In the past three posts, I have covered the first 39 “rules” from Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb.: 52 Truths For Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self (2009).  I found this book to be relevant not only for entrepreneurs in business, but for those changing the paradigm of teaching by moving online.  This post will complete my review of his rules and their application to online teaching and learning.  Here are the last thirteen:

Rule #40 – Technology is about changing how we work.

Webber makes a great point that directly ties into our work in online teaching and learning – “It’s never about the technology – it’s always about what the technology makes possible.”  Technology is a moving target.  The online environment today is totally different than just five years ago due to the increased two-way interactivity now possible.  Rather than adopting “a” technology, we should be about adopting technological concepts that allow us to bring learning alive.  The question is never Wordpress versus Blogger or Moveable Type, but rather whether blogging can improve dialogue and connections in your class.  This rule also suggests that it is okay to try new approaches to teaching and learning due to new affordances technology grants rather than trying to shoe-horn our old course into an online learning environment.

Rule #41 – If you want to be a real leader, first get real about leadership.

In business, leadership is not attached to a single job title.  It is also not attached to a specific gender or race.  In classes, the same can be said.  Leadership is a way of thinking and acting, and we do our students a disservice if we do not cultivate that.  Real leaders grow new leaders, and real teachers grow the next generation of leaders as well.  How is your class organized to recognize and cultivate thinking and acting as leaders?

Rule #42 – The survival of the fittest is the business case for diversity.

Webber noted that diversity is the key to adaptation and the way to tap new ideas.  It is a way of learning new ways of thinking and operating.  Much has been written about the anonymity of students online, but I would suggest that one can also create opportunities that expose the diversity of thought.  I will never forget an early online class I taught in which college leadership was being discussed.  A white American male posted a lengthy comment about authoritative leadership, and then one male student from Guam started his post with “I am a Chamorro and that is not how we think…”  Online classes open up wonderful opportunities for cross-cultural, gender, or racial discussions in a safe environment.  Exposing our students to diversity of thought equips them for success in the flat world.

Rule #43 – Don’t confuse credentials with talent.

In business today, particularly with the speed of change that is occurring, it makes sense to hire for attitude and then train for skills.  I wonder if we are guilty of the reverse in education.  We (and our students) place great value on degrees and grades.  The number one question we tend to get in class (online or F2F) is “Will this be on the test?”  If we were in the talent business rather than the credentialing business, we faculty and our students would be focused more on learning and less on grades.  Do our classes help or hurt our students’ future job prospects when it comes to attitude?

Rule #44 – When it comes to business, it helps if you actually know something about something.

The same can be said for teaching online.  Our role as faculty has definitely changed.  We now live in a world where Scantron tests are obsolete if students can enter the question into Wolfram Alpha or Google or Wikipedia and ascertain the correct answer.  But that is not learning.  Our role has evolved from knowledge giver into a knowledge guide, which does mean that we have to know something about something…so that we can guide those who only check the first five returns in Google.  We should want to move our students beyond information to knowledge.

Rule #45 – Failure isn’t failing.  Failure is failing to try.

Webber noted that the articles in FastCompany magazine that garnered the greatest reader responses were the ones where authors talked about their failures and what they learned.  One cannot take risks without having failures, but the question becomes what one does with the lessons learned.  That is true of online teachers and it is true of online students.  Regardless of the myth of the digital natives, the truth is that the online environment is still outside the comfort zone of many students (as it is for many faculty).  Yet, this new environment offers rich opportunities to try things that could never be tried face-to-face.  I recently required my graduate class of technology-frightened students to research a Web 2.0 tool and then post a multimedia presentation on that tool in a wiki to their fellow classmates in a two-week period…with no instruction on “how” to do that.  But I also told them that anyone who successfully posted a multimedia presentation passed the assignment.  They ended up amazing themselves, posting a combination of YouTube, Jing, and Camtasia videos on 25 separate tools.  They also learned that the lesson was not the presentation but the journey in preparing and posting the presentation.  After that two-week period, I no longer had a class of students scared of technology.  Almost all of them ended up applying their new skills in the K-12 classes they taught.  What excites me most is the spirit of experimentation that has suddenly erupted in these teachers.

Rule #46 – Tough leaders wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Webber noted that the kind of leaders the world needs are those who exercise tough leadership with warm hearts.  I believe that the worst mistake an online faculty can make is to be invisible.  It is okay to have a tough course but your students should “see” you as someone who is passionate about the subject matter and caring about their success in the class.  The social presence of the faculty impacts learning, retention, and ultimately student success.

Rule #47 – Everyone’s at the center of their map of the world.

I am currently in Boston visiting my daughter and grandkids.  One of the lesser known tourist attractions is the Mapparium, a three-story tall stained glass globe that you walk into and stand at the center of the world.  It certainly is a unique view of geography.  Yet, unique views are common.  I was talking with my good friend Bruce Robinson last night.  Bruce is Headmaster of the British School of Boston and was my roommate at University of Nebraska as we worked on our doctorates.  Bruce is also originally from Australia, and he had a world map that (to me) was upside down and showed Australia as center of the world.  Technology has given us all the ability to construct our own personal learning environments in which we are the center of the world, with linkages to information and knowledge being generated all around us.  This concept that not only are we at the center but also we are responsible for our own learning is a great literacy that we need to pass on to our students.  Webber makes a great point in Rule #47: ”

“It’s a big world-and getting smaller all the time. It’s not so much that the world is flat.  It’s that we are all connected…you’re in the middle, and so is everyone else.”

Rule #48 – If you want to make change, start with an iconic project.

Everyone talks about “change” yet few really believe in it of do it.  The concept of change is too nebulous for most people.  So Webber suggests that the road to change is to pick a doable project that provides proof of concept and makes change believable.  So if you would like to add online courses to your education delivery mix, don’t try to do all of them immediately.  Pick one course that has impact and do a proof of concept design and delivery.  When we started the online delivery at Gwinnett Technical College in Georgia, we started with three courses and 41 students.  Within five years, we were offering 200 courses a quarter with the largest online technical college enrollment in the state.

Rule #49 – If you want to grow as a leader, you have to disarm your border guards.

It is an unwritten law of business that the higher you rise, the more inaccessible you become.  Webber points our that business today is more than numbers and rationality; that emotional intelligence plays just as important a role.  In a similar view, faculty who teach online need to be accessible and real to their online students.  It is too easy to put up barriers to access – rigid office hours, unreturned email, no use of social media like Facebook or Twitter.  Think about how accessible you are and what barriers may be blocking students from getting to you.

Rule #50 – On the way up, pay attention to your strengths; they’ll be your weaknesses on your way down.

We are all fascinated by lists of the best…but when it comes to businesses, those in the Fortune 500 today probably will not remain there.  Take a look at the Fortune 500 from fifty years ago – the top company was General Motors!  Every strength also has the potential as a vulnerability.  There are lessons from GM that can be applied to higher education.  We need to examine our strengths today with new lens of digital connectiveness, ubiquitous access to information, and open publishing.

Rule #51 – Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much.

Great advice…whether you run a company or a class.  I start all of my online classes with an icebreaker to get to know my students…and to let them get to know me.  There are a ton of interactive websites that can be used for ice breakers online. One I have used in the past with college-aged student is “Gone To the Dogs.” You click on GAMES (along the left side menu) and fill out the Dog Breed Calculator test to find out what breed of dog you are!  Turns out I am a “Azawakh” (or Tareg Sloughi)…a large but very skinny dog from the sub-Sahara. It is “rangy, leggy, lean, rugged, and elegant”…and my wife might suggest that I am three out of the five and leave it to me to figure out which!  My students love it – and we begin that first week making connections with each other.

Rule #52 – Stay alert!  There are teachers everywhere.

Wonderful way to end the book!  Webber suggests that we should all stay open to what we are hearing and be willing to listen and learn.  I note in my syllabus that I expect to learn as much from my students as they do from me, because I set my online classes up with the expectation that we are all co-creators of knowledge who learn from each other.

Webber ends his book by noting that the old rules no longer apply and that we need new rules of thumb.  That suggests a continuing evolution.  He asks that we all share our Rule #53, and has set up a website – http://www.rulesofthumbbook.com – to facilitate that sharing.

So – four posts covering 52 rules.  What do you think?  What would be our Rule #53 for online teaching and learning?  Leave a comment here and let me know!

Yesterday I started an examination of Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb.: 52 Truths For Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self (2009).  As Webber noted, these amazing times require one to rethink, reimagine, and recalibrate what is possible.  In other words, it is time to rewrite the rules.

I looked at the first thirteen rules yesterday, using as a lens our initiative to help faculty move their classes online.  Continuing today:

Rule #14 – You don’t know if you don’t go.

Webber suggests that we all need to get out of our comfort zone and experience new things.  How many of us as faculty spend time in the social media that our students use?  How do we add relevance to our students’ lives if we do not understand their culture?  You don’t know if you don’t go!

Rule #15 – Every start-up needs four things: change, connections, conversation and community.

Webber noted that these four words are not just a cute mnemonic device, they represent a foundation for a new type of business plan.  They also form a nice foundation for an online course.  In moving courses online, teaching (and learning) practices have to change.  Online courses work best when students make connections with the content, the faculty, and each other.  Learning occurs through conversations (synchronous and asynchronous).  The goal in online learning is to create a community of learners.

Rule #16 – Facts are facts; stories are how we learn.

Nothing is dryer than just the facts.  Facts come alive when coupled with stories that touch us.  My colleague Bud Deihl has been working with faculty at VCU to start a digital storytelling initiative.  Technology provides some wonderful tools these days for faculty to tell their stories…and for students to tell theirs.  Learning becomes more personal when stories are used, and more learning-centered if students become involved in telling those stories.  In my classes last year, I had quite a few online students who were frankly scared of technology, and yet when I pointed them to CogDog’s 50+ Ways to Tell a Story and let them begin telling theirs, magical things began to happen in the class.

Rule #17 – Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency.

There are safe ways to teach and there are creative ways to teach, and the two rarely coincide.  Online teaching and learning has opened new creative approaches for both my students and myself.  It is work, but it is also fun, exciting, and more vibrant than recycling the old lectures I used to use.

Rule #18 – Knowing it ain’t the same as doing it.

There are a lot of “experts” who theorize about best practices for teaching online.  But the critical component for me is whether these experts have actually done it – taught online themselves.  In a like manner, faculty will learn more the first semester they actually teach online, and there are no manuals or websites that can replace that crucible of experience.

Rule #19 – Memo to leaders: focus on the signal-to-noise ratio.

The signal-to-noise ratio comes from electrical engineering – the higher the ratio, the clearer the message being transmitted.  It is also a term I heard in my Navy days.  When hunting submarines, our job was to pull their signals out of the acoustic noise in the sea.  We used technology to improve the signal to noise ratio.  Today, our job as faculty is to still improve that signal-to-noise ratio.  The internet is awash in noise and distractions.  We do have tools such as RSS feeds that can help us improve our signal strength and focus on finding those bits of information that enhance the learning process.  Webber suggested that leaders need to do self-assessments about themselves, their company, their values, and their metrics in order to improve their signal-to-noise ratio.  Good advice also for faculty and the course they teach.  Particularly online, how clear are we on goals and objectives?  What processes are we using to help students critically examine our subject matter?  Do the metrics we use map to our learning objectives, and do our students understand that?

Rule #20 – Speed = strategy.

In an age where change is happening at a dizzying pace, the winners will be those who can see the change and adapt the swiftest.  This may not be true for every course, but every course can benefit from developing students who are critical thinkers and adaptive thinkers.  It raises the question as to how we unleash our students to question old models and create new ones.

Rule #21 – Great leaders answer Tom Peters’ great question: “How can I capture the world’s imagination?”

Is your course “insanely great?”  If not, why not?  Timid approaches to learning do succeed every day, and imaginative experiments in learning do fail everyday, but which excite you and your students more?  Considering how to have one’s course capture the students’ imagination is a great exercise in keeping at bay the status quo.

Rule #22 – Learn to see the world through the eyes of your customer.

The learning is a class changes when the faculty stops being a salesperson for her or his discipline and instead becomes a partner with students in knowledge creation around the discipline.  We faculty are guilty of being so passionate about our course that we fail to examine our course through our students’ eyes.  If we want them to want more than a grade, we have to work at creating opportunities so students see the relevance of the course to their own lives, lighting their own passions about the subject matter.  Some of the social media open new opportunities for making our students’ thinking visible.  It is one of the reasons I feel I get closer to my online students than my face-to-face students.  In the 24/7 online environment, I end up spending more time seeing the world through their eyes.

Rule #23 – Keep two lists: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?

Webber noted that some people have jobs while others have something they really work at.  The first question really gets at what are you passionate about, while the second is about being honest about what works and what does not.  What would be on your two lists?

Rule #24 – If you want to change the game, change the economics of how the game is played.

I love the quote from Jerry Garcia that starts this chapter – “You do not want to merely be considered just the best of the best.  You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”  I have always considered that great advice for an online teacher as well.  Rather than looking for the same ways of doing what you used to do in the classroom in an online class, look for new ways of teaching that the online environment and social media open up.

Rule #25 – If you want to change the game, change customer expectations.

John Tagg noted in The Learning Paradigm College that students are equally guilty at low expectations (you feed me what will be on the test, I’ll regurgitate it).  But as Chickering and Gamson noted in their classic Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, high expectations lead to improved performance.

6. Communicates High Expectations – Expect more and you will get more. High expectations are important for everyone — for the poorly prepared, for those unwilling to exert themselves, and for the bright and well motivated. Expecting students to perform well becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when teachers and institutions hold high expectations for themselves and make extra efforts.

In the online environment, expectation management is critical.  Rubrics are an excellent means by which your expectations can be crystal clear.

Rule #26 – The soft stuff is the hard stuff.

Does your course focus on the bottom line (grades) or investing in the future?  Do students leave your course motivated to continue their learning journey or glad the course is done and the box is checked for graduation?  What do you focus on?

These rules are resonating with me.  Are they with you?  I’ll continue my examination in the next post.

I have just finished Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb.: 52 Truths For Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self (2009).  It is a quick read and yet deserves reflection and discussion.  Webber previously took the traditional business magazine in exciting and rule-breaking directions with FastCompany, and his reason for writing this book is that these amazing times require one to rethink, reimagine, and recalibrate what is possible.  In other words, it is time to rewrite the rules.

The 52 chapters each cover a “rule” with typically a story from Alan’s past coupled with a “So What?” reflection on what the rule means.  As Tom Peters noted:

In short, Rules of Thumb, featuring 52 “rules,” is a marvel. Practical. Philosophical. Fun. And, above all, wise. Ever so wise.

Here is a sample:

#10 A Good Question Beats a Good Answer. #14 You Don’t Know if You Don’t Go. #16 Facts Are Facts; Stories Are How We Learn. #20 Speed = Strategy. #23 Keep Two Lists: What Gets You Up in the Morning? What Keeps You Up at Night? #26 The Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff. #28 Good Design Is Table Stakes. Great Design Wins. #29 Words Matter. #33 Everything Is a Performance. #42 The Survival of the Fittest Is the Business Case for Diversity. #45 Failure Isn’t Failing. Failure Is Failing to Try. #46 Tough Leaders Wear Their Hearts on Their Sleeves. #49 If You Want to Grow as a Leader, You Have to Disarm Your Border Guards. #50 On the Way Up Pay Attention to Your Strengths; They’ll Be Your Weaknesses on the Way Down. #52 Stay Alert! There Are Teachers Everywhere.

I would like to have listed all 52—there are no losers in this set. (In fact, I believe Alan’s idiot editor sliced about half of them from the first draft, which I saw; damn shame.)

Fact is, I love Alan, and I love his book. Yes, he truly is a wise man.

Ahhhh…as only Tom Peters can write!

But I agree with him.  In fact, what struck me was how many of the rules fit our current initiative to help faculty move their teaching and learning online.  So I thought I would spend a few blog posts examining Webber’s rules and their fit with our initiative.

Rule#1 – When the going gets tough, the tough relax.

Webber noted that one of my heroes, Edwards Deming, was famous for his eighth point in creating quality in an organization – Drive Out Fear.  Webber suggested that you not let fear undermine your chance to do what you want to do.  I could suggest that this equally applies to faculty considering teaching online, but for me, it suggests a deeper truth – No course will ever have learning at its core if fear rules the students.  Webber suggests that one should smile and enjoy the trip.  I would say that works equally well for faculty and students in an online class.

Rule #2 – Every company is running for office.  To win, give the voters what they want.

Webber noted that every day you are running for office, and that every vote counts!  He states that you have to prove to your customers that you get them and care about them.  While I would not necessarily equate students with customers, I do believe that it is important that online students “see” you as a real person that cares about them and their learning.  Giving students what they want does not mean watering down a course, it means giving students clear organization, clear directions, and the respect to allow them to be co-explorers in the learning process.

Rule #3 – Ask the last question first.

Webber noted that when one starts with “Do you know the point of the exercise?”, it becomes a way to reverse-engineer the project.  In a similar manner, students will understand their online work better if they understand what the point of any assignment is…how it relates to the learning objectives of the course and ultimately to why your particular course is important and relevant to their lives.

Rule #4 – Don’t implement solutions.  Prevent problems.

I was always impressed that the first time a Sony Trinitron TV was plugged in and turned on was when a customer pulled it out of the box.  Sony did not wait until a TV was built to test it, it incrementally tested each component along the manufacturing process such that the assembled TV worked, period.  That makes sense in manufacturing, yet too many faculty use only a mid-term and final to assess the learning that takes place in their classes.  Building in formative assessment and shifting the responsibility for learning equally to the students makes as much sense in online learning as it does for Sony.

Rule #5 – Change is a math formula.

The formula is that change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change.  Up until now, most good online faculty have been early adopters.  The status quo has worked for most faculty, who continue to teach the way they were taught.  However, in the past few years, the internet has slowly become integrated into the status quo.  From social networking to twittering, a new generation of both younger and older adults are routinely using the web as part of their lives.  Failing to integrate the web into teaching and learning risks alienating this new generation.  The tipping point is rapidly approaching where failing to provide online classes will be a marketing issue for some programs in higher education.

Rule #6 – If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture.

Webber quoted Ted Levitt who suggested that many companies suffer from a serious problem of not really understanding what business they were in.  Some business do get it.  Southwest Airlines is not in the transportation business – it is in the freedom business.  Starbucks is not in the coffee business, it is in the “home away from home” business.  Harley Davidson does not sell motorcycles, it sells a lifestyle.  It begs the question – how do your students see your online course?  Do you see your job as “teaching” or do you see yourself as someone who sets up a learning environment and builds a learning community?

Rule #7 – The system is the solution.

One could go many directions with this in higher education.  After all, our schools and our courses tend to be very siloed, acting as if each was independent of the other.  In truth, our courses are systems within systems, and our students spend four-plus years trying to figure out the interrelationships between them.  It carries over in our online classes.  We load students and content into a course management system and expect learning to occur.  Learning would be optimized if we took a more system-level approach.  I am a big believer in TPACK, which looks at the appropriate technology and the appropriate pedagogy for the specific content students are exploring.  In our online class, we use a variety of social media to enhance the course management system and connect our students with others in the discipline.  In the interconnected system, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Rule #8 – New realities demand new categories.

Webber stated that solving today’s problems means moving beyond yesterday’s outmoded categories.   The online environment is creating new categories every day – ebooks, unparallelled access to information, wikipedias, virtual worlds, open-source, crowd-sourcing, new forms of academic publishing, to name a few.  In a hyperlinked world, a seat-time approach to education using hard-bound books no longer fits.

Rule #9 – Nothing happens until money changes hands.

Okay, maybe one rule that would be a stretch applying to online teaching and learning.  After all, this book was written primarly for entrepreneurs.  And yet, there is something to be said for not only creating enthusiasm for learning in your class, but also having tangible results – the first paper or the first video or the first podcast created by your students and submitted for your (and peer) review.

Rule #10 – A good question beats a good answer.

This resonates with me as a researcher.  Good research almost always raises good questions as part of the research.  Given how knowledge continues to grow, it makes sense that we develop our students to be questioners rather than parrots who feed the “correct” answer back to us.  As history has too often shown, the correct answer only works for so long before a more correct answer comes along.

Rule #11 – We’ve moved from an either/or past to a both/and future.

Webber suggests that entrepreneurs today have to reject the old either/or choices and instead look for both/and synergies.  When Barack Obama suggested that there were no red states or blue states, just red, white and blue states, he was reframing a both/and future rather than an either/or past.  Higher education likewise needs to move past face-to-face or online classes to a both/and approach that gives both options to our students.  At a past institution where I worked, the majority of our “online” students also came to campus and took face-to-face classes.  We and our students should value building a degree around a combination of face-to-face classes and online classes.

Rule #12 – The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it.

I am a different teacher today than I was three-years ago.  The reason – my network who continually feeds information to me, whether through Twitter, Ning, or Google Reader.  This rapid assimilation of knowledge allows me to keep my course current and relevant.  It suggest to me that these new skills I have developed now need to be part of my classes so that my students develop similar skills.  Knowledge-sharing is now a normal part of my life, and it is a job skill my students will need.

Rule #13 – Learn to take no as a question.

While my passion is online teaching and learning, the reality currently is that most faculty who seek me out do so to web enhance their face-to-face class, and have no interest in online teaching and learning.  And yet, to me, web enhancing a class IS online teaching and learning.  I am slowly learning to take the NO about online teaching and learning as an opportunity to open a new dialogue with my colleagues.  I am a victim of my own rose-colored glasses, and I really need to better understand the reluctance others have, so that I can do a better job helping them when the time is right for them to move online.

I’ll continue with the next 13 in the next post.  My question to you – on target or off the board?  What do you think?

I am sure that I will not be the only one blogging today about President Obama’s Inauguration speech.  Bud Deihl and I walked over to the student commons and watched it with several hundred students and staff.   Our new President crafted a wonderful speech with both hope and purpose in mind, founded on the idea that we are all in this ship of state together.  Looking out over the cheering students, I could not help but reflect not only on the journey, but also on the idea articulated by another young President that indeed, the torch had passed…and that we will be okay as a nation.

I probably will also not be the only one using Wordle today, but I like the way certain words jump out at you from his speech.

As a retired Navy Commander, his call to service for this country really resonated with me.  I was reminded as I listened to Vice President Biden take his oath of office that that particular oath was the same one I swore to as a Navy Ensign.  It is an oath of allegiance to an idea, not a person…something I have always held dear.

As several Twitterers noted, the White House website rolled over to the new administration’s site on time at noon.  It proclaims that change has come to this country.  I was happy to hear the word “digital” in Obama’s speech, and it appears likely that the digital age will be part of that change…and that these changes will impact education.  I see that as positive.

I have not blogged for the past three weeks for a combination of reasons.  Some of it is old habits.  When I was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, January was historically known as “The Dark Ages.”  Old habits die hard.  I was also sick for a week, followed by the hectic nature of a semester start.  The Dark Ages began to thaw this weekend when several of my students remarked in our online class that they were excited and enlightened by the first week’s activities!  I was simply introducing Delicious and Web 2.0 to these school teachers, but I spend so much time immersed in Web 2.0 that I can forget how exciting and refreshing it is to discover it!

So today’s speech seemed to lift those dark feelings off me.  It may still be January, but I am looking forward to this semester and the coming days with a renewed sense of hope and purpose.  I know I have a part to play in education…and I will look for opportunities to serve in other ways as well.

Three words captured the start of our country and three new words capture the direction forward,

We, The People!

Yes We Can!

The speech today merged these two concepts into one unified direction for our country and all of us.  I’m stoked! 

{Photo Credit: Jim Young / Reuters}

For the past two weeks, I have been drafting a white paper on the state of the union regarding online education.  It certainly has had me thinking strategically.  I do not think that I am alone – it seems many are thinking strategically right now.  I have been influenced by Stephen Downes’ “The Future of Online Learning,” the Landmark Project and its Big Ideas for Education, and the Sloan-C annual report, “Staying the Course – Online Education in the United States.  Ken Allen, Laura Blankenship and Gardner Campbell also have me reflecting longer term with some of their recent posts.  When I am further along on the white paper, I will post more about it.

Yesterday, Jeff Nugent and I joined about 18 other educators from around Virginia to help the Electronic Campus of Virginia do some strategic planning.  ECVA is a cooperative effort of the state institutions of higher education to pool resources, learn from one another, and assist policy makers in formulating electronic policy for the state.  In our meeting yesterday, we broke into four groups to examine:

• Assessment of Digital Literacy
• Fading and Emerging Technologies
• Open Source
• Virtualization / Cloud Computing

Gardner was a past leader in ECVA, and was tweeting about his current participation in the MIT Program for the Future conference - a timely event.  The relevance of his tweets was a bit spooky!  Jeff and I joined the group discussing fading and emerging technologies.  Our first task was to define “emerging technologies.”  Jeff tweeted:

It was a good question.  As we often discuss here, what is emerging for us as early adopters is different from what is emerging for the masses in the middle.  Historically, the early and late majority have been slow to adopt new technologies…and equally slow in letting go of old technologies.  Early adopters on the other hand are quick to move on to some new technology and drop their latest even as the majority are starting to recognize what they are abandoning.  Stopping support for fading technologies (think slide projectors and overheads) is even tougher.  John St. Clair of University of Mary Washington used a great term yesterday when he noted that we sometimes need to “euthanize” technologies that are past their prime.

I wish that I had found Ray Sims post yesterday.  I like how he framed his question of “In the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?”…

1. Use cases for new collaboration and social software applications. I think back to my experience with wiki four+ years ago prior to having benefit of the seeds in wikipatterns.com. Then, we openly didn’t know what we were going to use the wiki for, but overtime, some “standard” use cases emerged. Now I see the same with some of the newer social software applications like Twitter, where not only use cases but syntax conventions (for @username and #hashtags) emerge.
2. Shifts in company culture, including towards more openness and more innovation
3. Shifts in the macro way that employees work
4. Organizational networks, including new ties facilitated by social software applications, shifting demographics, and changing culture
5. Folksonomy, emerging from content categories
6. Increased visibility to the most valuable content, derived both from explicit ratings and from behavior (e.g. tagging, subscriptions, linking, and page views)
7. Wiki page structures
8. Definitions and terminology, including definitions of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and knowledge management beyond the original coinage — see for example the enterprise 2.0 definition exchange documented in the AIIM report
9. Collective intelligence. I’m still sorting out in my own mind to what extent this term works for me, but I at least think it is better than AIIM’s “collective wisdom” — although the report also uses “collective intelligence”
10. Perhaps software applications, or at least mash-ups. Is it valid to claim emergence here? Although in a common-language sense they are emerging, it really isn’t emergence in the sense of complexity theory.

Ray has some great points.  We tend to focus in on tools and technologies, but what is really driving use is the culture established…and leaders are responsible for the culture.

As we circled around the topic, we kept coming back to the question of what resources drive our thinking.  We had all been influenced by the Horizon Report from NMC.  Jeff noted that when educators put lists together, they quickly grow to huge numbers, which few then digest.  So we began to wonder, could we cull such lists down to the top five resources we should point policy makers towards to influence their decisions?  We have great diversity in the edublogosphere, but we also tend to see common themes.  Can we collapse those themes down to the five we would give to policy makers?  What five resources would we want President-Elect Obama and the new Secretary of Education to read?  We thought that the list would include these three as a start:

• The Horizon Report
• The Sloan-C Annual Report
• The ECAR Study on Students and IT

So my question to my readers – What would be on YOUR top 5 list?  Use the comment feature below to add your ideas and voice.

Darren Draper had an interesting and thought provoking post Monday, which is no surprise from Darren.  In “No Teacher Left Behind?,” Darren began by noting that he believed the positive message David Truss had posted in “Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?“, but then asked if:

• In spending so much time to create (shallow?) connections with such a wide range of educators on a global level, isn’t it possible that one might also neglect local relationships that are equally (if not more) important?
• What can we do to consistently maintain a healthy perspective?

Shifting gears to a higher plane:

• Do we really think that all teachers need to be this connected?
• Can every teacher (human being) handle all of the information? Are they “bad teachers” if they can’t?
• And what about those teachers that take 25 minutes just to create a Gmail account? Will it really be worth my time – and theirs – to help them enter the 21st Century? Or are the benefits of such efforts simply not worth the costs?

I guess what I’m really wondering is this:

• Is it ever OK to simply leave some teachers behind?

He DID note that he was tired as he posted these questions! 

I think many of us that work with faculty wonder some times if it is okay to simply leave some teachers behind.  However, let me suggest an alternative view.  I have been excited this week as my online class of graduate students – all older K-12 teachers and many self-labeled technologically-challenged, began to submit their projects on Web 2.0 tools.  My 21 students have each taken a different tool, explored it, and then begun to share their exploration with their fellow students in ways that reinforce Web 2.0.  So I am starting to see teachers who had never ventured beyond Powerpoint suddenly using some of the tools CogDog lists in his 50+ Ways to Tell a Story.  I am finding new tools that I have never seen before, such as RockYou.Com, which allows someone who has never published multimedia before to mix photos, effects, and music in compelling ways.  SlideShare, Camtasia and Jing are being used.

It is early yet, and only a quarter of my students have posted so far, but I am excited by what I have seen so far.  It reminds me that it is worth the time to get teachers excited about using 21st Century skills!

{Photo Credit: Saffanna, weinnat }

Iskold’s article “Rethinking Crossing the Chasm” discusses the difficulty companies have in bridging the gap between early adopters and the mainstream markets of early and late majorities. In a nutshell, early adopters love new stuff but make up too small a percentage of the population to ever be profitable. Iskold discusses the success that Apple had with the iPod, but also noted that there is real difficulty in getting a particular technology widely adopted. He stated:

“The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

For example, some people who used to blog regularly, blog less now because they discovered Twittering (microblogging). Or, early adopters who have discovered Second Life might not have as much time to spend on MySpace anymore. These are not even necessarily competitive technologies, they are complimentary, but the fact is that they all compete for peoples’ time and attention.”

His main point (and my point last night) – “The early adopters are the pillars needed to cross the chasm; without them the whole scheme falls apart. You can’t make a leap and bring on board the masses if the very foundation you are standing on, the early adopters, leave to do other things.”

The true innovators (Rogers’ 2.5 percent) are the ones that need to keep moving ahead, forging a path for the rest of us. But there is a danger if too many early adopters do not become evangelists for Web 2.0 and stick with helping bridge the gap. This month’s MIT Technology Review (one of my favorite magazines/ezines) has several articles on the future of Web 2.0 – and they do not paint a bright picture. Interestingly, the cover photo shows Leah Culver, cofounder of Pownce, blowing a big bubble (which bursts when you get into the articles). Jason Pontin, the editor, compares the current euphoria over Web 2.0 to the dot.com craze of the Nineties, and noted that both have the same structural weaknesses – no clearly understood business that is floating on investors’ capital. Check out the whole issue, but pay attention to “Social Networking is Not a Business (…But It Might Be Soon)” by Bryant Urstadt.

Urstadt also points to the attention deficit of the early adopters and the issues Web 2.0 companies have in making a profit. He noted that most Web 2.0 apps are seen as portals – and portals are (in his words) “walled gardens” where inexperienced web users congregate for a while, but then grow restless and leave for another spot in the Web 2.0 stream.

Many of us have been extolling the educational value of using Web 2.0 in classroom settings. We do not need this bubble to burst! If we are to be successful, we have to bridge the gap with the majority of our fellow faculty. I therefore like what Jeff Nugent said in his comment to my post yesterday:

“We have had several conversations about the “long nose of adoption” and the role this seems to play as an innovation makes its way through different levels of adoption…or not. … I think there has also been trend over the last year or so for folks in the edtech camp to hunt and gather the latest tools, to be the first at the site and to announce it and pass it along. I think this has been a fun and fascinating time, but it may have come to define too much of the work we engage in.

…the excitement and interest that innovators and early adopters share in the early stages of using the innovation is not often shared by the early and late majority bands. These adopter groups tend to come to the table for different reasons. This creates an adoption dilemma for those of us involved in the work of sharing the potential educational benefit of an innovation. The language of the innovator is often a second or foreign language for the early and late majority. It seems to me that the real challenge in supporting the diffusion of an innovation lies in our ability to engage in some translation that can serve to support broader adoption.”

I think Jeff is on target. My question to you readers is this – What are the reasons mainstream faculty SHOULD come to the table? What language should we use to translate our excitement into their needs? I look forward to your thoughts.

{Photo Credit: Trenchfoot}

- Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach noted that this year’s conference was not the same “love-fest” as the one the previous year.

- Jeff Utecht felt the conference had outgrown its effectiveness and was too fast paced.

- Vicki Davis stated that she felt overwhelmed and unimportant after the conference.

- Will Richardson felt he was seeing the same old stuff. In fact, he blogged:

“I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.’

Will’s words rocked me a little. I am a bit of an early adopter, and many of the bloggers I follow are either innovators or early adopters themselves. But it seems many are becoming irritated by the slow pace of change.

Okay – change can be slow, but in taking the long view, really amazing! In reflecting on my own career, I can remember when computer screen color choices were green text or amber text on a black screen in the pre-GUI days. We definitely would not want to go back to those days! In one generation we have come a tremendous way – so much so that now days we ed techies get upset if major change is not happening on a annual basis (or daily basis). We used to say “That is so last year….” and now we seem to be saying “That is so 9am!”

We need to collectively remember that while much of the social media and web-based instruction is no longer new to us, it is still relatively new to the majority of our colleagues. And that suggests we still have work to do!

We innovators and early adopters have a clear leadership role to play in facilitating adoption by the much bigger population of early and late majorities (and I write off the laggards). I liked the comment Brett Hinton made:

“Real transformation in any large established system has generally always taken time. I think the feelings about this year’s NECC conference might be indicative of the fact that educators who want this change are coming to grips that this change is going to take some time. Sustained effort and patience are going to be equally necessary components to accomplish the change we want to see. Hopefully people like Will and David and the many others don’t lose patience and give up. Change is happening, but slowly, and we will get to that tipping point we want if we just keep plugging away at both implementing these ideas and sharing them with others.”

I agree! I also liked the tone of Stephanie Sandifer’s blog where she urged us to become more proactively vocal in reaching newbies and the majority.

We are the minority, but we have seen the potential. Let’s keep plugging away!

{Photo Credit: Mr. Sheehy}

We have completed two days of our TLwT Institute and are having a ball! Over the five days, we take a cohort of 18 diverse faculty from multiple disciplines on a journey of Web 2.0 exploration. During the first two days, my colleagues Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I have worked with this cohort to define instructional applications for Web 2.0 sites, analyze the syntax of the web in developing search strategies, establish social bookmarking accounts, put RSS feeds to work towards building personal learning environments, and explore ways of connecting and collaborating through Google Docs, Wimba Voice tools, and wikis. I was reminded of the classic Farside cartoon yesterday afternoon when one said her brain was full!

I need some time to reflect on some of our interactions and know that Jeff and Bud will also want to post their perspectives. Jeff’s call on who gets to do one of “collaboration”…but this cohort developed a pretty powerful map of academic collaboration that we will be sharing!

Last night – as a way to unwind after a full day – I started reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). Bad mistake…as I immediately saw a lot of relevance to what we are doing this week. I am not very far into the book, but here are some early take aways. The book takes its title from the “fact” that Europeans knew for a fact that all swans were white until black swans were discovered in Australia – which immediately upset the established norm. Taleb says that there are numerous black swan examples, and that they carry three characterisitcs:

- It is unpredictable,

- It carries a massive impact, and

- after the fact, we concoct an explanation to make it appear less random and more predictable.

9/11 was a Black Swan, as are many of the applications we use online such as Google. In fact, I was thinking last night that Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat was just such an after the fact explanation of events that were not predicted and carried a massive impact.

The lessons from black swans according to Taleb is that we should pay less attention to what we know and more attention to what we do not know – as it is the unknown, unpredictable things that have the huge impacts. We focus in on specifics when we should focus on generalities. As Taleb noted, predicting the future based on the known is a somewhat silly exercise, as it tends to be the unknowns that drive the future.

Okay…this does put a different spin on things. Yet, as one who spins a lot of time immersed in Web 2.0 apps – most unknown by the field at large, I begin to wonder whether I am swimming with black swans or am I just seeing the world through a different lens? It makes you consider faculty development (or workplace development) a little differently if you focus in first on the unknowns and their potential impacts before jumping to the specifics of how to upload a powerpoint to SlideShare. Jeff often notes that I have been transformed this past year in part due to the social nature of the web. To me, the social side of the web is a big black swan that none of us saw a few years back and yet take for granted today.

Food for thought as we move in to day three of our Institute!

[Institute logo designed by William "Bud" Deihl]

At our own institution, we ran a week-long Summer Institute with twenty faculty participants. The theme for this year’s CTE Summer Institute on Teaching and Learning was “Reflection, Alignment, and Engagement: 3 Keys to Better Learning.” A key focus for this institute was the teaching philosophy. As our website stated:

How we think about teaching and learning impacts the decisions we make about our course design, classroom teaching and how we interact with our students. How do we view our role as instructors? How do we view our students as learners? What are the conditions that are conducive to learning? Sometimes our focus is so granular and we forget to revisit these very important philosophical questions, or understand and appreciate the extent to which they influence our decision making. Furthermore, absent a cogent, unifying teaching and learning philosophy, many courses appear to students as a maze instead of a roadmap—after all, it is called a course.

The focus was on teaching and learning, not technology, and yet building off a question that arose last week in Twitter, I think that the question ought to be about the effective application and use of technology as an integrated component of teaching and learning. Whether you buy the term “Net Generation” or not, it is now a given that the internet impacts today’s classrooms. Yet in our Institute, the session regarding today’s students and today’s capabilities given technology was delegated to the final session on the fifth day before the parting lunch. Throughout the Institute, I heard different participants discuss the “problem” of technology. One noted on the first day that four participants had brought laptops to the the Institute and he thought that was rude. Another noted that he would never allow laptops in his classroom. The web was seen as an impediment to “true” learning. As one noted, learning could not occur unless he was seated at the table with his students and reading their body language. I am singling our three men but there were women present who felt just as strongly.

I do not want to imply that these are “bad” faculty – on the contrary, they are seasoned teachers who genuinely worked hard for an entire week on improving their craft of teaching, and hopefully through the process, will improve student learning. What I did observe was a strong need for and uncompromising refusal to let go of teacher control. They had no problem with student-centered learning as long as they controlled the process and outcome.

I do not know if it was fortunate or unfortunate that the timing overlapped, but in the middle of our Institute, the University of Mary Washington held it’s annual Faculty Academy. This had a different focus – a celebration of web-empowered learning by faculty both at UMW and at other institutions. As their website stated, for “the past 13 years, Faculty Academy has brought together faculty and staff from both campuses at UMW to share and celebrate the year’s efforts and accomplishments in the classroom, with teaching and learning technologies as the specific focus (or, one might say, catalyst) of the event.” The Faculty Academy is for UMW faculty but faculty from other institutions of higher learning can attend. Guest speakers come from all over the nation to present and engage participants in analysis of learning activities. I drove up to attend the first day’s activities and my colleague Jeff Nugent did the same on the second day – using Twitter and the UStream to stay connected with each other at the two events – Faculty Academy and Summer Institute.

The most striking difference between the two events was laptop use. Tables at the Faculty Academy had placards that announced “This Table Has Power” to facilitate the use of laptops, and wireless connection was provided at no charge. As presenters talked, one could hear the quiet clicking of keyboards as an underlying theme – and it seemed normal! I remember at one point when Barbara Sawhill described blogging and commenting as a dance and Twitter lit up – six of us tweeted that point simultaneously and then saw that we had and commented about that. The backchannel discussion was a natural and expected component of the learning process at Faculty Academy.

I attended some excellent sessions – which were facilitated by the use of blogs and wikis as part of the digital program. Barbara Sawhill of Oberlin College discussed her use of student blogging to teach Spanish. Mara Scanlon and Jim Groom discussed class projects that involved expanding Wikipedia articles. Chris Foss showed how he used a wiki to develop an annotated resource for students. Jim Groom did another presentation on his use of the Internet Archives for classroom resource material. Anand Rao and Antonella Dalla Torre did two presentations on student-created mash-ups.

Probably my favorite presentation of the afternoon was a panel discussion between Sarah Allen, Laura Blankenship, Jason Davidson, Steve Greenlaw, Jeff McCLurken, and Deborah Zies. These were faculty from two institutions (UMW and Bryn Mawr) who represented the continuum I have been noting and who tackled the subject of why or why not to adopt technology in teaching. One did not use and did not plan to use technology. Others were in the early adoption stages. Two were actively twittering with the audience during the presentation and represented active users of technology. I am probably reading too much in to this, but I found the fact that UMW was debating this refreshing.

I continued to follow the events at UMW the next day through Jeff’s twittering as well as tweets from other participants that I follow. I found it exciting to be engaged in both parallel universes simultaneously. I also suspect that my colleagues conducting our Institute found what Jeff and I were doing more amusing than engaging – something those tech boys do that really is not relevant to what they were doing for teaching and learning. And that is the rub. I felt a distinct comfort level up at UMW for a day…but I recognize that I was immersed in a stream of like-minded individuals – a very visible case of homophily described by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody. I continue to wrestle with aligning these parallel universes, and I wonder if that is where I should focus my energy? As Thomas Kuhn and Joel Barker have pointed out, people with one set of paradigms have an almost pathological inability to see what the other is seeing. The data being presented does not match their preconceived notions and so the data is ignored. I see very clearly a convergence between digital literacy and “the old school” literacy, but I am not apparently making the compelling case to the majority of my colleagues.

Do others feel that rub? I would love to hear from others on their experiences, thoughts and suggestions.

[Photo Credits: catbagan, askpang]