So I turn to my growing PLN, Personal Learning Network. Thanks to my colleagues at the University of Regina, I connected with Alec Couros. Alec is a leading expert in the world of connected and open learning and using social media in education. Currently, he is leading a MOOC, Massive Open Online Course, #etmooc. To learn more about #etmooc, click here. As an etmooc class member I have been exposed to an amazing wealth of information about teaching and learning, and about educational technologies. I have had many online conversations, both text and audio, and a few video conferences in Google Hangout. (Yes, it does work on my Qiniq account). My PLN has increased 100fold along with my enthusiasm for connecting with people digitally. I may not be able to have a great conversation around the coffee machine but I can have those stimulating conversations at my desk or on my big comfy couch.

All of this has prompted me to set up a Google Community in Google+, Connected Arctic Educators. I invite you to join in the conversations and connect with us in our group.If you haven’t used Google+, I can tell you that it’s a lot like FaceBook and fairly easy to use. Here are a couple of screencast tutorials from one of my new etmooc circles, Aaron Mueller. Watching these helped me get started in Google+ and after using it now for a couple of weeks I am convinced it’s a great tool.

Connectivism is “a learning theory for the digital age”, based on the premise that knowledge exists in the world rather than in the head of an individual. The theory proposes that technology affects how people live, how they communicate and how they learn and that learners create connections as they develop a network using digital technologies. This network contributes to their professional development and knowledge. The learner builds a trusting relationship with the people in their networks but may never meet them in person.
It is so easy to break out of our isolation and join the world of caring, connected educators. For some tips on where and how to start visit Sue Waters wiki here Sue is one of the world’s most connected educators and a great source of information for people wanting to start connecting with other educators.

We want to connect with Northern Educators, both K-12 and post-secondary. If you are interested in building an online network using social media tools, contact us at: @nunavutcollege, @lindapemik on Twitter or email nacpublic affairs @gmail.com.

The Essence of Connected Learning from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

Check it out, and if it interests you go to the connected Learning website to explore some more. You might want to read the case study there about the experiences of one teacher who is using digital connections to build a learning community in his classroom and to connect his learners globally.

One more question for you: Might this digital age hold the possibility of bringing us Nunavummiut closer together?

One of my beautiful grandsons

A colleague of mine that I connected with through blogging, Jim Stauffer, an adult educator in Wahti, NWT, uses the the Khan Academy extensively in his ABE classroom to engage learners and enable them to work at their own pace. His model presents some interesting possibilities for those of us at Arctic College who are currently examining how we might use internet learning technologies to enhance our ABE programs. Come April we will have a report to share with you about what we learn as we investigate this further. The report will be available on the College website, so stay tuned.

A simple search on Google or one of the powerful search engines that most of us use from time to time will bring up an almost endless menu of free online courses, webinars, and mini workshops that teach how to use the tools and /or get engaged in the digital world. Join a MOOC, such as Change11, and you will immediately be connected with an extensive network of knowledgeable, digitally savvy educators from around the world. If that seems too overwhelming, join a smaller online learning community. Some of us need more help. We need an invitation to jump into the water! or even a little push.

In my experience I have found that one of the best ways to learn new skills and encourage the mind shift that becoming a citizen in the digital world entails is to join an online learning community. Many online communities operate according to principles of participation and mutual learning. Henry Jenkins, MIT media scholar, describes the online learning community as a good example of the emerging participatory culture. He describes some of the elements of online Learning communities as: “strong support for creating and sharing creations with others, some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices, members who believe that their contributions matter, and members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least, they care what other people think about what they have created)”.

These functions are clearly demonstrated in the learning community that I have recently joined, Powerful Learning Practices. Powerful Learning Practice uses a new model for professional development for teachers at all levels, that offers opportunities to:
• Work together collaboratively to understand 21st Century learning environments through immersion in these environments
• Re-envision their curriculum in ways that are relevant for today’s learners
• Manage change through communities and networks
This model is currently enabling thousands of educators around the country to experience the transformative power of the social Web: Face-to-face in their own schools, exchanging ideas through a community of inquiry, and in re-envisioning their own personal learning practice.
The warm caring members of the community that I have joined support and encourage me to grow professionally and to try new tools in a safe, authentic learning environment. I am currently enrolled in one of the online courses offered by the PLP, Connected Coaching. This course like U of Regina’s ec&i831 which I took last year, is providing me with the opportunity to join a new (to me) affinity space where the skills of the group are pulling me towards their expertise and exposing me to new ways of thinking about learning and teaching.
Once you figure out how to join the online learning revolution and jump in, there is no end to the learning opportunities and resources that you can access. Come on in the water’s fine!

"You can't cross a sea by merely staring into the water." Rabindranath Tagore

This is an easy to use site for making cartoons.  I can think of a few applications such as with basic literacy classes, use with ABE students or NTEP.  Can you think of other ways you could use this in your class rooms?

@petrycraft: Congratulations @NunavutCollege for the success of Katinniq 2011. Wonderful to see such dedication & enthusiasm in Nunavut’s educators.

We are a great group of educators and this is one time I won’t be shy about letting everyone know that!  Although I often get frustrated with the seeming lack of connections among staff I think we are getting better at it and this conference brought that home to me. I think that our developing knowledge of technology and expanding cyberinfrastructure is making a difference, but the core of our success is our dedicated staff.  As our Public Affairs Officer, Jamie Bell, is always reminding us:  “It is not about the technology, it is about the people”.  Technology gives us access to more tools.  How we use those tools is up to us.

Speaking of tools, I came across a great PD activity that you may be interested in joining.  It is a free, two week online course from Powerful Learning Practice, a Do-It-Yourself Web 2.0 Tools course. The Powerful Learning Practice website is a great resource for people who want to learn more about using technology in education and for those who want to start developing  their own Personal Learning Network.

Another way to jump into open online learning is to sign up for a MOOC—a massive open online course.  Terry Anderson, our keynote speaker at Katinniq 2011, mentioned one that is starting up soon, facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier.  I found the home page online and have registered for the course…anyone at the College interested in joining us in the course?  We could form our own Arctic College sub-group.  Click on this link to find out more about the mooc   http://change.mooc.ca/index.html.

If you know of other online courses that you think would help us learn more about using technology in our classrooms send us the link in the comments section.

In a recent column on the NALD website, Tom Sticht explored the relationship between social capital and adult literacy education, and how social media tools can help both learners and educators improve their skills.  He writes:

However, it is only in the last few years that attention in the adult basic skills education field has turned to the idea of developing social capital with adult learners. For instance, in August 2010, The Centre for Literacy in Montreal issued a report entitled Social Capital Outcomes of Adult Learning and Literacy Initiatives: How Do We Measure Them? The report states: “Human capital refers to the knowledge and abilities that individuals possess, while social capital refers broadly to the social connections and understandings between people that enable them to work together, live together and learn from each other.”

In January 2011, Maurice Taylor and his associates at the University of Ottawa released a report entitled Making Sense of Social Capital Theory through the Lens of Adult Learning. The authors state that research findings “suggest that the creation of social capital can have a positive impact on learners’ lives especially in the areas of personal, family, work, education and public lives. The increase in confidence, seen in data collected over time, was correlated to the ability of learners to acquire new skills and network with peers.”

In my 1997 Functional Context Education notebook which I used in workshops for adult literacy educators, I argued for the social basis of mind and discussed how the motivation of learners to persist in programs could be formed in social groups and networks (churches, clubs, gangs, etc.) with which an individual interacts and which motivate and support him/her, that is, they provide social capital.

Literacy programs can help form social capital by having peer learning, team activities and small group instruction in which members of the group support each other’s efforts.  They can also host social occasions such as parties, where community members and learners come together, encouraging social interaction and communication.

Today, social media using digital technologies offer additional opportunities for both teachers and learners to obtain and provide social capital to help them sustain and advance in their teaching and learning activities. Numerous discussion groups for adult literacy educators can be found using the Internet and provide opportunities for teachers to learn from each other and obtain motivation for their daily work.  Additionally, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites serve to provide social capital.

Numerous Internet-based resources are available for adult learners to pursue study on their own, and many programs are now offering distance learning opportunities as adjuncts to their classroom work or as stand-alone learning opportunities. Teachers can provide social capital through the use of cell phones, email or social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and learner to learner peer interactions can also be conducted using digital social media.

The essentially social basis of literacy and other cognitive processes which require social capital for their development is captured in John Donne’s classic 1624 devotion No Man Is an Island. In a newspaper for adult literacy educators and learners that colleagues and I produced several years ago, we borrowed John Donne’s devotion and changed it to No Mind Is an Island for the newspaper motto. Here our idea was to explicitly express the idea that we all are engaged in sharing our minds and that all minds are part of our collective, virtual mind.

Overall, adult literacy education, like the other components of our educational system, serves the general purpose of improving the entire network of minds in the society in which we live and helps to maintain our very survival as a society of human beings in contemporary times.

Using traditional face-to-face tutoring, classrooms and/or the latest digital social media, adult literacy education makes a valuable contribution to our nation’s store of social capital used in forming bridges among minds, fostering social inclusion and insuring that ‘no mind is an island.’

This work is published with permission of the author, Tom Sticht.  He is an international consultant in adult educationand can be reached at tsticht@aznet.net

The social elements of learning and the use of social networking tools for education purposes are not limited to literacy programs.   Dr. Terry Anderson, Canada Research Chair in Distance Education, and a professor at Athabasca University in Alberta, is building a safe open-source environment that enables university students studying by distance to do many of the things that they would do on campus, including finding study buddies, posting hints, discussing projects and working on group assignments.

“It’s been my life quest to improve teaching and learning opportunities for people at Athabasca University and globally,” Anderson explains. “With the emergence of social software, we hope to create ways for people to socially engage in cooperative and collaborative learning. We hope to enable more distance students to meet and support each other; to replicate the social component of the campus experience. We also hope to find an ‘economy of scale’ that will expand the reach of post-secondary education and give more people access.”  (Dr. Anderson will be the key note speaker at the upcoming Arctic College Staff Development conference in Iqaluit.(August 23-26).

These are interesting times to be working as an adult educator/instructor.   What do you think about using social media to support learning?

Lindsay Sowdluapik-Lloyd with the Learning Group in Cambridge Bay.

Although we often hear about the difficulties with internet access in communities around the territory, the Introduction to the Circumpolar World course, created through the University of the Arctic, was accessible at Community Learning Centre’s in Nunavut despite occasional computer and internet glitches. As the instructor working from the College in Iqaluit, it was fascinating to be able to connect with people across the territory through different forms of technology, although I still wish I had the chance to “meet” everyone in person. Creating a human connection was essential to the success of the course and through a combination of email, Skype, phone calls and a trip to Cambridge Bay to meet with the 6 students there, we were able to share ideas, thoughts, news stories and academic papers at all hours of the day (and night!).

In the future, Nunavut Arctic College will be offering more courses online and will continue to partner with institutions not only in the south, but also around the circumpolar world to provide learning opportunities for Nunavummiut in their home communities. With the improved infrastructure that will be available in the learning centres across Nunavut, there will only be more and more opportunities to connect over the coming months and years. It is exciting to be able to take online courses not only from our home communities in Nunavut, but from anywhere around the world at any time. For me, it has drastically changed the way I think about what education means and when and how learning happens. Congratulations to all of the students who took part in Introduction to the Circumpolar World course this past semester! I look forward to seeing more Nunavummiut and members of Nunavut Arctic College online in the coming semesters.

Lindsay

For more information on up coming courses you can contact Lindsay at lindsay.sowdluapik-lloyd@arcticcollege.ca

These kinds of results make me sit up and take notice. Could our students at Nunavut Arctic College improve their attendance, retention and academic success rates if we introduced the routine use of technology into our classrooms?

Another more recent study at a Canadian community college showed significant academic gains by non-traditional students in a Math transition program.  Seneca College in Ontario introduced the use of tablet computers in one of their classes. The instructor said,

“I’ve been a math teacher for almost 30 years, and through all that time, I have never seen anything have this effect on students. With HP tablets, my classroom is more collaborative today. The air is charged with enthusiasm which is evident in the level of activity and noise. That’s not your traditional math classroom, especially one with students who have said they hate math. These are students who, for whatever reason, have not been successful or have not taken the coursework to prepare them for college, especially college mathematics. They are less likely than other college students to be engaged in the classroom.”

Don’t you wonder what the impact of using tools like this would be at Arctic College?  Could we see increased student engagement, I wonder?

Another study done at a traditional southern university cited in Scientific American magazine, describes improved student learning outcomes in a traditional university Intro to Biology course:

“At UW, students from educationally or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, many of who were underrepresented minorities and the first in their family to attend college, had previously been more than twice as likely to fail the intro Biology 180 lecture course than other students.

But Haak, now at Indiana University, and his colleagues decided to take a page from the latest K-12 pedagogical lesson books and start introducing more active-learning elements into the courses. For his more structured course design, he included previously proven tools, such as small group discussions, short weekly exams and class-wide quizzes where students use clickers to register their answers in a central computer system—allowing an instructor to get instant feedback on the class’ comprehension.

The team then analyzed student grades from several academic years of the biology course given in both standard and active-learning formats. Even when controlling for student ability and individual faculty differences, the team found that the courses with the most active learning elements saw improved learning for all students. And those who benefited the most were the disadvantaged students. The achievement gap between them and their more advantaged peers was cut nearly in half. Scott Freeman, a UW biology lecturer and coauthor of the paper, acknowledged that although the approach is affordable once it is up and running, developing a good interactive course can take time, money and enthusiasm on the part of the professors and departments. “Most faculty lack training in these techniques and may also lack the time to develop needed materials,” Freeman said in a prepared statement. But given his school’s positive results, he added, “we should move to active learning as quickly as possible.”

The use of clickers which are part of an electronic multiple-choice polling system just like those used on TV shows like “Do you Want to be a Millionaire” are popular and affordable devices that are being used in many post-secondary institutions.  They can be used – very successfully – to promote debate and critical analysis, engage students with the target material and increase motivation.

We have some early adaptors at the College who are using or planning to use some of these tools in their classrooms in 2011-12.  Jason Carpenter, Senior Instructor in the Environmental Technology program has begun to explore the possible uses of iclickers in his classroom.  Carpenter says ” they are a great way for an instructor to know immediately who understands the concepts being presented and who doesn’t and also to actively engage learners in the presentation of materials”.

Neil Christopher, Nunavut Teacher Education Program instructor, will be experimenting with the use of tablet computers in some of his teacher education classes in 2011-12.

With innovative teachers like this soon we will be able to see the impact of these technologies in Arctic College classrooms.

If you are using innovative approaches or educational technology tools in your classroom leave us a comment and tell us about it.  We would love to hear from you.