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Every now and then I get to do some things that are more fun than usual. Two workshops this year at e-fest.
Creative online facilitation for formal taught courses in the new age of blogs, wikis and RSS With Leigh Blackall
Communities of Practice 2.0: now we have Web 2.0 tools, what has changed for distributed communities of practice?
Still trying to hide from day two at the conference, but that is another story.
Nancy shared a nice link last night. http://blog.manypossibilities.net/2007/05/group-consensus-facilitation/ A F2F activity with tags. Leigh and I want to do something with ‘paper blogging’ . . with a few surprises.
And today, through some link-hopping, this: Useful Games (David Wilcox)
“The Digital Challenge is a UK government-funded programme within which local partnerships compete to develop plans for technology programmes that will improve delivery of public services, and also ensure the benefits of the online world are widely available. We are working with the Challenge team to create a game that will help partnerships develop their plans, involve local people, and later share their experience with others.”
I want something authentic and real, and not overly complex.
I think a Professional Leadership Community approach has a lot to offer. But what do we need leadership in teaching for?
Brian Lord and Barbara Miller have this to say:
At present, we do not know enough about teacher leadership to make bold claims for its effectiveness in helping reforms go to scale or improving student achievement. However, preliminary research findings point to one critical feature. Teacher leadership is often treated as a strictly instrumental strategy to increase the number of professional development providers – putting in place more people to provide more contact hours with classroom teachers. This approach offers limited promise of achieving reformers’ goals. Yet, when teachers leaders are part of a wider, systemic strategy, within a well-aligned constellation of district supports (e.g., assessment and accountability systems, programs for curriculum implementation), the potential for impact is greater. For this reason, we view teacher leadership less as a magic bullet for quickly solving the “numbers” problem and more as a critical feature in a coherent and focused set of district policies to address the substantive challenges of reform.
From: Teacher Leadership: An Appealing and Inescapable Force in School Reform? Brian Lord and Barbara Miller, Education Development Center, March 2000.
I agree. Instrumental strategies in any enterprise involving people will do less than succeed. People are not merely productive units. It’s a complex equation: look after the people and a lot of organisational goals will come into line.
Professional learning communities. A rare thing!!
In case you don’t know what GTD means, it’s the term from Dave Allen’s book and stands for Getting Things Done.
There are a bunch of web sites around to support this, in fact it’s become a cottage industry.  New job, new roles and all that, I think I need a little help at the moment.
At random . . A summary of GTD. There are scores of these.
Here are a few links I’ve visited in the last week:
Comparison with “Seven Habits” – (Rosa Say, http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/ )
http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2005/06/the-7-habits-and-gtd/
I have benefited from the Seven Habits over the years, but have faltered a bit with GTD, and it has not taken root in my practices or thinking. What has changed has been a Dave Allen podcast with Merlin of 43folders.com.
43folders is one of the premier GTD sites (it is a little Mac oriented)
This podcast detailed two observations:
- GTD can fail after 3-4 weeks (and Dave lists a few reasons)
- GTD often takes 2 years to really take hold. This I can cope with. I’m now back on the wagon.
Getting Things Done: The Procrastinator’s Version Contains a great summary diagram. http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/12/13.html
Rosa Say’s Blog has some of her personal story A really interesting read.
So to from Will Simpson: http://www.willsimpson.org/taxonomy/gtd/
ASIDES: HISTORY
An interesting article on Stephen Covey with comments on the Franklin Covey merger (USA Today, 2004) http://www.usatoday.com/money/2004-11-08-covey-usat_x.htm
ASIDES. GTD TOOLS:
A diagnostic tool for those interested in GTD. Dave Seah has an interesting approach, a little analysis tool to look at time on task, with a neat flash app to support it. Read about it:
davidseah.com/archives/2006/04/18/the-printable-ceo-iii-emergent-task-timing/
The Flash app: http://www.lifehack.org/free-online-graph-grid-templates-pdf/
Paper implementation discussion: http://www.davidco.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2100
I now have a name plate on my door, and work is ramping up with calls about things WebCT for the new semester.
But I’m still not sure about workshops as a vehicle for professional development. I found this video on a website today, one of two CareerBuilder.com‘s adverts at the super bowl. One of the themes is people who hate workplace training.
I’m now largely working in the main campus of the University, rather than Ilam West. The retreat from last year now sometimes seems like a distant memory.
Here is the Teaching and Learning Plan:
 I’m still very interested to see how the whole teaching and learning aspects are linked (or otherwise) into the university structure along with the research side. The role of the “Teaching and Learning Centre” is constantly under debate somewhere in the world. One particular place for instance is the POD (Professional Organisational Development) list.
Our retreat was absolutely stock standard: sweaty pitchers of water, mints, postits, butchers paper, felt tip markers and a faciltator. 50 minute lunch break. Nice food (even if it is mass produced) a quick walk round the building and then back into it.
Carol, our particular facilitator was superb. There but unobtrusive, and with a few delightful and highly effective little comments and metaphors she brought to the day. I think she managed to get some genuine ‘Open Space’ elements into our activities and I didn’t feel at any time the boredom and chagrin I have known in other places in the past as I see a golden opportunity flowing out under the door and well and truly lost. She also engendered some trust. I think behind her relaxed appearance she really knew what she was doing.
 . . . as usual, whiteboards covered with the small group work. These emerged a little later into 4 pages of plans and encapsulation. We have some great plans.
The pages are on the top of the filing cabinet in the UCTL office and I look at the pile each day. We were sort of all here for a brief moment yesterday, but the last month has largely been holiday. I’m half shifted from the College (2 km away). The year has been launched.
I started a new job yesterday, similar role, but in a new institution.
We have a meeting next Monday all day to plan the future with an external facilitator. Probably the usual: postit notes, markers, butchers paper, mints and sweaty pitchers of water. Should be good, we have some chance to plan how this new unit will coagulate into something productive.
It is interesting to recall how over the past months the possible structures have emerged as ideas. There are at least three themes. Most of us in the centre will probably fit into all three in one way or another:
- staff development (which is generally prefaced by the word academic)
- educational technology (which is the area I have been slotted into)
- and what I have seen called SOTL – the Scholarship of teaching and learning.
But it is staff development that I am currently immersed in. Even the terminology is a little fraught. I definitely avoid the term ‘Staff training’. My first job, as kind of a precursor to the formal transfer, was to provide some help with the migration from WebCT 4.2 to WebCT 6.0. (Now sometimes referred to as BlackCT or just Blackboard, but that is another story)
I presented 36 workshops for staff. The same old questions besiege me: is this the best we can come up with in models of staff development?
Well, a few of you know I’m up north doing my first visit to a couple of outposts of our College to run two workshops. Who decided to open these outposts here? (I wonder) I must ask.
I’m currently in the second closest Motel to WITT. This has free broadband. More with it than some snazzy places I stayed in last year where you get this deal .35c a minute up to a maximum of $33.00 per day.  Nothing deep today. Just some musings about being a lonely passer through in New Plymouth.
Haven’t been here in PN for a while: I drove up for a funeral in 1991. It’s totaly unlike what I expected. Met rushhour traffic that was similar to Riccarton Road. (ie long q’s and stopped).
I did a dumb thing last night ordering Curry in a Celtic bar having been lured in by the thought of a nice beer and the sign “Live music every night”. It looked like Watties instant curry, served fusion style. (Pesto spread around the Huge plate to provide colour). I should have stuck to the special, Smoked fish pie, but the blackboard menu was hidden. The barman had that studied aloofness and distance that only comes from practice, when what I wanted was some cheery word.
The walk on the foreshore was good. Really good. But what a contrast!! Who on earth in their right mind created this awful dreadful 45m high straw that sticks up into the middle of the air here?
That’s really a rhetorical question. I did find the plaque. He died in 1981, and this was some misguided implementation of a vision he had for the new millennium. More like a nightmare. But who on earth actually paid for it and let it get put here? There was this superb exhibition of stone sculpture on the foreshore in the balmy NI air, with the sun really low.
Nothing like some real art if there was no real music. There are two great buildings with a mix of untreated in any way hardwood finishings. And this shiny red monstrosity in the background!!
Living under the shadow of something like the mount must be fun. Lived at Kapiti for a while, and we had the island. Nothing much in ChCh though. Just the wind. Took a great snap of the mount at dusk. Will do a small workshop tomorrow and then on to Tauranga. I feel quite remote from Interact, staffing problems, merger talks, press button coffee. But really sad to miss Brons’s haere ra.
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