Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Learning Technologies, Teacher Education, and Social Media

I recently had the opportunity to talk with a number of educators online with George Siemens as a part of the Commun-IT.org organization. Tim Hawes and Quentin DeSouza are the two main advocates for the site that focuses on supporting teacher professional development in Ontario, Canada.

Below is the transcript of my talk that is in two parts. Part I addresses how learning technologies are being used to support/enhance teacher development at my institution, and Part II briefly examines what educators could/should be doing to make best use of social media.

I hope you find the contents mildly useful. If you think there are other uses of social media that have not been addressed, please chime in. Also, any comments concerning overcoming barriers such as getting educators interested in using social media or re-visioning classroom practice are most welcome.

Part I

Teacher education at UF essentially comes in two flavors: conventional and non-conventional. [I prefer the term conventional over traditional for a variety of semantic and connotative reasons.]

Conventional teacher education consists of f2f coursework combined with practicums, classroom observations, site placements, and extended internships.

Learning technologies such as our online course management system are used to enhance f2f courses by providing fora for extended discussions, activities, and as a resource repository for materials to support learning and development (rubrics, readings, lesson plan examples, syllabi, external resource linkages, etc.)

All teacher education students are required a foundations of educational technology course which introduces them to wikis, weblogs, RSS, social bookmarking, vodcasting & podcasting (Will Richardson’s text is required reading).

Students are then asked to incorporate these read/write resources in a way that will enhance lesson planning, parent communication, student communication, peer communication, resource development, etc.

We are currently investigating how students use what they’ve learned in this course in their other courses and we’re also looking at extending this research to their teaching careers (i.e., beyond the uni).

Most of our conventional f2f students are young and new to teaching. A majority have MySpace and Facebook accounts so they are familiar with social media/social networking technologies, yet often keep these technologies separate from their professional practice. Many of these student teachers see no connection between their personal use of the Read/Write Web (pdf) and their professional use. I believe there are many research possibilities here that I would like to explore in more detail.

Beyond our conventional teacher education programming, we have several non-conventional programs that serve working professional educators around the state and nation.

We have two fully online masters programs that use the Moodle course management system, three blended, cohort based doctorate programs, two alternative certification programs, one blended professional/personal development program, and we are currently developing a professional development online portal to serve first year professional educators and college alumni.

Most of the technology incorporated in these programs involves the use of our course management system where discussion boards figure prominently. I’ll call these traditional online courses.

The two projects I am most actively engaged with are the alternative certification program and the teacher professional development program.

The alternative certification program is based on preparing teachers to work in high poverty school settings. Since this program is aimed at getting teachers immediately prepared for teaching, we are focusing mainly on the acquisition of teaching skills associated with 12 state-defined accomplished practices. We have created an online portfolio site designed to scaffold and document artifacts associated with demonstration of accomplished practice. This site was created in Drupal and it provides us with a way to manage artifacts, justifications for the inclusion of such artifacts, instructor feedback, remediation activities, and various reports that can be provided to state administrators and education researchers.

The professional development project I am associated with focuses on training teachers to incorporate action research into their practice as a means for exploring and researching their experience in a way that both documents and extends the professional knowledge base of teacher practice but also leads educators towards adopting what Cochran-Smith and Lytle refer to as an inquiry stance, i.e., a way to approach teaching that recognizes that we are all learners (teachers and students) and that to create inquiring students, we educators need to model such behaviors.

This project has incorporated a "mother blog” created in Drupal to support reflection, community, communication, collaboration, and the creation and sharing of resources. This project is the pilot study for my dissertation wherein I am investigating the nature of interactions in this online community and to see how to best foster knowledge creation and collaboration within such an environment.


Part II

For me social media in teacher education is very much connected to George’s thinking about connectivism.

Social media provides us a medium to build or extend relationships, that is, our connections to one another as well as connecting us to a network of resources (human, intellectual, practical, spiritual, etc.).

In my view, social media is about building, extending, connecting, and expanding our world. These connections we are able to form online offer us an opportunity to discover new knowledge, create new understandings, and provide us with new perspectives and new ways of seeing.

So what does this mean for teachers?

When I was first starting out as a teacher, I developed a bond with several members of my teacher college cohort. We would meet once a week at a local pub and share “war stories,” talk about what worked in our classrooms’, what didn’t, and shared lesson plans, and resources we thought we might find useful.

Collectively, we built three units together even though we all taught different grade levels at different schools (we all taught Language Arts – English classes, Reading & Writing at the secondary level, i.e., working with 14-18 year olds).  This was back in the days of online BBS’s, MUD's, and MOOs. The World Wide Web and IRC becoming more and more popular and reproducing like rabbits. In the beginning the Web was like a vast city with little life, but lots of storefronts and facades promising content to come (e.g., this site is under construction). It was both promising and frustrating.

My colleagues and I built a website to share resources, lesson plans, assessment instruments, and, I’ll be honest, bad jokes. We constructed bios and linked to personal interests and favorite Web sites. For us the Web was a repository and a place to look for new content, new materials to enhance our practice. If I found content online like a lesson plan that I really liked, I would email the site admin asking for permission to share the content. In a few cases, I developed a friendship with this distant colleague and we became online  “pen pals.”

I recognize that not all educators are as curious or adventurous as we were. none of us were technically brilliant, but we weren’t afraid to experiment. We were obviously a bit technogeeky so the idea of learning html didn’t put us off.

Today, I see many Read/Write technologies like Ning, WikiSpaces, Elgg/EduSpaces, Edublogs, Delicious, PageFlakes, Google Groups, etc. that allow for quick and relatively painless opportunities to communicate, collaborate, connect, create, and aggregate a variety of multimedia resources.

The piece I find most exciting about this is the notion of portability, i.e., these social networking instances are relegated to one person’s hard drive or institution. These Read/Write resources can be accessed from practically any machine from any place on the planet that has Internet connectivity.

As an educator I adore these social networking tools precisely for this reason… I don’t have to store these resources on my hard drive. I can upload and down and them as I need. My GMail account is part email portal part document and multimedia repository. I no longer keep piles of hard copies in file folders in my office, although I do like to keep at least one hard copy of most items (what can I say, I’m a belt and suspenders kinda guy!).

Social media is also a fantastic way to stay abreast of what’s happening across the teaching profession. I am a member of a number of communities where I check in regularly to see what’s new, what’s hot, what to stay away from, and what I might be able to use in the classroom Monday morning.

Social media brought us all to this spot today. Reading Stephen Downes’ weblog over three years brought me to George Siemens. George and Stephen have subsequently introduced me to Clarence Fisher, Quentin DeSouza, Vicki Davis, Brian Lamb, Barbara Ganley, Will Richardson, David Warlick, and on and on.

And as such social media tools have connected me to hundreds of others who have impacted and expanded my worldview.

All it took was a bit of curiosity and persistence. For me, as an educator, it is important to keep my eyes and ears open. As an educator, I recognize that I am a role model for my students, for parents, for administrators and my peers. Being an educator is like being a flight attendant on a plane that never lands. I am always serving others and myself. Luckily, I find joy and contentment in this.

To make the nest of social media, educators need to know what makes them tick; they need to know what turns them on, what fires their passion, and to follow that passion. Others often share these passions and social media provides a means to connect with others of a similar mind.

As my friend Ben Werdmuller likes to say, the Internet is people. And connecting people is what social media is all about.