Featured, Syndicated, Virginia Group

In the Open, Vulnerability is Essential, Agency is Everything and the Network is the Classroom

I’ve just returned from ELI2018, where a few of us presented on the OpenLearning ’17 experience and took the opportunity to promote OpenLearning ’18. My colleague Gardner Campbell, Hub Director extraordinaire and leader of our motley crew gave me the opportunity to talk about my “Novice to Node” experience in OpenLearnimg ’17. I started that journey with no blog, no Twitter presence and no experience in a networked learning environment. In some ways, I had no business being a facilitator for OpenLearning ’17, but it some ways, I was best guide for fellow newbies and my newness to it all gives me a unique perspective among my colleagues on the steering committee. And besides, not knowing how to do something is not a valid hurdle for me. I figured out how to do it by doing it. I learned through trying to teach others.

There were some tweets from audience members in the session that called out my pithy personal learning outcomes from the OpenLearning ’17 experience. I had my 5 seconds of fame as they were liked and retweeted, but I think they may have been misinterpreted as lessons learned from one specific week. I want to be clear about this– these are takeaways from my entire experience over the duration of the course. These ideas evolved over a 15 week period (don’t worry, OpenLearning ’18 is just 8 weeks!) when I was focused on learning about teaching and learning in the open.

So now that I’ve cleared that up, I’d like to explain a little more about what I meant in the session at ELI2018.

Vulnerability is Essential

If you can be vulnerable and in the moment, you can make connections between ideas and you can make connections with other learners in this networked environment. The network is the classroom and the more time you spend in the network, the more experiences you will have and the more you will learn. Vulnerability and authenticity are important traits for leaders, and I would argue for teachers as well. They are certainly important traits for learners, but it can be hard to admit what you don’t know, especially if you are used to being an expert in your field.

Having just returned from a conference, I find the conference scene a useful metaphor. If you go to sessions, but talk to no one there or in between sessions, you are going to have a more shallow experience than if you strike up conversations in the hallways and over meals. It requires putting yourself out there, but the reward is significant. If you engage on Twitter with others at the conference, you might have an even richer experience.

The Network is the Classroom

The same is true for connected learning–to get the most out of the experience, you need to connect, not just with the readings, but with the other learners in the network. And ideally, you get the opportunity to connect with people who are another step further out from the course you are engaged in. You begin to build your network thought the connections you make in the course, and then you make connections with their connections (it’s like those shampoo commercials from the 70s and 80s–and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and that’s the power of the network).

But back to vulnerability. Think about times when you have really made a connection with someone, not over something superficial (like shampoo…), but over something meaningful. How did that connection happen? One or both of you probably shared something personal, something that was important to you, something you’ve been thinking about for some time. That’s what can happen in the network if you open yourself up to connecting in that deeper way, but you do have to put a piece of your deeper self out there. The network IS the classroom. It’s where the learning happens. To be part of the learning experience, you need to be in the network, connecting with others.

Agency is Everything

Agency is about having a choice, and in the connected learning environment the choice is for the learner. The learner decides whether to do all, some, or none of the readings in a cMOOC. The learner decides whether to participate in the synchronous activities offered and at what level (are you lurking in the Hangout, or are you engaging in the chat?). Each learner’s experience will be different based on the choices they have made. Agency is empowering. It also lets us make decisions about our privacy. Perhaps you don’t want to join Twitter because you are concerned about how your information will be used. You can choose not to participate in that way. Your experience will be limited by that choice, but the choice is yours to make. Open pedagogy takes further steps to give students agency. Students might have a voice in how the syllabus is shaped or in the tools they use to complete an assignment. Perhaps they even have a choice in which assignments they will complete. Again, each learner’s experience is unique based on their decisions and what learning opportunities they choose to experience.

And a little about time management for cMOOCs

For me, I choose it all. My only limit is time and I have been amazed at how much time I can create when I adjust my priorities and my habits. So when I’m in the cMOOC, I will take a break from social media that is not connected to the experience (sorry, Pinterest and Facebook), and I will engage on Twitter over my morning coffee, but I will filter for #OpenLearning18 and focus my experience. I might write a blog post over several mornings or evenings (this one was begun in an airport and finished in my office). I will find ways to fit this experience into my days and nights because it is important to me. I know I will gain valuable insights from connecting with others in the network. It’s worth the small sacrifices and adjustments to my routines. For 8 weeks, I can change my lifestyle and it will change my life for the better.

Here’s how to join OpenLearning ’18: http://openlearninghub.net/the-stream/ 

We’ll get started on Sunday, February 4th. I look forward to connecting with you!

Open Participants, Syndicated

Take Note

I am currently in the process of collecting exemplars of the Ontario Extend module activities for an in-development activity bank. It’s looking pretty slick thanks to the Internet construction machine that is Alan Levine (aka cogdog). Stay tuned for that!

I thought it couldn’t hurt to do a couple myself. This is the last one, I swear! I did one yesterday, too.

This is my take on the Extend activity at the bottom of this page in the Teacher for Learning module. See the module itself for the ol’ how-to do it stuff.

Try watching a TED talk or conference keynote video yourself to practice your own note-taking skills using Cornell Notes.

I took this opportunity to revisit one of the most wonderful keynotes I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Thank so much to Robin DeRosa for Periscoping it so that I was able to relive this!

Gardner Campbell from the 2016 Open Education Conference in Richmond, Virginia. Gardner discusses insight and how we might be able to stop stifling it so much in higher ed. My Cornell notes are below, but ignore those and watch the periscope. I still think about it often, 15 months later. Layers upon layers!

Date/Subject: Nov 2016, Keynote at OpenEd Conference by Gardner Campbell

Key Points

-Insight

-The Eureka Hunt New Yorker Article

-The Insight experience

-alpha, beta,gamma waves

-gamma rhythm is when the insights happen

-brain cells can be restructured often an insight

-you have to wait for it the insight

-A summary and response to the eureka hunt-

-clenched state of mind

-these insight killing activities even spawn industry like Course Hero

Deadly Mantras of student success

 Notes

-Opens with footage of Bob Dylan in Sweden answering questions from reporters… being cagey about his answers

-Gardner introduces smokejumper story. Robert Wag survived a forest fire bc of insight. The others perished because they couldn’t believe it.

-insight was to start another fire before he jumped into it. it would burn out before he landed and he would be ok. it worked. others didn’t believe him so they died.

-etymology of insight. synonyms of insight… all would be on the banned ‘sinister 16 verbs in your learning outcomes. don’t dare put them on there

-but insights are obviously deep learning experiences

-The Eureka Hunt- new yorker article

-The INsight experience: concentrate, search, mental block/impasse, walk away/relax……… problem solved. what’s in the gap? gamma rhythm…

“students will have made distant and unprecedented connections”

neurons in the right hemisphere are less precise but better connected.

maybe an apple watch could let you know when you’re having a gamma wave

“you may now say OMG!”

-let yourself/students prepare for an experience when they can make a connection. you have to wait for it

-showed a student response to the eureka hunt. boring and uninsightful. not the students fault as it was what was asked. it was the asking that did not allow for insight. summary and response and insight maybe don’t mix.

-“insight into insights” we could be getting Watson to produce this stuff algorithmically

‘flash cards on the eureka hunt’

“get the answer to YOUR response to the Eureka Hunt”

Deadly Mantras of student success: students don’t do optional, define more pathways, we need to graduate more students (students graduate we don’t do that to them), our students are our products.

-The Aha moment is well within the competence of the average person

-will it scale? if we want it to.

-The blog is where the insights occur

-how about an opportunity to write without a rubric

-“i don’t even know how I would put that in a rubric”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, my favorite thing about blogging for school is being encouraged to take an active role in my own education.”

-“I just wanted something real to happen in the room”
Summary

Insight, and the experiences that may lead to insight learning is amazing and addicting. Typical and traditional outcomes/activities/assessments, so lock step, may be counter- productive to and prevent actual insights

See, my note taking is suspect. But in the Cornell note-taking style, it’s easier to find out that you should take your own, better notes!

OH and if YOU would like to add an exemplar of your own to any of the Ontario Extend module activities, even if it’s something you’ve already done, please let me know by commenting below!

image: “… is taking notes” flickr photo by Jon Åslund https://flickr.com/photos/jooon/2712042772 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

 

 

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

And We All Dine On

This page of the Ontario Extend Collaborator Module includes words that, when you read them, make your brain think that you might want to create an image of a dining table representing a project that you’ve worked on.

“Okay” my brain thought upon reading these words. “I’ll do that.”

Using the latest of bare bones basic visual editing software (Microsoft Paint for Windows 10) and the wonderful people of the world who openly licence their photography, I was able to piece together the dinner table for those involved in the making of The Open Faculty Patchbook. In reality, this meal would cost a bit over my budget since I’d have to fly people in from Tennessee, Ohio, and Cairo.

Oh and hey! Check out The Open Learner Patchbook and let me know if you know anyone who’d like to be at that dinner table by commenting below.

Who’s at your collaborative dining table?

(“lauren’s mermaid party” flickr photo by mom2sofia https://flickr.com/photos/mom2sofia/15479145327 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license)

Open Participants, Syndicated

Here we go again! Taking Year 2 of Networked Narratives for a spin!

What The Heck Kind of Course is This?

At the core this is a bonafide on the ground course in Networked Narratives at Kean University, with registered students who will spend some time each week in a classroom. Last year it was co-taught by Mia Zamora at Kean join via the interwebs by Alan Levine who beamed in from his home Arizona. Several of you participated.

This time around, Alan is the sole teacher, still beaming in, with the assistance of TAs Hailey and Marissa. Mia is this year teaching at the University of Bergen in Norway, and her class there will overlap with ours as well. And for a middle segment of the course we will be connecting with students of Maha Bali at the American University Cairo.

Also, as an open connected course, the experience is open to anyone else on the internet who wants to do all or part of the same activities and assignments. Why? Because that’s what networks allow and enable. – Alan Levine

Everyday there is a prompt to create something digital, a Digital Daily Create (dda), to post online and/or tweet; #dda132 for example.

#dda132 A Spin of the Google Translate Roulette

If you connect your blog, both registered students and “open participants” (like me), your posts appear on the Networked Narratives website. It’s all very interwoven and mysterious and fun!

For my “Spin of the Google Translate Roulette” I chose a “song” that emerged from Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in the 1960s. A musical improvisation with a nod to free jazz, there are thousands of recordings available and no two are the same. Originally created by the Grateful Dead, “Dark Star” is now performed world wide and a band has taken the title for the name of their “orchestra.” American movie director John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape from New York, They Live) chose “Dark Star’ for the title of his first film. The song lyrics are credited to Writer(s): Robert Hall Weir, Jerome J. Garcia, Philip Lesh, Ronald Charles Mckernan, Michael S. Hart, Robert C. Hunter and William Kreutzmann on AZLyrics.com.

Dark Star is often performed as part of a larger medley and improvisational ‘jams’ can extend the ‘song’ to nearly an hour. These ‘jams’ appealed to 60s concert goers more interested in “an experience” that in just listening to recorded songs performed live. The first version I ever heard was recorded live at the Filmore West and released as a double album titled “Live Dead.” Years later I had the good fortune to work with Bob Thomas, the artist and graphic designer who painted the album cover, at the original “Renaissance Pleasure Faires”, but that’s another story…

I translated “Dark Star” from English to French, from French to Chinese, from Chinese to Hindi, from Hindi to French and from French back into English. To quote an English rock band I never cared for;

“The Song Remains the Same.”

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Dialogue Education: Revisited

This week I facilitated a lunchtime session for the IDEA (Instructional Design and Education Activities) Interest Group at Mayo Clinic School. The group consists of human resource professionals, hospital administrators, instructional designers, adult educators,  faculty & staff, and interested others who function in face-to-face and online domains and concentrate in workforce training, public education, and graduate & professional schools across the health sciences fields.  The IDEA Interest Group leader was very generous in allowing me to choose my topic, but she offered these three guidelines: the topic should have broad appeal, somehow relate one or more best practices in adult learning, and leverage the digital affordances of the group’s meeting place, Blackboard Collaborate.  I chose to talk about Dialogue Education, the highly structured, pre-digital approach to participatory learning described by Jane Vella in the 1980s.

Click to view slideshow.

You can download this presentation here.

At first glance, Dialogue Education seems so opposite-of-cutting-edge as to be irrelevant.  While it may have been considered radical in the 1980s, there is nothing overtly radical about Dialogue Education now.  I recently reread Vella’s On Teaching and Learning, and I find her emphasis on Bloom’s taxonomy and instructor-generated structure particularly disturbing when juxtaposed (often on the same page) with strongly worded mandates for “equality” among instructors and learners.  I’m not suggesting that such contradictions can’t work themselves out, but I always get suspicious when they go unacknowledged.

Additionally, there is nothing emerging about the approach.  A review of current Dialogue Education resources offers the exact same content Vella developed 20 years ago; absolutely nothing has changed with the times, with one superficial exception: the 4 Is (Induction, Input, Implementation, Integration) are now called the 4 As (Anchor, Add, Application, and Away).

The lack of conversation around dialogue education and digital participatory culture makes it look dinosaurian, particularly when compared to connected learning. Vella writes of online education in her 2008 text, On Teaching and Learning, but it’s clear she had not grasped the affordances or implications of flipped, blended, networked, or digital-integrated learning. To be fair, few educators had considered any of this in 2008 but some had; for example, by 2008 the debate over whether connectivism was a new learning theory or just a new take on social constructivism was well underway.

I want to make this clear. Dialogue Education is not my (or anyone else’s) everything. However, I think it is most definitely something – something worth talking about with all kinds of people everywhere – and here’s why.

I quit practicing medicine in March 2011.  In July, an acquaintance of an acquaintance – an education professor who was looking to recruit health professionals to her adult education degree program –  met me for lunch in a local grocery store.  She convinced me to enroll in her night class on program planning and instructional design, because, as she put it “what else was I going to do with my time?”

At the time, I didn’t even know what instructional design was – I actually didn’t figure it out until about halfway through the semester.  I sat in that class every Tuesday and Thursday night, a burned out ex-physician with all the anger, fear, and grief that you would expect me to have (and probably more), surrounded by teachers, instructors, and workforce trainers with years of experience.  I not only thought to myself “Why am I here?” but I literally wrote it out over and over again in my notebook.

The professor (who must have regretted her decision to recruit me more than once) taught Dialogue Education using Dialogue Education.  By the end of the semester, I had not only designed a workshop but had used Dialogue Education to teach my (mostly non-medical) classmates how to interpret gynecologic ultrasound studies.  I had also started teaching other subject matter experts how to integrate Dialogue Education into their continuing education workshops.

All this in one semester.  One class. One book.

I was a very conflicted adult learner with a fuzzy understanding of my purpose. Dialogue Education kept me in my seat. I came to class.  I learned something.  I used what I learned.

I was a subject matter expert with no understanding of education as a discipline. Dialogue Education opened my eyes to the fact that teaching and learning are about more than making sure the lectures are in the right order.  There are bodies of literature, best practices, things to know, and things to practice.

I was a novice instructional designer with no idea of how to start. Dialogue Education gave me something simple and concrete that I could wrap my arms around and share with others. The 4Is are firmly linked to the most ubiquitous themes of adult education literature.  When implemented well, Vella’s structure offers diverse and balanced approaches to passive and active learning. I was able to start teaching faculty how to implement Dialogue Education before I finished my class.

Despite all my protestations of “I am NOT a teacher,” I taught every single day of my medical career.  Oftentimes it was coaching, but I was also unusually active on the lecture circuit (back then it was women’s clubs, health classes, and junior leagues).  I would prepare my comments right down to the inflection and punctuation and always end within 5 seconds of my target.  The idea of moving away from that level of preparation and into the unknown abyss of participatory learning was terrifying.  Designing the right discussion questions is hard. What if they didn’t talk?  What if they said something different than what I wanted them to say? What if they said something wrong? Dialogue Education served as a stepping stone, a way to test the waters. If a group discussion bombs, even I could see that it would be okay. There is always another scheduled activity – not a class discussion!- in the next twenty minutes or less.

I believe Dialogue Education could play a pivotal role in the transition from traditional to participatory pedagogies particularly in structure-forward, accreditation-oriented, and content-driven fields.  Despite all indications to the contrary, Dialogue Education might be part of the revolution – leading the way one highly structured learning task at a time.

 

 

Resources

 

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Further Adventures of an Adult Student

I’m completing a Bachelor’s degree online at Metropolitan State University’s College of Individualized Studies in St. Paul, Minnesota. I chose Metro State because they were originally a University Without Walls when created in 1971. I’m also a student and worker at the Western Institute for Social Research in Berkeley, California, which grew out of Berkeley’s University Without Walls after it imploded.

I had to have all my transcripts sent to Metro State, just from the accredited schools, eight in all. To have a complete education record, I also ordered my SAT scores from the College Board – from 1981.

That’s where it began. I selected the appropriate period for the search (1980-1985), paid the $31 research fee for archived scores and waited. A week later I received a snail mail letter that said ”Although we have thoroughly searched our files for the years 1970 through 1975, we have not been able to locate archived SAT Program test scores in your name.” I had to go online to find a phone number to call. I’m old enough to remember when companies included contact information below their signature.

After waiting on hold for twenty minutes, I talked with Victoria Wolk and explained the error. She said she would correct the time period of the search and send my scores.

A week later I received a snail mail letter that said ”Although we have thoroughly searched our files for the years 1970 through 1975, we have not been able to locate archived SAT Program test scores in your name.” This time I had Ms. Wolk’s phone number. I called and got her voicemail and left a message. When she called back I told her I had received the same letter and wondered if graduating from high school in 1972 was causing them to search the wrong time period. She sent me an email (!) with an Inquiry case number and said my case was resolved.

A week later I received a snail mail letter that said ”Although we have thoroughly searched our files for the years 1980 through 1985, we have not been able to locate archived SAT Program test scores in your name.”

OK, it was worth a try.

A week later I received a bill from the College Board for $55 – $31 for the search and two $12 charges for SAT scores sent. The invoice included a phone number, so I called to find out what was going on. According to the billing department, my scores had been found and sent to Metro State and me. (I’ve learned to order a copy to see if things are really sent) I explained what I had been told before and that I hadn’t received any scores. They said they would look into my situation.

After several more calls, often waiting on hold, I learned they had found my scores but were waiting for my payment. I offered to pay immediately online but the representative explained I couldn’t pay online (the same way I paid the initial $31), but would have to wait for an invoice and mail them a check. Really.

I went online and found the New York State Department of State – Division of Consumer Protection and registered a complaint against the College Board, just to create a record.

Then I got a snail mail invoice:
DELINQUENT – IMMEDIATE ATTENTION REQUIRED
Score holds may not be released until the account balance is paid in full.

At least they had removed the $31 already paid.

More phone calls to billing, waiting on hold, and my scores had still not been sent. Then I got this email:

More phone calls and then back to Ms. Wolk who assured me the scores had been sent. I called Metro State to check and no, they had not received my scores. I called Ms. Wolk and reported that neither Metro State nor I had received my scores. I also asked that any charges be waived because I was spending so much time trying to get my SAT scores. She agreed and requested they be sent again. She also said I should ignore any further delinquent notices because it would take billing some time to process the fee waiver. Sigh.

This week my scores arrived! Five months, twenty (?) phone calls, a consumer complaint and two delinquent notices later, my college and I had my SAT scores. 

If my SAT scores had been required before I could enroll, I would have missed two semesters – an entire academic year!

The network is the deliverable