blog.LearnStream.co

Education Reform: WHY can't we all just get along...don't we want the same thing?

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:13:00 -0400

Education Reform: WHY can't we all just get along...don't we want the same thing?:

Earlier, I wrote a post for The Orlando Blog to explain some proposals I recently made to the administration of the public school district which my teen-age daughter attends. At the same time, I’ve been trying to make sense of the larger landscape of education reform which spans thorny issues such as school choice, high-stakes testing, teacher evaluation, and parent trigger! In order to do so, I’ve been reading a lot of blogs representing both sides of these issues and I have observed they are mostly “preaching to the choir” because those who DISagree hardly ever comment on posts and whenever they do, their opinions are dismissed without any consideration of their merit. This isn’t much different from what’s been going on in the current Presidential campaign so I shouldn’t be surprised at all!

Just in case you haven’t been aware of this trend in the education sector, here are a few examples. In the Chicago school strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has been demonized along with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In school choice, private operators and foundations are demonized for their support of charter schools. Surprisingly, these issues create “strange bedfellows”!

This begs the question: where can we agree and work together? For five years, EdWeek has featured a dialogue which hopefully will continue! Nevertheless, we can’t seem to agree on how to help public education! For me, this effort to “reform” public education has (at least) two frustrations:

Why is it so difficult for public education to change?
Public education is preparing our students for a world which no longer exists!

So, education reform can be very adversarial. This situation is exacerbated for those of us “on the outside looking in” because we have little first-hand experience and we don’t know who to believe among those who do! Thus, there’s a critical need for more transparency!

What do I mean by that and HOW can we accomplish it? First, why can’t we achieve more transparency of student learning to provide evidence of student learning to relieve the pressure on high-stakes testing to assess learning? Among other alternatives, technology offers such an opportunity:

Social media can be used to create learning artifacts to assess learning and to enable students’ positive digital identities
Electronic portfolios serve as a repository for learning artifacts

Second, why can’t we achieve more transparency of teacher performance to provide evidence of student learning to relieve the pressure on high-stakes testing to assess teachers?Teacher professional development “screams” for social media for at least two reasons:

Social media can provide evidence of professional development to complement other evidence such as students’ performance on high-stakes tests
Social media “savvy” teachers expect students to use social media in positive ways as previously explained

My school administration has not done enough to facilitate these outcomes…has yours?

UPDATE: I recently spoke on this subject (it has a synchronized audio track)

Visualize my education posts on RebelMouse

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 13:47:00 -0400

DigiFoot12

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:38:52 -0400

DigiFoot12:

Join me in this course to learn how to track YOUR digital footprint…it just started on July 5 and runs for 7 weeks!

Getting more A's in school!

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:51:00 -0500

In a previous post, I outlined how we could harness social media for learning in order to:

assess
account for professional development
advocate

in order to promote our schools.

I recently saw my district’s “GUIDELINES FOR EMPLOYEE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS” and was quite disheartened because it did virtually nothing to encourage social media for learning! I am concerned about the UNintended consequences of the “tone” of these guidelines which are so defensive! I am aware of the sensitive position in which school districts find themselves these days, but there must be a way to achieve a more “balanced’ tone which would ENCOURAGE the use of social networks to promote innovation and to generate positive stories! For example, innovative teachers share best practices by building Personal Learning Networks based on social media services such as Twitter. Without an active social media ecosystem, social media efforts such as school Facebook Pages will likely be doomed to failure as an empty public relations gesture withOUT robust content to encourage engagement with parents, legislators, and other constituents. Any doubts about the need to ENCOURAGE teachers to use social media for learning are quickly dispelled by posts such as this one.

The power of social media leverages USER-generated content! WithOUT the active participation of teachers, I fear schools will have relatively little meaningful content to convey the sense of excitement about learning which ought to be the outcome of their social media efforts! Instead, I urge that we recognize teachers as:

Advocates
Assets
Artisans

In my previous post, I already made the point of how we ought to use social media to encourage constituents to advocate for our schools. Of course, teachers are among those constituents and are in the best position to advocate on behalf of our schools because they know what is going on!

Teachers have gotten a bad rap so our best teachers are disheartened because they feel their hands are tied because they are discouraged to innovate. They aren’t seen as assets whose creative efforts could be harnessed to motivate the creation of CONTENT to fuel our efforts to advocate. Rather than merely evaluating teachers based on students’ test scores, let’s create a culture where teachers are more like artisans or craftsmen! We needn’t fear their social media activities because the ones who would participate are thoughtful and caring people!

I’m going to share this post with MY school board…how about YOU?

In addition to the comments below, here’s more conversation about this post at Google+.

Getting all A's in school!

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:56:00 -0400

Recently, I’ve been posting in The Orlando Blog to drum up support for educational innovation in central Florida, my new home of a little more than a year. I’ve been encouraged by the response so I’ll be resuming posting in this blog as I try to mobilize action on behalf of education in my new home!

In replying to a comment from a school administrator in Lake County, I explained WHY a school district ought to embrace technology in order to upgrade its ability to:

Assess learning
Accountability
Advocate

I explained how social media could enable us to capture students’ learning artifacts so that we could assess learning while we could also use social media to document teachers’ activity in their Personal Learning Networks for which they would be accountable to create and to harness for their professional development. We could think of these as students’ and teachers’ LearnStreams which will be easy to recognize as soon as Facebook’s Timeline goes live soon. I’ve long been a fan of lifestreaming and have experimented with its use in my own courses over two years ago. Earlier posts in this blog describe those experiments. Recently, I have assembled a collection of resources to demonstrate how I am currently capturing my personal LearnStream as a result of those earlier experiments. Future posts will describe my ongoing experiments.

Once we have these LearnStreams, we could publish them to demonstrate our students’ learning and teachers’ professional development in order to “tell our story” in a more compelling way to our constituents who we hope would then advocate for us as we build financial and political support for education.

Recently, I presented these ideas to some administrators in my own school system where it was received with an understanding of the need for change in order to compete more effectively in the changing landscape of education! That is a far cry from other administrators who don’t YET “get it” because they’re still trying to dig out of the hole that we’re in! What are YOU going to do?

In addition to the comments below, here’s more conversation about this post on Google+.

The "ups and downs" of education reform

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:01:35 -0400

Here’s the final screen from my 3 days of participation in the third iteration of a FREE, global, completely online conference coincidentally called “The Reform Symposium” on the same weekend of the “Save our schools” march on Washington, DC.

After you read this post, you’ll know the answer to the question I posed in my tweet.

Later in the week, I also watched the broadcast of the FIRST #140edu conference which was held for 2 days in New York. Needless to say, it’s been a bonanza week, but it certainly gives me mixed feelings because while I am encouraged by what is going on ELSEWHERE, I am frustrated that there isn’t more going on in central Florida where I live. I blogged about that and was both encouraged that so many commenters expressed their appreciation, but discouraged by the comment reaction to another article later in the week about a central Florida high school which is instituting another iPad “1-to-1” program this fall. It’s evident there’s a great need for “education” about the use of technology for teaching and learning! There are so many opportunities to learn here in central Florida which hosts many education conferences as well as being the physical home of the Florida Virtual School. I’ll have more to say about fulfilling that need in a subsequent post.

The Reform Symposium isn’t the only such opportunity for FREE, online professional development. The next Global Education Conference is coming in November. Last fall, the first one is what got me thinking about getting back into education! You can volunteer to help with the next one…I have! It’s worth the effort to see comments like Bill Montana’s in the middle of that final screenshot!

Where would YOU rather be?

Sorting out the LearnStream

Thu, 12 May 2011 12:48:00 -0400

I’ve tried to create a Web presence to make it easy (not sure if I’ve succeeded YET so please be patient as I streamline it) for anyone who might want to follow my teaching and learning experiments. First, this blog will be a journal in which I intend to maintain a record of my experiments. I hope you will subscribe to my blog and comment often. Second, I will cross-post to Twitter. The QR code at Twitter will redirect to a mobile-friendly version of this blog as well as any other relevant content which I manage to make mobile-friendly. By the way, I have started a Twitter list of like-minded folks and I will work to keep it relevant and focused. Third, I will aggregate relevant content at LearnStream.info which is currently hosted at Netvibes. I am actually NOT using that domain currently because Netvibes has been returning a “strange” error when I redirect LearnStream.info to Netvibes. LearnStream.info is an archive of all experiments as well as a hub for all of the content described in this post. Fourth, LearnStream.info includes a tab for my Diigo EasyBlog where I will be highlighting KEY bookmarks. Finally, I will be creating bit.ly bundles to identify key topics. I have started the first one on “Social media and learning” and I hope there will be many more.

For those of you who prefer Facebook, most of this content will be aggregated at my Facebook page. For my higher education colleagues, here is my Academia.edu profile.

Especially, I want to ENGAGE you! Although Twitter is my preference, there are other places where you can interact with me. Currently, my social media profiles are cataloged on Netvibes and DrThomasHo.com. I STILL use email, but be forewarned that it is NO LONGER the first place where I check!

I hope this helps because I have a lot of content to catalog. I’ll be looking for a way to do it better, but this is its current state.

What do students need to learn?

Thu, 05 May 2011 09:31:14 -0400

As I prepare to help in an iPad 1-to1 program next fall, I’ve been collecting my thoughts about what outcomes should motivate our pedagogical strategy. Thus far, I’ve boiled it down to 5 C’s:

Critical thinking
Collaboration
Communication
Creativity
Christian

Critical thinking can be fostered via information literacy, the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. With the vast amount of information now available online, curation of online information is a particularly key skill.

Collaboration can be fostered by enabling students to work together so Web 2.0 tools will be a particular focus of our efforts.

Communication will be facilitated by collaboration.

Creativity is the most difficult to define but there are examples of learning via collaboration which fosters creativity.

The Master’s Academy is a Christian school.

In anticipation of posting regularly as my next experiment gets...

Tue, 03 May 2011 16:54:25 -0400

In anticipation of posting regularly as my next experiment gets underway, I am also working on making as much of the relevant content mobile-friendly especially since it involves the use of mobile devices. The attached QR code will take you to that mobile-friendly content. You should also be able to find that QR code at the associated Twitter profile LearnStream.

You can learn more about how this is done at this post on my personal blog.

On hiatus

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:26:22 -0400

until my next experiment on teaching & learning with technology

Refining the LearnStream

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:42:57 -0500

To promote student learning as well as to facilitate assessment, I am trying to create a “LearnStream” which might best be characterized as a course lifestream. HOW to do that with available social media tools and their limitations (or maybe, it’s MY limitations) is going to be an ongoing theme of this blog!

I have created a Twitter account @cit49900. Any of the students are able to send a direct message to @cit49900 which will be posted on its tweetstream. On Twitter, do I continue to interact with students as @DrThomasHo or do I use @CIT49900 instead?

On FriendFeed, I have created a new FriendFeed name:

cit49900 FriendFeed name aggregating the students’ tweets

It also includes a FriendFeed group which includes all of the students’ blogs.

This is in addition to another FriendFeed group which I had created last year when I conducted my previous teaching and learning experiment:

cit499 FriendFeed group created by drthomasho consisting of

We're back!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:10:26 -0500

A new semester has begun so it’s time to resume our adventure in learning with social media. Unlike last semester when we lacked critical mass for experimentation, I have several students this semester so let the fun begin! This semester’s CIT 49900 has three goals:

Fulfill subject matter objectives
Experience a “study abroad trip” via emerging technologies such as social media
Build a “personal brand” using social media

The subject matter of this semester’s course is national information infrastructure. If you don’t YET understand what this means, it isn’t important at this early stage and you’ll know soon enough if you join us for the ride. With the intention to compare the United States’ IT infrastructure with other countries, the course has a “new wrinkle” to create an international learning experience without requiring the time and expense of a traditional study abroad trip, but to try to use social media to build relationships and to share experiences in using IT infrastructure. Finally, of course, those of you who already “know” me would be surprised if I didn’t try to teach my students how to build their “personal brand” using social media. Although I have had limited success with students realizing how critical this is to their competitiveness, I have been having more success so I am especially hopeful that most of this current group of students will CONTINUE to “boost their brand” even AFTER the semester ends.

As I told them on the first day of class, by doing so, neither their personal learning network nor our opportunity to continue to assess their learning will end!

This blog is on hiatus until my next teaching & learning experiment

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:21:12 -0500

This blog is on hiatus until my next teaching & learning experiment

BlogIndiana higher education summit

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:39:00 -0400

BlogIndiana higher education summit:

Join me on August 13 to learn more about this course.

Click [here] to see my presentation. My slides are here

Embracing the Twitter Classroom

Sun, 31 May 2009 18:55:58 -0400

It’s my experience as a post-secondary educator that students don’t “get” Twitter and for that matter, they don’t get much beyond Facebook! To me, that’s a good enough reason to show them Twitter and other tools for teaching and learning so that they will realize that there is so much MORE available to help them learn than the time that they might “waste” on Facebook where I spend much less time anymore.

I like Twitter for discovery and because of that, I now use it IN PLACE OF my RSS reader because I depend on the Twitter “crowd” to tell me what’s important because I need some way of figuring out what deserves my ATTENTION since I can’t keep up with all of the RSS feeds that I would want to read. Twitter is important because it has fostered an ECOSYSTEM that now offers a rich array of services whose POTENTIAL for teaching and learning that we are just beginning to understand and appreciate!

My own experiment with Twitter in a class was conducted during the previous semester at http://cit499.info Although it was only moderately successful, I learned enough from the experience to try again next semester and I now know better what to do (and NOT to do) in order to improve the experience. Read more at Mark Krynsky’s blog at http://bit.ly/cit499lifestreamblog which explains WHY it’s important for students to “get” social media for personal branding to get an advantage in job-hunting.

A new "version" of the course lifestream

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:23:00 -0400

I was trying out the new beta of FriendFeed and may have stumbled on something.

I created a “list” (still NOT exactly sure what that means) for CIT 499. Then, I noticed that Diigo bookmarks that appear in the Friendfeed list include the comments that were originally posted in the Diigo bookmark. That is pretty cool because it gives more context and meaning to entries in the course lifestream.

Click here for this new version of the course lifestream which I will also post to the course page. This is promising!

CIT 499 now has a mobile site (work-in-progress)

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:29:00 -0400

I have characterized CIT 499 as a “Web 2.0” course because not only does it teach Web 2.0 as subject matter, but it also uses Web 2.0 for delivery. As such, it demonstrates that one can deliver a course essentially with Web 2.0 services withOUT needing a learning management system (or course management system)! The CIT 499 course page is the current version of this demonstration.

One of the emerging technologies discussed in CIT 499 is mobility and it “dawned on me” yesterday that the course didN’T have a “mobile-friendly” version of the course page so I turned to MY FAVORITE site for creating “mobile-friendly” sites: Winksite. I “played around” a little and this is what I came up with.

Not being willing to “leave well enough alone” I decided to re-direct http://m.cit499.info to the Winksite. I “meant well” but that’s probably where I created some problems as I’ll describe later.

Wanting to “show off” my new creation, I sought feedback from @davidharper (founder of Winksite), @jeffsonstein (faculty member at RIT), @grigs (founder of Mobile Portland), and @palmsolo (of MobileTechRoundup and ZDNet) who I respect as mobility “gurus” and I just realized that I overlooked @toddogas (MobileViews Blog).

Early this morning, I first heard from David who pointed out that the way that I was re-directing to http://m.cit499.info (using GoDaddy) was causing the Winksite to be displayed inside of frames that were created by GoDaddy. Needless to say, this concerned David because it made Winksite look “bad” which is what Jeff started to point out without realizing what I had done.

To “make a long story short” with David’s help, I have “fixed” http://m.cit499.info so that it now displays without frames. There are a few other fixes that Winksite will make to improve the user experience, but I think that we now have a good start on a “mobile-friendly” site for CIT 499.

In the meantime, I have also heard from @dberube of MoFuse so let’s “wait and see” what he has to offer.

I’m having so much “fun”…aren’t you?

We're being "noticed"

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:08:24 -0400

Mark Krynsky, a leading proponent of lifestreaming, just posted about our course in his blog. He characterized CIT 499 as the “First College Course on Lifestreaming” which is probably true, but it’s ironic because it hasN’T been MY intent that lifestreaming be the focus of the course. He did “pick up” that the students are being graded on their lifestreams.

He also characterized the course as ‘about helping guide students to use social media and other services to help build a “personal brand”’ Those who were in CIT 310 last year would recognize that I was then trying to help students to build their “personal brand” through their electronic portfolios.

This course uses social media, especially Twitter, much more aggressively! That “tweetstream” has certainly been the “best AND worst” thing to happen to the course lifestream as previous posts have documented.

Recent developments have moved me to broaden my view of the “course lifestream” as a way to document learning. As an assessment tool, the course lifestream is certainly a valuable artifact because it documents the learning PROCESS rather than merely the outcomes! Furthermore, the notion of a lifestream can be applied not only to any form of learning, but to any activity in one’s LIFE! I suspect that this notion will eventually help us to justify what many see as merely a result of personal vanity.

In the meantime, I will concentrate on learning in whatever way that happens. For example, I am only now becoming aware of one’s “personal learning network” (PLN) so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the relevance of lifestreams to PLNs.

I’d like to start calling them “learnstream” or “learning stream” BUT a Google search reveals that those terms are already “taken” so I’ll let that go for now.

Addition to course lifestream

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:37:31 -0400

Since we’re seeing some “life” in the CIT 499 blog in the form of comments, I realized that I had neglected to include the RSS feed of the comments in the course lifestream. That has now been remedied.

Is there "noise" in the course lifestream?

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:21:28 -0400

In order to “breathe life” into the CIT 499 “organism”, I have created a course lifestream by using Friendfeed. However, I have been concerned that this lifestream contains entries that are NOT relevant to the course. Especially since it includes entries from the lifestreams of the students enrolled in the course, it is conceivable that some of the students’ posts are not necessarily relevant to the course because their (personal) lifestreams encompass activities outside the scope of the course. Twitter is most likely to be the source of such posts due to the “impromptu” nature of tweets. For the time being, we are trying to remedy this problem by creating lifestreams that do not include their tweetstreams from Twitter. Then, we are using Twitter search to filter tweets with the #cit499 hashtag to include Twitter in our course lifestream with “relevant” tweets. Let’s “wait and see” how this works out.