My world on the web
On the open web, we implicitly consent to more than I think we mean to.
She talks about the challenges of doing a PhD remotely, participation in MOOCs such as Rhizo14 and the creation of Virtually Connecting. She also shares some of the limits to open education, especially in regards to those who are vulnerable.
This isn’t an issue for individual professors. This is an organized effort. Sociologists may know a little something about those. Learn how to organize, then organize.
I wonder what this means for K-12 educators and the call for connected educators?
The most useful network or community is the one you can build with your immediate team and colleagues in your school. They’re in the context and in the ‘know’. They’re accountable with you and they know the support structures — especially if it’s them — and can act on them. If you don’t feel you’re getting that support, find a mentor outside the context and learn to build relationships within. We need to be an active participant in those networks we choose to belong.
Writing across each other’s blogs, I love how in some MOOCs, when people are focused on the same topic, one writes a post connecting ideas from multiple other posts, taking the ideas further, grabbing comments from elsewhere, and making something new, then recycling the ideas again. It’s a kind of “distributed” collaborative writing.
the true power in technology is not just the readiness. The skills. The playing around with tools to create something impossible. It is the power to be seen. To not be alone. To feel that in the world, someone values you. That someone out there gets you.
Going from an audience of zero to an audience of ten is so big that it’s actually huger than going from ten people to a million.
Although connections are powerful, it is important to not over-hype the hoped for outcomes. All that we can do is create the conditions for comments. A point Kathleen Morris makes.
Can you remember the route by which you came to use Twitter to support your professional learning?
I really wonder if it is ever one thing, rather than an assemblage of parts. This has me thinking about blogging as well and how the take up of Twitter might compare with the early days of educational blogging? Would there be similarities? Do these things change? Would someone starting out on their path now be different to yourself starting out in 2009? How does it differ from a wider discussion of connected education? Always so many questions.
My criteria was: does I recognize this name, even remotely? Do I ever see or notice this person in my timeline? If not, the likely result was an unfollow. I haven’t yet made it to the bottom of my follower list, so more are likely to go.
For so long I followed any educator who followed me. It just seemed right. But I have noted the consequence within spaces like Nuzzel. Although I have used lists in the past, but with my tendency to use Twitter on my phone, this can be tedious.
I went through and removed two thirds of follows. I basically kept those who I have had some conversation and connection with. I am not sure what difference this might make to how I use Twitter, especially with my dive into the #Indieweb. Time will tell.
Session Description
So often we come to conferences and see new applications flashed around, showing their possibilities and potential, only to discover that in practise they require more time and energy than was previously realised. What is often missing ingredient in all of this is constraint. This can be the time allocated or our particular knowledge and skillset, but it also exists within programs whether it be functionality or the focus of the task at hand. Too often such constraints go unseen, but by identifying them, it provides us with more clarity and allows us to get on with things in a more focused manner.
Quick Makes is about giving the chance to tinker with a range of applications and programs, each with their own constraints, to discover that creating, making and engaging with technology is not only easy but can be fun, especially when we are focused. From mashing up a website with Mozilla Thimble to creating your own visual with Google Draw, spend a few minutes exploring the potential for technology to make giving a voice to learning more doable.
Click here for the resources.
Becoming a More Connected Educator (DIGICON15) – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Click here for my notes and resources.
A Periscope video of my 12 minute Sparktalk for DigiCon15.
Here is the blurb for the session that Steve Brophy and I presented:
One of the biggest challenges in education today is how to empower everyone and give a voice to every learner, this means moving beyond listening to those who seek to be heard and finding ways to capture every voice in and out of the classroom. From collaborating on a document to using a learning response system to reflect on a unit of work, this session will look at not only how we can use various web 2.0 tools to capture the different voices in and out of the classroom, but also how these tools can be used to provoke and prompt further into ongoing dialogue. Presenting our thoughts and reflections from a wide range of settings and scenarios, both Primary and Secondary, we hope that you leave this session armed with an array of tools and ideas that will help you go and listen to some of those lost and hidden voices today.
Here are the slides from the session:
Further notes and reflections can be found here.