Connected educators

Are you a connected educator? Are you a teacher who has managed to harness the power of social media to connect with peers and experts around the globe? Coming hand in hand with these connections is a whole new culture of learning and teaching. Steven Anderson (@web20classroom) has a lot to say about the connected educator. They are transparent in their thinking, he suggests, and that means that they are not shy in sharing their ideas or giving away their content for free. Connected educators know that in doing this they become global educators, with their content being amplified across a worldwide community of practice. On the #authorspeak Twitter hashtag today there was a lot of commentary about connected educators. Connected educators are transparent in their thinking and tend to reflect more deeply on what they learn, simply because they have had to make the effort to connect with new knowledge.

Nicholas Provenzano (@thenerdyteacher on Twitter) was a major contributor. He said that the Connected educators are co-learners, co-leaders and co-creators of content and that they are never isolated. There are many avenues to connect with people from all over the world, he argued. He added that the Connected Educator uses social media to connect with others around the globe and engage in conversations online.

Kyle Pace (@kylepace), another contributor to the discussion, made the important point that the connected educator with a well developed network depends on that before going to Google. I would imagine that this is because a personal network is hand chosen, and therefore infinitely more trustworthy and relevant to one's own professional needs and interests. He knows that the Professional (and personal) Learning Network (PLN) as an important resource for learning in a connected world.

My own contribution on Twitter #authorspeak today was that connected educators are in a more powerful position than those who are isolated. They have a greater ability to check their facts, call on support and find out new things when connected to their personal learning networks than they do isolated. I also think that the ability (or perhaps more appropriately willingness) they have to share knowledge has become a part of the cultural capital of the connected educator. Sharing - the gift economy on which much of social media are founded - is probably the most important part of a connected educator's role. It is abundantly clear to me that connectivity is one of the essentials in the 21st Century teacher toolkit. We are now learning more from each other than we could ever learn on our own. So I will return to my original question. Are you a connected educator?


Note: The #authorspeak hashtag was a Twitter backchannel of a live presentation by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

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Connected educators by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Blogstorm

Something extraordinary is happening to our student teacher population at Plymouth University. They are becoming excited at the prospect of sharing their ideas to a potential worldwide audience, and relish the idea of having dialogue with their readership. People are beginning to notice an increase in the quantity and quality of blog posts and tweets emerging from our group of learners in the School of Education. Someone tweeted last night during the Bolton Teachmeet that Plymouth seems to be the 'edudigital capital' of the UK. Even our own Vice Chancellor Professor Wendy Purcell (@WMPUPVC) this morning remarked on how productive our student body has become on social media platforms over the past few months. Here at Plymouth we are taking social media seriously, and are encouraging innovative uses. We are promoting the idea that any teacher can become a global educator through the appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools. We embed a lot of different tools - wikis, blogs, podcasts, lecture capture, interactive whiteboards - into the fabric of our teaching sessions, and this effort is clearly beginning to pay off.

My colleagues Peter Yeomans (@ethinking on Twitter) and Oliver Quinlan (@oliverquinlan) have between them generated an exciting culture of sharing on the web for our primary education students, and have created the plymuniprimary site to aggregate the B.Ed (Hons) student blogs. Earlier today another 20 or so students on my BA Education Studies programme also started out on their blogging journey, and there have been several outstanding blog posts already. Some of the earlier posts can be found on my Student Blogs Scoop.it site. A variety of topics is covered, including txting, personal learning environments, classroom technology, plagiarism and e-safety.

What do the students learn from blogging? Well, the list is endless, but for example, we have evidence to suggest that they improve their writing skills, and also their confidence in public writing and engagement in discourse. There are problem solving and communication skills required. They must consider how they present their ideas and arguments, and what images, videos, hypermedia and other tools they will use to attract people to read their blogs. They will also be able to crystallise their ideas, practice their academic writing and make themselves more aware of issues such as copyright, navigation and plagiarism of content on the web. To gain so much from such a simple tool must be a bonus for any teacher.

Please pay a visit to some of these student blogs if you have some time, and make a comment or two. It will certainly encourage the students to keep up their good work and push their ideas further.

Image by Adam Gimpert


Blogstorm by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A thousand conversations

I was labelled a 'radical' yesterday by one of my colleagues. Well, bless. I hadn't thought about myself in those terms before, because what I do is instinctive and what I write about seems to be absolutely normal to me. But standing back from me and trying to look in from the outside, I suppose some might think I was slightly out of left field, or that some of my ideas were idealistic. Whatever.

What I would like to know is, what does 'radical' actually mean in the context of education? A post on my blog last year, entitled Outrageous Alternatives outlined a brief history of what are considered to be radical approaches to schooling. Others have also written recently about radical ideas about how to effect the transformation of education many of us wish to see.

If you're into 'radical' thought, one set of resources I can highly recommend is by Beth Davies-Stofka. She curates an excellent Scoop.it site called Radical Education which is crammed full of great blog posts written to get us all thinking about how we can transform education and create more effective learning environments. In a post on digital storytelling, Aleks Krotoski writes:

"Human experience is a series of never-ending, overlapping stories bumping into one another in expected and unexpected ways. Our days are made up of personal narratives of good and evil, joy and conflict, magic potions and angry gnomes."

I can subscribe to this. The magic potion in this part of the world would be cider of course. Even the angry gnomes part can be a little too close to the truth, in this neck of the woods. Krotoski goes on to elaborate about why storytelling is so important:

"They are naturally co-creations based on a push and pull of projection and interpretation. We interpret, analyse and synthesise the characters and events in our lives to help us make sense of the world, and these have been translated by professionals into folk tales, myths, legends, pantomime, bestsellers, soap operas and Hollywood blockbusters. Storytellers are simply curators of information who finesse the elements of a yarn into a beginning, middle and end."

Story telling is important to all of us. It goes beyond a mere collection of events. We tell the story of our lives when we meet. We make sense of the world around us as we relate our histories. We establish norms and decide what is important for our community. Krotoski again: "Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they've been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they've reinforced local and universal norms about where we've been and where we're going. And when they've been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they've helped us define who we are and how we fit in."

In short, story telling can be very powerful. It's powerful because it is a route through to making sense of our worlds - one of our prime motivators in life. It is our common search for the tacit knowledge that will enable us to survive. If something doesn't make sense, or if there is a clash of principles in our heads (cognitive dissonance), we go all out to try to resolve the conflict. That is how tacit learning happens. According to Thomas and Seely-Brown (2011), you can't teach tacit knowledge. Unlike explicit knowledge, which is peddled every day in our schools in the form of lessons full of facts, this deeper 'tacit' knowldge has to be experienced personally by each individual before it becomes theirs to own and to use. Storytelling takes each participant on a personal journey through a sometimes bewildering landscape of opportunities to acquire this kind of learning.

Digital storytelling can take our personal narratives up to a new plane of experience. The tools available to us today enable us to take companions on our journey through this terrain. We can co-create content, tell the story to each other regardless of location, and rework it so that it has common meaning and purpose. Our stories can be told time and time again, each time differently, with each version taking on a greater richness than its predecessor.

Is digital storytelling a radical departure from traditional education practices? I don't think so. We have been telling each other stories since the day we could string a sentence together. Children tell jokes in the playground. They write essays about what they did during their holidays. Children read Harry Potter and watch Eastenders on evening TV. It's something they are habituated into. Yet there is something new in the way our own stories can be generated, shared, repurposed and retold. The digital tools we now have at our disposal enable what Rose (2010) calls "multi-way conversation." For Rose, storytelling has reached a new pitch, has opened up space into a new social dimension: "It's very different when you have a medium that forces you to engage with other people," he says. "You don't know if you're going to have to tell a story for one hour, two hours or 10 years."

Telling your story is an age-old cultural practice. Digital storytelling takes it to another level, involving global conversations, multiple versions, and a cast of thousands. The radical part is where our understanding of the world around us can be transformed through these conversations. You don't need school for that.

References
Rose, F. (2010) The Art of Immersion: How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the way we tell stories. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Thomas, D. and Seely-Brown, J (2011) A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. USA: Create Space.

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A thousand conversations by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Me and Malcolm McLaren

This is the story behind that photograph. Malcolm McLaren was notorious for a variety of reasons. He was in a relationship with the avant garde fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, introduced fetish-wear, managed various punk rock bands including the Sex Pistols, and was agent provocateur and innovator in the art and music scenes for decades. It could be claimed that he was not only the originator of punk rock, but also one of the prime movers in the New Wave and Hip Hop music genres. He earned the nickname 'The Godfather of Punk' during this period, but in his later years, he seemed to have mellowed out to a more avuncular version of his younger restless self.

When I heard that he was to speak at the 2009 Handheld Learning Festival in London, I made sure I had a front row seat. I wanted to hear what McLaren would say about learning and about technology. Further, what would be his take on education and its place in society? Would he be controversial, caustic, conciliatory? Predictably, McLaren did not disappoint, polarising the audience with a very personal, sardonic and provocative account of his own learning journey. His reference to Karoake culture resonated - where anyone through the medium of technology, especially the reality TV shows, can become famous ... for simply being in the public eye for long enough. His key message was that failure and messiness are the key to the best kinds of learning. None of us at the time were to know that he had very little time left to live. A few days after this public appearance, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and died 6 months later, in a hospital in Switzerland.

I took several photographs of Malcolm during his speech. The one I considered to be the best was posted up onto my Flickr account, and I labelled it for free reuse as I always do, under Creative Commons licencing. I also used the image in my subsequent blog post entitled Karaoke Culture. It turned out to be one of the last photographs ever taken of him. Later, someone saw my photograph on Flickr and uploaded it for use on his Wikipedia page. It was thereafter mirrored on all the other foreign language versions of Wikipedia. When Malcolm McLaren died, guess where many of the journals and newspapers went to find copyright free images of him?

This is why newspapers such as the Caledonian Mercury and the London Daily News, websites such as Shapers of the 80's and Compas, and Goldmine all carried the image when they reported on McLaren's funeral. It appears that my name (credited with the photograph) will forever be linked to that of Malcolm McLaren. What have I learnt from this experience? Just being in the right place at the right time is not always enough. Posting your content on social media sites and making them available for free use and reuse is not only an equitable way of sharing the love. It is often a precursor for widespread amplification of that content. Whether or not something goes viral is left to the whims of the social web, but giving your content away for free can give it an excellent chance. 


Me and Malcolm McLaren by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Do it yourself education

Reading Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz has been fascinating. It's a book that has been recommended to me several times over, so it was long overdue that I laid my hands on a copy. With its lurid red cover and aggressive image of a fist gripping a pencil (I would have suggested an iPod Touch or iPhone instead) while wearing a wrist band that proclaims DIY U, the books holds a lot of promise. But we all know you don't judge a book by its cover. Anya Kamenetz is no edupunk, and doesn't pretend to be. Turns out she's a journalist, working the scene, trying to make sense of the open access and bricollage movements that are gripping the imagination of teachers in schools, colleges and universities across the globe. Yet she does express opinions that are sympathetic to the Edupunk philosophy of 'do it yourself', rage against the system, undermine the edubusinesses and give it all away for free (with the exception of her book, which is reasonably priced .... and she does earn her living as a writer). You can visit her DIY U website for a deeper insight into her views.

In a fast moving writing style that reminded me of a squash ball, she ricochets off subject after seemingly unrelated subject, weaving her way swiftly through a history of education, philosophy, science, music, popular culture and sociology in an attempt to paint the broadest of brushstroke backdrops to the book. Her key message is simple - that education needs to change to make it more accessible to those who want to, but cannot afford to enter into full time higher education. Like some seasoned livestock farmer, she herds her illustrations, examples and 'key player' profiles together, to reiterate this theme throughout. Some of our favourite Twitter buddies pop up to make cameo appearances, including Jim Groom (inevitably included, but described in gritty terms as chain-smoking and unshaven), David Wiley, Alec Couros, George Siemens, Lawrence Lessig and Stephen Downes. Notably, the book is disappointingly parochial and inward looking however, focusing largely on North American activism, with scant interest to the rest of the world, as if nothing much is happening outside the borders of the USA and Canada. There is no mention for example of the New Zealand based OER University (or its founder Wayne McIntosh) and the ground breaking work they are doing to transform open educational practices in higher education. This criticism apart, the book still manages to provide some useful observations about the DIY and Open Ed movements and explores their crossover points.

One of the best ideas in the book is where Kamenetz suggests that ideas travel faster over informal networks than they ever could within the closed silo of an organisation or department. Those of us who are residents in the land of social media already know the truth of this, but it's nice to see it opined on the pages of a mainstream publication. Kamenetz eulogises over blogs which she describes as nodes in a vast, informal network of learning and opportunity. If there is a need for your ideas to escape the walls of your organisation, blogging is an excellent way to set them loose, she says. This is all good stuff, but although it may have been considered Edupunk a decade ago, it's a little passe now. What Kamenetz does do well however, is to highlight the significance of Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs), suggesting that they may yet play a part in breaking the hold of the traditional, ivy league universities on mass higher education. What she misses the opportunity to explore is the informal nature of MOOCs, the amplifying power of connections created by such endeavours, and the resultant myriad of artefacts, activities and achievements that result from direct engagement with these learning movements.

Although it leaves much unsaid, Anya Kamenetz's book is useful to read if you are new to these ideas. The challenge, she says, is to capture the potential of technology to both lower costs and improve learning for all. High ideals indeed. Higher education is changing slowly, and it is good to know that the ideas of the Edupunk and OER movements are being written about formally, and that the ideals of these approaches is entering into the mainstream of people's consciousness.


Tomorrow: Me and Malcolm McLaren: The story of that photograph.

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Do it yourself education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The elephant in the room

Far too many futurologists, authors and commentators are ignoring the issue of the digital divide. Several books I have read recently on new and emerging technologies provide a healthy balance. They eulogise about the benefits, and are circumspect about the dangers of technology. Yet few acknowledge that many members of society are still technologically peripheral. The digital divide will not go away, but it cannot be ignored. Some even talk about the 'digital dividend', which to me sounds very much like a neat side step around the main issue. Avoiding the issue is not helpful. Call it what you want - digital exclusion, techno-marginalisation, analogue culture. It's the elephant in the room, and those who hold the purse strings are steadfastly looking away from it. Not everyone can participate in the digital society. Some people don't have mobile phones, and many more are not, nor ever will be, on Facebook, regardless of the hype Zuckerberg and his pals periodically peddle.

Some don't have access to the tools that enable this kind of participation. But to be fair, the digital divide is not always about lack of money, even though most accounts cite this as the prime cause. Some people avoid participation in the digital world even though they have the resources to fully participate. They become refuseniks, techno-luddites, laggards. Still others simply don't have the skills or literacies to meaningfully involve themselves in the digital society. It's not always about money. Not only are there the 'haves and have nots', there are also the 'wills and will nots' and the 'cans and cannots'.

Regardless of the causes - whether the divide is socio-economic, psychological or practical - the fact is, many people around the globe will not be subscribing to the digital citizen club any time soon.

Those of us who work at the 'chalk-face' are limited in what we can do to bridge the digital divide but we are not completely powerless. Many people choose to create that gulf between themselves and the connected world. For any number of reasons, they refuse to participate. Those who are lacking skill or confidence are another matter. We should make it our duty to help such people to gain the confidence they need, and that is exactly what many teachers are doing. The big challenge to all teachers and trainers now is this: How do we continue to develop 21st century learning, when there are always those few who are stuck (for whatever reason) in the last century?

Most of the problems are caused by lack of provision. Lack of broadband infrastructure. Lack of training opportunities. Lack of finance. The digital agenda of many western governments is falling sadly short of its intended outcomes, because the issues are far more complex than anyone could have imagined. Those in authority need to wake up and acknowledge that the digital divide is one of the key threats to lack of progress and that there are many causes. So just how long will it take until people wake up and notice the elephant in the room? Will they continue to ignore it until it fouls the carpet?

Image by Tom Clearwood


The elephant in the room by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Eye on the future

Below is my keynote abstract for the C-SAP Showcase in Birmingham. C-SAP is the Higher Education Academy subject Network for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, and it's in it's eleventh and final year of existence. The event will take place tomorrow at the Burlington Hotel, and will include numerous papers, workshops and poster sessions from delegates.

The future of learning will be...

How much can we shape our own futures? As an academic community, how much can we invest in our present to secure a better future for ourselves and our students? The answer is clear - the more we invest in the present, the more we will reap in the future. But we cannot control everything. There are randomly variable events. George Orwell once said 'He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past'. This is why the media - television, newspapers, radio, internet, gaming - have so much influence over public perceptions. For slightly different reasons it is also why lecturers can wield such power in the classroom. We know what technologies we can use to create excellent learning opportunities for our students. We also know from research what the pitfalls and caveats are. We know for example, that technology used for technology's sake is usually a mistake. We also know that learners engage better when they have tools to use they feel comfortable with and enjoy using. The balance decision is ours to make. What we don't know much about (but can guess) is what technologies are just around the corner, waiting to be harnessed. In this keynote presentation I will explore our learning technology past, attempt a glimpse into our technological future and trace the trends that will lead us into a future that will be open, personal, social and mobile.

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Eye on the future by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.