Presenting Blogs and PLN's to my school

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.

"Sharing: The Moral Imperative" and Hug Your Lurkers

Sharing: The Moral Imperative



I have just watched this video by Dean Shareski. It is a keynote to the K-12Online Preconference and 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.

Long Time, No See!! Thoughts on a MOOC

Most of the big discussion on PLENK2010 this week seems to be about how quiet it has become around the discussion forums in the last couple of weeks and the value of lurking. I was only able to get my head in the game about the middle of the course and had a good two or three weeks of ideas and input (from my point of view) before other demands loomed and I had to drop out of sight again. A good deal of the course therefore, has for me, been spent lurking or gleaning. Occasionally I feel able to create a post or add a comment, but much of the time I am put off because I'm too far removed in time from the discussion.


Time is of the essence (but not available)
The problem I've had with the MOOC is more about the timing than anything else. It is difficult to keep up with the amount of discussion that takes place and because of the way my particular combination of web tools works, it is difficult to have a late comment (i.e. one added more than a couple of days after the bulk of the discussion has ended) discussed.

I've been using Netvibes as my aggregator and whilst I was keeping up to date it was great. But because it doesn't notify me of new additions to discussion posts, I haven't necessarily been aware of whether my comments have themselves engendered any discussion.

Lurking, I think, is a by-product of not being able to keep up. I haven't yet found a way of keeping track of all of the little discussions and postings and their associated ripples. I think this is a vitally important and missing part of the process since a PLN works because people respond to each other.

Lurkers may add the odd comment here and there but get discouraged because they aren't necessarily noticed by the rest of the pack, who have already moved on. I haven't really noticed the cat-i-ness that has been mentioned a few times over the last few weeks, but I wonder if that frustration is a result of comments and postings being "ignored". Human nature, in my experience, looks to blame people for the unpleasantness that comes their way, but I am convinced that quite a lot of this unpleasantness is just "the way it is", i.e. a part of the system, not the fault of individuals. What needs to happen then, is for course conveners to take a long hard look at the system and question whether it meets the needs of the participants?

Architects design, Engineers make the building stand up!
I know this isn't the fault of the MOOC conveners, but I wonder if the architecture of the course is actually counterproductive when used with a Moodle platform. We are trying to get Moodle up and running at our high-school and one of the problems is the course architecture. We can set different faculties up and have different years/subjects within the faculties, but then we are immediately stuck at trying to put everything else into the last remaining tier. Everything ends up looking too crowded and confusing.

The MOOC needs to be set up by topic rather than by week and they need to be kept open all the time. My reason for this is that, a discussion might come up in Week 2 that attracts some interest and people want to follow the discussion. The conversation may have various tags/topics/categories which could be associated with it.
Six weeks down the track, someone else raises a point that could be easily linked back to the initial discussion but isn't because few people are that aware of the huge number of tags/topics that were raised in Week 2, let alone those over the entire eight preceding weeks!

How one is meant to keep a track of all the different threads and discussions I don't know but I imagine it will have something to do with tags. I think that the PLENK twitter network and the associated hashtags may be what I'm trying to describe, but not having access to twitter on a regular basis has prevented me from really seeing its' potential.

The MOOC has become quite messy and unwieldy and difficult to navigate around. I find it really quite hard to find the list of readings for the beginning of each week without trying to backtrack through the Daily archives. I've got no idea where a particular discussion thread was unless someone points me to it. Overall, some of the important learning points are probably going to pass me by without me noticing, which seems a shame.

So, for PLENK2011, how should the course be organised?

Ideally, I would like individuals to engage in a MOOC in their own time. We all have other commitments, so it seems fair to assume that although I may post a comment in a timely manner, it may not be read for a while. When it is read, I would like to have any comments fed straight back to me.

Also, when I am running a couple of weeks behind schedule and trying to play catch-up I would like to be able to post comments or new discussions on old topics and have them read and commented on in return. This is easy for my blog so long as I actively encourage my PLN, but I have found a bit problematic with the Moodle.

Learning by Doing
In terms of continually encouraging new people to join in the conversation we need some mechanism by which they can actively participate in conversations that are old. After all the discussion in a PLN is what creates the learning, so excluding someone from the conversation just because they are 3 months behind everyone else isn't in keeping with the spirit of a PLN.

On the contrary, it would actually be beneficial for not-so-newbies to improve their own mentoring skills by assisting newbies along the way. However, this does require individuals to step up to the mark and take on these responsibilities as they arise.

I watched the Tom Chatfield's TED video the other day and wonder if some sort of incremental scoring system (like experience points) may be useful in determining whether someone should adopt a more responsible role within a PLN. Your PLN should include a certain number of experts, peers and newbies so that you are able to fill the roles of expert, peer and newbie yourself. Your "score" should be a rough average of the scores of those members of your network. When your score starts to rise above your PLN average, you start directing some of your "newbies" to assume responsibility for the new "newbies" coming into the system.

I've tried to represent this here:


The diagram seems quite limiting in that I've set it at three levels but that obviously isn't necessarily the case. Also one individual may appear in more then one network and at different levels.

Active Mentoring
I suppose the idea I'm trying to get across is that unless there is some architecture set up like this, the "new-newbies" coming in at the bottom do not have someone who is only slightly above their level of understanding helping them along the way. The pressure is all on the course conveners to try and encourage the "new-newbies" and those who have been in it from the beginning.

I think it is important for the the "peers" and "newbies" to assist the "new-newbies" because this in turn reinforces their own learning (the best way to learn is to teach). I also think the "experts" have the right to delegate some of their responsibilities further down the chain so that they can devote more energy to their own learning.

Of course, all of this interaction is published on course blogs and people know where they are because of the mind-maps and organisational structures that are published. It is important though that we all know roughly what level of expertise someone has. So we come back to a point raised in the PLENK forums a few weeks ago about how individuals describe themselves in their profiles. This may have been discussed, but I haven't managed to find it yet. ;)
In summary then;

• The MOOC needs to be structured so that learning is not limited by the time you have available to participate
• There needs to be some way of scoring within a PLN so that it is easy for individuals to see how they compare with other members of their network:
• this will encourage new-newbies to participate if they can see that the bulk of members of the network they are joining aren't too far ahead of them
• it will also allow experts to estimate the level of understanding of the peers and newbies in their network and delegate some mentoring responsibilities to them
• All of the artifacts produced by individuals within the course need to be tagged in a way which is easily navigated, so someone (or someones) need to arrange organisational maps of the tags that are easy to find and use.
• The artifacts need to be accordingly mapped into the organisational map so that individuals on their learning journey can see if they are headed down a path already well-worn by previous MOOCers

Fairwell and Adieu you Fare PLENKish Ladies (and Gents)
I joined this course with no expectations. I'd done nothing like it before and had never heard the term Personal Learning Network. I'd never really understood the educational buzz about "collaborate, communicate and create" replacing the 3 R's. I've come away from the course with an astounding wealth of knowledge about new tools and technologies and have learned the names of a few people who I will continue to follow and converse with in the future. I am also trying to work out how I can best incorporate PLN's into the architecture of learning in my high school. They seem such a simple and yet powerful resource for learning.
Ultimately, I think the MOOC has broadened my horizons about the term "life-long learner" and given me a view of how modern technologies can have a huge impact on the efficacy of an individuals learning journey.
Long may my own journey continue.

My PLN "The Duck"

At the risk of repeating myself in numerous places...

I finally had a bit of a breakthrough with using CMAP to chart my PLN. I don't really know what clicked but it all just flowed onto the screen one morning. The duck is purely serendipitous. The map just ended up in that vague shape and given that I'm a visual learner and like to make people associate understanding with visual cues, I pasted the duck in.



On reflection there are a few issues:

• I don't yet use some of the tools I've listed
• I'm fairly sure there are also some missing
• I'm not entirely happy with the use of the clip art picture. I think it is free, but I'm not sure and I think I may end up doing my own duck (which may be fun)

I know there are some tools not listed because although they are used to interact with the network, they aren't actually a part of it. I'm thinking specifically of Netvibes (which once I worked out how to use has proved absolutely invaluable) and Delicious and Diigo (also essential) and Facebook/Twitter etc

I think that they are part of my PLE but have yet to concrete my understanding of the term.

As soon as I'd added the duck in though, it did occur to me that the PLE should be done in a turkey and that I needed to include a chicken in the middle. A turducken seems too good an opportunity to pass up :)

Why teach PLN's?

I'm Teaching but they don't seem to be Learning

I've been trying to work out why the PLENK course peaked my interest in the first place and I think I've come up with an answer.

I started teaching because of my experience at Camp Chipinaw in NY. I found that I got a great deal from working with kids who were able to make huge developments in their self efficacy through positive experiences in quite challenging environments. I then spent about 10 years following a career path involved in experiential education. I only entered mainstream education when, having arrived in Australia, I found that the outdoor recreation industry here is more seasonal than in the UK (go figure!!). I trained as a PE teacher and then, when it became apparent that there are too many of those in NSW, I retrained as a Maths teacher and, in the process, returned to subjects I pursued rather unsuccessfully in Years 11 and 12. (A case of those who can do, those that can't... !).

So I don't feel particularly successful as a Maths teacher. I love the idea of teaching and I've had successes in terms of "light-bulb" moments, but not many in my current field. I can get by and I can teach the content, but I don't seem to be able to get the students into a state of "flow" (by which I think I'm referring to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development)

Paddling the River PLENK

I'd not really thought about it in this way before but the ideas were flowing on Friday night and this was one that popped up. When I'm in a particular mood (relaxed, pressures off for the day), I sometimes find that what I am thinking or writing about continually triggers fresh ideas or insights. I'll start by jotting down a few ideas and then an hour later realise that I've filled out several pages of notes. Up till now I've enjoyed these moments of productivity but not really considered the vehicle by which I can disseminate them and receive feedback and criticism. My PLN is the most obvious mechanism in which to do this.

What I enjoy about PLENK is the feeling that I'm involved in a highly productive network of learners and experts. Some of the content is way over my head, but it's not hard to find things out and catch up. It is also very empowering to be able to contribute to discussions. Even if my input is not very ground-breaking (or even helpful), it can generate feedback and further discussion and so help expand this gradual unfolding of knowledge.

In terms of flow, the river analogy has already been used several times in the various discussions and web posts. But I'm a paddler at heart and so will string it along a bit further. Engaging in this course does feel like I'm sat on the side of a river watching a lot of information drift past. Every so often I jump in and float along with the current by joining conversations and making comments on people's posts. Every so often I'll get swept into an eddie where I'll decide to hop back on the bank again or wait until someone throws a metaphorical rock into the pool and the conversation sweeps off on a new wave.

I still feel, very much, the novice paddler. I stay close to the shore, not yet brave enough to head into deeper waters and paddle with the pro's. The fear of capsizing by posting a discussion topic or blog post that tries to chart new territory that has already been charted and finished by others! I know that my fear in this regard is unfounded. Throughout the course, the support for newbies has always come across as whole-hearted. I know there will be people around to put me back in my boat and help me figure things out, point me in the right direction.

The classroom as a component of a Personal Learning Network

As a teacher, I love the idea of my students being exposed to a supportive learning environment in which the emphasis is on them to contribute and improve each other's understanding of the course. I want the physical classroom to become a part of my students personal learning network, as opposed to it being the only place where they learn Mathematics. Of course they learn maths in hundreds of different places, but they don't make the connection between what they do in "real life" and what they do in the classroom.

I want the lesson to continue outside the classroom and I see PLN's as a method of enabling that. The important element being that the network is explicitly about the students interactions with maths and maths ideas as they travel through their day. The more those interactions are published by the students and then read by their peers, the more noticeable they will become to everyone in the class. I've introduced Edmodo to my classes and we'll see how they respond to it to the stimulus questions I've posed on it.

But to make the most of the opportunity, I really need to be able to teach them how to build their own PLN's. To stop relying on the educational structures that have been imposed on them since primary school. To be brave.

My view of education doesn't fit the current model. It's never really worked for me, neither as a student or as a teacher. Experiential education had a major impact on the direction my life and career took and inspired me to be a teacher. But my classroom isn't based on experience and it is, quite frankly, boring. I believe that teaching students to develop their own personal learning networks, and engage with conversations outside of the classroom is closer to the idea behind the one-to-one laptop programs appearing in schools then the more traditional methods of education. But I can see that implementing this will require a fair bit of work and, worryingly, a departure from the traditional curriculum. A risky move really given the students whose futures I am experimenting with.

PLENK - Too much information...

There is so much information to absorb in this course. I thought last night that I may just have to resign myself to working through everything more slowly than the offical course allows and hoping that the Moodle and resources will still be open after the ten weeks are up. The downside is that most of the important discussion points will probably be over. I'll be tagging comments on but everyone else will have moved on. This flies in the face of the idea that I am part of a network of people who are learning together.

Lindsay Jordan has made a nice post about how to effectively manage the overload of information and I hope that some of her pointers will help me deal with the information overload.

I suppose I should be attempting to answer the questions I posed in my first post.

1. How applicable do people see this in high school or primary school settings? 
2. How do people envisage assessment occurring? 
3. Would assessment be a case of submitting pieces of work, or would it be a case of gradually developing and quantifying the respect of your peers as you progress from novice toward expert in your particular interest area

Are Personal Learning Networks a modern entity?

Hi there. This will be a short post as I've spent all night trying to work out how to use Adobe's Contribute to edit my blog only to figure out that it is much easier to do it online. Maybe I'll figure that out at some point in the future.
Well I'm enjoying what I'm reading so far. The "7 things you should know..." peaked my interest immediately. The idea that an individual creates their own network of peers, experts and resources in order to follow their own particular interest is fascinating.
I wonder for how long they have actually been occurring outside of formal education. It seems to me that an individual would probably have developed a PLN as they try and learn about any undertaking. I try to paint every so often and I get better at it by asking people for suggestions or criticism about what I do. The people I ask are students, art teachers, my peers, my sister (who is a graphic designer), and others. I have books of my own and borrow from the local libraries as well. I have occasionally used the web to find forums or watch videos.
My point is that PLN's have probably always existed in some form or another for as long as people have tried to improve their skills by developing a network of experts, peers and resources. The addition of technology into this mix has just broadened the distance between the individual nodes of the network. I can ask my sister in the UK just as easily as one of the art teachers in my school. The Internet wasn't available 100 years ago, but the ability to network certainly was.
From that point of view, maybe the idea that PLN's are an effective tool for education won't be that hard a sell. The issue would be to show how this potentially open-ended and unstructured system would lend itself to the assessment of required outcomes for students.
.....added later (found comment in similar vein in discussion on Moodle)
Some questions:
How applicable do people see this in high school or primary school settings?
How do people envisage assessment occurring?
Would assessment be a case of submitting pieces of work, or would it be a case of gradually developing and quantifying the respect of your peers as you progress from novice toward expert in your particular interest area?