Okay.
The school year is over, the kids are on their way home and all our staff have got two days of professional development before the holidays.
I'm trying to encourage the use of blogging as an educational strategy for our students in the New Year and am presenting my case for the use of Blogs and PLN's to the staff in a couple of sessions tomorrow.
I owe a huge debt to the members of my PLN as, over the last few months, they have greatly contributed to my understanding of Personal Learning Networks, have asked me several pertinent questions and made some wonderful suggestions abut how to go about integrating these technologies into my school's culture. Thank you so much to Susan, Chris, Vahid, Julia, Scott, Jim, Sara, Kate and Linn. I am still amazed at how wide afield my network is spread and the different cultures that it is already influenced by.
I apologize in advance for any suggestions that haven't been put into the programme for tomorrow but I am hoping that next year will see many of the staff and students continue to develop their understanding and I will be able to make use of the many suggestions that have been offered.
I'm pushing ahead with blogging as an entry point to PLN's as I believe that text is probably the most generic and applicable medium that will apply to the participants tomorrow. Other formats may be more useful to individuals and Key Learning Areas but I am hoping that I will be able to work with smaller groups in the New Year and assist them to find the tools relevant for their own PLN's.
My plan is this:
I am going to start with the Powerpoint presentation as it says what I want it to say and I can leave it as a resource on Slideshare for people to come back to if they want to.
Having run through the presentation, I will model the process of setting up a blog on the interactive white board at the front of the room. Hopefully, I'll be able to take everyone through setting up their own blog and then publishing their first post.
The modelled blog will become a clearing house for all the blogs that the school population creates. So individuals can return to the site and find links to new blogs that may pique their interest.
I'm going to use EduBlogs, although I will leave the choice of platform up to individuals. Being a school based resource, I have to try and protect the students from adult content where possible.
I've created a Symbaloo page to provide a series of links that I hope may prove useful.
I would like to think that this will provide an opportunity for the school population to find out a bit more about each other and discover common interests that fall outside the typical domain of a 'school'. I also hope it will set many on the same road to developing professional contacts with people outside the school and our immediate local area.
Many apologies to anybody tht may have tried to leave a comment. I know I've been getting a fair bit of traffic over the last couple of weeks (I can check Bloggers Stats tab), but since trying to Disqus to field all my comments and Google Analytics to give me a bit more depth about reader analysis, I don't seem to be receiving anything on either website. Very frustrating.
Have contacted both to see if they can offer a soultion. In the mean time, if you wish to post me a comment that you really wanted to make then email me at iwoods2807@gmail.com.
P.S. don't forget to include the posting title in the subject. Ta
I have just watched this video by Dean Shareski. It is a keynote to the K-12Online Preconferenceand seems (somewhat) relevant to a couple of the points I've been making in my blog and various other blogs and groups after the end of PLENK2010.
Dean asks that teachers consider that their profession is one of sharing. That we share knowledge with our students. He proposes that the web has knocked down many of the walls teachers have felt constrained by when it comes to giving and receiving resources. In the past, geographical distances and the costs associated with reproducing and delivering materials meant that sharing was expensive and difficult. Now, with access to high speed internet, suites of tools are available to upload, download, rate, translate, comment on, edit and tweak a variety of commonly recognised and easily reproducible file-types. So there are few reasons why educators would not be able to share their resources.
Dean argues that there is actually a moral imperative to share the resources we create. Why should a fantastic resource that you have made be kept for the benefit of the students within your classroom walls? It behoves all of us to share the resources we have created. If it positively impacts on one student, regardless of their location, culture, language or age, then that resource has enriched the planet as a whole. The wider your audience, then the bigger the impact that your resource will have on human knowledge.
The link between this and my point about lurkers made perfect sense when I thought of it but now I find I'm struggling to bridge the gap. Oh well, ploughing on regardless...
One of the recurrent discussions I've been sticking my nosey beak into, concerns lurkers in PLN's. I get the sense generally that lurkers are seen as a bad thing. I dispute this as I see lurkers as people who, for whatever reason, are unable to contribute to the current learning being undertaken by the PLN.
My argument is, that regardless of the reasons, the lurkers are still learning. Their understanding of the world is improving. At some point in the future, they themselves will have the opportunity to share (ahh.. there's the link) their knowledge and, so long as their initial experience of the learning was positive, then they are likely to share that knowledge in a positive way.
If, however, their experience of the PLN left them unhappy because their lack of activity resulted in other members of the PLN complaining, then they are not likely to share that knowledge as it will bring negative emotions to mind.
My message is simple. Anybody that uses some information learned as part of their involvement with a learning network, regardless of the amount of involvement they had with that network, is increasing the general level of knowing held by the human race.
And because of this gradual increase in human understanding, we should never discourage individuals by disparaging their level of involvement.
On the contrary, we should actively work to encourage participation, not by just saying "Go on, have a go!" but working to improve the self-efficacy of an individual in regards to their confidence about posting comments or resources online. Maybe we do this by inviting specific individuals that we know outside the PLN to contribute and by explicitly welcoming them to the group. Sounds a bit of group-hug kind of thing, but we have to work to improve efficacy before they contribute. Otherwise, individuals with low efficacy will not contribute and more importantly will not share their knowledge further down the track.
One of the summer camps I worked in the USA was for children with behavioural or educational disorders (Summit Camp near Honesdale in PA). We were routinely given a short in-service before the kids arrived. The aim of the camp was to improve the self-efficacy of the kids as, outside of camp, they were at the bottom end of their peer group on any number of different scales. Our job was to ensure that every interaction was to be as positive as possible, so that the kids felt encouraged to participate in activities.
The counsellors in the camp had a video that demonstrated a great metaphor using poker chips as a tangible substitute for the amount of efficacy held in a particular situation. Those kids who had high efficacy (a large number of chips) would be more inclined to buy into an activity because they could afford to lose some chips and so could cope with failure more easily. However, those with low efficacy, or a only a couple of chips, would be inclined to horde, and not participate. Conversely, they bet big, blow their entire stack in a last ditch effort to get back in the game, and having lost it all, throw a major tantrum.
As counsellors, we had to dispense as much positivity as possible, so as to increase the kids' efficacy or stack of poker chips. I've remembered this 5 minute seminar for 13 years and still have my original blue poker chip! If anybody knows of a link to the original video and could post it here that would be wonderful.
Much thanks to Troy Adams at Camp Summit who posted me the link to the video. He says they still watch it every summer!
This simple interaction is the reason why social networking sites have pokes and hugs and welcomes. They serve to increase the efficacy of individuals joining the network and encourage them to believe that the community or network is going to receive their input favourably.
New members of your network need to be hugged or if you aren't as in-touch with your nuturing-self have their metaphorical hand warmly shaken. If this happens on a regular basis (increasing an individuals store of poker-chips) they are more likely to invest in the effort of contributing to a discussion and more likely to share the resources they have already created or will create in the future.
We all have the opportunity to teach.
We should all feel the imperative to share.
We should also acknowledge that that imperative may be overwhelmed by low self-efficacy in the face of unfamiliarity with the amazing technologies that we are faced with.
Don't encourage members of your PLN to share. Just encourage them to feel welcome. They will share when they feel welcomed enough.
This is the end of a reply I made to discussion on the Grou.ps forum. I'm trying to set up an introdction to PLN's and Blogging for my staff at school and asked the group for help/advice. Susan O'Grady commented about the frustration with the blinkered view that a lot of people have about change. Specifically we were talking about educators, but the problem isn't limited to us. It applies to anyone.
I think that the blinkers are there as a result of fear. My first school was quite get up and go but we were a hard-to-staff school in Moree. I'm in Nowra now, relatively easy to staff because everyone wants to retire to the coast. Unfortunately, an older teaching population (being age-ist!) results in more conservatism. It's hard work staying up with current trends in technology, especially if you start to feel increasingly out of touch with it. At some point, self-preservation kicks in and you stop thinking "I'm out of touch" and start to think "The World's gone mad and it's all a fad anyway!" and so stop trying.
I'm lucky in that I've been playing with computers for the last 30 years, since my Dad borrowed a Sinclair ZX80 from his work. I've (luckily) never been scared about breaking my computer. I've always just played and learned things. It was the same with PLENK. I had a great deal of fun exploring all the tools.
A large part of the fear is reinforced by the negative experiences people have had or have heard about with the web. Identity theft, cyber-bullying, and the like. My own philosophy, especially since joining PLENK, is that the more positive and progressive my online persona is, then the more resilient it will become and the less llikely that negative interactions are going to have a dramatic impact on it.
