What is this project about?

This project started last year when we combined our annual e-learning conference eFest with the recently established teaching & learning conference. One of the themes was the changing role of the teacher in the 21st century and us education technologists were eager to show that e-learning is all about teaching & learning, just with technology & access to the web. Of course this can be daunting, overwhelming, scary, uncomfortable, risky…. So we wanted to let educators new to these exciting possibilities, know that they’re not alone. That others have gone before them and are willing to help. Besides introducing the audience to various existing communities of practice out there (like Classroom2.0), I also introduced the Personal Learning Network concept to them.

This project was inspired by Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness for #OpenEd09, but my project is on a much smaller scale.

I’m asking you to answer the question: “What does my PLN mean to me?” and share your thoughts in a short video/animation/slidecast, about 2-3 minutes. If you work in education, I’d love to hear from you – teachers, librarians, educational technologists and managers. Feel free to answer as you will. However if you get stuck, here are some suggestions to include (use these as guidelines only – remember this has got to be personal!!!):

• Who you are, where you are & what you do
• How your PLN has affected your own learning?
• How your PLN has affected your practice?
• Something really neat you learned through your PLN recently
• Which tools you use in your PLN?
• How you use technology in your teaching or educational practice
• How you’re adapting your teaching or practice for the 21st century?
• Your most ‘fruitful’ connection made through your PLN
• Any words of encouragement for educators new to this 21st century, ‘techie’ way of teaching & learning

After you’ve posted your video/animation/slidecast somewhere on the web, please also embed it on the What My PLN Means – wiki here. And send me (@catspyjamasnz) a tweet to let me know – include the hashtag #mypln. That way I can thank you.

Your task

1. Think about your PLN/PLE and what it means to you. Work together in group of 3-5 to have brief discussion about this.

2. Record your video/screencast. You can do this alone, but probably handier in a group. Use Flip videos available (3), the iMacs provided by Citilab, your own recording devices (iPhones, Flips, digital camera’s) or…. go to the professional Citilab recording studio where Jordi will be operating the professional equipment!

3. Upload your video to YouTube. Use a title like this: What My PLN Means To Me – @twittername or real name – #PLE_BCN.

4. Link on What My PLN Means To Me wiki

5. Send me a tweet @catspyjamasnz with a link so that I can thank you, moltas gracies con petons (thanks v much with kisses )

Why participate in this project?

• For you individually, it’s good practice to reflect on your PLN/PLE
• For our PLE/PLN community, these videos can act as resources, evidence showing this new personal learning in action
• For teachers new to technology, these videos can act as encouragement
• A cross-section of these videos, will be mixed together to create an overview resource
• The videos will be harvested for themes & ideas to prompt further research into the PLN/PLE concept

Thanks for your help, PLN_BCN people! Moltas gracies!

Here’s my video about what my PLN means to me.

This was a day with mixed ability and experience staff, all encouraged to take the next step up on their education technology skills ladder. They did this in groups, led by a colleague who is more experienced.

Usually what happens with these ‘traditional-style’ staff development sessions is that a survey is sent the next week to staff (the ‘happy sheets‘). Did you find this useful? That’s interesting but not as interesting as asking again 6 weeks later, are you still using your newly acquired skills? If not, why not? If yes, how else can we help you?

Now a little red cynical me, popped up on my shoulder, and said: “of course they will not still be using it in 6 weeks”. There’s rivalling priorities (research, clinical placements, marking) and suddenly what was claimed today to be a timesaver (Moodle quizzes, Flip videos), seems like just too much work.

But then I thought, wait a minute, that is my responsibility too. How can I encourage and support them over the next 6 weeks, so they will continue to use these skills?

My preference would be to run staff development through networked learning. Inducting staff into an education technology network of like-minded colleagues, would make on-going encouragement and support easy. But this is not a part of our institution (yet – give me time ).

So in traditional staff development situations (one day, 2 days, a 2-hour workshop), how do I deal with my side of the bargain? If participants are expected to continue using a newly acquired skill and give me feedback on my workshop/my work, then my side is to provide active encouragement & support (more than just being on the end of a phone or email). But being realistic about my available time too, as only e-learning advisor in an institution of 350 staff.

Options to keep my side of the bargain within current institution structures:

• Use the newly set up Faculty community page to provide links to examples and instruction videos
• Send weekly emails to the group with interesting education technology and 21st C learning news
• Send 3 surveys for feedback, 1 next week, 1 in 6 weeks, 1 at end of the year. These need to be informative & snappy, but not happy sheets
• Encourage the staff with more education technology experience to share examples of their work on the Faculty community page
• Run virtual debates via the Faculty community page. Some valid questions and worries were posed today about use of social media in education. This conversation can be continued
• Ask faculty managers to take active role in encouraging continued ed tech use (through above mentioned methods).

Any other suggestions?

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers

Hope you find it useful. Would appreciate your feedback.

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers (PDF)

A few weeks ago, I ran an online facilitation workshop with a group of teachers & their managers. Together they run a programme that is taught entirely online. As part of this, a draft of some online course protocols was on the table. Most of these had to do with the updating & editing of the courses, but one of the protocols had to do with teaching the courses. It proposed that teachers should use the Course Announcements forum (a News forum in Moodle, our LMS) at least once a week. In the past, some courses (certainly not all, don’t want you to get the wrong idea…) had underused the Course Announcements (and other forums). A rather heated discussion followed this proposal.

The opponents to this protocol seemed to have 2 main objections:

1. They didn’t like to be dictated in when and how they should contact their students,

2. They felt that one course announcement a week would be too invasive, as the students would receive these as an email in their inbox, adding to their “information overload”.

I find that drawing a parallel with the on-campus  situation is always helpful. In this case…

1. We are all used to teachers being timetabled in, to be in a set classroom, at a set time, to teach a set group of students for on-campus classes. This is a ‘protocol’ that teachers accept and in fact, expect. Surely this new expectation to send a course announcement, in a set environment (the Course Announcements forum), at a set time (once a week) to a set group of students (the online students) is not unduly different from the on-campus expectation?

2.  We find it perfectly acceptable to ask students to leave their home, arrange child care or time off work, drive 2-10 kms to our campus, find a parking space, then walk across campus to be in a set room at a set time and sit there for 2-4 hours in a row. But an email in their inbox is too much of an imposition?

I believe that in an online class, communications should happen in a steady stream, flowing freely & flexibly, whether through forums, chat rooms, wikis, blogs or other means, as participants, teachers & students together, come to grips with the topics. I’ve seen the differences in courses I’ve taught. When I’m communicating in a steady stream, so do the students. In cases where I flagged as I got too busy with other commitments, the entire course dynamics sagged like a soufflé when the oven door is opened. I’ve learned from this and now see a weekly email/forum post as an opening shot, rather than a bridge too far. Am I overly optimistic?

Of course it will take a while for all of us to get used to working in these new environments, but I’d like to echo Tomaz Lasic’s thoughts: “The sooner educators move beyond the point of fear & awe of Moodle [or any other tech] and see it as a tool just like a pen, desk, whiteboard, book etc. the sooner they will be used better and more frequently to reach the pedagogical goals”. Just try to picture the Course Announcements forum as that place at the front of the class where you usually stand or sit to communicate with your students.

Tour de Moodle tweetout

I thought it would be a perfect end-of-year activity, but last weekend was embarrasingly quiet (cue: tumbleweeds). However, after a week the Tour de Moodle now seems to be getting a little traction (thanks to @adzebill, @moodleman, @moodlerific, @dafyddhumphreys and @joseph_thibault).

You can see the stops the Tour de Moodle has made so far at What the Hashtag (my favourite twitter archiver at the moment): http://wthashtag.com/Tourdemoodle

Participating is easy, just send out a tweet including:

• a link to your organisation’s Moodle homepage
• the hashtag #tourdemoodle
• the hashtag #moodle
• optional: “Pls share yr Moodle too”

Looking forward to watching your Moodles race by! Currently the yellow jersey holder is @kineoopensource.

An example of this today was a Twitter exchange between James Clay & Mark Smithers. Although they were discussing the role of IT departments in higher education, in passing James suggested that Mark install WPTouch for Wordpress so his blog would render better on an iPhone.

I hadn’t optimised my blog yet so decided to install WPTouch as well. It took me about 5 seconds to install and it makes my site look just shiny on the iPhone. Thanks James!

Over the next few months I will be testing an iPhone for work. They’ve asked me to make a project out of it, so I’ll blog about issues & opportunities I encounter in iPhone use here. This is now my first post for this project – check!

Google Wave is a tool that allows asynchronous communication (similar to email or discussion boards), semi-synchronous communications (similar to Twitter or FriendFeed) and synchronous communications (similar to instant messaging) all wrapped up with wiki-like capabilities for collaboration.

After only 48 hrs experience, really only abt 4 hours of actually poking about,  I am tempted to agree with his assessment that students and teachers could use Waves as collaboration spaces. However, I’d like to see the file sharing capabilities first. This is switched off at the moment.

I’m less impressed with some of the mass waves with 300+ participants – they feel very chaotic. Mark calls them standing waves – I wonder if tsunamis is more apt? The Educators Directory Wave is a prime example. Everyone is talking (literally over each other as this is possible in a Wave), threads are difficult to discern, it’s hard to recognise individual contributions and the whole thing is liberally sprinkled with polls and maps. I wasn’t surprised when at about 4pm Google Wave warned me that this wave was about to explode.

So, after the initial 48 hours, here is my Google Wave description in a sentence:

Google Wave is like a wiki done by amateurs, a text chat with 120 participants and a discussion forum without a facilitator, all rolled into one.

I’m sure this will improve as we get the hang of making waves…

If you want to get in touch and improve with me, I’m nz.catspyjamas [at] googlewave.com

This is the first year we’re combining our annual e-learning conference eFest with the recently established teaching & learning conference. One of the themes is the changing role of the teacher in the 21st century and us ed techies are eager to show that e-learning is all about teaching & learning, just with technology & access to the web. Of course this can be daunting, overwhelming, scary, uncomfortable, risky…. So we want to let educators new to these exciting possibilities, know that they’re not alone. That others have gone before them and are willing to help. Besides introducing the audience to various existing communities of practice out there (like Classroom2.0), I also want to introduce the Personal Learning Network concept to them.

Now I was going to introduce the PLN concept with the classic tweet-out (“Please say hi to my audience…”) and I’ll probably still do this. However, I’d like them to hear a little more from you than 140 characters. So inspired by Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness, but on a much smaller scale, this is an advanced tweet-out from me.

I’m asking you to answer the question: “What does my PLN mean to me?” and share your thoughts in a short video/animation/slidecast, about 2-3 minutes. If you work in education, I’d love to hear from you – teachers, librarians, educational technologists and managers. Feel free to answer as you will. However if you get stuck, here are some suggestions to include:

• Who you are, where you are & what you do
• How your PLN has affected your own learning?
• How your PLN has affected your practice?
• Something really neat you learned through your PLN recently
• Which tools you use in your PLN?
• How you use technology in your teaching or educational practice
• How you’re adapting your teaching or practice for the 21st century?
• Your most ‘fruitful’ connection made through your PLN
• Any words of encouragement for educators new to this 21st century, ‘techie’ way of teaching & learning

After you’ve posted your video/animation/slidecast somewhere on the web, please also embed it on the What My PLN Means – wiki here. And send me (@catspyjamasnz) a tweet to let me know – include the hashtag #mypln. That way I can thank you. Hopefully this project will go beyond my presentation, and provide us all with some additional evidence of the usefulness of a PLN for an educator.

Thanks for your help, PLN!

Update: only fair that I go first. Here’s my video about what my PLN means to me.

I was pulled into the conversation via @bookjewel, as she re-plurked Alec’s questions on Plurk. Somehow her question crystallized my thinking, and rather than responding in 140 characters, I quickly fired up PowerPoint and used its SmartArt (I’m a big fan) to create a visualization of the relationship I see between the PLE and the PLN. Alec then kindly included my graphic in his blog post. And as of this posting, it had been viewed 742 times, which makes it my most shared artefact on the web by quite a stretch. As I’ve never blogged it (it’s only ever existed on Flickr) I thought I would post it here, to re-start my own thinking about PLNs where it left off, in December 2008.

I’ve split up the technological connections (in the PLE) from the inter-personal connections (in the PLN). I think of the PLE, the environment, as the ‘hardware’ of the PLN. The PLE can exist as interrelated links, feeds and profiles on a myriad of sites, but it is nothing without the encompassing PLN of the person, their personal connections with others and their interchange of ideas to make meaning of it.

Those were my initial thoughts back then. I’m hoping to do more work on PLNs soon, by running a pilot project implementing PLNs as a staff development tool for teachers.

Social media are such an extension of conferences and events. Pre-social media we used to hear from the 15-20 selected speakers at a conference. And probably about the bunions of the man you were unfortunate enough to sit down next to at lunch and were unable to ditch. Now we can hear from everyone at the conference, and select those we want to hear more from. For 6 days, the #opened09 column in my Tweetdeck dispensed precious ideas & information. I began following new people, feverishly bookmarking urls and favouriting tweets for follow-up.

my #opened09 fav tweets in Tweetdeck

And that’s where I hit a snag – the tweets.

1. My favourite tweets don’t make much sense without the context of the other tweets. And unfortunately, the Twitter search is ephemeral and will not let you retrieve those later. It’ll let you set extensive date parameters, but these don’t give you the desired results.  This was a harsh lesson from  the EDUCAUSE Australasia conference in Perth this year, which was one of the first well-tweeted events I attended. We lost a lot of witty and valuable tweets…

2. And a more academic problem -  some #opened09 tweets are such gems, I’ll likely want to quote and re-quote them. How do I give credit where credit is due and correctly reference a tweet?

But then I came across Gunther Eysenbach How to cite twitter, how to cite tweets, how to archive tweets which solves both problems. In it he gives a detailed how-to of the WebCite service which not only gives you the correct reference for a website, but perhaps more importantly, also creates a permanent archive for that site. And it works for tweets too.

So I can reference and archive Scott Leslie’s individual tweet like this:

A favourite opened09 tweet by Scott Leslie

Leslie, Scott. Twitter / Scott Leslie: are you supposed to get ch… . 2009-08-18. URL:http://twitter.com/sleslie/statuses/3310928225. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j7I0nnKZ)

or the entire Twitter stream for the #opened09 hashtag like this:

[Multiple Authors]. #opened09 – Twitter Search. . 2009-08-18. URL:http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23opened09. Accessed: 2009-08-18. (Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5j79icRhc)

These archived tweets are now static at WebCite so they can be referred to and retrieved. Of course, that was 2 hours ago. The #opened09-ers go on. Even as I’ve been writing this post, the Twitter search tab is showing 7 new results ’since you started searching’…