Class – Page 2 – Self-Directed Professional Development

How Mack Ended Up in Skinny Jeans

Swem Review of Technology
How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way

Mack Lundy has posted a nice example of how using RSS technology can lead to finding some excellent resources that you might otherwise miss. Using an RSS aggregator, like BlogLines, is one of the key skills for making the most of the collective wisdom of the blogosphere. His post refers to an article that introduces a complete novice to the idea of RSS in the “Oprah way” posted on the Back in Skinny Jeans bog.

When you go to Back in Skinny Jeans you might ask yourself, “What earthly reason does Mack have for going to a web site about beauty and weight loss?” My arrival there is an example of how information is distributed across the Internet and how unlikely connections are made. The sequence went like this:

Stephanie posts the article to her blog

Steve Rubel on the Micro Persuasion blog posts about it later that day.

Jill Stover picks up the story from Micro Persuasion and blogs about it today on her blog, Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book. Jill is the Undergraduate Services Librarian at VCU, by the way.

I’m a subscriber to Library Marketing, I read Stephanie’s “how to …”, and wrote this blog entry.

While I don’t read as many blogs as Mack–113 to his 154–I agree that it’s a good investment of some time each week to “read a lot, read broadly, and follow links – there is a lot of good stuff out there.”

Building Pedagogical Intelligence

Carnegie Perspectives: Building Pedagogical Intelligence

It’s been eight years since I taught an (explicity) adult education course, so I’m spending quite a bit of time reviewing the literature and trying to find an appropriate framework for the class I’m teaching this fall. In the past I’ve always taught as part of a specialized graduate program, and students either entered with some exposure to the field or were looking to my course to provide the basis future work. This class is the only one on the topic at William and Mary, so it will probably be the only exposure many get to adult education as a field of practice. Packaging a field that includes everything from adult basic education (ABE) to continuing professional education (CPE) into a single course is no small task.

One key goal of my classes has always been to help participants become more effective self-directed learners and more confident in their abilities in “learning how to learn”. Pat Hutchins, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, calls the enhancement of this ability of students to become more aware of themselves as learners “building pedagogical intelligence.”

More important, having a voice in matters pedagogical would make students better learners. It’s easy for those of us in “the business” to forget that getting educated isn’t easy. Just jumping through the hoops is not enough. Students need to be able to make connections between what is learned in very different, and typically unconnected, settings. And to do this they need to be able to step back and see what their efforts add up to, to take stock both of what they have learned and what it will take to get to a next level of understanding. In a word, they need to be agents of their own learning.

Since this will be a graduate class in the school of education, we can probably justify a little more obsessing about the topic than the typical undergraduate course:

This is not to suggest that Econ 101 or 19th Century American Lit be turned into occasions to obsess about the learning process. But the disposition to be thoughtful about one’s own learning, to be an active agent of learning, to find and even to design experiences in which learning is advanced—these are goals that should be central to undergraduate education.

Sharing the Sense of Wonder in the Classroom

Gardner Writes » Blog Archive » Surprised by YouTube

Gardner writes about his experience with students in his film studies class finding an illustration for a critical essay–on YouTube. As usual, Dr. Glu extracts some important lessons for himself and his colleagues.

As the information abundance spreads, and if we are brave and curious enough to embrace it, we will find our own serendipity fields dramatically expanded. And we will find our students bringing archival gems into the classroom, casually and crucially. At that point, the professor’s role as advanced learner, one who models the “ah, what do we have here?” that’s the result and nursery of a good education, will be explicit and essential as never before.

My students constantly put me in that role of advanced learner (and sometimes not so advanced–just older) when 8-9 of them are using their notebooks to find resources, update our wiki, check facts, and Skyping and IMimg with folks all over the continent. (Picture sitting in a technology planning class talking about personal learning environments when one of your students says, “I’ve got Darren Kuropatwa on Skype and he has a different perspective. Darren, do you want to share your thoughts with us? I actually don’t remember exactly who Sheryl was Skyping with that night, but I remember being impressed.)

One of the shortcomings of traditional college teaching is that I probably know more about what’s happening in that film class at Mary Washington than I do at almost any of the summer school classes at William and Mary. I know that lots of faculty are using PowerPoint or Blackboard, but I know almost nothing about how they are making sense out of these new tools as they use them in class each day. What insights are they taking away from their interactions with their studens? Are they intimidated? Energized? Humbled? I wish there were more mainstream faculty who were sharing there reflections more broadly.

“Tribes of the internet” The Critical Role of Higher Education

Link to: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Tribes of the internet

One of the most important messages I’ve taken away from this semester’s class is the critical role that higher education has to play in helping students learn how to more effectively use the internet. One of the phases that I’ve used over and over has been “left to their own devices”, as in:

Left to their own devices most students won’t do the hard intellectual work that will be required to use blogs as one effective tool for their own intellectual development.
Left to their own devices most students won’t have the skills to contribute effectively to a collaborative writing project –such as a wiki– that requires them to critically and comfortably edit their classmates work in accomplishing a common goal.
Left to their own devices most of our students won’t question the authority of either the Britannica or the WikiPedia.

The good news is that students don’t come to our universities to be left to their own devices. We can help them learn through meaningful class assignments under the mentorship of faculty members who themselves understand the potential and the dangers of our networks and infrastructure. Through those assignments students can move beyond seeing the internet as Google, IM and P2P and see the larger implications for themselves and the society. Our students (and faculty) need to be explosed to the important issues raised here by Nicholas Carr, both as part their general education and in the specialized work of their majors.

Research shows that very small biases, when magnified through thousands or millions or billions of choices, can turn into profound schisms. There’s reason to believe, or at least to fear, that this effect, inherent in large networks, may end up turning the internet into a polarizing force rather than a unifying on.

Overall, I’m a little more optimistic than Nicholas Carr on this point. It’s unrealistic to assume that our students are not going to use their internet connections to interact with others who share their tastes in music, politics and culture. It’s realistic, however, to expect that colleges and universities can be an effective force to counteract some of the balkanization that can well result from billions of thoughtless clicks; we have the opportunity to help make them at least a little more thoughtful.

Third Graders

Link to: bgblogging: Learning from Teachers Outside My Realm

One of the things that I enjoy most about my technology planning class is the opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in the world of K-12 teachers. Those of us in higher education read papers about the shaping of the Net Generation while our colleagues in the schools are living it every day. Every week I learn more about the kinds of pressures that teachers are under–particularly in this world of SOL’s and other high stakes testing. Every once in a while, though, I get a sense of the energy and creativity that teachers are able to unleash. Barbara Ganley blogged about a weekly podcast by members of a third grade class that certainly got my attention. These third graders won’t be entering college for a nearly a decade, and it’s hard to imagine the expectations they’ll bring with them when they hit the campuses if they keep using tools like these to enhance their learning.

Since last April, Bob’s third graders have been making weekly podcasts–third graders. (In third grade I was copying letters, practicing times tables and trying to avoid getting into trouble with my oh-so-scary teacher. ) I love the way he has kids summarizing highlights from the week (Word-of-the-week ‘s use of interviews was terrific, for instance). Bob talked a bit about how devoting time to the weekly shows has helped his students develop their speaking and writing voices, understand the flow of sentences, and consolidate the learning for the week. It’s such a great and easy idea–what a natural in the elementary school environment! Imagine what students reaching my doors are going to be able to do and want to do if they are podcasting and making on-line newsletters in third grade. College teachers had better wake up!

Here’s the link to the ~~show that ran just before Thanksgiving~~ the current show, in which the student reporters provide information about their classroom to a new student: Podcast

More Resources for Teaching Poetry

Link to: Poetry Archive

Gardner’s Donne A Day project demonstrated how podcasting could provide a new dimension to the study of poetry by archiving easily assessable MP3 recordings of the Renaissance poet. The Poetry Archive provides another resource as the “world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work.”

Try listening to Felix Dennis reading This is the server….

I found the Felix Dennis poem while looking to see if the archive included Carl Dennis reading one of my favorites, The God Who Loves You. Dennis read his poem in a segment by Elizabeth Farnsworth on the News Hour that was recorded when Practical Gods was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

The reading of the poem starts 2:28 minutes into the audio of the interview.

The Rise and Fall of Educational Technology.

Link to: The Rise and Fall of Educational Technology: Did We Miss the Point?

It’s taking a while to get caught up after the Thanksgiving break. Apparently, educational technology died while I was on vacation, and I missed it! There’s much in this long artlcle that I agree with–particularly reflecting on the class we’re finishing up on Educational Technology Planning.

As technology permeates every discipline to some degree or another, the field of educational technology is growing dramatically, and it’s really hard for any course to avoid being a mile wide and an inch deep. Sebastian Foti lists a half a dozen topics that we didn’t even consider or merely waved at.

For example, there is the history of computing; using the computer for things such as word processing, building databases, making movies, creating music, developing budgets, creating charts. . . doing educational “research” and becoming familiar with famous researchers; learning about laws related to computer use; understanding innovation diffusion; and much, much more.

While there were lots of topics that we didn’t get to, the group project in creating our Drupal community site gave everyone some experience in bridging the gap between theory and practice:

Thinking about hypermedia interfaces adds a dimension to the communication stream that goes beyond building convincing textual arguments. It forces one to think about the vast number of variables associated with perception. More importantly, More importantly, it challenges the notion that the author is in control.

Foti’s point is well taken in that even if constructionism accurately describes individual learning (which I believe it does), developers have to work beyond their own learning to anticipate and understand the perceptions of the users of a website or piece of software–users that they probably will never “meet.” Until someone starts making decisions about what piece of code goes where, the website is just a blank piece of paper. (Well virtual paper, maybe.) Code, not magic creates, software. Our experience was summed up perfectly by the following:

Such development empowers learners by putting them in charge of hundreds, perhaps thousands of decisions. The “product” represents the instantiation of all of those decisions and it can provide pride not granted by a mandatory, directed writing assignment

The section on how do we fix it is has some good ideas as well.

Encourage the use of media.
Bring academic computing back into teacher discussions.
Help students develop tools for students.
Don’t think about how.
Expand the dialog.

OK, No More Professional Development

Link to: 2 Cents Worth » OK, No More Staff Development

David Warlick’s recent post suggests replacing the notion of a staff development plan for schools considering 1:1 computer or tablet initiatives with a more comprehensive concept of creating a staff development infrastructure. That infrastructure would include some key components of building ongoing communities of practice where teachers could support each other in managing their own learning:

Have the time to reflect and retool (at least three hours a day),
Have ready access to local and global ideas and resources that are logically and socially indexed,
Have the skills to research, evaluate, collaborate, remix, and implement new tools and techniques (contemporary literacy),
Are part of an ongoing professional conversation where the expressed purpose is to provoke change (adapt),
Leave the school from time to time to have their heads turned by new experiences,
Share what they and their students are doing with what they teach and learn — their information products and relics of learning become an explicit and irresistibly interwoven part of the school’s culture.

Back in the olden days I did lots of workshops on professional development for student affairs folks in higher education based on my dissertation research. One of the points that I made in those workshops was that professional development was more about the attitude of continually extracting and sharing meaning from the work they were doing than it was about participating in activities. David’s list is an excellent summary of how to operationalize that attitude using a set of tools that we weren’t even dreaming about back in 1991.

It would be interestsing to reframe this list to clearly articulate how we could use these tools in build that culture at William and Mary to support our 1:1 computing initiative.

Blogging and the Brain

Link to: Blogging and the Brain | Messer Family

Jon has uncovered a very interesting article from the Eide Neurolearning Blog suggesting that maintaining a weblog can encourage the growth of neural paths that may:

improve critical and analytical ability,
promote creative, intuitive and associational thinking,
provide outstanding examples of attorney’s philosophers and academic engaged in ongoing analogical thinking,
combine the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

My own blogging experience certainly provides excellent opportunities to foster my intuitive and associational pathways. The Eide’s (self-described as physcian-parents) note that:

Blogging is ideally suited to follow the plan for promoting creativity advocated by pioneering molecular biologist Max Delbruck. Delbruck’s “Principle of Limited Sloppiness” states we should be sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can’t find out that it did.

My recent explorations with associational thinking included a brief walk down memory lane to my K-12 teaching days, an encounter with the Devil Shelves at the library and a quick visit to the shadowy world of the neo-luddites. It’s a tale that has little to do with traditional models of scholarship, but which may actually be an archetype of the kind of professional development that will dominate the lives of many practitioners.

Continue reading “Blogging and the Brain”

More On Digital Cheating

Link to: The Chronicle: Daily news: 10/27/2005 — 02

I first saw the announcement of these electronic study guides and naively thought of how valuable it would be to students to have audio excerpts of some of the key parts of the literature they were studying.

I keep making these mind trips back to the year I spent as a 12th grade English teacher. I remember using the Monarch Notes extensively to help my students follow the complexities of the Dante’s Inferno. (This was long before resources like TeachersFirst helped translate the complex allusions and obscure references into activities that would engage 12th graders.)

This Chronicle article focuses on the more negative aspects of the technology to enable electronic “crib sheets”:

The guides released by SparkNotes and iPREPpress are compatible with most iPods — including the new video-playing model and the iPod Nano, which has a screen about the size of a postage stamp. That could be bad news for professors, who may worry that such small devices could easily become digital cheat sheets in the hands of unscrupulous students.

Mr. Goszyk conceded that iPods loaded with study guides could be smuggled into classrooms. “I think anytime you’ve got something — whether it’s technology or just a slip of paper — that you could sneak into the classroom, those people who are going to want to cheat are going to cheat,” he said.

Professors whose reading lists include works like Pride and Prejudice or The Odyssey may have to police their classrooms carefully on exam day, Mr. Goszyk said.

Will Richardson offered an alternative to more careful policing in the piece I wrote about yesterday.

… they take the ideas we have tried to teach them and connect them to and show us that they can teach it to someone else with their own spin on it, their own remix.

If we can figure out assignments that help stduents do that, we don’t have to worry about postage stamp screens displaying the contents of the Cliff Notes