I don’t think it is as clear cut as this: the group does have a significant history and has acheived some good things. They have some capacity to learn. They already have done a lot of learning – but it’s like now “How can we build for the future and improve our learning?” and in particular, the reason I was there: “What can some sort of virtual environment do for this?”

I said the electronic tools are only part of the question. It’s the habits of people that count.

So we ask: What do you do before you learn? What structures and disciplines can be put in place to build institutional habits?  Good questions.

Individual knowledge locked up in individuals is not enough. Some sort of shared disciplines are needed to benefit from this.  And how to manage the inward (personal learningO) focus, the outward service and keep the personal and corporate goals in balance.  I’ve tried to put a few of these thoughts in a simple diagram.  Not quite there yet, but here it is:

As well, in the current climate: knowing we can do it is also not enough.  Certification and meeting of standards is also an issue: this learning also needs to be formalised.  Somehow.

The Learning Organisation

From a search: About 473,000 results in Google – another 173,000 spelled with a z.

Senge (www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm) has his definition of a learning organisation:

…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.

Characteristics of a Learning organisation: (Senge)

• Systems thinking
• Personal mastery
• Mental models
• Building shared vision
• Team learning

He sees people as agents, able to act upon the structures and systems of they are a part of. These characteristics are ‘concerned with a shift of mind from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future’ (Senge 1990, p69)

OK, so we note people AND systems

Another definition:

“an organization that facilitates the learning of all its members and consciously transforms itself and its context”

Referenced in gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/learning-organization-2

REF:  Senge, P.M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline. London: Century Business.  One of the many internet summaries of this work: gagasgegas.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/review-of-the-fifth-discipline/

OK, what does all this practically mean?

After the Systems and the people, pay attention to Tools + Habits

Possibly some sort of online environment in the organisation with around collaboration, communities. Access to the formal qualifications needed. Gentle shepherding, facilitation of the learning communities.  Unfortunately, organisations have an appalling track record with choosing the right tools.

A little quote from blog post from How to start a small business

It seems that whenever there’s a new technology platform, learning organizations get so excited they end up forgetting the basics.    <snip>   As with any other training, you still must identify the purpose of the learning before developing a program so that purpose and design align.

“Our experience shows that when people complain about learning curve, [it's] not a complaint about learning curve, but a complaint about instructional design,” said Alex Heiphetz, CEO of AHG Inc., which specializes in developing tools and simulations for training and education.”  (Emphasis added)

Making the change is hard. Not all of us have seen the tools really working, and then buy into something quickly.  And I agree with the quote from Alex.  Design has a lot to answer for in some products.

Where to now?

I guess my questions after the meeting are: How to clarify the return on investment? Demonstrate the advantages, and clarify a value proposition . . not simple, but definitely doable.

In some respects (from the point of view of management) it’s all about ‘Improving performance’. A need of management, central funding provider pressures and all that.

How then to then help management support the staff and let them, the staff, manage the learning they need to do the job.

I have moved on from the University of Canterbury.  Below is my old bio.  (From uctl.canterbury.ac.nz/derek-chirnside which is still there as I write this). I’ll be sorting a new version soon.  If I had bothered to update it for 2009, it would have said: “Moodle is in, we now are making the transition to using Moodle.  We have a model for the transition: dividing up the faculties, each with a UCTL contact, introductory workshops and specialist follow on workshops.  Hundreds of courses making the transition in one way or another.

Now I’m doing a contracting work, mainly around workplace learning, staff development and organisational learning – all with an online aspect, and all involving some form of Learning Management System.  (Organisational Learning: there’s a surprise – I’ve been interested in this for a while, but never really had a chance to use any of this except more at a personal level)

(My Old) Profile

I have a background in Physics teaching, having made a switch from Chemistry and Maths. Since 1977 I have taught in a range of schools and settings including intermediate, High School and one year (1998 – at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and CPIT) in Tertiary.

In terms of Educational Design, prior to 2000 I did not even know such a field existed.  However I found I had been doing it for years in a range of teacher professional development projects (including Denis Chapman’s wonderful Riccarton Project) and many national science and physics education conferences. in December 2000 I took over from Alan Cutting at the Christchurch College of Education working in quite a remarkable context: the POLO distance education programme.

In the distance education side of my life I am indebted to Prof Mike Wells (now Professor Emeritus, Montana State University-Bozeman) who taught a distance course I was part of in 1998 (“Real World Problem Solving”, via First Class)  Here he modeled many of the practices I later adopted as my own.  I was ready for 2001 when the courses at the College moved to having a serious online presence with the development of Interact, our home grown learning management system.

In 2002 I was part of the establishment of Learning and Information Services at the College of Education: one of the few institutional restructures I have seen that produced an unequivovably better result than what was left behind.  With Maureen, Rosemary, Kerry, Glen, Bruce, Donna, Rob, Fiona, Angie, Des and Tim we sought to integrate services and support around flexible and distance courses.  This was conceived over some wine and cheese during an Educause conference in Adelaide.

In 2005 I shifted to the UCTL at the University of Canterbury, first on secondment and later as part of the merger.

My role here at UCTL mainly centres around course design, both online and in flexible or blended courses, with some staff development and policy involvement. My specialty areas are blogs and wikis in knowledge management and learning, communities and e-learning.

I use ICT, but I resist people defining me in this light: I am interested in teaching and learning strategies, particularly those that assist engaged or active learning (both online and not). Learning theory has traditionally been classified in three: behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist.  I see a fourth as significant: social practice and situated learning.

Online learning, using online tools: should help improve learning outcomes, save time and help us feel better about our teaching.

Current Activities

Recently: Moodle trial, podcasting workshops, using video clips in online courses.

December 2008. Currently: I am working with Moodle transition (Gradebook, Groups, Forums and wikis), getting StudentNet set up for another year, helping with some case study approaches to classes and a new project with Massey.

Recent Presentations

2007 Oporto, Portugal. Workshop with THEKA (midway through a three year professional development project): Communities of Practice: leadership practices and planning.  Link to Blog Post on this .

2007 Chuxiong University, China: Teaching Strategies to Support Active Learning
Two days of workshops, mainly physics-teacher oriented, but tons of others came.

October 2008: Podcasting Workshops (Tai Pe Tuni Polytechnic, Greymouth)

November 2008: The use of Web 2.0 tools (Blogs and wikis. tagging and RSS) to support ongoing Professional Learning.  Karero Learning Centre, Greymouth.

In the posts on MirandaNet about the axing of BECTA one of the contributors, Leon Cych posted this comment:

I’d much rather see teachers who have developed “open” expertise, sharing it with each other at a social event in a transparent way, rather than traditional models of training. If someone has found an innovative and useful way of working with software or hardware then they often develop a highly developed generic expertise and forge new pedagogies round that and often ways in which it has not been thought of by the software companies themselves. TeachMeets are rapidly becoming seed beds for grass root talents sharing and disseminating 21st Century skills.
I have seen this time and time again at TeachMeets (teachmeet.pbworks.com) and that model is finally beginning to catch on.

From the TeachMeet site:

What are the tried and tested structures from Teachmeets?

• 7 minute short presentation (sometimes 2 or 3 lined up)
• 2 minute nano presentation (3-5 one after the other)
• Break out sessions (@SLF 4 speakers took up 4 different locations, participants chose to listen to who they like)
• Random speakers – Classtools fruit machine.

And this, from teachmeet.pbworks.com/Organise

TeachMeet is an unconference, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need organising. Early on, get a small group together to get everything sorted out for your event

. . . . and some structure/rules:

Some rules might be: no PowerPoints, micro-presentations must last no more than seven minutes, nano presentations no more than two, no selling of products, everything must be happening in a classroom now.

We all know the best parts of conferences are, of course, the coffee breaks and social events, where you get a chance to pore over someone’s laptop for 15 minutes and learn one new really cool thing you can actually use, have late-night discussions over serious stuff, helped along by a few drops of amber. Why not just make this the conference itself? Provide coffee and tea all day long, lots of muffins and biscuits

In other words, PD by the people for the people, what’s happening now, presented by the people doing it. A great structure for an UnConference.

A final comment from Leon:

“Training” is a bit of a cul-de-sac, or rather a one way street, in my opinion. It is a single function or pathway to doing things. Much better develop an independent mindset that can think and route around what resources are available rather than going down a proprietorial route.

A way ahead maybe?  Effectiveness, lower cost – and fun.

We believe that visualizations gain power when multiple people use them to communicate, and that communication gains power when multiple people can visualize and explore information together. We want to democratize visualization, enabling anyone on the internet to publish powerful interactive visualizations and start their own data conversations. Many Eyes is designed to bring that power to you.

This is from the guys who brought us Wordle.  I didn’t know about all this other functionality.

I stumbled upon this post from Gardner Campbells blog Gardner Writes: Kathy Sierra Lives.

A little quote:

Can we find a way to work with our legacy brain to get cognition and affect to work together to get us to our goals?

I can’t help pointing out the John Donne connection here. T. S. Eliot wrote this about Donne: “To Donne, a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.” And I think the process will work in reverse.

Kathy notes that we must choose our cognitive/affect triggers carefully so we encourage relevant practice and not irrelevant personal tangents. I agree, though there’s real artistry needed here, as that legacy brain spam filter will skew “relevance” toward very narrow channels if we’re not careful.

Great point here: adopting a more conversational voice triggers the hold-up-my-end-of-the-conversation reflex in our minds. We feel we’re in a real give-and-take, not simply a one-way broadcast.

We are still in a time delimited workshop training session mentality in many respects.  In the dreadful staff development 90 minute sessions, can we find better ways to engage and focus without imposing a pathway, a straitjacket, a lack of mystery and magic and taking the minds in the room off creativity and originality?

A post worth reading.  I’m sure there are more seeds of Kathy’s recent thoughts floating around on the net.  The top of the Google search produced this from just 11 days ago, a nice 6 minutes that obviously includes some of the ideas in the presentation Gardner comments on:

She didn’t call her blog “Creating passionate Users” for nothing.

The VC has announced serious planned changes.  UCTL to be broken into several chunks, splitting Teaching and learning policy from operational (ie academic development), moving Institutional research into another section away from Academic development, putting the learning Skills centre somewhere else (maybe back where it was 22 months ago).  About a month for submissions.

Sharing is very powerful. In Leigh’s circle, people have sought to develop stuff, posted it as a work in progress to find other people working on similar things just down the road. Bingo: collaboration, synergy, time saving and dare I say it, saving time and feeling better about things. Oh and doing a better job.

What is an OER (Open Educational Resource)?

Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

* Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
* Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
* Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

The term comes from a UNESCO conference in 2002.

There is a LOT of work in developing countries at the moment, building synergy between institutions. Resoures currently being used are worked up and improved. or new resources created. Often funded by some group.

Some think this is a new form of colonialism. http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/08/looking-into-sky-open-ed-oh-nine.html

A quick history of Open Education (from one perspective)

Norman Freisen: wikieducator.org/Open_Education:_Precursors

I presented on day one: http://openedconference.org/program/program-schedule-at-a-glance
I’ve summarised some of the material in some posts here and here.

OK, of what value was this conference?

1. Conversations. I learned a lot about processes for dialogue and moving on thinking. I’m convinced of the unconference model. We just don’t get it in New Zealand. We have a great opportunity at the next e-fest conference, with an unconference day, based on open space approaches. But what are we doing? Starting it with a keynote.
2. Personal. This has been quite remarkable. There was the inner core of mainly guys, but they were generally very approachable. (I’m not sure I’d go so far as the post here: …  to come when I find it)
3. University back home: there is a lot I have learned. I think this whole open ed idea is a thing of the heart. You need to have some sense of connections. Once you do this, things become quite different.
   OK then: how to engage in this at an institutional level? or a department level? or a team level?
4. Global. Still thinking.
   I’d like to go to China or Bangladesh.  I have a proposal.
5. Local. New Zealand wide? Christchurch wide? Too much competition.  But it may be possible on a micro level.

That’s it for now.  If you want to meet: Friday 28th, 12.00pm at Okover house.  But check in with me in case the venue changes.

Twitter emerged at the OPenEd conference complete with conference tag: #opened09.  Not as a trickle, but a steady stream.  I wondered a little at how people kept up until I saw they used some other applications.  Moving into using TweetDeck instantly quadrupled my productivity and ease of use of Twiter. In other words, if you dabble just using the regular Tweeter interface it takes too much time and there are too many overheads.

But when and how do we learn about these new things?

1. There is a discipline in following up on a piece of new technology
2. You need to make some decisions on how beneficial it is, or is not going to be, and we often don’t get this right
3. It took this conference as a catalyst to properly lure me into this.

Aside: The buzz word is microblogging.  I stumbled on this little romantic piece about twittering from Richard Smith who we met last Saturday: Is twitter the latest thing? Or is it an ancient thing, writ new? I argue the latter.

It seemed to me there was not much blogging about the conference during the conference, and that many people were putting their energy into tweets and personal conversations. Probably a good thing. Here is Tony Hirsts’s post on visualizing Twitter and the connections at the conference:

http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/preliminary-thoughts-on-visualising-the-opened09-twitter-network/

Long term I’m not sure how I will cope with Twitter.  There is such a flow of information, the responses and the follow up often are so fragmentary.  But we shall see.  I’ll get a plug in on this blog.  Which one? To be decided.

But, during the conference it was stimulating, sparking off many side conversations.  It favours the quick typists, then the people who can think two things at once, or quickly change from a moment, send their tweet and then return.  Several observations:

Lost gems: Some passing comments seemed to just disappear into the flow of posts. Others got picked up and retweeted. I notice in the help documentation the abbreviation RT for retweet is not regarded as a standard Twitter phrase but is extremely popular.

Democracy (or not): In some respects, some voices are louder than others. On the other hand, there is a democratization process at work and a comment from somebody, even a non-attender of a conference via Twitter, can help bring a new thought into the conversations.

Unfinished conversations: Just like some things can get lost, some things can be just unfinished. An example of this, in particular, is the final session on Thursday with David Wiley looking at the quality of OERs. The question of voting, metadata, personal recommendations, tags and so on was completely unresolved at the time, and there were a lot of half-finished conversations.  There were a large number of diverse threads to this particular discussion. Personally I was finding it difficult to decide what to give my attention to. Often it came down to a case of what was personally interesting to me at the time, versus what might have had specific long-term value for my work situation back home; after all they have helped to fund this trip.

The serious blogging came after the conference.

• Divide the board into sections
• Hold the chalk at the horizontal
• Use the same colours for headings and subheadings each time
• Underline with a squiggly line rather than a straight line (because nobody can draw a straight line)
• Keep a section for first appearance of terms, vocab
• Throw the blackboard duster at a student
• Rub off section by section so slow scribblers can catch up on copying what you wrote 10 minutes ago
• Have blackboard monitors or helpers, beacause kids love erasing and clapping out dusters
• Colour in a new blackboard with side of a piece of chalk, then erase normally to ³prime² it for use
• Fun fact: chalk is not actually made from chalk rock (calcium carbonate), but from calcium sulfate in its dihydrate form, gypsum.

From an e-mail Mike Dickison http://www.giantflightlessbirds.com/

Yesterday, the last of the conference, a trip to Whistler.

Last night tea with Randy, Patricia Schmitt and Christine Geith, all with a Wikieducator connection.

Today is Saturday, we took the Ferry to Bowen Island for a meetup with Peter Rawsthorne http://www.rawsthorne.org/ after some canoeing (6 hours, I didn’t think I was up to it so I’m hanging around the organic market waiting for the bluegrass music festival to start). This is 20 minutes free internet in the library.

Close to being like paradise here.