Rethinking Digital Literacy: Collaborating, Hyperlinking, and Owning Our Learning

With my ALA Editions “Rethinking Digital Literacy” co-conspirators (AKA learners) currently exploring the broad question of “who owns the learning” in digital environments, I saw at least one obvious answer while co-hosting and participating in a tweet chat about hyperlinked learning last night: anyone willing to be a collaborator/co-conspirator in the learning process owns the learning.

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.

With my tweet-chat colleagues in the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course (#etmooc) community, the answer to both facets of the question is obvious and openly accessible. All of us involved in that particular community of learning retain (and openly share) access to the artifacts produced through our learning—e.g., through blog postings that occasionally connect to and interact with blog posts from other members of the community; through archived recordings of our interactions during  the course and those that continue to take place in Google Hangouts and any other accessible online tool we can find and explore as part of our continuing learning efforts on the topic of educational technology and media; and through tweets and the Storify learning objects we produce.

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.

Owning the learning at this level always seems to produce results far beyond anything we anticipate. The hyperlinked-learning tweet chat, for example, produced numerous examples of hyperlinked learning in action. There was the magnificent “Tutor/Mentor Learning Map,” with more than 2,000 hyperlinks to other resources, prepared and shared by #etmooc community member Daniel Bassill. There were exchanges about tech tools some community members had not yet tried. There were informal attempts to define hyperlinked learning, including Daniel’s suggestion that it “is like island-hopping in a huge ocean of knowledge. You can go from place to place in any direction”; Shuana Niessen’s suggestion that it’s “non linear responsive learning”; and my own observation (based on our source material from Michael Stephens) that it’s “what we did/do in #etmooc: connecting, exploring, playing, collaborating, learning experientially” and what I’m fostering among my Rethinking Digital Literacy co-conspirators.

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. 

N.B.: This is the fourth in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions “Rethinking Digital Literacy” course.

Rethinking Digital Literacy: Collaboration, Experience, and Riding Digital Waves

There is no denying that playing and working in a variety of digital environments can sometimes feel akin to trying to drink out of a fire hose. There is also no denying that there’s another way to approach digital/online interactions: as if they produce magnificent waves well worth riding to a warm and welcoming shore—which pretty much describes the experiences I had riding rather than drowning in digital interactions last week as our ALA Editions four-week online course “Rethinking Digital Literacy” continued.

While the learners I am supporting—and have, as an extension of what I have learned elsewhere, begun referring to as my “co-conspirators” —spent the second of four weeks trying to define and determine ways to foster digital literacy among those we serve, I continued engaging in my own efforts to see where a blend of onsite and online interactions involving a wide range of friends and colleagues might take me—a tremendously satisfying exercise that culminated in a richly rewarding conversation with T is for Training colleagues at the end of the week.

Plenty of disparate elements had to come together for that particular wave to carry us all to shore, and they seemed to coalesce around a very specific digital-literacy skill: an ability to collaborate across numerous platforms and environments. The experience began early in the week as a local (San Francisco Bay Area) colleague (Clark Quinn), with whom I tend to interact more frequently online than face to face, was confirming lunch plans with me. Taking advantage of an hour-long trip via public transportation to reach Clark, I read several recent posts on his blog, where he consistently and engagingly addresses training-teaching-learning issues of interest to those of us working with adult learners in workplace learning and performance (staff training) settings. The punch line to one of his most recent posts—“…it’s not about content [in learning]. It’s about experience [in learning]. Are you designing experience?”—led to an intriguing conversation over lunch as I carried that online resource and inspiration into our face-to-face environment.

But it didn’t stop there: I sensed there was plenty more to explore, and suspected a perfect venue drawing upon our digital literacy skill of collaborating within digital environments was back in the online sandbox I share with colleagues through Maurice Coleman’s biweekly T is for Training conversation/podcast—a program designed for those of us involved in library training-teaching-learning efforts. When Maurice and our T colleague Jill Hurst-Wahl agreed that Clark’s post and the question regarding content vs. experience would be a great topic for discussion, I notified Clark to see if he wanted to join us; he and I also continued the conversation briefly via exchanges in the weekly #lrnchat tweet chat (with an entirely different set of colleagues discussing tech trends) the night before the T is for Training was scheduled to take place.

Initially indicating he wouldn’t be available, Clark ultimately was able to join the conversation a few minutes after that episode of T began, and the results were every bit as stimulating as any of us might have hoped. A core group of the T “usual suspects” quickly welcomed Clark and interacted in ways that brought his non-library learning and development expertise to the forefront of the conversation; Clark, in turn, dove into the conversation in ways that helped him better understand how designing experiences in library training-teaching-learning efforts paralleled as well as differed from what he has seen elsewhere.

By the end of the hour-long exchange, many things were obvious. The cross-pollination that occurs through interactions among members of various online communities—particularly the kind of online connected-learning communities with which I’m familiar—can bring benefits to everyone involved. This variation on hyperlinked learning—comprised of playing, learning, telling stories, transparency, participation, harnessing user-generated content (in this case, Clark’s blog post), and making connections, as Michael Stephens has suggested—benefits tremendously from our willingness to carry a variety of approaches into our continually evolving and ever-increasing tech tools. This combination of cross-pollination and hyperlinked learning produces notable results, small and large: T, for example, may have picked up a new usual suspect (if Clark is able to join us for additional conversations); Clark may be continuing the conversation in an upcoming Learnlet post to carry it to a larger audience; I’m certainly continuing this set of explorations further via my own blog and a tweet chat I’ll join later this week with #etmooc (Educational Technology & Media massive open online course) colleagues; and I will carry it back to the learners/co-conspirators in Rethinking Digital Literacy in the hope they can use it with their own colleagues in a number of different countries.

Ultimately, this level of collaboration, designing learning experiences, and riding rather than drowning under waves of digital interactions and resources creates exactly the sort of learning experience I pictured when I read Clark’s blog post. More importantly, it supports our efforts to hone that very important digital-literacy skill of collaboration that, at its essence, supports the way we live, play, and work positively, creatively, and enthusiastically in a hyperlinked world.

N.B.: This is the third in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions “Rethinking Digital Literacy” course.

Rethinking Digital Literacy: Moving Out

Out of chaos sometimes comes more chaos—and that can be a very exhilarating and productive learning environment under the right conditions, as we’re seeing in our ALA Editions four-week online course “Rethinking Digital Literacy.”

The course is literally and somewhat chaotically all over the virtual map. It has an obvious, easily-accessible  home base, which is our learning-management-system (Moodle). During Week 2, Rethinking has fostered increasing levels of digital literacy by moving out, beyond our virtual classroom walls, and expanding into Twitter; Facebook; blogs; and, as of this morning, a learner-produced video posted within and shared from Google Drive. And there’s no end in sight as to how far it can and will extend, which is fine: this connected learning, rhizomatically-growing learning experience is at least partially helping well-supported learners within a vibrant community of learning to viscerally understand that a key digital-literacy skill is an ability to navigate a variety of online resources and venues without allowing ourselves to become overwhelmed.

Our methodology, so far, appears to perfectly match and support the content, learning goals, and user experience within Rethinking. In designing and facilitating the course, I’m attempting to create an engaging, stimulating, learner-centric, results-based experience where learners (or to borrow one of my favorite terms that continues to evolve from the Educational Technology & Media MOOC—#etmooc: “co-conspirators”) are partners in the digital-literacy learning process. Where the original conspirators (those designing and facilitating the course)  in #etmooc inspired a group of co-conspirators in the form of #etmooc learners who collaborated on designing and facilitating a follow-up massive open online course (MOOC), the co-conspirators in Relearning include every learner who is joining me in shaping and learning from the course.

Another match between methodology and content/learning goals/experience within Rethinking is the focus on co-conspirators learning how to define and foster digital literacy by identifying and further developing the digital literacy skills they bring to the course. They are offered—and some are taking advantage of—opportunities to learn about digital literacy by exploring digital tools and resources of interest to them and to those they serve. The process is still very much in its early stages, but is already producing results similar to what I saw—and was inspired by—in #etmooc. A few Rethinking learners are using blogs to document and build upon what they are learning. Others, as a result of asynchronous online group discussions within Moodle, have agreed upon a Twitter hashtag (#ReDigLit) they can use to carry their discussions and learning into the Twittersphere.

The latest expansion of our semi-controlled chaotic approach came this morning through the creative approach course participant/co-conspirator Joan Jordan took in playfully completing a warm-up exercise I offered for Week 2: she combined the assignment with an ongoing optional avenue I’ve encouraged learners to explore (try a new digital literacy tool of their own choosing each week to expand their digital-literacy toolkit). Joan decided to learn how to use the video capabilities of her smartphone, learn how to upload the video she created, and learn how to share a link to that video from an online venue (in this case, Google Drive). With that as the foundation for her approach, she responded to the actual warm-up assignment: watch a brief, charming video showing young learners displaying a variety of digital literacy skills, identify as many digital literacy skills in use as possible, and post the resulting list of skills within our Week 2 online discussion board. The result was extremely engaging: she filmed her cat, produced a video that had the cat telling us which digital literacy skills were observable in the video Joan and other course participants are viewing, and shared that video with us in place of providing a text-based inventory of the skills on display. In the best of digital-literacy approaches, she not only managed to learn what she wanted and needed to learn, but also inspired a lively conversation that is continuing to develop back at home base (Moodle).

An additional intriguing element of our collaboratively-developing methodology—very much what I would call “the #etmooc method” because that’s where I first experienced it—is the opportunity to see whether what grew out of #etmooc could develop from an online course that is not a MOOC: a sustainable community of learning that continues long after formal coursework concludes—what I have only half-jokingly referred to as a MOOChort elsewhere. As my Rethinking co-conspirators continue to define and explore digital literacy by carrying their conversations into a variety of digital settings, I suspect the seeds of a post-Rethinking community are already beginning to germinate.

N.B.: This is the second in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions “Rethinking Digital Literacy” course.

NMC 2015 Summer Conference: Full Participation & Circling Back to Conversations

When a few hundred of your favorite educational-technology colleagues from all over the world gather to explore trends and developments in teaching-training-learning, you certainly don’t want to miss a single minute of it. So you arrive a day or two before formal activities start. Spend inordinate amounts of time engaged in face-to-face conversations in the various hotel lounges and lobbies. Skim the conference Twitter feed (#nmc15 for this one). Pore over the conference program book and website trying to decide how to be in five places at the same time. Reach out via social media to colleagues who couldn’t be onsite so they won’t be left out of the conversations. Grab every available opportunity to join colleagues for breakfast, coffee, lunch, coffee, dessert, coffee, dinner, coffee, dessert and coffee. And just when you believe you’ve covered all your physical and virtual bases, you unexpectedly find delightful additional ways to be so plugged into and help plug others into the overall conference conversation that it feels as if it will never end.

What we’re talking about here is a magnificent part of the connected learning–lifelong learning process at conferences that becomes exponentially more rewarding with every new effort we make to be part of the conversations that contribute to the growth and innovation fueling first-rate teaching-training-learning efforts, as we’re seeing again this week during the New Media Consortium (NMC) 2015 Summer Conference here in the Washington, D.C. area. Formal conference keynote presentations, breakout sessions within a variety of pathways, and other activities start tomorrow; half-day preconference workshops took place today. Onsite conversations were already underway two days ago as a few of us arrived Sunday evening. And pre-preconference online conversations have been taking place for at least a few weeks. All of which raises an interesting question: given all the resources we have to interact face-to-face as well as virtually and synchronously as well as asynchronously, when can we actually say an intensive onsite-online learning experience begins and ends, and what (if any) geographic boundaries define a conference site?

Twitter has been an essential part of my conference experience for the past few years. By skimming the feed from a conference hashtag a few times a day (and understanding that it’s far from necessary to read every tweet if I want to gain a sense of what is occurring), I’m able to asynchronously join conversations and “attend” sessions I otherwise would not have time to sample. By live-tweeting sessions and monitoring the feed from those sessions, I’m able to share content with offsite colleagues, occasionally draw them into what is happening onsite, and interact with others in particularly large meeting rooms. And, by commenting on colleagues’ tweets during and after sessions, I’ve found Twitter serving as yet another portal to meeting colleagues I might otherwise not have met—even though we were (or are) in the same room during a conference session.

And that’s where conversations can both meander and circle back upon themselves in the most unexpected ways and at the most unexpected times. I’ve met colleagues face-to-face for the first time by responding to their tweets during a session, and then seeking them out before any of us have a chance to leave a room at the end of a session—which, of course, leads to extensions of the conversations fostered by those facilitating the conference sessions we were attending. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to serendipitously pick up the threads of a conversation hours later when small groups of colleagues gather in those aforementioned hotel lounges and lobbies. Conversations occasionally extend over Twitter for several days after a conference formally ends, and can also continue as those of us who blog read and comment upon each other’s posted reflections on those blogs.

Coffee in a local shop

But today brought a wonderfully new and unexpected variation on the theme. Needing some time away from all those preconference conversations and preconference workshops, I decided to go offsite for the first half of the day to have brunch and visit one of Washington’s magnificent museums. As I was finishing brunch, I couldn’t resist the temptation to engage in what was going to be first of three check-ins to the conference Twitter feed throughout the day. And there it was: a colleague’s wonderful summary of high points from a three-hour workshop—which I was able to skim in less than 10 minutes, with a few additional minutes set aside to retweet a few comments I thought off-site colleagues might appreciate reading. After a couple of hours in the museum and a little more reading time in a local coffee shop, I made the quick cross-town trip back toward the conference hotel via Washington’s subway system, and planned to catch the shuttle that completes a circle between the hotel, the closest subway station, and the airport (which is only a very short distance from the hotel where we are staying) every 30 minutes.

The shuttle arrived as expected. What I hadn’t in any way anticipated was the discovery that the presenter from that morning preconference workshop was sitting across the aisle from me on the shuttle. So as he was heading back to the airport and I was planning on staying on the shuttle to return to the hotel, we had a few minutes to ride that circular route together while discussing his presentation, laugh over the idea that we didn’t have to send follow-up tweets (at least for the moment) to continue our conversation, and that his part of the circle that was taking him to the airport so wonderfully overlapped with part of my own circle back to the onsite conference conversation.

It may be months before we see each other face-to-face again. But already, as I capture this set of reflections late at night, I see the conversation extending further—along with the reach of the “conference site” via a follow-up email message he sent. And if he and I (and others here at the NMC 2015 Summer Conference) carry these extended-learning lessons back to our own learners, who can say when the conference will really end?

Alan Levine, #etmooc, and the cMOOC That Would Not Die

We can cut off its head, fill its mouth with garlic, and drive a stake through its body, but we apparently can’t kill a well-designed, engaging, dynamic learning experience and the community of learning it spawns. Nor would we want to.

Graphic by Alan Levine

At least that’s what a cherished colleague, Alan Levine, suggests in “The cMOOC That Would Not Die,” a newly-posted article (with accompanying graphics that puckishly draw upon horror-film imagery) that captures the spirit and reach of #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course he helped shape and facilitate as a course “conspirator” in early 2013.

Inspired by the #etmooc community’s latest learning endeavor—a tweet chat that drew community members together for a lively hour-long discussion about integrating Twitter into learning earlier this week—Levine combines his usual wicked sense of humor and insightful perspective into a set of reflections that should inspire any trainer-teacher-learner.

I’ve been among those writing extensively about the unexpected longevity of #etmooc as a learning experience/community; a model for lifelong learning communities; and an example of how connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) are beginning to serve as a new form of (collaboratively-produced) textbook; in fact, I’ve probably produced enough to kill a small forest of virtual trees, and am far from finished with the topic. But none of that stops me from eagerly reading and learning from Levine’s “cMOOC That Would Not Die” and recognizing it as a manifestation of the very thing it is exploring.

The playfulness with which he tackles his topic reflects the playfulness that was at the heart of the learning process in #etmooc (and, for that matter, almost every significant learning experience I can remember having). That same playfulness is certainly one of the elements that binds members of the #etmooc community together, as anyone reading the slightly-edited transcript of the integrating-Twitter-into-learning session can’t help but notice. The sense of camaraderie is palpable, and when I talk with friends and colleagues about the value of engagement in training-teaching-learning, I often wonder aloud why so many people seem to be reticent about fostering a sense of community in the learning process.

Levine’s obvious passion for #etmoocers’ continuing levels of engagement—the community had produced tens of thousands of tweets and 4,746 posts from 513 blogs before he wrote his article; his latest contribution pushed it to 4,747 posts—reflects the same passion that continues to draw #etmooc community members together through tweet chats, Google Hangouts, and other online platforms. And, he notes, it’s not about massive numbers of participants; it’s about the quality and openness of the engagement: “I will cherish and take this kind of experience any day over some massive MOOC of tens of thousands of enrollees, 2% or so who stick around, and [whose] corpus remains stockpiled behind a login.”

His reflections further serve as a manifestation how he and other #etmooc community members learn via extended cross-platform asynchronous exchanges that inspire additional collaborations: he blogs; we read; we respond via the sort of linked response I’m producing here; and we extend the conversation via comments on his own blog site as well as via tweets that call attention to his blogged reflections—a process that is continuing to unfold even as I write these words.

As I often note in learning sessions I facilitate, this is a wonderfully messy and engaging approach to learning—one that offers numerous rewards while also inspiring us to learn how to learn through entirely different approaches to learning than we ever expected to encounter. It’s what many of us learned, from Dave Cormier, to refer to and think of as rhizomatic learning—learning that expands as rapidly and expansively as rhizomes do.

But when all is said and done, it all comes down to something Levine facetiously asserts at the beginning of his article: “Someone never told the folks who participated in the 2013 Educational Technology and Media MOOC that it was over. They are still at it.” And the perfect riposte comes in a form of a tweet posted by Thomas Okon (@thomasjokon) in March 2013 as the last of the formal #etmooc modules had been completed and people were talking about how sorry they were that the course was “over”: “Over?  Was it over when the Germans… Its not over till we say it is. Im keeping my column in Tweet deck!”

Okon was—and remains—right. We continue to learn together in a variety of settings. To work together (several of us went on to design and facilitate another connectivist MOOC). To write about it individually and as co-writers. And to engage in teaching-training-learning-doing so that the community continues to grow by acquiring new members and inspiring others to produce their own versions of our successes.

NEKLS Innovation Day 2015: Training-Teaching-Learning While Hanging Out in Kansas

I’ve hung out before, and I’m sure I’ll hang out again, but I can’t imagine a more intensely innovative and emotionally-rewarding approach to incorporating Google Hangouts into training-teaching-learning than the one collaboratively created as part of the 2015 Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS) Innovation Day program yesterday.

What we’re continuing to explore with Hangouts is highly-engaging, low-/no-cost web-conferencing, a rudimentary and surprisingly effective form of telepresence, and  notably strong levels of interaction in training-teaching-learning made possible through the use of an easy-to-learn social media tool—something that fell into place nicely in two consecutive sessions during Innovation Day.

It has taken a fair amount of experimentation and practice to reach the point we reached yesterday: an onsite event that seamlessly expanded to include two offsite presenters (Harford County Public Library Technical Trainer Maurice Coleman and me) so we not only could interact directly with onsite participates but with each other as if we were all in the same room—and the room expanded further via connections simultaneously made with Twitter.

My own experience in training-teaching-learning through web conferencing and rudimentary telepresence dates back to a successful experiment to bring an offsite presenter (from Ohio) into an onsite event attended by more than 200 people here in San Francisco in 2007 in a way that encouraged some limited, direct interactions between the online presenter and members of the onsite audience. I expanded the exercise a bit a few years later by incorporating Skype, Twitter, and onsite colleagues into one of these blended learning events at a Sacramento ASTD (American Society for Training & Development meeting, then carried it a bit further with my New Media Consortium colleague Samantha Adams Becker when we switched over to Google Hangouts for onsite-online blended sessions with ASTD Mount Diablo and Golden Gate chapter colleagues.

What many of us were realizing at that point was that with proper preparation (which included abundant amounts of rehearsal time) and the right equipment (most of which was already available to us in each of the venues we used), we could erase geographic barriers in ways that caused onsite participants to forget that the online participants weren’t physically in the room.

An expansion of the experimentation included adding an onsite Twitter facilitator (colleague Larry Straining, who ad-libbed from a basic script to tweet out what Samantha and I were doing via Google Hangouts for ASTD—now ATD, the Association for Talent Development) at a conference in the Washington, D.C. area in late 2014. Adding Twitter to the mix in this focused, pre-planned way helped make the point that the “rooms” in which each of these events was physically taking place was actually expanding to include a global audience comprised of participants working synchronously and others who could participate later in an asynchronous fashion by seeing and responding to the tweets in an ongoing conversation. Carrying this another step further by drawing “left-behind” colleagues (including Maurice) into the 2015 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting (held in Chicago) provided yet another example of how Hangouts could produce live as well as archived learning opportunities —and further laid the groundwork for what we accomplished yesterday during the annual NEKLS Innovation Day conference: live interactions between the two of us who were offsite, interactions between the two of us and those who were physically present at the conference; and interactions with non-conference attendees who saw the tweets and shared content through retweeting. All that was missing yesterday was synchronous two-way interactions between those non-conference attendees and those of us who were participating onsite or via the Hangout)—but we had a hint of it as my own Innovation Day tweets were picked up and retweeted by several unfamiliar tweeters here in the United States and elsewhere.

NEKLS Continuing Education Consultant Patti Poe initiated the process as part of her overall Innovation Day planning by inviting me to use Google Hangouts as the vehicle for a presentation/discussion on using online collaboration tools. When she mentioned that Maurice would be doing a separate (closing keynote address) session via Hangouts, I asked if it would be possible to also include Maurice in the session I was facilitating and schedule that session in the time slot immediately preceding his keynote address. The experiences Maurice and I had with the ALA Midwinter Meeting experiment primed us to attempt something that was both structured—with specific learning goals and objectives—and improvisational so that onsite conference attendees would very much be involved in learning while also shaping the nature of the session.

Rehearsal for Innovation Day Hangout (Photo by Robin Hastings)

As Patti noted shortly after the day ended, it exceeded everyone’s expectations and once again demonstrated that it’s possible to have this technology as the vehicle for—not the central feature of—learning opportunities and to have all of us interacting almost exactly as we would have if we hadn’t been spread over a 2,800-mile distance—in essence, creating a 2,800-mile-wide room. Maurice and I had a PowerPoint slide deck (with extensive speaker notes) and a supplemental resource sheet that I prepared and that served as our roadmap even though we actually didn’t display either during the live session (we wanted onsite attendees seeing us rather than slides as part of our effort to create the sense that we were  in the room in a very real sense); the slide deck and resource sheet were posted online later as additional learning objects and as a way to give the synchronous session an extended asynchronous life. We also allowed for plenty of interactions via question-and-answer periods throughout the entire hour-long “Using Online Collaboration Tools” session just as we do when we’re physically present in training-teaching-learning sessions. And when that initial hour came to an end, we took the same sort of between-session break we would have taken if we had physically been onsite, then returned with Maurice assuming the lead and with me maintaining an onsite-onscreen presence through a small window at the bottom of the screen as I watched his onsite-online presentation.

All of us had set out to create the sense of presence (i.e., close physical proximity) that we believe—and continually prove—is possible in well-planned, well-executed onsite-online learning environments capable of transforming learners. All of us confirmed with those onsite that we had achieved that goal. But several hours passed before I realized that in my playful role of the trickster who creates the illusion of physical proximity, I had unintentionally even tricked myself, for as I sat in the comfort of my own home here in San Francisco last night—never physically having left that home—I unexpectedly felt the same sense of melancholy I sometimes experience after intensively engaging in learning with colleagues at onsite conferences and then being physically separated from them as we return to our own homes and workplaces across the country. And I have the same sense of longing to be back with them again sooner than later to continue the connected-learning process that brings all of us such deeply rewarding experiences and relationships.

On the Make: Co-learning, Making, and Sharing in the Connected Courses (#ccourses) MOOC

Let’s create and play a trainer-teacher-learner’s version of blog-hopping (specifically crafted for connected-learning students and aficionados) by seeing how many blogs we can link together into a cohesive asynchronous discussion. Our goal is to see whether the process leads us through the act of making something (e.g., a virtual, sprawling, multi-site learning object) that contributes to our understanding of our own learning, co-learning, and the learning process—and perhaps even to other people’s learning.

This particular learning object is already a work in progress thanks to interactions among a few of us connected via the Connected Courses (#ccourses) massive open online course (MOOC). It started with a self-contained set of reflections, by long-time learning colleague Alan Levine, on what constitutes “a make” (something created as part of the learning process to facilitate the learning process itself) within a connectivist MOOC (#ccourses, in this case). It grew a bit through #ccourses co-learner Maha Bali’s reflections inspired by Alan’s article and something I had written about the development of communities of learning similar to what we’re seeing in #ccourses. It continued growing rhizomatically as I posted individual responses to Alan’s and Maha’s posts and then realized that my own comments, if carried over into the article you’re now reading, could provide the foundations for what paradoxically is a self-contained lesson/make on “makes” that, at the same time, is interwoven into other makes—some of which are yet to come.

Alan deserves the credit for unintentionally inspiring this admittedly complex yet intentionally playful attempt at showing how a blog can be a make. He begins by suggesting that blog posts are “part of the regular things to do” in the connected-learning process and he explicitly says that he does not “see blog posts or comments as ‘makes.’” Maha responds by acknowledging how engaging and supportive of the learning process a collaborative make can be, then circles back to suggest that “for some people, blogging is ‘their thing,’” just as other learners may immerse themselves in equally engaging and productive makes. Our colleague Kevin Hodgson, for example, has produced course-related cartoons that are very much his version of a make and inspire the rest of us to absorb Connected Courses lessons through those playful makes. And, she continues, “every blogpost of Simon [Ensor]’s is a make.”

I initially inadvertently extended our make-in-progress by commenting on Alan’s blog. As a big supporter of experiential learning, I assured him that I agree that some level of making is essential in the learning process, and I obviously do believe that blogging can fit that category when we see our blogs as more than personal reflections. Blog postings, I suggested, can also be self-contained lessons (particularly through the use of hyperlinks that lead our co-learners to other learning resources). I’m ultimately not very concerned about what my co-learners and I make; an instructor’s recommended “makes,” in fact, often simply don’t support my own learning goals. I am, however, concerned that we make something that is seamlessly integrated into the learning experience so we have learned something useful, quantifiable, and rewarding to ourselves and others who learn with and from us.

The theme seemed to grow without much effort on my part as I turned back to Maha’s blog to assure her that I agreed about Kevin Hodgson’s cartoons and Simon Ensor’s blog articles being makes for them as learners and for others who see and are inspired by their work.

As we’re seeing through the current Connected Courses two-week module on co-learning, we have countless ways to creatively and effectively engage in making. I would even suggest, as I wrote to Maha, that participating in the “Case of #etmooc [the Educational Tecnology & Media MOOC]” panel discussion earlier this week was a form of making in that it produced a learning object—that online archived recording that is stimulating plenty of conversation and will continue to be a learning resource for anyone interested in knowing how sustainable communities of learning can develop out of well-designed, well-facilitated connectivist MOOCs.

It all very nicely wraps around and draws upon some of the other learning objects we have accessed during our co-learning explorations this week: the Howard Rheingold/Alec Couros interview about building communities of learning, the video of Dean Shareski discussing educators’ “moral imperative” to share, and Rheingold’s “Toward Peeragogy” article for the dmlcentral blog.

If some of the makes that Alan so rightly admires are grounded in collaborative efforts that shape new learning objects from mashups of open educational resources and other freely-shared items, then makes like the one you’re reading—drawing upon a variety of resources to create a unique learning object springing from the learning process itself—most certainly should qualify as makes. The beauty of this type of make is that, like the idea of MOOCs serving as a new form of open textbook, it is never completely finished. If you build upon this in your own blog or contribute through a comment to this piece, you’re contributing to the make—and, more importantly, to the rhizomatically-expanding set of learning resources available to us all benefiting from co-learning through connected learning efforts.

N.B.: This is the fourteenth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and other MOOCs.

Co-learning, #ccourses, and Keeping the Lights On: #etmooc and the Connected Courses MOOC

We may have a new corollary to one of the most famous lines from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life (“Teacher says, ‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’”): Every time #etmooc is mentioned, a learner gets new learning wings.

Which, apparently, is exactly what happened as the Connected Learning MOOC (#ccourses) webinar about #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course—and the development of online communities of learning drew to an end last night. No more than 15 minutes after “The Case of #etmooc” concluded, an audience member posted the following tweet: “Just watched the live #ccourses webinar about #etmooc. Impressed = signed up for my 1^st MOOC. Excited to learn.” And if that means another teacher-trainer-learner finds the pleasures and rewards of participating in connectivist MOOCs and the sustainable communities of learning they are capable of spawning, then we have yet another example of what well-designed and well-facilitated MOOCs along the lines of #etmooc and #ccourses can and do offer.

There was something wonderfully circular, encouraging, and tremendously important there for all teacher-trainer-learners to absorb. The hour-long session began with #etmooc’s Alec Couros, two of his #ccourses co-facilitators (Howard Rheingold and Mia Zamora), and several #etmooc alums discussing what made #etmooc different from other MOOCs and, more broadly, from other learning experiences we had had up to the time we joined that course. As part of the current two-week-long #ccourses exploration of co-learning within connected learning opportunities, the session also served as an example of co-learning in action since the lines between learning facilitators (Couros, Rheingold, and Zamora) and learners (the #etmooc alums) quickly blurred—all of us were learning plenty from each other (and probably thinking about what we would next be doing to share those learned lessons with others). And it circled back to the idea of how interwoven our communities of learning are when Zamora surprised at least a few of us by telling us that she learned about connected learning by observing us in action while #etmooc was in progress. Turns out she had signed up for #etmooc when it was first offered in early 2013, but had little time to become actively involved: “I watched from afar,” she said. “I learned something from all of you…because I watched, because I lurked.

“Transformation,” she continued, “happens in places that you cannot even see it happening, not even in yourself….Watching community build is also a powerful learning process. I think that’s what #etmooc gave me as a sort of out-of-the-gate kind of experience for this” experience of helping develop and facilitate the equally dynamic Connected Courses MOOC.

And have no doubts: one of the most significant results of that hour-long session last night was that transformations were occurring. We could see that our explorations of what transformed #etmooc into a vibrant, vital, sustainable community of learning were also helping solidify #ccourses as another learning community that is likely to continue far longer than the formal period during which all of us are interacting within the current course structure. We could see that the same sense of openness—the commitment Couros and his #etmooc “co-conspirators” maintained to injecting a very human, personal element into that massive open online learning environment—was and is in play in the Connected Courses MOOC. We could see that the playful interactions among the session panelists reflected the playfulness that flows through #ccourses and just about every other successful, inspiring, and memorable learning experience we have—a reminder that we need to carry that level of playfulness, as much as possible, into the face-to-face and online learning environments we help create and nurture.

Most importantly, we could see that all-too-rare occurrence in learning: the transformation of a group of learners from students to collaborators to long-term friends—“which is really amazing,” #etmooc alum Susan Spellman Cann observed during the conversation. “I did not expect that from a MOOC.”

Among the reasons cited for the transformation from student to collaborator to friend were Couros’s tremendous skills at facilitating conversations, his natural inclination to make participants feel welcome into that developing community of learning, and the playful introductory activities that included a crowdsourced communal “lip dub” that quickly drew #etmooc participants together while using the educational technology and media tools explored at that point in the course.

As to the underlying question of what #ccourses facilitators and participants (and members of other learning communities) can do to create communities that outlast courses: there was an acknowledgment that connected learning endeavors have a tool we haven’t thought to develop in our more traditional learning environments—the learning environments (e.g., Google+ and Twitter communities united around a hashtag such as #etmooc or #ccourses) that don’t shut down as courses usually do when content within a learning management system is closed and archived beyond the reach of course participants.

It’s not as if “we’re turning the lights off now” when a connectivist MOOC delivers its final lesson, #etmooc and #ccourses co-learner Rhonda Jessen observed.

“Opening up the doors…was really cool,” our co-learner Erin Luong added.

And as long as we keep those lights on and those doors open, we’re likely to see an extension and continuation of learning communities unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And many more wings.

N.B.: This is the thirteenth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and other MOOCs.

Learning When No One Is at the Center of the Room: Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses)

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.

N.B.: This is the twelfth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.  

#oclmooc, Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses), and ATD Chapter Leaders: How Big Is the Room?

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.

The “Perfect Blend: Seamlessly Serving [Chapter] Members Onsite and Online” session I designed and co-presented with New Media Consortium colleague Samantha Adams Becker and Larry Straining (serving as our tweet-stream manager) at the 2014 ATD Chapter Leaders Conference was designed to demonstrate how well-blended we all are becoming through training-teaching-learning. What it really did for me, at a personal level, was serve as a central example of a weeklong intensive immersion in pushing the envelope of what the combination of people and easy-to-use tech tools can produce.

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.

It was clear to everyone that, as we said during the session, we (trainer-teacher-learners) are social people who are frequently drawn together in social situations, so we’re becoming increasingly comfortable with our ability to socialize while we learn onsite and online. It’s equally clear that the technology we’re exploring allows us to create social learning spaces that are variations on the Third Place that Ray Oldenburg first described in 1989 in his book The Great Good Place. It’s very much a part of what we see through our interactions within connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc), the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses), the Educational Technology & Media MOOC (#etmooc), and the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC (#xplrpln). It’s also very much a part of a world where connections overlap with connections that, in turn, overlap with other connections.

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.

But it didn’t stop there. After the conference ended and after I had a couple of days to relax in our nation’s capital while continuing to interact with various members of my overlapping communities of learning, I saw one additional enlargement of the room: I was able to interact, from 37,000 feet above our planet, with #oclmooc colleagues in a live session that connected my cross-country flight with trainer-teacher-learners in Alberta (Canada) and several places throughout the United States.

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.

N.B.: This is the eleventh in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.