Bud the Teacher

The more I work as a professional developer and teacher of teachers, the more I am resolved that I will do my best to never create a resource for one situation that cannot be useful in another.  There are too few of me and too many needs in my district to do otherwise.

I think, though, the careful consideration of audience and purpose that I engage in before creating a resource is a valuable one for all readers, writers, and creators.  Perhaps there’s value, in a connective writing class, in spending some time on rhetorical analysis, specifically in the vein of thinking about multi-purposed work.

This isn’t a new statement for me to make, either here or in my classroom(s), as I’ve always operated under the assumption that the best writing happens when writers consider their audience and their purpose for writing, allowing them to determine the focus they should take in a particular piece.  This idea (often called the rhetorical triangle, with each of the points defined slightly differently by the person(s) doing the defining) can and should be expanded to include all kinds of composition and writing, not just print texts.  This leads me to the teaching point that I would want to include in my connective writing work:

As much as possible, all texts should have a life outside of the classroom.

This “extra-curricular life” can take multiple forms, and won’t make sense for all types of writing and creation, but I strongly believe that we should never create something that will die after a teacher has blessed or cursed it with a grade.  I’ve always believed that, but the more I learn, the less I’m willing to suggest that such multi-purposed work should only happen at the end of a course, after all the practice work is completed.  Project-based learning, too, embodies this philosophy, as projects should have a life outside of the classroom.

What does “extracurricular life,” or multi-purposed work, look like in a professional learning experience for teachers?  One way I attempted to create a multi-purpose-able resource in CyberCamp was through the series of Works in Progress (WiP) presentations that we asked every participant to do.  As I explained at the beginning of CyberCamp:

One of the values of CyberCamp is sharing.  Talking about what we’re up to is a good way to better understand our own work, and the act of sharing it with a group is useful, too, because it allows your fellow CyberCampers to help you out, be it through good questions, suggestions, or becoming an extra set of eyes and ears in the world seeking resources to help you with your project.

Because sharing is so essential, we’ve set up time here at CyberCamp for everyone to have a 20 minute block of time in which to share their work.  Each day, we’ll ask two of you to share what you’re working on and then we’ll give ten minutes to the CyberCampers to give you some constructive feedback.  We’ll be talking more about what “constructive feedback” looks at CyberCamp, but know that you’ll be getting help - not criticism.

Again, because sharing is so essential to what we do, we’ll be adding an extra level of sharing to your process.  We’ll literally be sharing your Work in Progress conversation with the world and archiving your presentation here on the blog using a tool called Ustream.  This will allow you to share your work with, and to learn from, the world.  While that can be scary, trust us when we tell you that your work is important and worthy of being shared.

Not to toot our own horn (or whistle, to stick with the camp metaphor), but it seems to me that a twenty minute investment of class time here (thirty minutes if you leave time for some feedback) leads to an excellent archive/snapshot of a work in progress, a chance to get very specific feedback, and a permanent record of the event that is available for further scrutiny, reflection and commenting.   Not bad, as far as multi-purposing goes.  Add in the fact that these presentations also become resources for other people working on similar projects as well as models of our activity for future CyberCamp experiences, and we’ve got some handy multi-purpose resources.

Other examples of multi-purposing in CyberCamp include our project proposals as well as our blog.  Pretty much, any well-written blog (as a whole, not each entry) is a fine example of multi-purposed writing.  But perhaps that’s another post.

One of the struggles, of course, with trying to build multi-purpose resources, or to find ways to ask learners to do so, at least one that I worry/wonder about, is making sure that I’m never putting the needs of future learners or secondary audiences ahead of the learners who are the “primary” audience for a particular activity/event/experience.  Let me try to say that better - we can sometimes create problems for our class when we try to create opportunities with “outsiders,” particularly if we’re forcing a connection that maybe isn’t organically or authentically there.  Connections just for connections’ sake are bad ideas, maybe even educational malpractice.  The trick becomes figuring out where those lines and boundaries are, and when to say no to kind invitations to meet/Skype/join up with others who may or may not be in a similar place, educationally speaking.

Another struggle, I suspect, is figuring out how to contextualize those creations in a way as to make them as useful as possible.  I’m beginning to practically understand why so many higher ed folks talk about learning objects and repositories and a slew of related issues, and struggle with those things, too.

At the risk of getting a little too meta, I’m going to be talking through my history of thinking about linking, or conective writing, today during CyberCamp as a part of our series of “Works in Progress” conversations.  I’m inviting you, if you’re interested, mostly to help me model how a backchannel and uStream conversation can be of value to a face to face group, but selfishly, too, because I’m always interested in how others are thinking about these ideas.  So, if you’re willing and able, join us at around 11:30am MST for a short uStream presentation.  All the details are on our wiki.  

Thanks in advance!

Beginning today, I’m going to be co-facilitating my school district’s CyberCamp, a two-week summer institute focused on teachers building projects that help them to integrate technology into their classrooms.  You won’t see me much here, but I do hope you’ll join us over at CyberCamp’s digital HQ as we do some intense learning and thinking and questioning together.

In fact, I’m counting on it.

One of my hopes for CyberCamp is that we are able to model how transparent and connected learning doesn’t have to be limited to a specific time, place and location, that teachers in my district can learn from you, and that you can learn from them.  We’re all in this together, and that’s a good thing.

We’re putting so much of CyberCamp online in part to honor the wisdom and knowledge of our teachers, but also because we want to model the power of learning networks as professional learning communities.  But that only works if people stop by and join with us in learning and sharing and thinking and questioning and . . . well, you get the point. If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, then you know that I think we’re all better when students and teachers all share and learn and take turns leading.  Teaching and learning can be so isolating - but it doesn’t have to be that way.  CyberCamp, I hope, is an attempt to demonstrate that.

So, I’m writing this post to formally invite you, whoever you are, to come and join in the fun.  And the hard work.  I’ve nothing to offer you except a great deal of learning.  But if you do come and leave a comment or two when you can, our CyberCamp will be all the better for it.  I thank you in advance, and hope to see you at CyberCamp.

Oh, and by the way - we don’t own this model of learning.  There are plenty of folks trying this type of work - and I am grateful to them for sharing what they do as they do it.  That said, I wanted to explicitly remind you that, if you like what you see here, feel free to take it and adapt it to your communities, to your needs.  I pledge to you that I’ll happily come to your CyberCamp.  In fact, I look forward to it.

I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year.  This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence.  We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.

The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online.  One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work.  My personal web presence should be like that, too.  But I’m not sure that it is.  I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people.  There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year.  (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important?  Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole?  Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?

I think, too, about what “web presence” means.  Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing.  Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.

These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate.  This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment.  I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back.  My work this weekend will continue to influence that work.  Lots to learn.  Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with.  We should all be so lucky.

    I recently finished reading Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, and I’ve got lots to say formally about it.  But I only have a minute at the moment and I wanted to ask a question.  In the book, Papert forwards the idea that we should have as big a body of knowledge about learning and how to learn as we do about teaching and how to teach.  (He even postulates at one point that “learning theory” is much more about teaching than it is about actually learning. And I agreed with him.  Too often, we think of education that is something that we can do to someone, rather than with someone. We certainly can’t do it for someone.)

Since I’d never actually heard of the word before I read the book, I’m guessing that it’s not a big term/idea in teaching and learning circles.  But I don’t know - perhaps I’m out of the academic loop a bit.   It seems that the term does surface in some academic arenas, and has for some time, but I can’t get a sense of its meaning in those contexts. I guess I’m writing right now to both ask about your knowledge of the term as well as to ask if you think it’s true that we spend way too much time thinking about teaching without taking the time to think about learning.  Or, rather, are we too busy teaching to bother to learn?  I’ve read plenty of posts that suggest as much, and in fact, I think I’ve said it myself.  If that’s the case, what are we going to do about it?

Papert says it, at one point, this way:

…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning. (p.72 - from this page of quotes, which are worth reading) 

It’s frustrating that this isn’t a new idea, but that it’s still revolutionary.  Read the book.  I’ll give it a more formal review later. Short version: Two thumbs up.  Mindstorms is on my nightstand, now, sitting on top of my XO, which is appropriate for so many reasons.

This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day.  I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world. 

I can’t promise that I’ll be here blogging all day - but I hope to be.  Today’s a big deal for me.  I hope it’s useful to you.  I’ll live blog as much as I can, but you might want to head to the wiki to learn more or to join in the conversations via Ustream.  Ben’s liveblogging, too. (Scroll to the bottom.)
 

Today’s podcast, recorded yesterday, is a short recording about Myra and her work with our district library clerks as they learn more about he read/write web.  Enjoy.

Links
Myra’s course
The "23 Things "  project - which is formally called Learning 2.0
An article about our school district’s Tech Fair (which I don’t mention in the podcast, really, but I’m pretty excited about)

Today’s podcast is a reflection on some experimentation I did today with Brian C. Smith as we’re both learning how to collaborate via the XO.  In short, we were impressed.  Enjoy.

Links
Chris Craft’s post
Xochat.org
Tom Hoffman’s hardware/software post

    Today’s podcast is a semi-rambling review of the XO.  I also manage to mention Learning 2.0 (have you registered yet? We’d love to have you.) and a couple other little things.  Enjoy and let me know - what are you doing with your XO?

Links I mentioned

The OLPC Wiki
XoChat.org
Educon
Learning 2.0

I didn’t mention this really useful walkthrough of the XO user interface.  But I should have.