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!

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.

Blogging with the iTouch part 1

At an Apple event organised by the Sheffield College on 26 Nov 2009 and sponsored by http://www.krcs.co.uk, I was lucky enough to learn a lot more about using Macs generally (Dave Foster's session was particularly good. He's the manager of the Leeds West CLC) and some new things about the iTouch that I didn't know about as a newcomer to these devices.

Quite a few of my eCPD PDAs and MoLeNET projects are using or going to use iTouches so I thought I'd mention a couple of useful things here.

First of all, if you buy a small mic for your iTouch, you can use it as a voice recorder. Better still, set up an Audioboo.fm account and you can create podcasts on the fly. Here's my first audioboo: http://audioboo.fm/boos/92908-mic-for-itouch

The first mic I saw for the iTouch was the thumb tack-like mic at the Sheffield event: http://tinyurl.com/ybptuge

This is nice and small (and easily mistaken for a real thumb tack!) and works simply by inserting it in the headphone socket of the iTouch. However, the disadvantage is that you have to remove the mic in order to hear the recording (since you have inserted it in the headphone socket, the iTouch will try to play it back through the mic).

I went on Amazon.co.uk and bought this one instead: http://tinyurl.com/y8vcn9a

This is much bigger than the thumb tack so less aesthetically pleasing, but

allows you to simply record and then playback without having to remove it from the headphone socket. There is a slightly different model on Amazon and if anyone has any other models and experiences, it would be good to find out what you think to your mic for the iTouch.

The iTouch does not have a camera which makes it somewhat limited in capturing what you see. I learned to do a screen grab of the iTouch screen by clicking the on/off button at the top and the button below the screen at the same time. Whatever you are viewing at the time is then added to the camera roll and you can use the image in your blog or podcast. You can browse to a picture using Safari on the iTouch and screen capture it (ensure you are staying legal in terms of copyright, of course).

Other ways of getting photos to your iTouch without having to sync to iTunes would be to email pictures to yourself. Tap the picture in the email and a menu comes up with options to save your image.

Thanks to Dave Foster and James Clay for their ideas and introductions to the hardware/software.