Virtually Foolproof

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T. S. Eliot

I’m arriving where I started in the sense that I’m beginning a proposal for a grant to design a new online course. It’s something I’ve done before with my ECI 521 “Teaching Literature for Young Adults” course. And here I am again, only this time with the benefit of participating in the Program for Online Teaching (POT).

Week-By-Week Review

A goal of mine in writing each blog post was to write a reflective essay inspired by the resources or in Lisa’s words “to use the readings as a springboard.” It is the most difficult lesson I’ve seen my students face in blogging. It’s double jeopardy for them because they are pre- and inservice English teachers and they’ve been carefully taught to teach their students to read and respond to prompts. “Springboarding” seems like sacrilege to them.

I wrote about this challenge in Week 10, Open Platform for Teaching and Learning:

Ashley, one of my college writing instructors has had the worst time with this because she says she teaches her students to address the prompt thoroughly. Blogging is more open and can be challenging in its own way. After embracing the tension, she wrote a fascinating blog post about her efforts to not only blog as a springboard but include herself — her personal self — in the blogging.

So let me begin my self-assessment by saying how much I enjoyed practicing what I teach and that I’m even more convinced now that this type of writing requires more creative-critical thinking than simply addressing a prompt, step-by-step.

As for the rubric, I’ve condensed it to the most relevant criteria: Content of Posts; Length of Posts; Response to Readings and Other Media. Length-wise, I lean to the longer posts with lots of stories, metaphors, examples. In my comments below I will focus on what I noted content- or response-wise that I think distinguishes the post and highlights what I learned from the reading, reflecting, and writing.

[Week 1. Introduction] Slow Teaching

Ko and Rossen (2010) described the instructional design process for an online course as extremely intentional and theorized that teaching online “heightens our awareness of what we are actually doing in a classroom (p. 19). I was inspired to coin the term (at least I’d never heard it before at that point) “slow teaching” to describe this heightened awareness plus the increased amount of time that we’re reflecting as we’re reading and writing with our students.

In reviewing the post, I’m pleased because I think I’ve demonstrated reflection and explained my new insights in an interesting way with links to an archive of a “live” class and connection to Dave White’s digital visitors and residents concept.

[Week 2. Teaching and Learning Online] Begin the Beguine

“My take-away that I’ll bring to this course? Every course has a mood, an energy, a rhythm that begins with the designer’s goals for the course and vision of space that will be created for learning. *Cole Porter’s song, “Begin the Beguine,” is evidently uniquely complex and singular in its melodic and harmonic characteristics. I think every course is, too.”

Rereading this post reminds me of how much I learned from the experience of working with an instructional designer and a graphic artist to bring my ECI 521 course to life. I think this is what inspired me to think of teaching as design and has led to my new interest in teaching as a design science (Diana Laurillard, Week 31, Change 11).

[Week 3. Pedagogy and Course Design] Fora and Fondu

This post is pretty much the story of how I learned to value blogging over discussion forums, whoops, fora. I hope my experience can help those newer to online teaching consider the benefits I see in blogging.

[Week 4. Materials for Online] Finding Your Zen in Course Presentations

I’m a follower of Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen approach to presentation design and I think I did well to include and exemplar I’ve been impressed with — Allison Littlejohn’s Connected Learning Slideshare.

[Week 5. The Online Syllabus] One-Click Wonder: Taming the Syllabus

I’m pleased to see that I’ve referenced Vanessa’s “inner graphic designer” blog post. I always encourage this type of “intertextuality” in my students’ blogs and really like what it says about how we see each other as resources.

I’m feeling better about the problem of the multiple locations for content, assignments, and due dates and that the interactive syllabus will be a huge improvement.

[Week 6. Creating Presentations] Tweet to Teach

I enjoyed contributing to the “Twelve Minutes of Twitter” and sharing how I’ve modeled after exemplary online teachers (Jim Groom and Alex Couros) to use Twitter as a community-building tool.

[Week 7. The Online Classroom] The Space Between Tweet and Post

I’m glad I grappled in this post on the value of using Twitter and Facebook as course communication tools. I’ve used Facebook a lot since then for my teen writers club and teen book club. I did follow up with an end-of-course survey of my students with a question about the use of Facebook as a course communication tool. The majority approved of Facebook as a casual space for sharing thoughts, questions, and resources.

[Week 8. Creating Community] Community Is Where You Feel It

I’m pleased to have a new term for a carefully planned sequence of learning activities/experiences. It’s “pedagogical pattern” and Diana Lauillard in Change 31 encouraged us to carefully document and share these with other educators.

The pedagogical pattern that I’ve shared in this post is for creating community by completing a “funds of knowledge” inventory and partnering to create a class inventory with information gathered from the individually-created Funds of Knowledge.

[Week 9. Student Activities] Being There

This is my ode to Second Life, and I’m re-inspired after reading to continue my efforts to engage students in this virtual world. Learning and teaching in virtual worlds will be huge — we just don’t have any idea how long it might take. I’m going to continue to include weekly or biweekly sessions.

[Week 10. Open Platform for Teaching and Learning] Hands Off My Blog: Affirming the Right to Blog

As I reread, I was reminded of my opening expression of support for “springboarding” and the value of giving students a lot of freedom to learn to blog in their own style.

[Week 11. Class Resources and Intellectual Property] Just Because You Can . . .

Copyright and intellectual property has always been a big interest of mine, and I’m happy now to be able to add Creative Commons to the mix. Completing the Open Educational Resources MOOC this year was really helpful.

These concepts will be vital for students to understand and practice in the new course I’m proposing — Creative Inquiry: Through Digital Storytelling.

[Week 12. Resources Online] The Learner Will Become His Own Teacher

I still get goosebumps when I read the prediction made by Dron and Anderson: “The learner will become his own teacher.” This was my first post in support of opening up university courses to non-crediting-seeking students. Revisiting it makes me even more adamant that the courses I design from now on will be open to all who want to learn.

Week 13. Creating Class Elements Part 1: Images and Screenshots] Time for the Melinda Awards! The Oscars of Young Adult Literature

I had no idea that you could annotate a Flickr image nor that there were cool tools that would make it clean and easy to attribute and link to Flickr Creative Commons images. Thanks again to Norm for the attribution tools.

I’m glad that I integrated these new skills and tools into an actual, purposeful post. it makes the learning more relevant.

[Week 14. Creating Class Elements Part 2: Audio and video ] Cris’s Adventures in Audio Wonderland

What a coincidence that I got to record in a real radio station the same week we were learning about audio!

I have my own cyberinfrastructure with WordPress.org so I don’t face the many challenges with embedding media that those on WordPress.com do. I learned to create a single slide with audio to make an audio element more attractive in my post. A cinch in iMovie. I hope this will be helpful for those on WordPress.com, especially since my students will be using WordPress.com in my new creative inquiry as digital storytelling course.

I’m wondering if there’s a list someone has made of all the problems POT participants faced with WordPress.com? I think that could help me get prepared for helping my students who will surely face the same obstacles.

[Week 15. Creating Class Elements Part 3: Screencasting and Multimedia] Stayin’ Alive: Professional Associations in a Digitally Connected World

Again, I really appreciated being able to apply what I was learning in POT to a real need, and creating the sitemap and screencast of the explanation was really helpful. Of course, now I know that the website developer who asked for a sitemap wanted an all-text, outline format and found my mindmap a bit quaint but I still learned a lot.

I’m hoping that as I design the creative inquiry course that I can make many assignments open-ended so that students can apply what they’re learning to a personally-relevant need, problem, interest. There are many like me, I think, who like to think that we live creatively rather than turn it on and off for an assignment.

[Week 16. Our Students Online]. Twofer: Student-Generated FAQs

This was another aha! An aha that I can improve a current pedagogy pattern. Currently, students tweet a question or a response to a question during the course orientation, and these are complied daily in the Paper.li eNewspaper. Now I see the value in compiling these in an FAQ, too.

[Week 17 Classroom Management] The Poetry of Learning

This may be my favorite post! I enjoyed reviewing the trajectory of my thinking that began with Gardener Campbell’s argument for teaching for the kind of complex thinking that defies efforts to impose simple assessments and learning analytics and concluded with Kegan’s theory of self-authoring. I think I may have demonstrated complex thinking.

[Week 18. The Course Management System ] Scaling the Walled Garden

What fun! I got to use my cottage garden-in-progress as a metaphor for autonomy and personalization in course tools rather than falling back on the LMSs, CMSs, and VLEs often referred to as walled garden.

But out of respect for complexity, I did temper my rant and create a grid based on Joyce Seitzinger’s Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers that refers to David White’s visitor/resident model for online engagement for deciding when an LMS/CMS/VLE might be the best solution.

[Week 19. Web-Enhanced, Hybrid and Open Classes] The Garden MOOC

Why am I not surprised that I returned to the garden metaphor? I’m obsessed with my cottage garden!

In this post, I suggested that we add generosity to the principles of connectivism and connectivist-inspired MOOCs.. When Jenny Mackness suggested that my community garden was more, well, like a community than a network, I enjoyed reading Wenger to learn more about communities of practice. After much deliberation though, I still think my community garden is a network.

[Week 20. Introduction to Educational Technology and Instructional Design] Saving Time in a Bottle

This may be my biggest stretch as I attempt to understand how individuals’ concept of the passage of time may influence their degree of engagement in a course. I enjoyed my dialogue with Lisa about the extension of Hurst’s theory of perceived time — living withing or through to beyond.

[Week 21. Introduction to Online Education Theory] The Magic of Self-Invention

No, this is definitely my favorite post.

What I like so much is that, as usual, I am so self-centered, no, that doesn’t sound right. I mean, self-referential, perhaps, in the way that I read, relate, and then respond to our readings and other media resources. I take the the principles of connectivism to heart and exert my autonomy, openness, diversity, and interactivity to make lots of personal connections while drawing in many additional resources. I definitely am a connectivist learner.

[Week 22. Personal Learning Networks] The Enterprising Teacher

In this post, I pretty much recommitted myself to opening up my courses. It’s again a real problem that I’m facing and have chosen to write myself through it. I was asked to design a course for my professional organization and take the course inside a walled garden. “The Enterprising Teacher” came out of my grappling with this request philosophically and deciding that I’ll persevere and place “pedagogy first.”

[Week 23. Presentations] Working the Edge of My Incompetence

I liked being asked to create a presentation sharing what we’ve learned in POT. I think the assignment helps us reflect and crystallize our learning into something that’s easily shared. For several years now, I have asked my ECI 521 students to create a video or audio slide show to share the story of their action learning project — its design, implementation, evaluation, and reflections. I confess that an added dividend is that these (5 minutes or less) presentations are terrific for sharing as exemplars for future students and for teachers interested in learning about these projects.

Thoughts on POT

I called POT a “users’ group for online learning and teaching” in my Top Ten Lessons Learned in POT. In my review of my blog posts, I reread Jenny Mackness’s post on Wenger’s community of practice, I think that POT is more of a community of practice. I think that Wenger’s 5 Cycles of Value Creation could be helpful in my reflecting upon POT.

Cycle 1 –considers the immediate value (activities and interactions) that people get when they enter a community, e.g. having fun. A lot of communities/people stop here.

I think the early real-time meetings and opportunities to explore new conferencing tools were a lot of fun and helped people make connections and begin to build relationships.

Cycle 2 – considers the potential value (knowledge capital), i.e. something you get from the CoP that has potential to change something you do, i.e. knowledge capital. Knowledge capital can take different forms (see p.20 of the paper).

The weekly readings/media and reflections were designed to guide us in applying what we were learning to our own teaching. I really appreciate that we’ve been encouraged to use the media we find most comfortable and/or appropriate for what we want to say.

Cycle 3 – considers applied value (changes in practice). In this cycle stories are collected about how people use knowledge capital to change their practice. It was mentioned that data is most difficult to collect in this cycle.

This is where we are now in the process — collecting “narratives of aspiration” or “what can be because we work together” as Jenny explains. I think the final presentations serve this purpose well. It’s been fascinating watching these to see not only each participant’s realized value but how they choose to represent their learning.

Cycle 4 – considers realized value (performance improvement) – i.e. the effect of knowledge capital and changes in practice on people outside the CoP – value that can be quantified. This data is often already in the institution.

The “people outside” most affected by changes in our performance would be our students so the kind of data we and the institution would be collecting could be course evaluations and less formal surveys/questionnaires where students could respond to specific questions about various practices and their value for them as learners. So, really, the research on POT should follow participants into their teaching and results they and their students see.

Cycle 5 – considers reframing value (redefining success) – at this stage a CoP may realise that what they have been thinking of as measures of success may need to change – what they are doing might need changing. It may not be enough to realise value in the terms that have been defined. This is where is becomes evident that voices from the ‘bottom’ can change the direction of the community.

Interesting to think that after receiving input in Cycle 4 that a re-evaluation of what signifies success of POT could lead to changes in the “measures of success.” What’s not surprising is that in a true community of practice that every voice should be heard and valued, so insights or nagging questions from a newbie could be all the inspiration needed to see things differently.

And, at that point, we may “know the place for the first time.”

“You mean you give the course away for free?”

Shareski is right that teachers love to share but there’s a business model that has been superimposed on the teaching process that makes sharing stop at the Moodle/Blackboard log-in. Trying to get across this concept of free online courses seems akin to explaining that there is this new thing called the Internet coming soon where you’ll be able see files from everyone’s computer.

Bonnie Stewart has written that this new experiment of massive open online courses (MOOCs) — which are free to all — is more about augmentation to existing forms of education than disruption. And it’s a kind of augmentation that any enterprising teacher can do — as in augmenting his or her own professional learning or augmenting that of others by sharing.

My own Personal Learning Environment was pretty minimalist when I began my PLENK 10 (Personal Learning Environment and Knowledge), my first MOOC. Several MOOCS later (CKC11, MobiMOOC, CMC11, LAK11, DS106) and I’ve expanded my network and resources exponentially without spending a penny. I’ve been inspired to open up my graduate course and every other Web-based project. I can’t imagine locking any new course or project in a walled garden.

The new course I’m proposing would engage a group in collaboratively designing a collaborative critical inquiry and serve as a model for each to then design his or her own to share with the group and beyond. Following the precedent set by many MOOCs, a specified number of participants will pay to earn credit while everyone else can partake of the course to whatever degree he or she would like. This is what I’m finding is a hard sell to the professional organization I’m pitching the idea to. The resistance is an eye-opener to me because I’ve been the beneficiary of so many MOOCs that it would seem wrong not to share anything I create. I think that all will be well once the organization gets the concept that by giving away that you’re not only making a contribution but doing some very positive self-promotion.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to enjoy every MOOC I can. I’m excited to learn that a new one beginning in the fall will break both the original MOOC mold of educational theory/philosophy and the next wave of science/technology MOOCs. Would you believe a poetry MOOC?

“Poetry is really good in this setting because you can read it alone and get so much out of it, and be perfectly fine with it, but the next step was [to] hang out with some intuitively smart people and collectively — together, collaboratively — let’s read the poem together.”

So says Al Filreis who will teach the new Poetry MOOC.

I predict that Filreis’s poetry MOOC will be a huge success and that literature courses will be next. I’d love to see a book MOOC with thousands of people globally reading and discussing the same book. I know it’s been done with One Book, One City and with One Book, One Twitter so maybe the world is ready for a Book MOOC.

Oh, dear, I think I feel another enterprise coming on . . .