Learn 4 Life

Outside the Wire - passing notes in class - how interconnectedness is speeding things up

Photo attribution TKCS on Flickr CC some rights reserved licence.

As an example of what I mean by mindset and informal learning in the previous post, I’m going to give a few examples in a series of articles on how people are joining up to create new and exciting practice and spaces in and outside education like never before.

Informal/ Formal Real Life and Virtual Connections

Practitioners are now connected by several informal networks that enable them to share resources at a blistering speed and to distill and innovate what they do in highly interactive ways; and the ways they are joining up these Personal Learning Networks to do all the heavy lifting in 21st Century education is quite breathtaking. The teachers, researchers and consultants involved are plumbed into a system of Web 2.0 apps often by mobile phone, laptops and handheld devices, but forget the tech, think communication and transformation.

Their mindset is exactly the same mindset of developers and business startups in the “real world” - but get this, the spaces they all inhabit are highly ad hoc, often virtual-to-real learning spaces and vice versa, and they are joining up at a faster and faster rate.

People who populate these spaces, are engaged in immersive interactive learning, whether they be in business, academia or teaching, and they seem to share much of the same vision - they speak the same language and they are doing quite amazing things. A new Digital Culture is evolving.

None of them have had any training - they simply share, use and do and then remix again and it is in a completely flat digital landscape where hierarchies get you nowhere but your individual value to the group does. Try not engaging or sharing and you’ll soon find yourself Billy no mates. The environment is collaborative - sure people lurk and suck in info without giving out but they are missing out on all the fun!

Last week I attended the Handheld Learning Conference 08 but I never went there in person. I was following the backchannel on Twitter and if you don’t know what Twitter is then read and listen to Martin Weller’s wonderful slideshare presentation. I made a few predictions back in May of last year and some of them are certainly coming true.

Attribution palk:i on Flikr CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Backchannels

Backchannel? Backchannels and talkback channels have been in the recording, radio and TV studios for decades but only now is that concept coming into sharp relief in education mostly because of the size and connectivity of devices. Some of the delegates were writing and sending electronic text based comments back and forth on the conference presentation and on their day there - they were sitting facing the speaker in real time in real life but they were backchatting on digital devices and others were joining the conversation remotely.  Not only that, but one attendee was blogging the whole thing live using Coveritlive, and discussing (through text on the browser) the proceedings with people writing on the Twitter back channel, #HHL08, about the presentations as they were happening - people logged in from all over the world to contribute.

Think of it as passing notes and photos under the table in class but in this instance people were passing them over timezones and continents as well - all highly engaged in the proceedings. Some people were following it on mobile phones from their classrooms, others, like me on a laptop at home, and others still between workbreaks or in all sorts of socially distributed situations - some may even have been following on text notice boards in Second Life through RSS feeds for all I know but I doubt it.

Photo attribution Mark Kramer

Recording Informal Ad Hoc Interaction around Formal Proceedings

The keynote speech given there by danah boyd has been generously uploaded to the web by Grahame Brown-Martin but the scoop of the day was Mark Kramer’s informal interview with her before she talked - which had all sorts of insightful and touching elements. It underpinned and augmented what she had to say later formally.

Informal Social Learning

And even later still - some people who were monitoring the proceeding met up in real life in pubs and restaurants face to face and a lot of informal social learning went on. This was posted out in real time to sites like Qik.com.

At the end of the conference I joined people face to face and people presented informal ’show and tell’ discussions to each other about a number of different topics.

So my experience was:

• some remote learning (looking at conference videos and monitoring Twitter feeds)
• some informal networked learning (as above)
• and some face to face social learning (going down the pub or restaurant and show and tell)

Teacher exemplars of using Personal Learning Networks

Now, earlier in the day, as I was reading and participating in that discussion, an even more amazing event happened at the same time. Two teachers in different classrooms in different parts of London (I’m presuming here by the context) started up another conversation.

The first teacher asked for help with making a contents page in M$ Word.

Literally, within minutes, the second teacher also in class (I’m also presuming here as the narration was personalised) put up a link to a screencast presentation on the basics of how to do it.

The message had gone out and someone from that teacher’s Personal Learning Network cared enough to make and prepare that resource on the fly and post a link back. That is what I mean about mindset and a can-do attitude.

We need a teaching workforce like this. Not one that is constrained by current outmoded ways of doing things. Teachers are joining up in peer to peer learning networks to advance their craft but all too often they are restricted by instiutional policies and guidelines on what they can and cannot do outside the wire in informal virtual space.

This needs to change.