Nurturing your PLN for everyone’s ongoing professional development

This is the blog post I intended to fire off after the last TESOL Arabia conference March 11-13 at Zayed University in Dubai.  I made a presentation there that I did not complete.  The part I gave was recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/100312vance-dubai.  The slides of all I had intended to say are here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/nurturing-your-pln-for-everyones-ongoing-professional-development. Since they were posted online they have been favorited by a number of people :-)

 

http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10410955223 shows the above Twitpic of Gavin Dudeney presenting at TESOL Arabia, Dubai, March 13, 2010.  I took the pic on my iPhone during his presentation, Twitpic'd it, and Gavin showed it to his audience when he checked his Twitter feed 5 minutes later in his presentation.

TESOL Arabia conferences in the UAE have not historically been well connected.  Often they are held in hotels where there may be wireless only in the lobby, or perhaps even in some of the presentation rooms, but in all venues presenters could expect connectivity to be patchy to non-existent.  Certainly you wouldn't plan to rely on an internet connection under such conditions, and so I arrived at TESOL Arabia this year with a PowerPoint presentation safely stored on my laptop and backed up to a flash drive, having made no preparation for delivering it to anyone beyond the brick and mortar campus at ZU apart from a mere mention on my PLN that I might try to webcast from there.

The part of the presentation that I didn't give because I ran out of time was to be a complaint against conferences which forced participants to remove themselves from their networks (fortunately, not an issue at this happily interconnected conference in Dubai - the only issue was that hardly anyone was using the connectivity; but that's the next step beyond the scope of this post, and something I hope to address in a TESOL Arabia chapter presentation from Abu Dhabi April 10, 2010; preliminary info at: http://bit.ly/Apr10_prez_TA_Auh).

As I ran out of time, I was leading to the question of what TESOL Arabia, or any viable configuration of practitioners interested in futhering their professional development, is or should be.  To arrive at what I was leading up to I had presented a distinction between groups, communities, and networks, and was showing how knowledge resides in networks and is passed around the network through modeling and demonstrating practical applications of knowledge applied to practice. In this model of how knowledge is disseminated in the 21st century, I suggest that it is never appropriate to cut anyone, at any time, students in class, participants at a conference, or knowledge workers attending meetings, off from their networks.

As a result of this trend, professional development less and less happens mainly at conferences. For many professionals, development happens every day in the course of using Skype, Twitter, or Facebook, reading blogs and wikis, or viewing and sharing tutorials and presentations on YouTube, TeacherTube, Drop.io, uStream, TED Talks, etc. etc.  This means that for many professionals, face-to-face conferences are of decreasing importance.

As most of us agree that learning is mainly social, such conferences seem most appreciated for their networking potentials rather than for the papers presented there, which more and more often can be read or their recordings viewed online, as archives of such materials become more and more widely distributed. Travel to distant cities to participate on site in conferences has become inefficient and less necessary than before, and is less crucial for gaining knowledge than opportunities available in cyberspaces dedicated to education.  Accordingly, one can argue that face-to-face meetings (in the workplace) risk a similar obsolescence, or that the notion of forcing students to attend classes is becoming archaic when podcasts of lectures are available, and indeed interaction around their subject matter can be made more rewarding using a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online resources.

In other words, to face-to-face gatherings, add a networked dimension.  Hold the meeting, or conference, or class in a brick and mortar edifice as usual, but configure the space so that it lets in the network. Now you have the best of all worlds that blended learning has to offer.  Participants in the physical spaces are able to look each other in the eye and benefit from each other's company, but they can share what they are doing with the wider world, or draw in people and resources from their PLNs or personal learning networks. In this way consumers of content at a face-to-face gathering can generate content online, and as this content is reflected on, remixed, and recycled, and filtered back to participants either physically at or virtually enjoying the live event, everyone involved would be learning more than they possibly could if the event were cut off from the networks of those who participated.

There is opposition to this notion. Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls is an interesting article, recently discussed on the Webheads list, about how PLN's can be distracting, but I think this will continue to be a problem only in the short term.  This article calls attention to how inappropriate use of PLNs in contexts where greater focus is called for can be detrimental to the individuals who engage in such behaviors.  With greater experience and sophistication, such behavior is likely to dissipate, as people come to distinguish the affordances of network enhancements to how they learn in face-to-face situations from uses of networks that are decidedly unprofessional in such contexts.

I had meant to suggest in my presentation (as I did in the slides) that in future, successful conferences and professional organizations will have to combine opportunities for face-to-face interpersonal connection with the connectivity to allow seamless interaction with distributed personal learning networks. Those that do not will become decreasingly relevant I am aware that not all agree that this should be the case. As the article indicates, not everyone sees networks intrusion as a positive force in the dynamics of face-to-face interaction.  So I was hoping to raise the question, if conferences are networked, who benefits? who loses?

I argued this point February 20, 2009 at the AACE's Spaces of Interaction online conversation on improving traditional conferences, http://aace.org/globalu/. The last slide posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences has the dinosaur image, and the talk itself was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

At that event, George Siemens agreed that conferences that do not provide and encourage networking are "unacceptable" but this is what one expects at annual TESOL conferences, for example, which are always held in corporate convention centers, and where getting computers inside and setting them up and networking them is done by unionized labor, and any bandwidth provided is done at a surcharge that prices it beyond the range of most individual educators.  Even to get a data show to make a presentation there, the presenter has to pay an inflated fee to the convention center to cover the costs of union wages and to line the pockets of the shareholders investing in the convention center, a mindset quite at odds with that of most educators who pay so much of their limited resources to attend those conferences.

The CALL-IS (interest section) in TESOL has done a remarkable job of gaming this system so that a room full of Internet ready computers has been available for presentations at all TESOL conferences since the mid-80's, and I've made a number of presentations at TESOL-sponsored events where thanks to TESOL subsidy for its own sponsored events, Internet was provided.  

One of the most memorable of these was at an academic session CALL-IS put on in Salt Lake City in 2002 http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/evonline2002/academic.htm.  Each interest section has the right to place its academic session in the program and as the event is TESOL-sponsored it is possible to request an Internet connection.  Thus the panelists at this event were asked if they NEEDED an internet connection. Bearing in mind that this would be expensive, and even when Internet is expected, experienced presenters always prepare a backup slideshow that can be delivered unplugged if needed, and so as not to waste precious resources, every panelist but me said, no, they didn't need it.

What would I need it for?  I wasn't exactly sure, but I had the notion to stream the session live. The year before I had been asked to give a plenary address at an IATEFL conference in Nicosia, and we had streamed that along with several other of the talks at that event http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/cyprus2001/index.html.  This had come about because on a mailing list, Neteach or TESLCAL, someone had mentioned they wanted to do a voice hookup for educational purposes and Eric Baber had replied that he had an underutilized streaming server which he was using to deliver live voice and video language courses from NetLearn Languages that he would be willing to offer as a solution to what the lady wanted to do.  

I twigged immediately to the potential of what Eric was offering the community.  I wrote him and asked if I could use it to stream from Cyprus.  I don't remember how it came about, but Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, who was in charge of the conference, was so keen on the idea that eventually all conference presenters were asked if they would consent to be streamed, and for all those who replied affirmative, Eric set up web pages where each presentation could be accessed live, and where the recording could later be replayed.  He did this all for free, and the conference was a great success especially due to this remarkable commitment and innovation.

Curious footnotes:

• I was the first presenter at the conference, the first to be streamed, and the first to be recorded.  When the second plenary was streamed and recorded, the person managing the stream at our end, unfamiliar with the process, over-wrote my file with the recording of the second presentation, and my talk was forever lost to posterity.
• Michael Coghlan, another visionary as ahead of his time as I, was the only presenter at the conference who had offered to be streamed IN.  That is, whereas a dozen presentations were streamed worldwide FROM the conference, only Michael had realized he could take advantage of the option of making a talk at the conference from a remote location, in his case Adelaide, Australia.  Michael's session was a concurrent one.  All the presentations took place in good sized auditoriums, in which Michael's talk only had a few attendees.  I was managing the stream in from the podium, Michael asked me more than once how many people were in the audience, and more than once I evaded the question, not having the heart to tell him only three or four people.  Not only that but one lady in the audience was a fan of Michael's and had come to the presentation specifically to meet him.  When it became obvious that he wasn't actually there, she complained loudly how cheated she felt when in fact she was witnessing a pioneering event illustrating how we were on the verge of realizing grand potentials for global collaboration in independent learning and ongoing professional development.

This audience reaction to our early online adventures was nothing unusual.  Later in our collaborations together, Michael and Buthaina Alothman both flew in to Abu Dhabi to present with me live and in person from the main auditorium at the Petroleum Institute as a part of a virtual event: one of John Hibbs's last epic 24-hour Global Learn Days http://bfranklin.edu/gld/.  I had announced the event to my colleagues at the PI but unbeknownst to me there was an important rugby match on at the time and I was later told that that event was well attended.  Michael and Buth and I presented from the stage of a 100 seat auditorium, which was packed during our presentation with three or at the most maybe 4 people, but, get this, we counted at least 60 in the synchronous online chat.  Buthaina archived the event here:  http://alothman-b.tripod.com/wia-buth-gld.htm.

Although the concept has been slow to take off, it's getting these days more common for there to be strong online components at on-site conferences.  I can think of numerous examples: Shanghai 2.0, NECC, Educon 2.0 etc etc.  IATEFL has been expanding its online events; for example at Harrogate this year: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/, and CALL-IS has made a major effort to announce a series of streamed events from the Eletronic Village, Boston TESOL 2010, http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/TESOL/2010/Webcasts/Sessions-Schedule.htm.

But getting back to the UAE, the TESOL Arabia conference this year was at Zayed University in Dubai, a remarkably beautiful campus with ubiquitous Internet. I got to the conference in time for the plenary at 9:00 on Thursday. I saw Gavin Dudeney with a spare seat beside him, sat down and said hello, and he remarked that the wireless was working quite well there.  I pulled out my iPhone and sure enough it was.  I tweeted to my network that this was a good sign.  I might be able to present live at 11:00, as I had "mentioned" earlier on the Webheads list.

After the plenary session, I went to the room where my own session would be and half listened to the presenter at 10:00 there while firing up my laptop and connecting flawlessly to the wireless.  Elluminate came up perfectly.  I uploaded my presentation to the whiteboard in Elluminate. Elluminate is available to Webheads thanks to a grant from Learning Times, whom I can never thank enough for this remarkable service, one of many pieces loosely joined in a network of globally connected educators.  Speaking of networks, I then tweeted to my PLN that I was preparing to go live online, and I sent an email to the webheads list with the same information. When it was my turn to set up at the front of the room I had already been joined by one or two people in Elluminate.

I was easily able to record my presentation, both voice and webcam.  I turned the cam occasionally to give a sense of the surroundings, not just present a talking head.  Cristina Costa joined in and although circumstances compelled me to present somewhat didactically, I managed to engage her for a moment in reminiscence of a chat we had had the summer before with Etienne Wenger, where she had remarked that she knew she was a member of a community of practice when her practice changed. The audience, sometimes sceptical at such events, warmed to the occasion and became noticably relaxed and engaged as we went along.  Their satisfaction plus that of the online audience, plus getting everything to work and connect, all presented more than one ball to juggle.  The last ball to pull out of the air is closing the Elluminate session, then retrieving the URL of the recording minutes later, then posting the URL onto various spaces including Twitter, the webheads list, and blogs.  Later someone asked me to put it on Facebook, they could get it there.  The Twitter posting makes a particularly good link for the slides and session recording.



The point I'm making here is that this is the way conferences should be.  We shouldn't all have to leave our networks at the door, or at home, or wherever the last hotspot was.  Face-to-face conferences are augmented by connectivity and backchanneling among participants, as are our classrooms.

This is another important point: how we connect at conferences is how we connect in real life.  And that should carry over to how we connect with students and they with us and how we all connect with peers both face-to-face and online.  Conferences are places we go to network and to learn.  As I pointed out in my presentation, echoing Stephen Downes, teaching is modeling and demonstrating.  This is what we should be doing at our conferences, modeling the tools we can use with each other and YES with students.  None of this connectivity should be blocked or suppressed.  The Washington Post article referenced earlier may indicate an attention deficite disorder inherent in multitasking but it also reveals a phase through which we all must pass.

As a teenager I used to show off to peers by driving fast and irresponsibly, in an era where seatbelts were not the norm.  Now in the UAE I see much evidence of this same lack of sophistication. But we all grow out of it.  We educate one another how to maximize the potentials of the technologies we harness while avoiding the pitfalls that many of us toy with when the technlogy is new to us.  In other words, if people are checking cell phone messages in class or meetings, diverting attention from the meeting itself, they are hopefully going through a temporary phase.  In time it will become understood that there is a time and place for that.

It used to be that in my classes students would sneak onto MSN messenger.  Now they almost never do that. These days they might switch in and out of Facebook, but Facebook is less intrusive.  Use of mobiles is more of a problem now, but in time we will have learned how to use them appropriately to effectively leverage our learning by widening our networks and accessing data needed for class or workplace intelligence. (Actually I found today two of my students on MSN, but it turned out they were in communication with each other, back-channeling in the classroom. I thought that this was an appropriate use of the tool).

I remember one time Gavin mentioned in a recorded presentation his discomfort with people interacting with their media while he was presenting, but now I'm glad to see that he has his iPhone and laptop with him and happily uses them in enjoyment of always-on connectivity. The back channel at the conference was all aTwitter.  At one point Gavin asked his Twitter network for advice on what to do evenings in Dubai, and I rose to the occasion with the definitive 140-character travel guide for Dubai: "@dudeneyge in Dubai, go to the creek, cross it in an abra, walk through the souks at either end of the abra ride, Deira & Bur Dubai, & dhows" <http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/10368130620>.  I don't know if Gavin ever got the chance to actually follow my itinerary, but at least he and hundreds of my followers were 140 characters wiser for what Gavin was missing.

That's how knowledge spreads throughout a network, and what we should see a lot more of at face-to-face conferences, wherever they are held, although where they are actually held is getting to be increasingly irrelevant in our increasingly networked world.

PS: I just stumbled on Terry Freedman's compilation of resources at http://www.ictineducation.org/free-stuff/ and found there an article on "What I look for in a conference". On the wish list is "#7 I wanna be connected: The best conference will have wi-fi throughout the venue, including the hotel. There must also be a conference Twitter feed, and Flickr and Technorati tags."  Indeed.


TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/230310advanced

Paradigm Shift as an Agent of Changing Practice

I hope to have the opportunity travel professionally this summer and give some live face-to-face presentations along the way, starting as early as May 7-9 (if invited to speak at an IATEFL conference in Belgrade), CALICO in Amherst June 8-10 (if invited to be on a panel there discussing a book I helped co-edit), and culminating in Sao Paolo at BrazTESOL July 19-22 as part of this year's annual Future of Learning in a Networked World event (http://flnw.wikispaces.com/brazil), with stops along the way or afterwards in Argentina if specifically invited to come there.

This will not be my first FLNW event. I participated in FLNW in January 2008, documented here:

• http://www.vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#080112
• http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008/01/future-of-learning-in-networked-world.html

If given the opportunity, this is what I hope to be speaking on ...

Teachers these days, struggling to cope with technology overload, can sometimes misconstrue the nature of the beast.  Dogme language teachers espouse teaching "unplugged" but are grappling with to what extent technology facilitates or detracts from that process (see links below). Musicians who play unplugged for example, still use technology to amplify their clean sound, and perhaps podcast their recordings. Technology, therefore, helps musicians to be heard when digital literacies are understood by those around them. Used correctly, technology can greatly facilitate the process of language learning; incorrectly (as with bands who rely on technology) it would be a distraction, perhaps an obstacle.  Prensky has gone so far as to say teachers shouldn't use IWB's because they would use them inappropriately, but their students should use them (http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/prensky-on-interactive-whiteboards.html).

Why, what assumptions underly so provocative a statement? 

I'd like to talk this summer about the dozen paradigm shifts that users of technology need to understand before they can apply them in ways that can be transformative to students.  When teachers think of technology challenges they often have in mind learning to use the latest educational and administrative gadgets and software systems,such as those listed by Allen in his article in TESOL Arabia Perspectives, to which I responded here: http://multiliteracies.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-can-teachers-deal-with (and this article contains as well my latest characterization of the dozen paradigm shifts).  This mindset addresses certain functional literacies skills that often fall short of accommodating how technology is transforming the way we view and interact with one another in our world, with immediate ramifications to our educational systems and our students themselves.

Using technology is only partly about interfaces and settings.  It's more correctly about having a theory of how people learn, and how the many different technology tools can be made to work together to foster development in a subject matter in ways commensurate with that appropriate model of learning.

Web 2.0 is the driving force for technology to be applied in constructivist and connectivist models of learning.  Web 2.0 puts learning where it belongs, in the hands of learners.  I will explain how a number of Web 2.0 tools can be used to enhance language learning by allowing learners to produce artifacts and leave them online where other learners can find them and interact with them in a process that develops communicative and critical skills while intrinsically motivating students to produce quality work in response to a palpable awareness of audience (e.g. http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com, Stevens 2009a, and Stevens et al. 2008).

I hope to talk this summer about how student peers can find one another in a seemingly chaotic online environment. The quick answers to that regard the paradigm shift from taxonomies to folksonomies, such as tagging and RSS, which I will also address. I could perhaps elaborate on the concepts in workshops such as the one delivered here: http://justcurious.posterous.com/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most-0; however, a short presentation can only give glimpses of the paradigm shifts necessary to move away from the old ways of information dissemination through more traditional gatekeepers.  In order empower learners, teachers must truly  grasp the fundamentals and principles of applying technology to transformative learning. To accomplish this, practice with peers is necessary, where teachers themselves become lifelong learners and mentors for one another while sharing discoveries and experiences with students, as I point out in Stevens, 2009b.

I have had long experience in many online and face-to-face settings with helping teachers form communities of peers, and suggesting ways that they can develop their own PLN's, or personal learning networks to ensure their continuous lifelong learning (Stevens, forthcoming). Teachers who agree that learner autonomy is something that should be encouraged and developed in students should see the need to cultivate autonomy in themselves. So I will address the issue of teacher autonomy, where the teachers are in their roles by virtue of being, as David Warlick suggests, "master learners," (as I did in my presentation November 6, 2009 entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks, relevant links blogged here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/11/modeling-social-media-in-groups.html; and in written up more formally in Stevens, 2009c).

Change is the most important outcome of this approach to professional development.  Too often teachers are put in situations which are labeled professional development but which in reality are (a) driven top-down, (b) don't assess or address teacher needs, and (c) do not lead to development. Teachers who drive their own professional development through participation in learning communities and PLNs are constantly expressing and assessing each other's needs, and promoting professional development on an as-needed basis. Once one is familiar with and comfortable in this style of learning, it is only a short leap to applying it to students.

Etienne Wenger once asked Cristina Costa how she knew she was participating in a community of practice, and she replied, "When my practice changed." (Wenger, 2007)  This is the kind of change I hope to be an agent of if I am invited to present this line of reasoning at any professional gatherings this summer.

References

Stevens, Vance. (Forthcoming). Webheads and Distributed Communities of Practice. To be published some time after October 2009 by the TESOL EFL IS Newsletter, as part of a summary of the EFL Academic Session from Denver TESOL 2009. Draft here: http://tinyurl.com/vance2009denver

Stevens, Vance. (2009a July 15). Engaging Collaborative Writing through Social Networking. In Koyama, Toshiko; Noguchi, Judy; Yoshinari,Yuichiro; and Iwasaki, Akio (Eds.). Proceedings of the WorldCALL 2008 Conference. The Japan Association for Language Education and Technology (LET). ISBN: 978-4-9904807-0-7, http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/proceedings/proceedings.pdf pp.68-71.

Stevens, Vance. (2009b). Life-long learner autonomy meets Electronic Village Online. TESOL Arabia Learner Independence Special Interest Group, Conference Newsletter 2009, p.9. http://tailearn.googlepages.com/LISIGNL09.pdf

Stevens, Vance. (2009c). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/

Stevens, Vance, Nelba Quintana, Rita Zeinstejer, Saša Sirk, Doris Molero & Carla Arena. (2008). Writingmatrix: Connecting Students with Blogs, Tags, and Social Networking. In Stevens, Vance & Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, Co-editors. (2008). Special Feature: Proceedings of the Webheads in Action Online Convergence, 2007. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 4: http://tesl-ej.org/ej44/a7.html

Wenger, E. and Nyrop, S. (2007). Communities of practice in an interconnected World: New geographies of knowledge and iIdentity. Keynote presentation at Webheads in Action Online Convergence (WiAOC 2007).  Retrieved October 9, 2009 from: http://webheadsinaction.org/wiaoc2007/EtienneWenger; audio recording at: http://streamarchives.net/node/56 and http://streamarchives.net/node/55.

Links for Dogme:

• Scott Thornbury's "Teaching Unplugged" page: http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm
• SEETA course with "Myths about the 'anti-tech' crowd" (must register first): http://www.seeta.eu/course/view.php?id=28

Who are you and what have you done lately?

The last time I was asked to write a personal assessment of my work I turned it into a blog post: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/who-are-you-and-what-do-you-do.html.  That was in November 2007 but now two years later, the time has come again to take stock of my professional self-perception, and here it is.

I feel that my work is having an impact on the field of social networking in education, and is getting some attention in the area of learner independence as well. I was invited in 2008 for example to participate in a Learner Autonomy SIG Pre-conference event at the annual IATEFL conference in Exeter, and I was asked to contribute an article to the SIG Newsletter on the topic. My take on the issue is that teachers must first become truly autonomous; and this in fact is the connection with social networking.

Stevens, Vance. (2007). The Multiliterate Autonomous Learner: Teacher Attitudes and the Inculcation of Strategies for Lifelong Learning Independence, Winter 2007 (Issue 42) . Retrieved November 9, 2007 from http://www.learnerautonomy.org/VanceStevens.pdf

• Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/lets-start-with-teacher-autonomy-multiliteracies-and-lifelong-learning

• Recording: http://tinyurl.com/468qrp

There is no good comprehensive handbook on social networking of which I am aware (the best references on the topic tend to be circulated around the network). Social networking has to be done. In other words, in order to learn about it, people have to teach themselves through informal learning and collaboration with peers. The collaboration is important because in order to DO social networking, you have to have a network with which to experiment. So my work recently has been to promote and examine the formation of social networks and how they work. It is complex but intuitive at the same time; still the complexity makes it difficult to introduce the concept to those who are not engaged themselves (overtly) in social networking. This is again the link with learner autonomy. Teachers who know something about the topic introduce its many components gradually to those who want to learn, a premise which I have exercised in my several annual renditions lately of my course in Multiliteracies taught for TESOL (http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com), parts of which I have included in materials on Computer Literacy for students I teach face-to-face (http://issuu.com/vances/docs/social_networking_2009_lessons1-3), and also a short course for teachers taught for the first time in January of 2010 (http://tinyurl.com/21centuryskills4pdo).

My work with this process of introduction of both the content and process of social networking has evolved from looking at the topic from the evolution of groups to communities, to arrive at a perspective of distributed learning networks (I was invited to talk on groups, communities, and networks at the most recent TESOL conference, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/global-and-local-visions-webheads-and.html). This has taken me through a line of inquiry examining the perspective of communities of practice, which had great traction earlier in the decade, and which I have been often asked to speak on recently. When I was asked to design and teach my TESOL course on multiliteracies a few years back this gave me further perspectives on the issue and brought my inquiries to bear on social networks, and the new theory of connectivism, which is considered to be a participatory or connection multiliteracy, depending on how that topic is viewed.

The many views on the topic are part of a paradigm shift for education, the nature of which my work has also examined (http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/how-can-teachers-deal-with-technology-overload/). The many aspects in perspectives that this shift impacts deeply influence my view of the role of computing in learning, and how students and teachers should be learning to prepare themselves for changes that can be expected in the way they will work and learn into the next decade. Most of us can sense that this change is impending, and I feel that my work helps educators to grasp the nature of that change and see how they can leverage it to their advantage and to the benefit of their students. I have feedback on this as I participate in communities of hundreds of teachers worldwide, and coordinate several, including a significant community called Webheads, much appreciated by its members (http://webheads.info). As I am often asked to speak on the topic, or am followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/vances), or re-tweeted, or as comments are added to my blog posts, as people ask me to write articles, or to edit sections of professional journals, I become aware that my work is trickling out over networked communities and having some impact and is earning a modicum of respect among others interested in the topic (http://vancestevens.com/papers). I’m also encouraged my work is gaining in interest where I teach at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi:
http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/class-finale-january-19-2010-live-worldwide-webcast-from-7-to-830-a-m-gmt/ .

Another aspect of my work is change agency. I realize how difficult it is to be a change agent, and that change typically takes a long time to first penetrate and then filter up through an institution, but I’m getting some indications that the filtering has begun at the PI, and I hope to be a part of that through some aspects of social networking that might benefit colleagues where I work, and which could be taught (that is modeled, demonstrated) in turn to students (e.g. http://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/earthbridges-earthcast10-and-earth-day-at-pi-april-22-2010/).  After all, students are the focus of this work, but students by definition are learners, and that includes all of us.

Links updated after now-defunct Ning and Posterous blogs exported to Wordpress

Is DOGME for adVancEducation?

According to its YahooGroup members listing (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dogme/), I joined Dogme on March 8, 2002 .  I started following the group after James Farmer put Webheads on to it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/121 (in the 121st msg posted to the group), but as my interests gravitated toward edtech, I eventually lost interest and lost track.  Since then there have been about 20 messages mentioning dogme in the almost 25,000 posted to the Webheads list, but only recently have there been overt recommendations for Webheads to pay closer attention to what was going on there; e.g., Graham Stanley early in 2009: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/21479.

The founder of the concept for teaching (drawing on the film genre) is Scott Thornbury, and its minimalist essence is captured in the front page of this website: http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/portal.htm (with links to a longer article on "teaching unplugged").  There's a Wikipedia entry on Dogme here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching, where it states succinctly that "Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching and encourages teaching without published textbooks and instead focusing on conversational communication among the learners and the teacher."

Now, what got me started on this posting was Karen Sylvester's tweet, here:
http://twitter.com/kalinagoenglish/status/7784038613

So, I bit. I popped over to http://eisensei.blogspot.com/2010/01/dogme-el-what-t.html and left a comment; to wit:

"Ok, here's Dogme from the perspective of teaching some other language as a foreign language. I wrote an article here Stevens, Vance. 2006. Learner strategies at the interface: Computer-assisted language learning meets computer-mediated communication. In Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century, Kassem Wahba, Zeinab Taha, and Liz England (Eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., a pre-publication version of which I put online here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/cairo2004/hbalt-gvs05sep.htm At that URL, scroll to just above and below the section "A syllabus for language learning". I think that's Dogme."

I'd like to reproduce here what I said in that article, regarding my experiences in learning Arabic unplugged.  The teacher referred to below as "Salem" is in fact the best Arabic teacher I ever had, Haridi Salim, and is still in touch with me from time to time from Cairo:

"...  students made no elaborate preparations but spontaneously brought realia to the class. Simply put, the only operative rule was "No English, Only Arabic." We formed classes of students who would follow this rule. Salem, whose other classes were conducted in more traditional vein, often remarked about how much he was learning about language teaching through the experience of working with us. We were all learning that authentic materials were more motivating than traditional ones and that communicative approaches allowed us to use what Pinker (1994) called our "language instinct' to efficiently learn the language. This efficiency was also improved by focusing our concentration on Arabic, allowing us to actually think in that language, and cutting out the factor of code switching that constantly throws students off in bilingual language classes. We were learning what we needed to know about creating materials once the technology caught up with our need to find and present authentic language learning materials in Arabic.

A syllabus for language learning

This section elaborates on the idealized syllabus for learning a language such as Arabic and how it can be augmented with technology. The syllabus accrues from experiences with "'Salem"' described above and can be minimalistically characterised as finding teachers who will use only Arabic in class (spoken and written) and putting them before students who agree to read, speak, and write the same. I have had the opportunity to replicate this configuration in two learning situations since that time and in both instances, the technique was markedly effective with small groups of students who self-selected to learn on these principles.

However, creating such a pure and facilitative learning environment in an Arabic class is not easy in practice. I have faced problems with Arabic teachers who are not convinced teaching with only discourse in their target language is possible. They feel that students' first- language support is necessary and they tend to over-use it, thus suppressing opportunities for students to internalize patterns discernible from rich target language input. I have known Arabic teachers who refuse to teach Arabic script in the belief that this would be too great a leap for their students. However, the converse is true: using student-language emulations of target language features often disguises the patterns inherent in the target language and can actually hinder the learning of the language through elucidation of it's otherwise predictable features.

Resistance also comes from students who don't realize the possibility of learning Arabic using only discourse in the target language. They feel that first-language support is necessary and tend to ask questions in their native language, thus suppressing opportunities for internalizing patterns discernible from rich target language usage and input (when the response is made in the target language rather than the student's native). Oddly, some students in this group are themselves language teachers who teach classes using the target language only yet still persist in relying on support in their native language in their own Arabic classes rather than persevering in the target.

Once all concerned agree to learn and work in Arabic only and settle on a time to meet regularly, finding things to do in the class has never been a problem when the students are encouraged to raise topics for class discussion. They have the essential ingredients for good language learning; namely, an informant, a commitment on the part of students to digest the material, and materials proposed by and therefore relevant to the students themselves. The classes I've experienced have all gone well ala munasib (according to the occasion) but both students and teachers must seed discussion and activities."

Ironically that article is about teaching "plugged", not "unplugged".  The latter term I know means (in music) without relying on electronic enhancements, but the article itself is about how technology can enhance the dogme approach.  As I say in its conclusion, it shows:

"...how instructional technology supports current trends in language teaching methodology by allowing students to engage in meaningful, authentic, and truly communicative activities that enhance their ability to learn languages such as Arabic through the use of the Internet.. Computers have allowed the achievement of constructivist outcomes by facilitating the establishment of learning environments which have moved:

• from making behaviorist teaching paradigms such as tutorials and drill and practice more efficient;
• through more cognitive approaches such as simulations and better use and analysis of corpora and multimedia;
• to comprehensive access of a world of authentic target-language documents via the Internet; and
• most recently, to all of the above plus genuine communication and empathy with native and non-native speakers of Arabic through the formation of communities of practice online and in blended learning situations."

Graham Stanley, Dennis Newson and Gavin Dudeney are all vocal protagonists of dogme, and enthusiastic teachers, learners, and builders in Second Life, so I'm sure there are no real implication in the term "unplugged" that teachers should eschew educational technology (after all, unplugged musicians use microphones and sound systems that project what they do onstage to the far corners of concert halls; or in cinematic terms, even the most purist dogme director would still use hi-tech cameras), but I wish here to drive home the point nevertheless, that technology is capable of enhancing what Thornbury declares is the thrust of dogme: "to restore teaching to its pre-method 'state of grace' - when all there was was a room with a few chairs, a blackboard, a teacher and some students, and where learning was jointly constructed out of the talk that evolved in that simplest, and most prototypical of situations." Why not, then, a few rezzed furniture objects embedded in a holodeck in Second Life, that do marvelous things when clicked on, giving learners that much more to wonder at and talk about?

Thornbury, S.  (2002) A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues 153, Feb/March 2000. http://www.thornburyscott.com/tu/Dogma%20article.htm.

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. Harper Perennial (Harper/Collins Publishers): New York, NY.


TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/100118advanced

Modeling social media in networks and bringing the pieces loosely joined together

I haven't posted here for some time, but I've been quite busy, as you can see from my last-century web page at http://vancestevens.com/papers/. I've got a number of articles in the works for 2010, and in the last days of 2009, I managed to complete and submit in Wordpress my latest article for the column I edit four times each year (and often write myself) for the TESL-EJ online professional journal.

The article is entitled Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/. It's about the importance of teachers developing, nurturing, and interacting in networks and then modeling and demonstrating within those networks in order to scaffold each other's professional development. The Implications section starts out by saying:

"A major key to success in keeping current in one’s field is in nurturing productive contacts within a network ... the skill of leveraging networks is increasingly important in the 21^st century in plumbing and aggregating knowledge when that knowledge base is forever changing at an increasingly accelerated pace. For appropriate use of online social networks to be taught in schools, teachers themselves must be familiar with their impact on learning. One problem is that teacher-trainers without sufficient experience with technology and who are rooted in old-school methodologies are simply not modeling new age learning behaviors for their trainees by showing them how to reach out to networks."

It was only the second time I had used Wordpress for my submissions, and the first time, for the article I submitted 3 months ago, I scrupulously followed directions including watching a 20-minute screencast on using the interface.  But this time around I tried to wing it and missed some steps, resulting in my article being the one to hold up the works as the editors were trying publish the issue.  Pressed to finalize my part of the process, I got up at 5 a.m., went through the article one last time, put in some final touches, and hit the publish button, then headed down to my car to drive off to work.

When I commute I listen to my mp3 player, and the program that I had been listening to was from the Worldbridges megafeed, and it happened to be Wesley Fryer speaking with Kim Cofino, who had recorded a keynote presentation for the 2009 K12Online conference entitled Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education, http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=424.  Worldbridges had hosted a "fireside chat" with Kim, mounted on their website at http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/4613. I had been listening to the first part of the chat earlier, so the part that came on just as I was pulling away from the house was the part of her keynote where she was talking about the importance of nurturing networks, how those already in such networks can model their cultivation for others, and suggesting six ways to start one.

It was uncanny that as I pulled out into Abu Dhabi traffic I heard Kim say almost exactly what I had just been working and re-working in my head in my apartment just then and for the previous week as I massaged my article to completion. Her words resonated with me at just the right moment, and I felt as if a jigsaw puzzle of thoughts inside my head and Kim's were coming together on my drive to work.

I decided to extract the part of Kim's talk where she made those points and share it here: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/f/KimCofino2009FiresidechatPLE.mp3

My daily commute is an important part of connecting with my network for me.  This is a time when I listen to what others in my network have recorded and podcast online, and I often arrive at work itching to get onto my computer and check out web sites and URLs I've heard mentioned while I was driving to work.  Podcasts are a crucible of ideas for me, like Twitter, something I can monitor in the background and extract the nuggets of knowledge that are lurking in the stream as I run the sounds between my ears.

When Kim, and her colleague at International School of Bangkok Jeff Utecht, gave their keynote talk at the WiAOC online conference in May, 2009 (http://www.webheadsinaction.org/node/364), I introduced them by telling the story of when I met Kim in Bangkok while traveling with the FLNW (Future of Learning in a Networked World) traveling roadshow in January, 2008.  This story is a great illustration of how networked worlds collide to release energy quantum levels above that of the disconnected component parts.

The FLNW roadshow is an un-event, loosely organized in 2008 by John Eyles who got Michael Coghlan, Trish Everett, and I to meet him in Bangkok for a few days or a week or two, whatever time we could spare, of hopping from one educational institute to another as John worked his way toward Thai TESOL in Chiang Mai and on to a village in Laos where he would deliver some books he had arranged to be donated there.  Our first event was a stop at ISB.

• I recorded the event here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
• and Kim blogged this: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/always-learning/04cc1ccaf9963683f905ae93219700b5

Talk about coming full circle and fitting together more pieces of the jigsaw, I have just re-read that and noticed where Kim said in that post "Not only was it fantastic to have three so well-respected and knowledgeable visitors talk to our teachers in a casual format about their questions, issues and problems, but it was so great to have them reinforce so many of the things Justin, Dennis and I say on a daily basis."  So here we are, echoing one another again.

At the time of this event I had never met nor heard of Kim, she had not yet become a part of my network, and I was there simply because John had arranged a van to pick us up and take us to ISB. John had mentioned we had been asked to talk about reading, so I had prepared a slide show on that topic, and as one does when illustrating the future or education in a networked world, I had arranged with Doug Symington on Vancouver Island in Canada to webcast our meeting, which I had hoped to stream from Bangkok out to the networked world at large.  We had of course asked in advance about the facilities at ISB and we were told we could have access to anything we wanted, but a disconnect occurred when we arrived on site and found that this was true only if we had specified in advance what we needed, and then their IT people would have allowed us to breach their firewall.  However, I arrived and discovered that having arranged with Doug to meet him online at a certain time, I was totally unable to connect to Skype or Elluminate, and I imagined Doug having rearranged his schedule to accommodate ours and having set up a webcast, trying to reach me but being unable to, and not having any way to tell him what was going on.

Meanwhile, the ISB folks had set up their own webcast via Ustream, which they had working, having made the necessary arrangements with IT.  And who should be in the chat there but Doug Symington!! So the network had come to the rescue.  Doug was in Kim's network, whose tendrils had reached out and roped him in, and all was fine, the network had saved the day.

I find it really fascinating how a system so prone to chaos and entropy so often works through the wisdom of the crowds that populate it to keep the pieces loosely joined all heading in the same direction.  Something is quite in synch here, and I hope in this post that I've been able to get at one small part of it.

You can share this post via http://tinyurl.com/advanced100101


Comments from the Twittersphere (Jan 14 and Jan 3, 2010):

Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks

I'm filling in this placeholder with links to my presentation at the AVEALMEC/ARCALL online conference on Social Networking, November 5-8, 2009, http://avealmec.org.ve/.

• The complete schedules and PDF promotional documents for this conference are here: http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/
• This link gives a good overview of presenters with links to their presentation recordings http://avealmec.org.ve/moodle/course/view.php?id=4

My presentation is entitled Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks. The presentation took place November 6, 2009, at 18:30 GMT.

• The writeup is here:
  http://tinyurl.com/vance-socialnet09
• The presentation recording is here: http://tinyurl.com/vance091106wiziq
• The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/modeling-social-media-in-groups-communities-and-networks-socialnetworking-2009-online-conference
  

As the presentation was on knowledge dissemination and sharing throughout networks, it naturally touched on Creative Commons, so I took care to license the presentation with the attribution 3.0 license. I selected jurisdiction to be USA but I could have left it "unported"; anyone know what ramifications that would have?


Modeling social media in groups, communities, and networks by Vance Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at advanceducation.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vancestevens.com.

If you have any comments on the presentation, you are most welcome to make them here.

AVEALMEC Conference on Social Networking November 5-8, 2009

In the picture you can see a group of people I'll be joining in early November at a conference with infinite heart but no walls. But I'm having a heck of a time getting the slide show done for my presentation there because I'm so distracted. I'm up before dawn. I was looking for graphics till late last night searching Google Images and Flickr and Creative Commons for images I can use in my presentation. This alone could take hours wandering through other people's flights of fancy, which they have elected to SHARE; to allow me to put online if I will only acknowledge their hand in their own work, to pay forward to the community (Mireille's term on Webcast Academy). Creating a slide show for a respected audience is a journey where every step takes you halfway there; you never arrive!

I stop to reflect here, how did I KNOW about Creative Commons, and what it means? How did I know I could find CC images at Flickr and the Creative Commons website, and turn the license filter on for Google Images? Did I read that somewhere or hear it word of mouth? Yes, I did, but not in a book or in any traditional media. As we speak, Twitter is constantly bleeping my radar, and even my Gmail is flooding me with messages on the latest SCoPE seminar, The Art of Teaching (looks to be a great one). I just joined the Educator's PLN Ning ... now that's kind of a mirror within a mirror, messages are coming through for existing participants to Twitter in more (yet another layer of mirror within mirror).

I'm not sure what's going on with George Siemens's and Stephen Downes's CCK09 at the moment but I heard on EdTech Weekly that it had only a few hundred participants, not bad for a free online course, but down from its mega-status of thousands in its initial rendition. I know that Alec Couros is giving an interesting Open Course at the moment (which I had every intention of joining but never did), and Leigh Blackall is starting one as well, both of these inviting participants from anywhere, for whatever reason or benefit they hope to gain from it. I've never met either Alec or Leigh, but I've invited both to give keynote talks at WiAOC free online conferences, and both readily agreed. Why? Heike Philp has offered to try and set up a live synchronous discussion online with anyone her PLN suggests. Someone said, ok, I'd like to talk with Noam Chomsky. So she asked him, he agreed, she set up the discussion, and now anyone can replay the recording. News about all these events reaches not just me but everyone in my extended social network in ways we didn't have available last year, last month, yesterday even ... how about tomorrow, Google Wave anyone?

These events and courses have a wonderful dynamic, one that I apply instinctively to the EVO Multiliteracies course I'm about to moderate again. I don't really have time for any of these courses, nor for preparing for my ALVEALMEC presentation for that matter. My professional development cup runneth over with creative juices that spill in all directions. Matt Montaigne is one of these teachers who seems to be everywhere at once, pushing people forward in their learning with this project and that (Earth Day webcasts, for example, on the Worldbridges Network). I was surprised to hear him say on a recent EdTechTalk shows that these efforts were chaos, he gets them started and then they just surge this way and that and leave messes that no one sees and no one mops up, but enough energy reaches the target that the impression is one of sustained and directed effort. Why am I surprised? I'm like that. I imagine many creative people are, minds as cluttered as an artist's atelier. It would be interesting to sound some of the other presenters at this conference on social networking out on exactly that topic.

This is how energy is harnessed and channeled in a PLN. It's messy. And while trying to focus on meeting an arbitrary deadline to prepare slides for a presentation to be given two weeks hence (if it were two days, I would be genuinely focused; there's nothing like a real deadline!) I am moving all over the network that brought me to this point. If not for the network, I would not have been given the opportunity to make the presentation. If not for the network, I'd be able to actually put this presentation together in a timely manner. But you can't have the upside without the downside, so we need to get used to it, and revel in it!

Seth Godin has introduced the notion of "tribes" as being groups of people who congeal around an idea that some dominant figure within that tribe leads. Switching conventional notions on its head, charisma he says, is not what the leader needs to attract followers, it's what the leader gets from the act of leading others, or better said, moving to the forward position where the leader appears to be at the head of where the tribe was going in the first place. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully a tribe is something that can be subsumed in the framework of the talk I'm giving at AVEALMEC.

In this brief posting I've again taken a step leading me only halfway to my destination. But each step needs to end (even as the destination shifts like an amorphous paradigm. Wasn't it just there? Where is it now?) so I'll wrap up this thought. Where have I arrived in this step? This posting has been about the role of a network of peers and their peers which is constantly channeling us information which we can use to convert to the knowledge that makes us interesting enough that others will invite us to speak at gatherings ranging in formality from conferences (online or face to face) to ad hoc discussions (again, online or face to face).

If you follow this out to its logical end, it means that any of us in the network is potentially interesting enough, and therefore no better than, anyone who is speaking to them at a conference. I say potentially, because the information is there, but it has to be aggregated and processed into knowledge, and then be communicated effectively. Some people are better at that than others, or simply have more time. The network provides the information but the better the network the more time it consumes. Those of us who are getting used to that reality are reveling in it, and exuding an energy that makes us want to share our passion with others, like those who created and shared the graphics that I'll put in my presentation, as part of the scaffolding on the launching pad I am trying to create for the talk I plan to give at AVEALMEC.

The more I learn about this conference, the more I see of the buildup and the accumulation of artifacts on the web, the more I anticipate being a part of it. I'm looking forward to savoring the aggregation of content and hearing what the speakers have to say. This conference has a very appealing look and feel. It's being done right. Congratulations to those putting it on! For more information: http://avealmec.org.ve/