non-the-less

Then there was a talk by the Alan Morrison from the NSW Ambo service demonstrating how they’ve been using flexible delivery within their training programs. This was also interesting to see such a different application of online learning. I was particularly interested in the emphasis Alan had on the need for online socialisation before interaction and - more importantly - knowledge construction can be viable online.

Microsoft then had a quick explanation of their own focus in education, majoring on their Learning Gateway integration tool. Really it didn’t seem to add any value to a custom integration suite for a Uni or othe Educational institution… only seemed to lock you in to using MS technology - both software and hardware (see the Solution overview for Microsoft’s Learning Gateway). Given that most LMSs are using standards-based technologies (XML-RPC or SOAP) for integration, I can’t see the the value that Learning Gateway can add. None-the-less, I got the guys card so I can find out more…

But by far the most interesting session for the day (am I biased?) was a workshop by Leigh Blackall entitled: Using Free and Open Source Software to Create Free and Open Courseware. Guess I was just excited to find someone else more enthusiastic than me about the possibilities of Open Source software and Open Courseware in TAFE!

One of the learning goals that I want to set for my own Professional Development is to develop a greater awareness and understanding of the learning standards.

The two that seem to be most frequently mentioned are SCORM (from ADL) and IMS Learning Design. But these beasts seem bigger than Ben Hur to the uninitiated (me!)… so I’m going to explain what I understand so far, with the knowledge that there might be lots of misunderstandings and gaps at present!

Firstly, from what I understand, SCORM is not actually a standard, it is itself a reference model that encompasses a bunch of standards from different organisations such as ADL, IEEE and IMS. Phillip Dodds, one of the founders of SCORM, says:

In early 1999, I drafted the first version of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model as a way to integrate and “connect” work from other organizations.

SCORM seems to be most focussed on the packaging of learning content into discrete learning objects that can be shared and re-used in different environments. Furthermore, SCORM allows complex directed learning experiences to be designed through the complex sequencing of the content, depending on learner progress.

IMS Learning design, on the other hand, seems to combine the roles of participants and facilitators, together with the available resources, to focus on learning activities. Or perhaps the difference is better expressed by the focus on the process of learning, as opposed to the learning content. In a discussion on a Moodle forum, Michael Klieb says:

But, organizing activities rather than content is the main difference to “content aggregation models” for learning objects like SCORM and IMS-Content-Packaging. Organizing activities of teachers and learners in group (= class) is the “unique selling point” of IMS-LD.
IMS-LD: Stop thinking about putting together resources for learning, start thinking of the learning process.

So, my question is, are they mutually exclusive? Can Learning Design be integrated into a reference model similar to SCORM, or is SCORM inherently based on a single-user e-learning experience, as opposed to Learning Design’s multiple user interactive blended-learning focus? Guess I’ll need to do more research to find out

Just did some reading about another activity based learning system called LAMS, developed at Macquarie Uni. Like Moodle, it seems to be based around social constructivist ideas - there’s lots of links to the IMS Learning Design specification.

Both LAMS and the IMS Learning Design specification have already been discussed on one of the moodle forums. Interesting to note that LAMS is a Java/Flash application, so quite different from Moodle (HTML/PHP). Also interesting to note that Moodle 2 is looking towards the IMS LD Spec!

I just finished reading Martin Dougiamas’ reflection A Journey into Constructivism. It helpfully presented Martin’s own reflections from learning about constructivism in a format that espouses the benefits of constructivism - as best as one can in an essay! (I guess this essay designed to demonstrate his understanding of constructivism).

The five modes of constructivism identified by the author are as follows:

• Trivial Constructivism
• Radical Constructivism
• Social Constructivism
• Cultural Constructivism
• Critical Constructivism

(The fact that I just remembered all five without referring back to the essay is testament to the clarity of the essay!) I want to overview these concepts briefly before going to play with Mim (daughter) before they slip my mind!

Trivial Constructivism

Trivial perhaps because it is obvious, trivial constructivism is summed up neatly in the essay (?) as

Knowledge is actively constructed by the learner, not passively received from the environment.

Radical Constructivism

Bordering on relativism, radical constructivism sounds similar to the common ideology that everyone constructs their own reality inside their head. While I think this is in some ways true, I wouldn’t go so far as to treat each reality as equally valid nor without context! Most probably my very new understanding of this term is overly simplified and incorrect!

Social Constructivism

Social Constructivism tempers radical constructivism by saying that we construct reality within our own minds yet in the context of our social learning environment. A social-learning environment in the classroom provides a very obvious example of participants learning from the interactions with the facilitator and each other. Each participant’s own landscape of knowledge, beliefs and experience will receive the flow of liquid “content” differently, with meaning gathering or dispersing differently within each participants mind. Furthermore, participants can interact with the flow of the meaning through each others mental-landscape as they question/discuss/encourage each others’ input.

Actually, in hindsight, the analogy of a mental landscape is a bad one in this situation (I think it came from some Edward deBono book that I read years ago about the mind as a self-organising system - I am right, you are wrong: from rock logic to Water Logic). It produces an image of meaning being determined by each participant’s mental landscape, rather than meaning being actively constructed.

Cultural Constructivism

Outside of the immediate social learning environment is the cultural environment of the society, group or school within which the learning is taking place. I’m a bit hazy on the distinction between social and cultural constructivism… guess I’ll need to read more. Does anyone else have helpful input here?

Critical Constructivism

Assuming social and cultural constructivism, critical constructivism seems to be like the term meta-cognition (thinking about thinking). I think the gist of it is reflecting on the constructivism occuring within a learning environment so that constructive steps can be taken to modify the learning environment itself, perhaps challenging social or cultural assumptions. Again, I’ve probably way over-simplified the concept, but it’s a start… am I on the right track?

All in all, a very worthwhile piece of reading! (the original essay by Martin that is!)

Just had an idea… get it down in writing while it’s still in my head!

What if Jude, Gene and I (the teachers of the Webdesign course), were to take up a local community web-design project each semester, just like the students! It’d be a great way to keep our own skills technically current, while also better prepare for the content that we teach! It’d also be a great way to get TAFE out there in the community and raise the profile of the Web Design course… must talk to Colin/Sherrie/Jenny about this idea!

I finally got around to printing the Technical Currency TAFE material from the Intranet site. Some of the material is really useful, such as the “Getting Started: A guide to planning your professional development”, which is quite motivating and encourages reflection on current skills etc.

The “Suggested Activities for Technical Currency” also looks helpful, lots of ideas to motivate one to get involved!

The “Technical Currency Diary” is a bit disappointing though… looks more like a sign-off for superiors to make sure that professional development activities are being recorded… nothing about reflecting on the activities in a journal for your own development as a professional.

Either way, I’m inspired to set out my professional development plan in writing, and hopefully this journal will be a great place to develop and reflect on the ideas! I’m currently thinking of integrating some of the social-constructivist learning and blended-learning that I’m already doing, but to formalise or focus my learning… i guess just make it more intentional.