Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach Co-Founder & CEO Powerful Learning Practice, LLChttp://plpnetwork.comsheryl@plpnetwork.com

President21st Century Collaborative, LLChttp://21stcenturycollaborative.com

AuthorThe Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age

Follow me on Twitter@snbeach

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

Housekeeping

Get close to someone

Paperless handoutshttp://plpwiki.com

Back Channel Chathttp://todaysmeet.com/catccamp13#catccamp13

My Community Work- Learning by Doing

Mantra for today’s keynote…

We are stronger together than apart.

None of us is as smart, creative, good or interesting as all of us.

• How can the “infusion of contemporary technologies and digital resources” best meet the needs of our learning community?

• How can the the “infusion of contemporary technologies and digital resources” best meet the needs of my personal learning?

• How will you leverage, how will you enable your teachers or your students to leverage- collective intelligence?

Guiding Questions

Learner First—Educator Second

Introduce yourselves to each other and brag a little. Talk about (in 2 min or less) the most recent or compelling connected learning project you have recently led, discovered, or been involved in.

Emerson and Thoreau reunited would ask-

“What has become clearer to you since we last met?”

The world is changing...

 

6 Trends for the digital age

Analogue DigitalTethered MobileClosed OpenIsolated ConnectedGeneric Personal Consuming Creating

Source: David Wiley: Openness and the disaggregated future of higher education

“We are tethered to our always on/ always on us communication devices and the people and things we reach through them.”

~ Sherry Turkle

Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0

We are living in a new economy – powered by technology, fueled by information, and driven by knowledge.

-- Futureworks: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century

Shifting From Shifting To

Learning at school Learning anytime/anywhere

Teaching as a private event Teaching as a public collaborative practice

Learning as passiveparticipant

Learning in a participatory culture

Learning as individuals

Linear knowledge

Learning in a networked community

Distributed knowledge

By the year 2011 80% of all Fortune 500 companies will be using immersive worlds – Gartner Vice President Jackie Fenn

Libraries 2.0Management 2.0 Education 2.0Warfare 2.0Government 2.0Vatican 2.0

Credit: Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid

Everything 2.0

Are you Ready for Learning and Leading in the 21st

Century?

It isn’t just “coming”… it has arrived! And schools who aren’t redefining themselves, risk becoming irrelevant in preparing students for the future.

dangeuslyirrelevant.org

Our kids have tasted the honey.

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Free range learnersFree-range learners choose how and what they learn. Self-service is less expensive and more timely than the alternative. Informal learning has no need for the busywork, chrome, and bureaucracy that accompany typical classroom instruction.

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATORThe Disconnect“Every time I go to school, I have to power down.” --a high school student

The pace of change is accelerating

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year.

That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.

Knowledge Creation

For students starting a four-year education degree, this means that . . .

half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

Shifts focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.

Shifts focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.

Connected Learning

The computer connects the student to the rest of the worldLearning occurs through connections with other learnersLearning is based on conversation and interaction

Stephen Downes

Connected Learner Scale

Share (Publish & Participate) –

Connect (Comment and Cooperate) –

Remixing (building on the ideas of others) –

Collaborate (Co-construction of knowledge and meaning) –

Collective Action (Social Justice, Activism, Service Learning) –

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Education for Citizenship

“A capable and productive citizen doesn’t simply turn up for jury service. Rather, she is capable of serving impartially on trials that may require learning unfamiliar facts and concepts and new ways to communicate and reach decisions with her fellow jurors…. Jurors may be called on to decide complex matters that require the verbal, reasoning, math, science, and socialization skills that should be imparted in public schools. Jurors today must determine questions of fact concerning DNA evidence, statistical analyses, and convoluted financial fraud, to name only three topics.”

Justice Leland DeGrasse, 2001

Are there new Literacies- and if so, what are they?

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms..

What does it mean to work in a participatory 2.0 world?

Reflection

What is Do -It- Yourself Learning ?

How Does One Get Started on the Path to Becoming a DIY, Connected Educator?

Status Quo-- Things are working well most of the time.

THENSomething happens that creates a sense of urgency to change. A desire to learn something new. You are presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It touches you in some way.

Maybe…- a disturbing look at a problem- a hopeful glimpse of the future- a sobering self reflection- you hear someone like Ewan McIntosh speak and are moved to action

.

One of three things happen:

1. Complacency - You are moved but fail act - telling yourself or others, "Everything is fine."

2. False urgency - You are busy, working-working-working and never reflect or move yourself to action. You talk and it scratches the itch.

3. True urgency or passion- Urgent behavior is driven by a belief that the world contains great opportunities and great hazards. It inspires a gut-level determination to move, and shift, now. You are clearly focused on making real progress every single day.

You see it. You feel it and you are moved to change or act or learn

• Letting go of control• Willing to unlearn and relearn• Mindset of discovery• Reversed mentorship• Co-learning and co-creating• Messy, ground zero, risk taking

Wonder is both a sense of awe and capacity for contemplation.

Wonderment begins with curiosity but then goes deeper beyond the surface to a place of possibility. A place we look for patterns and testing of ideas we had closed to our more reasonable mind.

Wonder is to leave aside our taken-for-granted assumptions, peel away our biases, and to willing explore aspects and angles we wouldn't have seen before.

• http://bit.ly/QSqfjI

• PLN Speed Dating

It also helps to ask yourself questions like:

1) Why am I planning to do this? 2) How will I initiate this change? 3) Who can I connect with online in my network that can help me? 4) How will I measure my progress? Or how will I know if I am learning?

“Understanding how networks work is one of the most important literacies of the 21st Century.”

- Howard Rheingold

http://www.ischool.berkeley.eduHow do you define networks?

In connectivism, learning involves creating connections and developing a network. It is a theory for the digital age drawing upon chaos, emergent properties, and self organized learning.

Photo credit: Cogdogblog

George Siemens

responsiveresponsive

personalized

“Twitter and blogs ... contribute an entirely new dimension of what it means to be a part of a tribe. The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.”

Internet tribes

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“A tribe needs a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

Connected Learning Communities provide the personal learning environment (PLE) to do the nudging

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

1. Local community: Purposeful, face-to-face connections among members of a committed group—a professional learning community (PLC)

2. Global network: Individually chosen, online connections with a diverse collection of people and resources from around the world—a personal learning network (PLN)

3. Bounded community: A committed, collective, and often global group of individuals who have overlapping interests and recognize a need for connections that go deeper than the personal learning network or the professional learning community can provide—a community of practice or inquiry (CoP)

• THE CONNECTED EDUCATOR

Professional Learning Communities

Personal Learning Networks

Communities of Practice

Method Often organized for teachers

Do-it-yourself Educators organize it themselves

Purpose To collaborate in subject area or grade leverl teams around tasks

For individuals to gather info for personal knowledge construction and to bring back info to the community

Collective knowledge building around shared interests and goals.

Structure Team/groupF2f

Individual, face to face, and online

Collective, face to face, or online

Focus Student achievement

Personal growth Systemic improvement

Community and Networks are the New Professional Development

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999a) describe three ways of knowing and constructing knowledge…

Knowledge for Practice is often reflected in traditional PD efforts when a trainer shares information produced by researchers. This knowledge presumes a commonly accepted degree of correctness about what is being shared. The learner is typically passive in this kind of "sit and get" experience. This kind of knowledge is difficult to transfer to local context without support and follow through. After a workshop, much of what was useful gets lost in the daily grind, pressures and isolation of doing the work.

Knowledge in Practice recognizes the importance of experience and practical knowledge in improving practice. As you test out new strategies and assimilates them into your routines you construct knowledge in practice. You learn by doing. This knowledge is strengthened when teams reflect and share with one another lessons learned during application and describe the tacit knowledge embedded in their experiences.

Community and Networks are the new Professional Development

Knowledge of Practice believes that systematic inquiry where learners create knowledge as they focus on raising questions about and systematically studying their own practices collaboratively, allows participants to construct knowledge of practice in ways that move beyond the basics of work routines to a more systemic view of practice.

I believe that by attending to the development of knowledge for, in and of practice, we can enhance professional growth that leads to real change.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S.L. (1999a). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teaching learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249-305.

Passive, active, and reflective knowledge building in local (PLC), global (CoP) and contextual (PLN) learning spaces.

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“ Do you know what who you know knows?” H. Rheingold

Critical friends: Form a professional learning team who come together voluntarily at least once a month. Have members commit to improving their practice through collaborative learning. Use protocols to examine each other’s teaching or leadership activities and share both warm and cool feedback in respectful ways.

Curriculum review or mapping groups: Meet regularly in teams to review what team members are teaching, to reflect together on the impact of assumptions that underlie the curriculum, and to make collaborative decisions. Teams often study lesson plans together.

Action research groups: Do active, collaborative research focused on improvement around a possibility or problem in a classroom, school, district, or state.

Book study groups: Collaboratively read and discuss a book in an online space.

Case studies: Analyze in detail specific situations and their relationship to current thinking and pedagogy. Write, discuss, and reflect on cases using a 21st century lens to produce collaborative reflection and improve practice.

Instructional rounds: Adopt a process through which educators develop a shared practice of observing each other, analyzing learning and teaching from a research perspective, and sharing expertise.

Connected coaching: Assign a connected coach to individuals on teams who will discuss and share teaching practices in order to promote collegiality and help educators think about how the new literacies inform current teaching practices.

"Imagine an organization with an employee who can accurately see the truth, understand the situation, and understand the potential outcomes of various decisions. And now imagine that this person is able to make something happen." ~ Seth Godin.

Real Question is this:Are we willing to change- to risk change- to meet the needs of the precious folks we serve?

Can you accept that Change (with a “big” C) is sometimes a messy process and that learning new things together is going to require some tolerance for ambiguity.

Change is hard

Connected learners are more effective change agents

We have a choice: A choice to be powerful or pitiful. A choice to allow ourselves to become victims of all that is wrong in education or activists. Activists who set their own course. Who resist the urge to quit prematurely. DIY change agents who choose to be powerful learners on behalf of the children they serve.