Is "Ninging" the Same Thing as Blogging? and other questions about 21st c. staff development
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I just left this comment on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog post entitled “How can we help shape teacher attitudes toward technology?”
Before you read it, don’t get me wrong. I think Ning is a great thing – but, at the risk of sounding like a prig and a purist, I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark as open blogging. And I worry that teachers who mistake these walled blogs (or social blogworks?) for “open range” 
blogging will never learn the crucial role that Technorati, tagging, hyperlinking, and such play as the “ligaments” of the connectivity that is real blogging. And thus never be able to introduce their students to that experience.
Ning and 21classes and so forth just seem isolated, and isolating, by comparison.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Our in-house staff development day is Wednesday – only four days away – and I’m not yet decided on how I’m going to run my mandatory training session. The Old School instinct says “Direct their learning, decide what they need to know, and make them learn it.” But another impulse says the idea to let them choose the pathway based on their own multiple intelligences, and toward the goal of unlocking their creativity, is the better way.
And a third voice says, “Maybe there’s a Middle Way.” (Can I really lose this opportunity to introduce them to RSS and social bookmarking?)
So here’s that comment:
This is a timely post for me to read, as we’re giving an in-house “Learning 2.0″ conference at my high school in Korea to present what four of us department heads learned at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference.
Since I’m 1/4 teacher, 3/4 tech coordinator for the HS, all teachers have to attend my session. I’m leaning towards the WIIFM ["What's In It For Me?"] approach, but with this twist: I want to test the hypothesis that, if teachers discovered their own creativity, based on the strengths of their “multiple intelligences” profiles, by learning to express that creativity through some “digital art” they don’t know about with iLife or the read/write web, then my hope/hunch is this: their excitement at unlocking their own creativity will gradually trickle down into their instruction.
This is partly influenced by my own discovery of how easy it is, after 20 years of fantasizing about it, to actually do music composition using GarageBand (we just went 1:1 as an Apple Laptop School, so all teachers have MacBooks).
There is talk at my school of “assigning” all teachers to blog on Ning or 21classes, but I’m ambivalent about that. It treats teachers as “students” (or as mere “teachers” instead of humans with unlocked potential), it treats web 2.0 as “homework” (or simply “work”), and worse still, it treats forced blogging on a walled garden as the real thing (those of us who blog know that it goes beyond writing posts on Ning). It also forces writing, when there are so many other modes of expression that some teachers might be more comfortable with. All of that is a recipe for aversion, it seems to me.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, though I know you’re enjoying Manhattan right now. 
I made a staff development wiki that sorts “digital arts” (activities) into separate “menus” based on the different multiple intelligences that is open to all for editing and using. I’d be curious, again, to hear any feedback on any of the above ramble
Enjoyed the post.
Thoughts? (And Patrick and Anthony, I’m particularly interested to hear your views.)
Photo: Eduardo Amorim
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12 Responses to 'Is "Ninging" the Same Thing as Blogging? and other questions about 21st c. staff development'
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What to do? I guess, if I were attending a development day, I’d like to see some structure that would give me some information and then allow me to explore various things that I find interesting. I’m now at a stage where I believe that the first thing I would do is introduce teachers to an online desktop idea, like igoogle, netvibe or pageflakes. Why? Because you can build up various areas of interest from there. You can add RSS feeds, showing them how they work, introduce them to a few organizational tools like icalendar or google documents and show them the whole idea of a blog they can place on their desktop. As for Ning, I think it is a starting point but one must go beyond it to show teachers the power of blogging. You’re so right about an open blog being so much more than what you find in Ning. I like the discussion there but I usually end up pointing people to ideas and information outside of the ning environment where people are exploring ideas and concepts in a much different manner and the audience is a bit more diverse. Hope your projects are going well!
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Kelly Christopherson
29 Sep 07 at 7:51 pm
Kelly, this is such excellent advice. Thanks much for taking the time. I think the iGoogle approach (or Pageflakes, which I fear might be overwhelming – and I’ve never tried Netvibes) is right on. I’d originally planned to do Bloglines, since I haven’t found a better service for finding feeds; and I like its simplicity. But maybe you’re on to something otherwise.
You know your Blogger profile is blocked, right? Doesn’t lead to any way to connect back to you via your comment link. Intentional?
Thanks again
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Clay Burell
29 Sep 07 at 8:08 pm
Clay,
I love being called out like this! Kelly speaks of giving them something like iGoogle or Pageflakes to begin with, but it sounds like you have inroad already with Anthony and with another teacher whose name escapes me at the moment, which can be to your advantage when presenting a new idea to a staff that is slightly hesitant.
Base it may be, but envy has always been something that I have used to my advantage when presenting to staff. I make it a point to present the work of teachers that are leading the charge, creating digital content with their students. What I have found is that other teachers want to do what this teacher or that teacher did. Like I said, it may not reside on the ethical high-road, but when it comes to initiating change, I’ll take anything I can get.
Concerning the walled garden idea, my belief lies along the same lines as using emotion to trigger buy in; you need to assess the comfort level your staff has with these social applications. Asking someone who has not written for a non-student audience in 10 years to do so will paralyze them. As much as you may want to blow them away with what is possible, you run the risk of losing them if you go too far above where they are comfortable.
Just some thoughts…Will contribute to the wiki in a short while.
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Patrick Higgins
30 Sep 07 at 12:49 am
Clay: I’m very interested in your thoughts along these lines as well as the thoughts of others. I think Kelly’s use of the word “stage” is really important. ACOT showed us that teachers go through different stages when they are in a supportive environment for creative technology use, and doubtless you’ll have teachers all over the board at your workshop Wednesday. I like Ning because I think it provides a more accessible way for teachers to readily join in conversations, but I agree that the “open range” of blogging and tagging is far richer, and those are fields we want to both show and invite our teachers to explore. I have found that del.icio.us social bookmarking is an ideal way to help teachers understand the power of social networking, tagging, and working on the web. About a month ago when I was in Goodland, Kansas, I spent all the workshop time with about 50 teachers, who each had their own laptops, in the morning and afternoon on social bookmarking. I think helping teachers save, access, and locate “good stuff” online is an enduring need, so social bookmarking SHOULD fit into everyone’s “what’s in it for me” perspectives. I agree forcing everyone to blog won’t light the fire of inspired creativity within all teachers, but I certainly DO think it is reasonable to expect/require all teachers to be reflecting on their practices. I would advocate giving teachers choices about how they reflect, perhaps on the entire day, in posts to a Ning, in their own blog they setup on blogger or elsewhere, in a VoiceThread or series of VoiceThreads, etc. The key is that everyone is EXPECTED to reflect, and that reflective pieces will be made PUBLIC. That is radically different and potentially disruptive, but the interactive aspect of this perhaps has the most “energy potential” to engage and “hook” some teachers on the value of these tools. I haven’t been to or participated in many PD events which had this as an expectation, and I think it’s a great idea.
I agree with Papert that “uniformity” really is a major evil in formalized education, so the degree to which we can provide differentiated pathways of learning and assessment for teachers in PD sessions as well as students in their classes, the better off we are in avoiding the dangers “uniformity” presents to authentic learning.
Good luck with your workshop! I’ll look forward to hearing what you all end up doing and how things go!
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Wesley Fryer
30 Sep 07 at 11:53 pm
Clay – interesting thoughts on Ning and I have to say until I saw this community modeled effectively I was never that fussed.
Last week I had to run an 1 hour online session on Video in Elearning for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. I had to target it at beginners but was asked to make it interactive. Tough requests considering it was all online using Elluminate.
So I decided to set up a Ning community so that participants could discuss the topics before and after the session plus use it for practicing embedding videos. You can check out more about the session and how it went here.
What I found was that participants are slowly starting to use Ning. I have a much greater understanding of who they are and what assistance I can provide them compared to what I and they would have gained from a 1 hour online presentation. If all this interaction was based only on my blog I would not have achieved the same outcome.
Most of these participants are not using Feed Readers and do not know what RSS is. So to see that several individuals are achieving what they see as first is for me the greatest reward and the Ning community gives me the ability to gradually increase their skills (those that want to) to get them to the point where they can be moved out into other parts of Web 2.0.
I suggest you check out my page at etools and tips for educators to see what the participants are saying.
Sue
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Sue Waters
1 Oct 07 at 1:02 am
I left this comment on Graham’s blog, which picked up on this idea very nicely (and in which Sue pasted her response to my post here):
Your post – and Sue’s comment on both of our posts – extended my thinking and enlarged my network (I’ll be checking out your links to Darren and Keving shortly!). And it all happened through Technorati.
And that sort of underlines what I think we’re both trying to get at, without at all disagreeing with Sue’s point that Ning is clearly powerful. It underlines that the whole blogosphere produces pathways in a different way than Ning does. Again, both have their uses and relative strengths (Ning’s media players are incredible, for example, and I embed them in my blog posts on Blogger, though I wonder how easy that is on WordPress – have you tried?).
One distinction seems safe – Ning’s population seems comprised more of newcomers, and it would be interesting to track how often they peer over the walls, and how often and soon they establish their own blogs, their own connections through non-Ning RSS feeds, etc.
Again, I don’t think we’re disagreeing with Sue. I’d even hazard the guess that’s Sue’s ultimate goal is for her Ning members to go “open range” once they’re in deep enough.
Tribes v. Nomads comes to mind, I’m not sure how fairly or validly.
And your point about the pleasures of creating your own unique fingerprint in this world is the one that really seems possible only in the open range.
I’m glad we’ve connected, by the way. It’s been instructive and, as importantly, good for some chuckles
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Clay Burell
1 Oct 07 at 6:24 am
Graham’s post is here, by the way.
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Clay Burell
1 Oct 07 at 6:25 am
Wes, thanks for the thoughtful input. I’d arrived at something similar with the help of my Twitter network as I processed more after this post. As things stand now, we’re going to invite the fearless to create their own blog, and encourage the less comfortable to feel fine about using their staff Ning blog to reflect.
We’re going to start the morning by signing all staff up with a “baker’s dozen” of must-have 2.0 accounts and bookmarks – Google, Diigo/del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines (they can OPML to something more complex like Pageflakes or iGoogle later), and other things (all on this wiki).
Then we’re going into breakaway sessions led by the early adopters at our school – 11 separate workshops from which teachers choose three, and are required to take my “Digital Arts Menu for Multiple Intelligences,” in which the goal is to let them choose a mode of digital expression suited to their learning style and creative bent.
By the end of the week, they’ll be “encouraged” (okay, required) to reflect on their blog or Ning, in whatever medium they choose.
And I’m trying to figure out how to set up an auto tag-aggregator to suck all those posts onto one page. Never done that before! Tips?
Thanks, all – you’re making this exhausting process an exhilarating one at the same time
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Clay Burell
1 Oct 07 at 6:37 am
I don’t believe that having teachers maintain a reflective blog is going to hinder their ability to be creative. I agree there will be a type of aversion that develops if teachers are told how they need to write their posts (minimum of 5 paragraphs, include references, write a blog post each day, or blog about a specific topic, etc), but if the only requirement is for them to write about something that works really well in their classroom, I think many teachers would take a great deal of pride in being able to share that expertise with others. Their instructional creativity can be advanced through the use of comments and suggestions made to their post, and their practices can be more readily expanded to other areas within the school since other teachers will have the ability to read their posts and use those ideas for themselves. Much of the aversion will also result from teachers having to do new things, but that’s the reality of the times we are teaching in today.
It’s also good professional practice that can strengthen the educational practices of all those involved in the school. There have been many times in my career that I wish I could have had the chance to sit in on one of my colleagues classes so that I could see what they were doing and learn from them. I finally feel like I have now gained that ability because of blogging and, as a result, I believe I’ve grown more as an educator in the past 6 months than I had grown in the 10 years prior to this. A lot of it has to do with the wonderful ideas and practices that have been shared to me by people like yourself and the others who have commented to this post. I don’t see why this model wouldn’t want to be duplicated on a smaller scale within the immediate school building
As for my presentation, I’m taking a page out of Patrick’s post, “Some thoughts on Changing our Practices” and am working on setting up a structure, such as Kelly mentioned, and offering choices, such as Wes mentioned, for teachers to see what’s possible and think about how they can take those ideas and fit them within their current teaching practice and technology comfort level. It’s not done yet, but here’s the wiki I’ve made so far which includes samples from which other teachers could learn from. My main fear is teachers feeling overwhelmed by it all.
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Anthony
1 Oct 07 at 8:40 am
Here’s what I have for the MS teachers so far. I only have an hour with them so I’m hoping that it can be something they can come back throughout the year to get ideas from.
http://teachercommunal.wikispaces.com/Samples
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Anthony
1 Oct 07 at 8:44 am
“I agree there will be a type of aversion that develops if teachers are told how they need to write their posts (minimum of 5 paragraphs, include references, write a blog post each day, or blog about a specific topic, etc), but if the only requirement is for them to write about something that works really well in their classroom, I think many teachers would take a great deal of pride in being able to share that expertise with others.”
Wow. Brain explosion. Just like I keep thinking about how fascinating it is that most sessions at ed tech shows are lecture-style, even when discussing collaborative technologies–and when I read the above I immediately thought of how we expect students to obediently do something we recognize teachers wouldn’t want to do.
Just as a point of interest, and for the sake of ed tech history, I started Classroom 2.0 after a series of discussions Will Richardson and I had about the need to have educators actually use the tools of Web 2.0 before they would understand their value or how to bring them into the classroom. When I saw Ning, I had a fleeting thought that it might be an easier way to do this than asking folks to blog to the empty room for 9 months… Classroom 2.0 was throwing spaghetti against the wall, and that it stuck was something of a delightful surprise.
I do think that social networks, and Ning in particular, really help to introduce and environment for engaged dialog. For many educators, that will be all they want to do, and in my mind, is a huge step forward. I’ve gotten so many comments from teachers and administrators who joined who started participating online for the first time there, and it was a real turning point for them. Some of them will move on to blogging and the “real” distributed web, and that will be good to.
I will say that I think the discussions are different in the social networks than on the blogs, and that we can recognize them as different and equally valuable. There is a collaboration in the social networks, and a sort of egalitarian (ego-less) achievement of thought that I personally feel is harder in blog comments–partly because of the ability to have threaded comments in Ning, and partly because blogs tend to be a little oriented toward the “wisdom” of the blogger. Am I alone in feeling that?
I’m really glad to have come across this and the other related posts, and appreciate the deep thinking. And, I’ll say, a little tongue in cheek, it’s been harder to follow this discussion over three blogs than it would have been in one forum post in Ning…
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Steve Hargadon
3 Oct 07 at 12:11 am
As a user, not a presenter I have an opinion about ning vs. blogging—I do both. I’ve had a blog for almost a year and readership is slow in coming. In the ning community I can ask a question and get opinions in a matter of hours. I think for a lot of new users ning would be a comfortable place to start.
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nbosch
8 Oct 07 at 10:15 am