Weblogs
My life has been a whirlwind of activity since NECC and I have found it hard to keep up with blogging. I don't know why, but I feel guilty blogging when I have other deadlines looming. Do any of you experience that? Is it illogical? Should I blog anyway, much like we still get the day to day things done at work of home when we have extra tasks on our "to do" lists or should I take any free moment and put it toward the deadlines and follow Grandmas' rule of "work before play"?
I'd love to hear your take.
Disclaimer: Blogging is like play for me- sheer enjoyment. Not necessarily the writing, as for me the writing doesn't come easy, but the thrill of the hits and conversation that follows.
Community Driven System 
The purpose of stealing moments away from my already full agenda this morning though is to share the wonderment of the last week. This week I came to realized more than ever that I am a community driven woman. I believe in the power of the community, the wisdom of the crowd, that the network is more powerful than the node and that none of us are as good as all of us. I believe that School 2.0 means moving from a classroom system to a community system. And now more than ever I also believe that about PD and I mean all PD- conferences(e.g. K12Online08), workshops (e.g. most recently CABOCES Summer Instititue), ongoing, job embedded sync and asysn (e.g. PLP) and as a result I am going to start changing my keynotes even more to flow from a community model as well. As I reflected over the last week I realized even my family operates as a community rather than a traditional family model. I am no loan wolf.
CABOCES Summer Institute
One week ago I landed in Buffalo and was greeted by Rick Weinberg who took me to Selemanca where I would be spending the next week working with educators from the surrounding area. When the day drew closer to the conference Rick shared that unexpectedly numbers were down. I gave him the opportunity to cancel rather than bring me out for just a few people, (I am knee deep in buying my first home in Va and could have used the time) but Rick was firm that they wanted to move forward. I am so glad he made that decision because this week was an incredible week of learning for me personally.
Here are my take aways...
1. When you are focused on educational reform from a community perspective- more is not always better.
Monday- I had 10 administrators who were with me for one day. The small number enabled me to spend time personally getting to know each attendee. I invited Karen Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and Jon Becker to attend a panel discussion answering their concerns and questions. You can listen to the panel discussion here. The strength of intimacy because of such a small number of participants in the room made me realize that relationship is a more powerful tool when trying to leverage change than having large numbers of people in a room who are passively listening to you talk.
John Norton's wine glass metaphor rings true here- (He was drinking a glass of wine when it occurred to him- hence the name) that it is better to have small numbers of highly engaged people when influencing school reform than hundreds of folks who show up but walk away unchanged by the experience.
Also, on Friday when we knew our numbers would be minimal and we had such brilliant panel members coming from the community (Darren Kuropatwa, Kevn Honeycutt, Allanah King, and Mark Clemente) we made it a teachable moment. We spontaneously opened the Elluminate session up to the world (and they showed up) and we used Ustream and a chat channel as well to show if you offer quality the community will come to you- no matter how rural or small you are.
2. My belief was reinforced that for most newbies, teaching tools in isolation is too overwhelming and a waste of time.
Tuesday I tried to lay the foundation and set the context. I also wanted to help attendees understand the today's digital learner. Wes Fryer (Oklahoma), Laura Deisley (Atlanta), Meg Ormiston (Illinois), and
Sue Waters (Australia) talked about personal learning networks and the tools that support them (listen in here) on Wednesday. On Thursday my plan was to look more closely at tools and their pedagogy and how they best relate to various instructional activities and then on Friday to plan inquiry based instruction with an interactive model of building a PBL mini-unit. For the most part things went according to plan, but Thursday's tools, tools, and more tools left me feeling overwhelmed and tense. I know if I had been a newbie in that audience not having been given the opportunity to use the tools in a meaningful application would have been frustrating. The idea was to create an awareness, not mastery, so that on Friday when we created lessons using the TPCK model we would have a web 2.0 list of applications from which to choose. The result though was painful, at least for me.
I brainstormed with Rick Weinberg and Tim Clarke afterward and what we felt would have worked better was to have four tables- with one of us at each table presenting a tool. Our presentations would include the tool, an activity using the tool, and a chance to reflect on best uses of the tool. Then after 45 minutes we would break for 15 and then could present another tool. We would do that three times (12 tools) and participants could choose which tools they wanted to learn.
I really believe that the best examples of tool instruction are within the context of what you are learning. Like our heating and cooling system they should be invisible. The only time we focus on our heating and cooling is when they aren't working properly. Then we have to rethink the tool. Even Bill Fitzgerald (Funny Monkey) after his discussion on Open Source tools left the attendees with the idea of forgetting the tool- focus instead on what you want kids to know and be able to do- then figure out the right task and tool for the job to help them learn or do it.
3. What is most important to 21st Century educational reform is to listen to kids. 
On Tuesday I decided to create a panel of kids from 11th grade to college juniors and talk to them about their reflections on technology. It was the most inspiring part of my week long work. I am still learning from all they taught me during that hour.
Meet Gracie, Maegan, Ryan, Jay, Danny, Christian, Thomas, Caroline and Jesse. You won't be sorry you did.
4. Teachers need time to reflect, explore, and build in the safety net of your workshop.
Teachers, like kids, need you to model and then let them explore authentic use with you there to help. They need to understand how to create lesson plans that use the tools in meaningful ways, but then they need to actually collaborate together to build activities that they can use in school. Activities that leverage the potential of these new mediums for connecting and collaborating.
Typically, in my workshops I only have time to present the shift and the tools- never to actually jump to the most important step of helping teachers contextualize what they are learning. I walked away from this week realizing that this step is what is missing in school reform and why, in my opinion, that change is happening so slowly.
The most exciting time of the conference for me personally was to watch the groups choose a topic- create a concept web, a curriculum web, choose appropriate standards, an essential pedagogy, an appropriate tool and develop several lessons that all integrated not only core disciplines but fell together under a theme, project or problem. The creative juices really began to flow as we constructed together a killer initiating activity that would usher in our year long project and the lessons we would use to teach state mandated content from a passion-based perspective. The tools made sense because they were merely a means to an end- helping students learn about things that interested them from the perspective of a scientist, historian or author.
I am thankful to CABOCES for being willing to invest the time that allowed their educators to not only gain an awareness but to deeply reflect, discuss, and wrestle with the concepts while facilitators and the community stood close to help them make informed choices about change.
Below are the notes for a 15 minute presentation about my research in social software and teacher professional development. Please let me know if you have any questions or areas you would like clarified. -c-
Student Alliance of Graduates in Education Presentation
06 June 2008
Christopher D. Sessums
Adjunct Faculty/PhD candidate in Curriculum & Instruction with an emphasis in Educational Technology
School of Teaching and Learning/Educational Technology
email: csessums@coe.ufl.edu
Using social software to support teacher professional development
Keywords: social software, school-based professional development, inquiry, action research, professional learning communities, online learning communities, professional networks, teacher professional development, educational technology, weblogs, Read/Write Web, networking
1. The Problem: Given the promise of action research to transform educators’ practices and improve schools, coupled with advances in thinking about professional learning communities, it is reasonable to wonder about the role of a facilitated, computer-mediated learning environment and how participation in such a focused community fosters educators’ critical understandings of their practice.
2. Study Objectives: Design a case study to better understand how an online learning community supports a network of practitioners coaching action research. The three main questions that guide this research examine the ways in which an online learning community, as an organizational structure, facilitates participants ability to (1) deepen their understanding of the action research process; (2) deepen their understanding of coaching action research; and (3) deepen their understanding of their own evolving stance toward their professional practice.
3. Perspectives: A phenomenological approach is used in this study focusing on the meaning participants make of their own experiences as revealed by their speaking, writing, and behaviors.
4. Modes of Inquiry: An exploratory case study approach is used to examine participant activity associated with the online learning community over a nine month period. A modified social network analysis protocol will be used to analyze the relationships between participants, and narrative analysis will be used to examine site postings and participant interviews.
5. Data Sources: (1) Facilitator generated prompts and participant responses, (2) participant initiated discussion, (3) technical data associated with facilitator and participant activity in the online learning community site, (4) participant interviews, and (5) field notes.
6. The Workshop: The CSI PDC workshop consisted of three face-to-face meetings (September, November, January) before the final Showcase in May 2008 with the majority of communication and interaction occuring online through the CSI blog site. Participants were provided a text and instructional protocols for coaching action research. During the face-to-face meetings participants were shown how to employ textual materials and protocols as a means of coaching other teachers through the teacher inquiry/action research process. In the online learning community, the facilitator created an organizational structure to provide spaces for both her and the coaches to share coaching experiences, strategies, critical reflections, and receive updates and announcements associated with organizing the Showcase. The facilitator posted regularly to the site modeling an inquiry stance prompting other participants to reply or post in kind. As such it was our hopes that through such prompting, the coaches would be able to develop a sense of community and share experiences, tools, ideas, lessons, rubrics, protocols, recruiting letters, and other specific documentation in supporting both the coaching of and the teacher inquiry process.
7. Participants: This study focuses on the experiences of 11 educators, one facilitator/workshop coordinator, and one technical support person. Educators' experience ranged from 3 to 19 years in the classroom full-time, 180 days a year. All participants had at least one year's experience conducting formal action research/teacher inquiry projects. Not all participants considered themselves technically savvy, but they all could use email and access World Wide Web pages either at home or at work via an Internet connection.
8. Results/Conclusions: My goal was to examine the ways in which an online learning community, as an organizational structure, facilitates participants ability to (1) deepen their understanding of the action research process; (2) deepen their understanding of coaching action research; and (3) deepen their understanding of their own evolving stance toward their professional practice.
While analysis of the interviews, site postings and interactions, and technical site data is still ongoing, preliminary findings include:
- recognition that time, effort, and attention are clear costs of participation
- the desire for emotional commitment by participants
- evidence of legitimate peripheral participation and a community of practice ontology which aided newcomers in entering and acquiring the sociocultural practices of the community
- the recognition of a participant epistemological stance and its impact on levels of participation
- participants valued the ability to post questions and receive responses from peers and facilitator
- participants spent more time observing each other online than actually interacting online i.e., writing back and forth, posting, commenting.
- all participants report that the site allowed them to deepen heir understanding of the AR process, coaching AR, and their own evolving stance by allowing them to observe their peers and make comparisons of their own responses and activity to that of their peers.
9. Educational import of the study: This study provides an exploration of ways school-based professionals can participate, enhance, and expand their professional learning, work toward school improvement goals, and tap in to extended professional networks afforded by social software adoption and use.
10. Intended audience: Education professionals, educational technologists, teacher educators, professional learning communities, educational leadership and administration.
At the risk of getting a little too meta, I’m going to be talking through my history of thinking about linking, or conective writing, today during CyberCamp as a part of our series of “Works in Progress” conversations. I’m inviting you, if you’re interested, mostly to help me model how a backchannel and uStream conversation can be of value to a face to face group, but selfishly, too, because I’m always interested in how others are thinking about these ideas. So, if you’re willing and able, join us at around 11:30am MST for a short uStream presentation. All the details are on our wiki.
Thanks in advance!
Imagine that -- unfolding in real time -- you find a perfect real-world example that, with eerie clarity, embodies almost all the concepts you've devoted yourself to teaching and studying in the past ten or so years.
Here are the slides associated with two talks I gave yesterday on Blogging and Social Networking for the University of Florida Libraries Technology Expo 2008.
The turn out was greater than I expected (around 25). My goal was to talk on topic for about 10 minutes (15 max) and then open the floor to discussion and conversation. With this size of a group, this format proved to be quite fun and engaging, allowing for local expertise to shared and acknowledged.
Two items that are connected to the Social Networking presentation that I would like to point your attention to:
1) Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison -- a terrific primer for framing a definition of social networks and encapsulating early research associated with social network sites.
2) Why do people participate in social applications? by Josh Bernoff -- a blog post based on associated findings by the people at Forrester Research. Not as academic as the boyd & Ellison piece, but equally compelling in terms of thinking about what motivates people to participate in online social communities.
Other highlights:
At the end of my Social Networks talk, I asked participants what they would like to see in a social networking application. A young undergraduate student promptly raised his hand and said (I am paraphrasing),
I would like to be able to belong to a university network where each course had a socially managed website where students could upload their notes for a particular class, engage in discussions, share resources, collaborate on assignments.
The student was not satisfied that the university's current learning management system was adequate for such student-centered activity. He went on:
This site would be a resource hub, provided to the students by the university, and would be accessible to all students so they can get a sense of what kind of work is associated with a particular course or instructor.
I admit, the smile on my face crossed two county lines! I was amazed at the suggestion and the cooperative and participatory ethos engendered by the student's comment. Responses from other participants in the audience to his suggestion ranged from potential intellectual property issues, issues with the student honor code, as well as student privacy issues. Nevertheless, I imagine there could be a set of norms or ground rules developed outlining what participants in such a system could and could not do.
We're essentially talking about creating and organizing a wiki for each course on campus that could be sorted, viewed, and connected to a larger online social hub for students.
QUESTION:
Is anybody familiar with a similar service? Does this idea ring any bells with you? Your thoughts are dearly encouraged.
The International Herald Tribune published a piece back in early April on the life of professional bloggers. The article notes that some bloggers on professional sites can make $30K with the top bloggers up to $70K. But it comes with a cost; these bloggers are chained to their computers, constantly trying to scoop the rest of the blogosphere:
Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else's post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.
This a good piece to share with professional writing students. While being a paid, professional blogger might sound idyllic, the self-imposed "digital sweatshop" requires a certain type of writer ready for an always-on, stressful career. Makes me amazed that Dennis hasn't burned out by now given that he's been blogging longer than all but a very small majority of bloggers on the web (about 9 years).
I didn’t want to let too much time go by before responding to Doug’s post, and the others that have followed it, but I haven’t have time for a thorough response. There’s plenty of thoughtfulness in the posts and comments, but I did just want to state, again, that I’m pretty sure an awful lot of the “conversation” on the post(s) is based on a bad assumption, which is this:
There isn’t one “edublogosphere.” Never has been and never will be. So to ascribe universal characteristics to something which isn’t (universal) is problematic, to say the least. Here’s how I said it in November:
Mostly, the assumption that’s troubling me so much is that there’s one group (community - whatever) out there that exists for educational conversation via electronic media, and that we should all try to engage and involve everyone in that one (fallacious) group so that we’re all friends and reading and commenting each other. And that we’ll all agree on where that group should go, when they should meet, and what we’ll all do when we get there. Or that we ever agreed in the first place.
Ain’t going to happen. Not now, not ever. Never did happen, in fact. We all construct our blogrolls, our Twitter friends, or our other social networking relationships for our benefit and to meet our own unique needs.
Would I prefer to see more reflective or data-driven posts around teaching and learning practices? Yep. But me (or anyone else) not seeing them doesn’t mean that they’re not there. I’d encourage you to read the rest of that November post for more explanation of my position.
This post may be premature as I have only seen 2/3s of the PLP Independent Schools' team presentations of their impact journey through PLP and team projects- but I must say, Will and I were more than impressed. It was more on the level of WOW.
From extensive summer institutes with a Web 2.0 registration process for other schools to attend (all taught by the team members) to an 8th grade project that will utilize the best that Web 2.0 has to offer in a project based format implemented by all 8th grade teachers next year to a creative Lunch 2.0 project or school-based wikis with all digital curriculum shared and more, we found ourselves renewed in the faith that schools can make principled changes in the way we "do" school as a way to remain relevant in the lives of the students we teach. Independent school culture is such that teachers need to make certain they build on the rich heritage of what works and yet make room to rethink delivery of AP courses and such so that these kids not only get into some of the most prestigious colleges around, but they are fluent in the new literacies when they arrive.
All the project plans will be shared on the Independent School wiki after the remaining 1/3 of the teams present next week.
Cohorts are forming for next year's Powerful Learning Practice opportunity. If you are interested in learning more visit http://plpnetwork.com
It was about a year ago that I wrote a piece for English Journal on teaching “blogging” vs. “writing with blogs” that was pretty much a re-hash of some blog posts that I thought were saying something. The trouble is, I wasn’t sure what they were saying. I’ve been fumbling at this one for a while.
I’ve always found something particularly special about writing online, or at least I’ve learned that there’re more options, more possibilities, and plenty of challenges that make writing online much more complicated than cutting and pasting a Word file into a text box and hitting “submit.”
But most folks that I see beginning to use digital writing spaces aren’t treating them any differently. And I can’t quite figure out why. I also can’t quite figure out how to articulate the differences, even though I think I get some, if not several, of them. And if I can’t articulate them, perhaps I can’t teach them. (Not sure about that, actually - but work with me.)
I think one good way to articulate some of the differences is to tell you a story. Here goes.
Tonight, I’m sitting in a local cafe, enjoying a cup of wicked sweet coffee and some tunes. As I wrote that last sentence, and added the links in, I wondered how you would read it. Are you someone who clicks on any link you see in a blog post? Or are you more like me? I use a browser that shows me the URL of the link I’m pointing to, saving me the trouble of traveling here if, after reading the URL, I see that I don’t need to follow the link, perhaps because I already know the site, or I don’t want to go to the site, because I’m worried about pop-ups, or a virus, or something that I don’t actually want to see. I love that browser, except when it leaks memory.
I could continue, but I think (hope) I’m making my point. I could have written that paragraph without the links - but I would’ve need an awful lot more details to tell you as much as I did with the links. And you each will have worked your way through that paragraph differently. Some of you read and clicked and fiddled. Others of you read differently. (Oh - and here’s a minor nit - but how many of you, in that last sentence, read, ahem, “read” in the past tense? Present tense? Language is hard. But anyway.)
I don’t know what my students do/did when they see blocks of text with links. And I’m 98 percent sure that there wasn’t another teacher in my school who was thinking about how to explain that to students, much less about how they read that text themselves.
Digital texts have the potential to make a big, juicy mess of a linear experience. Or to turn a so-so piece of writing into a masterful collection of references, linktributions, and pointers to other good stuff. My hunch, a rough one, but one I’ve held for a while, is that reading and writing that way makes you (ultimately) a better reader and writer. I just don’t really think I know how to teach that way yet, or at least, I don’t know how to teach other people to think about teaching that way.
Will Richardson asked me recently (well, it was two weeks ago - but that counts as recent if you forgive me the week I spent sick. And I do.) about connective writing, and what a course on it might look like. I blame him for the frustrated typing that I’m up to right now. And the posts that I suspect are forthcoming. (And I’m thankful, too. I needed a push.)
What would such a course look like? What would it cover? How would it differ from a “regular” (I know - bogus term.) 9th or 10th grade high school writing course? How would it be the same? (Why wait until high school? I’ve been thinking through blogs as science or inquiry notebooks at the elementary school level.) What happens when we add video(s)? Pictures? Embedded widgets? I’ve got to believe that some analysis of what links do and how they do it would be a necessary piece of any such course. So, too, would be copious quoting and linking to others, building a network of classroom texts that would be added to the greater networks of the world.
I’d kill to teach that class.
Perhaps I’ve stumbled across another thesis idea. Again. Nuts.
_______
Postscript - I had thought that perhaps I’d dig into the research on hypertextual writing a bit before I started down this post. I know these ideas aren’t new. But I couldn’t help myself. I made it four pages into this fascinating article before I started writing. Worth a read, I think.
Please forgive Typepad. They've apparently mixed up their feeds, and have been pushing celebrity gossip through mine and many other Typepad users. Yet another reason why I contemplate leaving.
I'm sure they didn't mean harm, and that they'll apologize for, or at least acknowledge, their mistake soon.
Right, Typepad?
Update: This was posted in the help ticket area of Typepad. I found it when I went there to complain about not seeing a notification anywhere else. I guess I don't know why they didn't post this somewhere a little more public.
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
On March 6, 2008 we experienced a brief problem with our feed service
on TypePad. Some TypePad users were affected, where another blog's
entries appeared to be coming from their feed. We've corrected the
problem and feeds are now rendering correctly, but your readers may
still see these incorrect entries in RSS reading applications (like
Google Reader). We're very sorry for the confusion this issue may have
caused you and your readers -- and we're working hard to make sure it
doesn't happen again.
