Giving Thanks 2021: ShapingEDU, Saying “Yes,” and Documenting Pandemic Lessons Learned

One of the words that leaves me feeling happiest is “yes.” The power of the word “yes” first became obvious to me when I was listening to a (horrible) guest speaker in a graduate-level management class proudly describe the sign hanging over her desk: “What part of no do you not understand?” “Yes” continually exerts a restorative power over me. It encourages me. It tells me that there is a bridge to be crossed successfully. A collaborative effort to be pursued. An acquaintance who is about to become a colleague/partner/collaborator and, with any luck, a friend.

Graphic by Karina Branson/ConverSketch

“Yes” is a word I consistently hear from members of the ShapingEDU community (operating under the auspices of—and with tremendous support and numerous “yeses” from—the members of the University Technology Office at Arizona State University) as part of their collective commitment as “dreamer-doer-drivers” committed to doing whatever they can to help reshape the future of learning in the digital age, One of the most recent (and significant) yeses I heard was from community members participating in the fourth annual ShapingEDU Unconference (July 20-23, 2021) as we were exploring a set of 10 wicked challenges in contemporary learning—with an eye toward framing them within a newly-created structure of five calls to action that would guide our work over the next 12 months.

Graphic by Karina Branson/ConverSketch

At the end of a series of discussions I helped facilitate on the challenge of identifying, documenting, and disseminating stories about how we are rethinking our approach to learning as a result of the teaching-training-learning experiences we and others have had since the pandemic began in early 2020, I posed a simple question to participants in that set of discussions: Are you interested in continuing this discussion after the unconference so we can find ways to implement what we have been talking about here?

The resounding “yes” from several of the participants led us to begin engaging in biweekly one-hour online meetings a few weeks after the conference ended, and those results-oriented conversations are continuing with the involvement of anyone who wants to join us. Our original unconference-session discussions, under the title “365+ Days Later: Post-Pandemic Best Practices,” are continuing under the newly-established, much more playful project name “Are We There Yet? (Capturing the Evolving New Now in Learning).”

Our newly-adopted name covers a lot of ground. It recognizes that we are stepping away from the idea that we are somehow savvy enough to have identified “best practices” when what we are really doing is documenting what seems to be working for now among our brightest, most creative colleagues; the approach here is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It recognizes that we are far from having reached an end-point in our explorations; this really is a situation and a challenge that is continually evolving in the way that all wicked problems continually evolve (which is part of what makes them so wicked). And, most importantly, by asking “are we there yet?”, we are tacitly admitting that we don’t ever completely expect to “get there” in terms of having definitively established a “new now” in learning; the evolving nature of what we face in pandemic-era conditions and beyond suggests that we will be working together for a good long time. And should we ever actually “get there” and recognize that our work in response to this challenge is finished, we probably, in the best traditions of ShapingEDU, will identify a new challenge in teaching-training-learning to pursue together.

There’s much more to this than having established a new name; our biweekly meetings have produced a (still-evolving) planning document that begins with a summary of the steps we plan to take through Are We There Yet?:

• Each of us will reach out to members of our communities to draw them into this conversation and this project; the potential here is to quickly begin building a global coalition that engages in research through studies, with real-time support in how to respond to challenges.

• We will draw upon our colleagues and resources at Arizona State University to build this coalition/project.
  
• To get the word out that we are seeking collaborators, we will: 

• Create an introductory video that is posted on the ShapingEDU site to disseminate this story of how we are telling the stories of others

• Determine where we will house the stories so that they can be shared

• Look for opportunities (synchronous and asynchronous; online and onsite; through webinars and workshops) to pair stories with lessons learned and facilitate discussions to broadly disseminate what we are observing and documenting; an example of this is initiative created by Are We There Yet? team member Tula Dlamini’s to have members of his community in South Africa come together in ways mirroring how ShapingEDU community members come together during annual unconferences) to explore and document what they are seeing
  
• Work at a global level to find ways to integrate the various stories we have with those we find through our efforts.

the earliest activities we are pursuing are creating an online site, before the end of December 2021, for teacher-trainer-learners to submit stories about how they have successfully adapted their work to pandemic conditions; a highly-interactive online workshop to help participants create their stories about pandemic-era learning successes (possibly in January or February 2022); and an online mini-conference (in March or April) to bring teacher-trainer-learners together to find ways to document and share our learning-success stories. We are also working to call attention to first-rate resources, including the recently-published book Learn at Your Own Risk: 9 Strategies for Thriving in a Pandemic and Beyond, by ShapingEDU Storyteller in Residence and Are We There Yet? team member Tom Haymes.

There is plenty to do. There are lots of opportunities to be developed. And all we need now is a “yes” from you indicating your interest in being part of the project—which you can do by contacting those of us listed as team leaders on the project page.

N.B.: This is the eighth in a series of year-end reflections inspired by the people, organizations, and events that are helping to change the world in positive ways and the thirty-second in a series of reflections inspired by colleagues’ reactions to the coronavirus and shelter-in-place experiences.

Giving Thanks 2021: Maurice Coleman and T is for Training at 300

As we look forward  (on December 2, 2021) to recording Episode #300 (you can listen to the episode here)—where have all those years gone?—of Maurice Coleman’s fabulous T is for Training podcast for trainer-teacher-learners working in and with libraries, I think, with gratitude, of all that Maurice and that community add to my life and to the lives of so many others.

Initiated in 2008 when Maurice decided—correctly, as it turns out—that a podcast might be an effective way to “replicate the vibe and comradery I felt at conferences where I was surrounded with brilliant members of my ‘tribe’ of trainers, computer folks and other gear/near/cool folk heads.”

T has always been more than a podcast. It’s a virtual meeting space that occasionally—at least before the coronavirus pandemic drastically altered our training-teaching-learning landscape and so much more—went onsite for live recordings at conferences where members of the T is for Training community gathered. It’s a biweekly opportunity to learn with and from an ever-growing group of creative, inspired, playful, and irreverent colleagues who also are, in every sense of the word, “friends” worth celebrating. It’s a Frans Johansson-like “intersection”—one of those places where people meet, talk, learn, and then go their separate ways to disseminate what they have learned. In other words, it’s the sort of place where people who want to change the world in small-, medium-, and large-scale ways can gather to remain inspired.

Having joined the show/community as a sporadic attendee more than a decade ago and eventually becoming a core member of the group that keeps the show evolving while not abandoning that original commitment to “replicate the vibe and comradery” we so often feel at onsite and online conferences, I remain deeply grateful for what Maurice and so many others bring to those biweekly conversations. It was Maurice who, by having me participate in those online discussions, took my own online skills and presence to new levels of achievement and made me aware of how much any trainer-teacher-learner can assimilate through the act of participating on a regular basis in well-facilitated online conversations. It was Maurice who believed in me enough to offer—before even one word was written of the book—to write an introduction to a book on training, learning, and leadership with a colleague. It was Maurice who continually introduced me—and continues to introduce me—to people within and beyond the expansive boundaries of our industry to people well worth knowing (and whom I probably would not have met without his generous and timely intercessions). And it is Maurice who serves as a mentor-colleague-brother patiently, supportively, and with a killer sense of humor that lifts me even in my darkest moments. Anyone who didn’t feel compelled to acknowledge gratitude for that combination of gifts probably ought to just walk away from Thanksgiving Day celebrations and never come back!

As is the case with any endeavor worth pursuing, T is for Training continues to evolve—something evident to anyone who has been participating in or listening to the recordings completed since July 2021—a period of time during which we have more consciously drawn in new participants to discuss their recently-published books and/or their recent conference presentations on challenging topics well worth exploring. The series of guests—some of whom are well on their way, through ongoing participation, to becoming “Usual Suspects” in the T is for Training community in this ongoing set of conversations—began an interview/conversation with cherished colleague R. David Lankes, who joined us to talk about his newly released book Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today’s Information Society. We followed that up two weeks later with a conversation centered around Usual Suspect/Keeper of the T is for Training blog/author Jill Hurst-Wahl on the topic of the impact volunteering has on a person’s life and career—in honor of Jill having received the Special Libraries Association John Cotton Dana [Lifetime Achievement] Award in July 2021.   

August 2021 found us again combining the return of a cherished colleague—Clark Quinn—for a discussion of his newly-released Learning Science for Instructional Designers: From Cognition to Application—and an opportunity to explore new avenues, this time by scheduling an hour-long conversation, with writer-friend-colleague James Richardson (one of my first editors, dating back to that period of time when we were both working for the UCLA Daily Bruin) on the theme of “moving from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ in training-teaching-learning.” It was a unique program for T in that Jim does not work for libraries; has teaching-training-learning in his life as a subsidiary rather than primary element of his lifelong career arc that started with journalism, has included publication of a thoughtful, engaging, well-balanced biography of Willie Brown; and took a complete career turn that led him to become an Episcopalian minister who, among other things, served as Chaplain for the California State Senate for two terms between 2005 and 2008. (It was Jim’s story to me earlier this year about how he moved from “no” to “yes” in terms of leaving his journalism career to begin his seminary studies that led to the invitation to discuss that theme within the context of training-teaching-learning.)

September, October, and November brought equally inspirational conversations featuring a variety of new and returning faces including Sardek Love, Elaine Biech, Rita Bailey, and I exploring what we had learned about training-teaching-learning-presenting as a result of our participation in the 2021 ATD International Conference & Exposition in Salt Lake City; Tom Haymes and Ruben Puentedura on sustainability, antifragility, and gamification in training-teaching-learning (Tom has also been featured several times as we have talked about lessons learned from his thoughtful, story-laden book Learn at Your Own Risk: 9 Strategies for Thriving in a Pandemic and Beyond); Brian Washburn on his book What’s Your Formula: Combine Learning Element for Impactful Training; Ken Phillips on assessment and evaluation in training-teaching-learning; Jared Bendis on just about anything he wants to discuss—in this case, back-to-back episodes on gamification in learning and, expanding on a comment he made in that episode, the follow-up conversation about the role hope plays in learning; and, in our most recent outing, the return of Elaine Biech and Rita Bailey, with their/our colleague Tonya Wilson, for a deeply thoughtful, honest, heart-felt exploration of diversity, equity, and inclusion in training-teaching-learning inspired by their session at the ATD conference in September.

These are my peeps—a fact for which I remain tremendously grateful today, on Thanksgiving Day 2021, and throughout the year, These are your peeps—something I hope you will benefit from by listening to what they said on T is for Training, through the archived podcasts, and sharing links to those recordings to help us reach the audience the show deserves.

T is for Training is a meeting place for all of us; hope you’ll join us for one (or more) of our biweekly Thursday evening (9 pm ET/6 pm PT) recording sessions via TalkShoe. I suspect you’ll be grateful you did.

Next: Howard Prager on how to make someone’s day

N.B.: This is the first in a series of year-end reflections inspired by the people, organizations, and events that are helping to change the world in positive ways.

ShapingEDU Winter Games: Making Sense and Making Music IRL

There is no going back; there is only going forward, a panelist suggested during the opening keynote event on Day Two (yesterday) of the Arizona State University ShapingEDU three-day Winter Games conference for dreamers, doers, and drivers shaping the future of learning in the digital age. And, like much of what we heard, saw, and experienced yesterday, those words were, before the day was over, provoking entirely different thoughts than what the speaker had intended when he voiced them during a dynamic, thoughtful, and wide-ranging discussion of “The Future of Sports and Entertainment.”

One central element of that panel discussion was a series of reflections on how the shelter-in-place social distancing guidelines implemented in response to the current coronavirus pandemic are continuing to force major adjustments regarding how teams and fans interact, and regarding how technology is providing possibilities, short- and long-term, that weren’t much under consideration before the pandemic began—virtual interactions between players and fans, apps that extend the experiences of the games themselves, and virtual gatherings of fans who are geographically dispersed.

Where the pandemic erected barriers, creativity (and tragedy and necessity) fostered innovation. When it became impossible for fans and teams to be together onsite, many—including panelists Robert Mathews; Collaboration Strategist, AVI Systems; Rick Schantz, Head Coach, Phoenix Rising FC; Mark Feller, VP of Technology, Arizona Cardinals; Salvatore Galatioto, President of Galatioto Sports Partners; and Stephen Rusche, Sr. Director, Smart Communities, COX Communications—immediately began engaging in large-scale rethinking. Followed by innovation. Followed by success stories that are already creating a new normal. And, possibly, to be followed—in the months and years ahead of us—by a long-lasting new-and-better normal. One that combines the best of what we had with the best of what we are developing during the pandemic.

Which pretty much carries us to a theme flowing through much of what the “digital immersive experiences” of the Winter Games has offered: the idea that, in digital-age lifelong learning, we are experiencing massive shifts caused by situations many of us were too comfortable to anticipate or acknowledge, and to which we now are responding—sometimes creatively and sometimes successfully—with innovations that are well worth nurturing and preserving after the need for social distancing becomes less necessary.

A highly-interactive session later that morning—ShapingEDU Storyteller in Residence Tom Haymes’ “Learn at Your Own Risk: A Hackathon for Navigating the Post-Pandemic Slope and Skiing Into the Digital Age of Learning” —took us a significant step farther down that path of designing and exploring a new and better normal. Built on the theme of nine strategies for thriving in a pandemic and beyond (drawn from his newly-released book (Learn at Your Own Risk), the hackathon engaged session participants through interactions within an online collaborative tool to help us see how we could apply those strategies, to the benefit of our learners, within our own teaching environments.

“Systems shape our behavior” and “our behavior shapes systems,” Haymes observed at one point, and those words, like the sports panelist’s remark about looking forward rather than back, seemed unintentionally prescient less than a few hours later…because that’s when many of us, during a scheduled break in the Winter Games conference, became aware of and tried to make sense of the actions of the seditionists who had forced their way through the meager and ineffectual security forces in our nation’s Capitol and had temporarily disrupted our legislature’s attempt to formally count and certify the votes cast through the Electoral College.

It’s impossible to try to capture even a small portion of all the thoughts and emotions we had during that three-hour mid-day break. I am, however, left with the memory of one stunning contrast in terms of reactions I observed. Away from the Winter Games (in the sense that I was talking with my wife and absorbing news reports), I was skimming email messages and came across a notice that, because of what was happening in Washington, DC, a local San Francisco Bay Area bookseller I very much admire was cancelling an online author event that was to be held that evening—a decision with which I have no disagreement because it was the right decision for the community served by that bookseller. In contrast, moments later, I was back online with others in the ShapingEDU community at the scheduled time for the resumption of the Winter Games conference. Because I knew that this was a community that would see, in the act of moving ahead as planned rather than postponing or cancelling our interactions, a reaffirmation of all that is at the core of our community. A commitment to working together. To finding solace and encouragement by remaining together during this latest time of national tragedy. And to thinking about all we had been hearing, seeing, and doing together—looking toward and helping shape the future rather than being frozen by looking back. Considering how systems and behavior are interwoven and equally important elements in our efforts to foster positive change among ourselves, our communities, and those we serve.

In that moment during which divisiveness was on display in all its ugliness in our national capital, we couldn’t miss the irony—nor could we have been any more appreciative—of the fact that the Winter Games session we were about to attend together was centered on the theme of inclusivity. Nor could we have been more appreciative for the realization that we were about to hear about and explore possibilities for healing ourselves through that session, facilitated by Alycia Anderson, on the power of inclusivity. But most stunning of all—in the most positive of ways—was the ease with which one of our community leaders and Winter Games organizers, Samantha Becker, stepped up to the plate to introduce that session. She immediately acknowledged what was happening in the Capitol. How the situation was touching each of us in the most personal and emotional ways possible. And how, through what we do, we continue to light and carry the equivalent of an Olympic-sized torch to light the way toward the bright future to which our community is so strongly committed. It was yet another in an enormously long list of moments in which I’ve been proud to be part of the ShapingEDU community.  Inspired by people like Anderson who join us in an effort to help us broaden our horizons and remember the importance of what we are doing. And (somewhat) hopeful, even in our darkest moments, that we might continue looking forward and improving our systems and our behavior in ways that lift to one step closer to living up to our highest and most cherished ideals.

You would think, after all of that (including the very moving presentation Anderson offered us in that tremendous moment of need), that we would be ready to call it a day. But no. As is a tradition within our nearly four-year-old community of dreamers-doers-drivers, we weren’t quite done with each other yet. So we moved into the final event of the day—a stunningly positive online concert featuring seven tremendously diverse musicians who not only reminded us of the importance of the arts in our lives, but demonstrated, through their adaptability, the innovative way our artists are responding to the challenges and changes caused by the pandemic. The performers very effectively dealt with Zoom-as-a-concert venue from the beginning segment (which featured a series of one-song-per-artist performances in our main virtual concert hall); into a second segment where were able to follow a few individual performers into breakout rooms that served as smaller, more intimate recital halls for short sets; and then back into the main hall for activities that culminated in a final set of one-song-per-artist performances by each musician. And it was through this very effective combination of live music online and the social connections fostered among audience members who communicated through Zoom’s typed-chat function that the session became so much more than it might otherwise have been. A musical event. A chance for the same sort of online interactions many of us have during evening events at onsite conferences. And a chance, using and observing the technology, to be immersed in and simultaneously step back from the environment to see what it was providing.

“I’ve had the honor of seeing [him] play this IRL,” one colleague observed in a comment via chat near the end of the evening. “And it’s awesome in any format.”

“I love the reference to ‘in real life,’” I immediately responded as if we were chatting across a table in a coffee house where musicians were performing, and I was thinking again of how the pandemic has inspired us to redefine what we see as “in real life.”

Is it only physical, face-to-face interactions, as some continue to assume without considering how our world is rapidly evolving? Or has “in real life” matured to the point where we can see our blending of onsite and online interactions as a magnificent opportunity to interact in almost magical, mystical ways, that have never before been possible in sports, the arts, and lifelong learning?

I look at my three-day in-real-life experiences at the Winter Games—which I’ll continue to describe in my next post, covering Day 3—and at all the small and large transformations the experiences are nurturing within me and other members of the community. And I’m inspired to continue looking forward. Trying to make sense of what I see. Hungry to make music and foster positive change at every possible level. And committed to helping shape a brilliant future in collaboration with these cherished members of our community and anyone one who wants to join us on this journey.

–N.B.: 1) This is the twenty-seventh in a series of reflections inspired by colleagues’ reactions to the coronavirus and shelter-in-place experiences, and the second in a series of posts inspired by the ShapingEDU Winter Games.