It’s Pretty Much Never About Facebook

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Bud Hunt

I was asked yesterday by a teacher in the school district where I work why it is that we don’t block Facebook. She was concerned that students were making some bad choices, and wouldn’t it be helpful if we could save them the trouble? Honest question. And not the first time I’d been asked.

My answer was that it’s not really about Facebook. We block Facebook, then it’s about the next distraction. We block that, then the next. It’s a Web filter arms race that no one will actually win, but will take a lot of time.

Better to help students make choices by being present and in conversation with them when they make ones with which we might disagree. More difficult sometimes, but better.

Off to NCTE

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I’m sitting at the airport this morning waiting for a flight to Las Vegas for the NCTE 2012 Annual Convention. I’m eager to be in conversation and community with friends and colleagues.

And I’m also excited to find my conference schedule a little lighter than in recent trips, which means I get to do something I don’t do as often as I’d like – I get to listen. While there, I’ll be listening specifically for folks reactions to Common Core implementation, the coming assessments, and how devices are or aren’t making their way into schools and classrooms.

What else should I be listening for? To whom should as be listening? I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Writing in Public

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Bud Hunt

It happened to me again last week, as it does from time to time. I wrote something that I felt needed to write, to say something I felt needed to be said, and as a result, some people’s feelings were hurt.

I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. I suspect you don’t either. But it’s tricky to move in directions that always result in happiness for all. In fact, when it comes to issues of change and reform and fiddling with the essential elements of a system built by people, it’s likely that suggesting that something change results in someone taking it personally.

I try not to do that when the change suggested is directed at me. That said, I feel like we collectively are too nice to one another in our public discourse, or we are completely monstrous. The middle ground is narrow and slippery and tricky to navigate.

It’s always easier to talk about big problems at a global level, to suggest change for all, but not change for a specific system, like our own. But I find that the global comments directed at everyone are also too often directed at no one, and that’s no good, either.

I am reminded as I write this of the Four Agreements, a text that my friend and colleague often reminds me of. Those agreements are:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

I suspect we all struggle to live up to those in all that we do. And I try to always expect that folks are living by some version of them. But I fail to not take things as personally as I’d like all the time, and I know others struggle with that. I also know that I do make assumptions about the folks that I work with – I try to always, in the words of Adaptive Schools language, presume positive intentions in others, even when I’m not sure. Especially when I am not sure.

But change breaks eggs. And can hurt feelings. And it’d be easier to not act for fear of causing harm. I’ve always been a big fan of the Society for Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, specifically their call to those seeking truth to work, as they aim to tell that truth, to minimize harm. They advocate that this looks like this:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should:
— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

And they recognize that, while you might cause some harm, there’s often a greater good at work. Tread carefully, but don’t not tread.

There’s paralysis in the moments after words I’ve written cause someone harm, and that paralysis is poisonous. It sends my stomach on every roller coaster I’ve yet experienced, costs me sleep, and incites a healthy pile of self-doubt.¹ But I realize there’s work to be done, and things to explore and wonder out loud in public about. Many times in the almost eight years I’ve been blogging, something I’ve written has led someone to question my motives, or to suggest that it’d be better if I didn’t share in public. Maybe, I’m often told, it’d be safer to not say anything.

And I think that’s wrong. We don’t share in public enough. We avoid action too often because we want to play safe and nice and not bother anyone. That’s not the world I want to live in. That’s not the person I want to be. That’s not the world I want my children to enter into. I want them to be agents for something, rather than passive participants in their lives.

And that’ll cause hurt sometimes. Okay. I can live with that. Right now, at least. At just this second of understanding. Which I’ll do my best to preserve and protect.

How do you work to minimize harm while you also work to advocate for the change you believe in? And what do you do when you cause harm, unintentionally or otherwise?

I’m in the middle of doubting myself right now. I’m writing right now to try to free myself a bit from that. [↩]

So Why the End Comments After Two Weeks, Then?

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I’ve often read that endnotey and heavily annotated papers, returned to students after a week or two, aren’t terribly useful for improving student writing, and yet I see that that’s how many teachers seem to “grade” papers. That annotation work that the teacher “has” to do also is given as a reason why more writing doesn’t happen at school. It takes hours of time, time that’s often stolen not from the schedule of the school day, but the teacher’s family or home life.

I don’t get why we continue to think that’s the way it has to be.

In this morning’s WSJ, Doug Lemov has a piece on practice, plugging his new book, and he writes this:

The anecdote suggests the many ways that instructors, in talking about practice, are just as likely to get things wrong as to get them right. Here, social science can help. Research has established that fast, simple feedback is almost always more effective at shaping behavior than is a more comprehensive response well after the fact. Better to whisper “Please use a more formal tone with clients, Steven” right away than to lecture Steven at length on the wherefores and whys the next morning.

I wonder how we might create structures for writing with students that are more about whispering alongside them rather than authoritatively annotating their written work after the fact. The more I use Google Docs for commenting and collaborative writing, the more I feel like that’s on the right track – but how do we change the perception that the teacher’s job is to scribble all over work after the student’s on to the next thing?

Centering on Essential Lenses

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Bud Hunt

(Cross-posted from the Center for Make/Hack/Play, a new project we’ll be working on. Find the Center for Make/Hack/Play on Twitter and Facebook.)

photo: alexkerhead

Lenses are powerful tools. With the right lens on your camera, you can see things very close up, or incredibly distant. The right lenses can help you bring light to dark places, or shelter the darkness from too much intruding light. Turn the lens on your microscope or telescope the right way, and what was blurry becomes much easier to see.

Lenses are good for focusing on what matters in a given situation, challenge, or opportunity. But you need several in your camera bag if you want to see the most of the world and capture it for yourself or others.

Beyond cameras, the metaphorical lenses or frames that we apply to our experiences can help us to better understand them, or to give us new ways of seeing what’s happening to or around us. There are three lenses that seem essential for any learner’s toolbag, be that learner a student in a classroom, or one who frames the learning of others. Helping to build and shape and develop these lenses is essential for lifelong learning in the 21st Century. Or the 20th. Or the 22nd.

How you see is shaped by how you look. And we say folks should look with lenses like these.

1. Making

There’s a copy of Make Magazine on my desk right now as I write this, as much as talisman as anything else. I’m not a big DIY guy around the house. To be honest, my lawn sprinklers are in serious need of attention right now, and I am in over my head. I pity the portion of my yard that suffers while I figure that out. It’s a slow journey for me as a suburban homeowner to adapt my environment to my needs.

But I’ve always believe that making things is essential to the craft of teaching and learning. Students learn more and better and fuller and richer when they are making something to demonstrate their learning. Or making something to share their learning. Or making something to help them understand their learning. Or . . . well, you get it, don’t you?

Learning happens when we make things. We make sense of new situations. We make knowledge by processing our experiences. We make tools to help us do things we might not yet be able to do. Making matters.

2. Hacking

Hacking too often gets a bad rap, because we’ve lost the sense of the word. The original definition of a hack was a fiddle that improved a process or a program. A hacker was someone who made such changes. Hackers were revered in technology communities, because they took what was there and made it better. The first hackers tweaked some code and made their software or hardware do something that it couldn’t do before. Later, the term grew to include people who fiddled for nefarious purposes.

But the original meaning of hacking is worth reclaiming. Hackers are the folks you want on your side when something’s not working like you want it to. Hackers improve things.

Learning happens when we hack things, too, because we must understand what our situation is, and how we can fiddle with it, in order to improve it.

3. Playing

While there are many definitions of “play,” our favorite is the definition of play as the search for freedom within constraints. When a system, be it law, or culture, or “the rules” of whatever you find yourself in, blocks something, playing with that system results in your discovery of freedom or agency. That playing might require you to make something, or to hack something. But good play certainly requires that you understand what and who you’re playing with, and perhaps even the nature of the game. If you don’t like the game, perhaps you can tinker your way into a better one.

Playing with information or structures or situations can lead to powerful learning.

Centering, Then

And maybe the best sort of way to spend your time as a learner is through making, or hacking, or playing. Or maybe all three. And along the way, you might rediscover the parts of yourself that have gone to sleep. Or have never been awake. Those are the parts that you can use to make and hack and play wherever you happen to be.

These lenses can lead to agency. And that’s worth shooting for. That’s a life skill that’s bigger than science or geography or math or language arts. Applying and being aware of agency to and in whatever you’re doing, agency informed by your abilities to make and hack and play, leads to you being more fully in control of your situation.

That’s powerful learning. So enter the Center for Make/Hack/Play, an ethospace informed by and seeking to inform others of the value of making, hacking and playing. A place where it’s all about the agency of the learner and the art and habits of active learning.

Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some ideas for applying making, hacking, and playing lenses and principles to the work that should happen in schools and classrooms and learning organizations. We hope to offer workshops and work with schools and teachers and the community to build and sustain spaces for this kind of learning. While some of this learning requires specialized tools and equipment and classrooms, not all of it does. The principles of making, hacking and playing can thrive in any learning situation. And maybe they should.

So that’s worth figuring out. That’s worth doing. So let’s begin.

Responding to Responses to “What Automated Essay Grading Says To Children”

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I wrote a post the other day about what I feel like the use of machine scoring for student writing looks like to children. The responses were strong. I thought it made sense for me to clarify what I was saying, what I wasn’t saying, and what I didn’t say.

Let’s tackle the last one first. I didn’t say that I’m unsympathetic to the idea that more writing would happen if there was less grading to do. Certainly, one reason that writing isn’t happening enough in classrooms now is that there’s a perception that every piece written must be “marked” or “graded” or “bled upon” by a teacher. That’s completely false and a terrible idea.

What our students need isn’t so many end comments or suggestions for grammatical or technical correction, but they need to be responded to as writers by readers who are reading their work. Peter Elbow says this far smarter than I ever could, but we teachers should be doing less evaluating and more responding.

So, yes. Teachers are taking too long with papers. The answer isn’t to stop reading them. It’s to read them differently. Or to have more teachers reading fewer students’ writing. And we don’t need to read everything that a student writes. We certainly don’t need to grade everything a student writes.

Where I think this gets messy is, as evidenced by Justin’s comment, is the notion that students need more grading from us in order to get better as writers. They do not. They need for we teachers to write with them, and to create cultures of inquiry and reflection rather than regurgitation in our classrooms. They need to be treated as apprentice writers and brought up accordingly.

Robotic graders are for people too busy to read the work our students are investing in. That’s not fair to our students.

Now, to clarify. I’ve ben in classrooms where existing writing assessment software has been used, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I’ve seen. My most recent experience with a writing assessment tool was in a middle school classroom in my school district, where a gifted teacher was using the tool as a starting place for her writing courses. The software did free her up to be in conversation with her students about their writing. That was just the right way for her and the class to be – the students drafting, the teacher conversing and reading and being with her students.

The students wrote more and revised more. In talking with them, they felt a connection to their teacher and that she was concerned for them as writers. The software was a scaffold, and a place to start.

I was okay with that. More than okay. The teacher made the classroom shine. The software augmented the teacher. She could’ve run a similar, maybe not as prolific, writing workshop with her students using only paper and pencil.

And she read what they wrote. And encouraged them to share their writing with each other.

Writing for a machine to read all the time, though, is not really writing. It’s pretending. It’s make believe. And not the good and playful kind. It’s faking it when there’s not an other someone reading at least some of the work. We want our students to write well not because they’ll need to do so in some far off future job. We want them to write well because they have something important to say to the world right now.

So let me clarify further. I get how the computers do the “reading” that they do¹. And I won’t completely knock it. It’s handy if you need to score a bunch of tests in a hurry. And that’s one kind of writing – writing as proof of knowing. But it’s writing that assumes unimportance.

And it’s writing that suggests that the students could build their own robot essay writers to write their essays for them. In fact, that’s what an awful lot of student “cheating” cases are – they’re crowdsourcing their homework. Some students do that out of malicious intent. Others out of ignorance. But too many students fake their way through essays out of boredom, and out of the knowledge that the teacher’ll be in a hurry and probably not notice.

You’ve got to notice what your students are doing. And you’re going to miss some things. But you can’t miss all of them. Maybe even most.

I don’t think a machine grading writing is the end-all of everything I hold dear. I’m sympathetic to the argument that our students need to write more and perhaps the machines will encourage that. But the fervor with which I suspect machine grading of writing will be adopted suggests the real problem – we don’t actually want to read and write with our students. We want to do reading and writing to them. And that’s wrong.

By the way, Justin’s series on automated essay grading is worth your time if you want to understand the processes and processing involved. [↩]

What Automated Essay Grading Says To Children

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Bud Hunt

“Your thoughts and ideas and writing are so important that, rather than investing in other people to mentor you and nurture your abilities, I’m going to have you put your words into a machine so I don’t have to be bothered to look at them.”

It’s a mixed message.

I’m all for students writing more. There is not enough writing occurring in schools. But someone should be reading the precious texts we ask of our students. They are too important to be left to machines.

Or, perhaps, we should be rethinking what we ask students to write. And when. And why.

In Search of Agency

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bud Hunt

It sure seems like a lot of things just happen to people. You know, beyond our control and all. We’re well-intentioned, and rocking along, and all of a sudden, but on a pretty regular basis, something just happens.

And we are helpless in the face of all this happening stuff. Right?

Of course not, but when it comes to teaching and learning, I have come to see that way more often than I’m comfortable with, teachers and students alike just let their schooling happen to them rather than acknowledging that they have control over what and how and even when they learn. Even in the face of mandates and political pressure. Even then.

But folks feel helpless more than I think they actually are. Learning, or school, or whatever, seems to happen to them, rather than the other way around. It’s supposed to be the other way around. Folks are supposed to own their actions and habits and the way they spend their time. And our culture too often supports passivity and compliance.

I feel like folks forget they are the agents of their experiences. We have agency. Power. Control. Maybe not over everything that happens. Certainly not all. But over more than we realize more often than not.

So how might we work to build agency in teachers and learners? Let me simplify that question – how can we help folks develop the ability to recognize the constraints of a situation and to begin to play with them?

As I delve more into elements of play and hacking, and even maker culture, it seems to me that there’s fertile ground there. Play, if you recall, is the ability to move freely within constraints. Hacking is the ability to see the system – and a problem with it – and work to improve it. Making is creating. It’s fiddling with the constraints of lots of different systems. Yarn. Blocks. Food. Circuits. Classrooms. Textbooks. Laws. Whatever.

Hacking and making and playing are how you figure out where the constraints are, and how you might be able to fiddle with them. As well as what happens when you do. These skills/habits/attitudes/frames of thinking are useful when thinking about developing agency.

That was where I got to in my wondering and thinking when it was time for Michelle and Kyle and I to think about what we’re going to work on next. And then I got a whiteboard pen in hand. And we did this¹:

Enter hacking/making/playing. Or, more specifically, Hack/Make/Play. It’ll be a multiple day and ongoing PD experience that we do in the district. In conversation with other folks. If school’s but one node in the learning networks of children, well, we want to play nicely with the other nodes. And we want to use our time with teachers to help them make things. To help them understand how to identify building blocks. And to help them figure out when and how to take things apart and put them back together differently.

Building on others’ successes in maker and hacking spaces, and on the idea that learning is, to some extent, playing with information, deconstructing and reconstructing it, we would like to create some professional learning experiences that would help people to begin to feel equipped, and to a more important extent, empowered, or permissioned, or whatever the word is for “it’s okay to do this”-ed in order to build those senses of agency for teachers and students and anyone involved in learning.

Right now, it’s just notes on a board. And messy ones. We started thinking about a week-long camp. But that wasn’t right. We want lots of entry points into this kind of thinking. Lots of ways to engage and get involved. So the “days” I spell out are probably not going to happen sequentially. We don’t know yet. But I do think that each of them is a kind of entry point. Hacking the Web seems an important way of thinking. Making stuff another. Hacking curriculum? Well, you get the idea.

The essential question at the bottom is, I think, the big piece – “How do I approach a system to determine where my agency lies?” If you’re able to play, you can see the constraints. To see them, you’ve got to know how and where to look. Hacking, making and playing seem to be useful ways to answer that question. Not the only ways – not everyone needs to play with Picocrickets, or build toy cars. Heck, the knitting circles I’m familiar with in our district likely embody the ethos we’re aiming for. Everyone needs to be making something.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll begin to flesh it out and look for the connective tissue that will hold various groups of hackers, makers, and players around our district together. In some cases, we’ll probably start new groups. In others, we might help existing groups to find one another. I don’t know. But I do know that something I said earlier in this post is worth saying again – there’s fertile ground here. Hackers and makers and gamers are really good at learning.

You might already be farming spaces like these – so I’m asking: Where do we go next?

I should not be allowed to use whiteboards without some serious remedial handwriting work. [↩]

Not #beyondthetextbook. #betterthetextbook

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Bud Hunt

A big bunch of friends, associates, colleagues, and interesting strangers will be sitting in a conference room in Maryland this weekend, talking about the future of textbooks. This is market research, but hopefully semi-public and sharable to others. I suspect it’ll be an interesting conversation.

I’ve written before about some of what I think needs to happen when it comes to textbooks at schools. And my colleague, Kyle, is working very hard with our curriculum staff to prototype some of what our new curricular resources might look like. But I thought it would make sense to share some thoughts here, as grist for the mill of conversations in Maryland.

I’m hoping that folks’ll at least take some time to make sure they’re working from shared definitions when it comes to words like “textbooks” and “resources.” Might not hurt to define “curriculum.” The problem with those words, and others that are likely to come up in the conversation, is that “everyone knows what they mean.” But they know that differently. Shared definitions matter.

I’d humbly offer this definition for textbook – “A collection of information organized around thoughtful principles intended to provide support to instruction.” It’s not the best definition – I’m sure there are better¹ – but before you go too far into a conversation about moving beyond something, it’d be good to have a sense of what it is that you’re going to move beyond.

I might drop “book” from the word, but I’m divided on that, as I’ve learned it’s hard enough for people to consider that video or audio are “texts.”² The book part really bugs people. That said, a “book” has never been a codex. That’s the delivery technology.

In your conversations this weekend, try to separate the delivery technology – the way the information gets to the people – from the information you’re trying to send. If you argue that “the Internet is the textbook,” then you have failed to separate delivery from information. You can’t completely separate the two – the way something comes to you affects what you get, of course – but try to at least be aware of the two elements. And take advantage of the right delivery tools to allow for the types of stuff you want to see your textbooks do.

Also try to refrain from overgeneralization. “Textbooks are dead,” might feel good to say, or to retweet, but is a foolish statement. No, BYOD solutions aren’t the only answer. Student 1:1 environments aren’t the only answer. There is no one size fits all answer to the problems you are trying to solve. Platform and device neutrality and Web standards are pieces of the puzzle you’re trying to solve. So is on-demand printing. Or sometimes mass printing. Paper is not the enemy, nor are screens the savior.

Don’t be afraid of relying on expertise. Expertise, after all, is what you’re looking for in a textbook. The reason for textbooks is to bring a collection of human expertise on something together. But do not let that expertise lie in a publisher’s office alone.

The best textbooks moving forward are likely those that start with small building blocks from publishers, OER repositories, classrooms, websites, movie studios, and pretty much any other source for interesting information, and they become textbooks when they are hung onto a curriculum frame by a local school district. This might be done by a committee of teachers, or a small group of curriculum coordinators in a front office somewhere, but what important is that it’s not done by a salesperson seeking to please a state official in Texas or California.

The shift that I hope is coming in instructional sources is the local creation and curation of this stuff, followed by the local distribution of it to students. Some of this local curation work will be scalable and useful to other places – that is one advantage, for both business and school interests, of the Common Core State Standards. But lots of it won’t.

If textbook companies want to sell us things for and in the rest of the 21st Century, they should be selling the building blocks of content. Small pieces. They should be selling expertise and guidance in how to create these local curriculum creation teams. They might sell the platforms that help us to put the pieces together and distribute them to our communities. Discovery actually does this now – and could lead in this area.

But no publisher can sell us monolithic books written for imaginary populations of lowest common denominators. That’s why folks are so angry with and about textbooks – in the race to create One Book to lead them all, our publishers gave us stuff that wasn’t super-duper for anybody. And we bought it.

We’ve got to better the textbook. Not move beyond it.

Looking forward to seeing what folks come up with during the conversation. I suspect I’ll have more to say on the matter.

Wikipedia’s isn’t bad. [↩]
Wikipedia even has trouble differentiating between the format and the content in their definition of “book.” But the entry on the term still might be useful. So, too, would “text.” [↩]

#DML2012 – The Experience of Listening. Was (Too Often) All.

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Bud Hunt

One of my takeaways from the DML 2012 conference is that the messages of connected learning have not quite caught up yet with the practices of academic conferences.

It’s a common complaint – both that I hear and that I sometimes make – that the learning spaces that we want for children should at least attempt to be modeled by the conferences/meetings where we go to talk about and explore learning possibilities. And while I get that there’s a culture or cultures to academia, and that much of the DML community is rooted in research and dissemination practices that are fairly formal, well, I’m struck that the medium and the messages of the event seemed to be in slight conflict. Even on the mothership, the interesting stuff was still rather on the edge.

Having run conferences and meetups and managed the learning of others’ both grown ups and children, I understand that it is a most difficult undertaking, so I should say right here that I found the DML event nothing short of wicked good. I learned a bunch and will be processing some powerful learning for a while to come. And yet. I’d gently suggest to the organizers of DML 2013 a few small points.

The first being a softball. I’m sure that everyone noticed that the space where the conference was held seemed far smaller than the people of DML. I think the folks there were the right folks – it was a fascinating mix of students and teachers and professors and researchers and makers and geeks.¹ But the way the conference was set up – or at least my version of it² – the sessions were overcrowded and packed into too small rooms and I couldn’t get to many of the things I wanted to see. Even when I could get a seat in a room – and to do so I had to stake out a space early – there were two or three other concurrent sessions I didn’t want to miss.

Here’s the tricky thing. At an event where the messages from the community and presenters and panelists were all about experiencing powerful participatory learning, well, we sure were expected, by design and practice and custom, to sit still and listen a lot. Certainly, we were listening to fascinating stories of promise and practice and learning and teaching and exploration and study and wonder – but we were listeners, and that’s a very particular kind of experience.

I listened to Super Awesome Sylvia talk about making things that mattered. And I really enjoyed hearing from her, particularly when she raised the differences between her learning at home and at school. But might we have made something together?

I listened to Jess Klein explain the potential of a HackJam. I love the tools and mindsets that Mozilla is building in that space. Having experienced a HackJam³, I know they are transformative. They are a Big Deal. Might we have done that together? At least a little bit? Perhaps this happened and I missed it.

I came to one session where a presenter began to read from a paper – the same paper excerpted in the conference program – on the power of media for engaging students. The presenter read from the paper that was provided to me already.

Even in our session on the multiplicity of composition – a session that we intentionally attempted to do differently than a talking head panel – we struggled to make it an active learning experience⁴. I don’t know if we were struggling against the Internet access in the hotel, or the expectations of the audience, or the limits of our imagination. Or maybe something else.

There’s work to do.

I thought the idea of the Mozilla Science Fair – an hour and a half long reception showcasing many of the institutions and organizations doing important learning work – was a great idea. But an hour or so of crowded tables meant we got short looks into thoughtful work. Those same twenty or so tables should’ve been parceled out over the entire event, with five at a time running engaging events modeling their fascinating and engaging practices. There was a big empty space in the conference area that cried out for us to use it for playing and making and exploring and doing together.⁵

How can we collectively do a better job of modeling the structures, habits, and aptitudes we want to see of learning and learners, particularly when DML learns together? And what can we do with the listening we’ve done to improve the experiences that are to come? Yeah, I’m saying “we” and “DML,” because, like Chad, I’m willing to say that I am engaged by this group of thoughtful people. I’d feel lucky to be counted as a member of the DML community. I so want them/us to do well.

And there’s room to grow.

That said, I didn’t see lots of IT folk there – but perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough. Or maybe operations types aren’t the crowd of DML. Oh. That’d be sad if it were true. [↩]
Everyone, you know, has their own conference experience, a collection of what they saw, with whom they spoke, and a variety of other factors. No two people have the same experience, of course. I may well have had the “bad” one. [↩]
That was masterfully facilitated at ISTE 2011 by Chad and Meenoo. [↩]
The writing some of the participants shared during that session, I thought, is worth more of my time. [↩]
The impromptu Occupy Badges session – a spillout of the overcrowded session on Badges – was a good example of what might’ve happened in that space. [↩]

Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Change