Transformational learning happens when a person goes through a struggle that causes a change of perspective or an increase of insight where the self becomes redefined.

Change is a difficult process, especially change of ones practice. 30 years of special education legislation has produced little results in improved achievement of students with special needs. The newest reauthorization of the special education law is designed to align special education law with the No Child Left Behind act in order to focus on educational achievement. This change will require special educators to shift their practice from identification to intervention.

It is even more difficult to design training to facilitate this process. It is not like you can put together a PowerPoint to communicate "This is how we used to do it, things have changed, and now this is how we will do it differently." and present it in an afternoon training hoping the change in practice will be complete. It will take time and support to see a change like this this through.

In some research I have done for my leadership project I came across this article on transformational learning used in a community of practice (CoP). Our district special education department is exploring using blackboard to facilitate on-line communities. Could an on-line CoP help facilitate transformational learning? The author believes it can. Members of a CoP can gain perspective with the assistance of community practitioners who aid the transformational process. Is sounds promising but I'd like to hear if anyone out there has any experience with CoP's and their transformational power?

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Reading Brent's instructions for this weeks blog posting and responses he poses a great question. What does it take to establish community?

The subject of building community has been recurring theme for me over the past few weeks. It has been discussed in my on-line facilitation training at work and in my practitioner profile with Lisa O’Reilly. Lisa is an instructional designer perusing a doctorate in education at the University of Colorado at Denver specializing in elearning. In my discussion with Lisa offered a definition of  community as "interactions and relationships". I could not agree more, but how do you go about designing for them?

Two important design considerations for building community, participation and social presence.  Participation presents a daunting challenge for self organizing on-line communities. 1% of users account for almost all the action while 9% contribute a little and 90% are passive participants sometimes called "lurkers".  In elearning, most participation is mandatory, but this will not insure a sense of community. Structured discussion topics and limiting discussion groups to 5 to 6 participants starts to build interactions that are the foundations for community. Lisa has an interesting take on participation by viewing it through the lens of marketing. She believes that designers should think of provocative topics that will draw participants into discussions or selecting topics that the participants can feel that they can contribute to in a meaningful way in order to increase participation.

Social Presence is a fascinating aspect of on line learning that I have recently been exploring. I learned that this is Lisa's area of study. She describes social presence as, being able to interact with the people around you based on what you know about them. This is a difficult area to excel at on-line, at least for me, and easy to dismiss as unimportant. I was amazed to learn   that social presence is important for cognitive and effective learning. Lisa mentioned that there are studies that prove students score higher when the instructor has a high level of social presence within a on-line course. Just a few weeks ago I was telling my wife that one of the things I miss most in my switch from the K-12 to the elearning program is attending class. Social presence is "second nature' in the f2f world but it takes work to make it happen on-line.

I did think of a real on-line community that I "lurked" around in for around six months that possessed interesting solutions to the aspects of participation and social presence.  The community sprang from the following of a video blog called The Show of a web designer Ze Frank. It was a year long experiment in social media and community building.  Ze  attempted to modify  participation  creating different levels of engagement ranging from voting or rating to full collaboration among users on various projects like an audience-created wiki. As far as social presence, you will have to judge for yourself, but I felt that he was very engaging. I had the feeling I got to know Ze and after six months of following the show I was sad to see it end.  I do feel that the blogs that I continuously follow over a long period of time are the bloggers that make you feel as if you know them even if you are just "lurking" along with them.

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http://www.commoncraft.com/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3273/100-Web-20-Ideas-for-Educators

Here are some del.icio.us videos I have created for previous course work.  They include a basic tour of the site, how to add a resource, and an exploration into some more advanced features like the network and searching.

My account is cbonner.  I've been looking my classmates so I can add them to my network but I do not see a central place to find your accounts. This brings up an important question, should we use a common tag for our resources we find for this class? I have used instructionaldesign (one word) but we could easily add a unique tag like a course number (5650) that is easily searchable and would connect bookmarks we find in this course. just some thoughts for some added conectiveness.

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Tags: 5650, UCD, bookmarks

This Thursday September 13th I will participate in a technology committee that will work to define the type of hardware that should be considered standard for elementary, middle school, and highschool classrooms in my school district. Examples of hardware might include laptops, printers, projectors, SmartBoards, and equipment for audio needs. We will also will discuss standard computer software configurations to meet the needs of students and teachers.

So classmates, (or readers) let me put the question to you. What hardware and software would you consider essential in your classroom?  I would really be very interested to hear your thoughts.

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I have just added all 31 blogs from our 5650/I T 6750 Trends Issues Classes to my RSS aggregator Netvibes. Netvibes is a wev based RSS reader that allows users to organize their rss feeds via tabs. I have created a tab for every blog in the class, Just click on the button below to check it out all the feeds.

Hello Classmates,

This is the resurrection of an old blog I started over a year and a half ago. I started to blog because I was excited about social software and wanted to begin using these cool new tools. I was also beginning the ILT k-12 program at UCD and wanted to post some of my thoughts about the work I was doing in my courses.

I made a few posts and got a few comments but eventually my interest in blogging dwindled. At times I would get the feeling that I really didn't have anything original to say. It felt like I was just echoing stuff that I had read about in other blogs.

I have now switched over to elearning for my course of study. I'm kind of excited to have a reason to restart this blog now that it will have more of a purpose. I even think that using this format has some advantages to using the eCollege shell:

• I can use my RSS aggregator to keep track of classmate's blogs http://www.netvibes.com/


• These conversations will last beyond the life of the course shell


• People can truly personalize a blog


• I can use integrate my blog some of my other sites like Flikr, YouTube, & Google Docs.

To find the picture for this post I did a Creative Commons search for the word "rebirth" and found this picture  Rebirth originally  posted by another flikr user James Jordan . Then I clicked on the "blog this button" and wrote this post. I get to personalize the post and use resources from some of my other sites, something that would not have been possiblle in eCollege.

I have just hooked up my flickr & google docs account to this blog. Very cool. Now I want to do some exploring and start tinkering with the sites CSS. We will see what happens.



disneyland-48.jpg

Originally uploaded by cobotelar



I'm posting via flickr and decided to include a Disneyland photo. It was near the end of the day and we were all working to hold it together! I even got a hilarious comment. It turns out that the look on my face is a common one in the land of Disney.

I have just finished my first ever presentation at the TIE conference this past Thursday. It was both an exciting and humbling experience. The presentation was titled Teaching with free tools on the Read/Write Web. I used an on-line handout over at the H2O playlist. The playlist is filled with over 70 links to resources covered in the presentation. In my two hour mini-session I planed to do a nuts and bolts demonstration on how to use free web tools to help teaching and learning. First I planned do some do-it yourself professional development using RSS and Bloglines. Then save and share Internet bookmarks using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. This was a key for the presentation because I set up an del.icio.us account called tie2006 specifically for the session much like Andy Calvin did for his PBS blog, learning.now. In this account the participants were to share resources to one common account using the for:tie2006 tag. To end the demonstration I wanted participants to create a little online content for our students by making a podcast using Audicity and posting it to an Ourmedia account. Looking back it was a pretty ambitious agenda.

I was impressed by the number of people who showed up, it was a full house of over 25 participants. Everything was going well through the first hour of the RSS portion of the presentation, participants had created a bloglines account and were adding feeds from the playlist and things were going well. When we moved to the del.icio.us segment I was unable to log on to del.icio.us!  It was quite a humbling experience.

I know that my presentation did not go as planned. In order to make up for it I created a web site that provides a screen capture of everything I wanted to demonstrate during the conference. I know that you cannot have a second chance to make a first impression but I hope that the site gives people an opportunity to learn how to use firefox, bloglines, del.icio.us, audacity, and ourmedia and adapt these tools to help them learn and teach.

I need to thank Andrea, my co-presenter, who helped set up the computers and helped guide the participants on an individual throughout the presentation. She was a great asset and support. I also need to thank all the participants who who attended my first presentation. I have learned a great deal through the experience and I know that my next presentation experience will be more of a success.