Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA.  It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship.

One of the highlights for me was the lunch debate between the Right Reverend Jim Groom and John St. Clair on “Is the CMS Dead?“  In a lively back and forth, the original Edupunk Jim suggested that the course management system was only good for management, not learning, and as such, SHOULD be dead … but appeared to be more undead (I knew zombies would appear at some point in his talk).  John countered that he thought the talk was about CMS – conservative mid-sized sedans – and that he thought most people wanted a sensible automobile and not some do-it-yourself hovercraft!

Both gentlemen gave great passionate arguments to their side.  I talked to Jim afterward and asked why the question had to be CMS “or” open systems?  In the past two semesters, I have used the Blackboard CMS for the things it does well (document and link management, rosters, grade management), but also used blogging, Jing and wikis for collaborative work with my students.  In other words, Blackboard served as a portal and launching point for my students into the open web.  This seemed to me to be a case of “AND” rather than “or.”

I enjoyed the lunch debate, but in reality, the whole day was fantastic!

James Boyle gave an invigorating keynote on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness.”  Having just come off the Board of Directors for Creative Commons, he was uniquely qualified to discuss this issue.  He started with a history of the internet and how openness was a bug meant to be fixed later, but the internet grew more rapidly than anticipated and openness spawned many wonderful opportunities and profitable enterprises.  It definitely caused problems and concerns, but also amazing positives in the business world, entertainment, government, and education.  Yet, Boyle stated that education has yet to deal with its concerns and instead simply is biased against openness.  He noted that openness meant not only the ability to copy but also the ability to improve.

Thoroughly enjoyed the talk.  Jeff Nugent has recently had us at the CTE discussing licensing our Center organizational web material with a Creative Commons license.

I attended a great panel discussion by UMW faculty on their use of blogging in their classes.  It was a chance to see a very diverse mix of blogs associated with writing classes, art classes, science classes and math classes.  One of the take-aways was that blogs allowed time for students to reflect on critical issues for which there just was not time in 50-minute classes.

Cole Camplese of Penn State University gave an excellent talk on emerging trends impacting teaching and learning.  I loved his observation that we view what our students do as “technology,” but that it is only technology to those of us born before technology.  To the students raised in a wired world, it is simply a means of communication and connection.  I was blown away by the fact he listed that 40% of students at Penn State no longer bring a TV to campus.  They get their “TV” and entertainment straight off the web.  He noted that our universities are still designed as if our students are going to receive our wisdom and reflect it back to us, when in reality, through their own content and knowledge creation, our students act more as amplifiers than reflectors.  At Penn State, they have cast blogs as a form of digital publishing and are exploring ways for students to keep their own digital content.  If blogs are viewed as personal content management systems, then digital expression is seen as a form of scholarship that must be systematically supported.

I was also impressed that a third of PSU faculty reported using YouTube instructionally. 

The last session of the day was a workshop run by Laura Blankenship on “Creating a Personal Learning Network for Yourself and Your Students.”  We will be discussing the same topic at our upcoming Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute in June, so I was interested in seeing how Laura presented this concept.  She did a great job by first focusing on problems that needed solving, and then brainstorming from the group web applications that could be used to solve these problems.  In the course of the discussion, we discussed RSS feeds, Google Reader, delicious, Jott, and a host of other tools.

One last side thought – Twitter was very active among participants, and the hashtag #umwfa09 made note-taking unnecessary.  However, Twitter had scheduled maintenance today which hit right at the end of Cole’s talk, and it was momentarily frustrating to lose it mid-conference (so much so that I complained about it in Facebook!!!) 

Great day – looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!

For their final assignment, we asked our graduate class that Jon Becker and I taught on Educational Technology and School Leadership to reflect on their 15-week journey. Their reflections are captured in the Wordle above. We had twenty-five K-12 teachers who immersed themselves in the Web 2.0 stream for a semester and examined applications to their teaching and to school leadership. The reflections indicated that they thoroughly enjoyed the journey.

The Wordle points out some obvious observations – everyone focused on technology and their students. Many discussed the immediate application of web tools to their teaching in their own classrooms.

I was struck, however, by some of the personal observations that did not emerge in this Wordle. One student noted that she had just been selected as Teacher of the Year for her school, which she attributed to her engagement in our class and her excited reapplication of her learning from our class into her own school. Another student stated that she had originally wanted to move out of the classroom and into administration because she felt burned out in the classroom. Our class had so re-energized her that she now saw that she could have a greater impact on children and learning by remaining in the classroom and helping her digital kids grow. Several students used the same term in their individual reflections – “life-altering”.

While I am both proud and humbled by the impact this course had on many of our students, I suspect much of the impact was similar to the impact I saw in myself this past year. The more I network and connect, the more it impacts me on a personal level. Our students began to see this too. Many reflected that “professional development” had taken on personal aspects that they had never considered before.  It was a paradigm shift to move from professional development as something you attend to professional development as something for which you take personal responsibility.

This provides interesting context as we get ready for our week-long institute with seventeen faculty on teaching and learning with technology.  Trent Batson lamented yesterday that “life on campus goes on as normal. Faculty members are still expected to publish in traditional journals, still expected to meet their classes in rooms equipped with chalkboards and designed for lectures, and still expected by their students to tell them what they should know so they can write it on paper during a test.” Our hope in the institute is to break that cycle – help faculty see – at a personal level – the impact that the web now has on teaching and learning.  Jeff Nugent suggested one way to prepare for this week was for each of us facilitating it to return and update our own notion of our personal learning network. So here is what I came up with:

(Link to full size image)

My PLE contains traditional methods of information gathering like journals, listservs, and even morning coffee sessions. But I am also mindful of and tapped in to numerous web applications, where I hear the conversations taking place worldwide on topics of interest to me. Some of those conversations pop up in Delicious, some through my Google Reader, many from Twitter or Facebook. When I go seeking information, I tend to look in Delicious or Wikipedia, but I also still Google things, though I am increasingly looking to Twiiter as a search engine.

While I tried to collate items in neat areas of “collect, communicate, collaborate, and create/share,” the truth is that the interconnections are numerous and blurry.  Twitter is all of the above.  Our class wiki was all of the above.  Delicious many times is all of the above.

The key for me is that the web now weaves itself into all aspects of my work life at a deeply personal level.  In keeping with the interactive nature of the web, it is no longer enough to passively receive information.  Personal learning includes actively connecting and communicating with my network across multiple paths.

It seems that the “buzz” about PLEs and PLNs has died down recently, yet I found it illuminating personally to relook at my own concept of my own learning environment and network.  I suspect that it will continue to evolve.  What do you think?  What resonates with you?  What seems off base?

I would be interested in your thoughts.

I probably read too much into this, but it suggests that people are not interested in the conversation about “why” one should or should not blog, they just want to know “how” to do it. And one reason I read too much in to it is that whether we are talking 4 or 12, few faculty in general even consider blogging as part of their professional life.

The issue may not even be blogging per se, but rather “workshops” as a verb.  Few faculty in general see a need to change how they do what they do.  While workshops remain a necessity to efficiently provide training, those who read this probably have shifted much of their professional development to the social media landscape (as I have).  But the majority of faculty do not use social media for their PLE, and if they see no need to change, they probably view workshops as something they do not need.

This was on my mind when I opened the April edition of Tom Peters Times newsletter, which arrived today in my email and contained several interesting articles on customer experience.  It linked to the following video of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant rapping his mandatory pre-flight  safety announcement.

You have to admit that this person delivered his message in a new and compelling way!

I am not suggesting that I begin singing my workshops…that would definitely drive down participation.  But I do think we in faculty development need to [re]examine our approaches in light of social media.   Taking a cue from the marketing types, networks like Twitter, Yammer, and Facebook could all be used to announce and draw in participants.  But more importantly, I need to look at the total delivery.  Would a “conversation” about blogging with faculty here be enhanced if bloggers from around the world joined the conversation by live streaming?  Why do I look at workshop format as locked in stone?  As the flight attendant noted, maybe I need to shake things up a bit!

And if the “customer experience” was enhanced, would word of mouth spread that news around campus, growing demand?

Be interested in your thoughts.

{Stone Carving from Flaming Text}

Ada Lovelace (per Wikipedia) “is today appreciated as the ‘first programmer’ since she was writing programs-that is, manipulating symbols according to rules-for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.”  Wikipedia goes on to explain:

“During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G) in complete detail a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, recognized by historians as the world’s first computer program.”

I first became aware of Ada Lovelace while in the Navy.  The Department of Defense computer program “Ada” was named for her.  Ada Lovelace Day, March 24th, was created by Suw Charman-Anderson to “to draw attention to women excelling in technology” by having everyone publish a post on this day about a woman in technology she or he admires.

I certainly have some fantastic role models in my PLE, so thought I would highlight them:

Laura Blankenship

danah boyd

Martha Burtis

Kim Cofino

Vicki Davis

Gabriela Grosseck

Jane Hart

Gayla Keesee

Jennifer Jones

Michele Martin

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Sarah Robbins

Barbara Sawhill

Elaine Talbert

Sue Waters

Then again, being surrounded by women who excell at technology is old hat with me.  My twin daughters grew up digital and continue to this day to use technology.  Melissa Frail is at MathWorks and Stephanie Watwood works out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  Ada would have been proud of them…and all the women listed above.  They all will serve as wonderful role models for my two granddaughters, Molly and Marin.

And I’ll be able to list numbers again this year. I have done workshops, presentations, published an article, consulted, and served a number of faculty.

Yet this year feels different.

Since submitting my annual report last June, I have begun using delicious as a communication and networking tool, placed material on SlideShare and received feedback from people I have never met. shifted from reading blogs to active blogging, and become an active Twitter user. It has been a transformative year for me. For more than a dozen years, I have been enamored with the technology. Now suddenly, I have become enamored with the connections and this network that has accepted me.

This “social” stuff has become a big part of my life and my job…and I am struggling with how to capture that in the bureaucratic necessity of an annual report!

Clay Shirky, in a video presentation, made an interesting statement about the context of his recent book Here Comes Everybody. He said:

“We’ve reached an age…where this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.”

He goes on to explain that the technology – whether computer or mobile – has become so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted, and as that tipping point was reached, the social effects began to manifest themselves.

Wow!

I could cite numbers – I follow and am followed by 138 people in Twitter (or 137 plus the Mars Phoenix lander). I have 45 people in my delicious network. My blog has had 1,900 visits in the past four months. I worked with 10 other faculty in a year-long Faculty Learning Community exploring engaged online learners. But, I am increasingly aware of the people behind those numbers.

I value my colleagues here in our Center – Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, who swim in these waters with me.

I value my students, who dive in to these same waters and grow to see the relevance. At a dinner last night, I met up with some of my grad students from last Fall, and the first thing they started talking about was how much they continue to use delicious!

I value some connections made a year ago, such as Eduardo Peirano (Uruguay) and Gabriela Grosseck (Romania) – who opened my eyes to an international perspective…yet a perspective similar in many respects to my local one. Closer to home, I added John Krutsch and Barry Dahl to my networks after meeting them at eLearning 2008, and continue to connect with them almost daily four months later.

I value the encouragement I received from superstars like Will Richardson and Wes Fryer, and up and coming stars like Sue Waters and Michele Martin. These four, along with Jeff and Bud, had more to do with my sustaining my blogging now for six months.

I value recent connections such as Ken Allan (a New Zealander who I met through the 31 Day Challenge) and Jon Becker, a fellow VCU faculty who also blogs and Twitters (and his blog is one of the best designed I have seen).

There are dozens of others I could name and I would still leave some out. Suffice it to say that the effects flowing from all of these varied social connections definitely manifest themselves daily in my life and work, and I think I am better for it – I know I am different because of it.

Am I making a mountain out of a virtual molehill, or is transformation occurring to others besides me? I would be interested in your thoughts and comments.

Having a little problem with SlideShare embed…so above is the presentation but click here to view.

We will see which generates more conversation, my face-to-face session or this blog post and SlideShare posting. Be interested in your thoughts.

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These thoughts came to mind as I watched my Center for Teaching Excellence partner, Bud Deihl, developing his first draft VoiceThread. Each of us in the Center has specialized in certain areas (I do online course design and social media, Jeff Nugent does tablet PC’s and podcasting, and Bud does screencasting, communications and graphic arts). His latest focus is in the area of digital storytelling.

Yesterday, he brought in a digital camera and took some shots of mundane objects. However, with his eye for layout and focal length, the results were anything but mundane. A wall clock became a slightly blurred impression of passing time. A Starbucks cup became an art object. A tag cloud became a backdrop. Some items were out of focus…others were in stark focus. Each picture had been clearly conceptualized and crafted.

This afternoon, Bud was showing me this series of connected photographs from which he is now recording a story. Yet, even without the audio, one sensed the story just by the layout. He was enjoying himself and I was able to enjoy the moment observing the pure fun he was having.

Maybe it struck me more than usual because Bud displayed real passion as he explained the context of each picture and how it related to his journey into Web 2.0. I was watching someone caught up in his learning and using Web 2.0 tools in his PLE to draw this story together.

Bud’s focus is to develop his own craft using VoiceThread so that he can then work with faculty to help them exploit this tool. It was fun simply watching him at work. I am sure he will be sharing his learning in his blog, but my joy came from watching his.

To me, there are parallels to our craft of teaching. It is too easy to be caught up in NCLB and state standardized tests or university requirements. However, if we can help our students catch this fever of learning and internalize it the way Bud has, deep and active learning will occur. Armed with their own PLEs, students will not only complete courses, they will thrive and carry the lessons on learning into their future.

Maybe that is why it was so much fun watching an artist at work today.

[Photo Credit: Clark's Aunt]

Workshops and articles about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) or Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are showing up frequently at conferences and blog postings. Wikipedia dates the first use of the term to November 4, 2004 – an eternity in computer years! I am working up a Lunch and Learn session in two weeks on PLEs, so it is interesting that a number of perspectives surfaced this week…which illustrates that the concept may be over three years old, but it is still evolving.

Earlier this week, David Warlick gave a good synopsis of PLEs by stating that PLEs have “three basic components.

1. The network — People who have things to say that help me do my job, and dynamic information sources that provide me with the raw materials I need.
2. The tools — Essentially, the avenues of communication through which I connect with people and information sources — conduits that often add value to the information.
3. My Own Personal Echo Chamber — This is my own world view from which I teach, where ideas from my PLN bounce around off the walls of my mind and off of other ideas, either losing momentum and fading away, or generating energy and growing.”

David also noted that a fourth component – a zipper – was needed to disengage oneself and stop and smell the roses! Amen, brother!

Kim Cofino discussed the steps educators need to take to be 21^st Century educators, which align nicely with David’s points…and also highlight that the wired world is not that simplistic. She saw the need to join social networks (a combination of network and tools such as Ning sites or twitter), the need to use Web 2.0 apps such as Google Reader and iTunes U. (more tools/communications with networked bloggers), the need to blog (which for me is both a personal echo chamber and a communication tool with my network), the need to attend conferences (F2F or virtual), and the need to develop personal connections. This past year has shown me just how tools such as delicious, Skype, blogging, and Twitter develop and reinforce personal connections.

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You really cannot name three or four components without showing the interconnections between them. I still like D’Arcy Norman’s illustration which when reduced down to thumbnail size simply shows the complexity of the interactions, This may be why David felt compelled to pull out Inspiration and draw a picture of his PLE.

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Jeff Utecht had an insightful piece on the stages of adoption he went through with his PLE/PLN:

“Stages of Personal Learning Networks Adoption

Stage 1 Immersion: Immerse yourself into networks. Create any and all networks you can find where there are people and ideas to connect to. Collaboration and connections take off.

Stage 2 Evaluation: Evaluate your networks and start to focus in on which networks you really want to focus your time on. You begin feeling a sense of urgency and try to figure out a way to “Know it all.”

Stage 3 Know it all: Find that you are spending many hours trying to learn everything you can. Realize there is much you do not know and feel like you can’t disconnect. This usually comes with spending every waking minutes trying to be connected to the point that you give up sleep and contact with others around you to be connected to your networks of knowledge.

Stage 4 Perspective: Start to put your life into perspective. Usually comes when you are forced to leave the network for awhile and spend time with family and friends who are not connected (a vacation to a hotel that does not offer a wireless connection, or visiting friends or family who do not have an Internet connection).

Stage 5 Balance: Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you. A sense of calm begins as you understand that you can learn when you need to learn and you do not need to know it all right now.”

Michele Martin looked at Jeff’s stages and basically agreed, though she noted that she would have reversed 2 and 3. I am with Michele – I think I went quickly from Immersion to what I would call “Trying to Know It All”. I had a good support group working with me to keep me from being overwhelmed and helping me into the third phase of evaluation. A lesson from this is that while PLE’s are intensely personal, they are best developed collaboratively. In other words, David’s lead off of “network” is vital.

It should be an interesting session in two weeks, and it will continue evolving up until (and after) the interactive session. I do think though that I am coming closer to conceptualizing and internalizing for myself what MY PLE is…and is not.

[Photo credits: Choconancy1, D'Arcy Norman]

There are some interesting parallels to our adoption curve and a leadership model first developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard: Situational Leadership. While some fault SL as not academically rigorous, it has nonetheless remained a stable of leadership courses (including mine) for the simple reason that it makes sense and works.

Hersey and Blanchard noted that most workers start as enthusiastic but non-competent practitioners. They are willing, so they need little supportive behavior, but they lack skills, so they need lots of direction. Blanchard called this the S1 Directing phase. As the workers’ skills grew, their motivation may wane, so they need added support and stroking. This is Blanchard’s S2 Coaching phase. On achieving mastery, the workers may not be confident, so support remains high as directing behaviors are backed off – Blanchard’s S3 Supporting phase. Finally, they can run on their own, and on reaching Blanchard’s S4 Delegating phase, little support or direction is needed.

The model is situational in that one might reach S4 in one area but need S1 guidance on assuming a new task. It appeared to me that Jeff, Bud and I all went through the S1-S2-S3-S4 cycles three times this year as we examined, learned and adopted three different technologies for personal use. With delicious last year, blogging this fall, and Twitter in the last month, I was interested and willing but not competent. Jeff provided the necessary direction to help me get started. We three formed our own support group and reinforced each other’s steps and mis-steps as we gained familiarity and confidence with [del.icio.us] [word-press and edublogs] [Twitter and twhirl]. As our abilities grew, less direction was needed and we continued to support each other. Finally – at least for delicious and blogging – little support or direction was needed, as these had become internalized and part of our normal routine. We are still in the Coaching/Supporting phases on Twitter!

The lesson for me is that adoption is not a quick process, but rather a continuum of activities, calling for both directing behaviors and supporting behaviors. I am fortunate to have great colleagues that provide that support on a daily basis!

Synchronicity struck once again! Guy Kawsaki commented back to me in the above post that I should check out his new Alltop aggregator. On the same day, I saw a feed from my friend Eduardo Peirano down in Uruguay which highlighted a customized aggregator that he had set up. There is power in each of our processes, so I thought I would compare and contrast.

Guy called me a “power Google Reader user” – though I feel at times more like a power Google Reader stumbler. The plus side for Google Reader is that it is easy to set up and use. To me, it is my daily newspaper. Like newspapers, I can quickly scan the “headlines” and only read the articles that actually interest me. Most RSS feeds from journals, news organizations, or blogs can be established with one click, which is nice. It has become part of my daily routine, but as Lee Lefever notes in his excellent summary video on YouTube, it can be addictive. I find that it does focus me to just the sites in which I am interested, acting in ways as a filter from the unwanted distractions out on the net.

However, I see the power of Guy’s Alltop. If Google Reader is my newspaper, Alltop is the magazine rack at Barnes and Noble! With a glance and a roll of the mouse, you can quickly scan the top feeds in education…or forty other categories. As Guy and his colleagues point out in their FAQ, one could build their own aggregator but, as they note”…knock yourself out. While you’re at it, you could backup your hard disk, bake your own bread, iron your own shirts, floss daily, tune your own car, and bike to work.”  I love it!  In other words, they have taken the work out of this process for you, and done a credible job. Alltop provides one place to quickly scan the pulse of the field and also spot the feeds you may not be following at the time.

Eduardo is an example of someone who did knock himself out and develop his own customized aggregator. Using Feedraider, Eduardo has built pages of feeds from his daily news (his delicious account, his Twitter account, news feeds, etc), feeds from the College 2.0 Ning site that he coordinates, feeds from Higher Ed, eLearning and Open Learning blogs and news services, and feeds from his friends. Like Alltop, his set up allows you to quickly scan the feeds and focus in on the ones of interest.

Eduardo is out on the bleeding edge of aggregation, but I think his model gives us a glimpse of what is possible. I recommend that you check out both his set-up and Guy’s Alltop…but be careful. As Alan Levine might note, these are both great timesucker sites….you can get lost in the rich information that you find there!