Churn, Sink and Drift – 21C Outcomes

Online communities – are now a  culture or counter-culture depending on your ideology. Community, culture, churn, sift and drift are the reagents of motivation and at the center of learning anything online.

Communities need culture to operate. Anyone talking about communities in an online world, cannot dismiss its cultural influences. This is however a ver spikey idea – especially to people who prefer the world the way as it was.  Big communities are more robust. In times of stress, they spin off into smaller ones rather than shattering. They are easy for newcomers to join, so you spend less time recruiting as there’s always room for one more. They are very attractive to socializers who seem to prefer their inclusive feel. Small communities are fast to develop, the community levels faster (I think there are 4 stages to community: communication, interest, practice and collective action). Small communities are more personal-friendly to newcomers. They tend to be more diverse in their interests and are far more exclusive. Explorers, risk takers and innovators prefer them.

They all suffer from churn, sink and drift.

Churn is the rate people leave. The stronger the community, the less churn. (schools auto-churn students every year). Most of the churn happens in the newcomer days: It’s too hard, I don’t have time, it’s not me etc., A good way to manage churn rates is to offer a trial (as in 10 days game play for nothing). This acts as safety value to ensure the community is not determined by the churn. The community does not want people who can’t strengthen it and are willing for give up revenue and size for this. Much of education is fixated on cost and size, so actually promotes churn. Education is built to churn by offering pilots and taster communities, most of which fail when the community is forced to scale to reach enterprise level. We go from a few classrooms to a few schools to a policy as enforcement. The churn point.

Sink is all about why people engage. Why people sink time and intellectual investment into learning or playing online. It is why people want to use a virtual world – or why they want to learn from YouTube. Drift is why they stop using it, or stop being interested. Community is the hook that pulls people into Educational Technology and what keeps them there. Immersion is what teachers and leaders need to be concerned with. It is rare for a politician to talk about immersing teachers in a culture of … as they have no real access to communities that do – they are not buraucrats.

The strategy of adding more hardware, more tools, more resources, more policy does not promote community of immersion. It promotes churn (I tried, and didn’t like), sink (I wanted to do it, but it was blocked) and drift (I have been using some technology, but that now I’m told its old hat).  I think that when you get beyond around 250 members of a community – you will see sub-groups forming with their own sub interests – leading and coordinating those is a whole new level. In EdTech communities; the laws of churn, sink and drift determine everything.

This is why we see teachers churning out the classrooms, sinking thousands of hours into online communities nand drifing away from the ideology and philosphies that were installed in them as pre-teachers. We love our small communities – as we reach that level of participation and action quicky (classrooms, small groups etc) and use the big communities (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) to locate them.

These communities operate at an almost intutitive level, they defend, promote, create and help constantly, the best ones do it for free and never attempt to rule the members but enable them. Second Classroom reached 250 members this week. A virtual community that now has to level up if it is going to become a big strong one.

 

 

 

 

 

5 Step Change Strategy

WHAT is a good teaching strategy? It’s a plan for someone else’s learning. It encompasses the presentation of materials the teacher might make, the activities and exercises they designed for the students, providing access to resources and tools needed to develop a growing understanding of the subject – and assess it.

Laptops and computers are not a strategy and hardly a revolution without teachers, but the steps needed to succeed are hard to articulate. We now have a fleeting opportunity to reshape schooling with long overdue public funding, yet teachers still find ‘tabbed browsing’ a new concept. This is not funny, it’s scary. They can hum the tune, but not name the song. Even experienced, successful teachers that function well inside the cognitive apprentice classroom are web novices unable to develop any effective strategy, lock-stepped by intersecting perceptions of why they can’t or won’t do as the tide of change rises ever higher.

The strategy is relatively straight forward, but obviously requires access to a group of people who are experts in dealing with this issue. If we are to capitalise on school investment – there has to be someone to call, someone to help – when you need it. This is the role of leadership – to create a culture of participation.

This is the question to put to school leaders. “How are you demonstrating this strategy in your own work and provisioning it for your staff?.”

There are five steps that I believe must occur continuously.

1. Encounter the idea, concept, principle or skill
2. Get to know more about it
3. Try it out for yourself
4. Get feedback/evaluation
5. Reflect (I liked, I wondered, my next steps)

It is a cycle of transition that won’t be done simply though infrastructure – and it amazes me how easily we accept press releases from high office about size, numbers and dollars – at the absolute expense of effective professional development of teachers. No effective teaching strategy, no effective learning. This is achieved by working with people who can implement it – not just talk about it.

Story Quest

STORY QUEST. Not only is this a brilliant idea, it represents yet another signal to the wider educational technology teaching community that virtual worlds are fast crossing over as the place to take your read/write/make classrooms. The impossible is possible, and with a clearer understanding of writing – students can experience a much more open and immersible learning environment – exploring on their own terms and raising questions that it generates. While the current fuss over Google Wave rages on Twitter, I can’t help keep asking what is it for – in the classroom. What does it do that can’t be done. I suspect Google Wave will have implications for people, but not sure how it would align with the current syllabus’ demands for information communication technology.

The great thing here is that you can not only watch that video; but step into it yourself. You prompt the action and interaction and your presence in the space triggers the events. It is designed for architects, to understand how to look at Second Life or Reaction Grid as an instructional design space that is created to meet outcomes intended, though activities and assessment. For more information, check out Jo Kay’s blog post on Story Quest, grab a walking stick and explore a new way to tell stories – and in Story Quest, there are no stupid questions.

As I begin a 6 month project in Virtual Worlds … this sim to me, shouts – this is where story’s and learning are heading …

Packing for the future

What is in the EdTech backpack? Is it a mobile phone, laptop, 3G dongle or a bag of virtual dirty tricks, magical potions and comforters – part operations, part strategy, part performance art.

With hind-sight, I’d have created a persona online from the outset. I’d be Victor Gloucester.  He’d feel confident to throw dynamite-ideas into rooms where people sit with arms folded staring into the vortex of techno-denial. He’d tell you “technology, when given to adults, presents a distinct chance that it will be used to reinforce more of the same – or it will blow their hand off and they won’t touch it again”. Vic would be far more self-confident and inordinately cooler. He’d have figured out how to have made a million from consulting by now. Vic wouldn’t create an ePorfolio … he’d serve ‘cease and desist’ notices to the Emporer Ruperts of old-lore-mediocraty – in between watching Geek Brief TV and riding his Triumph.

The great thing about ‘toons’ … we can characterise them any way we like, they are imagined. The great thing about us is we are real an can imagine adopting project based learning,  games, blogs, film making or writing a book. The characteristics of learning really are determined by our engagement with it. As simple as that. If the teacher isn’t engaged AND management doesn’t support or believe in it, then to them – your name is Vic. The tenants of eLearning have not changed in over a decade – but the opportunity has.

If you give people shovelware, all they will learn to do is shovel. God Bless Queen Victoria, and welcome the to the jugganaught of public education policy. We need stokers.

If the shoe fits #3

A fractured conversation between myself and Darcy Moore tonight over Connectivism (CCK09 Course) and participation. He published a great Australian view on his blog, where he mentions “neo-Luddites” as those unwilling to engage with digital technology and unable to form effective relationships and connections online or leverage them into their classrooms. I also read, in between the tweets, an article on Massively about the possible make-up of the race classes in Star Wars: Old Republic MMO. Yes! finally it seems, you will get to be a Jedi in a proper MMO.

It stuck me that the characteristics in Darcy’s description are valid in MMOs too, and education is just one “class”. Within that class are sub-sets or “races” – each with attributes and abilities. So the neo-Luddites are a race with abilities (or lack of). I obviously fall into a subset that believes that scenario/game/enquiry learning based on skill; issues and problems is an integral element of a holistic view of read/write learning ideologies – be that connectivism or other constructivist-esque ideology. So I have traits that connect me to other’s with a similar view.

Connectivism has long been present in virtual worlds and MMOs – or at least since The Well in the 1980s, so perhaps some refernce to these is appropriate.

Using  “video games” as a term to conceptualize MMOs is like describing Henri Matisse as a cave painter. Without doubt, there are significant reasons for educators to take notice of the vast variety and numbers of people playing, creating, sharing and experiencing MMOs. If you have been brought up with Nintendo DS and Xbox – then Metaplace and Small Worlds seem much far more ‘normal’ that Twitter – and I guess the Twitter demographic supports that. Ventrillo (Vent) is going to be identified by youth online along side MSN Messenger and Skype – yet few educators will have heard of Ventrillo – even if they have heard of Skype.

Today there are the big names such as Aion and Warcraft, but also hundreds of Indie MMOs and games, working in connceted frameworks. This week I’ve spent time in Reaction Grid – but also in communities that fringe that ‘virtual world’. I learned because I connected with people – in virtual spaces invisible to Google and it’s advertising driven agenda.

Darcy ends his post encouraging teachers to take part in the CCK09 course and in addition to that I’d like to add – point your RSS reader at Masssively (Tateru Nino’s blog) and the Metaverse Journal during the same time. We should be very wary of defining read/write in terms of blogs, wikis, podcasts and Twitter. In short, blogs and wikis may augment the classroom now, but what if the classoom becomes virtualised – beyond MSN Messenger, Skype and Ellumitate – but via a console or mobile phone. What happens when you can talk to a teacher using Vent as you walk though a skills based learning scenario. To me, Connectivism must include virtual worlds as well as social networks, PLNs etc., as virtual communities have been connecting online ever since John Draper appeared virtually as Captain Crunch.

If the shoe fits #1

DUTY OF CARE, the age old topic that is rolled out whenever the conversation about changing a culture of learning starts to get a little uncomfortable – when something new might disrupt the status-quo once again floated to the top of the turd bowl this week.

Private education has to comply with the same legal duty. Yet public policy sees Bob the Builder banned. More seriously, this potentially creates a second class experience for public schools using technology – some 70% of our children.

Yes we are critical – we have to be because the system is in a nice safe orbit. Failure to adequately address local policy adaptation and provide local school autonomy in ICT over a long period of time, though successive governments has resulted in a lock-stepped public system that is unable to cope.

Its a cultural problem! – bureaucrats unwilling and unable to create effective public policy, waving the ‘duty of care’ banner on any occasion that feels uncomfortable. The internet brings a macro level of scrutiny that has simply got out of hand. School leaders do not check every book or resource that a teacher brings to class or get it ratified by some faceless womble in head office. Yet the internet does.

I think I might move to Sweden – where I could either choose a school that will work for my kids (not against them), or I could set up my own, with 100% government funding. Could I do that here – absolutely – would I need to talk to DET, probably not – I need to talk to DET teachers – as our school would be different and better.

Now there’s an idea – a Free Virtual School for all Australian Kids online. Jeez why didn’t I think of that and tell someone earlier this year. Oh wait … you get the point – DET is not the only scenario on offer – and there is global research and evidence to suggest that the patriarchal model we have – is not guaranteed to continue. *Puts hand up for Virtual School! A school needs community – and that does not mean locking kids in a room day in and day out for several years anymore.

Reaction creates attraction

The recent debacle over Jo Kay’s SLEducation wiki has provided a wave of new discussions around Virtual Worlds in Education. It has raises discussions around the idea that Second Life is not THE virtual world for education, just one execution of it – and what if we used something else?

Many of those who have been writing, developing and researching are clearly past the critical flack of the initial beach landing, have overcome the initial ‘yeah but’ barrage from the sand dunes and are confidently aligning virtual worlds and games with learning and assessment.

Unlike a great deal of Web2.0-ness, virtual worlds are long supported by a wealth of academic research to suggest they are extreamly good at motivating students and offer high quality instructional design environments for learning.

Obviously not everyone is going to explore them. The biggest barrier is that in muves the experience has to be instructively designed to create opportunities that extend beyond it and facilitate experiences that cannot be created without it – Who has the time to do that?

Well lots of people actually, not least the students we are teaching and certainly the multi-billion dollar technology industry.

A flood of educators followed Kerry Johnson’s footsteps into Reaction Grid, a community of inter-connected Open Simulators.

The discussions have not been about whether Second Life is better, but how it changes pedagogical opportunities. I am yet to hear from teen-educators that Linden is easy to deal with, or overly keen to help – quite the opposite. But Lindens notice to Jo felt like a wake up call to lots of Second Life Educators.

Maybe it was time to get past what we can’t do and look at what we can. As blog posts appeared online last week over Jo and Sean’s well established (and Linden referenced) wiki there was a flurry of new activity – not about the wiki issue, but in going right around the problem – which was all about ownership and trademarks, not community. We get the idea of trademarks by the way.

The Jokaydia Second Life community flocked into Reaction Grid and Jo Kay has established a new outpost to allow Second Life educators to explore Reaction Grid with the same level of support, resources and expert development you’d expect.

There’s also an ISTE2010 conference proposal via  Judy and Vicki Davis that was put together via iPhones and Google Docs in a few hours this week to meet the call for proposal deadline.

In the next few months, there will be open resources and open spaces in Reaction Grid created for teachers to explore with students – and this will lead to further instances of students read, writing and making things outside of them. Some will be online – and perhaps some will be downloadable – able to run on local machines as stand alone or LAN learning objects. Imagine being able to download a unit of work around Huxley’s Brave New World and run it on your nice new DER laptops using open source resources – offline. Giving students a zip file to unpack and run for homework, where they have to model mathematical problems. Virtual school in a virtual world.

Change comes from places you least expect and creates opportunities you never imagined. You get into Reaction Grid for FREE. Join us at 9pm AEST on Sunday night – because that is where the new curriculum in being crafted. You can google it.

8 ways to get teachers talking about learning

We are moving past the inertia of “the future of learning is different” discourse. We seem to be increasingly talking about how and not why, perhaps in some part fueled by government investment. It’s hard not to notice the Ruddy Revolutions (GFC avoidance) happening in schools.

Much of the orbital stuff is giving way to people seeking practical strategies and operational advice on how to implement, not if to implement. Yes there are laggards, but now there are laptops! We can move much more rapidly – if we want to. It is likely that the students are digitally literate in terms of procedural knowledge and skill with technology – but not in pursuit of academic goals. Their use of read/write and mobile remains ‘friend based’, yet public learning environments are oppositional to that idea. We have to learn about creating better scenarios for students, to build on their skills. This post is about how school executives can approach curriculum renewal.

Taking a retrospective view, looking carefully at existing units of work, allows us to consider alternative scenarios at the strategic level. All to often the PD focus is on the operational stuff – ‘how do I manage this; what tool do I need; do I have the time’. And teachers hate that stuff. Focus on the intellectual change; not the operational ones first. All you then need is a facilitator to help steer the department into deeper thinking, not skills training. The facilitators are ‘us’, so drop us an email, we can help YOU.

Consider asking departmental staff to help you evaluate an existing unit of work. They will be more inclined to do this, than learn about ‘tools’.

Questions that get people talking about learning might be …

1. What are the performance problems … what skills need to be learned by students?
2. What are realistic scenarios in which we can use this technology in our environment?
3. What are the indicators of successful outcomes?
4. What are the indicators of unsuccessful outcomes?
5. What are the descriptions of successful and fail behaviors?
6. What resources can assist us in improving the unit?
7. What is that we know, that they need to know?
8. What is that they can do, that we need to learn about?

A great PD day pulls units to pieces and realigning them with enquiry driven learning, augmented by available technology. During that day, you can introduce minimal and small Web2.0 tools. If they can’t use it in 10 mins, don’t talk about it. The first experience that teachers need is a familiar one; where they have an immediate win – and end the day talking about the design of learning being collegial. From that point you can start to develop their ideas into a professional development programme – without calling it PD.

Reflective Writing 1-2-3

‘REFLECTION’ is a word closely associated with 21st Century Learning. I thought I’d write a post on how to improve critical literacy though a 3 step adjustment to read/write activities in the classroom.

Watson (1997) says “Reflection encourages students to – self examine, self-asses and evaluate their own practice. Without reflecting, the student is at risk of practicing in a manner if unquestioned routines, accepted directives and/or rote learning.”

This short observation highlights the need for students to question, not simply to recount or answer declarative questions with read/write tools. There is bountiful research that suggests talking about what they are doing, not just what they or others have done, encourages the conscious practice of discussing the consequences of their findings and actions.

We need to ensure that testing for prior knowledge is more than asking declarative questions at the beginning of a (lesson or tutorial) learning instance. The facilitator should be conscious of three stages of reflection and also consider selecting different tools to achieve this. For example: Use a combination of micro-blog, game and video. This also encourages students to explore a more diverse media landscape.

1. Reflecting before acting – preventing unnecessary errors. Making sure the student is aware of the outcomes being sought. Asking students to predict the activity, talk about their expectations and possible fears as the activity is revealed to them. What can they do already and show you? What skills are they missing that will help them? This can be though a series of microblog posts for example – as the teacher begins to reveal the activity though providing readings or given them mini-tasks to complete – not just delivering content.

2. Reflect during the activity – use methods to monitor their actions during the event in order to maintain contextually appropriate performance and effort. This is often though feedback from the software itself – such as sound, images, scores etc. In a game this is in-built, but in a MUVE it has to be designed. Teachers need to pay close attention to this phase, to ensure the learner is challenged but not frustrated by poor feedback, or not understanding the importance of it in the learning sequence/pattern – from the teacher or the software.

3. Critically review their actions and experience after. This last action is dependent on recall. Technology often allows recall to occur as events are recorded in some manner such as a blog post, or screen shot. Self and peer assessment to deconstruct the learning process should be combined with encouraging the student to record that event and use that evidence to support their critical reflection.

The outcome,  activity and the assessment should not be limited to a predicted performance. “I think they’ll be able to do it” or “I think I can teach using that”. Design the task so that the student can modify it (up or down), to negotiate their curriculum and perhaps explore incidental or peripheral ideas outside core curriculum content. This might mean making a video, interviewing people, performing a role pay together with text based activities.  Pacing the activity also helps, changing the emphasis from one activity to another to allow you to uncover more about the learner. Keep the tools VERY simple, look for ready-to-learn solutions, so that students learn to select their own tools to demonstrate their learning. Consider that when you first start using read/write media – you students will have little idea what to do and the social dynamics are all over the place. Most games will train you to operate effectively individually rather than in a group -which is much more complex. By default you have ‘groups’ of learners … but initially, this is a good way to learn more about them as individuals, which you can use later in wider approaches.

Ref: Watson S. (1997) ‘An analysis of concept experience”. Journal of Advanced Nursing, vol.16 pp 1117-1121.

Activating Leadership

PRESIDENT Lincoln is reported as saying “Men moving in an official circle are apt to become official – not to say arbitrary – in their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day”. He was talking in relation to his social philosophy in which he valued communication with ‘ordinary’ people, not just receiving office-seekers and bureaucrats. It strikes me that despite our almost god-like technology that our current leadership seems grotesque oppositional to Lincoln’s philosophy, a man who was often called disruptive in his time.

I wonder if technology, once used to create hierarchy and singularity now needs leaders who can receive ‘ordinary’ people.  I get this feeling that we are increasingly involved in the unification of science with disciplines such as the humanities. This is activating the intrinsic human mind’s pre-programming to participate in the process of learning. The artifacts of 21st Century learning; blogs; wikis; podcasts; youtube; virtual worlds and games are conflict with mechanisms of the past – firewalls, filters, proprietary software, private networks, experts etc.,

It seems plain to me that the authors of the hidden-curriculum, those who are 21st Century teachers are seeking a much greater rallying point than some appointed bureaucrat responding to marketing, surveys and political party lines. This activates nothing, and places emphasis on the ‘cost’ and ‘opportunity’ that they are providing us, passing responsibility of professional learning principles or executive. These people are likely to make poor(er) decisions, follow the guidelines of office-seekers and ideology.

We need to activate executives and principals as collaborators with an ability to act independently for their community. Something enjoyed by Catholic and Independent Education – both of whom have the SAME duty of care as public. Yet the policies and ideologies are massively different.  Mr Whitby says is a consistent voice in the community,  Greg Black, tirelessly tries to open up conversation – we don’t see this reflected in pubic education – which loves to give itself titles that end in the world ‘Authority’. Open up, we want to come in.

How worse would a school be if it took ONE laptop out the look and re-allocated funding?

Take $5000 and throw it into pedagogy. A virtual world $2000.00 (blocked), a campus blog ($1000) blocked; pro-flicker account ($50, blocked) – for less than the software cost of one laptop – schools can activate so much more opportunity, but have been lock-stepped from it though the policy now in place, which is driven by notions of centralised governance; in a world which clearly rejecting socially. Don’t let the costs and numbers fool you – all of this investment needs activation. The DNA to do that is with online communities.

Like the naughty independent senator – there is a collabatorium manefesto won’t tow the line without negotiation. We wish to inform and be informed. In addition to infrastructure we also want pedagogy, citizenship, open resources, open learning, virtual classrooms and better policy. Its a global problem, but Australia has less people to solve it than our American cousins who are equally dissonant.

Data, transparency, and public availability of educational information are all highly desirable elements of education reform. It’s ridiculous that today a parent can find more information about choosing a new washing machine or automobile than about choosing a school, and it’s a travesty how frequently ideology trumps evidence in education policy making. Andrew Rotherham

How can they organise effective professional learning for their staff – who do they access, and how do the find these people? – This is why the back channel is important and why Twitter matters. Mark Pesce remarked to me “by any means necessary” in regard to maintaining pressure on change. To me we cannot allow the door to close in the next 6 months, as laptops find their way into schools.

DET/DER need to be far more open to alternative scenarios (and people) to actively receive advice from those who are able to help them with reform in the classroom – as well as having technocrats to interpret the operational requirements. It seems to me that though policy, action and marketing – the message, let alone the people is not yet being received.

Bureaucrats in public office have a public social duty of care to train teachers how to become active, informed online learning facilitators – not just filter out what doesn’t suit them.

For example, I want my local community to be fantastic – as that is where I live. I’m willing to help the local high school communities learn about teaching with laptops, because it matters to me, my kids and my community.  DET/DER needs to continue to expanding it’s appetite  to receiving people whom it currently sees as ‘the crowd’. This will help them recognise how in-accessible some of their current goals are unless they open up more grass roots opportunities and stop messing about with pilots.

So if you’re in 2251 postcode; give me a call – lets talk. It’s not too late – or come to the Unconference.