Rockstars of the Digital Classroom!

Another one of those things that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago - an  international micro-conference!  Wendy Gorton of Wikispaces fame collected together teachers using digital tools in the classroom and created a virtual meeting place where they could all share their processes and practices.

Garth Holman is a teacher deep into how #edtech pushes pedagogy in Ohio.  Jessica Sullivan is living in eternal summer in Caracas, Venezuela where she is leveraging social media and digital tools to produce students who are actually digitally fluent!  Our kids should be so lucky.

That it is possible to put something together like this with little more than an internet connection and a few laptops is astonishing.  Wikis themselves are a web-specific evolution in information sharing, a crowd sourced medium for self publication.  The social power of wikis are still reverberating around the world.  Garth talked about how his students create learning content and then set it free online, my own students do something similar using wikis.  As a way of creating shared notes and interconnecting information, wikis leverage digital learning spaces in a way that many other digital tools that act like paper analogues do not.  If you're using Google-docs to replace handouts you're not getting what the new medium is capable of.  Many teachers use digital tools as a replacement for paper, but that doesn't use the fluidity of digital information to best effect.

Besides exploring the limits of digital information sharing and delivery you've also got to consider the best digital tool for the job.  If you're only using a single digital tool you're probably finding it difficult.  When trying to use Google-docs to create shared notes you've probably run into the chaos that ensues.  Wikispaces lets you create working groups and lock out areas of a wiki so only the production team in that subject can edit.  As each student builds their own interlinked page in the wikispace, they are able to produce collaborative, supported material without stepping on each other.  Diversifying your digital learning toolbox is vital.  If you're not picking the best tool for the job you're going to run into organizational problems.

I'm doing a presentation at the upcoming elearning Ontario symposium on creating a sufficiently complex digital learning ecosystem.  The idea that a single system (D2L) or a single platform (GAFE) can give you a sufficiently diverse digital learning environment isn't just simplistic, it's also a bit monopolistic.  As a digitally fluent teacher you should be able to reach out online and find the digital tools that suit your learner's needs best.

In addition to regularly using Wikispaces, I'm also a big fan of Prezi and blogging (platform irrelevant).  If you're looking to leverage digital tools in learning, offering a broad ecosystem of digital tools is the first step towards a student centred, diversified learning environment.  All of the teachers above talk about how they are using Twitter in addition to a variety of other digital tools to make that happen.

Why Blog? Lisa's Meme

via Lisa Neale's Never Ever Stop Learning:  

I get the sense that a number of educators are recommitting to blogging in the new year.  This can only be a good thing.  A blogging educator not only reaches out to other teachers with a blog, but they also reach out to the general public, who seem to harbour a number of misconceptions about the profession.  Blogging is a wonderful way for individual educators to bridge that gap.

I've written for paper publication and find it tiresome.  The constant editorial revision waters down any edge in your writing and can make even the most acerbic argument seem bland.  The worry over saying anything that someone else may have already said and the resulting over-citation also takes any joy out of writing (or thinking for that matter).  I understand why many people would back away from old-school publication, it's a miserable experience.  Blogging is a way to refine your writer's craft while still enjoying the benefits of an audience.

My favourite part of blogging is that there is no captive audience, no circulation.  If people want to read it, they can, if they don't, they won't.  It's publication with none of the overhead (advertising, editors, space limitations, etc).  Blogging is an opportunity to write without having to carry a pile of other people with your words.

Lisa mentions Dean Shareski's 'excuse to write'.  With blogging you don't need an excuse, just write!  If you find you want to write about different subjects, then do that too, it's easy enough to create interest specific blogs, and it's a great way to enter the online community of your new interest.  The more you write, the easier it gets (like most things).  The trick is not to get all wound up with what you're writing, it'll get better over time.

With that all said, here is Lisa's dare:

Nominating blogger:  Lisa Neale
11 random facts about myself:  Facts?  How tedious... look me up online, it's all there if you want facts.  The fictions are far more interesting though, and much harder to find.
List 11 bloggers?  I enjoy many of the staff writers on WIRED.  Quinn Norton is a genius.  If I had to pick a local edu-blogger, it would have to be Jamie Raeburn-Weir.  She's a writer's writer, a direct, honest voice.  Andrew Campbell is another one I enjoy reading.  He writes how he talks, which probably gets him into a lot of fights.

Lisa's Questions:

favourite mode of transport:  motorcycles! The more minimal and visceral the better...

Random piece of advice:  luck is like everything else, you need to practice it to get good at it.  If you never test your luck you'll atrophy it.  Virgil understood this when he said, "fortune favours the bold."  We're all less lucky (and compassionate) than we once were because of the nanny-state and insurance.

Favourite hobby:  Reading? writing? photography? art? riding? mechanics? Whatever lets me express myself most completely in any given moment.

How do I like my eggs: sunny side up and runny.

Something I think differently about: it's not how long you're here, it's how you're here that matters.

Must watch movie:  anything by Guillermo del Toro, dude's a genius.

When nothing is pressing:  take a long ride on my motorbike.  It is meditation in the wind, you're completely in the moment.

Preferred hot beverage:  loose leaf black tea

How do you say 2014?  11111011110

First job:  delivering newspapers, refing minor sports (hockey, soccer)

Lesson learned from relationships: nobody owns anyone

I think that's it...  I've been told I haven't done this properly, but I'm ok with that.

I Know It's Just a Number: 30K

I just turned forty four; that's just a number.  A day later Dusty World is going to cross the thirty thousand page view mark.  That's just a number too, but I like it a lot more than forty four.

Blogging started as a bit of catharsis; a chance to reflect on my profession.  I picked up the idea from ECOO a few years ago and hit 5000 page views in February 2012, just over two years after I started posting.  I was overjoyed then.

In June of 2012, just four months later, Dusty World passed ten thousand page views.  Once a backlog of posts builds, people wander in off the internet looking at old posts as well as new.  This is my 168th post.  I tend to stay away from the picture and/or short comment posts.  When I write it tends to be about me trying to develop an idea, usually with graphics and a lot of hypertext to support it.  

I love how blogging has sharpened my voice and I love talking to people about ideas reading a post has sparked in them.  I even love listening to the disagreements; most times I agree with them.  When I write a post, I have to follow the idea all the way down the rabbit hole, it's why I do it.  Blogging has let me shake the dust of my English and philosophy degrees and exercise them.

Posting has become a natural part of my reflective process.  I sometimes don't even necessarily agree with what I end up working out in Dusty World posts, but they always offer me some perspective on what I'm wrestling with.

During the worst of the job action in Ontario this past year Dusty World occasionally wandered into politics. After being bitten by all sides of that dissonance I'm thinking that nothing is to be gained from trying to untangle the nasty politics around education in Ontario.  The interests are so deeply ingrained and self involved that coming out on one side or the other is essentially meaningless if you're interested in supporting education itself.  My energy is better spend focusing on the unnerving, exciting and revolutionary technological change we're going through.  It not only frightens and excites me, but it also makes for a rich source of reflection, especially when I see students being experimented on with it every day.  How technology is changing our society is always a source of interest and something I'd never want to stop looking at.

The bizarre future we're making for ourselves is going to make existing political structures around education increasingly tenuous and inconsequential.  If I have to take a side it would be the side that doesn't exist yet, but it will.  I'm OK with being the villain for thinking in a way that is only just beginning to exist.

Dusty World is going to keep its eye on the prize and speak to the radical changes we're all going to have to adapt to in the coming years.  Meanwhile, thirty thousand is a nice number to think about.

Noon on May 18th!!!

Best advice on blogging

Fourteen months into Dusty World and I'm approaching 5000 views, which is exciting.

When I started blogging after ECOO 2010, I did some reading about just how to do it.  A couple of suggestions have borne up well after fourteen months of blogging, but they aren't your typical how-to-drive-page-views blog advice.



/WARNING
This isn't a how-to-make-a-successful-business-blog type post.  There are piles of how to become a pro-blogger advice columns out there; this isn't that.  I didn't start blogging to make money or win fame.  If you're looking for a how to monetize your blog and push traffic type thing, then I'd argue that you're a shallow git who doesn't get what this really is.  Blogging isn't supposed to replace traditional media with a new way for a few people to target, market and sell to many, blogging is democratized publication.  Old, industrialized media is dying.  This isn't a bad thing, stop trying to be like them.
/WARNING OFF

To that end, I found a piece of advice early that has allowed me to keep blogging regardless; always write about what you want, the way you want.  This works for me in a couple of different ways.  The main reason I'm still at it over a year later is that I find writing about problems, solutions and challenges in technology and teaching to be cathartic.  Blogging gives me perspective, sometimes it prompts responses that help me see a way through, and ultimately allows me to be better at what I do.  These are all ends in themselves; reason enough to blog right there.

I also never feel like this is work, more like therapy.  I know I'll probably feel better after blogging, so tend to want to do it.  I've found that blogging tends to result in a very direct style of writing that clarifies thoughts and my feelings on issues (you can't go on and on in a blog, it's the wrong format).

I don't shy away from a philosophical approach because I'm representing my peeps.  I am what I am and write what I write, I wouldn't expect everyone to read it, I wouldn't want them to.  I'm aiming at a specific reader (thoughtful, educationally and digitally curious), and I'm fine with that.  If I wanted page views I'd write college humor blog entries (but that would be work).

Another suggestion I read was write often (and don't forget to label your entries so people can find them).  Once you've built up a library of entries, the views will find you.  This has been the case.  Looking at the stats, there is always a bump on a new post, but the archive gets more hits now than even the new-entry bump.  Keep writing, eventually you'll build up enough content on enough subjects that people will find you.  Your entries get shared, and shared again, you start to see views from all around the world (which makes me wonder just how Canadian-centric my thinking may appear), and before you know it, there are many avenues to your blog, not just you pushing it out on your social networks.

Publishing your writing puts it out there.  It makes you want to put your best ideas forward.  I proof my entries, and try and make them technically correct because I never know who might end up reading them. Diary or journal writing for yourself doesn't drive you in that direction, that's a different sort of therapy.

As an English teacher, I feel like blogging makes me a better writer and gives students a chance to see how I do what I'm expecting them to do.  So many English teachers don't write, or don't offer students access to their writing... it strikes me as a bit hypocritical.

In the meantime, I find myself, a digitally skilled student of philosophy and history, living at a pivotal moment in human history; the birth of a digital revolution that will rock the world in much the same way (and much more quickly) than the industrial revolution did in the past two hundred years.  The world is changing in ways we can't even begin to foresee, and I'm teaching in it!

It's an exciting time to pick a timely new medium and enjoy using it.  Blog well my friends.