Showing posts with label flnw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flnw. Show all posts

Monday, July 26, 2010

Future of Learning in a Networked World, Argentina and Brazil 2010

This is a quick post from a pleasant outdoor bar/restaurant with free wireless in view of the beach where I was just swimming in Toque Toque Piqueno, Brazil.  I composed offline and I'm taking advantage of available time and bandwidth to get this into the cloud.  I'll be back with URLs and photos to illustrate. (Here's one from Michael Coghlan http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/4848259991/.) Meanwhile enjoy this first draft ...

FLNW, or the Future of Learning in a Networked World, has a home: http://flnw.wikispaces.com.  According to this  URL it began with a meeting of minds not only in networked cyberspaces but in physical space in moveable feast progressing around New Zealand in 2006.  Participants in that initial encounter included Stephen Downes, Leigh Blackall, Alexander Hayes, Konrad Glogowski, Jo Kay,Teemu Leinonen, John Eyles, Rose Grozdanic, Derek Chirnside, and many others along the way, http://flnw.wikispaces.com/participants, etc.  Michael Coghlan flew over for it from Australia, and Barbara Dieu, or Bee as we know her, traveled to New Zealand all the way from Brazil.

The idea was that a group of networked educators would come together face to face and while interacting with one another, produce web-based artifacts that would allow others in the network to savour the experience vicariously.  My own take on that event at the time was to marvel at the use of tags to aggregate content, a concept that was new to me then, and that I started to understand from watching Leigh produce collages of photos from Flickr, etc. http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=flnw&m=text

Attempts to replicate the event have not been so stellar.  I participated in one in Thailand in January 2008, when John Eyles met Michael Coghlan and I in Bangkok where we met Kim Cofino, were joined by Trish Everett, and traveled on to Korat to give workshops to quite a few appreciative Thai teachers (see http://vancestevens.com/papers/index.html#080116, http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008/01/future-of-learning-in-networked-world.html and http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html).  I had to get back to work after that, but John Eyles and others continued on to Thai TESOL in Chang Mai and on into Cambodia.  It was a form of tourism that was new to me, and I enjoyed  the feeling of contributing my expertise while being hosted to some extent (some accommodation and a few memorable meals) by colleague educators who were benefiting from what FLNW had to offer.  True to form, John, Trish, and Michael and I blogged and photographed and recorded on iRiver mp3 players and other devices and posted audio and video files online along with numerous photos and blog posts.  Kim and her colleagues at the International School of Bangkok left us full uStream recordings of our time there (I think he uStream itself has disappeared, but remnants exist here: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/01/19/the-future-of-learning-in-a-networked-world/, 
and http://learningnetworkedworld.blogspot.com/2008/01/isb-bkk.html)

There was an FLNW event in 2009, unfortunately for me at the end of August, right on the week that my duties at the Petroleum Institute resumed, so I missed being able to join Leigh Blackall, Sylvia Curry, Derek Chirnside, Michael Coghlan, and others for a trip to the Northwest USA, including kayak trips around Puget Sound, http://www.fullcirc.com/2008/01/14/flnw-event-january-16-drawing-together-online/.  Nancy White wrote a blog post afterwards expressing disappointment that the deep conversations and constant posting of artifacts online were taking second place to what others regarded as vacation time (having come all that way, in the summer time ;-)

So when Bee got the idea to host the 2010 FLNW in Brazil to be anchored at BrazTESOL in Sao Paulo I submitted two proposals for the conference which were both accepted.  Bee created a wiki page for the event at http://flnw.wikispaces.com/brazil complete with links  to participants and itinerary and waited for others in the group to fill in the wiki.  When Michael and I signed up she arranged what funding she could for us (in my case, a hotel room for 5 nights in Sao Paulo, highly appreciated, beats a kick in the rear :-).  Tantalizingly, a Vivo Institute in Sao Paolo was arranging an event for about that time, inviting Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Teemu Leionen, so the ingredients were in place awaiting critical mass to kick it into gear.

But somehow the mass failed to congeal as hoped.  Scheduling problems caused Vivo to postpone their event to the following month.  No one in the movement besides Michael and I actually appeared in Brazil.  However, we turned it into an FLNW / Webheads in Action event.  Starting in Buenos Aires, we met Webheads Rita Zeinstejer and Jennifer Verschoor, president of ARCALL, and along the way picked up Paula Lesdema and Maria Laura.  We left a spirited Flickr photographic record 
and on July 16 flew to Sao Paulo where Bee and her husband Pierre met us at the airport and whisked us into the countryside for a taste of rural Brazil unplugged, offline.

On Monday we returned to Sao Paulo where Bee had arranged for us to present morning and afternoon at a PCI (pre-conference institute).  I had presentations myself on Wednesday and Thursday and was mulling how to best set up an ePortfolio portal for them when on Tuesday I settled on a wiki format.  So what happened in these days is best viewed at that portal http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/ with links from that page and from the sidebar to more information on the PCI, my demonstration of tag games Wednesday, and my talk on PLNs for educators Thursday; with photos aggregated on the tag braztesol10:

There is a link at my wiki to the next stop on the itinerary.  Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brasilia were hosting a conference on Thursday and Friday and we flew up for the second day.  We were taken to a great buffet lunch and then to a room at CTJ where our event was scheduled.  I had got my colleagues to title it "Thinking SMALL" to accommodate my new acronym for CALL, social media assisted language learning.  I don't think we actually mentioned the acronym during our presentations, which took on a sort of free-form structure, where we asked participants to tell us why they had joined us, and took it in turn from there.  As usual we took videos and pictures and posted online to leave a record of the event; e.g.

From there the FLNW crew enjoyed a Saturday with samba in Brasilia and progressed by plane on an early flight back to Sao Paulo where we arrived at Bee's flat and got onto wireless just in time to catch Claire Siskin in Pennsylvania, Anitha Devi in India, and Rick Rosenthal in Amman Jordan at the tail end of the weekly Webheads Sunday noon GMT meeting at http://tappedin.org.   We then hopped in Bee's car and drove 4 hours to the tiny bay of Toque Toque Piqueno, at a picture postcard beach house where Pierre was waiting for us with the shrimp and vegetables that would become our dinner.  Visions of wireless dancing in our heads were quickly dashed by reality, and we were forced to postpone a projected podcast with Alex Hayes and turn our attentions instead to the white sand beach with its alluring cool water for bathing.

Hopefully the future of learning in a networked world will include ubiquitous access to always-on connectivity, where bandwidth is as plentiful as water.  In our case, access to Internet, when we had it, was limited due to the incessant hospitality of the Brazilians we were with, who liked to sit for hours in restaurants, enjoying each other's company, while sipping the local beverages.

Here at Toque Toque Piqueno, where we have time but no bandwidth, I'm composing this blog post with hopes of posting it on arrival at our hotel in Paraty, where we should end up at some point today (and which SHOULD have wireless, and we'll see when we get there).

If we do find a connection, we might try to hook up with FLNW as planned, and after two nights in Paraty we'll return to Sao Paulo and go our separate ways, Michael back to Australia via Chile, Bobbi back home to UAE via Houston, and me on to Porto Seguro where I'll meet (at long last) Felix Zaniboni, one of our orginal webheads from 1998 or earlier http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/efwbahia.htm. Then I'll be back in Buenos Aires on Aug 8 for a pair of talks on August 9 and 10 with webheads there, an additional day in BsAs in case anyone wants to meet me on Aug 11, or otherwise I might pop on the ferry to Uraguay for a day trip, and then I leave the FLNW trail for a brief sojourn in Peru before returning to Houston and home to Abu Dhabi to reunite with my dear wife Bobbi.

on reflection ... 
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Friday, January 1, 2010

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 21st 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.
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


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