I just finished reading Curtis J. Bonk’s new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that Wiley, the publisher, emailed me after I reviewed Dan Willingham’s book in a previous post and asked if they could send me Bonk’s book for possible review (with no strings attached).

I said yes and the next week received a copy of this book at no charge.

With that said, this book has resonated with me and I found Bonk’s approach interesting.

In many ways, Bonk is as much a fan boy of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat as I am.  Just as Friedman had ten flatterners, Bonk has ten openers:

Ten Openers: (WE-ALL-LEARN)

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books
2. E-Learning and Blended Learning
3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software
4. Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals
6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
7. Electronic Collaboration
8. Alternate Reality Learning
9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability
10. Networks of Personalized Learning

WE-ALL-LEARN provides a framework for his book and the premise that anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime.  Bonk  spun out chapters on each opener, illustrating each concept with stories, a bit of research and statistics, and implications for education in the future.  Working in the field, I recognized some of the people he named, but I also learned new pioneers.  Bonk continually reinforces that these openers ought to be changing education as we know it, as our world is quite different from our parent’s world.

In Bonk’s view, these openers need to viewed through three overarching trends.  First, the pipes are getting bigger allowing access to tools and infrastructure.  Second, more and more pages of content is becoming available as free and open content. Third, a participatory learning culture is evolving around social media.

One of the things I found fascinating was my own reaction to the book.  I buy the basic theme that openness ultimately improves education, and I consider myself someone who is part of a participatory learning culture.  I was pleased that Bonk provided a companion website with hyperlinked references and other resources.  But my first inclination was to begin following Curt Bonk’s Twitter account…and I could not find one for him!  Other than his blog, I did not see Bonk participating to the same degree that he discusses in his book.  I have never met him and may be way off target, but I was somewhat surprised that I could not immediately connect with him the way I did with some of the people he mentioned in his book like Stephen Downes, Vicki Davis, Clay Shirky or Dave Weinberger.

So I was thrilled with the content and miffed a bit by the author!  Weird reaction!

I also found that increasingly with books like this one, I read it with a laptop nearby, so that I can quickly go look at something new and immediately start the learning process for myself.  I had never seen Dancing Matt before, so really enjoyed viewing his Youtube video while reading that section of the book.  This bouncing between the web and the written word is a new but interesting process…and it suggests that in many ways, this should have been an e-book as opposed to a print book.

His final opener has to do with personalized learning…something we reflect on often in faculty development.  Bonk stated that we should be striving to move from where we see personalized learning as the ideal to a culture where personalized learning is the accepted norm.  With the pipes, pages, and participatory culture, anyone can establish their own learning path on any topic, whether it be improved teaching, learning a new language, or finally programming the VCR (…just kidding).  The implications for faculty development are huge!

Bonk has fifteen predictions at the end.  I will leave it to you to check them out, but I liked that he is questioning the status quo.  With the availability of all the world’s knowledge in our pockets/cellphones, the typical four-year college process no longer makes sense to Bonk.  He suggests that formalized education will expand rather than contract.  But informal learning with global partners will play an equal role to the formalized higher education model.  Learning will be authentic from passionate teachers…but those “teachers” may no longer be credentialed.  Bonk also served up a dozen issues that will have to be solved for openness to succeed.

I work with faculty daily on best ways to incorporate the internet into their teaching practices.  In the past three years since I came to VCU, the access to learning on the web has exploded.  Bonk’s book is pushing me to reconceptualize how I should facilitate faculty development in an open world.  I recommend the book to you and would be interesting in your thoughts on the evolution/revolution of faculty development in these exciting times!

We wrap up our Center for Teaching Excellence annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute tomorrow, and it has been a wonderful week of discovery for ourselves and our 18 participants.  It is always fun to immerse yourself with colleagues in explorations of teaching practices built around the web and networked learning.  From delicious to digital storytelling to RSS to Slideshare and Jing, we have heard a lot of excitement and brainstorming on practical applications.  One of my high points was being a part of a panel discussion on blogging with three of my colleagues.  Laura McLay blogged about it here.

Check out the Twitter hashtag of “#tlwt09” to gain some appreciation for the week!

As energizing as this week has been, it has been equally fun to reflect on how far I have come in the past year.  I just went back and looked at my blog posts from one year ago.  I had forgotten that just one year ago we both changed our office locations and I bought my scooter!  More importantly, I have had the opportunity to continue learning and growing with my colleagues Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl.  The three of us spent from December to May brainstorming and then publishing the White Paper on online teaching and learning.  We also totally revamped this Institute, such that the current year focused on networked learning hardly resembles the previous more tool-oriented institute.

As an example, this afternoon was focused on “Casting the Net”.  In a three hour period, we took our participants on an exploration of first podcasting, then screencasting, and finally webcasting.  Our focus was on using these techniques to communicate and connect with students and colleagues.  While each is useful for disseminating material to students, we also demonstrated how each could be equally useful as student-generated material.  As one participant noted in Twitter, she sort of liked the concept of shifting from grading 30 five-page papers to grading 30 five-minute videos!

I illustrated how Jon Becker had put together an impromptu webcast with colleagues nationwide and our students, then Twittered a link for the web meeting, which allowed others outside our walled garden of Blackboard to join the conversation.

As something tangible to take back from their week with us, at the end of the day we gave each participant an iPod Touch.  It was totally unexpected and you could feel the boost in energy and excitement (and goosebumps) from the crowd as we began to hand them out.  We feel confident that this is a group that will make good use in this investment in technology!  This institute has really been an opening commitment to building a relationship that is going to evolve and grow over the coming years!

As I said, it was a nice Touch! 

{Photo Credit: Apple}

Forty years ago when I was a plebe at the U. S. Naval Academy, I learned quickly that naval officers never said “I don’t know.”  The correct response if you did not know the answer was “I’ll Find Out, Sir!”  And then you had better find out!  It is a little thing, and yet, from an attitude perspective, huge.  “I don’t know” is a passive response requiring no action.  “I’ll find out” is a proactive response requiring action.

As I said goodnight to Michele, I was reflecting on her comment about my not saying “I don’t know.”  That is a personal attitude, but could it not also be transferred to our students? After all, it is simply an expectation that students will take responsibility for their own learning.

We have been debating the efficacy of allowing laptops in classrooms here on campus.  At the risk of calling them old-schoolers, there is a segment here that flatly bans the use of laptops or mobile devices in their classes.  To me, that is inviting a passive student to your class.  Luckily there are faculty here who feel the opposite.

The alternative as these other faculty have found is to tap in to the natural curiosity of students and set the expectation of “I’ll Find Out!”  At a brown bag lunch last week, one faculty talked about the excitement of having students in his History class fact-check him during lectures and pull their impromptu research into the class discussion.  I totally agree, and I think the attitude applies whether you are talking face-to-face or online classes.

In my online classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level, I have tried to set the expectation of student-generated content to add to the learning process.  My current class is a good example.  I have enjoyed co-teaching Educational Technology and School Leadership this semester with Jon Becker.  Over the past twelve weeks, we and our students have collaboratively explored the integration of Web 2.0 in K-12 programs.  At the start of class, we had a group of self-described technophobes who were very worried about taking an online class.  Through the use of active learning and collaboration in a wiki, they have grown comfortable working and sharing online.  Now, they wonder why their colleagues are not doing the same.  During the past week, the online discussion was rich with commentary about the professional development of K-12 teachers.  It was interesting to see my students moving from a former expectation that it was the administrator’s job to provide professional development to one that espoused personal learning in a networked world as the key to professional development.

“I’ll Find Out!” may be the heart and soul of learning-centered teaching, but I am coming to the realization that it also is the heart and soul of faculty development as well.  Of course, it requires action on the part of each individual.  A personal learning environment or network does not materialize overnight.  It requires time and conscious thought to develop a learning network that works for you.

Trying to figure out how to facilitate that process will tug at me for the next few weeks.  In June, Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I will be guiding our annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute.  Our theme this year is Teaching and Learning in a Networked World.  Our challenge will be to introduce faculty to the power of networked learning and to assist them in developing their own networks.  I have had the luxury of a full semester with my class, so this is a tall task to attempt in one week.  It will be interesting to see how we do.  Will we succeed?

I’ll find out.

{Photo Credit: Ezalis, Chrisfreeland2002}

Had a great first day at the League for Innovation’s 2009 conference.  While I work at a wonderful four-year research university, my doctoral dissertation and first ten years in higher education revolved around two-year colleges.  So it was refreshing to once again rub elbows with the dedicated faculty and administrators who handle a significant segment of higher education.

Sixteen faculty attended my morning workshop on engaging students through free web tools, which I blogged about yesterday.  It was a fast three hours that I thoroughly enjoyed.  This group was simultaneously blown away and energized by both the opportunities for learning afforded by these tools, and by the enthusiasm evident as they brainstormed uses for these tools.  In a short three hours, I touched on:

• Pandora
• Delicious
• Wayfarer
• Wordle
• Google Reader
• Netvibes
• Blogs
• Slideshare
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Yammer
• Facebook
• Google Docs
• WetPaint
• Wikispaces
• Garage Band
• Audacity
• Jing
• Jott
• Zoho Polls
• PollDaddy

Whew!  Seems like a lot of tools, but what we focused on was the practices these tools offered.  What was gratifying was the comments by several at the end of the day on how helpful this session was to them personally.  Making a difference one faculty at a time!

After a breather, I attended two forums in the afternoon as well as the opening keynote.

Thelma Bushong and Elaine Karls of Delta College (home of my old mentor Jim Steele) did a presentation called “Everyone Grows: Organizational and Professional Development for All Employees.”  There premise (and one I agree with) is that it takes engaged faculty and an engaged support staff to develop engaged students.  A key question that they asked is how does a college invest in significant learning experiences that result in engagement, empowerment, and leadership development for faculty?  Part of their answer is to open leadership and learning opportunities to staff as well as faculty.  They have taken the concept of faculty learning communities and expanded it outside faculty to a holistic approach to college leadership and empowerment.

The second session I attended was by Michael Coste, Angelica McMillan and Brandon Berman from Front Range Community College entitled “Personalize Your Class with YouTube.”  This was an engaging and exciting session focused on, as they stated, getting the human that is in each of us into classes.  They demonstrated how, with the use of inexpensive Flip cameras and free software, they developed some rather sophisticated YouTube videos for:

• Introductions to Classes (Get to know the professor)
• Checking in (quick updates on general status of how class is going)
• Lesson Reviews
• Mini-lessons
• Group critiques (students commenting on each others YouTube presentations)
• Speeches ( faculty commenting on public speaking by students via YouTube)

A good example of one of their videos is here.

The keynote speaker to open Innovations 2009 was Gail Mellow, President of LaGuardia Community College in NYC.  She is co-author of the 2008 book Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. She gave a dynamite speech to the 1500 attendees at this conference.  She detailed the different standards American higher education places on two year colleges, noting that there were real differences between institutions that screen out and select their students versus institutions that welcome in students.  While noting that community colleges enroll roughly half of the higher ed population, they only receive about twenty percent of the funding.   The students are typically much further behind four-year students in terms of entering SAT scores.  Two-year and four-year institutions are typically assessed based on IPEDS data, yet that data is only collected for first-year full time students, which make up only 14% of community college students.  Yet, given the inequities in funding and assessment, community colleges are surprisingly successful at impacting the percentage of higher education students who complete a four-year degree.  She illustrated that if four-year institutions factored out their feeder institutions and reverse-transfer students, many four-year institions would be in trouble.  She saw community colleges as integral partners in President Obama’s call that all Americans complete some course work above high school as a means of rebuilding our economy.  It was an empassioned keynote that seemed to energize the crowd.

Looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!

The participatory web has allowed groups with common interests to organize and collaborate in ways that were not possible just five years ago.

Yesterday, Dr. Jonathon Becker, professor of Educational Leadership in the VCU School of Education, joined Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and myself of the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence to record a podcast on professional development in a networked world.  Jon and I co-teach our Education Technology and School Leadership online course, and I always enjoy listening to his perspectives on teaching, learning, and networked life.

Jon and Jeff shared their perspectives surrounding their attendance at EduCon 2.1, a “conference” organized and run by teachers and students without a supporting national professional organization.   Jon attended physically and presented, while Jeff attended from his home on a weekend via streaming video and social media.   It provided a rich example of networked learning and formed the basis for subsequent discussion into the changing nature of professional development…and learning.

Show Notes
Links mentioned during the podcast:

EduCon 2.1 – Conference wiki

K12Online Conference – Conference website and links to presentations

Shirky, Clay (2008) – Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk – What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Download file

{Photo Credit: William “Bud” Deihl}

We ended up having several students come in as well as several folks who joined from a Twitter link.  The conversation was lively, interesting, and marked with some fascinating points about the challenges we face with technology and instruction.  You can listen to an archived version here.  (Click Participant Join, put your first name in to enter, and then click Archive Start in the upper right to get the white board image to appear.)

If you do listen, one of the things you might find interesting is the backchannel conversation going on in the chat area while Jon and Ben were talking.  It was obvious that several people were engaged with the conversation, adding their “voice” without talking over the two presenters.

Some people had issues with the word “integration” as sort of an add-on to an already full plate.  Jon used a graphic here developed with one of his research students that suggested that there was quite a bit of literature regarding technology integration into curriculum, instruction, and assessment, but that little had been written about integration into school management.  I and several others saw this as a cultural issue, with leadership driving the culture in a school.

One aspect of the talk where I disagreed with Jon was in his work in West Virginia, where they have taken a systematic but slow approach to technology, limiting schools to a few vendors and standardizing technology across all schools.  While that makes sense for big-ticket items, I would suggest that in an age of ubiquitous web resources, a constrained approach continues a top-down and potentially teacher-centered approach to teaching and learning.  Still thinking this part through.

At the least, the conversation last night was interesting, fun, and engaging.  I am looking forward to being part of more conversations like this in the future.

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success (2008).  For those who have not yet read it, it is a terrific book.  Rather than focusing on intelligence and ambition as cause agents for success, Gladwell instead argues that success is more complex, linked to chance events and accidents of birth.  Gladwell makes the case that star athletes tend to be born in the first four months of the year, that software giants were all born around 1955, and that Asian cultures do better at math due to their rice paddy mentality of year-round work.  If that does not make sense to you, read the book – I think you will be surprised at the logical case made by Gladwell.

One theme that weaves through the book is that success is a direct result of practice.  The Beatles became the band they were due to hours of playtime in Hamburg.  Bill Gates and Bill Joy became superstars in programming due to the hours of practice as teens.  Asians are better at math simply because they go to school more hours and practice math longer than their American counterparts.  In fact, Gladwell places a value on hours of practice.  True masters like Mozart or the Beatles or Bill Gates have 10,000 hours of practice as a common factor in their success.

This emphasis on practice got me thinking about our approach to faculty development and web applications like blogging and Twitter.  For the past year, several of us in our Center for Teaching Excellence have been swimming in the Web 2.0 stream, immersing ourselves in blogging, Twitter, Yammer, delicious, SlideShare, Ning sites, and the like.  Our assumption has been that we needed to “spare” faculty of the time needed to master these applications.  By nature of their position and responsibilities, we felt that they were too busy to spend the time we were spending  practicing with these applications.

Now I am not so sure.  Gladwell would seem to suggest that these hours of “practice’ in blogging and Twitter are exactly what is required for success.  In fact, the hours we spent this past year in no way approach the 10,000 hours needed for true mastery.  In many ways, after one year we are still neophytes ourselves.

If that is true, it would seem that we need a new approach and a new “sales pitch” to faculty development.  What are your thoughts?  Is Gladwell on to something?  Is success as simple as hard work and practice?  If one sees compelling teaching and learning possibilities using web applications – in terms of connections, community, and collaboration – then will faculty be open to practicing with their students as they use these applications?  And does one need to put in the hours he suggests?

Be interested in your thoughts.  I would not like for those of us using these applications to be the outliers!

Every now and then, you are reading a book or article, and a phrase jumps out and grabs you.  It happened last night on page 198 of David Weinberger’s delightful Everything is Miscellaneous.

“The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple.  It is to swim in the complex.”

Wow!

David’s book is an interesting look at how our attempts to categorize knowledge by systems such as the Dewey Decimal System worked for books but fails in the messy interconnected web world…and that is not bad!  In essence, the web allows every person to have a customized library of knowledge built around what makes sense to that individual.

Teachers and educators are in the “knowing” business.  When I work with faculty and suggest 21st Century solutions to their problems, I am generally met with resistance.  It is easy to understand why.   With the exception of a few early adopters, faculty generally have an established concept of how to do research.  They correctly note that they gained their success and became tenured professors through a time-honored process that did not involve the web.  Social networking has not been part of that process.

Tomorrow, Jeff Nugent and I will be working with operational research faculty at the INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium. We are going to discuss what the research suggests about how people learn, how students have incorporated the web into their lives, and how technology can transform teaching and learning. We have a full day with them, so it should be interesting.  I am looking forward to seeing how open they are to ideas of messiness in teaching and learning!

Two nights ago, Jeff was a member of a panel discussing the Millennial Generation to Mass Communications students and faculty. One panel member stated that FaceBook did not have a place in education. Jeff countered that social networking was vital to education today. He noted how Twitter was typically the first means by which he learned of breaking news, and tried to describe how following in Twitter was akin to friending in FaceBook. He realized that the older members listening to him had no idea what he was describing. They did not get it.

I am starting to realize that one reason I do get it is that I swim in the complex every day. My normal routine every morning  and routinely during the day (7 days a week) is to first check emails, then Twitter, and then Google Reader, where I subscribe to over fifty blogs, a dozen news feeds, and some that are difficult to classify but definitely form part of my personal learning environment. I now assume that I will be part of a backchannel conversation in any meeting or conference I attend. This did not happen overnight, but it did happen in less than two years, and I now cannot conceive of returning to the old “manual” way of learning and knowing. It certainly is not simple, but it is right in line with David Weinberger’s reasoning.

Back in June, I used the stream analogy to reflect my emersion into Web 2.0.  It still fits, which is why David’s words resonated so powerfully with me. So, my advice to my colleagues is simple - the longer you try to keep your life simple and organized, the less you will know and the less you will be relevant.

Strong words or on target? Be interested in your thought!

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 }

I was thinking about this as I watched (in a virtual sense) my graduate students swim for the first time in Web 2.0 waters.  During their first week of their first online class, they found out that they could post material to a website, upload pictures, resize those pictures if necessary, set up accounts in GOOGLE, DELICIOUS, and WIKISPACES, and record an audio message to each other in the class using Wimba recorders.

I know that they think I simply threw them in … and some of them felt quite overwhelmed.  It is hard for them to see right now that the successes of this week will translate into practices in their lives and their classrooms in the near future.

Yet I am encouraged!  I took the 80 posts that the 18 students made in the discussion board and collected all the text, then placed the text in Wordle.  This was the resultant wordcloud:

I had asked the students to watch Michael Wesch’s The Machine is Us(ing) Us and then reflect on how (or whether) Web 2.0 was changing how they as K-12 teachers should approach teaching and learning.  It is therefore good to see that the top two words that emerged from 80 posts were “students” and “technology.”  I am also seeing words such as classroom, time, internet, can, world, and new.  You have to look very hard to find the word “overwhelmed”…it is there but tiny compared to other words that pop out.

I was fortunate in that my emersion into the Web 2.0 stream occurred over an 18-month period, with supporting friends locally and globally helping me out.  Where I paddled, my students are now being hit with a firehose (mixed metaphors…but you know what I mean).  There are some excited swimmers in the lot, and my role is to create that same sense of excitement in the rest.  I think that it is going to be fun.

Photo Credit: zanzibar}