Why I Teach a CL Course, or, Any Course

@yinbk @GoogleGuacamole @merryspaniel @Autumm absolutely. so much to unlearn before ppl can even start. why i made #ed1to1 slow/low-stakes.

— Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) July 16, 2015

#Students are the #heart of my work & always will be. They are our #hope. #WisconsinIdea #OurUW

— Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) July 17, 2015

 To reflect is to think, ponder, or meditate. Some people write blog reflections in double-quick time. I can't. Thinking takes time; and in my world, blog reflections consume time, which I don't have a lot of now, particularly when an online connected learning course is going on. My students' blog posts take priority. Reading everyone of them and writing quality comments take precedence over sleep, my own blogging, or any projects right now. My students are my priority. 

If I think about it, my obsession seems ludicrous. And I'm not blogging about it to make myself seem virtuous. Virginia State (my employer) does not pay me extra -- besides being an instructional designer -- to teach a 3-credit undergraduate course. I am still on the mend from the complications of last Summer. I should be sleeping more. Why then do I/we (my other Connected Learning/CL colleagues this summer) stay up late reading blog post after blog post? 

Because our students matter. They are our future.

I taught for 12 years in K12-13 schools and 3 more in the post-secondary polytechnic in Singapore. When I arrived in the USA, I thought I'd never teach again, and that I'd try something new. I couldn't. I moved from a cushy corporate job back into graduate school and slogged through a doctoral program to find myself back in education.

At the heart of me is the teacher wanting to make the most impact in my limited life for students/learners -- whether it be in instructional design or teaching.

Yes, designing and teaching a connected learning course for the first time without any TA, or co-instructor, is exhausting. It is an arduous task, trying to cajole my students to make paradigm shifts and unlearn from systemic institutional ways they have cultivated to "learn" and be "educated." I experienced first-hand for myself what it was like to dive into the sea of CL when I returned from leave in October 2014. I nearly drowned.

It took me many months to learn how to tweet and build up a learning network. In a compressed course of 7.5 weeks, I will not let my students drown in the CL sea. Initially, my course was less structured and explicitly written. But as the course unfolded, I saw and learned how much my students had to unlearn and relearn, and all these due to no fault of theirs. We may want our students to learn CL but they have never been given much or any opportunity to question, problem-find, to connect, to have freedom, and to have a voice. Do we remember or know what it is like to find our voice in the angsty years of adolescence? How long did it take you to find your voice? Are you still looking?

So I had to spend time preparing my students for CL and helping them to make the shift. This included designing more structure, more explicitness and more direct teaching of new concepts. Other factors complicated the learning. Everyone of them was working full-time (at least 40 hours). They could only connect after work or during a break. Some have partners or children to take care of. One is taking multiple courses at the same time. They were not as connected as I/we wish they were. One had no internet access at home and eventually dropped out. The small enrollment size of my course means the critical mass required to make CL work its magic was missing. Connecting them to #CLMOOC through #F5F turned flat due to many reasons, some still to be analyzed.

All these (and more to blog about) didn't detract from my desire to make this course as meaningful as it could be. Although my students couldn't be as connected as I desired, they were still learning, they were still trying. I still want them to be successful. My role as a teacher, leader, facilitator and coach is to help them overcome the odds life has stacked against them to achieve great things. I know what it means for my parents to put me through school. I was the first one to go to college in my family and a first-generation scholar. I want my students to go as far as they can, in formal or informal learning.

And I will gladly sleep less for 1.5 weeks more so that we can make the most of this time to learn together.

I'm not some fabulous award-winning teacher, but I know that what I value influences how I teach. As Parker Palmer wrote:

“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher... Then teaching can come from the depths of my own truth -- and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind."  

Not everyone is called to be a teacher. For those who are, thank you for the courage to teach and for the courage to stand up for our students.

Designing a Course Worth Learning 3: Course Video Make

Thinking and talking about the course has turned into action. Yes, UNIV 291 has begun. I did not create a navigation or orientation video because I had provided a lot of instructions on the website. The students didn't seem to be lost. They knew where to start. I had a Get Started button, to be sure.

Most of their questions centered around Learning Activity terms we use in Connected Learning. Were they doing things "right" and questions about social media. Why aren't my tweets showing up? There was anxiety and excitement at blasting off, but I wanted them to feel they belonged to a community right away. So I launched the site, let them navigate the course site a bit and then posted a video to let them know I'm present and available; always listening and responding. I also wanted to emphasize the affordances of the open web, knowing most of them were new to Twitter and were not familiar with Connected Learning.

The video took me considerable time to produce. The following are the tools I used and the production process:

1. PRE-PROD: I thought of what I wanted to say and wrote it out using MS Word. It would come in handy for close-captioning in YouTube later. 
2. I didn't read off the script. It was a guide so that I wouldn't have too many "Ums and Ahs." 
3. PROD: I created the raw videos in Quicktime Player on my iMac. There is an option for Movie recording. I saved both as MOV files. I had gone much longer than I intended to be - about 7 minutes. I split the first file and created another ending movie.  
4. I imported them into WeVideo for editing. [Note: I tried using iMovie but it didn't have the editing timeline I prefer to use but this option is available in WeVideo.] I have a paid account that allows me to have more storage space and editing features in WeVideo. The app didn't work too well with my older Windows machine. It worked better (without crashing) on my newer XP touchscreen laptop. (Just something to note.) In WeVideo, I clipped the videos and merged them with transitions, title and ending slides, audio and annotations.
5. I then published the final movie in WeVideo and YouTube (so that I could close caption it). 
6. POST-PROD: Close captioning was completed rather efficiently with a script in YouTube. 

I was reasonably pleased with the final outcome and what I could do in WeVideo. The whole video took longer than I intended to spend time on because I had not estimated how long my initial script would take. Mostly, it's also in the little details -- what font to use, what music, what transitions, etc. Let me know if you have any questions about creating your own course videos. It's highly doable these days with the available web technologies.

With more time, I would have captured the process with a software, but I'm short of time at the moment. Something to revisit later.
    

Truthseeking: Onward to the Next #TJC15 event

To Laura, and all potential truth seekers, 

Some preliminary thoughts.

Having read how your experiment first started (the background, your own journal reading club experiences), I understand better why you made the choices you did.

I have had pretty positive experiences of journal article reading with my peers in grad school. In a few classes and during dissertation writing sessions, there were some fine  debates with "a disputatious community of truth seekers" (Donald Campbell cited in Shadish, Cook & Leviton 1991 -- THE Evaluation book every evaluation student must read?). In real life, I've been blessed with some wonderful in-person mentoring experiences through grad school. Leaving those times behind, I often look to replicate these moments -- online and off. Alas, those were different times and a different dissertation topic from yours.

Coming in with those positive experiences, I'm thus of the opinion that reading in advance helped me to learn and participate better (call it learning preference, whatever). I got out of your earlier posts that you are looking for a fresher approach -- the unstructured, unconference, unjournal, un-[insert new approach here] -- which doesn't suggest that older practices may not be good -- which you didn't claim they weren't, at all. I understand now that you are just trying out a new combination of learning conditions to see how learning might work better but differently.  Learning science theories -- I think -- show that designing lessons where the student can be positioned to make as many connections as possible to a new idea helps extend learning. Twitter probably facilitates this, if one can juggle the multiple threads to the same topic. Twitter forgets though that cognitive overload is a challenge for some people. And so, guided instruction may work better for some than minimal guidance.

In the last event, although the frustration of not knowing the content ahead of time and being befuddled -- in my case -- motivated me to go read the interesting article, I wonder how long this ambiguity might sustain interest once the novelty of live-skimming-tweeting wears off or the article is comparably "less" interesting. ;-)) (An assumption probably, since all articles might have to be carefully weighed against some criteria your group has). This is related to Angela Duckworth's research on grit. Do I have the characteristics of grit to overcome the negotiation of ambiguities? Courage, deep commitment, follow-through... to engender intellectual and emotional engagement? So here, the PROCESS of this live-skimming-tweeting experience has an impact on my further engagement. It is also possibly linked to my motivation for participation. For me, it's a fun novel engagement, I've no checkboxes to mark off, no agenda for participating. So, a highly curious question I have for myself: How long would my intrinsic motivation sustain me if the process of constantly negotiating in the zone of change/discomfort/liminality wears me out? My thinking dispositions have held me through many ZPDs, so let's see how this unfolds. :-)

As in every event of complexity, there are no easy answers, what works for one person, may not work for another. I won't have any prepared agenda but I feel my expectation for the next event is somewhat "defiled" with  knowing much more about the origin of this event than I knew about the last event. (LOL)

Like Campbell, I just want to go into new territories and frontiers to interact with new + old people and engage with a "a disputatious community of truth seekers" (Donald Campbell cited in Shadish, Cook & Leviton, 1991). Simple. 

Thinking about Student Blogs and Community Building

Explaining hyperlinked blog concept to client using graphic depiction

"So you mean we are sharing cyberspace?" 

Seven words that offered a glimpse into our client's thinking. I will refer to her as Ms. Z. [Stan and I met with her.]

Some background information before I continue. She had come to ALT Lab, bogged down by barriers to blogpost-editing and seeking some assistance on how to integrate Timeline into a blogpost.

From her instructor's [Dr. Halo, pseudonym] course site [BEY 500, fake course name], Ms. Z was able to "jump to" and "see" her own blog site. Happily, she has also been blogging on her own in Rampages.us. Yet, how was she not able to edit her own blogposts when she clicked on her instructor's course site and landed on her own blog site? These bits of information gave me clues to her understanding about the concept of mother blog (and student blog) and how things work in an open connected course.

There were some details I clarified with her by drawing out the different entities on the whiteboard:

1. Her blog site and Dr. Halo's course site are two separate entities despite the fact that her blogsite is hyperlinked to Dr. Halo's site. She can access Dr. Halo's course site -- which is also on rampages.us -- via the front door/public view, but she cannot enter from the back end/dashboard view, just as she does for her own blog site. Ms. Z has no control over her instructor's site, she is a student user, not a site administrator. As administrator of her own blog site, Ms. Z can edit her site and create new pages and posts.

Dr. Halo had linked to Ms. Z's blog site (and other students' blogs) using URL links, and not pulling in student content via RSS feed syndication (which Stan and I initially thought was the root of all the confusion). Pulling in students' blogs via RSS feeds would have created the mother blog functionality that I mentioned earlier.

2. Ms. Z wanted to be able to use Timeline and incorporate it in her blog site. Stan explained and demonstrated how Ms. Z could do that, with me chipping in at parts. Ms. Z reviewed the finished product and preferred a more text-based product. Stan suggested using Google Doc instead. After embedding it into her blog site, it still didn't achieve the look Ms. Z wanted. Stan ended up just adding the link to her blogpost.

Ms. Z jotted down notes of our explanations. But one thing that she kept repeating was, "So I go to rampages.us, then under My Sites, look for my blog site, and ..."

I noticed a few striking details:

• Being able to log in and "do something" on her own site seemed to occupy her mind  considerably. She needed really clear, step-by-step instructions on how to get to her site. 
• Despite being aware of her classmates' blog sites (they were all hyperlinked to Dr. Halo's course site), she was not aware of what they were writing about or doing until we clicked on one of the blogs and showed her what her classmate was doing. 
• Depicting the different software applications as separate entities helped her to understand how she would work -- that is, where were the gateways and the sandbox. Not understanding how to gain access stopped her from frolicking in the playground.
• Ms. Z wanted the demo examples to be left published on her blog although they didn't contain real data. She wanted examples of how things were actually done so she could easily follow the steps when doing things on her own. 

In closing, this consultation raised a few questions:

• Does aggregating content in a course site create community? The technical structure facilitates community building. But how does community really come about? What makes participants in the community want to check out each other's content and actually connect? 
• How can we better help students to navigate the sites -- mother blog and student blogs -- so that they can understand the relevance and purpose of these structures and want to engage further? 

Blogging is Not a To-Do List Item

Sometimes we don't know how good we have it until it is gone. The Blizzard of 2015 in New York sent some cross-continental friends whatsapp-ing me two days ago to check if I was out of harm's way. Some of them think I'm still in New York state. It brought a smile to my face and tears to my eyes. My dad used to worry about things like these. It is a blessing to be a child of someone. To have someone worry about you; enough to call and wonder if you are safe in a ghastly snowstorm. What an honor and privilege.

Today, serendipitously or via divine intervention, in a parallel sense, I had some breakthrough thinking about blogging which arrested my previous perception of blogging as an item on my weekly to-do list. I stumbled upon a Twitter chat session led by Vicki Davis, @coolcatteacher, and moderated by Shelley Burgess, @burgess_shelley. I had followed Vicki on Twitter just a few days ago. 

This morning as I was checking the weather outlook on my smartphone, I looked at my Twitter Following stream and a surge of tweets were showing up under the hashtag, #satchatwc. What caught my eye was Vicki's tweet: 

A1: A well-rounded writer is experienced with many tools & selects the best one for the creative task at hand. #satchatwc
— Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) January 31, 2015

Riveted, I kept on reading the tweets surfacing at rapid-fire pace on the small screen.

A1: IMHO, Ss must learn to write electronically if they are going to be prepared for the world outside of the classroom. #satchatwc
— Andi McNair (@mcnairan3) January 31, 2015

A1: 21st century learning is all about social contribution, authenticity,voice & relevancy. That is far beyond paper and pencil. #satchatwc
— Sanee Bell (@SaneeBell) January 31, 2015

"@MitchChampagne: Let your students blog & write 4 the world. " pic.twitter.com/vNGLyfxLMK" #edcampiowa
— Tim Hadley (@MrHadleyHistory) January 31, 2015

@shirky17 Absolutely- Students must be TRANSLITERATE - literate in multiple media! #satchatwc
— Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) January 31, 2015

A1 All writing is thinking. Electronic writing is the pathway toward 21st century socially interactive thinking. #satchatwc
— Steve Wyborney (@SteveWyborney) January 31, 2015

And the tweets streamed on for a considerable period of time. You can read the entire tweet collection via Storify. I was blown away by what these teachers were sharing about "Reinventing Writing," a theme based on a book written by Vicki Davis.

I didn't stay till the end but these teachers' tweets inspired me to rethink my writing and blogging habits. Don't get me wrong, I have loved writing since I was a child. I have many personal blogs which I used as means to communicate with my close friends in other continents. I know my blog is my space to share some of my thoughts. But like the blind man Bartimaeus, I felt like the scales had fallen off my eyes today. This tweet by Vicki made me realized how privileged I am to have a space to blog. Correction, many spaces to blog:

A1: A student without a blog is a student without a voice. #satchatwc
— Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) January 31, 2015

I can blog on Blogger, WordPress, Rampages, Tumblr, anywhere, without restriction. Yet, I don't write as regularly as I used to -- I journaled extensively when I was a child and when I was a college student. I had resisted participating in Curious Creative's 28-day writing challenge to write for 28 minutes a day (nah, I can't write a post in 28 minutes).

Vicki and the #satchatwc educators highlighted a few things to me. As Greg Miller (a principal) says, "At heart, we are still teachers." Blogging is a way for me to not only model consistent reflective thinking but to also S-T-R-E-T-C-H my thinking. If I want my student to think deeply and clearly, I need to be doing that regularly for authenticity. Likewise, I want my students to know that my asking them to blog is not a burdensome chore. It is an honor to be given an opportunity to voice our thoughts. Never forget that. Reading some of our student blogposts on Rampages.us confirmed that. I was moved each time by the blogposts I had selected to  read -- example 1 example 2 example 3. If they only knew that their emotional labor (and invisible labor) was noted by someone, how encouraged they would be. We need to work at providing comments to these students' blogposts. (Some strategy needs to be crafted). I don't think these students are getting enough feedback.

Maybe we don't have time to blog or comment because of our hectic schedules. For me, I am going to make it a habit to write something more than once a week. I who have it so good -- access to so many resources and the freedom to voice my thoughts. Let me not hesitate to let my voice ring out more often for socially interactive thinking (citing Steve Wyborney)!

My First Storify Experiment on Understanding #fedwikihappening