#KiwiFoo 2013

My head is still scattered so, at this stage, thoughts on #KiwiFoo 2013 are best expressed by others (although I can just about stretch to a wee spot of curation)…..check out my Storify collection for a flavour of this rich unconference. Massive thanks and hat-tips to Nat Torkington, Janine Torkington, the hard-working crew, Mahurangi College, the sponsors, the participants, & my fab mate Claire….

[http://storify.com/virtuallykaren/kiwifoo2013]

I’m not quite ready to synthesise the goodness and bring it home to work or passions. I need some sleep first. But until then…..

grab-bag of take-aways / ponderings / wonderings….

• There is huge value in bringing together people from cross-disciplines – science, politics, education, tech, community, social. Throwing yourself in gains usually hard-to-grab opportunities to meet, connect with and learn from others who I would never had a chance to meet.

• The ‘so what’ of how people apply their skills: connections to the community, giving back, paying forward are what turns potential navel-gazing into meaningful projects.

• the value of immersive, hands-on learning (thinking here of the prototyping and robot-making sessions, as well as walking-the-talking in the collaboration across companies session) – the power of physical data visualisation

• The Makerspace movement as a pathway for learning – and prototyping, using methodologies from Stanford, to generate ideas through empathy

• The Electrum sculpture – Lightning Dreams – Gibbs Farm

• ‘A Pattern Language: Towns. Buildings. Construction’ by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein – and the concept of pattern language within educational professional learning and practice

• John Seddon and his thinking about the service industry – what would this look like in an educational context or in the way we develop organisations as systems?

• The open research movement and its potential to enhance participatory / action research / critical theory models as well as revolutionise the way in which we ‘judge’ quality, crowdsource new hypotheses and generate relevant questions.

• Stunning ideas to explore: Chalkle, Innocentive and PledgeMe (crowdsourcing), Ministry of Awesome (Christchurch), Goodreads (great books via social networking), Stone Soup (storytelling), finite and infinite games…

…..and there is another list of stuff I can’t get to right now….another time….

When the talk walks…

Today I completed my final Core Breakfast session for 2012 – a warm, enthusiastic session with a Dunedin crowd, exploring the possibilities for personalised (and connected – see image) professional learning that can be afforded by easily available technologies. This session was similar to the spotlight I facilitated at the Ulearn conference.

And at both of them, an interesting ‘meta-experience’ (real word? it is now..) highlighted for me the potential of the technologies that I am exploring with schools.

Story 1: Coming to you, live and direct!

The Ulearn session was streamed live and was freely available to anyone not at the conference, including one teacher who was tidying her classroom, somewhere in New Zealand.

She tweeted that was enjoying watching the session; a participant in the room with me showed me the tweet – and I was able to include her in the session, directly addressing the camera, illustrating the connecting power of the tech as it happened.

It may have startled her in the middle of tidying her desk (I imagine the pencils tumbling to the floor as she hears me talking to her from her laptop..) but what possibilities this offers for the future of professional learning are incredibly exciting.

While this has obviously been done before – one-to-many streamed TV shows offer interactivity via Twitter or similar, this is not a model that is common yet to PD but increased access through ultra-fast broadband will make this a reality in the coming years, bringing us:

• …live, multimedia synchronous sessions
• …interactive participation that can be tailored, personalised, meaningful
• …responsive and collaborative learning that is not bound by geographic constraints
• …the ability to record, replay, embed, transcribe and share – Universal Design for Learning and accessibility in action.

Story 2: Leveling our learning playing field

In this mornings’s breakfast session, one of the participants, Anne Kenneally (@annekenn), tweeted out that I was sharing resources from Dean Shareski (@shareski) – and included him in the tweet. He took the time to reply immediately, looping in both myself and Anne, as the session played out.

The double-loop that such online networks can create here, instantly connecting us to those people we admire and whose work we espouse, illustrates powerfully:

• The immediacy of access to others in our profession
• The leveling of the expert-student playing field – we are all experts, all learners, the reciprocity of akō in action
• The potential of the knowledge-based network

Both of the stories excite me – the irony that, at the moment of facilitating on the power of blended, networked professional learning, it plays out in the room in ways that add value for the participants and illustrate the talk in action.

This is the way we can de-silo, connect, and tailor our learning for our personal inquiries, all with an eye of sustaining our learning in ways that utilise the rich, developing, global networks of educators.

Our profession is founded on the sharing of knowledge with others.

Let’s make sure we share it amongst ourselves, too.

[Image source: "surprised kawaii cube"  by Jenn and Tony Bot]

Online professional learning: Punch above your weight

Here’s a story:

Sally is a primary teacher, who has had some exciting shifts in the way two of her students are learning to read. She rushes down the corridor to tell a colleague in the staffroom. Her colleague listens, is pleased for Sally, and spends a few minutes reflecting with her on both of their classrooms and how they teach literacy. Occasionally they return to the conversation over the following weeks. The end.

I use this as the start of an activity in the sessions I am running throughout this year on how blended/online approaches to professional learning can change the ending of this story. Sally’s story is the ‘BC’ version (before connectivity), although I know that it is still the norm in many schools.

I have been exploring why and how the social web, when it’s used strategically by educators, can make Sally’s story go further so, as a group, we can:

• build a shared articulation of practice
• make visible for others our reflective inquiries around ‘what works’
• create spaces for a collaborative approach to inquiry
• offer opportunities for professionals to make connections with each other, using visible online networks
• curate learning to build a lifelong digital portfolio, against which to reflect and discuss
• create expression of our practice to enable comparisons with others, to clarify what the key stories of effectiveness look like.

I am facilitating these sessions as part of the CORE Education breakfast series throughout 2012, and also at the ULearn12 conference in October.

Meanwhile, here’s me giving an overview of this trend, created for the 10 trends series:

[Image source:  Beverly & Pack]

Learning@School11: The gift that keeps on giving

The week of the Learning@School11 Conference in Rotorua was one marked by huge events unfolding in Christchurch – and it was rather odd to still be travelling to attend a conference that week, especially as flights were in disarray (not to mention the people).

But, despite the tragedies unfolding for my colleagues, I was able to grab moments to appreciate what L@S11 had to offer. Here are my top 3 highlights:

• Powerful language for learning: Joan Dalton and David Anderson explored the way in which the language (including body language) that we use needs to reflect the pedagogy that we espouse. If we are to prepare students for a networked, connected, collaborative world, then peppering our relationships with instructions, closed questions, and imperatives will not foster the sense of community that we know is so important. Great anecdotes illustrated their message; the story of the student who was failed for producing a blog that showed collaboration – sorry, make that cheating – drove home the point.
• The ‘a-ha!’ moments as I met folk from my Twitter PLN – some old faces (not literally, people;-) and some folks who I only knew by their avatar but who already felt like old faces.
• The networking and conversations – everything from social networking for educators to the idea that risk on the internet is normative and should be re-framed as a challenge to be addressed rather than avoided (whole new post needed on that one). Great, mind-expanding stuff.

Roll on ULearn 11 (but not too much rolling for those down South)

#eqnz

The Christchurch earthquake – and the tragedy unfolding in its wake – has stunned us all. But, in between the stories of bravery, local heroism and national response, there have been occasional moments where something has caught my attention because it is odd or unusual.

For me, it was the moment in Parliament on Tuesday 22 February, when Bill English asked people to stay off the phone lines and use texting instead. And it was the moment when a bizarre email from a friend made me think something had happened – and Twitter was my first source for immediate news. Both were, even at the time, in the midst of the devastating news, an odd reminder of the way technology is part of how we communicate.

This infographic from Mashable highlights the way online networks are now firmly centre stage during times when news is breaking; when the person in the street is at the heart of the story; when good, and bad, news travels faster than ever before.

If anyone still doubts the power of an online community, a social network or 140 character messages to have real impact on people’s lives, they have only to look at the messages coming through on the day of the earthquake, and still streaming through in the days afterwards, to be persuaded otherwise.

 

My Principal tweets: A report on leaders and social networks

We know that when leaders get involved in professional learning – when they walk the talk – their staff and community are much more likely to follow and be inspired to join in.

The report  - School Principals and Social Networking in Education: Practices, Policies, and Realities in 2010 – highlights the importance of school principals getting hands-on experience with social media tools, like Facebook and Twitter, in order to understand how it might support collaborative and networked learning.

The key findings of the report include:

• Principals who have active and personal experience of social media are far more likely to be strong advocates for its educational potential, and for e-learning in general.
• Many principals believe that there are possibilities within social media – but their schools do not have a strategy for its use.

The report recommends three key actions:

1. Greater active involvement in social networking is required for school leaders – and sites like EdWeb, ASCD Community and Google for Educators can provide a context that offers obvious benefits quite quickly if Facebook and Twitter don’t strike immediate chords.
2. Models of good practice are needed to show the potential of social networking in education
3. School policies need to be more effective and based on real-world contexts. They should extend beyond whether sites should be blocked to incorporate students and community in authentic digital citizenship conversations.

Schools look to their leaders for guidance and inspiration. What are they seeing at the moment?

Original link for report: http://www.edweb.net/fimages/op/PrincipalsandSocialNetworkingReport.pdf

43 decisions: Setting your privacy settings on Facebook

43. That’s the number of decisions you potentially have to make when you review your Facebook privacy settings.

And even if you’re a ‘digital citizen’, who fully understands the implications of your choices, it’s still hard.

Many young people find it much harder – and that’s why they need the support of parents and teachers.

This privacy chart for teens is part of a Parents’ Guide to Facebook. It steps you through each decision that you make as you set up or review your settings. And A Parents’ Guide to Facebook can be downloaded here.

And once you’ve done that, run the Scan for Privacy from reclaimPrivacy.org.

Because any platform that asks you to make at least 43 decisions about what you want to share, and what you don’t, needs to be handled with care.

Hands up for invisible tech

Steve Braunias, a keynote speaker, gently mocked the inoffensive little pun in the title of the NZ English teachers’ conference last week – but we WERE ‘enthusENG’, and for many of us, the focus was elearning.

Workshops ranged from using Digistore for planning to exploiting creative affordances for presentational tools to support the teaching of multi-media texts.

But one of the most startling, oft-commented-upon aspects – and it really shouldn’t be –  was that the venue was able to provide hassle-free connection, hassle-free technology, whip-smart students to address the few problems that arose and fast-as-you-would-wish-for broadband.  Christs’ College (as shot on my other blog) is also a Mac school (something that this author was most grateful for).

The connection and easy use of technology should not be remarkable – but it is. Many teachers and presenters know well the feeling of planning for a workshop or lesson, with almost near certainty that there will be a technological glitch. We make back-ups, prep offline versions, prepare handouts and get ready to wing it, preying to the tech-gods that all will be well.

So it was an absolute pleasure to be at Christs’. A well-resourced school it may be (and some would say that they can, of course, afford to provide such resources) but this should be an expectation that all schools should have.

Introducing the government’s broadband initiative, and the National Education Network (NZ). It may bring a handful of false dawns (for after all, schools still need to provide the gear, the support, the infrastructure, the effective teaching and learning…) but it should be a step in the direction of ubiquity and invisible technology.

Image source: Techiesouls, ‘Blue Computer Speed’