The amazingly quick, positive, and unanticipated results have been magnificent. And they provide a rudimentary case study well worth documenting—one that viscerally displays the benefits of participating in the open movement, in Open Education Week, and open collaboration in training-teaching-learning and many other endeavors.

Let’s step back to the identifiable origins of this experience. My initial source of inspiration for that time/collaboration/ learning piece—and this one, in fact—was my continuing participation in a wonderful massive open online course (MOOC)—#etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that Alec Couros and others are currently offering through March 2013. Because our latest #etmooc field of exploration is the open movement, I’ve been inclined to explore and write about it with MOOCmates in an open rather than pay-per-piece approach. This has facilitated the rapid development and exchange of still-evolving ideas; quickly inspired expansion of our synchronous and asynchronous conversations via a Google+ Hangout, live facilitated chats and other exchanges on Twitter, blog postings, comments in our Google+ community, and email exchanges; and helped us draw others who were not previously affiliated with the course into our platform-leaping exchanges.

A key moment in exploring our changing perceptions of time in collaboration and learning came when Christina Hendricks, a MOOCmate from Canada, posted a link to an article she had not yet read but suspected would contribute substantially to the conversation: “Pointillist, Cyclical, and Overlapping: Multidimensional Facets of Time in Online Learning,” published openly by Pekka Ihanainen (HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences, Finland) and John Moravec (University of Minnesota, USA) in November 2011. I devoured that piece in one sitting the same evening I received it—three nights ago; wrote about it a couple of days later—yesterday; and sent Moravec a link to my own article so he and Ihanainen would know that their work was continuing to influence others.

Not more than an hour passed before Moravec wrote back, via email, with a brief note of thanks and a follow-up question (yesterday afternoon) that is continuing to expand the conversation as I complete this piece this (Friday) evening at the end of Open Education Week 2013. The conversation shot out additional tendrils this morning: Ihanainen wrote back with additional thoughts; provided a link to an online collaborative document in which he and another researcher are exploring the theme in a way that opens the conversation to anyone—regardless of time or place—who is interested in following and/or participating in it; and included a link to his collaborator’s blog that creates a bridge between the “Pointillist” article and the online collaborative document: “Response to ‘Pointillist, cyclical, and overlapping: Multidimensional facets on time in online education,” posted by Michael Sean Gallagher on November 27, 2011. To read Gallagher’s response and the ensuing exchange of 14 comments appended to that blog posting is to openly eavesdrop in the moment on conversations that originally occurred between November 2011 and January 2012—but remain as alive now as they were when Ihanainen and Gallagher composed them.

This is where we need to further develop what I referred to in my earlier description (yesterday) as “another digital literacy skill: an ability to function simultaneously within a variety of timeframes we don’t normally consider while we’re learning”: we need to take a deep breath, step back a bit, and deconstruct what is happening here so we can build upon it to the benefit of trainer-teacher-learners worldwide.

Here’s that deconstruction and summary: Hendricks and I join approximately 1,600 other learners in #etmooc between mid-January and early February 2013. We start following each other’s work via blogs and other postings and share ideas and resources throughout February and early March—including that link to “Pointillist.” I write about  “Pointillist” on March 14 and immediately connect online to Moravec, who then puts me in contact with Ihanainen, who then leads me to Gallagher’s writing on March 15. We now have a paradoxically in-the-moment asynchronous conversation connecting participants here in San Francisco (me), in Minnesota (Moravec), in Canada (Hendricks), in London (Gallagher), and in Finland (Ihanainen) via postings that at this point extend back to November 2011 and continue into the moment in which you are reading and reacting to these thoughts—yet another example of the sort of rhizomatic learning studied and facilitated in #etmooc and at the heart of the topic of timeless learning—which Ihanainen, Moravec, and Gallagher are calling the “Pedagogy of Simultaneity.”

There’s a real danger here that all this messiness and complexity—these uncontrollable shoots and roots multiplying at a mind-numbing rate from the original #etmooc rhizome—could make the average trainer-teacher-learner run for the hills and never look back. Which would be a real shame. For at the heart of all this is a wonderfully philosophical question that also has tremendous potential repercussions for how we develop, deliver, and facilitate training-teaching-learning in our onsite-online world: what can we do to build upon the best of our traditional models of learning while incorporating the techniques and tools that are quickly becoming available to us, show no sign of slowing down, and may have evolved further by the time you’re actually reading this?

What this comes down to for me personally is that in the moment in which I’m writing this, all these conversations have merged into one vibrant vital moment regardless of when others composed and expressed their thoughts or where they were, physically, when they composed and expressed those thoughts. What it comes down to for you as a reader-learner-participant is that the same moment is as vibrant and vital regardless of the date on your calendar as you read and respond to this and regardless of where you are sitting and what form of technology you are using to read this information. And that, I suspect, is the greatest lesson to be absorbed within this particular moment comprised of what we, as members of a fluid, open, pedagogy-of-simultaneity community, bring to it.

N.B.: This is the twenty-second in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc–and the 200th piece I have posted on “Building Creative Bridges.”

Before we take the leap into a bit of virtual time travel to pursue this idea, let’s ground ourselves within a familiar idea: much of the formal learning with which we’re familiar takes place within clearly-defined segments of time, e.g., an hour-long workshop or webinar, or a course that extends over a day, week, month, or semester. We work synchronously during face-to-face or online interactions, and we work asynchronously through postings that extend a conversation as long as the formal learning opportunity is underway and participants are willingly engaged.

What we are seeing as we more engagingly explore online learning in general and, more specifically, through a well-designed massive open online course (MOOC) like #etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that Alec Couros and others are currently offering through March 2013, is that this connectivist learning process is far from linear—rhizomatic is one of the terms we’ve been using extensively throughout the course. We are also seeing that our learning process does not have to be limited to exchanges with learners and others who are participating within the formal linear timeframe suggested by a course such as #etmooc that officially begins in January 2013 and formally concludes at the end of March 2013. And that’s where we find ourselves on relatively new time turf.

What now is happening is that conversations can be comprised of those wonderfully synchronous, in-the-moment exchanges that are most familiar to us; those asynchronous exchanges that extend the “moment” to an hour, day, week, or semester-long period that formally defines a course; and those unexpected moments of participation by people not currently enrolled in a course, but drawn into a current extended moment of conversation by having their previously-posted work become part of a current conversation.

The seeds for viewing learning time in this unorthodox way were planted before I joined #etmooc at the beginning of February 2013. While facilitating two offerings of the online Social Media Basics course I have developed with colleagues at ALA Editions, I saw that learners from the first four-week offering (completed in June 2012) were beginning to interact with learners from the second offering (completed in early February 2013) via the private Facebook group I had established for any interested participant.

Some of these interactions took place during live office hours held within the Facebook space in January and February 2013. Some of the interactions took place via asynchronous postings between members of the first and second groups of learners. But most intriguingly, some of the interactions involved learners in group two going back to read postings completed when the first offering was in session—then incorporating aspects of those earlier (past-tense) comments into present-tense conversations that clearly have the potential to extend into future conversations when the next group of learners join the group (and the extended conversation) as the course reaches a third group of learners in July 2013 (or “reached” a third group if you’re reading this after July 2013).

The same backward-forward extension of conversation has crept into #etmooc. Ideas initiated in one setting, e.g., through a blog posting, extend into other platforms, e.g., within the course Google+ community. Cross-pollination and cross-time postings then occur via additional conversation within the context of a blog posting that may have been completed a day, week, or month earlier—but that remains very much in the moment through new postings within the context established within that initial post.

Where this becomes most fascinating and most worth noting is when the asynchronous postings attached to a specific blog posting then lead us to postings completed long before the current course was even in the planning stages—and those earlier postings are drawn into the current moment, as happened recently in an exchange a MOOCmate and I were having.

This becomes a bit tricky, so let’s take it step by step to bring a little order to the learning chaos this so obviously creates. I posted “Synchronous Sessions, Asynchronously: Blending Meetings, Learning, and Digital Literacy” on February 20, 2013. A couple of #etmooc colleagues transformed the piece into an extended conversation by adding comments that are continuing to be attached to that February 2013 posting as I write this piece a few weeks later. The conversation also is growing rhizomatically through extensions via Twitter, Google+, and the follow-up blog posting you are currently reading—which makes me realize that we not only have an organically-growing example of what we are discussing, but a conversation that will benefit from a rudimentary level of curation. (I’m providing that curation in the form of “see-also” references added at the bottom of the various postings within my own blog so anyone joining one part of the conversation can easily find and follow those rhizomatic roots and shoots in the form of the other postings).

The latest shoot came in the form of the online reference, posted by #etmooc colleague Christina Hendricks, to an article that Pekka Ihanainen (HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences, Finland) and John Moravec (University of Minnesota, USA) posted in November 2011: “Pointillist, Cyclical, and Overlapping: Multidimensional Facets of Time in Online Learning.” It’s all there in the first two lines of the abstract to that wonderfully twisty-turny densely-packed exposition: “A linear, sequential time conception based on in-person meetings and pedagogical activities is not enough for those who practice and hope to enhance contemporary education, particularly where online interactions are concerned. In this article, we propose a new model for understanding time in pedagogical contexts.”

Perhaps, by this time, your head is spinning beyond the boundaries of time and space; mine certainly is. But there’s no denying that what Ihanainen and Moravec explore in their thought-provoking article—and what many of us are experiencing in online venues ranging from live Twitter chats (that extend beyond the synchronous sessions via retweets appended with follow-up comments) to those Social Media Basics interactions that now include conversations that have extended over a half-year period and will undoubtedly take on extended life through an even longer “moment” when the course is offered again later this year—extends the challenges. And the possibilities. Which provides us with another wicked problem: how our traditional concepts of formal learning are adapting to learning in timeframes that increasingly include extremely extended moments without firmly established beginning and ending points. Our communities of learning are clearly one part of this evolving learning landscape, and we may need to acknowledge that we haven’t yet defined or developed some of the other key pieces of this particular learning jigsaw puzzle.

N.B.: This is the twenty-first in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Initially inspired to engage in Open Education Week ruminations and activities through my current immersion in #etmooc—an online Educational Technology & Media massive open online course (MOOC) developed by Alec Couros and colleagues—I am now finding myself nearly overwhelmed by how the current open movement module of the course is inspiring me to see rhizomatically-extending roots and shoots of “open” nearly everywhere I look.

There is, for starters, the idea that the open movement itself encompasses an incredibly broad set of terms and actions: the “connect, collect, create, and share” elements of Open Education Week; the four tenets of the open movement as cited in an #etmooc panel discussion (reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing content); and Don Tapscott’s quartet of collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talk he delivered in 2012.

But there is much more, as I’ve been reminded through additional reading and reflection over the past several days. A brief passage that I found in Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs, for example, beautifully captures the idea that physically-open spaces within our worksites and coworking settings can facilitate a different—yet not completely unrelated sorts of—open exchanges of ideas and “knowledge spillover”—think Google, Pixar,  the San Francisco Chronicle building Hub space mentioned by Moretti, and so many others that have recently caught our attention. (Not everyone is enamored of these physically-spaces, as the most cursory online search will show, and I certainly don’t believe that physically-open spaces should be universally adopted for all work we do; a little solitude can go a long way in providing us with the time we need to reflect and absorb what we learn.) The open work spaces, however, are far from revolutionary; they’re similar to what we have seen in our more innovative classrooms, for at least a couple of decades, where learners aren’t confined to desks but, instead, interact with each other and those facilitating their learning in collaborative ways. And it’s also the same concept we find in Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place descriptions of how our interactions with friends and colleagues in our wonderful third places (coffee shops, neighborhood restaurants, and other settings which now extend to online communities where we can drop in unannounced and know our social needs will be met through stimulating interactions) produce the sort of creative results fostered by the open movement.

It’s just a short intellectual jump from the open movement and Moretti’s thoughts to the greater world of open-movement exchanges of ideas, as we’ve seen in Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect, that wonderful reminder that chance encounters under the right circumstances between people of varying backgrounds can produce far more than might otherwise be inspired. It’s as if we’ve tossed The Medici Effect into a huge mixing bowl with James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, let them brew a while, and then scooped out a wonderful ladle of open, collaborative thinking to see what new flavors we can discover.

Which brings us back to Open Education Week and #etmooc itself: using the online resources available to us and the collaborative, participatory spirit that is at the heart of a successful MOOC and the open movement, we learn to viscerally understand, appreciate, and foster the spirit of open that drives these particular learning opportunities. And encourages us to openly engage within others in the hope that everybody wins during Open Education Week and for many more weeks, months, and years to come.

N.B.: This is the twentieth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

At the heart of this endeavor is the open movement—the latest of the five massive themes that we’re exploring in two-week bite-sized segments within #etmooc (an online Educational Technology & Media course), that massive open online course (MOOC) developed by Alec Couros and his wonderful gang of “conspirators.” The course itself is a living example of the spirit of open, and it is quite literally transforming not only those who are directly participating in it, but also those who are learning about it and participating vicariously through the blog postings we are producing and sharing openly, the Blackboard Collaborative sessions that are archived and openly available, the live tweet chat sessions and numerous unfacilitated stream of tweets it is generating, exchanges in a Google+ Community, YouTube videos, and various other rhizomatically spreading learning opportunities that will continue having an impact on learners worldwide long after the current January- March 2013 offering comes to an end.

It’s a movement I first encountered several years ago within the pages of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and that we all can continue to explore through the #etmooc panel discussion moderated earlier this week by Alberta Distance Learning Centre learning innovation lead teacher Verena Roberts. As has been the case with the handful of #etmooc presentations I’ve been able to attend or view, this one provides great content while also serving as an example of what it discusses. It was held as a Google+ Hangout to make it as accessible as possible; it was live-streamed on Roberts’ YouTube channel; interactivity between the panelists and learners was facilitated across platforms, including a Google Doc that also is openly accessible; and it is taking on a life of its own through tweets, blog postings, and other openly-shared resources.

To watch the recording of that hour-long Google+ Hangout panel discussion is to sense the power of online learning and engagement while receiving a full immersion that leaves us with hours of material to return to at our own leisure. We see and hear Mozilla Foundation staffers sharing resources and encouraging us to participate in them, e.g., through the Mozilla Festival and efforts to help define digital literacy. We learn about a magnificent repository of open resources curated under the title “Open High School of Utah OER [Open Educational Resources] Guide” under the auspices of the Open High School of Utah (which will become Mountain Heights Academy in fall 2013). We hear panelist Christina Cantrill, from the National Writing Project, suggest that open is about resources, but “is also about practices.” And we walk away from the session with a clear understanding that four basic tenets of the open movement are reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing content without losing site of the fact that we still have an obligation to acknowledge the sources upon which we draw.

For those of us wanting to continue our explorations within the context of the Wikinomics model, we turn to another variation on the open theme: the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talk—“Four Principles for the Open World”—that Tapscott delivered in 2012. He takes us a bit deeper into the open movement by suggesting that there are four pillars of openness: collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment: “The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom,” he tells us at one point.

The fact that these brief but stimulating explorations of openness take us from Open Education Week’s key themes of “connect, collect, create, and share” to those four tenets (reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing content) on to Tapscott’s quartet of collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment confirm that we’re facing the same wicked problem here that we face in digital literacy/digital literacies: settling on a firm definition is a far-from-completed endeavor.

We aren’t, at this point, anywhere near achieving that goal. But Tapscott, by introducing us to the concept of murmuration near the end of his TED talk through a video showing an exquisitely beautiful murmuration of starlings, provides an example from nature that should inspire all of us to start by participating and collaborating in Open Education Week (conversations on Twitter will be organized though use of the #OpenEducationWk hashtag and nurtured through the @OpenEducationWk Twitter account) and then incorporating open practices into our training-teaching-learning endeavors wherever we can. 

N.B.: This is the nineteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Now, thanks to researchers Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars, we have a thoughtful and thought-provoking research-based study showing what can hinder success among certain groups of online learners.

Focusing on failure rates of online learners drawn from a very large sample (40,000 community and technical college learners throughout Washington state, tracked over a five-year period), Xu and Jaggars have produced a paper that includes insights useful to any of us involved in training-teaching learning. “Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas” (published through the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, at Columbia University), opens with a well-balanced introduction that cites previous research papers comparing face-to-face and online learning; provides observations about why some students may do better than others in online learning environments, e.g., “those with more extensive exposure to technology or those who have been taught skills in terms of time-management and self-directed learning…may adapt more readily to online learning than others” (p. 1); and includes the suggestion that “insufficient time management and self-directed learning skills” could contribute to the online learning failures examined in their paper (p. 4). Reading that section alone gives us a wonderfully concise overview of the challenges we and our learners face, and it serves as a great example of the sort of resources coming out of the open movement—the subject of our latest #etmooc module.

As we move more deeply into Xu and Jaggars’ 32-page paper, we learn more about the writers’ meticulous methodology; the subjects of their study and the types of courses they were attempting to complete; and the possibility that “older students’ superior adaptability to online learning lends them a slight advantage in online courses in comparison with their younger counterparts” (pp. 17-18). They go far beyond the usual basic levels of evaluation and ponder the possibility that peers’ behavior can have positive or negative effects on the learning process: “These descriptive comparisons suggest that a given student is exposed to higher performing peers in some subject areas and lower performing peers in others and that this could affect his or her own adaptability to online courses in each subject area” (p. 21).

In reaching the conclusion that those who struggle with face-to-face learning are even more likely to struggle with and fail at online learning, Xu and Jaggars lead us to an interesting set of conclusions and recommendations that include “screening, scaffolding, early warning, and wholesale [course] improvement” (p. 25).  Acknowledging the difficulties inherent within each of their four suggestions, they leave us with proposals to define online learning “as a privilege rather than a right” and delay learners’ entry into online learning “until they demonstrate that they are likely to adapt well to the online context”; to incorporate “the teaching of online learning skills into online courses…”; to build “early warning systems into online courses in order to identify and intervene with students who are having difficulty adapting”; and “focus on improving the quality of all online courses…to ensure that their learning outcomes are equal to those of face-to face courses” (pp. 25-26).

None of this is revolutionary, nor is it beyond our reach. Preparing learners for new learning experiences before we toss them into the deep end of the learning pool simply makes good sense. Offering them help in developing their online learning skills is something that many of us already routinely do for online learners, and there are plenty of online examples at the community-college level alone for anyone who has not yet traveled this particular learning path. Building early warning systems into the process goes hand-in-hand with the increasing levels of attention we are giving to learning analytics and learning analytics tools; even at a rudimentary level, I’ve been able to increase retention rates in online courses by noting who is falling behind on assignments and sending individual notes to check in occasionally with those learners—the result is that the learners invariably note, in their course evaluations, that they had no idea online learning could be so personal and engaging. And the suggestion that we look for ways to further improve the quality of courses to make them more responsive to learners’ needs is a conclusion that hardly needs response; the wicked problem we face in meeting that challenge is to obtain the resources needed so we—and our learners—will be successful rather than being part of another report on why learners fail.

N.B.: This is the eighteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Think of The Daily Currant as an online version of The Daily Show on Comedy Central or a subtle version of The Onion. And also think of it as a reminder of the need for finely-honed crap detection skills—one piece of the overall skill set seems to be an integral part of any definition we can create for our constantly evolving sense of what “digital literacy” means in its broadest as well as its most specific sense.

Digital literacy is a theme many of us began exploring a few weeks ago within the context of a wonderful  massive open online course (MOOC), #etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that Alec Couros and others are currently offering through March 2013. For a couple of weeks and with the guidance of some wonderful learning facilitators, we struggled with the wicked problem of trying to create a workable definition for digital literacy—a term that appeared straightforward at a glance but that proved to be incredibly nuanced, subjective, and complex as we gave it increased attention.

But there’s nothing nuanced or complex about the obvious need for highly-developed crap detection skills in our onsite-online world—a theme brought into full focus for us through Howard Rheingold’s #etmooc digital literacy presentation on “Literacies of Attention, Crap Detection, Collaboration, and Network Know-How” last month. Picking up on themes he has obviously covered elsewhere, he talked about walking his daughter through the process of exploring a website that initially appeared to be an official site about a well-known historic figure, but eventually turned out to be a far-from-objective source of information. He also recalled taking an online pregnancy test that confirmed he was going to give birth to a baby girl and that the father of his child was Fabio Lanzoni.

We don’t need the extreme example of the online test that confirmed Rheingold’s pregnancy to see how alert we and those we help in our roles as trainer-teacher-learners need to be. When we find ourselves or our media learners taken in by something along the lines of that Daily Currant story about Rahm Emanuel, we need to be able to laugh at ourselves as well as at the story; remember that what seems improbable to some appears to be completely credible to others; and do a little follow-up in sifting through the deluge of information—and perhaps, along the ways, honing what a colleague referred to as “deluge literacy.” We can, for example, see right through stories about how Pope Benedict XVI actually resigned because he is gay, how Sarah Palin announced her intention to run for president of the United States in 2014, how New York Times columnist and award-winning economist Paul Krugman has filed for bankruptcy, and how Facebook is going to begin charging us if we want to remove our photos from its site—once we know that we’re viewing a satirical website. But those who don’t have the digital literacy skills to make that determination are not only going to believe what seems credible to them, they’re going to forward that misinformation on to others via Twitter and other social media platforms and react through postings on the Daily Currant site itself. (If your crap detectors are going off and you’re wondering whether people actually do post comments indicating they believed the stories, skim some of the comments. A running joke among regular readers of the fake news within The Daily Currant is the fake dilemma of whether to point out the “About” page to those who believe they’re reading real news reports—or whether to egg them on by responding with comments including “Quick, go make a chain status! Everyone must know about this!”.)

When our crap detectors let us down and we fall prey to something displaying truthiness rather than truth, we can at least take solace that we’re not alone—as we recently saw when a Washington Post blogger fell into the trap of believing a Daily Currant story reporting that Sarah Palin was going to begin working for Al Jazeera after leaving Fox News. Adding insult to injury, the Currant writers ran a follow-up story reporting that Palin had accepted a position as a visiting scholar at Harvard, a situation that “will finally put to rest the rumors, first reported in the Washington Post, that she would be joining Al-Jazeera as an on-air commentator.”

I suppose, given all these twists and turns, that we should be grateful some of our best online pranksters are transparent about the reliability of what they are disseminating. One of my favorites, for example, is the Fake Library Stats (@FakeLibStats) Twitter account, where we have, within the past 24 hours, fake-learned that “35% of librarians send overdue notices to their friends & family to whom they’ve loaned a book,” “97% of librarians have alphabetized their friends’ spice racks,” and “98% of all librarians secretly want to weed and then rearrange their friends’ book collections.”

If laughter helps us learn, then we should acknowledge and thank The Daily Currant, The Daily Show, The Onion, @FakeLibStats, and many others for helping us hone that part of our digital literacy skill set covered by the concept of crap detection. And, in the meantime, let’s see if we can track down confirmation that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is demanding that Donald Trump produce a copy of his birth certificate so he can be assured that he won’t be disqualified, as a non-citizen, from running for president if he ever again considers pursuing that path.

N.B.: This is the seventeenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

It’s a safe assumption that this type of learning fosters an expansive, collaborative community of learning; in #etmooc (the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that Alec Couros and others are currently offering through March 2013), for example, we have more than 1,600 colleagues from a variety of countries. It’s also safe to assume that we’re talking about more than physical geography when we discuss this rhizomatically extensive learning environment—the learning environment that expands as wonderfully, organically, and extensively as the rhizomes that provide the name for the concept: we have the main course website; an archive of the fabulous sessions conducted and recorded via Blackboard Collaborate; blog postings; live tweet chat sessions and an ongoing stream of individual, nonfacilitated tweets; postings in a Google+ community; and an ever-expanding set of virtual meeting places apparently limited only by time and our own imaginations.

And it’s becoming more and more apparent that even time is not a critically limiting factor to the development and growth of the learning that a MOOC can nurture. In writing about synchronous and asynchronous meetings recently, I inadvertently appear to have created an example of the very phenomenon I was describing: the idea that a “moment” can be the usual physical manifestation of time that has been so familiar to us throughout our lives, or a more extended period of time in which a moment extends over days, weeks, months, or years as we begin conversations in an online venue like a blog posting and then see that moment of conversation continue asynchronously as additional participants add on to the conversation with new postings that are then seen (and responded to) by those previously engaged in the conversation.

The “Synchronous Sessions, Asynchronously: Blending Meetings, Learning, and Digital Literacy” piece that I originally posted on February 20, 2013, has now taken on a life of its own. There are exchanges that currently include three other #etmoocMates and a couple of other people who have referenced the piece in their own postings. I have, furthermore, used the course Google+ community to make others aware of the conversation and invited them to expand upon it either via comments attached to the original blog posting or through postings there in the Google+ #etmooc community. We have, as a result of these planned and spontaneous endeavors, managed to do what anyone does with the best learning experiences: we have carried it out into the world beyond the boundaries of class discussions, applied the themes we’re exploring to non-course settings, and then brought them back into the context of course discussions to see how much they have transformed the perceptions we carried into the course—and transformed us!

The latest expansive moment within that greater #etmooc conversational moment came for me late last week. As I explained to my MOOCmates via an addition to our blog-based in-the-moment conversation, I was sitting with Herman Rodriguez, a Colombian-born friend who owns Stelline restaurant here in San Francisco and is also a working artist—someone who paints wonderfully timeless landscapes in watercolor and oil. He was describing the difficulty he has in responding to requests for an artist’s statement about why he doesn’t put completion dates on his paintings: the works, for him, are as much a product of that immediately calendar-driven date as they are part of a much larger process where a moment can extend over periods of days, weeks, or months, and he wants the paintings to reflect that feeling viscerally.

It became clear to me, during that conversation, that Herman was struggling with his decision to express himself in the language of watercolor and oil painting, whereas those wanting a formal artist’s statement were looking for something in the language of text: “If you had wanted to express yourself in text, you would have written something rather than painted something,” I observed. “So what we have to do is engage in a bit of translation that carries what you paint into what others want to read.”

Working face to face, he and I jointly crafted a text statement, ostensibly in his voice, that combined what he paints and what my #etmooc colleagues and I have been exploring in the realm of short and extended moments. In essence, the artist and I learned on the spot how to temporarily find a way to speak as collaboratively—in one consistent voice that reflected his work and incorporated my own complementary experiences—as my MOOCmates and I speak in that fabulously extended moment we’re creating online together. We quickly produced a statement that includes the following excerpt—a statement that could easily be adapted to reflect the #etmooc learning experience if we substituted the word “learning” for “paintings” and made a few other grammatical adjustments:

“My paintings, in very important ways, are products of a specific moment—a mood, a setting, an urge, a need to capture something that otherwise would be lost because it is ephemeral. They are equally products of extended moments that cannot be defined by what a clock or calendar would show; they are so all encompassing to me that they feel as if they are outside the boundaries of time and space as we define them—they have a feeling of existing without beginning and without end, literally in a moment that is the opposite of what we usually think about when we use the word ‘moment.’”

Something significant is clearly happening here within the context of members of an ever-expanding community of learners interacting. Since #etmooc as a connectivist MOOC is, by definition, an attempt to create community, it makes sense that our community would rhizomatically expand from blog to face-to-face conversations to postings on other social networking sites and even expand from one person’s blog to another—and ultimately include an artist not previously connected to the course. We’re creating a magnificent digital jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces each have their own unique and appealing beauty while revealing greater aspects of beauty whenever we manage to connect them to other pieces of that same puzzle.

It may be that this particular conversation will eventually die a natural death. Or it may be that it continues spreading, circling back to completely encompass all the creeping rootstalks that encompass this particular learning rhizome. But whatever it does, it certainly will have contributed to a memorable leaning experience. Will serve as an expansion of a vibrant and vital community of learning. And will have kept many of us off the streets for a while as we puzzled over, were drawn into, and were growing in positive ways as a result of our participation in a wonderfully expansive moment of collaboration.

N.B.: This is the sixteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Although far from massive, a new free learning opportunity provided by the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) system for its users is beginning to roll out. It promises to be another great step in libraries’ efforts to brand themselves as learning centers within the extended communities they increasingly serve in our onsite-online world.

Using courses purchased from Cengage Learning’s Ed2Go, San Francisco Public is making these courses available at no cost beyond what we already pay in the tax revenues that support library services. The list of subject areas covered is magnificent: accounting and finance; business; college readiness; computer applications; design and composition; health care and medical; language and arts; law and legal; personal development; teaching and education; technology; and writing and publishing.

The initial list of courses is spectacular, as even the most cursory review reveals. Following the teaching and education link, for example, produces several subcategories of courses: classroom computing; languages; mathematics; reading and writing; science; test prep; and tools for teachers. Following that classroom computing subcategory currently produces links to 13 different offerings, including “Teaching Smarter with Smart Boards,” “Blogging and Podcasting for Beginners,” “Integrating Technology in the Classroom,” and “Creating a Classroom Website.”

SFPL’s Ed2Go offerings under the personal development link are organized into 10 subcategories including arts; children, parents, and family; digital photography; health and wellness; job search; languages; personal enrichment; personal finance and investments; start your own business; and test prep.

The offerings appear to be wonderfully learner-centric in that each course listing includes a “detail” page that provides learners with a concise description of the learning need to be met by the course; a formal course syllabus; an instructor bio; a list of requirements so learners know in advance what they need to bring to the course; and student reviews offering comments by previous learners.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Ed2Go roll-out is how it reflects SFPL’s growth as a learning organization that uses learning to serve its community; when I last spoke with colleagues a couple of years ago about their plans to offer online learning to library users, the plan was still in its early-development stages. Discussions, at that point, were centered on short staff-produced videos using Camtasia or other online authoring tools. Members of the library’s Literacy and Learning Area Focus Team have clearly made tremendous progress since that time in finding ways to offer learning opportunities to library users, and they are far from finished.

“We’re rolling it out slowly,” a colleague told me this afternoon. “Training is one of our big pushes right now. It [Ed2Go] is our first start, and we have other ideas down the pike…We’re serious about internal [staff] training, external [non-staff] training—going out to the public.”

The idea of having staff produce videos is still under consideration, as is the idea of having library staff take an even more active role in providing more learning opportunities for the public: “We’re talking about doing out own trainings and putting them online, but that’s down the road. We’re not reinventing the wheel—but we are rounding it.”

As I have mentioned in other articles, the wicked problem of reinventing education continues to receive plenty of creative attention in a variety of settings, including the New Media Consortium’s recent Future of Education summit in Austin, Texas, and the “Future of Education” document that came out of that summit. Seeing increasing collaboration among the various providers of learning opportunities (e.g., our colleagues in academia, in museums, in libraries, in professional workplace learning and performance organizations including the American Society for Training & Development and other professional associations including the American Library Association) helps us understand why offerings along the lines of the massive open online courses and libraries’ freE-learning opportunities are quickly becoming part of our learning landscape—and suggests that those collaborations might be part of what leads us closer to effectively addressing the wicked problems we face in training-teaching-learning.

N.B.: This is the fifteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

This becomes more obvious than ever to me earlier today when I have an unexpected opportunity to re-view EDUCAUSE Director Malcolm Brown’s stimulating “Ideas That Matter” presentation from the New Media Consortium Horizon Project Summit on the Future of Education held in Austin, Texas in January 2013. I enjoy the presentation when Brown originally delivers it. I take notes that I reread with fresh eyes a few days later. But it isn’t until I watch the newly-posted video of that discussion of the creative process needed to address wicked problems—those complex and ambiguous problems requiring innovative approaches—that I see how much my perspective on the topic has evolved over the period of a single month.

What makes the viewing of that video transformative is that it places me, in a very visceral way, in two distinct yet interwoven moments and frames of mind. The original moment, environment, and frame of mind is the one created by the act of being part of a summit where all attention is focused on a single, spectacular theme—the future of education. The contemporary moment is the one that is here and now, just one month later, when I continue to be part of a group absolutely transformed by participation in #etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media massive open online course (MOOC) that Alec Couros and others are currently offering through March 2013.

Brown, like Couros and his associates (his “co-conspirators”), lays the foundations for explorations without establishing a clear vision of the outcome. We know we’re going somewhere, we know it’s going to be a journey well worth taking, and we know we’re going to experience unexpected pleasures along the way, but we have no idea what the destination is until we help create it through our own participation. It’s a learning process, and the most successful learning processes are those that the learners themselves—ourselves—help define, create, and complete. We allow for successes far greater and more significant than we can envision at the beginning of the learning process; we create an expectation and acceptance of the possibility and likelihood of failures along the way; and we create the most wonderfully odd juxtapositions that in and of themselves serve as the sandboxes capable of producing results worth seeking.

Brown, at a key point in his presentation, draws our attention to John Cleese’s lecture on creativity—a spectacularly entertaining and thought-provoking presentation that was originally delivered in 1991, yet continues popping up via online links with great regularity and proving itself to be as timely today as it was more than two decades ago. Being onsite with Brown means that we experience Cleese second-hand; watching the video of Brown’s presentation provides the invitation (consider it a command performance) to take the time to actually relive Cleese’s lecture in the moment, in juxtaposition with what Brown is offering. And we’re all the richer for this opportunity to re-walk both those paths again as frequently as we allow ourselves to be drawn to them, just as we’re able to re-walk some of the paths we’re creating, visiting, and revisiting through the various platforms that #etmooc uses (Blackboard Collaborate presentations; blog postings; live tweet chat sessions; postings in a Google+ community; and a variety of other settings limited only by our own imaginations and the amount of time we have to give to our continuing education efforts in a vibrant community of learning).

But let’s stay with a key point that Brown makes by quoting from Cleese’s earlier yet virtually contemporaneous presentation: creativity “is not a talent; it is a way of operating.” Every time we creatively pull ourselves back into an inspiring learning moment by re-reading our notes, or re-viewing an online presentation, or re-reading a blog posting (and, perhaps, adding to what is already there by posting a new comment that draws the original blogger back to what he or she wrote days/weeks/months/years ago), we keep our learning moments alive, productive, and fertile.

Jumping from Brown to Cleese also takes us deeper into that fabulously Cleesian world where he begins by telling his audience (which, thanks to the video, now includes us in the sort of wonderfully synchronously asynchronous moment that I’m attempting to create with this article) that he can more easily explain humor than he can explain the creative process. Then proceeds to do both by talking about creativity while continually interrupting his own presentation with a seemingly endless string of light bulb jokes. Then finds a way to connect the learning dots by helping us understand how the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas (like creativity and light bulb jokes) can move our minds from a comfortably closed state (that is antithetical to creativity) to one open to unexpected possibilities (which provides a field where seeds of creativity can sprout, grow, and thrive). He makes us laugh repeatedly by reminding us how important these absurd juxtapositions are, and then producing more of them to prove the point. By the time we leave Cleese and Brown, we have strengthened our ability to engage in the process—and even make sense of the sort of juxtapositions I calculatingly create in the headline to this article.

N.B.: This is the fourteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.

Nearing the end of a two-week exploration of digital literacy that was initiated by Doug Belshaw’s introductory session on the theme, our entire #etmooc learning experience is both extending all around us rhizomatically and circling back in upon itself.

When we think about some of the #etmooc themes—the idea that learners in this sort of (connectivist) MOOC set our own goals within the broad framework established, and that there is no pressure around keeping up or falling behind since we each approach the course with a desire and ability to set our own learning goals and learning pace—we gain a visceral appreciation for and understanding of what a well-run MOOC can offer. And we have to ask ourselves a simple question: how do those concepts play into the challenge of defining and nurturing digital literacy? When, for example, we find ourselves starting with what appears to be a basic course text—Belshaw’s What is ‘digital literacy’?—and then, through our own learning hikes, locating other texts that can be equally engaging, attractive, and important in helping us shape ideas of what digital literacy means to us, we come to the realization that we’re using digital literacy skills we may not have previously considered. This, of course, can’t help but shape our own attempts to define and nurture digital literacy.

Two of those digital learning texts came my way this week through digital connections. The first, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century (2009), caught my attention when a colleague (Cleveland Public Library learning strategist Buffy Hamilton) mentioned it in her Goodreads account. The second, the New Media Consortium’s online publication A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21^st Century Summit (2005), came my way directly from the first in that it was mentioned in Confronting the Challenges.

Henry Jenkins and his co-writers, in Confronting the Challenges, engage us in a book-length exploration regarding “core social skills and cultural competencies” for anyone interested in being “full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture.” The book (available free online as well as in a printed edition) is well worth reading for its concise descriptions of those skills; for the examples provided at the end of each section; and for the summary of those elements on pages 105-106: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. More importantly, the writers conclude the book with a reminder of why digital literacy is important: to “ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [creative,] and economic life…”

The same concern drives the New Media Consortium report. The first few pages remind us that 21^st-century literacy is “multimodal,…includes creative fluency as well as interpretive facility,…means learning a new grammar with its own rules of construction,…lends itself to interactive communication,…implies the ability to use media to evoke emotional responses,…[and] has the potential to transform the way we learn.” A call to action on page 19 of the report provides one possible road map that, through its proposals, helps us focus on the digital literacy skills we might want to foster.

A striking element of Confronting the Challenges and A Global Imperative is that both works focus on the need to promote digital literacy among our youngest learners. There’s no reason to limit our attention to that audience, however; it’s clear that older learners have as strong a need for digital literacy—however we define it—as those younger learners have. If we expand our thinking a bit and apply the same needs for digital literacy to learners of all ages, we stand a good chance of fostering the sort of digital citizenship that is going to be a topic of discussion during the final weeks of #etmooc. Which brings us back to the #etmooc challenge of defining, understanding, and, by extension, fostering digital literacy: if we want to understand the theme, we need to take a hike. And expect to keep going long beyond the destination we originally intended to reach.

N.B.: This is the thirteenth in a series of posts responding to the assignments and explorations fostered through #etmooc.