It's really hard to form the habit of continual development without a formal qualification to drive you. I've been thinking this through in the context of the Erasmus Future Teacher 3.0 project that I'm currently working on as part of Learning Apps (see About FT 3.0 tab)
The plan is to create a Digital Thermometer to help people measure where they are on their digital teaching journey. Then there's a Digital Compass to direct them to a set of Digital Journeys they can take.
How do we keep people going through a cycle of journeys after the project ends?
After completing my CMALT, I should have continued to use the core areas of competency to reflect on my on-going journey, but I didn't. I'd reached an 'end' to the journey. Refreshing the portfolio in 3 years' time felt like I had lots of time to relax and to do other things. I didn't develop the habit of continuing to blog as a result of CMALT because it wasn't part of the qualification requirement.
I then embarked on the MSc TEL a few years later to continue my professional development journey (gaining my Prince2 and Agile project management qualifications in between).
What I'm now curious about is whether I can get into the habit of continually developing my portfolio. I recently had to curate my recent works as evidence of my ability to meet a person specification. I had a fun time going through my back catalogue of presentations, materials, and reflections, but it was also time consuming. Much better if I could keep on top of things and feel like I could reflect my professional capacity more easily at any time, and not just at one point in time.
I also miss the habit of blogging (triggered by my very active life as an e-learning consultant) and the fun we had in creating podcasts with the likes of David Sugden, James Clay, Ron Mitchell etc). Ron, Alistair and I are currently recording our audio discussions as they lend themselves to being a podcast. It's great to be able to hear people's thought processes when they are designing a lesson for you! (View the Future Teacher link above to listen to the discussions which have been added to the learning objects.)
I also miss the habit of blogging (triggered by my very active life as an e-learning consultant) and the fun we had in creating podcasts with the likes of David Sugden, James Clay, Ron Mitchell etc). Ron, Alistair and I are currently recording our audio discussions as they lend themselves to being a podcast. It's great to be able to hear people's thought processes when they are designing a lesson for you! (View the Future Teacher link above to listen to the discussions which have been added to the learning objects.)
I looked into ways of triggering the habit of adding to a portfolio and in the end, it boils down to this. It has to:
- be easy to add to
- allow me to categorise entries so I can curate when I need to
- be easy to share with others when I need to
And so, I've come back to my slightly neglected blog! Email into blog is one of the easiest ways to add things to a visible site. If I want to, I can keep things in draft until I'm ready to share it. It allows me to tag stuff, so I can find it again easily. I could go through items and tag it with a new tag if I need to group it for a new audience. Curation sorted!
Very pleased with this idea. What I need to do now is to determine a set of tags for each area of competence that I would like to keep adding to, set reminders on my calendar or aim to add to it every day, and then have regular reviews to ensure I'm not focusing too much on one area of competence over another. I'm also keen to cycle through different models of e-learning for reflection purposes to deepen my understanding of their principles (or work out what works best when). TPACK might be a useful starting point, but for learning technologists, would we be using Learning Technology as our subject specialism for our Content Knowledge? It may not work so well for us.
In terms of accountability, I'm thinking of asking other learning technologist friends to start the journey with me. Maybe we can make part of the journey "read someone else's journey and provide them with feedback". This could be a really hippy but fun experiment for my Masters project.
It certainly ticks the box in terms of being based on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.If we can build this into our Erasmus project with the ultimate aim that people continue on their journey after we have 'finished with them' (you know what I mean!), then I might feel like my day's work is done!
