Vance is interviewed by Doris Molero

On May 22 at the start of the recent Webheads in Action Online Convergence, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Doris Molero, who had requested an interview as a part of a project for her degree program. Doris was under close time constraints, but with WiAOC09 close on our heels, I was too. The constraints appeared so insurmountable that I suggested Doris conduct the interview as a session of WiAOC. She agreed and set up an event at http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/May22. It happened to be the second event in the 74 hour online conference, and it was recorded here: http://worldbridges.info/wiaoc09/audio/WiAOC09-May22-0200GMT.mp3 (link updated Aug 2009)

A minor hiccup however was that Doris had connectivity problems right at that time and did not appear for the interview. Jeff Lebow was there as were some stragglers from Doug Symington's EdTech brainstorm just ended. Afterwards Jeff remarked that I had done a good job at interviewing myself. I can only assume he was being complimentary.

Meanwhile, Doris sent me a pared-down version of her original 30 questions and on a car journey between Abu Dhabi and the dive spots on the east coast of the UAE I managed to address them in writing. Here then is the somewhat delayed interview between me and Doris Molero, a glimpse at how it might have gone on May 22 :-)


Doris: What’s your opinion about teaching English as a foreign language in the university?

Vance: It’s been a great career for me. Lots of travel opportunities and good vacations, pays the bills while allowing me to interact with a great community of online educators. I like working with language learners.

2. What do you think about teaching a second language with the help of the Internet and computers?

Language is about communication. For most people, there is no purpose to learning a language apart from a desire to communicate in it (not counting theoretical linguists who might wish to study a language for other purposes). Since this is most people's goal, it is awkward and inefficient to study a language in a context where communication is not done purposefully. By purposeful, I do not include exercises that a student might do on instructions of a teacher which put the student in communication only with the teacher. Communication with others in the class is also possible but I have been a language learner in classrooms where the teachers did not exploit this potential, dominated the class with student to teacher interaction, and spent class time on exercises with printed materials which were not at all communicative.

Properly used, the internet opens a world of communication to language learners. They can blog and get comments, they can collaborate with others worldwide, they can engage in live voice conversations, and do constructive language play with real people behind avatars in Second Life (just as a few examples). No student needs to study language in isolation any longer. Teachers who have developed skills in productive use of Web 2.0 can model use of appropriate tools with their students and put them in touch with language learners in collaborative projects. Teachers who reflect on the results of such projects report remarkable gains in motivation to write and hone ideas for peer critique. Most importantly language learning becomes FUN and meaningful for all concerned. Communication is clearly restored as the true purpose of learning the language in the first place.

3. How have your students changed compared to the ones you used to have when you first started teaching?

I started teaching in the mid 1970’s and everyone has changed. I would say that the most significant recent changes, apart from going from questioning the efficacy of using computers in language learning to general acceptance of technology in all aspects of life, have to do with the ubiquity of mobile technologies, especially with younger people including students down to the K-12 level, and the integration of social networking into transactions ranging from making purchases on Amazon and eBay through to so many people, especially students, congregating on Facebook and in other socially networked spaces. These developments are poised to make even more significant impacts on our profession. I have suggested that CALL is becoming an outmoded acronym. These days I encourage people to think SMALL (social media assisted language learning).

4. What does it take to be multiliterate? Are you multiliterate? Why do you think so?

Multiliterate means to be conversant with media as it develops in conjunction with technology. It means to be able to communicate appropriately in these media, that is to know what multimedia tools are available and how to use them, as well as to be able to search and access the communications of others in their various forms of technological enhancement. I teach courses in multiliteracies so I feel that I am moderately multiliterate myself and generally aware of the issues (see http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ for a last rendition of the course, and http://multiliteracies.ning.com/ for the Ning).

5. In your opinion, do you think that just using a textbook, a workbook and an audio program is enough to teach a second language at university level these days?

It could be enough depending on the motivation of the students to learn. I have met many people while traveling in foreign countries who had used such materials to achieve some competence in English and were grateful for the opportunity to meet a foreigner and have the chance to put their skills to use. However, as noted in question 2, the ability to learn a language well through communication with other learners and native speakers online increases the scope for language learning.

6. What do you do to teach the following skills: listening, reading, writing, critical thinking and speaking to your EFL students?

I taught EFL for 20 years but switched to computing and software development in 1995, so I can’t speak first hand about teaching EFL in the past decade. I have been working in teacher training since that time (online through webheads and other communities and networks) so I am aware of what others are doing. These people are blogging their experiences so my answer here would be to review their blogs and recorded experiences, but as the question relates to my personal experiences in EFL, I am not currently working specifically in that area.

7. What differences do you find between the traditional paper and pencil class and the class that integrated Web 2.0 tools?

These differences are those noted in my response to question 2.

8. What kind of text do you and your students use in your classes?

We use texts teaching computing written in-house by computing faculty.

9. How does participating in a community of learning help to learn more?

Peers in the community model the most productive behaviors to one another toward reaching the shared goals. They scaffold one another, support one another in collaborative projects, feed back to one another, provide encouragement, answer questions on a just-in-time basis, and provide a context for informal, social learning to take place. More importantly each ‘node’ in the network is connected with its own locus of other nodes, with the result that the knowledge contained in any one node is accessible throughout the connected networks to all the other nodes. In connectivist terms, knowledge can be defined not as what one possesses within one’s mind or the walls of one’s library, but in terms of ‘the pipes’ or how successfully one is able to nurture and access the nodes in the extended network. The knowledge contained in the network is the sum of its parts, and to be knowledgeable in multiliterate terms means to be able to incorporate this knowledge into one’s own Personal Learning Environment or Network.

10. How should we evaluate when we integrate web tools into the class?

This is a very good question, and my instinct is to say NOT how we evaluate traditional learning. To examine how we might evaluate alternatively, I refer to my answer in question 3, think SMALL. Techniques are evolving for measuring trust on the Internet. Examples are found in Google’s predominant algorithm for search, whereby trust is measured by calculating links from other trusted sites. E-bay, Amazon, and Couch Surfing all have trust systems set up whereby users rank each other according to expected performance. A system has been proposed for enhancing internet security whereby users might have a way of seeing who else has installed software that’s about to install on their machines as a means to helping them decide if they should authorize it (the information would come from tracking choices made by users as each made the choice individually). I think that these techniques could be adapted to pedagogical evaluation systems, whereby users were ranked on the quantity and quality of comments on their blog postings, for example, on measures relating to download and feedback on their podcasts, how viral their uploads to YouTube were, and other peer measures utilizing features of these so-called ‘trust’ systems.

11. What do you think about using project based approach as a learning tool to validate what has been learned in class?

Projects are the only valid thing to evaluate in a system described above. There would be little of this kind of feedback generated by user responses to a multiple choice test, these tests being designed solely for student-teacher interactions, nothing more. In a world where we are all connected to one another, peer evaluation, both by peers who knew and those who did not know the student in question, could become part of the evaluation matrix. Project based learning also lends itself to students' creating digital portfolios of inter-related artifacts which could be evaluated as yet another measure. These methods might produce a mindset whereby the answer to a question on history might not necessarily be 1492 (though a student could look that up if the exact date were required; as opposed to having memorized it) but something along the lines of, let’s see, Columbus was sent on a voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, who at about that time ejected the Moors from Spain, so this would have been toward the end of the 15^th century …

12. What do you think should be the role of the teacher that integrates web 2.0 tools into his or her classes?

I like what I hear from teachers who successfully integrate interactive whiteboards in their classes. What works, I understand, is for the teacher to move to the back of the room and guide the students in turn taking at the IWB. Similarly with Web 2.0 the paradigm of learning has to change. In writing that last sentence I changed what I had originally written to replace ‘teaching' with ‘learning’. The role of the teacher is to not teach, but to become a master learner who is simply the model for how everyone in that class learns. With regard to language teaching, the ‘teacher’ is a language informant in that the teacher ‘knows’ what is accepted as correct language, and the teacher can facilitate the learning process. But the idea that anyone can ‘teach’ a language is a spurious one beyond the most rudimentary levels. Language has to be learned; it can’t be taught. What we still call a teacher is actually someone who is more experienced in learning and who can model tricks and tips for students to apply to their own learning. This is where web 2. 0 fits perfectly with this conception of the role of guide on the side facilitator of learning in a classroom. Web 2.0 tools put control in the power of learners, or anyone who uses them. They enable users to communicate online, to record to online spaces, and to tag their artifacts so that others can find or stumble on them. They are ideal tools for constructivist, connectivist learning environments. The role of the teacher in such an environment is to introduce them to students, model appropriate uses, suggest or help learners conceive of ways the tools might be used in collaborative language development, and then step to the back of the room and let the learners get on with it.

13. What do you think should be added or changed in the EFL class in the university?

What is generally needed is for teachers steeped in traditional ways of learning, who have never had the new tools modeled for them, to become first aware of the tools available, and then to form communities where they can see and experience the tools modeled so that they can learn which ones are effective with each other. Only then will they be tentatively in a position to try some of the tools out on their own students.

The fact that this process is not a straightforward one is its biggest drawback. Some awareness of a number of fundamental paradigm shifts is required. I have elsewhere set out ten or 12 of these and many have been covered here (see http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2009/03/celebrating-25-years-of-call-forging.html). Essentially they revolved around a fundamental underpinning of multiliteracies, that the way that people communicate online is becoming less arbitrated and more populist. It comes down to how readily people can accept that people on the Internet will regulate one another, so that it becomes possible for example to produce an encyclopedia (for free!) that anyone can write on that is more comprehensive, more current, and arguably of better quality than a very expensive and ecologically unfriendly one produced through the tradition publishing process. Not until this essential concept is grasped, accepted, and understood, can one make sense of the rest of it.

So the people who need to be reached are those who have not yet grasped a functional conception of the socializing and interconnectivist forces at play in an appropriately configured learning network. This is where the concept of change agency becomes crucial. Teachers already attuned to the role of multiliteracies in 21^st century learning have crossed a rubicon and must build bridges to those still on the other side. This is difficult. Those on the left bank, as in the one left behind, are not convinced that there is anything better on the right bank, and think they are being talked down to when those on the right try and explain why this is the ‘right’ place to be. It makes little sense to someone who feels the left bank has been perfectly fine for their entire teaching careers to go to the trouble to move off that spot for something that might be just a passing fad.

There are still people whom I work with who tell me they will never blog, and wonder how anyone could be so self-absorbed. Many (sometimes the same people) will tell you that the blogs they’ve read are just nonsensical journals, not for serious readers. I came upon a post on a mailing list the other day that argued that we should carefully consider how we use computers in teaching because learning is social and computers are isolating. Clearly the author of that post is broadcasting ‘knowingly’ from the ‘left’ bank.

There is also an interesting bit of research that suggests that people who are incompetent are blithely unaware of how incompetent they are (not meaning to question anyone's competence in the present instance, concerning colleagues I don't even know - just that this is an interesting bit of research: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html).

But what I have just written is anathema to change agency. Successful change agents do not belittle the shortcomings of others or, more importantly, appear to (I didn’t mean to just then; I might have appeared to - anyway the incompetent could be me, or any reader of this blog, blissfully unaware of course :-). Change agents need to start by forming cooperative partnerships with peers who want to learn. The change that’s needed in teaching programs is that these partnerships need to be somehow encouraged.

Thank you to Doris Molero for giving me the opportunity to post this interview here and link it from WiAOC09. The tiny url for this post is http://tinyurl.com/090522molero

New Millenium Professional Development

I’ve been asked to propose a task force to promote the use of pedagogical technology at the place where I work. This has really got me thinking about how to preach to someone other than the choir. I think I'm going to need some help from my community on this one. I'm being asked to really effect change at an educational institute where there is not a lot of awareness of the very latest issues in educational technology and their impacts on learning. How do I start this ball rolling?

The first issue to be addressed before such a task force can be agreed upon is why it is needed? I believe it is needed, but why would anyone else think so? So the first task of the task force should be to determine its scope regarding the nature of the need in the perceptions of those concerned.

In helping the task force to approach such an analysis, I could suggest many things that my colleagues might want to read. It would be easy to go overboard here. I suppose I should select a baker’s dozen items that I think people should read, but thinking this through just a bit more, perhaps I should think of this as a baker’s dozen number of topics. Each topic would have a set of background readings, one of which would be the one I would recommend be read if one wanted to read just one thing on that topic. The other readings would be available in case the first reading succeeded in piquing interest in the topic.

Not all of the recommended items would be readings per se. A couple would be videos or other media. Sometimes these are more approachable than readings. The various media would illustrate the emergence of multiliterate approaches on the Internet.

Putting off for the moment coming up with the readings, here are the baker’s dozen of topics I am thinking to choose. Many of these items overlap and impinge on other items in the list (RSS is a major component in blogs for example, yet both topics are important enough to be treated separately, and the concept of blogging could accordingly stand alone apart from other asynchronous collaboration media mentioned in item 12.)

1. RSS and push/pull technologies and feed readers
2. Aggregation: tagging, Del.icio.us, and folksonomic classification systems as opposed to taxonomic ones
3. Podcasts: harvesting them primarily, but also producing them, as vital resources in ongoing professional development
4. Paradigm shift: multiliteracies and new learning heuristics
5. Blogging and microblogging
6. Digital storytelling
7. Social networking
8. Distributive learning networks: communities and connectivism
9. Web 2.0
10. Informal / just-in-time learning
11. Synchronous communications: instant messaging, online presentation venues incorporating interactive whiteboard, voice, and video
12. Asynchronous collaborations tools: blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Slideshare and similar, Google docs and similar, Google notebook

How can I expand and fine tune my list of items? I will engage my community of practice, my social network, my distributed learning network, my community of colleagues, most of whom I have never met face to face although we’ve been interacting for the past 5 or ten years. I have asked them for their advice.

This is in fact the key to staying up on the new technologies. It’s a question of keeping attuned to a network of people with something worth sharing. In the most recent age of print literacy one would encounter needed resources in libraries and through journal subscriptions, where the network would consist of a range of static authors.

In the new age it is possible to interact with writers and thinkers directly, but though this is possible and with emerging technologies this possibility can be exploited with great benefit to all concerned, for those who are hesitant to get 'up close' at the very outset, it is not absolutely necessary to interact with people synchronously any more than it is necessary to meet an author of a book or journal article. However, the crucial difference nowadays is in knowing where to find that network of people with information to share most relevant to the individual. It turns out that these people are less frequently publishing in traditional media. So the first thing to learn, as it is with what we should be teaching our students, is HOW we stay on top of things, given new developments in technology having major impacts on both literacy and learning.

So the first challenge of this task force should be to develop a core of educators where I work with a greater awareness of what the new technologies are and their potentials for education, what some people characterize as having transformational potentials. Once consciousness has been raised to a requisite degree, the task force can then begin identifying areas within existing curricula where these technologies might apply. It would be hoped in this phase to involve teachers within those departments who could in turn be made aware of the affordances made possible by principled use of technology in the service of the teaching goals of the various departments.

If anyone reading this has any ideas on how I can better approach this, or if you can think of other topics for my baker's dozen, I'd really appreciate your comments.

I am posting this in draft form in order to hopefully elicit comments and suggestions, but I intend to change this, for example to fill in the readings, at some point in the near future.

Tiny URL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/2kkb3v

Meanwhile, Tom Robb was kind enough to send me a copy of his chapter:
Helping teachers to help themselves. In: Hubbard, Philip and Mike Levy (Eds.). Teacher education in CALL. 2006. xii, 354 pp. (pp. 335–347).
More about this book here: http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LL%26LT%2014

Robb suggests that supporting teacher autonomy in technology at the program level would benefit from the following elements:

• Survey of institution's technical support environment
• Hire a (CALL or technology) specialist
• Recognize and reward self training and innovation
• Set up a faculty development program
• Budget for training and resource personnel (equal amounts on human, hardware, and software resources)
• Encourage networking
• Provide release time and funding
• and finally, the kicker: brute force, require the use of technology
  

Also Kim Cofino lists diverse aspects involved in "the shift to a 21st century learning environment" in her post: Making the shift happen, Always Learning (Feb 24, 2008):
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/02/24/making-the-shift-happen/

1. Vision and philosophy - "Expecting teachers to change their practice, without providing a thought-out vision and philosophy for why they should change will only result in frustration."
   
2. Leadership - "at some point, school leadership needs to clarify and confirm that this is the direction the school is heading. There needs to be an official acknowledgment of the vision and philosophy and clear expectations that change will happen."
3. Paradigm shift and transparency - "you also need to develop a clear framework which details exactly what the roles are for each individual involved ... - each person on staff will be responsible for some aspect of this transition and they need to know how they fit into the bigger picture."
4. Curriculum and professional development - "Embedding this new model for teaching and learning into the curriculum development process is a natural way to institutionalize change - if it becomes part of our curriculum, it becomes part of our teaching and learning practice."
   
5. Staffing and equipment - "Why would we hire someone with no teaching load - someone who just “helps” people all day? Unfortunately, without the human support (which can range from being a teaching model in the classroom, to curricular or pedagogical support, to technical support, to a “safety blanket”) the technological troubles can end up feeling insurmountable for teachers new to this model of teaching and learning - exactly what you don’t want."
   
6. Infrastructure and communication - "Once staffing and equipment are sufficient, clear infrastructure and communication strategies need to be put in place ... Having resources and knowing how to access them or how to get support are all very different things."
   
7. Resources - "To help teachers and administrators cope with the rapid pace of technological change, developing easy to use resources (like “how to” sheets for both students and teachers, or common rubrics and assessment tools) can make the use of new tools far less intimidating."
   
8. Reflection and adaption - "Another important aspect of reflection is sharing our successes. Finding consistent ways to publicize success - not only within the school, but also to the wider school community, helps teachers gain confidence, explore new areas of teaching and learning, and promote positive attitudes towards this change. We can often get bogged down with solving problems, but sometimes the solution is sharing success."

Cofino's post provides numerous links to additional resources for developing the various aspects which must be addressed in accomplishing such a shift.

Facing up to Facebook

Heather made a posting to one of the lists I follow in which she said that she was considering using Facebook with her students, and did anyone have any thoughts on how she might do that. Someone was quick to respond with a posting citing a litany of paedophilia encounters on social networking sites. The posting was perhaps meant as a warning about such sites, but was more likely a case of someone passing on something they had seen lately on the topic, though they didn't know much more about it than that.

I responded that this was exactly the reason WHY educators SHOULD be taking an interest in social networking sites like Facebook. Some commonly cited analogies are that you don’t keep scissors out of your classroom, you teach people not to run with them. What if adults 'blocked' streets and tried to keep children from crossing them instead of teaching them HOW to cross them? Sure, the kids would be safe for a while, if a bit ignorant, but eventually they would encounter streets, and they’d have to work out, probably from emulating a seemingly wiser peer, how to cross them.

Kids are encountering Facebook among other social networking sites. They are not going to revert to postcards and letters at this point. Means of communication, literacies, language, conceptions of technology … all evolve and change and there is no forcing a return to a more comprehensible time no matter how convenient that would be for parents and teachers. In fact, if we older folks want to remain relevant to kids, we have to meet them in their space (My Space?). We need to act as guides there. It is our responsibility as parents and teachers, if we wish to have an impact on how this new generation develops, to make an effort to understand what is going on with social networking, even to the point of joining in, and discoursing with people young and old from an informed perspective, offering insights gained from greater experience in life, but understanding that the world changes and those who prosper change with it.

A good guide has to learn the terrain. To be a guide in Facebook you need to get an account. It’s easy and intuitive, though even I balk at installing Super Walls and accepting Vampire Bites. If you’re fortunate enough to have a fervent user in your family or distributed learning network, you might learn how tagging works with photos, or how professionals are using it to network. I found out about the recent Edublog awards ceremony in Second Life through a Facebook announcement, and Curt Bonk has started a Bonkian YouTubian Researchian network (pretty Bonkian alright - Curt, to me, is a 'seemingly wiser peer'). I’ve been teaching a course on multiliteracies for TESOL and we have been using a book written by Stuart Selber. Through another Facebook contact who discovered that Stuart had a Facebook acct and who added him to her friends list, I added Stuart to mine and he accepted. I sense that my next Multiliteracies course is going to have an interesting dimension to it as we now have the possibility of discussing the concepts with the author of the book via Facebook, can’t wait!

Heather made an important point. Apart from suggesting that she get her students started in Facebook (they most likely already ARE started .. Facebook is now what we have to ask students to log out of instead of MSN, as used to be the case a year or two ago.) … but apart from that, letting them get on with it is exactly the point. If you want to hear something interesting listen to Konrad Glogowski’s K-12 Online presentation at http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=166, or what I was actually thinking of, his conversation with Women of Web 2.0 at http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/2661 where he explains how he did just that in his PhD research, got his students blogging and let them go for a month and then researched what they said about their school work. Guess what, they didn’t say ANYthing about the syllabus. BUT (and his students are 8th graders) they wrote cogently and engagingly about what interested them, and they dialoged with one another, and considered audience and argument to a much greater degree than one would expect from more traditional ways of teaching 8th graders.

Konrad cited the work of Ray Oldenburg who coined the term “Third Place” in the context of being not home and not work, but a place of “broader, more creative interaction" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place (why, when I want to know something, can I invariably find out more about it in Wikipedia? - another social networking site that certain segments of education really need to face up to). Konrad has an interesting blog post on turning classrooms into Third Places: http://www.commun-it.org/community/konradg/weblog/454.html . So what Heather is suggesting then is creating a Third Place that might overlap a little with her class, where students could get away from the ‘work’ place (the ‘second’ place) yet co-mingle the second and third. This is what Konrad did. When he saw that his students were not discoursing on the classroom in their blogs, he started bringing up their blog posts in class, making their postings a part of the discourse of his classroom, as he put it. One of my take-away quotes from listening to that conversation was Konrad’s contention that “writing is a social artifact” – think about it, and then think about Vygotsky and constructivism, and check out what George Siemens says about Connectionism next time you’re on Google.

The lesson for us is that in order to remain relevant to our students, we have to acknowledge their discourse, and absorb it to some extent into our dealings with them. To watch that boat leaving the pier and not make some effort to leap aboard, or reach it, is just going to widen the gap between us and our students.

MEANWHILE - This just in ...

... and regarding my previous posting, feeling experimental, a possible breakthrough in the ongoing saga of achieving long-sought recognition from Technorati that I as a blogger exist. Finally, an email from someone at Technorati apologizing for the long delay in getting back to me but they have made a small adjustment to their system and from now on but not including previous postings (that's fine with me) my blog should start appearing in their listings. No, the trick provided by David Warlick mentioned in the previous post didn't work, but if Technorati has fixed the problem, this posting should. If you find it after a search on one of the tags here, leave me a congratulatory comment!

WOW of the Week: Recidivism in teacher professional development

Having listened twice to Derek Wenmoth's Professional Learning Networks keynote “Holding a Mirror to our Professional Practice” at the recent K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=181 I was all ears when Derek was interviewed on a recent Women of Web 2.0 webcast #51 http://www.edtechtalk.com/node/2594

Derek said a couple of things during the conversation that I thought were well worth blogging. For one thing he said that in New Zealand they had selected individuals in institutes to receive funding in hopes that this would enhance technology at the entire institute through a trickle down effect, but post-studies revealed negligible evidence of trickle down. This doesn't suprise me given the tendency in many institutes for there to be just one or a few people really interested in technology and the majority of people at those institutes either ignoring them or at best largely avoiding the issue. This seems to indicate that funding the norm is not necessarily conducive to the spread of technology at educational institutes and that an institution-wide kick would be needed in order to impact change.

The second thing that Derek said that really grabbed me was to relate how a colleague had been studying the effects of programs of professional development and had come to the conclusion that in cases where teachers did not pursue a course of PD beyond a particular salient event, they were likely to revert to teaching in the way they had been taught within a certain number of months (was it 7? I'll listen again).

Given the vogue in considering learning networks as ecologies, here is a case of ontogony recapitulating philogony, or the offspring or product of a training program reverting to features inherent in a long line of previous trainers. This is to say that something more than a one-off course or training session is needed in order to really cause change in teaching methods. Calling forth a phlosophy of Zen and the Art of Maintaining a Respectable Commitment to Professional Development, it behooves us to realize that change must come from within. It is something that must be worked at continually, through blogging and reading blogs for example, or listening to podcasts such as the one I refer to here, through podcasting oneself occasionally, and through familiarity with what is involved in doing all that in order to inculcate similar learning heuristics in students by MODELING for them, through a teacher's personal professional development habits, what techniques and methods will help keep learners (lifelong-learning students and peers) connected to professional learning networks wherein new-age knowledge resides.

In conference presentations lately I have developed a set of ten aspects of change that are required by educators in order to undergo the shift in mindset that will lead to paradigm shift appropriate to integration of the latest technologies into educational settings. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then the one shown here represents what I normally have to say on this topic. The slide pictured is from the show here: http://docs.google.com/PresentationEditor?id=ddkc6v4f_40cvxvjm

Incidentally, I realize that I have two lists of items numbered 1-5 (hey, do the math!). The problem is that I was not able to get Google Presentation to number a second column of bulleted items consecutively after the first. If you know how, you might leave me a comment.