Category Archives: learning

The Learning Isn’t Over Until…

21st Century Skills, Education, learning, teaching

I have been learning non-stop for the past two weeks. First Educon 2.5 and then VirtualVA2013. Lots of conversations, glimpses into innovative classrooms, and connections with other thoughtful educators. I’ve been reflecting on the experiences but haven’t had time to put fingers to keyboard. Here are the big themes that have stood out in my personal reflections…I’ll expand on them in future posts but for now, I’ll start with the bulleted list:

  • Schooling vs Learning…but also Jobs vs Work: This distinction rose out of a conversation about how happy kids and teachers were on snow days. I pointed out that lots of grown ups were also excited to miss a day of work.  There seems to be some parallel between the two worlds: schooling and jobs both imply structure while learning and work seem to imply objectives and goals. The consensus seems to be that we have put too much emphasis on developing structures that are keeping people from enjoying learning or work and really accomplishing worthwhile goals. But can we ditch the structure completely? I was particularly intrigued with an idea I’ve encountered before: that we need to talk about the whole system including the physical spaces where we learn and work. Hacking education goes way beyond a new curriculum or even a new pedagogy.
  • Doing More Than Just Showing Up: In the midst of all this learning, I’ve been reading Seth Godin and he has had a couple blog posts that add meaning experiences I’ve had, especially at Educon. Beyond Showing Up and Watching Is Not Doing address the idea of being more involved in our lives and our learning. Educon is the perfect example: you get out of Educon what you put in. There are conversation leaders who help provide some structure but you are expected to participate by offering your ideas, sharing your resources and tweeting your heart out. We had an “open mic” session during VirtualVA2013 that mimicked a bit of Educon and gave us a chance to talk about some of the big themes that had come out of the week’s sessions. Our opening and closing sessions were more about conversation than slides and the presenters willingly engaged with the attendees.
  • Entrepreneurs vs. Entrepreneurial Spirit: The panels at Educon talked a lot about how we can help kids become entrepreneurs. I just finished reading Yong Zhao’s book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students as part of an ISTE SIGAdmin book group so I was particularly interested in the intersection of the book with the conversations. Someone made the distinction between the people (entrepreneurs) and their dispositions (entrepreneurial spirit) that made a lot of sense to me. And there’s a lot more here to explore…why entrepreneurs and schooling don’t seem to mix and if schools can produce entrepreneurs at all.

I am also aware that there is a lot of overlap between these three themes…it’s part of the problem I’ve had this week trying to sort out the various strands of conversations. I think it can be simplified a bit: the ultimate goal is to provide learning experiences (spaces?) for our students that challenge and engage them in meaningful ways and help them develop into thoughtful, active citizens.

Create, Connect, Commit in 2013

blogging, community, creativity, ds106, learning, reading, writing

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach described her New Year’s commitments and challenged the rest of us to do the same. As always, she makes a powerful statement and I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read. Dealing productively with digital and emotional distractions, finding a work/life balance, and pursuing excellent in everything…these are all worthy goals. She sums it up beautifully: “I am determined to influence the world this year rather than be  influenced by it.”

I have three goals for the new year: create, connect and commit.

Make Art Dammit!

This is the mantra from The Daily Create, an offshoot of ds106, a MOOC that originated at the University of Mary Washington. Each day, they post an assignment designed to inspire “spontaneous creativity.” Today’s assignment is to illustrate a decision. Mine is a screenshot of my Kindle app and wondering what to read next…

First Read of 2013?

As part of ds106 GIFfest, I had fun making my first animated gif in a very long time. It reminded me that I enjoy creating:  from crocheted doilies to homemade bread to flower gardens to digital media. And, I have lots of opportunities to be creative, as long as I make the time. Along with Sheryl, I’m going to stop thinking there isn’t enough time…I value creativity so making it part of my daily life is important. In a larger sense, by creating these things, I am creating a life.

Create Connections

One of the great things about doing The Daily Create is that you do so as part of a community. It was a real kick to get positive comments on my animated gif along with suggestions for how to extend the creativity. Creating is fun but being part of a creative community is even more fun. Writing this blog post is part of this goal: a way to connect with others at the start of the new year, a year in which I want to do more connecting. More blog writing, more twitter sharing, more community creating. I have recently started exploring Google+ as well. I do a lot of connecting as part of my work, bringing people together in courses and webinars and conferences, but I want to do it more personally, including getting more involved in the crochet group I joined last year.

Increasingly, our farm is becoming a place to make connections. We have gotten to know many members of our local community when they come by to get vegetables. We have also made connections with other local farmers, and the first thing I did this morning was sign up for beekeeping classes so I can get my hives up and running this year. This past summer, we donated our excess harvest to the food bank in town. I want to strengthen those local community ties, perhaps as part of a local anti-poverty or literacy initiative. Moving to the country has opened my eyes to rural issues. I’m not sure of the details yet but am committed to finding my niche in our new place.

Forge Commitment

When I look back at my reading list for 2012, it is filled with great books. But most of them are fiction. Meanwhile, there is a whole host of writing calling for my attention: get back to Kozol, dig further into the banned book list, spend time with contemporary writers about education and change, and work on the shelf of Wendell Berry’s books. I feel a deep connection to Berry as both a writer and a farmer.

This reading will help fuel my writing. I committed to a daily blogging practice this fall and then life and work got in the way. I am re-committing to that practice as I move into the new year. Writing is a way to both create and connect so offers a foundation for my other goals.

So, a public declaration of my goals for the new year…what about you? Want to join me in any of these endeavors?

 

 

 

 

 

 

On My Own

gaming, learning, Uncategorized

My current iPad game is My kingdom For a Princess. Typical building/time management game. Like many of these games, you can move forward without achieving expert level, but I prefer to play that way.  Well, I got stumped. So, I did what I always do: cheat. Or I should say I tried to cheat.

But I couldn’t find a walkthrough of this level anywhere. It was something of an outlier as it appeared after I completed a level. And no one seemed to be offering suggestions. I was only losing by a few seconds but nothing I tried made the difference. Until…

I remembered a tip I had read when I first started playing. You don’t always have to collect all the resources. Taking that advice along with my own observations, I tried something completely different, working down a different path and ignoring a few caches of materials that I had simply assumed I needed. And low and behold, it worked. I had been seduced by riches and taken my focus off the ultimate goal.

Life lesson? Probably but it is Friday and I am not in a reflective mood so for now it is just a gaming lesson and one I will continue to apply as I move into the next level.

Of Sweeping Passions and Grand Challenges

blogging, learning, teaching

Attending the TedXAshburn event on Saturday was an uplifting experience.  I was able to hear fascinating people talk with great passion about their lives and their work.  They were teachers and administrators and mission workers and musicians who all live very different lives yet shared one thing in common: passion.  Most of them had a single sweeping passion that drove them but they also had a passion for life and a determination to live a life that mattered, a life that made a difference to others.

yin yang graphicI found myself asking the question: what am I passionate about?  What drives me?  The simple answer is teaching.  I do lots of things as part of my work from organizing conferences to balancing budgets to leading book groups. But as I look across the landscape that is the life of a consultant, it is teaching that inspires me. So, I was glad to hear George Wolfe declare that we are all teachers.  I miss spending time with middle schoolers and having the feeling of influencing a young mind, but I know I am making a difference in the ways my pre-service teachers think about their classrooms and in the ways my graduate students approach the use of technology in their schools.

I have a second passion: learning. This summer, I had the privilege of working with groups of practicing teachers in schools across the country as they try to figure out the best ways to use emerging technologies to meet the needs of their students. I was the teacher as I had the responsibility of organizing our work together but, as with any teaching experience, I also learned so much from the participants just as I learn from the students in my courses. Now, as we continue our work together, I am taking on a different kind of teaching role, that of mentor, as I guide and support them as they work on implementation.

Hence the graphic I was inspired to create as I drafted this entry: we teach, we learn, all in the same time and space. I want to make sure my students know that I am learning from them and with them despite my label as teacher.

In addition to the live speakers, we were treated to two TED videos.  The organizers of Saturday’s event chose Google engineer Matt Cutts’ talk about the 30-day challenge.  Cutts suggests that you think of something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for 30 days:

While Cutts talks about doing something “new,” I’ve decided I just want to do something I already do but would like to do more regularly: write.  Specifically, write blog entries. It is something I think about a lot, even going so far as to draft entries in my head, but I never seem to get them written and published.  Life intervenes by way of emails and phone calls and other distractions.  So, starting today, I am challenging myself to write in this blog every day for the next 30 days. I make this personal challenge public as an added incentive for keeping with it.

The Present of Work

21st Century Skills, learning, thinking out loud

Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff points to an article in Forbes about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg.  The company has employees all over the world who work from home. They do have a big travel budget and are able to meet with their team at spots all over the world. And their work lives along with that of the lives of workers like me suggest that this is rapidly becoming the present nature of work so it becomes all the more pressing to help our students figure out where they fit in this world.

Tim asks the question I asked several years ago when I was describing my own “work” life: what skills and mindsets do we need in order to work in this kind of world?  In 2008, I focused on the need to find a balance between work and play when what passed for work often seemed like play.  For me, that continues to be the biggest issue: when you don’t have a particular start and end time to your day and you really love what you do, there is the potential to simply work all the time.  Additionally, since you don’t have the promise of a regular paycheck, you are always hesitant to turn down offers so you end up working on multiple projects at a time, which requires the ability to juggle activities even as it can create a varied and interesting to do list.

In 2008, my attempt at an answer to Tim’s question got at that second issue: the ability to plan and implement projects. I felt then and still do that we need to give kids more opportunity to not just work independently but to take charge of that work.  I have taught with colleagues who, when assigning individual projects, provided a packet with very prescriptive steps for how to accomplish the work. I know why they did it: they had long experience of students waiting until the last minute (the night before) to tackle what was meant to take a month of ongoing work.  My simple suggestion would be that rather than the teacher developing the schedule, make developing the schedule and interim due dates part of the project. So, learning how to work becomes part of the work itself. That’s how it goes in the real world: a client provides an overview and a due date and then it is left up to the worker to determine how and when the work gets done with check ins along the way to confer and collaborate with the client.

As for finding the balance, I think that’s a tougher problem and one I am wrestling with right now. I have a copy of this article by Tony Schwartz–The Magic of Doing One Thing At a Time–in Evernote, and I find myself reviewing it at odd moments. When I first read it, I bristled a bit, particularly over the third behavior of disconnecting completely.  In that 2008 blog post, I talked about how I almost never disconnect even when I’m on vacation and I had some perfect rationalizations for it.  But is it healthy to always be connected.  The article would suggest that it is not and I find myself annoyed to be answering work-related emails on Saturday or Sunday and then realize it is my fault for checking my email in the first place.

The lessons in the article might be good ones to introduce in some way to students.  We’ve always done it, even in the pre-digital era when we told students to turn off the TV when they did their homework. And we can integrate the three behaviors in our own lives and our classrooms in appropriate ways as well.

This blog post represents my attempt to work on the second behavior: Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. I am hoping to work writing into my daily practice so rather than immediately opening email today, I perused some of my favorite bloggers to find a topic for my own thinking.  (Thanks, Tim, for being the spark.)