The question about ownership of learning—engagingly examined by Alan November in a book and a TEDx talk we’re exploring in Rethinking —is important and double-edged for any trainer-teacher-learner working within a digital environment. It makes us think about who retains (or should retain) access to all our discussions, learning objects, and other tangible aspects of the online-learning process that are usually lost to us once a course formally concludes and the course learning management system is closed to learners. The question also makes us think about who has responsibility for nurturing and sustaining the (lifelong) learning process that is an essential component to fostering digital literacy.
More importantly, we shape those discussions and artifacts collaboratively and through our own initiative—this is learner-centric, learner-driven learning at a very high and productive level. We have learned to take the responsibility for asking what we can do rather than relying solely on others to facilitate our learning process. For the tweet chat last night, a couple of us prepared the script with questions to be used during the tweet chat. We facilitated the session. I then edited and posted the Storify transcript of the event so other members of the community could be part of the effort to use and disseminate that resource. The result is that while learning, we also made—and are continuing to make—it possible for others who want to learn more about hyperlinked learning to do so while also seeing how a self-directed community of learning operates.
What made the session particularly interesting was how often the discussion about hyperlinked learning actually became an example of hyperlinked learning. There was the moment, for example, when we had a unexpected appearance from Alec Couros, who with his own original group of co-conspirators designed and facilitated that MOOC that inspired us to assume shared ownership (without in any way excluding Alec) of the #etmooc learning community. And there were plenty of other moments when learning by hyperlink drew in new colleagues as well as a few we hadn’t seen in quite a while. Nothing could speak more viscerally and meaningfully to the topic of hyperlinked learning than a community so completely hyperlinked that interactions continue to grow rhizomatically—a theme we explored during the formal course and continue to explore and nurture with every new action we take.
Rereading the Storify transcript a few times led to additional reflection—and learning—for me throughout the day today as I continued to produce this article. I repeatedly was struck by how the act of collaboratively shaping our learning experiences means that we hone other digital-literacy skills at the same time: being able to work within ever-changing online environments; being willing to contribute to our own learning and to the growth of our learning communities; and being able to capture discussions, learning objects, and other aspects of the learning process so they remain accessible rather than locked away in something akin to the storage crate housing the Lost Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
As I return to my Rethinking Digital Literacy co-conspirators—those learners who are so creatively and effectively crafting their own learning experiences—I look with admiration at the ways they are, in Week 3 of our four-week course, continuing to expand the ways they interact across as many digital platforms as possible. They—we—will leave distinct traces, if not much larger artifacts, of our time and collaborative learning efforts. It’s what was done in #etmooc; it’s what some of us have done in the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) and the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses); and it’s what is creating the possibility that what we create during our four formal weeks of shared learning will remain accessible to current learning community members as well as to others who might want to learn from what we are accomplishing together.
In these dynamic, digitally-literate learning communities driven by hyperlinked learning, connected learning, connectivist-learning precepts, we are all co-conspirators. And we all own the learning, in every possible sense.
Frequent flyers, at one time or another, have the disorienting experience of having to consciously look for reminders of where we are; our minds simply can’t keep up with the frequent leaps between cities, states, and, occasionally, countries. Frequent learners engaged in co-learning (what Edward Brantmeier describes as the act of changing roles so teachers and learners become “joint sojourners on the quest for knowledge, understanding, and…wisdom”) within the world of connected learning may be facing a parallel challenge in at least a couple of ways; when interacting with connected-learning colleagues, we need to remind ourselves which of our wonderfully overlapping communities of learning we are currently engaging (Is this #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course? #xplrpln—the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC? #oclmooc—the Open and Connected Learning MOOC? #ccourses—the Connected Courses MOOC? Or all of the above?), and we have to remember that the line between teacher/trainer and learner is increasingly dissipating in the best of teaching-training-learning opportunities.
“The Case of #etmooc”—a learning opportunity that is less than two hours away as I write these words—shows us just how all-encompassing, rewarding, and intricately interwoven co-learning can be when it is effectively supported. The one-hour webinar, which initiates a two-week-long exploration of co-learning within the Connected Learning MOOC (#ccourses) and will be archived online for viewing, promises to be an example of how co-learning works to the benefit of everyone involved. Start with the idea that #ccourses facilitators are using the session to examine how co-learning in #etmooc contributed to the creation of a community of learning that still continues more than 18 months after that connectivist MOOC formally concluded. Continue with the fact that the learning facilitators have transformed several of us who are current #ccourses learners into co-learners by inviting us to join them in the formal discussion and recording of the session this evening. Then consider the idea that one of those #ccourses facilitators, Alec Couros, was among those who introduced so many of us to connected learning and connectivist MOOCs while deepening our appreciation of co-learning through all he and his “co-conspirators” did to bring #etmooc to fruition.
And that’s not all. Among the co-learners are colleagues from #etmooc, #xplrpln, and #oclmooc. But not just any colleagues. We’ll be with Jeff Merrell, an #etmooc learner who crossed the co-learning line last year by playing a key role in designing and facilitating #xplrpln. And we’ll be there with several of the #etmooc learners who, having sustained the #etmooc community since the course ended, reunited earlier this year to design and deliver #oclmooc. If it’s beginning to sound as if “The Case of #etmooc” is another homecoming party for many of us, a celebration of how co-learning in online environments fosters training-teaching-learning opportunities unlike any we could have imagined a decade or two ago, and an invitation to the ball, then #etmooc, #xplrpln, #oclmooc, and #ccourses are doing exactly what great learning opportunities should do: providing learning spaces where no one stands alone at the front or in the center of the room, where new long-lasting cohorts of learners/co-learners gather and coalesce, and where everyone with the least amount of interest is welcome. And the best is yet to come since so many of us continually engage in the overlapping roles of teacher-trainer-learner: we will, no doubt, continue to adapt our ongoing co-learning experiences in ways that invite our own learners to, sooner than later, become co-learners in our jointly-shared endeavors.
A recent week-long trip to spend time with Association for Talent Development (ATD) colleagues and other friends in the Washington, D.C. area provided yet another reminder of how seamlessly interwoven our blended (onsite-online) communities have become. Walls are permeable. Distances become negligible. And connections—and connected learning—are abundant in many parts of the world.
What made “Perfect Blend” work for so many of us was the onsite interactions my colleagues and I had with Samantha, who participated in the session, from her home in the Chicago area, via a Google Hangout. Samantha and I had successfully engaged in this level of interaction with other ATD colleagues several times, so the gist of what she, Larry, and I were attempting to convey was that tools such as Hangouts and Twitter, when used effectively, make it possible for us to feel as if we’re physically in the same space with people who are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s telepresence without the associated high price tag. And, once again, it worked very well as we quickly jettisoned the formal presentation we had prepared and simply engaged with our colleagues face-to-face, via the Hangout, and via the Twitter stream that Larry so masterfully managed during the hour-long session. As the session came to an end, we knew that we had effectively answered a question I asked at the beginning of the hour (“how big is this room?”) with the obvious answer: our room—our learning space—is as big as our use of technology makes it—700 miles wide if we consider the distance between Chicago (where Samantha was sitting) and the Washington, D.C. area, where most of us were participating. Or a couple of thousand miles wide if we consider some of the interactions we had via Twitter with others during and after the formal session.
And that’s what I saw throughout the week. The conversations during the “Perfect Blend” session were interwoven with face-to-face and online exchanges in the days preceding and following that learning opportunity. Some were with ATD colleagues; others were with my #oclmooc and #ccourses colleagues. They even carried over, via the conference backchannel, into exchanges with training-teaching-learning colleagues who were completely unfamiliar with the ATD Chapter Leaders Conference, but entered the conversations a bit and interacted directly with each other without any previous face-to-face or online contact by retweeting comments from the conference and offering their own observations about the various topics we were discussing. They extended further as I had brief exchanges with learners in the “Rethinking Library Instruction: Libraries as Social Learning Centers” I’m currently facilitating for the American Library Association, and carried some of those learners’ thoughts back to my ATD Chapter Leaders Conference colleagues.
So I return to the expansive question—how big is our room?—and see, as I shared with many of those colleagues, that the room is as big as we and our technology can make it. Cross-country. International. And even above the planet. Which makes our social learning space a wonderfully large and magnificent place to be.
It’s not often that I feel inspired to try live tweeting during a cross-country flight. But then again, I don’t often have the opportunity to explore the extreme edges of connected learning with colleagues while more than 37,000 feet above the surface of our planet. There’s something very satisfying about this sort of learning experience that becomes an ouroboros-like example of itself, and I’m trying to literally go full circle by blogging about it before my WiFi-enabled flight from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco lands.
We can start with this connected-learning ouroboros by noting that many of us in several countries are currently learning about connected learning by participating in at least one of two connectivistmassive open online courses (MOOCs): the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) and the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses). We can then follow the curve of this figurative ouroboros by adding the fact that a live Week 3 (“Collaboration and Community”) event within #oclmooc connected us, via Blackboard Collaborate, to a highly interactive session about The Global Read Aloud that connects young learners, teachers, parents, librarians, and others around the world through the reading of a specific book within a well-defined period of time. The #oclmooc interwoven connections circle around further by bringing us together with Global Read Aloud creator Pernille Ripp and with Kelli Holden, an Alberta-based fourth-grade teacher involved in The Global Read Aloud. We see our growing interconnections circling back to their point of origin through online connections fostered by live-tweeting from a few of us who were participating in the session in the United States and Canada. And I find my own connected-learning experience enhanced by trying something new—something inspired by necessity: participating in this session from the air rather than on ground because it is taking place while I’m in transit—something that previously kept me from being part of learning opportunities I had not wanted to miss.
Once we move past the novelty of engaging in this level of air-to-earth connected learning (in this case, learning about the Global Read Aloud with colleagues spread over an enormous geographic range), we realize once again that the technology takes a back seat to the content—and the learning. We hear Pernille talking about how she was inspired by a dream of a world connected by a book when she was creating Project Read Aloud. We visit the project website and read her reminder that “[g]lobal collaboration is necessary to show students that they are part of something bigger than them” and that endeavors such as The Global Read Aloud provide opportunities for them to speak to each other. We learn that more than 300,000 students are currently connecting through the project, and that more than 500,000 from more than 60 countries have participated since Project Read Aloud began in summer 2010. And we wonder what we might be doing to translate that sort of massive open online and onsite labor of love into efforts that would be equally compelling, engaging, and rewarding for adult learners around the world.
Holden then builds upon her own connected-learning efforts in this arena by letting us know that the participants are using many of the same tools we use within our connectivist MOOCs, including Twitter and Google+ communities. She tells us that using a Twitter backchannel can be as rewarding and engaging for the young Global Read Aloud participants as it can be for the adult communities of learning that foster effective backchannels. We see through chat exchanges that the end of this session will not be the end of the connections #oclmooc is inspiring. And the world begins to look even more connected from 37,000 feet than I ever imagined it could be.
We shouldn’t be surprised when we discover that our communities—onsite as well as online—are less safe than we expect them to be. But we are. Because we really do want to believe the best of people even though so many of them/us prove to be less than worthy of that trust. Which is probably why “trust” and “community and collaboration” are among the important aspects of online learning currently receiving attention both in the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) and the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) communities of learning.
These two connectivistmassive open online courses (MOOCs) are creating a wonderful sense of what is possible in well-managed and well-supported communities of learning. They are also providing ample opportunities—some of them unanticipated—for us to celebrate the positive side of online interactions and to react and respond to the less savory side of the online world—rather than abandoning online interactions completely.
An experience two online learning colleagues described earlier today reminded me that regardless of how digitally literate we become, we are going to have to ready for and confront online violations within our communities—particularly when we least expect them. It serves us well to be as prepared as possible to react strongly and positively when that moment arrives. My colleagues—both well versed in online interactions via a variety of mainstream platforms including Twitter and Google+ Hangouts—had their moment today when someone posing as a member of one of their learning communities joined a Hangout they were facilitating. Before they knew what was happening, they were exposed to an obviously unwanted sight: a close-up image of the man’s genitals. They quickly shut the session down, and then engaged in a debrief of what we all might learn.
This is where our connected learning efforts provide positive options for us. While recognizing that we’re never going to be able to completely eradicate this unwelcome behavior, we also recognize that the best way to combat it is to shine light on it. Connect with others to share resources and ideas of how to most quickly push it aside so our communities remain as positive and unsoiled as they possible can be (e.g., by publicly disseminating guides like Google’s “Report Abuse in Public Video Hangouts in Google+”). And make sure that, for every individual subjected to this sort of violation, thousands of other people are vigilantly acting together to object to and push away those unwanted acts of aggression.
I hope my colleagues will follow through on their plan to document what happened to them. I hope that all of us find ways to marginalize those who want to make our communities less than they should be. And I hope that we take the time to do what I’m about to do: support our proactive colleagues by drawing more attention to their best work—like the work of Sarah Houghton, who blogs as Librarian in Black.
Sarah is a trusted and cherished colleague who tirelessly addresses issues—like face-to-face and online harassment—consistently, directly, and often with a sense of humor even when she is documenting the most distressing, disgusting situations imaginable. Many of us—after moving beyond the initial shock we felt upon reading what she was describing—stood up and cheered (privately and publicly) when she first described the levels of harassment to which she had been subjected by members of her profession; we supported her because what was done to her hurt (and continues to hurt) all of us, and we wanted to be sure that others knew that when they disrupted our community, we would do all we could to stop the disruption. When she addressed the controversy brewing around efforts to create a code of conduct for conference attendees, we were right there with her to be sure those posting anonymous obscene responses were drowned out by calls for positive action. And when Sarah recently wrote a deeply personal article about the toll violations have taken on her, we were quick to publicly and vocally outnumber the first anonymous respondent who was naïve enough to believe that abusive comments online would be allowed to stand unchallenged on our virtual community’s turf.
That’s what we do for Sarah. That’s what we do for our #ccourses colleagues. That’s what we do for our #oclmooc colleagues. And that’s what we do for ourselves. Because we care. Because we trust that connected learning and connectivist MOOCs and the care and cultivation of our online communities matters. And because we must.
It’s difficult to know where to start in describing how the learning connections expanded rapidly and rhizomatically during that one-hour session that was fast-paced and well-facilitated by #oclmooc co-conspiratorVerena Roberts. There’s a temptation to talk about the obvious connections to be made between #oclmooc and the equally fabulous Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) community of learning since at least a few of us are participating in both and extending conversations between the two MOOC communities. There’s also the temptation to talk about how the #oclmooc session and so much of what we’re doing in #ccourses is making us more aware and appreciative of the importance of personal learning networks in learning—particularly since #ccourses just produced an engaging and inspiring session on “Social Capital and PLNs: Discovering, Building, and Cultivating Networks of Learners,” as I documented in a blog article posted yesterday. There is even a temptation to focus on the fact that what was originally designed to be a MOOC to connect educators in Alberta (Canada) quickly morphed into a MOOC open to—and attracting participation from—trainer-teacher-learners around the world (an obviously brazen and much-appreciated attempt by our Alberta colleagues to make the entire world a protectorate of Alberta and its innovative onsite-online learning community!).
But what was most interesting to me at a personal level was how the open conversation taking place within Twitter drew in colleagues not previously connected through either MOOC. This has happened to me in other MOOCs, as I wrote in an earlier article, and I would be surprised if it hasn’t happened to others engaged in connected-learning environments. What was noteworthy and unexpected this time was how quickly everyone naturally and playfully fell into exchanges that suggest the blossoming of new learning—and, more importantly for explorations and documentation of how connected-learning works, the blossoming of new learning relationships, as Verena quipped when it became obvious that one of my New Mexico-based colleagues from the New Media Consortium had seen one of my tweets and retweeted it to her own followers. Not more than a few minutes passed before a Kansas-based colleague from an entirely different community of learning—the American Library Association Learning Round Table—saw my online admission that I hadn’t yet participated in edcamp activities.
“You, of all people, need to crash an edcamp,” she commanded with mock consternation shared openly with other #oclmooc participants. “Get with it.”
And to emphasize yet another element of these connected-learning rhizomatically-expanding interactions—the idea that our online interactions are not and need not all be conducted synchronously—I later realized, while reviewing a record of the #oclmooc tweet chat, that a North Carolina-based colleague that I know well from yet another first-rate community of learning (#lrnchat) had also responded with an edcamp response directed to two #oclmooc members and one other #lrnchat colleague.
The tally of net gains (networked gains?) from the session, then, include a strengthening of the #oclmooc community, which was designed to foster greater communication between teacher-trainer-learners; more cross-pollination between #oclmooc and #ccourses through the tweets and this follow-up blog post; the possible beginning of interactions between various members of my own personal learning network outside of the MOOCs and members of the two connectivist MOOCs—with no need for me to remain anywhere near the center of those interactions; additional interactions between all of us and a group of young connected-learning students we were encouraged to contact through their own group blogging efforts; and the pleasure of encountering new ideas through articles—including Clay Shirky’s essay “Why I Just Asked My Students to Put Away Their Laptops,” and Laura Hilliger’s article “Teach the Web (MOOC)”—mentioned during the live tweet chat. And there clearly is much more to come.
When learning turns in on itself, the results are magnificent—as is the case when we learn about personal learning networks (PLNs) by engaging with members of our personal learning networks, for example.
Social Capital and PLNs, the opening session in a two-week exploration of “Trust and Network Fluency” through the three-month #ccourses MOOC, brought together a dynamic panel of experts (Kira Baker-Doyle as moderator, with Cristina Cantrill, Meenoo Rami, Howard Rheingold, and Shelly Sanchez Terrell as participants). The tips and reminders were wonderful; the interactions with those panelists and with #ccourses learners via Twitter were engaging reminders that this is a community of learning that is quickly connecting numerous personal learning networks around the world. And each individual learner is a node within that ever-growing network of networks.
The session, early on, included a reminder that, for many teachers (and other learning facilitators, I would add), Twitter is a starting point in developing social capital. Just as Twitter can rapidly increase our contacts with valuable colleagues we might otherwise not encounter, our PLNs can serve as “social magnifiers,” Rheingold suggested. Bringing value to our online interactions is essential, he continued: when we give away things of value (e.g., shared resources and links to useful information), we draw upon a “reservoir of reciprocity,” contribute to the value of the PLNs, and strengthen our own positions as valuable members within those interwoven and incredibly extensive personal learning networks—as all of us participating saw time and time again during our hour together.
Acknowledging the reciprocity and uniqueness of social capital helps us better appreciate it, he continued: the more social capital we spend, the more we have.
This was obvious throughout the session. As we provided resources for each other, we gathered even more, including links to a Storify document containing Rheingold’s tweeted tips for developing PLNs at one point, for example, and to the Peeragogy handbook—a “collection of techniques for collaborative learning and collaborative work”—at another.
PLNs, we were reminded, are not just about learning; they provide emotional support and can be important resources that sustain us when we are beginning to feel overwhelmed, Terrell suggested. They also are among the resources we need to help our learners master—by helping those learners acquire the skills to effectively function within and use them; helping them understand that online social networks are not necessarily just for fun; and promoting the idea that good PLNs ask as much of their members as they offer.
Developing PLNs can include relatively simple steps: finding “your hashtag,” for example—the hashtag that brings someone together with other members of his or her learning community.
What helps those communities coalesce is the realization that making and building things together is an essential part of cementing relationships within communities—which suggests that for those of us creating teaching-training-learning opportunities through active participation in #ccourses, #oclmooc, and other first-rate learning opportunities, there is positive result of drawing ever closer to having even stronger learning communities and personal learning networks than we previously believed possible.
The more we explore connected learning through connectivistmassive open online courses, the more room we see to push beyond our own perceptions of how far we can carry the connected-learning experience, I learned again last week.
I quickly cast aside the onsite-online dichotomy, however, by connecting to the onsite wireless network before the first session began, and spent significant parts of the day carrying the onsite experience online by using Twitter in two ways: to capture learning moments I could return to later as a way of reviewing what I had heard, and to share what I saw as the learning highlights with colleagues who were not present—including my learning partners in #ccourses and #oclmooc.
Attending Mike Ryan’s extremely well-organized and engaging session on m-learning (mobile learning) that afternoon pushed me beyond anything I had expected to pursue in terms of connecting various communities of learning through a completely blended learning opportunity with synchronous and asynchronous elements. It was clear to me immediately that Ryan was providing a tweeter’s dream: a presentation where key points were provided sequentially and concisely enough to provide a narrative flow via a stream of tweets. It was also equally clear to me that combining those tweets into one document would produce a learning object that could be shared with colleagues in a variety of settings—which made me realize I had the perfect impetus to learn how to use Storify, since that free online tool is designed to do exactly what I wanted to do: put the tweets in sequence and add commentary that transformed them into a basic asynchronous lesson online that could be adapted for a variety of situations. I came full circle when I realized I could interweave the Storify narrative with this blog post to help colleagues review some m-learning basics while also learning how to use Storify itself.
It wasn’t, for example, initially obvious to me from the Storify edit screen that I needed to click on the Twitter icon and log into my account to access the tweets I wanted to incorporate into the story; the online document quickly moved me past that challenge. The document also made it obvious that once I had completed a search for tweets that were unified by the hashtag I had used (#ATDsac), I could either move all the tweets into the Storify edit screen or move them one by one to manually put them in sequence. (Tweets appear in reverse chronological order in feeds, so we see the last tweet first; Storify gives us the option of manually carrying them over into the edit screen in correct chronological order to literally tell the story sequentially, and also allows us to click on an edit button that reverses the order of tweets within the screen to create the correct start-to-finish narrative flow if they are in their initial latest-to-earliest sequence.)
This exercise in connected learning became most interesting for me when I realized that the tweets, by themselves, adequately conveyed the basics, but that adding narrative would produce an interesting hybrid between a record of tweets and a more thoughtful lesson-in-a-blog format that could then be interwoven with a formal blog post—the article you’re reading now.
The result is a “package” that includes the stand-alone Storify story and this stand-alone blog post that also work well in tandem—as long as links within each learning object easily lead reader-learners from one to the other. And the added benefit to me as a trainer-teacher-learner is that I’m building upon what I’ve seen colleagues do, extending the onsite learning within that ATD community of learning into my online communities of learning, and providing yet another example for anyone interested in exploring innovative uses of open tools in ways that transform them into ed-tech tools that serve our partners in learning.
Immersed in the opening segments of the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) over the past few weeks and diving in as a “co-conspirator” at the formal launch of the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) in an online session this evening is leaving me a bit breathless. Dazed. Inspired. And ready for even more after seeing and hearing keynote presenter/facilitator Dave Cormier dazzle participants with an overview of how to learn effectively within connectivist MOOCs.
Part of the thrill of learning from and with Cormier, of course, is knowing that he is the person credited with coining the term MOOC in 2008, as we are reminded in a wonderful and concise overview of the development of MOOCs posted on Canvas. The “What Is a Connectivist MOOC?” page online, with a link to his “What Is a MOOC?” video, has been a magnificent starting point for any of us interested in understanding what MOOCs are and how they work. So spending an hour online with him and more than a dozen other trainer-teacher-learners exploring how MOOCs fit into our learning landscape reminds us –as another MOOCmate observed this week—that “massive” doesn’t need to mean “massive numbers of people”; it can mean “massive potential”—as in potentially transformative.
Members of our #oclmooc community of learning—like the community of learning that is developing in #ccourses—join these sessions to become more conversant in online learning and all that connected learning suggests and offers. And the learning in embedded in the experience of participating in the sessions since we interact in online environments including Blackboard Collaborate and Google Hangouts while carrying the conversation outside the virtual classroom by way of live interactions on Twitter. And we continue the learning, conversations, and collaborations—we can’t have one without the others in the world of connected learning—via postings in our Google+ #oclmooc and #ccourses communities, via blog postings where learners respond to one another and carry conversations across blog sites, and in many other ways.
This extended online connectivist network, Cormier reminded us, is never coherent; it’s always “messy” and “real”—“like life.” But that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible or impossible to navigate. In #oclmooc, we have our base camp in a WordPress site that allows us to provide and access updates through a table of contents extending down the right side of that home page; it’s a great resource designed to help learners keep their bearings whether they are completely new to the course or returning days, weeks, months, or even years after its initial offering. In #ccourses, we have a similar base camp that operates at an even more sophisticated level; the table of contents extends from left to right near the top of the home page, and engagement begins directly below that banner in the form of continually updated links to blog postings and tweets that create the rhizomatically-expanding connections between those who are actively participating in the #ccourses connected-learning experience.
If all of this somehow suggests that we are in an era of abundant learning and opportunities to be connected within our communities of learning, we are right where Cormier has tried to lead us. Reviewing centuries of learning methodology in a very brief presentation, he suggested that we are returning to what we once cherished in face-to-face verbal engagement. The twist that connectivist MOOCs provide is that we no longer have to be face-to-face for that level of engagement, he reminded us. The rhizomatic nature of learning within connectivist MOOCs, he continued, makes our learning wild, uncontrollable, difficult to manage—and powerful. And at the heart of the process is the realization that “the community is the curriculum,” he said. (The community, as I noted recently in an article for the New Media Consortium blog, is also immersed in creating the “textbooks” that facilitate our learning, with the MOOCs functioning as multimedia and multifaceted textbooks developed by the communities of learning themselves. Cormier quotes his colleague George Siemens as saying that MOOCs are “the Internet happening to education”; I would add that connectivist MOOCs are communities of learning happening to textbooks, and every active participant is, in a very real sense, a co-conspirator.)
Anyone new to connectivist MOOCs had, by the end of the session, not only been engaged in helping create the learning experience through contributing to content within online whiteboards, but had also heard Cormier recap five learning tips he includes in his online video: take time to become effectively oriented to the learning landscape rather than letting it overwhelm you; “declare” yourself within your learning community by sharing information about yourself with your learning colleagues; network by posting content and responding to content posted by others; “cluster” by working within subgroups of the learning community rather than unrealistically expecting to read and respond to every online contribution; and “focus” in a way that keeps you from burning out and succumbing to the idea that you have better things to do than to stay with the learning community as long as it is continuing to support the learning needs that initially attracted you to the MOOC.
It’s the job of learners to give each other a chance to know each other, he noted, and it’s essential to engage with a broad range of people: “You can’t collaborate alone!”
As if to remind us that we are our own worst critics, Cormier facetiously referred to himself as a “slacker” as the session was reaching its conclusion. When pressed, he attempted a clarification: he’s “lazy,” but “an enthusiast.” Which, in the world of connectivist MOOCs and connected learning, may leave us with a wonderfully apt description that applies to each of us—“lazy enthusiasts”—which keeps our collective sense of humor intact while we navigate those wild, uncontrollable, difficult to manage, and powerful learning moments that are endemic through courses like #oclmooc and #ccourses.
This is far from the usual review of how well learners do within the confines of an explicitly defined learning experience—a semester-long course or, by extension, the sort of workplace learning and performance (staff training) offering that so many of us as trainer-teacher-learners provide and then review through a formal assessment process. It’s a connected-learning session that takes us into the outer reaches of models like Donald Kirkpatrick’sfour levels of learning, where the gold standard is to ask what impact the learning eventually has not only on the learner, but on the community the learner ultimately serves. And it encourages us to take the learner’s point of view into account rather than focusing solely on the learning facilitator’s or learning organization’s vantage point.
“When you look from the perspective of the learner…the learning ecosystem looks very different than when you’re looking from the perspective of the class,” Ito reminds us during the session; it requires that we are as cognizant of what the learners bring to the learning space as we are of our own approach to facilitating the learning process—thinking about the learners “and how our practices in the classroom connect back out.”
“We want to take a long view of the outcomes,” Penuel suggests. “Do kids get to where they want to go next?…Where did this class lead them?”—questions we should just as firmly be asking within any training-teaching-learning setting.
All three presenters lead us into the deeper, far more significant question: Do we follow up with our learners to see “whether learning made a difference in their lives?”
“We have so few tools and practices that enable us to know what happened to students over time…a lot of these outcomes play out over time…you don’t really know what happens a few years down the line because nobody actually studies that,” Ito says.
But the picture is not completely bleak, she adds. A Gallup-Purdue University study released in May 2014 and designed to document post-graduation levels of workplace engagement and overall “well-being” provides some guidance for learning facilitators seeking ways to provide long-term positive benefits through their efforts. Learning that was project-based and that provided meaningful connections between the learners and those facilitating their learning led to significantly higher levels of workplace engagement and overall chances that the learners would thrive “in all areas of well-being.”
“It’s not just what kids got out of the course…but what happens next, “Ito reiterated.
Much of this, of course, leads us back to the goal of better understanding what connected-learning practices (fostering learner-centric approaches, finding ways to “harness the advances and innovations of our connected age to serve learning,” and nurturing deeper learning and understanding) might provide for learners of all ages, in a variety of training-teaching-learning settings.
“Interest is the beginning point, but the idea of cultivating an interest is that you don’t know where it is going to go,” Penuel notes. “Our interests are really a starting point, and we really do need experiences of various kinds that allow us to learn in order to deepen them—so develop knowledge related to our interests, to engage with others in relation to our interests—to find out what others are interested in and to perhaps do something with them. I think interests evolve, and I think new interests emerge from this deep engagement.”
All three presenters, as the session draws to an end, remind us that we are not lacking resources if we want to join them in their explorations. The Connected Learning Research Network, for example, engages in learning research, design, and practice. And the National Survey of Student Engagement is currently looking into how much time and effort students in higher education put into their learning—as well as how our colleagues in higher education are “deploying resources” to foster engagement among learners.
As we reflect upon what #ccourses and another current connectivist MOOC—the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc)—offer trainer-teacher-learners in terms of guidance and inspiration, we can’t help but be encouraged. They remind us to reflect upon what our own learning produces. They also consistently and continually serve as examples of how the connections these connected-learning opportunities contribute to our own growth, productivity, and satisfaction within the extended communities of learning we create, nurture, and sustain over a very long period of time.
Celebrating Life. Making positive connections and collaborating with people from around the world. Living everyday with positive energy, possibility, passion and peace of mind. Learning from a School Counsellor lens. I'm not a Counsellor because I want to make a living. I am a Counsellor because I want to make a difference. Gratitude for ETMOOC roots.
The question about ownership of learning—engagingly examined by Alan November in a book and a TEDx talk we’re exploring in Rethinking —is important and double-edged for any trainer-teacher-learner working within a digital environment. It makes us think about who retains (or should retain) access to all our discussions, learning objects, and other tangible aspects of the online-learning process that are usually lost to us once a course formally concludes and the course learning management system is closed to learners. The question also makes us think about who has responsibility for nurturing and sustaining the (lifelong) learning process that is an essential component to fostering digital literacy.
More importantly, we shape those discussions and artifacts collaboratively and through our own initiative—this is learner-centric, learner-driven learning at a very high and productive level. We have learned to take the responsibility for asking what we can do rather than relying solely on others to facilitate our learning process. For the tweet chat last night, a couple of us prepared the script with questions to be used during the tweet chat. We facilitated the session. I then edited and posted the Storify transcript of the event so other members of the community could be part of the effort to use and disseminate that resource. The result is that while learning, we also made—and are continuing to make—it possible for others who want to learn more about hyperlinked learning to do so while also seeing how a self-directed community of learning operates.
What made the session particularly interesting was how often the discussion about hyperlinked learning actually became an example of hyperlinked learning. There was the moment, for example, when we had a unexpected appearance from Alec Couros, who with his own original group of co-conspirators designed and facilitated that MOOC that inspired us to assume shared ownership (without in any way excluding Alec) of the #etmooc learning community. And there were plenty of other moments when learning by hyperlink drew in new colleagues as well as a few we hadn’t seen in quite a while. Nothing could speak more viscerally and meaningfully to the topic of hyperlinked learning than a community so completely hyperlinked that interactions continue to grow rhizomatically—a theme we explored during the formal course and continue to explore and nurture with every new action we take.
As I return to my Rethinking Digital Literacy co-conspirators—those learners who are so creatively and effectively crafting their own learning experiences—I look with admiration at the ways they are, in Week 3 of our four-week course, continuing to expand the ways they interact across as many digital platforms as possible. They—we—will leave distinct traces, if not much larger artifacts, of our time and collaborative learning efforts. It’s what was done in #etmooc; it’s what some of us have done in the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) and the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses); and it’s what is creating the possibility that what we create during our four formal weeks of shared learning will remain accessible to current learning community members as well as to others who might want to learn from what we are accomplishing together.
Posted by paulsignorelli 
Building Creative Bridges 