For the past year, I have been copying most of the posts on my new site to this older blog. I have encouraged followers to move from this site and subscribe here instead.
I will no longer add more content to this site but I will continue to maintain the resources and content found here for your use.
Thanks for your support as I worked to understand the process of documenting and sharing my own learning. I believe strongly in the importance of owning my own space on the web, and that is why I have moved to my own domain here.
I hope you will continue to learn with me and challenge me as I try to make sense of what learning needs to look like in this exponentially changing world.
An effective learning network is complex, changing, growing, shrinking, morphing over old, new and evolving platforms. It reaches into classrooms and across the globe, held together by personal learning networks (PLNs) that continually build new connections, cultivate new relationships and learning while allowing others to dissipate.
It centres on individual connections and actions, yet provides far-reaching value.
It allows learning to reach the student desk more quickly than our old structures. It puts an end to the geographic privilege of access, builds collaborative efficacy over distance, normalizes collaboration as a way of professional practice, and amplifies promising practices.
Individual Workflow – Personal Learning Environment or PLE
An effective network is composed of educators who work openly by default. Their daily workflow (Personal Learning Environment or PLE) includes personal learning that comes not only from traditional sources, like books and research articles, but also through efficient searching for educator blogs, tweets (microblogs), ebooks, audio books, webcasts, videos and exploring other online digital content that takes them into classrooms and into the minds of educators.
Content is organized and shared back to the community in a format that will reach their audience (parents, teachers, ECEs, leaders, community). They connect online with people in similar or different roles to have discussions, share strategies, consider ideas, connect thinking and stay in tune with what is happening in the world of the people they serve. They bring in the experts they need to ensure student outcomes are improving.
And, as they learn, they document that learning in a way that is valuable to others, considering audience and format, privacy and purpose. They share that learning back to their audience in a way that models digital citizenship and celebrates the work being done in their schools.
Collecting Information – Leaders dedicate time for professional learning and develop competencies in effectively exploring and organizing relevant content, including blogs, podcasts, discussions, monographs and articles shared by others through social media. They share these information and knowledge collecting strategies with peers, teachers, students and the community. They understand how to access the information they need by leveraging the capabilities of the network.
Connecting in Physical and Digital Spaces – Leaders value their connections to others and the learning that comes from conversations in person and online. They continue to nurture and build connections, bringing value to their organizations and those they serve. They model the importance of connectivism for students and other educators.
Curating and Sharing Important Learning with Others – Leaders streamline the flow of information by filtering, packaging, and sharing in a way that mobilizes knowledge for targeted audiences. This is a complex skill that all of our students should also master.
Creating and Providing Value to the Network – Leaders contribute what they are learning and make their thinking visible to others. This involves documentation and sharing skills, modelling them openly for others in the organization. Networks are only as valuable as the people in them and what they create and share with others.
Documenting Learning: Capturing the learning (and lack of learning)
Choosing an appropriate tool and product (text, blog, image, video, webcast, podcast, report, etc.)
Developing expertise in editing products (audio and video editing, website development)
Technical expertise
Reflecting (what to share, what audience, when?)
Modelling all of these for those you serve in the organization (students, educators)
Sharing the Learning (Openly as the Default)
Consider the privacy protection of those involved in your learning
Consider the intellectual property rights of any work you have used or remixed (develop a deep understanding of Creative Commons Licensing)
Consider the most effective and appropriate place to share based on desired audience (with open as default) – online open, online internal, conference, learning session. It is understanding the shifting differences and similarities among platforms, and where audiences reside at the moment.
Develop visual media, web and information literacies as well as global literacies
Amplify the practices that are making a difference.
Contribute in a positive way to the network, modelling this for others in the organization.
Where are other learning networks you can leverage?
This view of network leadership presents many entry points, and a shifting variety of digital literacies and skills needed for successful participation in networked learning.
(Please follow the blog at that site. This site will disappear soon!)
______________
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook make sharing easy, much easier, in fact, than reading the full content or discovering the real source of the post.
There is no human to complain to when that goes wrong.
Facebook makes money through likes and shares. It wants you to be engaged and share what you see. Critical thinking, truth, facts, none of these factor into the profit equation.
In what is now referred to the Post-truth era, it is disturbing to think about how much false content is circulated as fact. Students struggle to determine the difference between truth and fiction.
As parents and educators, how are we modelling practices that promote facts and reliable sources over clickbait and sensationalism?
On social media, liking, sharing and retweeting shows others the content that is meaningful to you. It is a reflection of who you are, and what you believe in.
A decade ago, I used to retweet fairly indiscriminately. If it looked like a good resource, I shared it. Then, Ira Socol took the time to question my retweet. I realized that retweeting is actually a form of curating. If I want to create value online for others, I need to critically evaluate resources and ideas, and share them with descriptive comments.
What I choose to share reflects my professionalism. What I choose to share is the value I am creating for others. Before sharing, I carefully evaluate the source, and I often highlight (in my comments) the part I find most valuable.
Fortunately, I have a loud PLN that will quickly question almost anything I share openly.
Other curators help me sort through the unfathomable amount of information on the web. Stephen Downes, Doug Belshaw, and Audrey Watters are examples of thought leaders who filter, curate and share information regularly. I know that there will be value in their curations.
More importantly, what do we do when we encounter colleagues and friends sharing misleading information or sheer fiction as though it were factual? Do we just turn our heads the other way, or do we take the time, like Ira Socol did for me, and challenge the source or the thinking?
Barack Obama said that we can’t move democracy forward if we don’t have a common set of facts to refer to. Now that we have seen the impact of the propaganda spread through social media, what will we do as educators to shut it down?
How do we ensure our students can critically evaluate information, triangulate sources, and distinguish between belief and fact?
Is knowledge more rapidly mobilized through the system when leaders work openly?
For the purposes of my work, I am considering personal professional openness – the concept of sharing thinking and learning in open spaces, curating resources for others, engaging in open conversations in text or through broadcast technologies like podcasts, videos and YouTube Live, blogging and commenting on blogs, and participating across the educational boundaries in wider conversations across the web.
“Working open” means different things in different contexts. Doug Belshaw has summarized the idea of working open in education here.
He provides this question, that is an excellent starting point for opening our work to others:
We should be continually asking the question, “can we make this public?” If that seems too radical, then a smaller step might be the question, “is there any reason why this shouldn’t be shared with everyone at the organisation?”
Here is a summary of what I learned this week. The full story is below.
Working openly is a new skill, with unlimited potential for mobilizing knowledge within the education system. We (as a system) don’t yet value it as a critical leadership skill for education.
“You are never going to be able to shortcut doing the hard work of changing hearts and mind, and the hook which gets people to realize that working openly is useful, is going to be different in every situation”. (Doug Belshaw)
When, as a leader, you work openly, you allow others to “swim in the river you are swimming in”, not your river, but the one you are swimming in right now. (Dai Barnes)
Open practices are on a continuum, and are dependent on context. Developing digital literacies helps leaders understand what should be shared openly, but also what should be shared behind a password, and what should be private.
Senior Leaders need to be conscious of their position when blogging, but sharing their learning minimizes the disconnect between leadership thinking and classroom practice.
Once Senior Leaders believe that open practice is worth pursuing, we need a scaffolded approach to help develop an understanding of digital literacies and support in developing that open practice.
Open practice by senior leaders encourages the participation of the entire learning community, and helps all stakeholders in public education find their voice.
_________________________
The full story:
Since beginning my work with #mathleadersNEO the Mathematics Leadership Network, I have been exploring this thinking – how open practice can impact the work of education leaders, particularly in influencing classroom practice and improving student learning.
Recently, I listened to the TIDE Podcast #61: Open to Suggestion, which got me thinking again about the value in working openly as an education leaders.
I was so pleased to see that in TIDE Episode #70, the answer to this question was discussed, and some ideas completely new to me surfaced in the conversation.
I have posted the sections of the podcast to help provide focus for the thinking. Please take a few minutes to listen to the sound clips that are much more explicit than my summaries below.
The Importance of Content – Choosing Words Carefully
Dai began by talking about the role of an education leader and how conscious a leader needs to be about that role and position, and the ‘weight’ of the words they might make public.
Understanding what can and should be shared openly is a digital literacy, and it takes time to build. Experiencing the value of reaching an audience this way, and leveraging it to achieve organizational goals, also takes time to develop.
It is difficult to access education leaders. When they make their thinking and learning visible through blogging and other social media interactions, everyone in the organization (and the community) has access to what they are learning.
Sharing Resources Openly (Instead of Through Email)
Instead of sharing resources with specific educators in email, leaders can share them in an open space (such as a blog or website) so that all educators, within the system and world wide, have access to those resources. It also allows others to then comment on how they use the resources in classroom practice, to add other similar resources to the list, and to have a conversation in the comments around the specific learning goals best supported through these resources.
What are the Barriers to Sharing Openly?
We have to understand what can (and should) be shared fully openly, what should be shared behind a password, and what should be private. As well, we need to learn how to do that sharing so that nobody is personally or professionally impacted in a negative way.
For example, sharing a screencast on how to copy a Google Doc might be valuable to many educators. What we wouldn’t say, is, “I know many educators in my school are struggling with this, so I have made this instructional screencast to help you”.
We might say instead, “Are you trying to copy a Google Doc? Here are some simple instructions to walk you through the process”. This statement makes the learning open to all without any suggestion that the skill is one specific people find difficult.
It’s new learning. It’s 2016 learning. And you don’t know what you don’t know. For so many educators, the way they have always done things has served them well and they don’t see the need for change in practice.
What New Leadership Qualities do we Value in 2016?
When, as a leader, you work openly, you allow others to “swim in the river you are swimming in”, not your river, but the one you are swimming in right now.
Dai is playing with an important concept here, I think.
There are certain qualities and strengths of education leaders that we have traditionally valued, and we look for these.
But working openly is a new skill, with unlimited potential for mobilizing knowledge within the education system. We don’t yet value it in the education system.
Open Practices: Changing Hearts and Minds
There is no such thing as open practice. It is open practices (plural) because it is always within the context of where the learning is happening.
“You are never going to be able to shortcut doing the hard work of changing hearts and mind, and the hook which gets people to realize that working openly is useful, is going to be different in every situation”.
Who can you influence to practice more openly today?
What small steps can each leader take to work more openly?
Here are some of the long term questions I am trying to answer:
How can Superintendents ensure that knowledge and understanding of high-yield instructional practices reaches the level of the student desk?
Does the exchange of ideas in open networks, across the boundaries of school districts, and even countries, more quickly impact change in classroom practice?
Can open leadership practices by system leaders enhance knowledge mobilization and improved classroom instruction, thereby increasing student learning and achievement?
Can technology help system leaders get new learning into classrooms?
________________________________________
Please also see our work with Stephen Downes here.
This morning, I am pleased to have the opportunity to work with PQP Part 1 Candidates in the OPC PQP course at HWDSB.
In conversation with their instructor, my friend and colleague and exemplary principal, Lisa Neale, we challenged the notion of “digital leadership” and its relevance in 2016.
We often say we need to “model digital leadership”, but that is getting tired.
The internet has been accessible to people for more than 20 years. The modelling days are over. Now it is about being connected; learning, living and leading so that digital and physical are seamless in our schools, as they are outside of our schools. It’s about connecting with students, parents, communities and the greater world, and making meaning, relevance and change for good.
The slides we used to guide our discussion are below. Resources are listed below the slides.
We have the technology now to learn from the best teachers in the world.
We can access our PLN from almost anywhere, through synchronous and asynchronous technologies.
Today, our students need personalized learning options. Our teachers need to learn according to personal and professional interests. Our leaders need to be able to consult with experts, and meet their own learning needs. And all of this is simple with a strong Professional Learning Network, and access to digital tools.
In fact, for many educators, this is their normal. It’s how they work in 2016.
Today I had the privilege to speak to educators at #depd in Ottawa (Discovery Education) as my PLN mate Paul Maguire was presenting and sharing how to connect with other educators through voxer.
Dean Shareski captured part of the conversation in this tweet:
I was thrilled to hear how clear it was, because up here on the north shore of Superior, I was in a torrential rainstorm during a power outage and I was using my car charger to keep my phone battery charged while hoping the cell coverage would remain intact!
But even with all of that, I was able to talk to the crowd gathered in Ottawa.
Currently listening to @fryed on #Voxer, this is absolutely incredible! #DEPD
For many of us, it has been our normal for a decade or more.
Our creative, curious, bright children can access the best teachers in the world with our help. Let’s make sure every one of them can. Their access to the best instruction should not depend on geography or classroom teacher.
And let’s encourage all educators, including our leaders, to build extensive, rich professional learning networks where they share learning, cultivate relationships, build their understanding of digital environments and establish a positive online identity.
Our physical and digital worlds are now one. Our learners need to be able to flow between them, and thrive in both.
Featured image by Donna Miller Fry: CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0
The Pallisades. Hwy 11 north of Nipigon, Ontario, at sunrise, late August, 2016.
This question is at the centre of tables around the province as boards and schools go through their new school and board improvement process (SILC: System Improvement Learning Cycles). The new process, evolving from the former BIPSA process, is more agile (faster cycles), more targeted, and more responsive to student needs. The focus is on system improvement, which requires change at every level of the organization, but is only effective if it reaches the level of the student “desk”.
I have two wonderings about the new process.
Where in this process is there an opportunity to truly look outside our walls and see what is happening in the world? Our urgent student learning needs are not just tied to trailing data on past learning priorities. As the world changes at an exponential rate, who is determining what our students will need to thrive in that world?
“Being willing to constantly disrupt our individual and collective mindsets, if we are to come to terms with the needed disruptions that must occur in our own organizations if we are to truly unentrench ourselves from the status quo thinking that often buries us in practices of the past.
Seeing how ‘next’ practices are also in need of ‘next’ metrics if we are to pivot effectively towards this emerging and more desirable future we envision for ourselves and our organizations.”
2. Urgent student learning needs are personal. Every child, every adult in the system has personalized needs that cannot be determined by “average” thinking.
Our thinking, connected teachers, when they have a deep understanding of curriculum expectations, can design personalized learning for every child/student. Creating this environment for our learners requires a foundation of connectivism thinking. Teachers need to be able to access and participate in a rich network of support, and use this network to support the individual learning needs of every student.
How are we supporting educators to self-direct their learning through their own Professional Learning Networks?
“…it will not only be individuals that will need to become adaptable learners, remaining agile to our exponentially shifting world we now live in…so must our educational organizations if they are to remain significant, dynamic, relevant hubs of learning, innovation and transformation in the face of these seismic shifts and changes.”
We need to ask ourselves, “What evidence do we have to support the hypothesis that the most urgent learning needs of our students can be found in our data?”.
Recently I have been fortunate to be asked to present at two different venues (Refresh2016 in North Bay, and the DSBONE Professional Learning Day) on the importance of understanding how digital identities impact mental health in teens, and where we as educators can find resources.
Podcasts have been a primary source of professional learning for me for many years. I have always wanted to use this tool, and this week, I found two teachers in WRDSB who use podcasting regularly.
Karen Blaak uses podcast conversations with her father to set the themes for her online English 3U course. The personal narrative and vulnerable stance appeals to students.
Carlo Fusco openly shares his process of capturing voices of the people he learns with.
Both of these talented and dedicated educators inspire me to really think about how I can more effectively use podcasting in my work.
I am continuing to work my way through “Most Likely to Succeed“, the book by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith. On p. 223 of “Most Likely to Succeed”, the Tripod of Learning for the 21st Century is described.This is a summary of that thinking.
The three points of the tripod are: 1) content knowledge, 2) skill, and 3) the will to learn.
Adapted from Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith, Most Likely to Succeed, p. 223
Of the three, will to learn (motivation) is seen as most critical, and the one most likely to be destroyed in the schools of today.
Content, for those with devices connected to the internet, is a free commodity (another reason why it is not okay that not everyone is connected).
Intrinsically motivated people are now free to learn new skills and content throughout their lives, because you can learn almost anything online.
The key question we need to ask is whether or not any given change we make to our education system, or to our teaching strategies, will increase student motivation for learning, and what evidence we will have to demonstrate this.
Motivation for learning does, of course, include engagement.
But do we also consider empowerment – the ownership of learning that involves persistence, knowing how to learn, knowing how we learn best, working hard to understand, sharing and gathering feedback, and self-discipline to keep at it?
Along with this, the ability to think critically, to communicate effectively in all modalities, to really collaborate (not just co-operate) and to use strategies for effective creative problem solving, are the survival skills our kids need in 2016.
Learning About Learning 