Beyond School

I really shouldn’t do this, being ham-strung for time, but I really should do this regardless. The feedback to my last post deserves a better fate than staying hidden from feed subscribers.

So down and dirty time. First, for context, here’s the brief original post. The basic questions were:

1. Should we approach workshops as how to teach with this stuff as a teacher? Or instead, as I want to try, as how to explore and tap into the teachers’ own individual creativity as a human being?

2. Should blogging be assigned to teachers? If so, is Ning the same thing as “open range” blogging?

I closed with an appeal for help, since this is my first time doing a staff development day.

Kelly Christopherson pitched in first with these nuggets:

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,” Kelly continued,

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!

I replied,

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.

And added this question (nudge), which I hope Kelly sees and acts on, so we can all learn more about/from this voice (though I just re-found Kelly through a Technorati search):

You know your Blogger profile is blocked, right? Doesn’t lead to any way to connect back to you via your comment link. Intentional?

Patrick Higgins answered my shout-out link to him (Technorati is such a great shout-out tool;):

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 [a teacher at my school who has taken off with speedy and impressive results over the last year] 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.

Then Wesley Fryer added this wonderful piece of “disruptive” advice:

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!

Sue Waters added her voice with this defense of Ning:

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.

(I did follow her links, and wasn’t surprised - but was impressed - by the enthusiasm bubbling off the pages of her Ning.)

Then I found Graham’s post through Technorati’s link to his “reaction” to my prior post - it’s long, it’s his, it’s an excellent investment of your three minutes to follow and read - and I answered his post there, and following Sue (who copied her reply here there, round and round), copied that answer 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

And finally, I replied to Wes with an update of how the workshop idea has progressed to this point - and I still have 36 hours to tweak it, and invite all of you to tweak its wiki here (put a link to your blog at the credits on the bottom of the page, please, to model the collaborative wow of wikis!):

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

That ending really says it all! In Shanghai last month, Wes used the noun “magic” to describe this world. It’s a word I often use too (though science is the proper word, and scientists the true magicians). The magic still amazes.

And that’s why I want the focus of Wednesday’s workshop to be on the participants’ creativity, again. The magic of this world can’t be taught; I’m seeking ways to open them to learning it through experiencing the creation of that magic, to becoming digital magicians themselves.

Or at least Sorcerer’s Apprentices.

I’d love to hear thoughts from any and all, on any and all of this.

Images:
“Mickey in the Hood” by undergroundbastard