Continuing professional development habit - Blogging as portfolio

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 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!

Rethinking pedagogies, reusing pedagogies

When it comes to delivering training, my preference to use a social constructivist approach is based on my belief that everyone has something to contribute and that I am not necessarily the expert, or the only expert about a topic. I like to harness the ‘resources’ of other people’s expertise in my teaching. I feel that people generally gain more satisfaction and active learning from participation than absorption. This feeling is supported by years spent delivering training and getting feedback; being involved in their own learning has been very gratifying for many teachers. (There are also many comments from these teachers that their students don’t care to be active learners. They just want to be fed the answers. That idea is for another blog post.)

I came across an interesting piece of research via a New Yorker article called “Why facts don’t change our minds”. Two professors, Sloman and Fernbach, found that “when it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.” Our incomplete knowledge about stuff actually helps to protect us as a group. We use a “division of cognitive labour” to help us make progress; if we all spent time working out how to programme the web before we used it, we wouldn’t have gotten very far. The ability to accept someone else’s thinking or outputs and to use it stops us from being in the dark ages. This is where people are willing to accept being trained or mentored by others they trust (The idea of social capital to be discussed in yet another blog post :-)). They essentially piggyback on others to get a step up. There is no point reinventing the wheel; just use the knowledge others can provide. Luckily for us as trainers, this behaviour means we have many attendees in our upcoming webinar on ‘Online learning: What works?’. This is part of the Future Teacher 3.0 series of webinars that you are welcome to join.

This trait can also work against us as people can have strong feelings about things they don’t understand, and talking to others with similar feelings can reinforce misconceptions. Many of my fellow trainers have encountered naysayers in our groups, or people who are so resistant to new ideas they are practically ‘dismantling the wheel’. This can also be dangerous in a community of knowledge where misconceptions can be spread like wildfire due to ‘confirmation bias’. Sloman and Fernback suggest that to counter such aggressive ignorance, people should be challenged to explain their thinking based on facts and research. I remember a teacher who proclaimed that using technology didn’t work since there was no improvement in his classes. This teacher had simply brought laptops into the class, but did nothing more. He didn’t redesign his learning activities to take advantage of the affordances of the technology. This is why we are approaching the topic of online learning ‘from the ground up’ by looking at strategies for designing active learning, rather than describing how to use online tools. We’ll be looking at ‘visible learning’ and ‘effect sizes’, a concept researched by John Hattie and I hope to have time to introduce Puentedura’s SAMR model. The latter has been criticised for not being based on empirical research, but some tools are useful despite not knowing their pedigree ;-). If it helps a teacher to evaluate their approach to learning activity design and to make a difference to the learner, a blunt instrument is better than no instrument at all.

This brings us full circle to the idea of using a social constructivist approach to the upcoming webinar. Much as I would like to have lots of discussion and chat over a ‘presentation-style’ webinar, the numbers attending mean that this is going to start off more like an interactive lecture, than a small-group discussion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; there are possibly some threshold concepts we need to communicate before people can have a reasonable discussion. Rather than continuing on my preferred ‘teaching style’, I am going to practice what we preach and consider the best alignment of practice with the optimum learning gains we can achieve. My co-presenter, Alistair McNaught, and I look forward to seeing you online on March 31. Future sessions will also feature my esteemed colleague, Ron Mitchell.

Is this a load of bollards?

I'm getting into my reading on Learning Organisations and I come across different models, theories, factors, principles etc etc. The short, sharp punchy '5 principles' approach or '3 criterion' explanations appeal to me - then I get to a '10 principles for explaining' such and such and my mind throws a cynical - really?
I can almost go with broad brush strokes to categorise behaviours but when you get to 10, why not go the whole hog and aim for 20? What is it about 3 or 5 or some smaller number that appeals but bigger numbers like 10 just seem ridiculous? Does a long list of 'factors' or 'principles' get in the way of understanding?
We're all familiar with trendy articles that try to entice us to read them with headlines like '3 ways to (lose belly fat) (gain confidence) (insert other title here)'. It works - for me anyway. I think I can handle that small amount of information whereas '100 ways to declutter' might just take too much time to read and leave me with decision-paralysis.
So, I'm trying not to dismiss the '10 principles' that I'm reading about and with my mindset, it's hard not to be cynical! However, I've decided to be positive about it and will try to look at a specific client's learning approach using '5 factors' and '10 principles' and see if the extra dissection helped me in my thinking at all.

A little learning could go a long way...

Reading Carol Levitt's 2011 paper on organisational learning and finding that it is triggering a whole new way of thinking about how one of my clients is approaching 'training'. I suggested to the client that we should write a strategy to guide our approach in the next 2-5 years; without a learning strategy, we are simply going by the 'topics' that need to be delivered. Having a strategy and considering organisational learning models may actually help us to have a more holistic approach. It will stimulate ways to design the training programme that we might not have otherwise considered. Looking forward to the difference this term's #msctel assignment will make to this global organisation.

Reflection on blogging

I've tinkered with blogs since 2000 and lost a few along the way. Posterous was a firm favourite for a few years until it disappeared. It was the most intuitive to use. Blogger and WordPress are rather difficult to navigate if you're a novice but I persisted with WordPress for a bit on various projects: https://cwaipads.wordpress.com
https://blhairtraining.wordpress.com
https://techdisambassadors.wordpress.com

Why I blog:
I quite enjoy blogging and looking back at my posts going back to 2007, it's a relief to be able to find reflections that I made years ago still available for me to refer to. Blogging has served as my memory bank. I think there's even benefit in looking back at the posts from years gone by and reflecting on those. Things can look different after time has passed and new knowledge and skills can further enhance my practice. I can look at my practice through new lenses as I learn about different theories. Things that I took for granted as praxis, I can now attempt to put into words.

In addition, I have a back catalogue of Tweets, Google Presentations, Google Sites, podcasts etc that all serve to record my experiences and interactions with others. I'm glad I have been keeping a digital recording of my professional life. It all went quiet for me when I went into the private sector in 2013 and I feel that I lost some valuable reflections on my developments at the time. I can only try to capture them now that the blogging habit has been reinstated.



Why I tag:
By tagging (or labelling) each post, I can recall a related set of blog posts by selecting a tag, regardless of chronological order. The discipline is in tagging posts, and sometimes reviewing previous posts to update tags as necessary, otherwise the system won't work for you. You get out what you put in. :-)

Why I add images (or not):
I do like to add images to blog posts where possible but do not make it a 'must-have', especially if I'm just 'dashing off' a quick idea. However, I can always come back and update the blog post with a relevant visual at a later date. It can help to identify the post more easily when you are scrolling down the web page.

Why I read other people's blogs:
Usually, this is a way for me to keep up with my colleagues who are working on similar things. In recent years, my work has changed focus and I felt less drawn to keeping up with this blog, and reading those from my blogroll. However, the MSc has given me fresh impetus and reminded me of the value of blogging.

Downsides to participating with blogs:
Learning to control the flow of information into my sphere of awareness is a 'digital literacy' that I have had to master as part of my profession. In some 'communities of practice', where I wish to be seen as expert, I feel the pressure to be the first to reply to a post or comment, and it takes some discipline to take a step back. In a 'contributing student' approach, it can also be a set back when there is insufficient participation from other members to provide a critical mass of viewpoints or discussion resources with which to work with.

Mini-projects

My favourite mini-projects can be found here:

Flipped Classroom with Textwall

The future of VLEs

Being succinct, being focused

This is a short Christmas post to record the fact that I have probably created my project and written my MSc TEL design project rationale 10 times over simply because I cannot decide on the angle I'm taking. How do other people do it? Choose one focus area and zoom in on it? Especially if you only have 1000 words! I'm as bad at this as I am at shopping - I can never decide if I have too much choice and I tend to walk away empty-handed. Unfortunately, walking away empty-handed is not an option when the deadline is looming! So many possible perspectives and so little time. My compromise is to store up all the ideas that don't fit into this one 'episode' for the future, and to focus on getting this one small bit polished and ready.
Things I've learned about essay-writing so far:
1. Start with a question or a stance when reading a book eg "This is not going to work for me because", or "This is going to work for me because..." Record key ideas relative to your stance.
2. Mind map the various ideas and for a small essay, focus in on one idea only. You can make reference to the others to show you thought about them
3. From the moment you pick up a book or go to a website, record the reference, otherwise it's a pain to go back and collect them!
4. After writing your essay, look back at the brief from the point of view of a tutor and see if you can 'mark' it - does it meet the objectives?

Does anyone have any other tips that helps them?

'Podcast' about using textwall in a flipped classroom context

Here's a recording of a conversation a fellow Masters student, Ono, and I had this week about using textwall in a flipped classroom context. I've never put the two things together before, so thank you, Ono, for a fabulous idea!
Select this link to listen to the recording (20 min)

Design of multimedia learning v pedagogic approaches to elearning

In my current work, I create e-learning modules for learners who access these through a Learning Management System (LMS). I'm keen to develop some guiding principles for my team based on theory and research by Richard E Mayers, Ruth Clark and John Sweller. In addition, I'm influenced by industry leaders in this field like Cathy Moore and Anna Sabramowicz.
However, I'm also looking forward to collating the theoretical principles that will guide and underpin the development of our e-learning. While reading Mayes and Freitas (2004), I've come across some useful 'language' that I believe will help me to sell my ideas to the company. Up to recent times, the company has been putting out e-learning based on an industry-wide 'understanding' that colourful pages with narration and interaction will sell e-learning. I was pleased to read that "there is no real theoretical base, but rather a strong folk tradition that compelling explanations will lead to better learning" (Mayes and Freitas, 2004). I've wanted to have a good reason for moving away from the digital chalk and talk to a more scenario-based, constructivist approach and I think I'm building up some good arguments to move us in that direction. (We've already started by shoe-horning in some scenarios but we've not yet re-designed our whole approach).
Using Biggs' model of constructive alignment, we should be looking at our curriculum or learning outcomes (LOs), our teaching and learning activities (TLAs), the learning environment and the assessment methods. Because we work in a compliance industry, we have no say in the LOs. Our learners have to use our LMS to access the learning, so the learning environment is fixed. We have the most control over the TLAs and the writing of our assessments and I intend to use theory to produce our e-learning guidelines 2.0 and start to move us away from the 'presentation of facts' mode to a more learner-centred approach.

MSc TEL Day 1

Started on the MSc TEL, looking forward to engaging with theory and getting some underpinning support for things I know work! Pop over to the MSc TEL tab for my assignment related work as they develop.
Coursemates:

It's been a while since I've posted actively on the blog. I've not been under a rock; I've had to sell myself to the private sector. ;-) Over the last two years, I've developed further skills in VLEs (known as Learning Management Systems or LMS in the private sector) and the development of multimedia materials. I've been developing a community of practitioners globally through a video channel and trying to engage them through forums. The next step is to implement badges and to see what happens. Perfect for an action research project, perhaps? I'm looking forward to putting some of my current work under theoretical interrogation and also to developing more theoretical frameworks for the effective use of textwall.