Tag Archives: reflections

First Post in EduBlog (Sept. 2008)

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This is my very first post last Fall. It began my professional journey into edublogging. The vision has changed considerably. I am now completing an independent studies course on edublogging theory and practice, and enjoy the flexibility and independence of working autonomously.

 

This stack of posts have been collected from Me2U at Athabasca University as well as from webskills.ca, a site I have now closed.

 

This Fall, I am taking the MDE 605 course from Athabasca University and the online connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes from the University of Manitoba.

 To focus my diverse but related development efforts, I have created a personal learning space called webskills.ca, to aggregate and showcase my progress towards a number of personal learning objectives:

1. The site will act as a drafting board for reflections and brainstorming for working through and chewing over ideas prior to officially publishing them to the MDE 605 members’ blog or the connectivism course blog.

2. To meet the MDE605 course requirements, the site will showcase a working model (in-progress) for an online DE start-up venture called web skills, to submit for scrutiny and feedback to potential investors and organizations. 

3. A section of the site will showcase a proof of concept for presentation to my employer (post-secondary institution) demonstrating the use of blogs and wikis for literacy instruction about ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) with adult learners.

4. Demonstrate the use of a collaborative wiki for generating/sharing/brainstorming ideas about the concept of liminality, the process of personal transition and transformation, and its impact on human potential in the emerging digital age of networked lifelong learning.

5. The exploration and sharing of ideas about technologies and strategies that encourage community-building and leaving an enduring legacy for future generations: collaborative journaling, digital story-telling, scrapbooking, path-making (making trails through the web’s resources, leaving it easier for others), meme creation and propagation (selecting five questions to frame an idea, reply to the questions, then post, and send off to others to do the same), and the use of digital story-sacks to encourage reading, and many other related ideas. I am especially interested in their impact on curriculum, and coming up with working examples demonstrating the use of the various instructional strategies.

Reflections on Posting and Blogging

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Jo’s blog post about blogging and her question about whether one should blog or not, and Al’s follow-up comments has got me thinking.

Here is the link to their discussion:

http://me2u.athabascau.ca/elgg/joha1/weblog/521.html

I prefer to blog when I have something to say, when I am working through ideas and lookng for feedback from others. I don’t tend to blog for blogging sake, to announce to the public my inner musings on any or every topic. It might be a waste of space on the virtual page, it might be premature, undigested.

The very fact that you leave a lasting virtual fingerprint should make one pause long enough to consider whether your personal thoughts approximately formulated and open to review are ready to pass into the public domain or to be passed to a group of peers.

For example, there has been a thought niggling in the back of my mind about the role of strategic planning in my professional life. The process of applying the principles of planning (mission statement, values, and identifying a marketable “product” (the networked educator) has tremendous implications for individual educators. (I was going to say academics, but that word restricts the scope of activities educators engage in) 

The management and planning over one’s own “Brand name” involves careful selection of the types of discussions one engages in, and the cultivating of a network of social contacts, and decisions about when and what to blog/post for maximum effect to accomplish goals. Identifying the goals and steps to take consistent with the vision (an assignment done in 603) could be an alternate assignment rather than requiring a business plan several of us will never implement after the course finishes.

This process of seeking to promote  and form connections over the blogosphere, and the process of effectively building and refining an academic career as a researcher, instructor, author, or contributor should involve strategic planning. The textbooks we have in this course do not speak to the student-as-infopreneur; it speaks to administrators and entrepreneurs, to the status quo.

However, as the connectivist course is amply demonstrating, making a name for oneself will occur in the blogosphere, in the open arena of ideas. Who links to whom, who read whose blogs, whose courses are promoted…what of all this? I need the management and planning skills of an info-preneur, not the skills of those engaged in small business or working in academic departments.

For those of us in this course who seek to be educators, the business planning has some application, but if taken as an exercise in which individual grad students can choose to apply the learning from this course to their own professional circumstances – as infopreneurs, a lot more in depth posting would occur.

I am not an entrepreneur, and the exercises in the course are likely an exercise of fiction for me. While it provides me with a greater appreciation of the thinking process of business types, my heart is really not into it.

I work in the field of adult literacy, where an upgrade to MS Word 2007 from 2003 can disrupt learners who do not have discretionary incomes to afford to upgrade. The digital divide is a reality I work in, need to account for. The traditional education system (residential schools) has scarred generations of First Nations learners, and account for most of the learners in the classrooms I teach in. I am attempting to introduce technology for holistic learning.

I am struggling to introduce technology and the web within the learning context, and this involves a reformulation of my professional learning goals. On one end, there are networks I can tap in to, and share ideas, and present my ideas. The BC Literacy Forum is one such network. But my concern is that for me much of the business planning involves making assumptions about individuals’ learning/working contexts that do not match reality.

I guess a learner’s silence on the blogs and forums is due to a lack of relevance, and not because they have nothing to say. Perhaps they have a lot to say, but like my literacy learners, feel their private ideas are not what public others want to hear.

Exploring EduBlogging

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I am a novice edublogger, and as such am a bit reluctant to put myself out there for more seasoned bloggers to read my ideas. Perhaps it is because of a bit of apprehension of how I will be received (or not received). Once you post to an academic community outside the “safe harbour” of an educational institution, you need to be prepared to engage in “gladiatorial battle” with far more experienced voices in the arena of ideas.

Writing for an elite group of edubloggers takes a lot of skill – yet I am beginning to realize that edublogs have appeal for many learners. Not every edublogger who thrives as a personal blogger, or who blogs within a sharing cirle or sharing community, will be engaged and effective in the more formal learning community involving a wider, more experienced, audience. I would say that perhaps the opposite is true as well. Academics comfortable with rational discourse may not feel equally comfortable participating in sharing circles with a small group of co-learners, discussing feelings, half-formed ideas, impressions, and intuitions. Roles and expectations of participants differ. The type of postings required/expected for these blogging venues also differ, The skills and attitudes attendant to each of these blog spaces would differ.

The ideas I present here are sketchy, based loosely on preliminary observations from case studies on the use of edublogs, as well as my experiences within the me2u athabasca community. However, I intuit that there is a progression in the scope of blogging over time for learners, and that various skill sets need to be cultivated before:

1. personal writing space

This space is meant for the expression of ideas which is shared with an educator who acts as learning companion and mentor. None of these posts are available to the general public, but perhaps a few are sent off as email to trusted sources.

2. sharing circle

This edublog acts as a personal writing space, but also acts as a drafting space and sharing space. There are a limited number of other individuals who comment on the blog’s posts, as well as the instructor, offering encouragement and insights. It is this developing synergy that indigenous pedagogues refer to as reciprocity. There is some posting on others’ blogs within the sharing circle, as well as on blogs that are publicly accessible.

3. sharing community

There is an ever widening group of confidantes, of kindred spirits, of well-wishers who make suggestions on new directions for exploration. The edublogger invites others into the fold to participate, and encourages still others to come and visit. At some point, starting perhaps with the sharing circle, but definitely more apparent in the sharing community, the edublogger’s motivations shift, and intensify. Such learners now explore others’ blogs and comment on others’ ideas, thus encouraging greater participation and attracting more individuals (experts, mentors) to take part in the discussions.

4. learning community

Most learning communities do not have the characteristics of the personal learning spaces, sharing circles, or sharing communities.
They are recognized as a formal way of exchanging ideas. This is the open arena where ideas are debated, reputations are built, and credibility and academic stature at the national, even global, level is cultivated and defended.

Semester End Reflections

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I started this course with a tentative mission statement, outlining my purposes for maintaining an edublog. Over the semester, I worked on drafting ideas that reflected my way-making (surfing explorations) and explored the use of discussion memes.

A major task that contributed to my successful use of the blog involved exploring a lot of external blogs. I used the edu-blog for private thoughts, and even deleted a couple of the posts I was not entirely comfortable with. I gained greater confidence in my skill as a a communicator of ideas.

One significant learning event occurred when I was frequently encouraged by Terry to widen access of most of my posts to the public, and when he invited me to comment on his Virtual Canuck blog. It gave me a deeper insight at the potential use of using edublogs as “incubators” that prepared students for public discourse
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Over the semester, I worked to come up with a series of examples of edu-blogging activities based on a number of metaphors: sandbox, incubator, sharing space, sharing circle, walled garden, etc. A lot of the work from MDDE 612 about experiential and transformative learning cross-pollinated my ideas for this course. Although it is a lot of work, I think there might be some potential for students to enroll in complementary double-courses that combine independent study elements with more structured activities.

I think that I would have enjoyed interacting with a couple expert “guest” edu-bloggers.

I think that Edu-blogging is about extended conversations that mix private, educational and public spheres, and in the case of edu-blogging, this technology is subservient to emergent needs for connection.Edu-Blogging requires a respect for and protection of individual agency, of learner autonomy.

EduBlogging – Issues to Consider

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I am building a theoretical framework which includes using edublogs for transformative learning, and I am especially interested in the issues conccerning the process of facilitating learners through thresholds, or liminal spaces, in which most learners experience transformative change.

Current literature describing case studies on blogging emphasizes the need for public blogs, groupwork, and interaction; in effect, the social aspects of blogging at the expense of the personal aspects. My focus begins with how the individual learners navigate through the decisions that need to be made to become more skilled bloggers. Oftentimes, learners are not given choices about whether to blog or not, whether to blog entirely in private (not seeking others’ views except by invitation), autonomously (welcoming others’ comments but not demotivated by their absence), or as a team member in a group blog (dependent on others’ validation and support). These perspectives of learners have to be accounted for. When moving between these three types of blogging contexts, students are involved in conscious, deliberate choices, and there the crux lies: each shift requires a transformation of perspective.

Each perspective is unique, often contradictory to one another, so rather than requiring all students to complete the same tasks in the same fashion, specific assessment tools are required. In addition, many educators shy away from assessing in any meaningful way what learners contribute in their own private blogs. By providing no guidance, and no door to dialogue, there is no expectation, no potential for feedback. However, if offered a choice over whether to disclose, whether to invite others to comment, learners set up the rules for self-assessment in cooperation with their instructor, who acts as a learning companion, or mentor.

A major concern of educators is to not let individual learners ruminate alone by themselves. I contend there is nothing wrong with private, solitary work, as long as a possibility remains, a choice, for that learner to invite their instructor or others to participate in conversations. There is nothing inherently wrong with enabling a private learning space for learners with locked doors, preventing instructors from entering without permission. Solitude is an important Solitude acts as an important pause-point from which to find personal inspiration.