Live Blogging at Equity Professional Learning

What are the possibilities for blogs and live blogging in schools? 

One of the ways we can discover these possibilities is by practicing with blogging in different settings and for different purposes. Blogging is not just for putting newspapers out of business, after all.

Dr Yemi Stembridge (Yemi) opened by sharing a personal story explaining that he ran into Ed Pinkney, a famous basketball player who hails from the Bronx, at Starbucks this morning. In short, Yemi was pumped to meet Pinkney and converse with him.

Yemi moved from Ed Pinkney, basketball star, to Margaret Beal Spencer, pedagogy star, and directed our attention to this article (screenshot below). This reference gave us a little optional homework and research frame for our shared work over the next 3 hours.

1:45 PM

We lined up from one end of the room to the other, rating ourselves on how well we liked school and when we felt successful. We discussed our risk factors and protective factors. I heard from an ECE coach who saw school as an escape from a troubled homelife. My friend Jacki shared how she used to wonder how socially acceptable her academic inclinations were even as she won Business Student of the Year as a junior. In her small town, athletes were prized, business students of the year wondered about their social capital.

After those conversations, we shared out the stories that emerged in our line. The first to share was A---, a colleague who taught down the hall from me in my first year teaching. A--- explained that graduating from college was a successful moment in her educational past but she had a risk factor to overcome. Her family members hadn't supporter her. In fact, they doubted that she was even attending class during the years she toiled to pay for school, play sports and study into the evening. A---'s story reminds me that when learners come from families that don't have successful experiences in school, or perhaps didn't attend or finish college, they go into schools without a significant advantage that many of us take for granted.

1:46 PM

Engineer successful experiences

A strategy- Engineer successful experiences for struggling students and narrate those back to the kiddos. Take a picture when an often-off-task student engages, then show it to them. Later you can bring that shared memory back up when that student struggles to engage, saying,  "I need my engaged _______ (student name) back."

1:49 PM

"Can we name a student's assets? When I work with a teacher who cannot name a student's assets, I know where the problem starts." - Yemi

1:53 PM 

"Where I come from, I was suspicious of someone who offered me trust too soon." - Yemi

1:56 PM

I want to understand "Differential Vulnerability" in order to get better at my work but I also want to learn about it in order to say it comfortably in conversation to educator audiences. "It calls to mind Differential vulnerability..." I'll say. Those are the two reasons I'll read this.

2:02 PM

In his new book, Dr Pedro Noguera writes about how, for boys of color, their relationship with their math teacher is predictive of success in math. (See how the reading list gets longer... I appreciate the connection to resources and learning opportunities.)

2:04 PM

Equity Professional learning: A new hope

How might identifying the risk factors and protective factors (see powerful matrix below) for students who struggle move us beyond surface conversations about bothersome student behaviors that those students often exhibit as a cry for help or show of disengagement?

2:10 PM

The mother who comes into school cussing everybody out is a stakeholder we can understand on the diagram above. She is a high protective factor for a child whose family has likely had negative experiences with school. She might also help us understand what the risk factor level is if we can connect with her and get past unproductive swearing. I'm all for productive swearing.

2:18 PM

A student other teachers might see as a "non-writer," Yemi sees as a "great visualizer." 

Yemi tells the story of J---, a boy whose behavior used to disrupt class and shares how J--- is making progress because he increasingly sees himself as a writer. Also, Yemi has learned that J--- is great at visualizing. Yemi aims to connect J----'s strengths with writing to help build J----'s self concept as a writer. 

It strikes me that the most important think about Yemi in this scenario is that Yemi sees J----- as a writer even when the boy won't put pen to paper in the classroom. Also, he starts his work knowing that if he gets to know J---- better, he'll uncover the assets that get J----- on a productive path in class and school. How do we build the capacity in all our teachers to see their students this way and trust their abilities to uncover the assets that will be levers to success in the classroom?

2:26 PM

Also, #blacklivesmatter in our work especially when we struggle to get our students out of a path to dropping out and all that comes with that. 

Yemi was reminded of Tamir Rice when he saw one student doing another student's homework in the hall. The connection: Instead of pulling out his referral pad and writing up a student for "cheating" based on a bunch of assumptions, Yemi de-escalated a problematic situation in the school context by investigating, talking to the would-be offender. Where others would punish, Yemi found a teachable moment. 

Note to self: When you live blog you are sure to jack up verb tenses, and transitions, and everything. Keep calm and blog on. 

2:38 

A "Birds of a Feather" conversation

We broke into groups based on the 6 strategies below. 

My group talked a great deal about the importance of building relationships with students as a key component of developing academic, emotional, and social skills. 

4:15

Yemi promises to capture our action plans via photo and post them to a Google folder. For my part, I appreciated Yemi's push for us to move to interest-based groups and work in a production-centered way. Also, I recognized the the rough action plans we created against the clock were prototypes of sorts, that we can refine based on stakeholder feedback even as we move to enact them. 

Looking at the time gap between my live posts, I make a final 

Note to self: Production-centered professional learning can stifle the flow of the live blogger but it also gets action plans written. 

Touring a virtual classroom #change11

I’ll be blogging in response to a webinar series offered by connectedlearning.tv at the invitation of the National Writing Project’s Digital Is.

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Last night I had an interesting, 21st Century choice to make: read my newest e-book, Net Smart, by Howard Rheingold, or watch Rheingold’s webinar on connectedlearning.tv.

I stopped and thought about how I wanted to learn about technology and education.

As a lifelong bookworm, I have always enjoyed the reading I choose outside of school over assigned reading at an assigned pace. The choice I make to hoard books and binge on texts is constructive personal foible that leaves me in a house with an overflowing bookshelf or book basket in every room. When I choose to grab a book and settle in, I make a familiar choice.

Increasingly, I have a new, less familiar option. With the time that I used to devote to personal reading, I can choose to join, observe or facilitate online learning conversations, reminiscent of class discussions. And I do. More and more, I log in to webinars and find myself using a different implement to scratch a personal learning itch.

So, I might have settled in with a good book and read Rheingold’s latest. Instead, I watched a webinar recording and found the author, the regular host of these sessions, in the role of the subject, talking with a panel of educators, with Mimi Ito facilitating the conversation. He shared the work he is doing in his Social Media Classroom, explaining the way he facilitates cooperative learning.

Watching from the comfort of my workstation at home, I toured his virtual classroom, detailing how these learners collaboratively construct mind maps during their online sessions, sometimes refining these maps individually after the session. Each part of the virtual space has a thoughtful, experimental purpose. The group uses a wiki to define terms and develop a common language. Discussion forums house the questions the group values, while blogs are spaces of personal reflection for the learners, and all the spaces invite participation. In this virtual space, Rheingold experiments online with cooperation and learning. He calls it “peeragogy.”

Watching Rheingold’s tour of his virtual classroom and hearing his discussion with the panel, I was reminded of the 21st Century choices I have when I leave the comforts of my personal space and go to work in schools. I get to decide about how to approach learning with colleagues and students. I, too, might engage with learners in some of the ways he modelled. My colleagues and I might construct our own mind maps, engage in asynchronous discussions and publish our reflective writing online for a larger, global audience.

As these 21st Century choices start to add up, I think about another affirming choice I have: How will I frame my own experiments in rapidly-evolving contexts like the Internet? (And school.)

An elephant of a sandbox #change11

I’ll be blogging in response to a webinar series offered by connectedlearning.tv at the invitation of the National Writing Project’s Digital Is.

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In last week’s webinar, Philipp Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer2Peer University (P2PU), spoke with host Howard Rheingold and a small panel of doctoral students who study connected learning.

P2PU, a grassroots online open education project, strives to provide high-quality, low-cost educational opportunities. Currently, P2PU offers a myriad of free, online courses.

Schmidt offered three questions to begin the discussion about scaling online learning:

How do you scale online courses that don’t stink?

What are new ways to recognize achievements?

How do you assess 21st century skills?

Now, days after the webinar, having viewed the archived session and consider these questions, I have the found the answers and they are ready for publication in this blog.

The correct answer to all these questions is: YES! (Any lower-case response, or response not in bold should receive only partial credit.)

My confidence in this answer comes from hearing Rheingold say to Schmidt about learning online, “It is still early.” 

It is worth noting that someone of Rheingold’s long experience hesitated to draw conclusions about online education. At this stage great questions serve to guide thoughtful inquiry.

The interchange made me remember the tale of the blind men and the elephant. In the old Indian tale, each man touches only a small part of the elephant, and therefore describes the elephant as something consistent with the part he can feel.

Having completed my second P2PU course in their school of education, I can look back at my experiences in those courses and talk about the excellent facilitation and the community building I experienced in the courses online sessions. To me, that is online learning.

Having participated in a couple of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), I can point to those experiences, all exploratory and positive, and say “that is online learning.”

But it is early. So, I remember the blind men and the elephant. In my passionate interest to explore and discuss online learning, I may just have a hold of this elephant’s tail.

Still, from my vantage point here at the tail, I  found myself disagreeing with the doctoral students in the discussion when I watched the archived web session. One of the participants made the claim that unless the courses offered certificates that academic institutions or employers recognize, time spent in open courses is akin to time spent watching soap operas. This is certainly not the case from my side of the elephant. The doctoral students in the webinar have their own position on this elephant of open online learning. Whatever appendage of the beast they have their hands on, the student researchers in the discussion seemed to think that certification is the most important thing in online learning. I feel confident that many of my “classmates” in the #change11 MOOC and my most recent P2PU course would disagree.

Maybe these doctoral students, working to complete their own certification requirements in varying education contexts, have a view of the world right now that says learning is pursuit of certification.

In the web session, Schmidt acknowledged the importance of thinking about learners and their motivations and pushed back on the notion that open learning must yield tangible rewards, saying, “It is great to be a sharer.”

Here are some other questions Schmidt posed for the group’s consideration:

What are good pathways from interest to learning?

What support mechanisms are needed?

What is the role of content?

The challenge for educators exploring online learning is to answer these questions by asking question. When I begin to draw conclusions, I will remember that it is still early. Again, a correct answer to these questions is “YES!”

The great invitation of online learning, especially in open virtual spaces like P2PU, filled with discussions, challenges and communities, is that the whole thing feels less like the elephant of traditional education and more like a sandbox. Educators can take their questions about online learning into the Schmidt’s sandbox where, through play and exploration, they might arrive at some answers. Or maybe better questions.

What am I doing in this MOOC? #change11

I read Stephen Downes’ address at EdgeX2012, highlighting the parts that were meaningful to me. Here is the annotated link in Diigo that shares my highlights. They might be useful to you if you’re pressed for time and find yourself wanting to skim the long post. I affixed to the digital text a virtual sticky note which reads, “When online begins to outperform face to face.”

After reading Downes’ address, I thought about his assertion that MOOCs aren’t about content, they are about doing. Here are some of the things I’ve done in this MOOC to date:

Annotated and shared those annotations

(See above.)

Blogged

I wrote informally about the speakers, the content and the experience of this MOOC.  

Commented

At one point during my participation in this course, I made my own rule that if someone commented on my blog, I would comment on theirs. Interesting stuff, this rule-making in an open online context. I would also like to do a better job of following those who comment on my writing and I try to “pay it forward,” reading the latest blogs to help myself feel current, but also to encourage recent participants.

Chatted

In the backchannels of the web sessions, I chat frequently and furiously, at times losing track of the speaker’s presentation. I’m fascinated by backchannels, their role in the session and the tangents and trails they take. I like to catch up on sessions I miss in the recording, taking notes online to record my thoughts and support my reflection, but without the live backchannel, the recordings are not nearly as engaging.

Questioned

I pose questions in chats during online sessions, and I pose them in the comment fields below participant blogs. My questions also leak into my own blog posts.

Challenged

In a previous blog post, I shared a workshop activity which invited readers to add their ideas to a Prezi I created. I was delighted to see a few additions from other participants.  

Moonlighted

Recently, during the “lull” in this MOOC, I co-facilitated a three-week open course through P2PU.org. Interestingly, in our discussion threads for that course I connected with (at least) three other participants from this MOOC.

When I think about the connections formed in a MOOC, I think about the common experiences of participants who have navigated, consumed, published, lurked and Tweeted as part of their participation in #change11. What changes? Our work? Our expectations? Our skill learning online?

Technology for community sake #Change11

Right before I show YouTube videos by Michael Wesch in professional development workshops, I always take a quick poll of the audience, asking who has heard of the Kansas State professor. In the last four weeks, I have had the opportunity to lead three variations of the same professional development workshop, with audiences ranging in size from 13 to 35. I average about one raised hand each time I ask. This comes as both good and bad news; good because I can keep showing the videos and asking participants, most of whom are inspired by 4 minutes of hearing Wesch speak, about the implications of his work for K-12 public education; bad because it indicates to me that K-12 educators, confronted by the same issues of scale and relevance that Wesch tries to optimize in his courses at Kansas State, have not heard of his cutting-edge work.


In this video, A Vision of Students Today, Wesch’s students famously publish the statistical results of a class survey they did on a Google Doc. In other talks Wesch has done, among them this address to the University of Manitoba in 2008, he details how he uses web portals to aggregate class resources and student work.  

The tech integration in these videos in not about portals, wikis and RSS feeds. I see Wesch gathering student data in new ways, employing a strategy not unlike a very low-tech system like “Fist to Five Feedback,” where the teacher asks students to quickly assess the success of her lesson.

When I read a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jeffrey Young, I realized that the importance of Wesch’s could elude the higher ed community. The article dismisses Wesch’s use of technology as a strategy that other professors are unable to apply, and then concludes that he is just talented, so his methods don’t matter. A talented lecturer might be just as effective using less interactive methods, according to Young.

Participants in technology workshops I lead readily agree that the purpose behind integration matters more than the tools. This is especially true in Wesch’s case. When a colleague of his remarks that they tried his methods and had them result in “chaos,” I worry that institutions cannot see past tools to instructional purposes. 




My biggest worry is that we might watch powerful practices enhanced by technology and see only the technology. We might not notice that Wesch asked his students, his paying customers, what it is like to be a student in his class and then used technology to maximize their experiences as learners.We might forget that when his students report that their professors don’t know their names, he uses technology to create social connections for them in a class of 200. We have to see past his web platform to think critically about his purpose.

When technology gives us the ability to hear from all students all the time, what questions will we ask them? Wesch asks his students about relevance and significance. If we don’t know what questions to ask, it doesn’t matter how well the technology helps us aggregate the answers.

Thinking collaboratively and creatively about digital texts and tools... #change11

Author: Samantha Penney, samantha.penney@gmail.com 

I recently read a Twitter feed discussion between educators about this graphic, which was published on the University of Southern Indiana's website. They were critical of this arrangement of tech tools, calling it "arbitrary foolishness" and generally "disappointing." I tended to agree, but the discussion brought me back to an article I read recently by Alice S. Horning, "The Psycholinguistics of Literacy in the Flat World," where she claims that our use of language is evolving, especially in digital environments and that texts themselves are going through an evolutionary process.

Her article reminded me of working with some high school seniors who were creating a Prezi on the evolution of video games to accompany a larger paper they'd written. They used an image showing an evolutionary chain of famous video game characters as an inspiration to draw their chain. So I wonder about the potential for evolutionary chains as an organizing structure to think about digital texts and tools. I generated a Prezi to capture my thinking, and also as a place where participants in a professional development workshop might explore these ideas together. Alas, due to tech issues with Internet access at the conference where I was presenting on education and technology, this Prezi went largely unused.

Reading Geetha Narayanan's introduction on the MOOC today with her commentary about the lack of emphasis on creativity on the web, I want to invite MOOC participants to engage in a discussion of texts and tools in this (potentially) creative space, if only because I'm guaranteed that MOOC participants will have Internet access, something we can't say about an ed tech conference in 2012. Check out the Prezi below. The link you need to edit is in the Prezi.

You say you want an evolution? #change11 on Prezi

Learner, not lurker... #change11

I’m still captivated by apologies on the MOOC. Lately, I notice blog entries where participants label themselves “lurkers.” While I understand the term as it relates to Internet culture and discussion boards, I read it as a form of apology or a caveat to informal, infrequent participation in this course which so often doesn’t feel like a course.

For my own part, my work in open courses ebbs and flows. At times I am a virtual version of the student who sits up front and raises his hand a little too much. Other times, I’m the person who asked to survey a popular course, only to show up late, unfamiliar with the material being discussed. These analogies come from traditional education because that is how I understand my participation in any course.

As a learner unbundling content relevant to me I have to make sense of how I am learning, what I am learning and how reading and writing fit in my daily life. In order to completely understand how I am learning from a MOOC, I have to also set aside my traditional schooling and consider other challenging and rewarding- informal- learning experiences. I have to think about how I learn to parent.  

Coming back to this MOOC, despite my late arrival and my occasional “lurker” status, the course will impact my work. I will read Howard Rheingold’s new book and think about the implications for reading instruction in public schools. I will think about how attention probes might inform some burgeoning reading intervention ideas like Internet reciprocal teaching.

I want to set aside the term “lurker” for myself and think about participation in an open course as something that ebbs and flows with my life. I prefer “learner.” I also want to revisit every apology I have had to make for falling behind in a course I paid handsomely for that didn’t meet my needs.

Social media spaces and learning potential...#change11

    At the invitation of my district’s educational technology department, I recently presented to a group of instructional leaders about the use of social media in education. Specifically, my topic was Twitter. In planning the session, I decided to avoid the discussion of how students might use Twitter in the classroom, opting instead to excerpt a couple of paragraphs from Personal Learning Networks, by Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli, before presenting a quick YouTube video* and linking to some relevant hashtags and users.
(I used this page on my wiki and asked for participants to reflect on a Google Doc one day and an Edmodo discussion thread another day.)
    The session was a success in that it generated a big buzz among the participants, most of whom opted to create Twitter accounts although I had not required, recommended or facilitated their doing so. Principals giggled, listing and followed each other. My old boss asked why her profile picture was an egg. When I explained the relationship between Twitter's bird logo and her default profile pic, she delighted site's nifty metaphor about comparing new users with unhatched chicks.
    Since the participants grappled with the safety concerns of student use during earlier presentations on YouTube and Facebook, I closed with the first minute and a half of Will Richardson’s TED talk and made the comment, “ In the interest of full disclosure, I could have just as easily guided you through Twitter content that would have generated a strong anti-Twitter sentiment. I thought for our purposes today it was more important to show how it might be used in professional development and why a high school teacher might argue for allowing students to use Twitter for research.” I wanted to finish in a way that might both honor and push back against their critical thinking about social media tools in the classroom.
    Afterward, I returned to an analogy I’ve been kicking around: Saying that schools should not use social media tools in the classroom by citing the potential dangers is like schools citing crime statistics and refusing to do community-oriented projects in the city of Chicago. Facebook is a huge virtual space that users explore largely without tour guides. As we consider the use of virtual spaces, especially gigantic virtual spaces like Facebook and Twitter, how can we map those spaces and identify the learning spaces within with the best potential?

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* In an interesting connection to Howard Rheingold’s discussion of attention and his directing participants to the selective attention test, I noticed only on the third or fourth viewing of my screencast video that one of the trending hashtags on Twitter during my recording was "#mustybutthole," which went completely unnoticed even among my co-facilitators who sat through my session twice in three days. A sadistic part of me wanted to point it out afterwards** as an example of selective attention.


**Aside from my sadistic impulse, I would direct educators’ to the inappropriate hashtag in order to point out that Twitter, like most any public space that educators might explore for possibilities, will have evidence of public use that educators might categorize as misuse.