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Syndicated, Virginia Group

#OpenLearning17 is Connected Learning

I was a bit daunted when I was asked to be a co-director for the Open Access week of OpenLearning17, and had mixed feelings when I realized that my co-director was a total stranger in Egypt.  Would this person be a good collaborator (yes!) and how would we plan a week of activities together when we were so many miles apart (Google Docs!).  I could not imagine a better experience.  Maha and I both embraced the spirit of collaboration from the start and have had a great synergy and a likeness of mind, but also a welcome diversity of experience and knowledge.  I hope that will come through in the activities we have planned for week 7.

So from this learning facilitator’s perspective, OpenLearning17 has definitely been a connected learning experience, both as a student and as a learning facilitator. I have learned a great deal through connecting with Maha and through our collaborative design of the learning experience for week 7 and I hope she feels the same. Teaching is always a learning experience for the teacher and I am grateful for having been nudged out my comfort zone (that is where the best learning experiences happen!).

I hope you enjoy week 7 as much as I have enjoyed planning it with Maha!

Open Participants, Syndicated

Language to include OER in Minnesota Law

I met this past Wednesday with Minnesota State Senator Patricia Torres Ray to discuss how to increase the opportunities for Minnesota teachers and students to use Open Education Resources – Creative Commons licensed curriculum. We decided to not add to try to add it to this bill, SF 158, dealing with STEM COURSE GRANTS; APPROPRIATION  which we had discussed the previous week, but rather to attempt to add it to this bill, SF 1554, which is for “an act relating to education; modifying the duties and expiration of the Online and Digital Learning Advisory Council; providing for a grant program to support digital curriculum development in Minnesota schools.”

SF 1554 already specifies that “The commissioner must award at least one grant to an applicant that proposes to create a new, digital, open educational  resource for statewide use.” Our thinking was, why stop there? If all other things were equal or, at least, similar, wouldn’t it make sense to use OER content instead of proprietary content whenever possible. The immediate dollar savings to the school districts and the state would be significant but probably even more important would be the affordances that the OER content would provide for teachers and students to modify the content to personalize or customize the content to meet the individual needs of every student. Modifications that were useful could be shared with other teachers in the building, district, state, or  anywhere. As Minnesota State Rep. Carlos Mariani said when discussing a different bill in one of the Education Committee hearings later in the day on Wednesday, ‘We need to be able to learn from the investments we make.’ Investing in OER is only a matter of investing in the necessary implementation that is required in order for teachers to use the free, digital, standards aligned curriculum effectively with their students. The learning from that investment comes when teachers and students are able to share what they’ve learned with others, which is what is encouraged by open education resources, OER.

So, this post is to ask for suggestions from you as to the best language to propose to include in Minnesota SF 1554. Any evidence or reasons you’d like to offer as to why adding such language would be useful is also appreciated.  You are welcome to send your thoughts directly to Senator Torres Ray using this email form, or you may add them as comments here, or in an email to me at dan@sabier.org; I’ll compile a summary and forward it to Senator Torres Ray.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Connected Learning: a personal epiphany

 

Pleiades

It happened just last Tuesday, and I’ve been reeling ever since.

I was talking with a student during an office visit. The topic of blogging came up. I’m not sure exactly how we got there, but I brought out one of my touchstones, the great “Dackolupatoni” experiment undertaken by a student at Virginia Tech just after a visit to the class by our Distinguished Innovator in Residence, Jon Udell. I could explain all that to you, but I’d really rather you just go read the student’s post (miraculously, several years later, it’s still there–thank you, VT). In a marvelously recursive description of her learning, the student blogged about, and thus enacted, her new understanding of the web’s peculiar, thrilling potential to be both noun and verb. The blog post was about the web, and because it was a blog post to the web, it also became webby itself. It webbed itself. “Dackolpatoni” thus became a small, potent, magically self-enacting instance of the very thing the student had just learned. It became, in Jon Udell’s wonderful metaphor, an “awakened grain of sand.”

The memory thrills me now now less than the experience did then. To have a student, all on her own, craft such an elegant proof of concept! There were several other electric moments in that class, but this one immediately defined a moment that continues to resonate, ever more plangently, throughout the sounding connections of this resonant web. The student’s post is as powerful a demonstration I can imagine of Jerome Bruner’s definition of understanding: “going beyond the information given.” And the going-beyond has now transcended its local context. It has gone beyond its own going beyond! The bright moment continues to expand its sphere of illumination. And the bright moment continues to light my path. So fragile and exquisite a moment, to have proven so remarkably enduring. But of course that was the reason for the student’s experiment to begin with. And the spark that became incandescent was the student’s realization that there were grounds for making that experiment. She became aware of a question to ask.

It was indeed a thrill for me, and remains so, to have been present in the moments leading up to, and away from, that particular moment. I wasn’t there for the moment of the writing, of course. I read that post after the class, after it had been written, after it had already begun to do its work. But reading it, afterwards, as it began to web, I saw something like the red shift that indicates the universe is expanding. I did not see the leap, but I saw the leaping. Spooky action at a distance. The web was the instrumentation that revealed that action, even as it inspired it and made it possible.

Thrilling as that “Dackolupatoni” experience was, it was not a new thrill for me. My experience with the Web has always been one of uncanny connections and near-mystical properties. I know they’re not really mystical properties, really I do, but I continue to marvel at, and seek to emulate and propagate, the conditions and protocols and dreams underlying the technical architecture that makes these properties possible. When I became an administrator at the University of Mary Washington, right about the time there was enormous energy around the idea of “Web 2.0,” I was fortunate to be able to gather a team that was ready and able to help faculty, staff, and students to find and make those uncanny, web-energized connections in their own work. Marvels tumbled out, and the sense of uncanny energies and possibilities seemed to increase with near-exponential intensity and frequency. Those webs kept growing, too–not that everyone understood or welcomed or even acknowledged these miracles in plain sight.

All of which brings me back to last Tuesday, and the student in my office. I had just told her the “Dackolupatoni” story as a way of describing the energy and linking I hoped students could discover (and craft, and experience) in the blogging we were doing for class. I told her about awakening grains of sand. She looked at me, paused, and thought. Then she said something like, “That’s a really interesting metaphor. I’d never thought about the Web that way. Posting something to the Web always seemed to me like sending a message into vast, dark, and empty interstellar space.” And all at once I could see, with newfound clarity, what I’ve been trying to share for years, even when I felt discouraged and baffled by aggressive and sometimes hostile resistance to the very idea of connected learning.

I see with renewed clarity that a core element of what I would call digital literacy, perhaps the core element, is understanding the possibilities the Web holds out to us for awakening grains of sand, of “Dackolupatoni” experiments that have the weird and transformative properties of demonstrating how giving airy nothings a local habitation and a name can make us more at home, and much less alone, within the apparent infinities of our own consciousness. How human agency can scale, not by dwarfing and even consuming those around us, but by equipping us to recognize, and on this platform to demonstrate, the possibility of becoming what Donne describes as “books lying open to each other,” in an environment in which it is possible, in Parker Palmer’s beautiful phrase, “to know as we are known.” Like language. Like love.

A story of two students, then, each of whom taught me crucial things. A story to help explain why “connected learning” is for me not only an aspiration, but pretty close to a redundancy. A story of how permissionless linking generates both spam and the music of the spheres. I hardly know what to say.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

New job, new narrative

Starting a new job has its challenges, one of which is introducing yourself and getting to know your work colleagues.  I attended my first faculty meeting several weeks ago.  I didn’t know anyone in the room except for my boss, so she introduced me, I smiled and waved, and the meeting went on. It was a fairly typical new employee experience.

Then the inevitable (for me, at least) occurred: when I am introduced as a former physician to a group, there is often at least one person who approaches me after the meeting to ask for one sentence on why I would leave a medical practice.  One sentence.  I know they don’t want more, because they ask while we are exiting a room, or entering an elevator, or waiting in the food line at a reception. Within one sentence of my explanation, they wander off, usually after shaking their head (as in “what a waste”) or making a comment about student debt.

These situations really bothers me, mostly because of the assumption that questions about my decision to leave medicine can be answered simply, and that they are appropriate for small talk with a very new acquaintance.  The fact that it makes me so angry has led me to conclude that there is more to my reaction than frustration at rudeness.  When I get angry, it is almost always because I am feeling vulnerable. I know this about myself.

New jobs – new work colleagues, new duties, new workspaces – are opportunities for reinvention: to tell different parts of your past, dress and behave differently, and learn from past mistakes, to be a different sort of work colleague.  As I ease into my new role, I find that I have kept my workflows and office decor. Blogging, whiteboards, and interchangeable/temporary gallery-style photos (although this time with a theme and a color palette) are undeniably me, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I changed my wardrobe. Gone are the Old Navy student duds and in their place is Talbot’s entire deeply discounted winter line (God help me if my mother reads this, since I once told her that I would *never* like anything from Talbots, but yes, it happened. Shh.).

More important, I’m in the process of changing my work narrative…and I think that is why being surprised in the hallway outside the faculty meeting with superficial questioning about my past made me so angry. Despite all the years and reflective blog posts, I have yet to figure out how to talk about what happened when I was practicing medicine.  I don’t know how to encapsulate the professional and personal isolation and the systemic sexism and the challenging patient population and the burn out… Not in one minute with a stranger while navigating a crowded space.  Not when I’m trying my hardest to make a fresh start without completely wiping the slate clean. I do not know how to handle this situation.

However, I am getting something else right.

When I started in my new position, a position in which I design and teach leadership development for faculty and the community – I made the intentional decision to prioritize self-care and work life balance. I had my reasons.  First, I’ve never been anything than a workaholic.  Second, I’ve experienced burn out before and left one career, so I’m concerned about leaving another. Third, I really should model what I am teaching.

Also, I want to change who I am at work.  I want a different story.

I have worked for and with many people across fields and disciplines. My favorite leaders – the ones I admire and would like to emulate – have been calmly competence, or at least they have been really good at giving that appearance.  They are efficient.  They do not take their stress out on their subordinates. They delegate well, provide ample feedback and growth opportunities, and give credit where it is due. I don’t mean that in terms of handing out gift cards, I mean that as caring about and respecting their employees. These leaders also seem to take care of themselves – they eat, they look good, they exercise, they read, they get haircuts, and if they need to go to the doctor, then by golly they make an appointment and they go.  I presume they do these things because it sustains them and makes them better at their jobs. This is the type of supervisor I want to be. I want to be sustainable as well as excellent.

As such, I have made an intentional decision to engage in self-care.  I eat lunch – often at my desk, but quietly and at rest.  I meet with friends on campus for peer coaching and networking.  I consistently leave work for home (almost) on time.  I rarely bring work home at night and limit my weekend work to no more than several hours on Sunday (if that).  I make and keep doctors appointments. I get hair cuts.  I sleep. I exercise, but not if it gets in the way of sleep.  Sleep comes first.

Self-care, specifically leaving the work on the desk at 5pm, has not been easy. There has been a lot of anxiety around not getting all of my tasks done as soon as they emerge. Given that I am supervising a large program evaluation, creating a communication plan, pitching several new programs, creating and teaching new sessions for existing programs, and orchestrating widespread infrastructure updates…*none* of these things were ever going to get done on a dime anyhow. But not giving in to the impulse to work nonstop has taken discipline, and a constant reminder to myself that there is time, the world will not end, the work can and should wait for me to recharge.

In being more disciplined, I have learned to let go.  I was working hard on a presentation last night…granted, I worked until 10 pm, but then I stopped and went to bed rather than work on it through til this morning.  It got the work done.  It was fine.  Furthermore, I have been delegating to student workers.  Granted, I have to correct some of their work, but I am teaching them about coding and database organization even as they do the detail work for me so that I can focus on data analysis. I have asked and received more help from my family around the house – they help me do tasks I once did all by myself, because I need time to unwind just as much as anyone else does.

Self-care takes discipline, but I have also seen results.  I am more efficient.  I feel more grounded, engaged, resilient in my work than I ever have.

Engaging in self-care has not been easy, but it is also beginning to make a difference in my narrative.  It’s too early to say if I will ever achieve calm competence, but today, someone from my workplace announced to a large group of people that I had inspired her to try harder in her own quest for work-life balance.  Apparently, I “leave the office on time almost every night” and I still get an extraordinary amount of work done. Apparently, that’s something to behold.

New job.  I’m changing the narrative.

Featured image by Ellie Pritts, CC-O

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Opening Up Space

starry sky

The gist of this week’s readings and viewings to me is that there is a movement to take formal learning and open it up. By open it up, I mean a few different things:

  • Connect formal learning in the classroom to activities and community outside of the classroom
  • Create opportunities in the classroom for students to explore what interests them
  • Connect students with other students and other people in general who share interests
  • Deconstruct and recreate what education looks like now that we have tools like the internet, which removes limitations that existed before

There are a lot of good-feels behind these things, so I felt pretty positive about it all. It also feels impossible or maybe too rosy. In the big picture, I wonder if this isn’t a reaction against all of the structure that has crept into education. I hope we don’t just react against structure without taking into account ways in which it might still be a useful component. My dad likes to say “don’t take down the fence until you know why it was put there in the first place.” He has a lot of sayings that still float around in my head. So, hopefully, folks who are spearheading this are not completely rejecting structured learning as inherently bad for learning.

Something that comes to mind about all of this in terms of libraries, is actually related to public libraries. Public libraries have more of the community space role and our local Central Rappahannock Regional Library does this well. The public library becomes the space where like-minded people can gather to pursue an interest. One of the problems with pursuing our interests with a group is where to do it. Not all activities pursued together can be pursued entirely online. Public libraries often provide space, and sometimes the resources. I know CRRL has a group that plays European games regularly. They also have a knitting group, book club, card playing group, etc. They help facilitate bringing people together in the community who wouldn’t necessarily know each other otherwise, and that often includes young people.

However, I wonder about the motivation to make such group connections happen. I suppose the thought would be that if you are interested enough you’d take the risk and put yourself out there in the community. But I wonder how many are really willing ultimately to do that. It is risky. I think of how we generally separate ourselves even from our physical neighbors and don’t necessarily even want to get to know them. Let me also add that when I moved into my house last year I intentionally interacted with my neighbors on multiple occasions because I want to reverse that trend at least for me personally. This was an intentional decision, though, as my inclination would be to keep to myself.

Perhaps that’s where the formal education in some form comes into play. The instructor can become the facilitator for such connections and the boost of confidence needed. The student wouldn’t alone in taking the risk as others in the class take the same risk.

This all still feels a bit vague and up in the theory clouds, but I can see the potential positive impact of bringing it down to earth.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Civic Engagement + Digital Literacy = Liberal Learning in the 21st Century

I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head so far in 2017. This week, they are starting to come together. As I try to articulate them, you may wonder what this has to do with open learning, but please bear with me.

Dr. Troy Paino, our new president at the University of Mary Washington, gave a speech last month in which he presented his vision for our future. I found his remarks both traditional and progressive. He asked what UMW should become, given our history, culture and geographic location.

UMW is a public liberal arts and sciences institution. While we have colleges of business and education and a growing number of masters programs, liberal education is our core. UMW was originally created as a normal school, a women’s college to train teachers. Subsequently, it became the women’s college of the University of Virginia, and then a public liberal arts & sciences school in the mid-1970s. Located in Virginia, half way between Washington, DC and Richmond, UMW has had a rich background in American history, from colonial times when George Washington grew up nearby, to the American Revolution with Patrick Henry, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and others who built this republic, to the civil rights movement in which former UMW faculty member James Farmer played an important part.

President Paino argued that UMW should build a future using a two-pronged approach: First, to create students who are civically engaged. Second, to create students who are digitally literate. These, he argued, are substantially related.

Students, Paino said, should understand the relevance of their liberal education to the problems of the world. But that’s just the start. Students need then to engage with the community, to make the world a better place, initially as part of their undergraduate studies, but then implicitly through their lives beyond university. This is what civic engagement means. A few years ago, I asked students if they had come to UMW because it was a liberal arts & sciences institution. Almost none of the students said yes. We need to do a better job of helping our students understand why that matters, and why fundamentally higher education at a school like Mary Washington is more than just completing one’s major.

Students also need to become digitally literate. UMW has a long and well recognized history in this area led by our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and encompassing UMW Blogs, which provided a blog server for faculty and students who wanted to engage with the digital world, our Online Learning Initiative, which sought to imagine what liberal learning could be in a blended or online course environment, to the Domain of One’s Own Project, which started at UMW, giving all students their own web domain and the resources to build those out in whatever way they chose. Despite a new major in communication and digital studies and a minor in digital studies, I think it’s fair to say that digital literacy does not currently play a central role in our curriculum, and most graduates do not take advantage of the opportunity to incorporate this into their degrees.

President Paino asked how can we adapt the liberal arts and sciences education provided at UMW to the digital world in which we now live. He observed that the world has changed from one where information was scarce and the goal of education was to provide that information, to one where information is abundant. In the latter, a key role for education has become to help people critically evaluate and filter the flood of information. How then, can we teach students to be critical thinkers in the world today? This is not a trivial question. This week, the Association of American Colleges & Universities released On Solid Ground, the initial results of a study of student achievement as measured by the AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics. The study included results from 92 universities and looked at, not standardized test scores, but actual student work to evaluate learning in three areas: Written Communication, Critical Thinking and Quantitative Reasoning. The findings were encouraging, but also showed room for improvement. To quote from the press release:

“In the area of Critical Thinking, students demonstrate strength in explaining issues and presenting evidence related to the issues. However, students have greater difficulty in drawing conclusions or making sense out of or explaining the importance of the issue studied.”

Despite what the new U.S. Secretary of Education said yesterday, our job as faculty is to teach students not what to think, but how to think.

I may be the last person to realize this, but as I was participating in this week’s OpenLearning’17 activities, listening to Bryan Alexander’s Monday introduction to information literacy, reading the ACRL Framework for information literacy, and watching the NMC webinar on Digital Literacy, it occurred to me that in this age of alternative facts and fake news, there may be nothing more important than teaching citizenship and civic engagement through information and digital literacy. President Paino claimed as much in his speech, saying that beyond traditional notions of liberal education, “our fundamental purpose [today] is the preservation and advancement of our representative democracy.”

These are strong words. To make them real, we have much work to do. But if not us, who?

Syndicated, Virginia Group

There’s a MOOC for That (Maybe)!

I really enjoyed the NMC video on digital literacy (University of Mary Washington panel participant mentioned digital fluency). The video led me to ask–where can faculty members go for professional development on digital literacy (or digital fluency)?

Maybe there is a MOOC for that—one that can discuss digital literacy in the context of our current society but also the meta-level understanding of how digital literacy works in the MOOC itself…a Meta-MOOC (sounds a little like a superhero)!

Open Participants, Syndicated

Open and info lit

Today I woke up to find Digital literacy and democracy

I wish my hastily-made blog posts could be this good. Democracy and civilization need an informed citizenry. Efforts at mis- and disinformation then, are uncivilized and antidemocratic. And immoral in their casual disregard for honesty, ethics and truth. It’s not enough to call these things out though. That may not even be productive. What matters is that people be empowered to ask questions and to access and use information. It’s also important to challenge our assumptions, or to have our assumptions challenged, to self-reflect and self-evaluate. This is basic information literacy as I see it, as well as basic learning and growth.

This week in OpenLearning17 we’re looking at digital literacy in general, and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in particular. Some see information literacy as an element of digital literacy, like JISC. I take a more expansive view. Information comes in many forms and flows through many channels. Information literacy then is an umbrella term, and things like media literacy, visual literacy and digital literacy delve into the forms and channels. A problem with that view is that information literacy becomes too big to know, as Belshaw pointed out.

I find it interesting that very little of the discussion around the Framework seems to tie to open education. I see a deep and long term connection between the two, and have been harping on it for a while.

It makes me wonder if this is just so obvious that it’s not worth talking about, or if I’m seeing a mirage. But I think it’s a matter of two movements on parallel tracks, not really connecting with each other. I’m sure the terminological issues play no small part in that disconnect. The Framework is ambitious and aspirational though, and as a framework, offers opportunity for connections. It won’t solve the problems of the world, but we can use it to find a path forward.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Home Sweet Home

cozy socks and mug

Back in familiar territory for me, as a librarian. Thus the coziness of the post.

I read through and listened to a smattering of the links for this week. How funny to be directed to the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework. It’s a bit of a controversial document still within academic libraries – stirs up a lot of strong feelings. Instruction is a secondary task for me, so I don’t personally think about it as much as my colleague does since he is primarily involved with instruction.

The content that sticks out the most to me is the whole idea of fake news and evaluating content. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to emphasize this in my instruction as I think it helps with that motivation piece for students learning how to do evaluation. For myself, I have not in the recent past been very engaged politically. During the recent election cycle, however, I tried to do better as a citizen than I have in the past. This process involved reading and reading a lot. I find myself not fitting nicely in any one political group, and I wanted to intentionally read from multiple points of view. What I really wanted to find was a source (podcast, web site, news source, whatever) that would actually provide both “sides” to any given story. The best I could come up with is www.allsides.com which is still a bit clunky. I’ve also tried KCRW Left, Right, and Center, which I did enjoy, but it didn’t go to the level of depth I was looking for. If anyone knows of something that does strive for deep analysis that provides multiple perspectives, please share. What I have landed on is reading/listening to a lot of things. I listen to Decode DC and a National Review podcast called The Editors. I read the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and Politico to name a few. I look at Politifact and FactCheck to check on politician claims. This is not to say I listen to every single episode or read every article, but the bit I do is time consuming enough. I have family and friends that run the gamut on politics, so relying on one perspective is not going to work for me. Plus, I don’t find relying on one perspective to be intellectually honest. Having said all that… again, it’s time consuming. I don’t really expect everyone to be able to dedicate the amount of time needed to be the best possibly informed citizen. I certainly don’t. I suppose the best I hope for is that, whether or not I have time to investigate a claim, I have the knowledge/skills to know to be skeptical of whatever that claim is. Maybe I won’t immediately share it on social media, convinced of its truth.

One of the frames in the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework is “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” I like this point in particular:

Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. Novice learners may need to rely on basic indicators of authority…

To me, this point is trying to grapple with the democrat vs neo-gatekeeper opinions that Alexander discusses in his post. Like many things, I don’t think it’s an either/or. (This part of my personality is a source of endless frustration to my loved ones. I am forever playing a bit of devil’s advocate or trying to see both perspectives. It sounds like a good thing, but it can also leave one a little ungrounded and paralyzed when you have to actually make a decision.) I think authoritative sources can have their purpose (I would see Politifact and FactCheck as having that function for me when I do my current events reading) as long as there is a bit of skepticism kept in the mix. I recognize that while these sites do their best to refrain from bias, there always is bias. And sometimes, the voices that are being shut out by the authorities are ones that need to heard. The majority can be wrong, as we all know from our history classes. Those concepts are challenging to bring to college students, but I do think at this educational level and age they should start grappling with that complexity. I don’t typically get to that point with students in my instruction because I only have so much time with them. My hope is that as they continue on to upper-level classes they come to understand those ideas through the instruction of their professors, which I think they usually do. I have fond memories of a few different professors who achieved that with me.

It’s clear this concept is important to me. Information literacy is also important to the VCCS and is included in our general education competencies. Digital literacy, which seems related or broader than information literacy, is not mentioned (as far as I know). For those that are accredited by SACS, it seems like a great topic for the Quality Enhancement Plan piece of the review. Here at Germanna we are too far along in that process to bring up digital literacy, but it’s important enough to keep in the back of my mind as opportunities arise to investigate it and suggest it as an area of concern for the college.

I always find myself landing on practical thoughts rather than philosophical ones… I promise I do enjoy philosophical reading from time to time…