My aim is to agitate and disturb people.
I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.

-Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)

“One-shot seminars, an afternoon with an expert, will not bring the [teaching] profession up to speed with emerging school reform” (1). Teacher professional development needs to be placed “in schools’ water supply”(1).

Overall, the RAND report suggests that teacher professional development needs to be less shallow "in both its definition and delivery"(8).

Teachers who participated in the workshop sponsored by RAND's Critical Technology Institute report that computing technology has the power to reshape school practice (1).

Forces defending the status quo include:

• Lack of time for education and training;
• Lack of coherent and sustainable professional development plans;
• Bureaucratic inertia;
• Inherited lines of authority;
• Attitudes about the proper role and authority of educators;
• The organization of schooling by clock and calendar;
• Anxieties and organizational issues that hinder technology use; and
  
• Expectations of what technology can accomplish.

Participants report the need for standards to guide technology use to improve teacher development. For example, what should teachers know about technology? Why do teachers need technology? How can technology enhance teacher productivity?  How can technology improve student achievement? How can technology contribute to education? What can teacher professional development, teaching and learning, be like using new technologies?

Teacher anxieties and other brick walls:

• It’s hard to imagine the possibilities of computing if you’ve never experienced them.
• The 80/20 rule: the 20 percent of teachers using computers in the classroom see the a potential for technology. The 80 percent are not interested until they see some practical benefit.
• The fact that most teachers still practice the “direct instruction” (i.e., instructor-centered) model of teaching and learning is clearly antithetical to effective technology integration.
  
• Until teachers can practice a different model, e.g., learner-centered, technologies will remain a threat as opposed to an opportunity. Making this shift will require some powerful tools to make the transition.
• Lack of technical support and pedagogical role models is another anxiety producer.
• What’s more important: VCRs and photocopiers or telephones and computers?
• Introducing technology as a useful pedagogical tool takes time and hand-holding. It’s more of a process than a one-time event and needs to be planned as such.
• Overestimating the capability of computing.
• Ease of use. Some powerful programs such as Photoshop or Flash are not as easy to use as the sales rep demonstrated. Other programs are easy to use but lack many useful features and thus limit creativity.
• Previous investments in technology. School systems occasionally buy systems or software packages that do not meet the needs of end users and are incompatible with the current computers already purchased.
• Updates. When a platform is updated by the manufacturer, updates and hardware upgrades are both costly and time consuming.
• The cost of connectivity. When school systems have decide between high bandwith access and fixing leaking roofs, it is likely the school will opt for roof repair, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for teachers and students but it does cut into supporting technology.
• Adequate pedagogical and technical support. Without it, educators are limited in their ability to practice as well as become more creative.
• Judging software and hardware. Are there standards of “goodness” regarding software and hardware? On what grounds does a school make a decision to purchase?

School culture and organization

• Teachers need time for professional development. They need to adopt technologies to improve their instruction, not use it to do the “same old thing.”
• Can computers be used to cut down “administrivia” or only shift it?
• Technology should be used to advance a new kind of school culture supporting a new kind of professional development.
• Professional development should be learner-centered and student-owned.
• Technology needs to be integrated into every part of school life so that the curriculum and the learner’s needs drive technology, not the reverse.
• Professional development needs to be bottom-up (i.e., demanded by the educators) and not top-down (demanded by the administration).
• If designed appropriately, computing could end “teacher isolation” by building networks within the school infrastructure between teachers, students, parents, principals, school boards, and district personnel.
• Teachers want sustained staff development, not short-term programs. They want to ownership of a program. They want assistance that will allow them to advance professionally and intellectually.
• Teachers need professional development to be flexible, to meet their time demands.
• Technology and computing in schools can be advanced by considering the three “C’s—comfort, confidence, and creativity.” Year one, teachers get comfortable using the technology. Year two  they develop confidence using it. Year three teachers become creative users of technology, embedding computer usage into their curriculum.

Federal Government’s Role
How might the federal government play a role in moving education forward into the 21st century?

• A bully pulpit? No child needs to be left behind, but it takes more than rhetoric to do so. Supplying computers to low-income communities and delivering broadband to rural areas are two areas clearly in need of additional support.
• Supporting research. What does research say about the best ways to professionally develop educators using technology? The government could sponsor research that looks deeper into such a concern. How effective are particular teaching strategies? How does technology or computing effect the school as a workplace?
• Infrastructure support. Bigger pipelines are always helpful and tech support is always needed in schools. Accessibility is another key area where government could pitch in to make sure a certain of level of access and support are always available.

Opportunities provided by computers in the classroom:

• On-demand professional development; time becomes a less limiting factor.
• Accessible models of practice can be delivered to educators.
• Ending Isolation. Computers can allow educators to connect over time and space. Given good design, educator communities of interest can form, information and dialogue can be exchanged. Parents can keep abreast of curriculum and homework schedules.
• It’s only just begun. Many teachers are just now discovering technology and are attempting to learn how to integrate it into their curriculum. As more young teachers enter the stream familiar with the tools and applications, the more likely technology will become embedded.

Finally, what if colleges of education focused on teaching educators to be designers and not technicians? Maybe educators would be better prepared to design class time around meeting the needs of individuals instead of repeating the same old patterns.

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Notes compiled from Harvey, J. & Purnell, S. (Eds.) (1995). Technology and teacher development. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.

I have been thinking about the concept of Web 2.0 a lot recently. David Warlick’s helpful analysis started several ideas churning. David’s post explores the users end of spectrum. What I have become fascinated with are the social and political ramifications of Web 2.0.

The Internet is similar to radio and television in their early stage of development. Although it is hard to tell what it will become, “it will reshape our culture once it settles into a stable form” (Feenberg & Bakardjieva, 2004, p.15). Overall, radio and television are accepted and defined as forms of entertainment media and we have adjusted our expectations and practices of listening and viewing to accommodate them as such. There are exceptions, of course, but they the outliers, not the standard.

So how will computer networks be defined? The answers depend on “the emergence of standard technical affordances, practices, and legal, organizational, and cultural forms associated with the technology and determining its social meaning” (Feenberg & Bakardjieva, 2004, p.15).

Web 2.0 currently affords users a certain level of democritization in influencing computer use and design. Open source technologies, AJAX, and other tools, for example, allow users to craft applications to their specific needs; they offer lay interventions, as opposed to ones defined by bureaucratic or commercial interests.

In a sense, Web 2.0 is democracy in action; it is about participatory design. It allows for creative appropriation, mash-ups and rip, mix, learn. These are the halcyon days where we are all able to participate freely in multiple gardens.

Feenberg and Bakardjieva suggest that the “consumption model of the Internet is a plausible version of its future given the structural realities of the world in which we live. The alternative community model would take much more conceptual work, design efforts, and political mobilization…. It is the human actors, putting their competencies and resources to work, fighting for their beliefs and desires, who will determine which of the emergent structures prevail” (Feenberg & Bakardjieva, 2004, p.24).

Is there a strategy that will allow this practice to be sustained? Will corporate rationality and determinism attempt to confine this medium? What can we do to proactively keep networks free? I believe this is an important issue for all of us to carefully consider in an age where democracy sometimes feels like a historical artifact.

Reference:

Feenberg, A. & Bakardjieva, M. (2004). Consumers or citizens? The online community debate. Community in the digital age: philosophy and practice. Eds., A. Feenberg & D. Barney. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

How educational technology is designed and used affects its educational potential. In other words, given the right conditions, educational technology can effectively support students’ academic achievement and intellectual growth.

(This notion seems obvious enough but it bears repeating. The same can be said for teaching and learning without computers, which is precisely my point).

Achievement in content areas is most apparent when computer-based assignments directly support state learning standards (Mann et al., 1999)

The development of higher-order thinking skills can be fostered through the appropriate educational technology/cognitive media (Hopson et al., 2001-2002).

The effective use of educational technology depends on an instructional model that offers a high-quality design, direct curriculum integration, and extensive teacher training (Liao, 1998).

Educational technology that fosters interactivity can promote metacognitive skills, collaborative learning and depth of understanding (Kulik, 2003).

Reeves’ (1998) analysis supports the conclusion that cognitive learning tools (educational technology):

• Improve measures on standardized tests
• Increase rates of learning
• Increase student motivation
• Promote the development of reflective thinking
• Build time management, organizational, and presentation skills

Cotton (2001) reports that schools with a working technology program tend to have:

•  Higher levels of self-efficacy
•  Higher attendance rates
•  Increased time on task
•  Increased positive behaviors
  

Effective Technology involves professional development.

Wengliski (1998) make a critical point in the use of cognitive media in his study revealing that students who experienced technology in a format associated with “lower-order thinking skills” (e.g., “rote and practice”) fared worse overall.

Wengliski’s (1998) findings show that the students of teachers with professional development in technology integration outperformed students of teachers who did not.

Thus how teachers use their resources is decisive. The benefits of technology or cognitive media clearly depend on how they are used.

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References:

Cotton, K. (2001). Computer-Assisted Instruction, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/5/cu10.html.

Hopson, M. H., Simms, R., and Knezek, G. A. (2001-2002). Using a technology–enriched environment to improve higher order thinking skills. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 34(2). Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://www.iste.org/jrte/34/2/abtracts/hopkins.cfm


Kulik, J. (2003) Effects of using Technology in Elementary and Secondary schools: What Controlled Evaluation Studies Say?, Arlington, Virginia: SRI International. Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/sandt/it/Kulik_ITi

Liao, Y.C. (1998). Effects Traditional Instruction on Students’ Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 3(4).

Mann, D., Shakeshaft, C., Becker, J., and Kottkamp, R. (1999). West Virginia Story: Achievement Gains from a Statewide Comprehensive Instructional Technology Program: What impact does technology have on learning? Milken Exchange on Educational Technology. Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://mff.org/publications/publications.taf?page=155


Reeves, T.C. (1998). The Impact of Media and Technology in Schools: A Research. New York: The Bertelsmann Foundation. Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://www.athensacademy.org/instruct/media_tech/reeves0.html

Wenglinski, H. (1998) Does it Compute? The Relationship Between Educational Technology and Students Achievement in Math, Princeton, NJ: Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service. Retrieved 07 March 2006 from http://www.est.org/research/pic/tecnolg.html

Virtual communities allow groups of people to act affectively. But here’s the rub: the technology that supports community is critical, but not as critical as the consciousness and intention of people using the technology.

In his introductory chapter to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold makes the following observations:

The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important, political leverage. But technology will not in itself fulfill that potential; this latent technical power must be used intelligently and deliberately by an informed population. Most people must learn about that leverage and learn to use it, while we still have the freedom to do so, if it is to live up to its potential. The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities; big power and big money always found ways to control new communications media when they emerged in the past (xix).

The beauty of the Internet and World Wide Web is that it is still relatively fast, cheap, and out of control. But, to paraphrase Rheingold, it has the potential to be seized, censored, metered, and sold back to us.

Rheingold warns:

The future of the Net has become too important to leave to specialists and special interests…. We need a clear citizens’ vision of the way the Net ought to grow, a firm idea of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future. If we do not develop such a vision for ourselves, the future will be shaped for us by large commercial and political powerholders. (xxi)

I am still trying to wrap around what we, the people, can do to maintain our current freedoms. What if one or many of us were to create a virtual summit dedicated to virtual freedom. What would be our mission statement? What would our agenda look like? Who might we attract? Is somebody already working towards this? Could such a community sustain itself? Will such a community only come into existence after the proverbial shoe is dropped (and we find ourselves reacting rather than being proactive)?

I’m curious to know what other people think.

Reference:

Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Cambridge: MIT Press.

An interesting discussion opened up in class around the popularity of Facebook, an online directory that connects people through social networks at schools. My prof submited a loaded question to the class: What makes Facebook so popular with adolescents?

He then offered a story about a colleague’s daughter. She’s 14 years old, bright, capable… but is doing poorly in school. According to her mother, she spends a majority of her waking hours on Facebook. “What gives?”

I had just finished reading Feenberg and Bakardjieva’s introductory chapter in Community in the Digital Age  when a couple of ideas came to mind.

Facebook resides somewhere at the crossroads of the consumption model of the Web and the community model. Scrolling through the variety of people, pictures, stories and connections within Facebook, the user is presented with a host of identities and communities in which one may participate. As a consumption model, Facebook offers information and news that is searchable and retrievable. Participants represent themselves or the idea of themselves online for others to desire, emulate, ignore, discard or drink in. Users are able to freely view, click and pick their way through “the goods.”

Unlike many consumption-modeled websites, Facebook allows participants to talk to one another, to sense and see other presences, thus serving as an authentic community. Facebook allows relationships to spawn among groups of individuals where they can interact, crisscross and reinforce one another. For a 14-year-old girl, Facebook is a place where she can try on any number of identities and relationships. Facebook serves her as a vehicle that allows her “to traverse the social world, penetrate previously unattainable regions of anonymity,” and expand her social reach (Bakardjieva, 2004, 122).

It seems clear that the online virtual community fills, to some extent, a void in her face-to-face community, satisfying some pressing need.

Sherry Turkle notes that such online communities as Facebook afford our 14-year-old what Erik Erikson dubs a psychological moratorium, a key feature in adolescent identity formation. Turkle writes:

the adolescent moratorium is a time of intense interaction with people and ideas. It is a time of passionate friendships and experimentation. The adolescent falls in and out of love with people and ideas. Erikson’s notion of the moratorium was not a “hold” on significant experiences but on their consequences. It is a time during which one’s actions are, in a certain sense, not counted as they will be later on in life. They are not given as much weight, not given the force of full judgment. In this context, experimentation can become the norm rather than a brave departure. Relatively consequence-free experimentation facilitates the development of a “core self,” a personal sense of what gives life meaning that Erikson calls “identity” (Turkle, 2004, 108).

 In a sense you begin to feel why many reactionary elements in society are against having adolescents participate in such online communities as Facebook. If you were to randomly poll several hundred teenagers and ask them if they find school boring, I’m willing to bet an overwhelming majority would respond “yes, and how!” Online communities offer a range of possible friendships, cliques, and means to experiment in ways that face-to-face communities cannot.

So, it seems that on a certain level Facebook offers adolescents a number of affordances that school never will. Of course, I am offering this argument as a simplification, ignoring a variety of other relevant concerns and affordances of face-to-face communities. Growing up is never easy. With today’s social software affordances like Facebook, things will not get necessarily easier for today’s youth. Similarly as adults, we all face issues of identification and negotiation at multiple levels. Wenger (1998) notes

One problem of the traditional classroom format is that it is both too disconnected from the world and too uniform to support meaningful forms of identification. It offers unusually little texture to negotiate identities: a teacher sticking out and a flat group of students all learning the same thing at the same time. Competence thus stripped of its social complexity, means pleasing the teacher, raising your hand first, getting good grades. There is little material with which to fashion identities that are locally differentiated and broadly connected. It is no surprise, then, that the playground tends to become the centerpiece of school life…, that the classroom itself becomes a dual world where instruction must compete with message passing, and that some students either seek their identity in subversive behavior or simply refuse to participate” (Wenger, 1998, 269).

One could argue that many parents have trouble responding to the identity development of their children and become disengaged and disconnected from the thoughts and feelings of their offspring. Clearly if parents and schools are not offering meaningful forms of identity formation (i.e., membership) and negotiability then children will likely seek communities and economies of meaning outside of it.

So, why does our 14-year-old example find Facebook more intriguing than her face-to-face schooling? That is the question. Should Internet communities like Facebook re-examine how they are used? Should researchers focus on examining how social software is being used, discerned, articulated, and how they affect real people in specific situations? Perhaps sites like Facebook represent a means for helping to clarify identity formation and should be encouraged.

Things that make me go hmmmm….

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References:

Bakardjieva, M. (2004) Virtual togetherness: An everyday life perspective. Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.) (2004). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.) (2004). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Turkle, S. (2004). Our splir screens. In Feenberg, A. and Barney, D. (Eds.). Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

When I took the job as the coordinator for correspondence studies at my uni back in 2000, the dean pulled me aside and said, “Chris, we are currently in a period of transition....” He then paused, looked up at the ceiling and continued: “Actually, we are ALWAYS in a period of transition.”

I thought that was a curious statement at the time only to realize he was absolutely correct. Six years later, I have seen and experienced so many changes in technology and attitudes that accompany distance teaching and learning, mostly in a positive direction.
Yesterday, I happened across Ben Werdmuller’s post that got me thinking about the affect of technology on education. Ben writes

the most important people are the students and teachers who don't participate [my emphasis]. In terms of changing things, the most important people are the ones who make the decisions. The rest of us are just commentators and people with ideas trying to push the envelope. What we tend to do in the weblog sphere is chat amongst ourselves, when we ought to be wise to the fact that most people don't read weblogs; most people, although they might be online in a nominal sense, don't really participate. The important discussions and interactions still need to happen in the real world, and although it's nice to be cutting edge, the real importance is to bring the added value that online spaces have the potential of providing - and to have these conversations with people on the outside.

Working as a full-time educational technology advisor and enabler, Ben’s comments struck a chord. It’s one thing to work with educators who do teach and learn with technology, but what about those educators who do not? I am not suggesting that social software is the magic bullet that will make everything better. Yet it has been my experience that educators who do employ a variety of instructional technologies into their practice are forced to re-think and re-examine what they do. This I believe is one of the hidden benefits of educational technology – the opportunity to critically reflect and readjust one’s practice. This retooling involves risk; it involves possible failure. But most of all it involves learning.

David Warlick regularly talks about telling a new story regarding teaching and learning. I believe technologies like blogs, wikis, and rss aggregation can begin to shift learning back into the learners’ hands. This transition has been slowly coming for many years and I think we will soon see more and more teachers talking to one another about how their practice has changed as a result of social software and Web 2.0 affordances.

So, given the winds of change that permeate the edublogosphere, I must report that today is my last day as director of distance learning for my uni’s office of distance, continuing, and executive education. As much as I would like to take a hiatus, I have accepted a position in the college of education where I can focus my energies on developing distance teaching and learning programs for educators across the globe. The degrees, courses, and certificate programs I will be working with aim at extending the conversation to those on the outside, to educators looking to gain new knowledge, new skills, and share them with their students. I am quite excited and am looking forward to getting started.

So despite the innumerable confusions associated with transitions, I don’t think I would have it any other way. As Nietzsche once said, “[o]ne must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

 

Ulises Mejias recently sent me a link to an essay he co-authored that I think many educators and instructional designers may be unaware of.

Learning Molecules provides a distinctive approach to learning design that you may find useful if you have limited experience or are working with faculty who have little to no experience with online learning. By using metaphor of a molecule, the model provides a useful framework “to help organize the content and structure the learning experience.” In this scenario, the molecule is likened to a learning module, or specific unit of learning, that includes objectives, resources, collaborative tools, and assessments. Multiple “molecules” can be bonded together to create a compound or course.

What makes the model even more extensible is the reference to the Periodic Table of Online Learning Elements which shows how learners can engage and interact with specific content. Similar to the atomic weight provided in the periodic table, the Online Learning table offers both a learning weight—“a measure in minutes of the amount of time that eCornell estimates the average learner will require to complete that element,” and a production weight—“a relative measure of how much effort is required to produce the element.” This allows course producers to roughly determine the amount of time and energy associated with course production that facilitates fiscal budgeting and time management.

The Learning Molecule and the Periodic Table of Online Learning Elements tells a new story, one that revises traditional models of instructional design and project management. Prior to implementing the model, eCornell reportedly “averaged 200–250 person-hours per finished hour of content. After implementing the model, [they] reduced that number to 93 person-hours per finished hour of content.” Based on your particular situation, new templates can readily be devised for inclusion in the periodic table.

As I reflect on the possibilities for this model, I find myself anxious to deploy it. If you haven't already, I encourage you to give it a try and let me know how it works for you.
 

Since I am working toward a doctorate that focuses on teacher professional development and social software affordances, I like to attend professional development seminars whenever I can. Today I sat in on a session given to middle and high school teachers by Stephen G. Barkley. His topics centered on small learning communities (SLC), wherein he discussed several strategies and structures that, in theory, serve to support students.

The first analogy Barkley made caught my attention: schools as airplanes. Many schools strap students into their seats facing toward the front, where talking is not discouraged, but it isn’t encouraged either. To extend the metaphor further, many schools focus more on the destination rather than the experience, centering more on scope and sequence rather than the myriad of opportunities that is our everyday existence. Where an in-flight movie serves more as a distraction rather than a meaningful encounter with a text.

Barkley discussed how, in his experience, many educators run their classrooms like a franchise: the students in the room are the teacher's responsibility, not the schools responsibility, not the team’s responsibility, not the community’s responsibility. He talked about how many schools target improving student test scores, not improving the lives of individual students. In terms of professional development, the question becomes: what do schools need to look at in terms of the way they are structured that will allow them to focus on individual students?

Barkley discussed looking at the deeper structures and cultures that exist within schools. He spoke about how an advisory structure could be devised so that teachers would be responsible for 20-30 students each. They become those particular students advocates; they know these students inside and out and can work with other teachers to make sure that their students’ needs are being served. The advisory structure serves to encourage and foster communication between students and teachers, teachers and teachers, teachers and parents.

During this seminar I sat with a group of teachers from a local high school. They voiced a certain level of confusion regarding how they could restructure their schools, their classrooms, to serve the individual needs of each of their students (their students!) They reported that advisement periods used to exist but they were removed. No one knew why.

Many schools and educators are caught in a bind. They have to choose between focusing on the curriculum or the students, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the school district.

Barkley cited the work of Margaret Wheatley where she states in effect that schools need to focus on the whole student instead of the parts. This notion is illustrated when you think of the school as an assembly line: The math teacher focuses on math, the English teacher focuses on language arts, the social studies teacher focuses on history, yet none of them focus on the child as a whole. Again, where’s the team? Many teachers and schools focus exclusively on curriculum and leave out the other teachers, the community, the parents, the library, the technology. It seems part of the reason for this is that schools are rule-bound, they work off of structures, whereas learning is more about processes, relationships, identity formation, and regular change. Learning is messy, and messy is anathema to school structure.

In A Simpler Way, Wheatley suggests that learning organizations are most effective when

• information flows cleanly between all stakeholders,
• there exist a diversity of quality relationships,
• when stakeholders share a common vision (e.g., individual learners are the most important part of any school)

When a clean flow of information, meaningful relationships, and a shared vision overlap, creativity can become unbound, allowing educators to experiment and the school culture can conceivably enter a state of innovation.

As I sat with the group of high school teachers digesting Barkley’s comments, I listened to the teachers around the table talk about not having enough time to observe other teachers, not knowing how to support and advise their students, not knowing how to take what Barkley was saying and making it happen tomorrow and the next day, and the next. These particular teachers needed a strategy and time to practice effective communication with each other and figure out how to build and implement a learner-centered practice.

Maybe because it was late in the day and everybody was simply tired. I have reason to believe that nothing will change in many of their classroom practices. Was the trainer hitting them with too much information? Was the trainer spending all of his time telling and not showing?  Would weblogs be useful in providing a place for teachers to share their reflections and brainstorm plans for focusing on individual learners?

After spending some time reflecting on the experience, I feel the trainer meant well, but all he could offer was a story about “yeast” rather than being the yeast itself. Research in the area of teacher professional development suggests that professional development needs to be a part of the water supply, not a special treat offered once a term. It seems a healthy learning environment is directly related to the leadership of the school. The leaders are the ones that shape the school climate, they can make teacher professional development part of the water supply, they can set the bar high (or lower if necessary) and provide the needed support so that every teacher becomes just as important as every student.

Empowering educators and learners is a tricky, high stakes business.

 

Just for fun, I started putting together a wiki page covering items related to the relatively ubiquitous term Web 2.0.

Also, I have been updating information on the Free Online Educational  Sites page.

Let me know if there are any pertinent items or resources that you think should be included.

 

 

This post was inspired after reading Will Richardson's post titled  “To Blog or Not To Blog….” For many of us (myself included), blogging fits nicely into what Plato, and most recently NYT columnist David Brooks, describes as the thymotic urge, i.e., it appeals to our desire for recognition. I realize this is only one facet to the multifaceted motivation to blog, but it is one that should be clearly acknowledged.

My dearest friend is bright, tech savvy, a good writer, and can quote Hegel and Homer Simpson. We have discussed why he doesn't blog many times. He says he just doesn't have the desire to put his thoughts out there in such a medium. We've talked about fear of rejection, of putting your heart and soul into your writing, only to have no one acknowledge it as being a possible factor preventing him from blogging.

So what makes edubloggers tick? What makes them feel that what they have to say will be worthwhile to others? Do edubloggers desire recognition? Would you blog if no one read your posts?

For me, blogging is a social act. I heart connecting with others. I like to share my thoughts and receive feedback from others. Blogging is a way for me to test my ideas out. As a future professor, writing and publishing determines whether or not I will be retained by a college. Professors are supposed to be contributing to the larger body of knowledge that exists in their area of expertise and blogging is an easy way to do that (it's almost as if the blogosphere were a perpetual conference). Blogging affords me the opportunity to contribute to the larger conversation and network with others of like and unlike minds.

I think what I love best about blogging is that it allows me to peer into the thought processes of others. Being a people-watcher, I have always been fascinated by what makes people do or say the things they do. My favorite bloggers reveal their minds and parts of their souls; they risk exposing themselves, their inner most thoughts and feelings, all for what purpose? My entertainment? Possible adulation from the roaring masses?

From what I have been able to gather, edubloggers offer ideas, advice, questions and solutions that serves to further the actual practice of teaching and learning. Edublogger reflections by people like Stephen, George, Will, Dave, Ulises, Bud, Vicki, Josie, Alan, Bryan, James, David, Jay, Anne, Barbara, Leigh, Bill, Mr. Kuropatwa, Brian, Tim, Albert, Doug, D’Arcy, Harold, Scott, Gardo, Derek, Quentin, Sebastian, the Xplana and Flosse posses serve a collective purpose that allow all of us to build our own practice and aid others in their personal and professional development.

So do we blog because we desire recognition? Perhaps to some degree. But I believe there’s more to it. I hesitate to post this because I do not want to appear to be oversimplifying the question.

So I ask you, what motivates you to blog? Would you do it if you knew no one would read it? And what happens when you become “popular”? Do you worry about what you will post next, whether it will be well received? What happens when you become a victim of your own success?

After spending some time reflecting on my last post, several concepts floated to the top that I wanted to share.

I am trying to learn from my own blogging.

Barbara Ganley has helped me to see that as a teaching and learning medium, blogging has the potential to foster what Seely-Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) term “cognitive apprenticeship.” Blogging can serve the learning process in the following ways (as offered by van Weigel (2002)):

1. Modeling: the teacher “puts his/her mind on display”
2. Coaching: teachers observe students performance of a task, offering feedback
3. Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.
4. Articulating: drawing students out dialogically, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
5. Reflecting: debriefing, replaying and discussion after an activity
6. Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

For me, the comments that came after the post provided me, as a learner, a taste of each of these six elements. The contributors all blog; they offered meaningful feedback from a variety of perspectives; they are helping me wrap around larger, more complex issues that I am working on; the comments are assisting me to convert my inferred knowledge into more precise knowledge; this process gives me items to reflect on which in turn prompt my further exploration of my initial ideas. Like Barbara I am trying to learn from my blogging.

Other items that caught my attention from the comments include:

• Blogging as a document center or respository.
• Blogging as identity-exploration.
• Blogging as a means for sharing information.
• Blogging as means of connection and engaement (to both people and ideas).
• Blogging as a means of extending the conversation.

People blog for a variety of reasons. Yet ultimately it seems to come back to a sense of participating in a larger community. Wenger (1998) talks about learning as a process of social participation. Blogging allows us "congregate in virtual spaces and develop shared ways of pursuing common interests" (p. 7). Thus, blogging serves as a means of making sense of the world.

Vicki Davis notes that for teachers like herself, blogging is a natural extension of the self. She writes:

The intrinsic desire of teachers is to transform and help those they teach become a better person.  So when a natural born teacher meets the blog, I find that my innate desire to help and teach others takes over.  To teach not only my students but others.

Similarly, Joan Vinall-Cox notes that when she adopts her teacher persona, her blogging operates as a service for herself as a digital immigrant and others (digital natives) interested in expanding their web skills.

D’Arcy Norman notes that blogging serves as his “outboard brain first and foremost.” It becomes a medium to store, retrieve, and shape “half-baked thoughts” that allow him to “make sense of new ideas.” Harold Jarche echoes this point, describing blogging as his own “personal knowledge management system and a way to stay involved in many conversations.”

In terms of blogging as a thymotic urge, or blogging as a means of gaining recognition, Karen
Romeis offers this gem:

Many of us, as kids, used to sing along to our favourite songs with a hairbrush-microphone, giving dramatic performances for audiences we knew to be entirely imaginary. It doesn't necessarily signify a desire for recognition as much as a desire for self-expression. Those who give the wildest performances in the privacy of their homes would often rather have root canal than face a real audience. For those people, the imaginary audience is infinitely preferable. I often write as if I'm addressing someone, but that "someone" is in fact my imaginary audience. If it turns out that there is actually someone out there, great; if not, hey ho.

Harold Jarche extends the blogging conversation in his post on Bloggers’ Rules which taps into a discussion with Jay Cross and a blog post from Dave Pollard.

As Harold notes, one blogger cannot address all readers and writers wants and needs. But the list is wonderfully thought provoking and provides more grist for the blogging mill.

In terms of teaching and learning, blogging allows for a contextualization of learning through hypertext links to other relevant learning materials, promoting a return to and a revision of learned concepts, thus enhancing the learning experience (Ferdig and Trammell, 2004).

So what are the downsides to blogging?

During a class presentation regarding research on blogging in teacher professional development environments I asked my colleagues "what do you think might be some drawbacks that would prevent teachers from blogging?" We discussed issues of privacy, self-efficacy, a sense of fallibility, and the issue of time.

Other items I have uncovered in my research include:

• Exposing oneself to others.
• If a participant feels that he or she is not a good writer or are technologically "all thumbs," then he or she might feel overwhelmed by the medium.
• The importance of providing technical support when first getting started with weblogging with those not familiar with such technology (Cavanaugh and Cavanaugh, 2005).
• Without a clear structure or ground rules, participants in a collaborative learning environment appear to flounder and lose direction (Glazer, Abbot, and Harris, 2004).

Blogging clearly illustrates changes in the information ecology, reflecting a user-inquiry stance, facilitating a multi-voiced dialogue flow, as well as supporting the transfer of knowledge (Siemens, 2004). The appropriate use of weblogs can learning on multiple levels. Weblogging enables reflection both individually and collectively in systematic ways that allows individuals, colleagues, and others to tap into a network that gives “something back, something more than the good feeling of simply articulating what's in our brain in writing.”

References:

Cavanaugh T. and Cavanaugh, C. (2005). Blogging as a professional development tool. eLearn Conference 2005, Vancouver CA: brief paper.

Ferdig, R. E. & Trammell, K. D. (2004). Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere'. Technological Horizons in Education Journal.

Glazer, C., Abbot, L. & Harris, J. (2004) A teacher-developed process for collaborative professional reflection. Reflective Practice, 5(1) pgs. 33-46.

Seely-Brown, J., Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-41.

Siemens, G. (2004). The Art of Blogging (Summary Notes). Presented at MADLAT Conference May 7, 2004.

Weigel, Van B. (2002). Deep learning for a digital age: Technology’s untapped potential to enrich higher education.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge Press.

I was researching the notion of blogs and actors (in a sociological sense) and came across this paper by Microsoft’s Jonathan Grudin. I was looking for a relationship between the notion of blogs and actants, between the structure and function of a blog and what can be triggered beyond the surface content. I am curious to know how realities, truths, actualities, social and otherwise, are generated between bloggers, blogs, and readers of blogs.

As such, the following quote by Edward Dwight Easty grabbed my attention

The actor’s awareness of what is needed for the creation of Inner Character can be greatly stimulated by asking himself honestly, as the character, a series of questions pertinent to the life of the character… For example, Who am I? What are my particular likes and dislikes? Do I have a hobby? Am I religious? Which religion do I believe in? What is my background? What did my father do for a living? What was my day like? On what street do I live? (Be able to describe the street.) What does my apartment look like? How many rooms do I have? (Give a full description of the type of living quarters that you as the character might inhabit. Give particular detail to the furnishings.) What did I do today? Who did I talk to? What is my basic relationship to the other characters in the play? What is my political outlook or my views on the world situation at the time of this play?... The actor can ask himself what kind of music a character such as this would enjoy. He can then listen at length to pieces of this music, deciding which passages the character would like best and, more important, why…”
                                                            – On Method Acting

Like method acting, we as humans are able to use an accumulation of details to trigger psychological change. Are bloggers similar to actors preparing for a part, using their weblogs, their outboard brains, as a means of shifting engagement with their inner character that then facilitates natural reactions without fully conscious thought?

I have seen many blogs where the author seems to be rattling off a stream of consciousness that you might encounter if you knew them intimately or were sitting across from them at their kitchen table. Others, like myself, read and re-read our posts, carefully editing them in an attempt to produce well-argued positions and points of view. Neither one is better or worse than the other. Both are a reflection of the writers’ outboard brain.

Think of an author describing a  fictional character; consider how the character “comes alive” and takes over. In the same way, blogs can present a person with whom others can engage, similar to a newspaper columnist, a movie reviewer, or an actor to whom we return to, whose viewpoint we come to identify with and use to comprehend the information being delivered.

And like actors or newspaper columnists, bloggers need an audience.  Grudin suggests that the details about the thoughts or life of an author attracts readership. What sustains the relationship between bloggers and their audience is richness of what is written, the hyperlinks that turn exploring a blog into a rich network of connectivity to other people, places, and multimedia (photos, movies, games, research, snapshots of homes, friends, encounters with friends, places, objects).

Grudin notes that a blog’s chronology enhances the users ability to engage and reason about the information they encounter when “they know how old it is and can quickly see what came before and after.” Chronological weblogs show us how a person’s thinking changes over time, where activity heightens, what makes the author tick. On this point I’m not sure I agree. For me, Ulises Mejias is someone I follow closely in terms of the content of his blog posts. What attracts me to his writing is not the shift in his thinking over time; it’s his content that I find exhilarating. Barbara Ganley is another example. I find myself returning to her posts because of the way she thinks; the way she plays with ideas as they relate to her practice as a writing instructor. Pehaps if I dig deep enough I would be able to note the development of her thoughts over time and see the evolution of her thinking/blogging. But that’s not what keeps me coming back. I’m simply curious to see what she’s thinking/blogging about today.

Grudin winds up his essay with an interesting conclusion. (I have bolded the portions that appear worth considering at a deeper level.)

[F]uture generations will look back at the early 21st century as a time of information scarcity.… [T]he increased quantity and richness of information that is available now is leading to a dramatic transformation in our stance toward the web and digital technologies through higher levels of deep engagement on many fronts…. This is not a contradiction, it suggests even more dramatic change ahead. We are on the threshhold of a broad expansion of sensor technologies, mobility, notification capabilities, and other advances that will produce a future of more plentiful information. The link between today and tomorrow is apparent in a younger generation’s adoption of text messaging, blogging, and other technologies. They are developing the skills to process and create multimedia information without effort, often multitasking, often mobile. James Martin wrote of a dam bursting in 1973. That wave swept away many habits and structures. In any era, the younger generation learns to ride any wave that comes along.

Is there a contradiction in this last phrase? Is the water sweeping away old habits and the younger generation riding the wave of old habits? Or are the flooding waters carrying away the old habits leaving new waters for the younger generation to surf?

Will social software foster the next generation’s ability to go deep, to express themselves meaningfully, to reflect and connect within a community of inquiry/practice in such a way that builds knowledge and connectivity on multiple levels? Can such software and the next generation of social connectivity encourage a sense of community, democracy, and a desire to give back something more than the good feeling of articulating what’s in our brain?

I hope to stick around and find out.