Lifelong Learner Autonomy meets Electronic Village Online

This article was prepared for an upcoming issue of the Learner Independence SIG Newsletter, of which this is an example: http://www.ilearn.internet-english.net/enl4.htm

The latest rendition of the Electronic Village Online (EVO 2009) was held this year in the six weeks between January 12 to February 22, 2009 <http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/>. This is the ninth consecutive year that these sessions have been held. Originally conceived as a kind of run-up to the annual TESOL convention, they are offered under the TESOL umbrella but are in fact a grass roots movement where educators volunteer their time to help others learn about each other's expertise. Participants don't have to be TESOL members, the courses are completely free, and they are an embodiment of the kind of program I had in mind for autonomous language teachers as put forward in Stevens (2007).

This year, session offerings included libraries for ESL students, teaching English through drama, using images, video, and Web 2.0 in materials development and lesson preparation, collaborative writing, digital storytelling, Internet for beginners, blogging, e-portfolios and digifolios, multiliteracies, and virtual worlds and language learning. This is a healthy menu for teachers wishing to upgrade skills in areas vital to their craft. Improvement is likely to be the outcome, as the sessions are mounted in a framework of comprehensive training of moderators and quality control throughout. Proposals for sessions are collected early, in time for aspiring moderators to go through a program of systematic introduction to EVO culture. The training ensures that all moderators actually develop materials for their sessions and get them online by the end of the year. Candidates having trouble meeting the benchmarks either shape up or wisely decide to defer their session until they truly have the time to meet the serious demands about to be made on them. When at the end of January the courses open to participants, they have been through a crucible and are therefore among the best and most accessible opportunities for professional development available at no cost to educators on this planet.

Although participant numbers tend to overwhelm moderators, I'm most surprised that relatively few avail themselves of this opportunity to upgrade their skills. It's possible that many are either unaware of them, or hesitant or too busy to try and adjust to an online environment. In fact, the session moderators and participants go out of their way to help each newcomer adapt to the new surroundings. Accordingly, the most interesting aspect to these courses is not to be found in the descriptions of the courses themselves. Earl Stevick said in one of his books that the quality of the learning that takes place when we focus our attention only on the items to be learned is different from (and probably inferior to) the quality of learning that is incidental to something else that we are trying to do (1982). I applaud David Warlick's concept of teachers being “master learners” (which he mentions in recent podcasts) and Stephen Downes's characterization of teaching being to model and to demonstrate, and learning being to practice and reflect (cited in Stevens 2007). In this respect, if teachers want to improve their craft, the way to do it is to engage in a cycle of teaching and learning with practitioners who model and demonstrate AND practice and reflect, because in reality, we are all at once teachers and learners. And THIS is what these sessions actually inculcate, how to interact socially online with people you've never actually met and in the process learn like you've never learned before. But in order to do this for the first time, you have to have an open mind and be willing to ACT on your potential as an autonomous learner.

Suzanne and Ron Scollon suggested that interactions mediated by computers tend to be patterned not as a conduit but more like a berry bush (1982). When that was written, the dominant metaphor in education and training was the conduit, and many trainers still operate under that premise. EVO models a berry bush approach to learning through technology, where users are presented with choices and encouraged to select the most appetizing ones, rather than expect to be taught stepwise, and feel they are behind if they missed the first few lessons. Teachers seeking to both be and coach autonomous learners would do well to become involved with these sessions next year. Participants emerging from them often credit EVO with having brought about true change in their approach to personal and learner autonomy.

References

Scollon, Suzanne & Ron Scollon. 1982. RUN TRILOGY: Can Tommy Read? Paper presented at the symposium Children's response to a literate environment: literacy before schooling, University of Victoria, October 9, 1982.

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

Stevick, E. 1982. Teaching and learning languages. New York: Cambridge University Press.

SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences

Feb 20, 2009 I gave a talk entitled "After a decade of inroads, SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences" at AACE's Spaces of Interaction: An online conversation on improving traditional conferences. http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/ - Speaker schedule: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/speakers/ - George Siemens's 4 min. introduction to the event: http://www.aace.org/conf/spaces/intro/player.html - Ning http://aacecommunity.ning.com/ for conversation and brainstorming before, during, and after the presentations.

My abstract: The presenter has been a long-time advocate and agitator for broadcasting online both into and out of on-site professional development events and conferences. The presenter describes inroads made during the past decade from 1999 to the present in making conferences accessible to many more than just their physically present delegates. Having debunked the myth that if conferences were open to online access on-site attendance would drop off, a case is made for the opposite scenario: that broadening channels for conversation at conference venues is a win-win situation in which everyone benefits, and conferences where these channels are blocked are the dinosaurs doomed to extinction.

• You can follow the draft as it develops at http://tinyurl.com/aace-vance
• The slides are posted at http://www.slideshare.net/vances/success-in-modeling-blended-learning-in-theory-and-practice-at-f2f-and-online-conferences
• The presentation was recorded and is available here: http://aace.na4.acrobat.com/p92907860/

SUCCESS in modeling blended learning in theory AND practice at F2F and online conferences

View more presentations from vances. (tags: multiliteracies webheadsinaction)

Twitter: What's in it for education?

I'm responding to another post today, this one: "Actually, I'm still a bit confused as to the educational uses of twitter/twemes, etc. Any useful tutorials you could suggest?"

Ok, Twemes is a mashup that aggregates tweets around a #hashtag. The catch is only that those tweeting have to put the #hashtag in their post somewhere. But if you are microblogging to a group, or microblogging something of interest to a group, then it's useful if your group has established early on that they will be following Twemes, so people have in the back of their minds that they can reach the group by tweeting and embedding the #hashtag in their post, and then anyone can go to the Twemes site and find all the posts to Twitter (tweets) containing that #hashtag. Another advantage to this system is that you don't have to be on Twitter to see the Twemes. You can see whatever has been #hashtagged simply by visiting http://twemes.com.

The more interesting question is why should educators use Twitter in the first place. For some time I've been using 'twitter' as a tag in my Delicious: http://delicious.com/vancestevens/twitter, so I had a look at the almost 100 links I've got stashed there and pulled out the ones most pertinent to education. Here they are:

If you want an educator's perspective on Twitter from the get-go, have a look at http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/twitter-guide/. If you want a more specific example of how Twitter helped one teacher, http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/767. There's also the inevitable Commoncraft explanation of Twitter: http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

My personal awakening with regard to Twitter was when I heard Jeff Utecht's presentation at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference. Jeff solicited help from his Twitter network when he started recording his presentation, and when help arrived I was able to understand how such a network works and how it would be useful to ME. You can listen and see if it strikes the same chord in you: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205

I'm sure I came on this next one through Twitter. The author notes that SHE came on this article through Twitter and points to another article, but you can read hers first and then go there. The point I'm making is that none of us in our distributed learning network would likely have known about this article had we not been on Twitter, so this is an example of how Twitter put the network on to something that we would not have found out about otherwise. Here's the microblog "review" post: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/02/twitter-in-academics-this-prof-shows.html and here's the article about using Twitter in academia: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/
This work was also discussed in SMiELT at http://dekita.org/smielt/forum/groups/microblogging/microblogging, and yet another writer has reviewed this work here: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2699 so this one made a big splash when it touched down.

If in further doubt, entertain yourself with this ditty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYP-wBaqQAI

Screencasting via UTipU

I created my first UTipU video today. Thanks Nellie for the good tip, worked very well!

Voila:



I wanted to see the button that can be generated. That's it above, not that impressive. I wish it could say what it was. In any event, the video, about creating animations in PowerPoint (now I'll bet you REALLY wanna watch it !! ;-) is here: http://www.utipu.com/app/tip/id/4712/. That link offers you a download (free, and well worth the bandwidth).

Famous Last Wordles

I've been meaning to do this for some time. It's a Worldle tag cloud from my Delicious feed:

• Worldle is at http://wordle.net/create
• My Delicious feed: http://delicious.com/vancestevens

Stop presses! This just in ...

VANCE STEVENS has addressed at a distance delegates at a conference in Rasht, Iran. Originally planning to travel in person to the conference, Vance adapted a workshop which was never given in Sudan with intent to give it at the 6th International TELLSI Conference held at Guilan University on October 8 & 9, 2008 <tinyurl.com/web20iran>.

Until it became clear that permission to apply for a visa would not be granted by the Iran Foreign Ministry, Vance was listed in the conference program to deliver a workshop Thursday afternoon, just before the closing ceremonies <tinyurl.com/tellsi2008>.

Thanks to the efforts of MORTEZA BARIN, who was able to raise a wireless connection at the appointed time from the conference site, Vance was able to deliver his presentation from his office in UAE using a version of Elluminate provided Webheads by Learning Times. The presentation was recorded and may be viewed at tinyurl.com/uae2iran.

Links to URLs are

• Portal for Web 2.0 workshop: http://tinyurl.com/web20iran
• TELLSI conference program: http://tinyurl.com/tellsi2008
• Recorded presentation on Elluminate: http://tinyurl.com/uae2iran

Clipping courtesy of http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

Morteza's Comment:

Morteza has been trying to post this comment from Iran but he gets a blank page when he clicks on Comments and tries to post. He can read the comments already there but can't post from where he is in Iran. He sent me this and asked me to put it here:

A Dream which changed into a Reality
I was very disappointed and very worry about the tools and amount of cooperation for having a live conference at the main time according to the conference time. After two days going here and there and speaking with conference organizers finally i found a wireless internet connection the Conference main Hall. And changed our place with another person who wanted to have a presentation in that place. I was full of stress and my blood pressure went up I thought I was burning in the fire but everything changed and first connection with Vance showed me there a way to do it. At that time I asked someone to go invite Dr.Susan Marandi to come to the main Hall. But She was invited to meeting for discussing about TELLSI.I asked God to help me and
succeed.

Connectivism: Too much Noise?

George Siemens commented in the Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge Moodle this morning http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=241#3625 on "how structure influences the ability for students to learn. Too much noise and learners are overwhelmed. Too much order and learners are not challenged. Some ambiguity in the learning process permits room for exploration and creativity." Noting that the course itself was 'traditionally' structured, he said "it's the conversation that's more chaotic...does that detract from the learning experience?"

My reply

We often hear that the goal of learning is to prepare a learner for a real-life experience of some sort. As a language teacher and learner, I can think of sitting in classes where the teacher tried to reduce the whole of the language into an ordered subset (here, learn these conjugations, that's what the test will be on). Later you find you were not prepared for the real world. I would say, too little noise, too little challenge definitely, but also too little emulation of what the real world is like. In fact, ambiguity is rampant and managing work and learning tasks involves filtering and reduction. If the work of filtering is done for you then the opportunity to learn is reduced, not only of the knowledge to be acquired, but of the heuristics to be applied in the real world. I think field dependence and independence describes how comfortable individuals are with coping with noise, but I would say it is a necessary part of the learning process.

Connectivism and noise in real life

Writing that was almost the first thing I did over coffee this morning. It's Saturday in the UAE, a day off, and though I'm not on the east coast diving, I still woke up at six thinking about how much I had to do (noise in my head) and switched on the computer. Do I then systematically work through my task list? No, that would be too structured and would ignore the wealth of connectivist activity (noise and clamor) that had accumulated in email and on Twitter and Google Reader while I slept, and which in fact impacts very much how I carry out the tasks I choose to do on my day off. Reflecting on what I just said I see that if I did not connect with my network today then I would be doing my work as if it were yesterday and I might be seriously out of date (as in 'that's sooo yesterday' ... on the other hand I might actually get some work done ;-) So perhaps touching base with the network is succumbing to the siren call of all that noise, and distracting me into procrastination. I'm not the first to have observed that this might be the case. So I decided rather than discipline myself into efficiency (after all, it's my day off) I would ADD to the noise (with this blog post) and try and document some of that noise and in the process see how connectivism fits into my workflow (or work stoppage, as the case may be).

Now where was I (sorry got up to make coffee, glance at morning papers, another part of my distributed learning network). Oh yes, how many windows are open on my computer? Here's one with an email I wrote but didn't send. Why not? Perhaps the answer will be in something I was looking up in another window (clicking, searching).

Scrolling through windows I come on Twitter. Let's see what the latest is there. That window has lots of tabs open because when I click on what people in my Twitter network suggest I check out, each item opens in a new tab. Twitter is very convenient in this respect. You can click on a tweet, the item appears in its new window, and when you click on the Twitter tab you're back at exactly where you left off. I like to keep Twitter running because it's the epitome of connectivism and connectivist knowledge. And noise. There's a lot of noise in Twitter, but never more than 140 characters of noise, so the noise is almost a whisper. Yet the pearls of wisdom shine there. I've learned a lot through Twitter, not only about things I can use in my practice, but also about how networks and the people who comprise the nodes in them work (and play, and interact both frivolously and seriously, and also that both are important; that you're not your best at work without taking time for play, and visa versa).

So Twitter is a big part of my day-to-day (hour-to-hour? minute-to-minute? nanosecond-to-nanosecond?) connectivist tools and influences, and one of the elixers I feel I need so that I can keep my work up to (today's) date. Email is another, obviously. I follow a couple of really good professional mailing lists. One of them is Learningwithcomputers, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/, an offshoot of Webheads that is active and well moderated in a way that Webheads isn't. Webheads is the other list, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/, and the flip side of the coin. There's a lot of noise in both places, but people keep coming back to and swear by Webheads. And they've been doing that for ten years now. In fact, Webheads is ten years old today: http://webheads10years.wikispaces.com/, which is something I should mention on Twitter shortly (assuming I dare put off doing my real work for just a little while longer; oh, what the heck, the whole morning's gone already!)

Now it's pretty amazing that a group, which started as an eGroup before it was a YahooGroup, and which we then came to look on as a community of practice, and which we now see as part of an even larger distributed learning network, can grow and remain not just cohesive but effective and inspiring, for an entire decade. There may be many other groups and communities and networks in play at the moment, one of the most impressive being the one that has jelled around the Connectivism and Connectivist Knowledge seminars, yet none have stood the test of time as have Webheads. This is really interesting because Webheads has in all that time been essentially leaderless. It's been a mob phenomenon, as Claire Siskin once said, refreshingly without any one person pushing an agenda. It's been a truly co-operative venture, which has sustained itself on the learning that each individual achieves through working within the network. And playing also, not just working.

So to complete this post, I was going to try and document all the stepping in and out of windows I've been doing this morning as I sit alone at my computer while remaining incessantly in touch with my network. Speaking of which, stop presses! Miguel Guhlin just twittered about TipCam free screen recorder (for Windows) that uploads to YouTube! How cool is that? And Jeff Utecht twitters to say he is planning to podcast every presentation at the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai http://learning2cn.ning.com/ so that's another network we can avidly follow while we're engaged in CCK08, as we get our proposals in for EVO http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/CfP which starts rolling now through February, and I'd promised to announce the next Webheads in Action Online Convergence http://wiaoc.org today, on the tenth anniversary of Webheads. All this assuming I can skim off time from the demands of 'real' work, the kind that pays the bills and sustains my DSL pipe from my home and workplace to the network where my 'real' work gets done (now which is the 'real' work; will the 'real' Slim Shady please stand up?)

Whoa!! too much networking. Stop the noise, I wanna get OFF! Maybe I should go for a jog (hang on, first gotta download the latests podcasts from http://edtechtalk.com/ so I can stay connected via my iRiver ... What else would I do with my brain while exercising?? ... )

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/4oasm9