Category: clmooc

Emergency Distance Learning: What’s working (and what’s not)

On Thursday, February 27th, Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe announces that schools should close for two weeks to prevent further spread of COVID-19, novel coronavirus.

My school decided the next afternoon to close for two weeks and introduced a distance learning plan including two days for faculty to gain proficiency with our learning management system and begin planning and creating online content.

Help on the web

There has been a deluge of posts packed with suggestions and recommendations. One of the best is Distance Learning Under Pressure: Getting Your School Ready in a Short Time, which includes many useful suggestions which may or may not work in any given situation. It’s at the top of my list, though, because it places empathy at the top of that priority list. Yoshiko Iwai’s article in Scientific American, Online Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic is also helpful because of its practical advice based on experience.

What’s working: Flexible guidelines

A distance learning plan must be an agreed set of principles and expectations, but not a schedule. Everyone needs to react to a public health emergency in different ways, and school-at-home cannot be the center of our lives in a crisis. One size cannot fit all. The stress of the situation cannot be overstated, and the plan must set all community members’ health – physical, mental, and emotional – as the top priority.

Some students will not be at home. They may stay with relatives who may or may not have broadband internet access. Some may be with a parent at their workplace, some may be home unsupervised. A distance learning plan must take this into consideration by:

  • Operating asynchronously: Students should be allowed to work at their own pace and submit assignments when they can, not according to a strict schedule.
  • Providing easy access to content: Videos available as small files for streaming, and content also available as text for minimal data consumption.
  • Continuing routine tasks from the classroom, although teachers may or may not be able to follow-up. For example, reading for pleasure and independent writing.

This applies mostly to students, but also to teachers: I am teaching from home at the same time I’m helping my two children complete their online learning. Many parents will be be working from home in this way and won’t be able to maintain their job and the full responsibilities of school.

Teachers will be developing entirely new sets of capacities all at once, essentially and instantly starting a new career as an e-learning professional. Everything needs to be scaled down for ease and flexibility of use.

What’s not working: Recreating school at home

Attempting to recreate school at home is literally impossible. It is achievable by degrees depending on the level of embedded technology normally in use in the classroom and the availability of adult support for students at home. What works at school might not even work at home, anyway, so we need to think more creatively.

My younger child, a kindergarten student, struggled to maintain focus through the full-day of activities his teacher was providing online. In school, the mutual support among the children helps him to maintain attention and routines. I asked if she could provide guidance each day about which tasks were required or optional. This helped us to prioritize at home, and seemed to help her feel less pressure to fill the children’s schedule. The required assignments include lesson videos for new content, while the optional tasks are less formal and can be reused each day.

What’s working: Video conferencing

The most indispensable tool for me has been Microsoft Teams. It is the hub of our online communication and has lessened the friction in transitioning to distance learning. Our first reading group session went smoothly for most groups, particularly for students who were already actively utilizing the tools in the Office 365 suite.

Group reading conference using Microsoft Teams

Another service that is ideally suited to the situation in Flipgrid. I believe that it has helped soothe the loneliness that students will inevitably feel when learning in isolation. It has facilitated the ‘social’ in social constructivism at a distance and I look forward to exploring its potential further.

What’s working: Continuing routines

Before the emergency closure, my class had several ongoing routines that students completed independently and were submitted, or could be submitted, digitally. One of these, a Weekly Sharing task, has continued totally unchanged. Students write a blogpost on Kidblog, record a video on Flipgrid, handwrite a journal entry and upload a photograph, or simply type their sharing in a distributed OneNote page that each student uses to document their work, usually by copying and pasting a link to their blog post or video.

This routine has continued, and even flourished, as students have more time and access to the technology they need to create thoughtful pieces. Another tool that we can continue to use with minimal disruption is Quizizz. My students enjoy practicing for quizzes for homework, and then taking the quiz live is a synchronous event that helps us feel more connected.

What’s not working: Sparse tech in school

The majority of students in my class are participating in distance learning using tablet computers, mostly of the iOS variety. Our school owns no tablet computers of any kind, which means the students are using technology at home that they have never used in the classroom. In addition, we have twenty-four notebook computers on a cart shared between four classes – one-hundred students. That’s assuming they are all functioning properly, which they never are.

The elementary school is generally discouraged from embedding technology too deeply, and that approach is coming back to bite us now. Many students who skate by in class without learning to use the technology tools we do utilize are now lost and require help that we can’t provide remotely.

If you want your class or school to be disaster distance learning proof, invest in the technology and make it an essential part of how, where, and when the children learn.

What’s working: Modeling

The best advice for a school leader is to use the distance learning tools you expect teachers to use to teach them how to use them. It would even alleviate the need for teachers to come to school during the closure for ‘training’. Regrettably, the administrative and IT leadership at my school did not do this.

If our IT department had developed online mini-courses about all of the tools available to us, it would be much quicker to get teachers onboard when it became necessary to use those tools. If this were an ongoing process, embedded in our school culture, the transition could have been seamless.

As it is, all of the teachers have struggled to overcome multiple steep learning curves in a short period of time. We have benefited from browsing each others’ pages to glean ideas, and sharing tips on a special Teams channel. It’s a testament to their professionalism, but the resulting added stress and confusion could have been avoided by investing in technology and cultivating a more tech-savvy and capable staff.

What’s not working: Ignoring contract hours

Emergency school closure is going to affect work schedules. It’s unavoidable and a professional must be aware of the need for greater-than-usual flexibility, particularly when it concerns students. I have no complaints about the stream of emails and query messages from 6:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night.

However, school administration doesn’t need special consideration. During the past two weekends, I have been emailed on Sunday. This is typical, so I simply don’t check school email until Monday morning. During this crisis, though, out of concern for students’ needs, I check more frequently. To make it worse, these emails contain requests for tasks to be done in preparation for Monday. That is unacceptable.

If something is that urgent, it should have been addressed on Friday morning. Knowing that teachers are more ‘plugged in’ means that administrators need to be more careful about demanding attention and action outside of contracted working hours.

I have also come to terms with the fact that, while I am working as much as – if not more than usual because I am a homeroom teacher, many support staff and specialist teachers have very little or nothing to do during the closure. It’s not a problem between me and my co-workers though. It’s between them and the administration. It doesn’t do any good for morale, though, when some are working hard all week and others are enjoying a vacation.

What’s working: Audio recording

Audio recording has been a source of quiet salvation in the face of problems such as camera shyness, technological glitches, low bandwidth internet, and more. A recorded read aloud has been a great success, as well as voice recorded assignments using OneNote in place of written work to introduce variety and practice speaking.

Conclusion

At this moment, I feel as disoriented as my students must feel. Teachers have been called in to school tomorrow to reflect and prepare another week of distance learning. Meeting with my grade-level team and sharing stories with colleagues will certainly help to broaden my perspective.

If you are teaching remotely, please comment here or leave a link to your own posts about it. The more we stay connected and share our experiences, the more everyone can make the most of this challenging situation.

CLMOOC Unmake: Unintroducing inquiry learning

I’m delighted to see educators around the world embracing the term ‘inquiry’. The word itself is so nebulous that it defies definition. One could assume it means simply ‘asking a question’, but it also means ‘collecting and organizing information’. Broadened further in my preferred nomenclature, ‘inquiry learning’ perplexes even further.

Are we learning through inquiry? Are we learning about inquiry? Are we inquiring into learning? Is it just a typo?

It’s an ideal topic for Making Learning Connected. As Michael Weller writes in his post, CLMOOC 2015: Make An Inquiry, Make Cycle 1 for the Make an Inquiry strand this summer, ”I think that inquiry, like the term research, can be intimidating – but I don’t think it needs to be!’.

As connected educators take to the information superhighway to explore and interpret the meaning of ‘inquiry learning’, our evaluations and reflections belie insecurity.

If a term exists that can be known, then we should be able to know it.

After all, we are educated.

Right?

There must be an answer to the question: What is inquiry learning?

We all want to get it right.

One prominent and highly visible modality in this rush to ‘get it’ is through graphics. A Google Images search for ‘inquiry cycle’ yields an overwhelmingly diverse field of interpretations. Many of these visual interpretations reveal fresh thought and creative courage in the true spirit of inquiry learning, like sprouts through the detritus.

After reading his post, Let Me Introduce Myself: From Pasture to Post, Tacit Knowing All the Way Down, I believe that Terry Elliott would enjoy a walk in this pasture ripe with nuanced tacit knowing meditating behind the desire for shared understanding.

We all know inquiry, tacitly. What we lack are mutually understood models.An impressive amount of making has gone into this! As each of us contributes our voice to the conversation, it increases meaning for all of us.

A diverse harvest of inquiry models

Some models are quite prescriptive, like this inquiry cycle by Nicole Laura from the post, Apps to Support Inquiry: Connect and Wonder.

(All images of inquiry models are hyperlinks to sources).

Some are adaptations or remixes of well known models, such as this KWHLAQ chart from Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano’s post, An Update to the Upgraded KWL for the 21st Century.

http://langwitches.org/blog/2015/06/12/an-update-to-the-upgraded-kwl-for-the-21st-century/

Some focus on questions to provoke inquiry, like this model from International School of Tianjin.

Some incorporate elements from popular design thinking (which I sometimes blog about using the LX Design label) models.

Design Inquiry Cycle by Rebecca Grodner, Shula Ponet
Figure 4. The Process of Inquiry and Research: Model 2

Most are based, directly or indirectly, on the work and writings of Kath Murdoch, whose post Busting some myths about ‘the inquiry cycle’… is required reading for anyone seeking to define, understand, or otherwise grapple with ‘inquiry’.

http://www.kathmurdoch.com.au/fileadmin/_migrated/content_uploads/phasesofinquiry.pdf

 

Don’t try too hard

A photo posted by blair at madstone farm (@startafarm) on Jun 28, 2015 at 6:12pm PDT

We are all getting it right

 

As long as we are trying, we are getting it. This is a mindset that also applies well in the classroom.

It’s easy to design a comprehensible worksheet, but nobody learns much from it.

It’s hard to empower learning, and everybody learns a lot from it.

In practice

In my classroom, we use models primarily to share and participate in each other’s inquiry learning. Most of my role as a teacher is to help students to publish their learning to each other and the greater school community.

Learners can utilize the models in ways that help them, and we often modify or ignore them as necessary.

There is no curriculum for inquiry learning. It is the Knowledge, Concepts, Skills, and Attitudes that emerge and grow in pursuit of one’s curiosities. Attempts to bind inquiry learning to an established curriculum are valiant, yet often mutually destructive.

My CLMOOC ‘Make an inquiry’ Model

Often, inquiry learning models begin with some iteration of ‘formulating questions’, but I have found that that is not necessarily the best way to begin an inquiry.

Whether it speaks to my preferred learning modality or personality type, I find that making is a great way to start. The challenges that arise catalyze questions. The enjoyment of the process of making demands to be shared. Reflection on doing is inherently more motivating than reflecting on thinking.

The challenge for teachers is to document and curate a constantly evolving authentic learning community!

With that in mind, please enjoy the inquiry model I made for CLMOOC this year, entitled The importance of irreverence..

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1xJX9WXSgfFiPLFuacjc4e1B53C2vv9nMYDPh2W_N9LA/edit?usp=sharing

Introducing myself | CLMOOC 2015 Summer Unschool

Having stowed away on the first Making Learning Connected voyage in 2013 but remaining ashore last summer, I’m excited to set sail again this year onto the open seas of connected maker learning.


This year, CLMOOC will be a part of a personal/professional project: Summer school for my three year old son! In her post, Learning to learn., my wife recently reflected on our decision to keep him home from school in the next school year due to an array of extenuating circumstances.

https://instagram.com/p/lCGDJYjStJ



I think my son will learn more by continuing to explore his curiosities and helping to take care of his new baby brother. July is going to be a research project for me to document his formal learning along this wandering informal path. He is already well versed in playing and being generally silly.




He has loved to draw since he could hold an extra thick crayon and now fills notepads of recycled paper at a staggering rate.

A photo posted by Bart Miller (@botofotos) on Dec 9, 2013 at 3:51am PST


//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.jsLuckily, pads of paper are cheap.

Last, but the opposite of least, he is a maker. He loves to mess around with legos, blocks, cardboard, tape, household objects, and anything else that he can pretend is something else. In a word, everything.

Here is one of his ‘makes’ from this past Father’s Day:

A photo posted by Bart Miller (@botofotos) on Jun 20, 2015 at 8:25pm PDT


//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.jsSometimes, he invites collaboration:



My challenge is to channel some of his fun, creative energy toward various ‘formal’ learning activities. My method is to:

1 Authentically channel his informal learning toward formal content.

2 Document the formal learning in his informal learning adventures.

In many cases, this is already happening naturally.

Since I will be on vacation throughout July, I intend to schedule a number of field expeditions. I also intend to not schedule some, and simply let his inspiration spill out onto the street and see where the current carries us.

If you’ve learned with me in CLMOOC or read my blog before, you know that I love Google forms for documentation. I’m currently designing a form to use this summer. I expect that it will have traditional categories, perhaps Language, Mathematics, STE(A)M, Physical, and Social Emotional. These could be coupled to reflections based on Connected Learning principles or the Learning Dimensions in the chart below from Tinkering Is Serious Play by Bronwyn Bevan, Mike Petrich, and Karen Wilkinson.


My summer vacation will not begin until the middle of next week, so I have a bit more time to plan and prepare before our CLMOOC 2015 Summer Unschool begins. Suggestions are certainly welcome!

Creativity = Motivation + Discipline

All I need to write by Grant Snider


This post started as a quick reflection on my personal journal on Tumblr and why I haven’t felt like posting lately.

But the more thought and consideration I put into it, the more it seemed appropriate to write a more formal article to reflect on and share my creative process. I have always been frustrated with my creative output, and a self study was long overdue.

To begin my analysis, I reflected on my feelings. Sometimes I feel creative. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I feel motivated. Sometimes I don’t. I sketched a graph to represent these poles.



 Next, I considered which activities seemed to align with different conditions. When I feel highly creative and highly motivated, it’s difficult to stop myself from creative work. However, when I feel neither creative nor motivated, even simple editing or organizing feels like a significant accomplishment.

But is my creativity at the mercy of my feelings? Do my moods really dictate my output?

That’s when I decided to get really geeky and gather some actual data by creating a Google Form for myself which I keep open in a tab on my smartphone web browser.



Over the past few weeks, I have diligently assessed my activities, resulting in some interesting data.


Mostly, I am curious to analyze these data to discover patterns. Do I follow my feelings logically? Do my activities influence my feelings? Am I wasting my most creative opportunities?


As this self assessment continues, I took some time to explore my creative history…

The muse is not a fairy

My first and most important lesson in creativity came from Jack Grapes, founder of the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective. In a writers’ workshop session, he described how it was a mistake to believe that creative inspiration is a phenomenon that ‘happens’ to us.

He instructed us to follow a creative routine: Write at a certain time each day. By doing this, we would train our minds to think during thinking time and write during writing time. Ignore spontaneous inspiration that leads to pulling over to the side of the road to jot down an idea you ‘don’t want to forget’. 

If the idea isn’t good enough to remember, it’s not good enough to drop everything to write down. Trust that the vast complexity of our brains will cooperate.

Connect socially

Jon Caliguiri, an old friend, also an alum of Jack’s writing courses, and long time creative collaborator responded to my post by sharing his Song of the Month Challenge:

 
‘I agree! Almost 3 years ago, a friend and I committed to writing and recording a song a month each.  We’ve been doing it consistently for that time and I haven’t missed a month aside from the “furlough” months we take off every year to reedit and tweak things.  It’s been the greatest experience and has helped my songwriting and recording immensely. It’s like a book club for rock and roll.’
 
Connecting with others in my creative work has always been a weak point for me. I don’t accept critique particularly well. I respond to critique terribly. I take great pride in my work, but ironically not enough to share with confidence. Often, my products are not shared until they are finished and my focus and energy have moved on to a new project. 

Perhaps the brilliance of Jon’s project is that it’s a concrete commitment, not a nebulous goal. What he’s making is not necessarily as important as his engagement in the process.

The product flows from the process, and the quality of the songs he has produced is clearly increasing as a result of his commitment.

Jon’s comments reminded me of a quote by Duke Ellington which I also referenced in the post, Exhibition: PBL To The Max!: ‘I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.’

Discipline

Arguably, the most important element of creativity is discipline. While I was studying music at The New School, my piano teacher, LeeAnne Ledgerwood, shared an important video which I published and commented on in the post, Bill Evans – Creative Process and Self Teaching. In the video, Bill insists that honesty and commitment are crucial to building creative fluency. An analytical approach that systematically builds skills lays the foundation for creative expression.


The more I reflect, the more the solution is clear. I need to set aside a time to practice creativity. As a teacher, father, and husband, that time can only be five o’clock in the morning. This wouldn’t be the first time to follow such a masochistic schedule, as I described in the post No Sleep November, but the purpose is quite different, more personal, and permanent.

Can I drag myself out of bed that early every day? Or perhaps a better question is ‘how?’ Nobody else is going to do it for me. Optimistic, the short video by Chris Jimenez, provides a succinct guide that is helpful for me.

Perhaps if I can focus on going to bed well, I’ll be on my way to meeting the first goal of waking up in a good mood.

There have been two great graphics on creative routines published recently: The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People and When Genius Slept, both based on Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. Another resource worth exploring further is This Emotional Lifeguide to Creativity by PBS.

These are all great for entertainment and even inspiration. They may even lead to increased motivation. But they won’t finish a novel or My String Quartet.

The only way to achieve those goals is through discipline to commit to a regular work time and to muster the courage to share my works in progress early and often.

It’s going to hurt, but it will be worth it.

Twitter: Promoters, connectors, and why I unfollowed you

I have something to confess: I finally did it: Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but haven’t mustered the courage until now:

I committed twittercide.


I was following over 900 people on Twitter. ‘How?’ you ask. I wasn’t really following anyone except the rare few whose tweets appeared on my feed in the odd moments I checked.

The more significant question is ‘why?’.

As described in my post Twitter misadventures and stumbling into connected learning, I started tweeting from the classroom in 2009. But it wasn’t until participating in the Learning Creative Learning and Making Learning Connected MOOCs in 2013 that my network and understanding empowered true connected learning.

Connectors

Twitter is alive with Connectors. They utilize the platform for collaborative sensemaking. They begin conversations in tweets that extend to other platforms, media, and into the physical world. They share resources and blog posts liberally and constantly invite others into their learning experiences. 

It’s true that Twitter is a convenient and simple platform for connecting with other teachers. Indeed, I consider many of my connections there as friends and anticipate someday meeting face to face.

However, when I was following over 900 people, I had no idea who most of them were. No doubt they are passionate connected educators like me, but how would I ever know if it was only by chance that I was able to read their posts or follow their links? Why was I following them, anyway?!?

And the simple answer is that I followed them because they followed me. I craved ‘followers’ and feared that they would unfollow me if I didn’t follow back.

The situation became worse when quasi celebrities and marketers began following me. How exciting it was to be ‘followed’ by someone with hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’!

Their tweets clogged my stream until it was obviously impossible to follow them at all. Every trip through the Twitterverse became cacophony. Unmanageable chaos reigned as motivational speakers mingled with online marketing ‘gurus’.

My family, friends, colleagues, and mentors were lost in the fray.

At the same time, I was reminded of the work of Adam Grant by the post and podcast, Adam Grant on Givers, Takers, Matchers and Fakers. Was I giving anything by following so many people on Twitter? I certainly wasn’t giving attention. By all accounts I was a matcher but that’s not want I want to be.

I didn’t want to unfollow ‘the fray’ for fear of losing followers. I was thinking computationally. I was thinking like a promoter.

Promoters

Promotors use social media to promote brands, products, and themselves. Everyone on Twitter is a promoter to some degree, but the more analysis I did, the more I recognized the patterns and strategies that are pure promotion.

The most glaring example of promotion on Twitter is done through hashtags. A Twitter user who always includes in their posts a hashtag related to a particular brand or product is a promoter.

Promoters study and strategize to mask their intent, for example by automating direct messages to new followers or retweeting, although I have observed that they almost always retweet from other promoters.

In years of Twittering, I have observed that all users can be located on a continuum with Connectors on one side and Promoters on the other. To explore this concept, I created the Twitter: Connectors v Promoters document embedded below to compare.

As a collaborative sensemaking activity, I invite you to add items based on your own experiences on Twitter.


All twitter users are at times more or less ‘connectors’ and ‘promoters’, and I don’t mean to imply judgment, rather analysis and reflection.


 What Connectors consistently show, and Promoters desperately fake, is authenticity.

Authenticity

My situation demanded an authenticity check. My loved ones, collaborators, and mentors deserve my attention. I was surprised and bolstered in my mission by a tweet and post by William Chamberlain during my deliberations.

To foster community on social networks, I must participate as a community member. The graphic below from The six types of Twitter conversations by Pew Research Center provided models which helped me to understand the nature of my connections.


 I didn’t want to continue my inauthentic participation in my ‘community’, but I also didn’t want to lose the connections I had made over the years. The solution was lists. I conducted a complete audit of my entire network and sorted everyone according to a system of lists that seems to work.

My lists

My first and smallest Twitter list is my PLCommunity. Members of this list are people with whom I regularly interact, who share stimulating and high quality content, and whom I trust to participate as community members when called to action. I follow all of them in my main feed and assume a level of responsibility for accepting their invitations and following up on their posts.

[2015.03.23 I decided to delete the PLCommunity list and simply consider the members of my PLNetwork whom I follow and with whom I regularly interact as my Personal/Professional Learning Community.]

Next is my PLNetwork. These are mostly educators around the world who share stimulating content and demonstrate commitment to connected learning, but whom I wouldn’t consider part of my community.

Finally, I sort all of my connected learning network into individuals and organizations by geography and created an Extended Global Network which contains almost everyone I have ever interacted with on Twitter.

Catalysts

My goal on Twitter is to be among those whom Harold Jarche would describe as Innovation Catalysts.

In my post, Don’t be a node. Be a nexus., I encourage myself and others to be active, independent, and dynamic in their online networks. For me, this starts from unfollowing hundreds of people so that I can give attention to my community.

To quote Sherry Turkle from The Flight From Conversation, ‘look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.’

2014 – a year of connection, disconnection, and loss

I believe that I learned more in 2014 than in any year of my life since Kindergarten. A close second would have to have been 2001, during which I lived in New York City, studied composition with the great Ludmila Ulehla, and experienced the terror of ‘9/11’, or 1996, when I graduated from high school and spent my first semester of college studying abroad in Nepal.

The past year was the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Horse, and I, being born in the Year of the Horse, sought to make it a year of work. I set my professional goal for the second half of the 2013-2014 school year to learn and practice as much as possible about Project Based Learning, self directed learning, and self determined learning in order to best facilitate my sixth grade class’ culminating Exhibition. To that end, I participated in the Deeper Learning MOOC and Macromedia University Design Thinking MOOC.

With that learning as inspiration, I have been inquiring into and blogging about PBL, project management, and design thinking in education using the label ‘LX Design‘.


Loss

Unfortunately, tragedy struck in September of 2014 when my father died. It happened unexpectedly just two weeks after my family and I returned home to Japan from a trip to my hometown in California to introduce our two year old son to his grandfather and other family and friends.


It was a devastating way to start a school year, and a bitter way to end what was otherwise a sweet summer.

Connections

Visiting California after being away for four years provided many lessons in perspective through reflecting on familiar sights and experiences from a new point of view. It was also a chance to practice using the Visual Supply Co photo editing and sharing tools. I began sharing my attempts at artistic photography there on my VSCO Grid as well as following the feeds professional and highly skilled photographers.

Of course, people have shared bazillions of vacation photographs via social media, but my goal was to find opportunities to create and share meaningful art through my experiences. Finding moments to express myself as a travel, food, landscape, and artistic photographer, however amateur, was fun and enriched my travels by allowing me to enjoy and reflect more deeply.


 During the trip, I entertained on the idea of Connected Living as an application or generalization of Connected Learning. One of my desires as a teacher and learner is to obscure the artificial boundaries that exist between formal and informal learning, ‘school’ and ‘real life’. Such distinctions between digital connection and analog, ‘face to face’ connections should also be blurred.

Sometimes, I am discovering, not shooting a picture to share on Instagram is infinitely more profound than doing so.

Relocating the muse

This New Year marks the tenth year in a row that I have resolved to finish a piece of music. At the conclusion of 2013, it was my string quartet. I have the first several measures of dozens of pieces, but they are all merely sketches in a notebook.

It’s not surprising. In the past ten years I have started a family and a career.

However, this year it is an especially solemn resolution to make in the shadow of my father’s death. One of my planned projects for years has been to publish arrangements of ‘Songs My Father Sang’, of which my jazz big band arrangement of Streets of Laredo is technically the first and regrettably the only.

Indeed, wrestling myself away from my smartphone might be just the signal my muse needs to come around to visit me again. I certainly have support from my connected learning friends and especially Brent Bedford, creator of the International Society for Fugues, who has been doing his best to inspire and motivate me to get out behind the woodshed! I hope he knows how much his efforts are appreciated.

2014 was a year of work. 2015 should be a year of fun. That’s my resolution.


How to eat sushi (like a snob)

A long time ago, I submitted my How to eat sushi (like a snob) ‘how to’ video to the Making Learning Connected Make Bank, a fantastic cooperative repository of accomplishment and inspiration. According to Terry Elliot’s post, the Make Bank is a Convivial Tool, and I agree whole-heartedly.

https://bartmiller.makes.org/popcorn/246k_

You may also find this article from The Creativity Post interesting: Seven Life Lessons From Making Sushi contains life and learning lessons from one of Japan’s most renowned sushi chefs, Jiro Ono.

If you’re hungry for more cat sushi pictures, please savor this post from Spoon & Tamago: Nekozushi | an absurd combination of cats and sushi.

Twitter misadventures and stumbling into connected learning

Twitter

Like most connected educators, my first ‘virtual mentors’ came via Twitter. While I have had a Twitter account (@BarMill) dating back to 2009, I didn’t really make any new connections there. Mostly I followed my friends and a few celebrities. However, I did find time to share some insights from my classroom. Please enjoy these highlights:

It wasn’t until I attended an International Baccaularreate Organization Primary Years Program workshop in 2012 and facilitator Craig Eldred introduced me to #PYPchat that I discovered the potential of Twitter for professional networking and relationship building.

Some of my ‘Most Valuable Tweachers’ are Joy Kirr, Melvina Kurashige, Steve Collis, and Sherri Edwards. They are generous sharers and active connectors and I highly recommend following them!

Although I don’t particularly care for Twitter chats (I prefer asynchronous online collaboration and cooperation), understanding how communities organize around hashtags on Twitter and other networks has been very valuable.

Twitter is a gateway network. Once a user begins to discover and navigate the possibilities, they will uncover opportunities for learning around the world, across diverse networks and communities.

I would encourage you to explore my favorite networked learning community, Connected Learning.

Connected Learning

The first MOOC I lurked in was MIT Media Lab Learning Creative Learning in 2013. Through that experience I was introduced to Connected Learning and DML Research Hub. I don’t remember exactly how I was introduced to the Making Learning Connected MOOC, but I signed up and jumped in.

The encouragement and enthusiasm of Terry Elliot and Kevin Hodgson are most responsible for hijacking me into the Making Learning Connected MOOC and Connected Learning community. Please read the post, My Connected Learning Credo, for details on how I was absconded into a life of convivial collaboration.
This community and the networks into which it is woven have been inspirational. To me, it’s a perfect example of connectivist learning because the community is the mentor and we all participate to increase its wisdom.

It’s also never too late to join Making Learning Connected (#clmooc on Twitter), which kicked off* this week!
*World Cup pun absolutely intended.

Technology to redefine learning

There are two possible units of inquiry that I will be leading in the Autumn of 2014 as potential candidates for redefinition through technology:

Rights & Responsibilities – inquiry into how human rights are granted, viewed, and protected

What’s your story? – inquiry into personal histories and the role of primary sources in historical understanding

In any case, my goal is to embed technology to maximize student agency. There are also Web 2.0 tools that need to be introduced and practiced throughout the school year so that students will be prepared to use them for their end of year Exhibition. Which one of these units is most suitable to be redesigned around a Web 2.0 tool in a way that redefines the learning of the unit?

One way to address this question, or determine if it is even a good question, is to consider tasks. In order to assess whether students have mastered using a new tool, they must be able to use it to complete a task.

Rights & Responsibilities
In this unit, we introduce Wikis as a tool to organize and share information and links. It was used simply to aggregate research findings. Students also created speech and slide presentations to communicate their understandings of the connections between rights and responsibilities.

One possible task might be to create a wiki to raise awareness for a human rights issue, embed a survey, petition, or pledge form, then use videos of their presentations to promote their causes and pages via social media like our class twitter account and blogs. Students this year completed a similar task, but only researched an issue to prepare a blog post.

The greatest challenge would be for me to design learning experiences to support students as they become web designers and social activists, perhaps at the expense of some of the ‘formal’ learning activities we did in the past. Perhaps the solution lies in integrating those activities into the learning of the web tool?

From a planning point of view, the wikis would be the focus. From a learning point of view, human rights would be the focus.

In terms of student agency, feeling that they are using technology to take action for a cause that they care about should foster an authentic sense of purpose and ownership. Web 2.0 tools and social media would empower us to redefine our learning from research and presentation to taking action to raise awareness.

What’s your story?

The summative assessment for this unit was to use VoiceThread to create a personal history for a family or community member. The process was quite tedious, and the results of mixed quality. VoiceThread is a fantastic tool for creating a personal history, but it certainly didn’t raise the task to the level of ‘redefinition’.

One of the challenges was in finding a community to share our stories. I believe that if I could find at least one other class also making personal histories about family members, it would significantly enhance the learning experience for students. We did collaborate with another class using VoiceThread to create personal introductions, however, that meant that our interactions focused on the technology, not on the learning.

Facilitating global collaboration among students with technology must focus on the learning, not only the technology.

Having some high-quality artifacts from this year, I can provide a model to other teachers so that students would be working in the same genre. By creating a tool with which we could all share links, the possibilities for interaction and conversation among students would be significantly enhanced.

It could be a case in which ‘modification’ on a large enough scale becomes ‘redefinition’.

Conclusion

I think that the key for integrating technology for me is to not think of it as ‘integration’, but rather as ‘utilization’. Finding a way to fit technology into an existing unit is inadequate. If my goal is to maximize student agency, then technology should be integrated as a tool to empower students to have more control over the direction of their learning.
This is a rich transformational process that I look forward to continuing over the summer.
What would you recommend?
Are there technological tools that I seem to be unaware of?
Are teachers already connected and collaborating on projects like these?
If so, where would I find them?

The future of learning

This week, I am excited to continue my connected learning inquiry as a participant in a new course, Teacher Practice in a Connected World, taught by Meenoo Rami, author of Thrive: 5 Ways to (Re)Invigorate Your Teaching.

I feel very grateful to be enrolled in the course on a scholarship from The Rendell Center for Citizenship and Civics.

Ooooh?


Our first task is to write a statement of goals. It’s a perfect opportunity to reflect on my connected learning and teaching journey which began about one year ago and summarize my hopes and goals for the future.

A connected learning manifesto

During the past year, I became a connected educator. Locating other teachers actively sharing and interacting on social media, developing a robust professional blogging regimen, participating in the Making Learning Connected MOOC, and progressing into a participatory flow through a myriad of online learning communities has led me to a place in which the distinctions between teaching and learning, virtual and real, online and offline, have all become blurred beyond recognition.

It feels like a long way from my teacher preparation courses nearly ten years ago. In those days, ‘educational technology’ was a set of multicolored markers and making a gradesheet with spreadsheet software. My college of education, one of the largest in the United States, had exactly one SmartBoard that I am aware of.

Technology has been redefined in the past ten years and is now on the cusp of being used to redefine education.

I believe that connected learning, specifically digitally networked learning will replace schools as we know them in the not too distant future. I also believe that this is a change that will benefit learning as a function of being human, education as an institution, and the world as a whole as our capacity for international understanding and cognitive empathy increases.

Connectivist Massive Open Online Courses (cMOOCs) are a prototype of this development in learning, as are the many various online spaces from student blogging platforms to maker spaces, interest focused forums to social media. I have learned a lot as a participant in the COETAIL community of international educators. Edcamp is also a revolutionary development and I was honored to help organize the first Edcamp Tokyo.



I am joining this movement and the ‘Teacher Practice in a Connected World’ course because I want teachers, as professional learners, to wrest and maintain control of educational technology and connected learning. We must master and use technology to continue to alter the course of the education so-called pendulum so that it swings ever more strongly toward learner empowerment.

Hopefully, we will be able to begin to design networks that can realize the potential for connected learning that already exists. In fact, the networks already exist. We need to coach ourselves and our colleagues to use them and take ownership. I am hopeful that one aspect of this course will be to create channels to encourage more teachers to join the digital collaboration that has already begun.

To do this, I think I need to understand the attitudes and practices that currently exist beyond my school and connected learning networks. Why isn’t everyone sharing online? When I invite colleagues in my school to participate in a MOOC or join a discussion forum, they literally never do. Am I selling it wrong? Is there something I could do to make it easier for them to begin?

I have approached connected learning from a totally practical perspective, as a learner, and I would like to spend some time exploring a more theoretical point of view. I believe that would enable me to better apply what I have learned as pedagogy.

Design thinking, experience design, and learning design are disciplines that I believe are essential to my goals to transform my classroom into a connected learning space. This has been of interest to me since I blogged about it in the post, Metateaching: Teachers as anthropologists and designers. The Macromedia Design Thinking MOOC has been an eye opening experience and something very different than learning that I have done in the past, particularly compared to ‘education’ classes. I see the potential of design principles to create environments in which interest driven learning and standards based education can connect and thrive.




The Maker Education Initiative is particularly interesting to me as a vehicle for supporting authentic learning and connecting it to the expectations of institutions and governments, particularly with so much emphasis being directed at STEM education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). This year, I started an after school Maker Club. It has been fascinating to see our young makers’ attitudes toward creativity and collaboration change in the first few weeks from trepidation to confidence and enjoyment.


Another project I look forward to developing further is Independent Inquiry. I started it two years ago as a way to replace homework with more relevant learning. Now, it incorporates values and principles from many of my favorite learning organizations including Connected Learning and the 21st Century Fluency Project. This summer, I plan to revise and reiterate the reflection tools once again for the next school year. Ideally, I would like to collaborate with other teachers interested in connecting students pursuing similar inquiries or to inspire each others’ curiosities. Many classrooms are applying Genius Hour, but I don’t see the kinds of sharing that existing networks could facilitate. I would like to help improve that situation.

Finally, my goal is to have fun again this summer. Last year, the Making Learning Connected MOOC showed me how connecting formal and informal learning is enjoyable. I would love to invite and engage with more wonderful people and excellent learners!


[Edit 2014.05.30 This post reimagined as a Frank Zappa fueled multimedia blitz: http://zeega.com/165935]