When I wasn't dreaming

Last night, when I wasn't dreaming, I was thinking. Now I'm a week into the eLearning course which I managed to get set up for a kickoff webinar that was delayed to February 20. You  can find the description of the course here, http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom, and here's the recording of the first webinar:

I had been given reassurance that the course would go ahead as planned when the RELO team in Bangkok informed me on February 8 that they were about to start promoting it. I was at CamTESOL in Phnom Penh at the time with a workshop to give the following day, and the day after that my beautiful assistant Bobbi and I flew to Thailand on a well-deserved break, having pre-paid for diving for three days. I downloaded Schoology manuals on my cell phone and took them on the boat with me, but didn't have much time or energy to focus on the eLearning course from the 8th until the day we spent transiting airports February 14, and I woke up in Penang on the 15th with only two days before the planned start of the course.

The first snag had been that I really didn't know much about Schoology, the platform I had selected on the basis of having experienced courses which others had developed, and been a collaborator on one that someone else had set up. Had I finally over-extended myself this time? I had come to the realization that there was a lot about Schoology that was not intuitive and that others had done for me in the past. So I had to set a full day aside to start googling my questions about Schoology and then systematically read the hits on the manuals that Schoology had thoughtfully placed on line to help users get started with the tool. Through this effort I was soon in position to get the course set up.

By then RELO Bangkok and I had decided to start with the first webinar on Feb 20, but the next problem was getting the course populated. There were not many respondents from Thailand to the announcements about the course from the week before and the original start date of Feb 17 came and went with only a 4 participants signed up besides another handful who were in other ways associated with managing the course. But RELO Bankok was amenable to my reaching out to my other networks, and once I had posted an invitation to my Facebook groups and on three TESOL Communities lists, we had 30 people registered before day of the first webinar on Feb 20.

Because the course had been planned as follow-up consultancies for participants whom it was assumed would have mostly been familar the my workshops at http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/, I had not built in any tutorial materials into the mix, and I had no idea who the new participants were, so I set up discussion forums asking who they were and why there were there. And on Feb 20, a few of them appeared at the opening webinar and I began to get an understanding of what direction the course should take. When we should meet was the first issue, but I was able to set up a kind of calendar once I discovered the participants responding were in South America (EST time zone), the Middle East, Thailand of course, and the rest of Asia (but not Japan, which would have been one time zone too far). From this we were able to fix a time for most of our events, 1400 UTC, waking hours morning and night for our complete range of participants.

So now we're working on the content for the course. I had loosely planned it on having participants learn by doing. Accordingly, there were three tasks, one for each week of the course.

Week 1 - create a digital poster or infographic

The first task for the week that ends three days from now is to create a "digital poster." This could be anything a participant wanted to project, as long as it had a link. I suggested it should have some mulitimedia element, or be an all-media presentation (a screen cast using Screencast-o-matic, for example). The the purpose of the assignment was to get participants to surface their existing digital literacies and to add to that tools I had referenced from my workshops, or that they might have learned about from others in the course. It's a community-as-curriculum approach, where participants drive what gets learned around their interests and what they need to know, and an active hands-on approach, where they learn by doing, making mistakes and correcting them, and from meaningful problem solving.

The problem with that approach is in getting participants to DO it with minimal guidance, though I have been tryng to steer them to my workshop materials, where the guidance is, expecially on the three tools I find most useful for creating blended learning environments and classrooms. Here are the links to those tools in my workshops:

• Jing for screen image (and even video) capture
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Imagecapture
• Screencast-o-matic for capturing video screencasts along with mic and webcam
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Screencasting/capture
• PBworks for cobbling together a quick portal which I find invaluable for drafting my ideas for blended learnng environments
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Createafreeportalspace

I would like to add to Week 1's mix one more element, Yo! Teach.

Yo!Teach! is a backchannel chat tool that was developed to replace Today's Meet, which died at some point last year, despite having become quite popular for passing messages to and from classes and other gatherings. I learned about Yo!Teach via an article in the TESOL CALL-IS Newsletter:
http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html

Yo!Teach is also listed as one possible replacement for Today's Meet at this website
https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement

When meeting blended learning classes online, it can be useful to set up a back channel. Then if anyone is having a problem, that person can post a message in Yo!Teach and stand a chance of there being someone at the other end who can help.  If there is no one there you can at least leave your message and someone should see it and reply, or if you leave a name or contact, get back to you at some point.

Yo! Teach was designed as a back channel to be used concurrently with live events. So I can monitor it during office hours, for the benefit of anyone who wanted to ask a question asynchronously (or synchronously) and know that they would be able to get it answered in live chat during office hours.

Week 2 - Create a digital story

The follow-on task for the second week is to advance from exploration and budding skills with the recommeded tools into something that can illustrate a narative, or digital story. This came up in the first week at the first office hour of the course, when Magali from Ecuador appeared and told us about a platform being developed at her university which featured a means for students to create digital stories using the primitive tools built into the platform. I suggested that she could use tools available online that she would have more control over, and link from the school's platform to the online artifacts that she and her students created in the wild using pre-existing Web 2.0 tools. That conversation was recorded, and you can see it here.

Digital storytelling is a concept that transcends multiple purposes. As with the simpler "digital poster", it would be an excercise that pushes participants to carry their skills forward from a simple infographic the first week to a narrative using digital tools which they would bring to bear on the project according to their abilities. And the benefit of that would be that everyone would see what everyone else's abilities were and scaffold one another when those abilities were a rung or two up the scaffold. Everyone would learn from one another.

So now that I'm getting some interaction from participants in the course, three days into its emergence, I have clearer ideas about how to proceed. Now I'm ready to move forward with materials for the second week that would focus us on tools that, through the ruse of finding and using them to create a digital story, would get people thinking about and working with the tools that would be most useful in creating and using blended (and flipped) learning classrooms.

Week 3 - Create some aspect of a blended learning classroom

The third week asks participants to start some aspect of a blended learning classroom. Again there is no instruction apart from what the instructor / English Language Specialist is modeling. When put in the position of having to appear in Thailand with a platform that would encompass my workshops, I fell back on PBworks. I tried both Wix and Weebly but found those frustrating. PBworks allows me most flexible control over my portals. I can embed images and other graphics and even videos. It's HTML-based and I can get at the code. It's quick to work with so I can alter it one day to the next. I have a system of setting up archives and using the sidebar for easy navigation around the site. The sidebar and table of contents widgit create bookmarks throughout the site which can each be linked to, so pointing participants to exactly where you want them to look is quick and easy. I haven't found anything better than or that even comes close to PBworks for power, simplicity of implemetation, and speed and alterability, except perhaps Google Docs, which could do almost the same thing but without the sidebar.

For the eLearning I added the Schoology layer because PBworks lacks a way for users to interact with one another. Schoology can host forums and announce events. It's also quick and easy to work with, moreso than Moodle. Although the complexity of Moodle makes it more robust, Moodle has to be hosted through someone who maintains the server, and this creates problem both in the permissions you have to control your own course and the stability of that server. If you want to host with someone whose business it is to host other people's Moodles, that usually comes with a fee. Schoology at the moment offers reliable hosting with no fee for the basic functions. So it's a good starter platform for creating an LMS.

The foregoing two paragraphs in this post are my content for Week 3, but I'm not explicit in teaching that in my coursel My intent is to model to participants how to create blending learning classrooms by getting them into one and letting them see how it looks and feels, and do the same in their own contexts if the wish, or apply the look and feel to other tools if they have access to others. So that gets us through week 3 and to the end of the course.

After the course, once I've stopped dreaming

But life goes on, and this is what I was thinking about last night as I lay awake at dawn, the realities I'm recording here encroaching on my dreams. In April I am scheduled to give a presentation at the TESOL conference in Denver as a member of a panel on "Creating Materials in a Digital World," which has been included in the TESOL 2020 convention program in Denver, April 1st, 2020, 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM in room 402 at The Colorado Convention Center.

This came about when the Materials Writers Interest Section, in conjunction with Career Paths Professional Learning Network, issued a call last August for panelists "who have experience adapting, creating, and using digital materials to teach English and train English teachers. ... Such experience may include, but is not limited to, blended and hybrid learning, online learning, gamification, differentiated learning, building online learning communities and teacher education." The abstract for the panel is:

As the world becomes more dependent on technology ELT professionals find ways to adapt. This presentation shows participants in all stages of their career paths various ways they can adapt, create, and develop materials for digital learning in a variety of contexts for language teaching and teacher training.

Although I had neither conceived nor imagined this English Language Specialist project when I applied to be on the panel, it is definitely what I'll be focusing on.

This brings me to one last part of the jigsaw puzzle. Every three months I have to produce an article, preferably an edited one, for the On the Internet column of TESL-EJ, http://tesl-ej.org/.  I wrote the last one and it is perhaps bad form for an editor to write two in a row for his own column, but I may have little choice, as my calls for papers go unanswered. A write-up of my TESOL presentation might make a worthy article for the next issue of OTI if no one else comes forward.

In this post, I may have got started on that article :-)

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.

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