Learning Journey

Leigh, this is a very hard question to answer…!!!!!

I thought this was going to be a easy, relaxing course…after all it’s summer time! Just kidding. Although this was my immediate inner-response.

Defining online communities is not as easy as it may seem. Despite all the theoretical background, how do you define, or better, explain a community? Leigh  Blackall is definitely not making our lives easy, but this is definitely a challenge to take!

Well, I can only report about my own reality and experiences, and I totally agree with the text provided in the wiki, which is supposed to prompt this piece of writing…reflection.

Lately, and especially since I started working in the UK, I have heard people talking about communities – and especially about communities of practice – as if it were the latest cool thing. There isn’t one conference or academic gathering I have attended in which people don’t mention something about setting up a community – what a great idea: Let’s all create a community? Why haven’t we still established a community of Practice in our department/University? I think we need to set up a community….and so on. It almost gets ridiculous, if you ask me.

Communities cannot be forced and tend not to work when people decide to start something as if it were merely a fashionable thing to do. Let’s face it: people don’t like to be pushed into one more thing they have to do, and I think people are starting to be put off by this intention of constantly wanting to create yet another community. Communities are more successful when they develop spontaneously, and people tend to engage better when they volunteer to do so - it shows personal willing to be part of it. However, we can argue that we can seed and provide support for a unity of people with common interests and hope it will grow into a community. Generally I would call this “unity of people with common goals” a group of individuals who bond together because they share similar common points of views, and/or needs, habits, purposes, aims; etc, but today I felt like playing with words…

The way I see it, a community never starts as a community. It is rather a group of individuals who have the desire to construct/create/do something together because they agree on something and feel that they might be able to achieve it better, or faster, or which ever reason made them bond in the first place, when they do it jointly. They don’t usually think of themselves as a community …at least, not until they have gone as far as to examine their performance as such in retrospect.

Now a bit of sociology: Individuals are not islands – we work better in groups and most time we perform even better when we collaborate. We like to communicate our ideas, seek for support and provide and get feedback about what we are thinking/doing. So it is only natural we bond in these unities of people based on common interest.

The advantage online is that it can be easier to find more like-minded people to work with, because we no longer are restricted to our local time or space. The web has opened up the doors to a wider world where individuals can come together and interact independently of their whereabouts. Living proof of that is this course. As individuals allow themselves to get involved and interact inside those groups they frequently get attached to other like-minded individuals. As those interrelationships intensify, the group becomes more and more meaningful for them.  And as it impacts on their learning, career, performance and/or even life in general, the individuals usually become more attached to each other – their activity as well as the contribution of others is valued.It also keep the individuals united in their purpose. Hence that unity grows stringer and eventually people connect as a community.

This is of course a very simplistic way to try to explain online communities, but what I think I want to say is that communities are the result of the joint effort of a group of people who come together for a reason. As interactions, members’ contributions, collaboration among peers, support, etc intensify the group also grows more coherent and eventually into a community.

I think a community is the result of a metamorphic process. It takes time to achieve the community level. It requires work and joint endeavour too. It depends on how the (learning) relationship progresses. It also depends on the members’ support and effort to keep communicating and working together. It is relation with the evolution of the learning interactions.

When compared with groups, I feel that attached to the community concept there is a stronger feeling of belonging and sense of identity. The feeling of being part of a group is more loosen and disperse.

In short, groups can evolve into communities, as support, communication and care grows more consistent as part of the individuals’ exchanges and commitment to that Unity of people who have something in common.         

Today Michael Coghlan shared this great video - a presentation by Michael Wesch on Youtube - An anthropological introduction to YouTube.

I just Loved it. As Micheal Coghlan said, it is bloody Brilliant. What an inspiring and true report about how media are changing the way we connect to people!

I especially like Wesch’s  idea that there is more to Media  than the role to mediate communication or being a tool; it is about mediating (understanding about) people.
I truly believe in it - this cyberworld and all the new emergent technologies which appear in our world everyday are about (re-)forming and (re)inventing the community.

Key to this researcher activity is the fact that to understand better the reality  under analysis, there is nothing better than taking part of it itself. Participant observation is core to his and his students’ activity as anthropologists. That’s an approach I support all the way, because it means you will be able to perceive your target group from the experience point of view.

It is really great to learn about others’ ideas from different angles and discipline specific views. As part of my Masters’ dissertation recommendations to new  future research ideas I suggested we should organize a collective research project in which several researchers from different social and human sciences could observe the CoP I studied during the same period of time and generate a research narrative based on the researchers’ sepcific subjects understanding. I think it would be powerful to see how ideas could convere, complement each other or even diverge! Not sure I was taken serious about it. Still I think it would be a good collaborative project with potentially interesting outcomes.

This is indeed an assumption many tend  to make when they are introduced to it. Is it because at the first sight it doesn’t seem to comply with the traditional ways of teaching? Is it because learning technologists sometimes may sound like geeks - when getting involved with social media in a rather overwhelming way? Is it because one doesn’t feel comfortable using these new media which are supposedly meant for our “kids”? Is it because one doesn’t care about new approaches that will make them “lose the expert” seat once again? Or maybe it is all/none the above… who knows…

The fact is that lately every conference I have taken part in, I always meet these brilliant minds who are thinking of doing something fantastic with educational technologies. They are usually people who either are developing a new piece of software or came up with this great idea to approach their practice differently. It also turns out that 9 out of 10 of those people I meet in these conferences call themselves Learning Technologists, Learning Technologies researchers, Lecturers in learning technologies, and so on!  Although there is nothing wrong with it, the fact is that we end up preaching to the choir; talking to those who have already perceived the potential and educational side of learning technologies. And all of a sudden everything seems so easy because our audience nods with conviction while we enthusiastically present about our topic. However, outside the conference building, our audience is not always like this.

We often come away from those venues reassured we have made important contributions to the educational world and that this will probably trigger more practitioners to follow our steps. In a way - YES - but we also tend to forget one thing: most times it’s researchers presenting research finding to other researchers. And although this is not bad, this is also not all we can do. Where are the teachers and all those lecturers who are preparing our youth to a future which more and more relies on technology? Well, they are probably attending and presenting at conferences of their own area of expertise, talking to other professionals who share the same interests and most probably the same kind of experiences. And this is not bad, but we can do better than this, especially at a time like this when we all seem to believe collaboration and cross-discipline cooperation is important.  Apart from the foreign language learning and teaching contexts of which I am part of,  Usually, I only come across new approaches by the same small group of  people. However, I am well aware that a wider variety of excellent practices exist both in number and diversity, and that there are lots of educators doing great stuff. The problem is that they tend to present the ideas and the results of their projects at conferences of their own subject, which is only fair. But more collaboration across sectors and disciplines is also desirable.

The example I am about to report is one of these cases.

The MSc in Advanced Occupational Therapy is a programme “totally delivered online” - so was it yesterday announced during the launch event of this new Masters programme hosted by the Faculty of Health and Social Care- University of Salford.

This programme has been a dream that after two years of hard work finally come true.   - Angela Hook and Sarah Bodell - occupational therapy lecturers - have done a magnificent job by putting it all together. In their own words - two years ago they ”knew nothing about learning technologies and powerpoint hadn’t been part of their practice for that long either”. Today this seems hard to believe, if we bear in mind these two ladies have just projected and launched a magnificent programme which incorporates the latest approaches such as podcasting for content deliver and discussion trigger, blogs for reflection, wikis for peer collaboration, SL and Facebook for socializing and skype for personal tutoring, because in the end it is the individual who really matters! The student’s assessment will even be negotiated by students themselves!! How cool is that?

As Sarah stated yesterday in the launching ceremony, this programme aims at putting occupation in occupation therapy. She also emphasized their passion for learning and the awareness that in this new century new ways of pursuing further development have to be taken into consideration, in order to provide professional people with the opportunity to engage with the latest development in their field of practice and also get updated qualifications.
Angela also excelled with the way she presented the structure of the programme. Before emphasizing the learning approach mentioned above, she said the programme was aimed at anyone who wants to engage with it and they only need very little ICT skills to do so. As she put it, “if you know how to use word, if you can manage email and you use the Internet to search for information, then you will be able to do this, because you already master the hardest part of technology.” And I could only agree. The hardest part is to get started. Once you do, everything will become easier, all the time. And to reassure learners of that and also make sure they will be looked after, this programme will provide their students with a four week induction period where they will have a chance to try all the tools and overcome all the fears they might have while doing so. ANd all of this with the personaizedl support of a team. Is this something or what?

This is indeed a great initiative. It becomes even more relevant, when you think that this team has been working on this for quite a while now, engaging themselves with all the applications and technologies they decided to include in the programme. It is like the old saying: Don’t expect others to do, what you yourself are not ready to. And in this case I think they can expect a lot, because they are guiding - and inspiring I’d say -  by example.

They themselves have meaningfully engaged with the approach they are trying to pass on to others and they are doing a great job at it. Example of that is their blog which has already enabled them to collaborate with other practitioners in their area who just happen to be on the other side of the globe. They even have already had the chance to write a paper together and present with them at a conference dedicated to Occupational Therapy issues, of course!

I am sure there are many other great examples like this one out there. Like I said before, I know quite a few in the Language learning / Teaching field, but apart from that my knowledge is quite limited to the people I usually engage with. I would be interested in knowing about other instances of outstanding practice in many different areas.

This post has also been posted here.

Two weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a Panel on Digital Literacy at UCLan. It was indeed interesting and thought provoking. As it often happens in this kind of events, so much was left to say. I especially liked the way the audience progressively got involved and we briefly touched some of the current worries considering literacy in the 21^st Century. Does it have the same meaning as it did 50 years ago? How are we to define literacy in this day and age? Is education keeping up with it?

Jonathon Westaway kicked off the debate by highlighting some of the hot themes concerning this matter, and off we went to jointly reflect about issues around the following questions:

• Is Social Media changing the way we read and write?
• What are the advantages of learning and teaching in the digital environment?
• What are the problems associated with information overload?
• Who has authority in the digital landscape?

Too many questions for such a short period of time, but we sure tried to get across as many ideas as possible.Educators in generally are still very worried the “little Johnnies” are not reading as much as they should! Not to mentioned their writing and spelling skills which are just getting worse by the minute. But is it really so? Are we reading less? Are our writing and spelling skills really that bad? Steven Johnson presents some counter arguments about it, and I must say I like what he says. We are not reading less; we have just started reading differently. I myself read more (blog) articles than ever, and have access to much more literature in my filed than when I was restricted to paper books and local library access. The web has opened the doors to a new world where the literacy concept is being reshaped into different dimensions. Professor David Crystal’s recent article also underlines very pertinent issues concerning the new writing and spelling habits (maybe styles?). They are away from being new, yet they are becoming more visible as social media, and micro digital communication devices and applications, such as mobile phones, micro-blogging, instant messaging, etc have become widely accessible in the latest years. They represent the main channels for written communication and also reflection. I have recently blogged about the twitter phenomenon and how it has impacted in my learning. It has increasingly contributed to my knowledge and increased my learning network. Despite the rather short length of twitter messages, true communication is achieved through this channel. And just like we were already doing with mobile phones, and also with lecture note-taking (remember those?), we do use a lot of abbreviations to convey the message. That’s how things have evolved. They are not bad or good. They are just different.

However, it doesn’t mean that we are getting worse at spelling; it just means we are developing additional communication registers.

One can argue that sometimes students tend to overreact and use such “tribal spelling” in their assignments. It’s in their nature, and role as students, to push boundaries; it’s our mission as educators to guide them to consider the different contexts in which they are involved in – that is to say, to prepare them for real life! . [I think sometimes we just tend to generalize something that happens less often, especially if it is something that we are not used to. It’s so much easier!!!].  The fact is that students often distinguish which kind of register belongs to which context, and if they don’t, then it tells a lot of the educational system they have been in. It is our job as educators to help them realize which register to adopt according to the situation they are in.

Times are changing. Generation conflicts are old as the world. We always try to do things differently from our parents, as our parents have done things differently from theirs…

I strongly believe that digital literacy is more than reading books and writing exam papers. That might have been the literacy ideal of the industrial age. These days, literacy is also related with how we use the digital media to search, access, read, critically think and make sense of what we read in our areas of expertise and interests. It is also how we show evidence of what we learn by communicating it through different means and ways. Today it is as important to know, as it is to know-how. And our kids sure know how to know when they feel they need to know something. Furthermore, they adapt more easily than most of use to those venues, where they engage into knowing whatever they want to learn. If it takes to learn a new spelling code, then they do it, because they want to feel part of it.

So why can’t we accept it? And why can’t we just familiarize our students with academic writing without despising their tribal writing? It would be easier than trying to ban the web because it is bad for your spelling!!!!

This is the second blog post on twitter within days. This must mean something.

I have been giving quite a lot of thought about this micro-phenomenon that is twitter. As I said before, I grew fonder and fonder of twitter over time until I totally fell in love with it. Just for you to have an idea, I have this awkward habit of checking my emails before leaving home for work in the morning. I now have replaced that with something even more insane: I am checking the tweets that were published during the time I was offline. It didn’t improve, I know…

As I sit here at my desk typing away some sentences that might convey the meaning twitter has acquired in my learning path, I am also listening to a podcast by Sue Waters. And if you can picture myself typing, you will also have to imagine me nodding all the way through the podcast, as I agree 150% with what Sue Waters, Alan Levine , Graham Wegner, Michael Coghlan, Kristin Hokanson and Simon Brown say about twitter.

It is an amazing new world where people communicate ideas, report about their mundane lives, complain about the weather, support their soccer teams, share resources, ask questions, tell jokes, link you to their fave tunes, etc. By the same token they make small bits and bytes of their lives available they also have access to others’ micro-existences. And all of this in 140 characters. And all of this is sharing! That is, I think, what makes twitter simultaneously so silly and so interesting. It is about how we communicate ourselves to others in our different facets and keep the conversation going while others also do the same. Some moments we twitter as learners, others as “the experts”, others yet just as “common mortals” who need a cup of coffee or are upset because the sun isn’t shining….
Because the interface is clear and the channel is straightforward the communication seems to flow quite easily and immediately (well…when twitter hasn’t reached its over capacity state!!!. And such breakdowns might also be due to the overenthusiastic usage by those thousands and thousands of devoted twitters out there who just cannot stop twittering).

Not everything is intellectually grave in twitter. And neither is everything we do in life necessarily connected to our main learning purpose. However many of the things we do or get involved in end up contributing to what we are and what we become.

There are a lot of messages your twitter friends will tweet and you don’t even have a clue what they are about, simply because you are not into that context and/or part of that sub-phere of twitters to whom such tweets are aimed to. But does that put people off? The answer is definitely no, because just like in face to face life we cannot follow all the twitters that surround us all the time.
I think, in this respect, twitter makes us develop a quicker selective eye, about what might be more relevant to us and what might not. We scan tweets, we link to resources we think might be valuable, we let other links go by just because they don’t seem that relevant to our area. But sharing resources is just one of the ways twitter can be used.
Twittering (online) is also another way of establishing networks of knowledge, or better said, of knowing.
I have connected to so many individuals I haven’t had come across before or whom I had little time to connect to previous to the twitter-mania. In some cases I have also re-connected to those who I already knew in a different way.

Tweet by tweet, plus everything else I try to get involved in, I carry on my personal learning journey in the company of those who care to contribute to it.  The further I go, the further I know there is still to go…

Twitter might not be around for that long - I am aware these networks are trendy - but the people will. And if today learning bonds are also being established in twitter, they might survive the twitter-phenomenon somewhere else, provided they are meaningful and still relevant.

Because in the end what matters is the people, and also how we connect and communicate with each other, how their messages make us feel and how that contributes to our personal growth. The channel is, of course, important, but it’s the human interaction that is crucial.

So, the question is, how have those online twitters changed your life?

This will also help me bring my next  post about the TEL Summer School experience, which I hope to write about tomorrow.

I haven’ got many words to say today, although my head is over-flooded with thoughts I want to share, but which somehow I don’t seem to be able to get across. I feel a little bit overwhelmed today!  I hate to have to admit it, but I am feeling a little adrift - not really sure of my mission. Hopefully, the tide will turn and I will feel better soon.

Meanwhile I have been listening to the The Mission Movie soundtrack. I found this video in youtube and thought of sharing it with you. Hope you like it.

Dear all,

we are in Ohrid/Macedonia this week taking part in a Summer school on Technology Enhanced Learning & Knowledge Management .

We have started a Twemes on the topics we are exploring and we would love to hear from you and your ideas/ experiences. We need you twitt-experts to help us lead the summer school by example!! ;-)  Let’s share reflection. Let’s connect! Please help us show the power of the community in action.

The Summer School participants will appreciate and learn in context. Your contribution in invaluable. Let’s learn/ twitter together! http://twemes.com/scohrid

We have already been picked up by twittscoop

Thank you for caring!

…Edumedia 2008?

I am been paying sporadic visits to the EduMedia 2008 Conference in Salzburg through twitter. And I think I can say I have been getting some interesting perspectives about education. And all of this thanks to twitter and those who are taking the time to twitter about it!

Thoughts, ideas, spontaneous reflection and immediate reactions to presentations are being shared on the spot (as they happen) by some of the conference delegates. Their tweets, pictures and bookmarks are being aggregated here…all thanks to good young twitter and the #edumedia08 tag.

This is twitter and twemes is action. It is worth checking this example of social software use making connecting the real world with the virtual one!

The next two days are going to be mad with so much webcast fun!

Today Carla Arena and I are launching People & Places webcast (through Webcast Academy) project which aims at communication, real content and cultural awareness.  Our very Special Guest is Michael Coghlan. And so if for nothing else, you should join us because Michael is a great story teller.
The launch is today at 13GMT. More info here.

Tomorrow it’s Evolve Launch time. Bee Dieu will be our special guest and keynote speaker for this first event. The event will take place in Jisc Elluminate at 1700 GMT (May 30).

Before that Doug Symington and I will webcast Bee’s session for BrazTESOL through Webcast Academy. Check more information here. The idea is to reach the Brazilian conference from whereever we are and get another podcast resource in the end, which we can listen and use later!

Finally, Jose Rodriguez is hosting webcasts in Spanish. They are worth checking although they happen quite late for Europe.

And that’s all the news for today. I just want to keep you posted about what is happening in cyberspace. It is nice to know what other people are doing and what the possibilities are.

The good thing about long journeys is that you get to catch up with reading.

Well… I didn’t necessarily focus on readings for my PhD as I should, I decided to add to my backpack the book I am reading - ‘Teacher Man’ by Frack McCourt just in case I felt like taking a break from the technical readings. Needless to say that I still haven’t opened the folder of research papers I especially printed to read on the plane!

I am now almost at the end of the narrative. I like F. McCourt’s writing style. He writes in a simple, fluid way. He is sincere in what he writes and somehow I can see bits of myself in some of the book’s passages.

Today while jogging I was thinking about it - my brain functions better when I move!!!

A good teacher is that who is able to relate to his/her own experience as a student…as someone who once also sat on those same (or similar) bench schools… and felt bored to death because he/she was not getting the point of absorbing all that “unpractical” information.
A better teacher is that who remembers being a student and recalls what s/he liked and s/he didn’t like while in that role, and how s/he felt in those situations.

The best teacher is that who is able to apply to his/her teaching what he perceived to work for him as a student, change what didn’t work, and at the same time innovate and adequate his/her practice to suit the learning experience of the generations he/she was ask to lead and inspire.

Frank McCourt narrates in his book that he did a lot of story telling…it engaged the students and it kind of created bonds and sense of trust between him and those kids. He also points out that sometimes he didn’t feel he was being a teacher because he was telling stories.

And I wonder… isn’t life this Big story made of many mini-stories. Aren’t we supposed to be preparing our kids to write their own stories / activate their own learning? Each one of us has one or more to tell and re-tell. So why don’t we do it? And why don’t we manage to write new ones in which students also become an integral part of? Why do we hide behind a pack of notes and references that are supposed to justify every single sentence we try to pour into kids’ minds? [ I am overacting here…I know that they are great teachers out there, but I have come across some very bad ones too…unfortunately)

I do think that a teacher’s role is to help students write their own story, it is also to help them refine it while inspiring them with other (his/her) own stories [ for the learning relationship to work you do have to make it personal…it is about you and the students].

A good story is always worth writing. It is 100 times worthier listening to. And learning (and teaching) is indeed about story telling; about listening to each other (an in that the conversation and interaction is implied).

just thinking aloud as usual!