Learning(Hu)Man Virtual Summer Camp: Flipping Scary Stories

Going to summer camp was something I thought was long behind me—particularly at a time when I am joining so many others in following shelter-in-place social distancing guidelines implemented in response to the current coronavirus pandemic. But I had that wrong. I’m back at camp. A newly-organized virtual summer camp. As a participant, facilitator, and occasional volunteer monitoring and fostering online conversations via Slack during the week-long Arizona State University ShapingEDU Learning(Hu)Man campy virtual summer camp.

It’s only one day old, and already it is an extraordinary experience produced by leadership and volunteers within a community of dreamer-doer-drivers who consistently demonstrate an unbelievable ability to plan and bring to fruition the most complex of endeavors within incredibly brief periods of time.

Some of the more than 2,000 of us who have registered joined the opening ceremony around the virtual campfire last night, and more of us continued to participate today through a series of dynamic, highly-interactive sessions featuring colleagues and a variety of visionary guests working together to shape the future of learning in the digital era. The theme for our first full day together has been “flipping scary stories,” and there certainly are plenty of scary stories to tell and flip. Virtual campers began the day with some early-morning online Mess Hall interactions, then gathered around the flag pole for an inspiring keynote presentation by Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who spoke eloquently and movingly of this moment in time when we have a chance for the first-ever full release of human potential through egalitarian access to education. A panel discussion on “the next normal” in learning—“the one we’re creating together” in response to the tremendously scary stories that are continuing to unfold around us—kept all of us standing virtually at attention for the remainder of that early-morning gathering.

[Image by Karina Branson/ConverSketch]

We then went to our own smaller online camp sites to choose from more than a dozen 50-minute sessions slotted into two consecutive time periods for the next couple of hours; among the choices were “Learning Futures: Avoiding the Zombie Apocalypse to Create the Brave New World”; “Using Data Science, Data, and the Power of Community to Address the Student Loan Crisis”; and the “Using Design Thinking to Close the Digital Divide” session I co-facilitated with ShapingEDU Innovator in Residence Lisa Gustinelli, FutureWe Founder Jonathan Nalder, and educational technologist Gordon Shupe (centered on the ShapingEDU “Connected for Work and Learning: Universal Broadband Access in the United States” initiative that is beginning to attract attention and support from a variety of collaborators). Other subsequent Learning(Hu)Man activities throughout the morning and early afternoon gave everyone plenty of options for playing, learning, interacting, dreaming, and plotting before we had an afternoon break to step away from the structured events and to reflect while taking virtual walks through the woods or much-needed naps.

[Image by Karina Branson/ConverSketch]

Refreshed from our walks and naps, many of us came back together for two overwhelmingly and richly dynamic sessions—the first featuring a live interview with Zoom Founder/CEO Eric Yuan, the second featuring three over-the-top brilliantly passionately engaging presenters (Nicol Turner-Lee, Director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation; Larry Irving, President and CEO of the Irving Information Group; and Joshua Edmonds, University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative and City of Detroit Digital Inclusion Fellow). Yuan, responding to deeply thoughtful questions from Zoom Chief Diversity Officer Damien Hooper-Campbell, addressed a variety of topics including Zoom’s commitment to quality, communities served, and willingness to collaborate with others seeking positive responses to some of our most challenging social issues; he assured Learning(Hu)Man campers that a priority for Zoom, post-pandemic, will be how to unleash the power of the Zoom platform in continuing to serve a variety of educational, artistic, and socially-diverse communities.

[Image by Karina Branson/ConverSketch]

Just when it appeared there was no way to top the momentum and excitement of what Learning(Hu)Man and its partners had produced, it did exactly that. The final session with Turner-Lee, Irving, and Edmonds showed virtual conferencing at its finest. The formal question-and-answer segments between those inspiring presenters was accompanied, seamlessly, by session audience members interacting with each other and the presenters, via a live-chat window, in a positively overwhelming flow of give-and-take. One of the many comments that stood out to me came from a fellow participant and, in a heartbeat, changed the way I have been viewing the challenge of the digital divide and overcoming less-than-ideal broadband access throughout our country: “Frankly, getting so tired of hearing ‘Digital Divide’…it’s a social, economic, social justice, bandwidth divide and it’s been going on for decades. So, despite funding from the FCC, state governments, private foundations, etc. We are Still Discussing…so what’s the solution? It’s not just technology, it’s a reflection of the inequities in our society.”

Both exhausted and exhilarated, I decided to skip the set of live conversations and playful activities that were scheduled to continue via Zoom before camp shut down for the evening and we began recharging our creative batteries in anticipation of reconvening early tomorrow morning in the camp Mess Hall for another day of thoughtfully engaging interactions designed to spur us toward positive action.

What remains for me this evening is to acknowledge the absolutely stunning accomplishment represented by the first full day of summer camp—an achievement in virtual conferencing described eloquently online by “Camp Groundskeeper” Samantha Becker on behalf of the entire Camp Team:

“Learning(Hu)Man 2020 is an experimental fusion of hands-on learning, storytelling, tech hacks and the good kind of shenanigans. In short, it’s total camp. Summer camp! This weeklong series of events will convene a global community of education changemakers to push the creative envelope for how we serve students and advance learner success.

“Interactive experiences led by a cohort of camp counselors (read: education and industry leaders) will uncover best practices in learning design, edtech tools and development, and emergent thinking around the art of the possible—all with the shared mission for enabling student success in all of its dimensions.

Thank you to [Camp Chef] Lev Gonick, who started passing me ‘back of the napkin’ ideas over Slack on this—and then never stopped.”

There are still several more days of camping ahead of all of us. And when everything formally wraps up next Monday morning with a two-hour session to summarize what we have experienced and what we hope to accomplish as a result of having gone to camp together, it still will not be over. There will be weeks, if not months, of reflections and follow-up interactions synchronously and asynchronously. There will be opportunities to view archived recordings as they are posted on the ShapingEDU YouTube channel. There will be continuing discussions on the ShapingEDU Slack site. There will be unforeseeable positive concrete actions. And, most of all, there will be that dynamic, unique ShapingEDU community “dreaming, driving, and doing” together in one long, uninterrupted moment that began long before we arrived at Learning(Hu)Man summer camp and will extend long after we “leave.”

–N.B.: 1) This is the fifteenth in a series of reflections inspired by colleagues’ reactions to the coronavirus and shelter-in-place experiences, and to our continuing interactions online. 2) Paul is one of two ShapingEDU Storytellers in Residence, serving from July 2020 – June 2021.

Shaping Education Unconference 2018: Homecoming for a Community of Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers (Pt. 1 of 4)

I didn’t even make it through the hotel lobby to check in before being gratefully and willingly drawn into my first conversation with cherished colleagues here at the Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning in Tempe and Scottsdale, Arizona Wednesday afternoon.

Unexpectedly seeing Jared Bendis, Tom Haymes, and Ruben Puentedura—people I had known, adored, and learned from for years through the New Media Consortium (NMC) before its board of directors closed the organization and put it into Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings—made me immediately feel as if I were home again.

It has been a long emotional journey to arrive here at the Unconference. Many of us had been shocked and tremendously saddened by the sudden demise, in December 2017, of the NMC. Committed as much to the global community of teacher-trainer-learner-doers (this, after all, is in the best sense of the word, a community of learning “activists”) fostered by the organization as to the organization itself, we quickly mobilized via a “Beyond the Horizon” group on Slack—a popular social media tool that can be used to effectively facilitate productive online conversations within a community of interest. Bryan Alexander, Lisa Gustinelli, Jonathan Nalder, and I were among those immediately turning to the challenge of exploring ways to continue working together even though the organization that had brought us together had disappeared. It only took a few days to begin reconvening members of the community; within a few weeks, we had drawn approximately 200 members into that Slack community. What was and is fascinating about the Beyond the Horizon group is that it is was not and is not simply a group of people gathering to hold a wake; new members—colleagues who never had any formal interaction with the New Media Consortium, but who shared the community’s commitment to creativity, learning/learners/lifelong learning, innovation, and educational technology—began joining by invitation so that, in essence, it was rapidly evolving at the same moment that it was reconvening.

We asked some fundamental questions—often prompted by our colleague Bryan, whose Future Trends Forum remained one of several important touchpoints for us as we struggled to regain our footing—about where we had been as a community and where we might go in our suddenly-changed training-teaching-learning-doing environment. Within a few weeks, the community had already come up with a rudimentary framework for action, which Bryan helped nurture and document on his own blog. We continued to look toward a future firmly rooted in our history and traditions as a community of learners. And, with a core group of planners and a still-expanding group of partners, began establishing a new identity—under the community-established name FOEcast (Future of Education forecast)—held an online “ideation” week to continue developing a formal plan of action.

But what really gave the community a major push was an invitation from our colleague Lev Gornick to gather here in Arizona for the unconference that will conclude this afternoon. Having attracted nearly two dozen sponsors—including EDUCAUSE, which obtained the NMC’s assets through the Chapter 7 proceedings and is proceeding with plans to publish the 2018 Horizon Report > Higher Ed Edition halted by the closing of the NMC—and reached out to a community that extends beyond the NMC community, Lev is giving us a much-needed opportunity to build upon what many of us have accomplished together so we can continue working to produce positive transformations within the global learning community in which we live, work, and play.

Karina Branson/ConverSketch

That hotel-lobby conversation that extended over a mid-afternoon lunch blossomed at the Unconference opening reception, where a fabulous graphic facilitator, Karina Branson, helped create the foundations for the conversations and work that went on all day yesterday and will conclude early this afternoon. Karina, by listening to individual participants informally recall their first experiences with digital learning, created a wonderfully illustrated timeline. Not as a way of reveling in perceived past glories. But, rather, as a way to remind ourselves that we have a tremendously rich legacy upon which we can build as the group continues to evolve into something even better and more productive than what we had before the NMC disappeared.

It would be easy to fall into maudlin, clichéd observation that the more than 100 of us gathered here in the Phoenix area arrived to be present for and participants in the rebirth of a community of learning. But that would be a terrible misrepresentation of what I sense is really happening here. This isn’t a rebirth, from the ashes of a wonderful, innovative, inspirational organization, of the community created and nurtured by NMC for more than two decades. This is the reconvening of the members of a dynamic, thoughtful inquisitive, and highly-motivated group of Edunauts—a term coined by Jonathan Nalder and at least two other people, independently of each other!—who as the title of the Unconference suggests, continue to meet and welcome new members into a group of dreamers, doers and drivers interested in being part of the process of shaping a future for learning—to the benefit of those we serve.

And as we left the opening reception Wednesday night and at least a couple of us continued our conversations well into the evening in the parking lot of our hotel, it was clear that our work was not about to begin; it was about to continue with a wonderfully crafted agenda and plenty of work on the table.

N.B. — This is the first of four sets of reflections inspired by the Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning in April 2018.

Next: A Day Full of Dreaming, Planning, and Doing

Beyond the Horizon Report: A Plan and a Call for Participation

This “guest post,” written by long-time NMC (New Media Consortium) colleague Bryan Alexander, initially appeared on Bryan’s own Future Trends Forum blog at https://bryanalexander.org/uncategorized/beyond-the-horizon-report-a-plan-and-a-call-for-participation/; is here with his permission; and is part of an effort by many of us to maintain the dynamic, vibrant, global ed-tech community the NMC fostered before suddenly announcing its dissolution on Monday December 18, 2017. 

Two weeks ago I floated the idea of creating a new project, a future of education and technology initiative that would go beyond the late Horizon Report.

I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond, to be honest.  This is awkward stuff, thinking about starting a new project while an inspirational one is being liquidated.  It’s a bit inside baseball, too.

Then people did respond.  From all over the world.

From Britain, an offer to help out:

3 Jan

Bryan Alexander@BryanAlexander

Beyond the Horizon Report: towards a new project http://bryanalexander.org/2018/01/03/beyond-the-horizon-report-towards-a-new-project/ … pic.twitter.com/8r67OgyCGa

Digital Maverick@digitalmaverick

How can someone like me get involved?

From Australia, Jonathan Nalder created this visualization for a variety of efforts, including a new research project:

(More from Jon below)

Another from Australia (what an awesome nation!), Kay Oddone blogged her reflections on the whole NMC story, with pointers to the future.

Rather than ‘keeping on, keeping on’, this likely halt in our favourite tech prediction publication may give us the pause to find new ways to work together to create something even better. A project that learns progressively and builds upon previous discoveries, which focuses on the how as much as the what.

The transnational team of Lisa Gustinelli, Jonathan Nalder, and Paul Signorelli offered this call for a new community after NMC:

We are at a very early stage in the evolution of this community—in some ways, it feels as if the NMC’s body hasn’t yet been placed into the ground—but we are already seeing the genesis of a community bootstrapping itself forward in hopeful and promising ways…

(More on them below)

From Turkey came advice from a related research project:

3 Jan

Bryan Alexander@BryanAlexander

Can we create a new future of education and technology project?
Beyond the Horizon Report: https://bryanalexander.org/2018/01/03/beyond-the-horizon-report-towards-a-new-project/ …#FTTE

Aras BOZKURT@arasbozkurt

1-Using Delphi, we carry out a similar research for Turkish Higher Education from the perspective of ODL. We grouped future hard technologies (eg: wearable tech), soft technologies (eg: blockchain) and research topics (eg: ethics in ICT).

From the United States came further concrete advice, as Michael Green called for an open approach:

3 Jan

Bryan Alexander@BryanAlexander

Can we create a new future of education and technology project?
Beyond the Horizon Report: https://bryanalexander.org/2018/01/03/beyond-the-horizon-report-towards-a-new-project/ …#FTTE

Michael Greene II@profmikegreene

@ncaidin yea, I like a lot of what Bryan is thinking in that post. Specifically, I adamantly advocate for the new project to be done in the open, on github. If not under @EDUCAUSELI or @Apereo ‘s github org, then a separate new space for the new project itself.

So where do we stand now?

At the present “we” are a group or network of interested and engaged people from around the world, in different professional and institutional positions, linked together through technology and a shared passion for the topic: better understanding the future of education and tech.  We think there’s a crying need for better intelligence about where things might be headed.

Although different organizations have expressed interest and support in various ways, none are playing a formal or determining role at this point.

We don’t have a name yet, although many have been floated, and we will settle on one.

To be clear, there is *no* connection between this potential project and the New Media Consortium. This is not a continuation of the NMC’s Horizon Report, but the creation of something new. It is influenced by Horizon, as well as many other futures projects.  (Here’s my personal disclaimer.)

Here’s what we’re considering doing.

The goal: to produce a prototype and/or detailed plan before the year is out.

The method for doing so includes the following:

1. Several design thinking events occurring face-to-face, such as at conferences, unconferences, and fortuitous meetups.
2. Several design thinking events occurring online, synchronously, through videoconference tools.
3.  ” ” ” ” ” “, asychronously, over a short time (say several days to a week). using a combination of tools, such as a wiki or Google Doc, Twitter hashtag, Slack group, etc.
4. A continuous, public, open, Web-based conversation about producing a prototype and/or detailed plan. This can use tech from #3, but would run without interruption until the goal is achieved.
5. A single, simple website to aggregate all of this information, with links and explanatory text.

What do you think of the plan?

To make this happen will require significant energy, planning, and commitment. There’s a lot of cat-herding, experimentation, and research involved. I am happy to do my part, since this is precisely in my wheelhouse. Others have joined up and contributed essentially to this process, including Maya Georgieva, Tom Haymes, Jonathan Nadler, Lisa Gustinelli, Paul Signorelli, and more.

We could use more folks. Indeed, this new project’s inception could grow a community.

Who’s with us?

N.B. — Those interested in joining the discussion within the Beyond the Horizon Slack community can contact Bryan or Paul for an invitation to become part of that global, online community of teacher-trainer-learners exploring and promoting the use of ed-tech in learning.

Next Steps for a Beyond Horizons (2.0) Community

The following piece was prepared collaboratively by Lisa Gustinelli, Jonathan Nalder, and Paul Signorelli; each of us is publishing and sharing it on our own sites in the spirit of the collaboration that the piece documents. Please repost.

We’re a community that knows how to work, play, and, when necessary (as we have recently learned), grieve together. The key to dealing with those unexpected moments of grief seems to be in looking ahead as we bury our dead and tend to the survivors.

Those of us who were part of the NMC (New Media Consortium) global family, tribe, and community of learning for many years were stunned, a couple of weeks ago, by the sudden, completely unexpected news that our NMC friends/staff/colleagues had been suddenly laid off during the holiday season and, as the official (unsigned) statement distributed by former Board President Gardner Campbell via email noted on December 18, 2017, the “NMC will be promptly commencing a chapter 7 bankruptcy case. A trustee will be appointed by the court to wind down NMC’s financial affairs, liquidate its assets and distribute any net proceeds to creditors…” Those who loved the ed-tech reports issued through NMC’s Horizon Project, which documented ed tech projects, developments, trends, and challenges across both formal and informal learning sectors, are concerned that a project with more than 16 years of insights and impact worldwide could die along with the NMC.

Here one minute, gone the next: It’s the classic Talebian Black Swan—something so stunningly unexpected and world-changing for those involved (akin to the first, completely unanticipated sighting of a black swan where only white swans had previously been seen) that it shakes our beliefs and perceptions to the core. (None of us has been able to overlook the irony that one of the biggest Black Swans we have encountered came in the form of the dissolution of the very organization that had brought the concept of the Black Swan to our attention through a combination of conversations, articles, and a summit some of us attended in January 2015—three years ago this month.)

Dissecting the situation to determine what caused this particularly unwelcome Black Swan to land in our pond is going to keep a lot of people busy for a very long time.

Frankly, that’s not our concern. As we heard so many times decades ago on the original Star Trek television show, “He’s dead, Jim,” and others will have to handle the NMC funeral and respectfully deal with what remains of the corpse.

In less than two weeks, however, numerous members of the community that was originally fostered and sustained through the New Media Consortium have come together to determine what we will do to continue our work and play and exploration together in a post-NMC world. It only took us a few days of intensive online conversations and phone calls to determine that our greatest asset—one that cannot be monetized by any trustee or sold  through any bankruptcy proceedings—is the extended, collaborative, global group of innovative educators-trainers-learners-doers (what one of us lovingly calls “Edunauts”) who produced, under Creative Commons licensing, much of what made NMC such a dynamic organization with such far-reaching impact.

We are members of a vital, vibrant, dynamic community. That community is not dead, even if the organization that helped it grow and thrive is. By the end of the same week the announcement of the NMC’s immediate dissolution appeared, four of us (Lisa, Jonathan, Paul, and Bryan Alexander) had initiated community-wide conversations that led to creation of a landing place for the community: the Beyond the Horizon community on Slack.

We are at a very early stage in the evolution of this community—in some ways, it feels as if the NMC’s body hasn’t yet been placed into the ground—but we are already seeing the genesis of a community bootstrapping itself forward in hopeful and promising ways:

• More than 150 people have become part of the Slack community mentioned above to explore possible futures for the community and its work. Colleagues including Bryan Alexander are sketching out possibilities. (See Bryan’s blog.) Another was sketched out by Jonathan in an online posting.
• EDUCAUSE President/CEO John O’Brien publicly committed the organization to doing whatever it can to bring the 2018 Higher Education Edition of the Horizon Report to fruition.
• And now, in our Beyond the Horizon Slack community, we have a prototype horizon 2.0, which we launch with this announcement.

We are, individually and collectively, working as friends/colleagues/collaborators/cultivators, each tilling the vineyards we know best, collectively working toward the same goal of moving past this tragedy and keeping the momentum of this community going. And we hope you’ll join us, informally and formally, as we continue the learning journey the NMC community was on for nearly 25 years.

NMC 2017: Expanding the Ever-growing Conversations in Our Global Learning Spaces

You certainly didn’t have to be here in Boston to have been an active participant in opening day at the NMC (New Media Consortium) 2017 Summer Conference yesterday. Because so many of us have become used to, adept at, and passionate about being part of  the blended (online-onsite) learning environments we help create and nurture, those of us onsite actively reached out to offsite colleagues to draw them into the presentations, conversations, explorations, and numerous moments of revelation in terms of trends, challenges, and developments in educational technology. And those to whom we reached out responded magnificently via synchronous and asynchronous contributions on Facebook, Twitter, Shindig, and other online collaborative tools. Sometimes with us, sometimes among themselves—a process that further emphasizes the diminishing assumption that onsite interactions are always central and online interactions are ancillary.

It’s far from unusual at conferences serving trainer-teacher-learner-doers to find dynamic levels of discourse flowing seamlessly between onsite and online participants. When the reason we are gathering is to learn more about technology by using it, the discourse that is fostered by creative use of resources such as Shindig only speeds up the process of disseminating that innovation and its adoption among ever-increasing numbers of people globally.

You could literally see the process taking place during International Society for Technology in Training (ISTE) CEO Richard Culatta’s keynote address during the formal opening session. Colleagues onsite were visibly engaged, and their engagement expanded via Twitter and Facebook to draw our offsite colleagues into exchanges that sometimes included backchannel conversations between those offsite colleagues—as if Culatta were with them as well as with us and inspiring some major rethinking about the world we inhabit.

Also apparent to those of us attentive to this was the way what used to be seen as discrete, separated moments are becoming intriguingly expanded “moments” that that can continue for days, weeks, months, or event years through the use of the online tools that continue to evolve to our benefit.

Richard Culatta(l) and Bryan Alexander at NMC17

The latest of those moments for me began earlier this week when Apple Distinguished Educator/Henderson Prize Winner/Future-U Founder/entrepreneur/innovator/NMC Ambassador/colleague/friend Jonathan Nalder and sat down to dinner here an hour after I arrived. Some of what we discussed during that dinner extended into another dinner two nights later with Shindig representatives, our colleague Bryan Alexander, and several others who, over the course of the evening, were sharing stories about the ed-tech developments we are exploring, fostering, and disseminating—including the use of Shindig to take advantage of collaborative learning opportunities. The moment again expanded unexpectedly yesterday morning when another colleague (Palm Beach State College Director of Innovation and Instructional Technology/NMC Ambassador Lisa Gustinelli) and I decided to track Bryan down to see if we could watch him conduct a live Virtual Connecting session via Shindig with offsite colleagues right after Richard Culatta’s keynote address concluded.  He and our Shindig colleagues didn’t just invite us in to observe the session involving Culatta and others; they introduced us to Culatta a few minutes later when he arrived to discuss his keynote address a bit with our offsite colleagues; allowed us to photograph the process in action; and even interviewed us, at the end of the session, to extend our own conversations into the online part of our global learning space.

NMC staff, administrators, board members, general members, and supporters have done a great job, over the past few years, in creating and fostering a vision of a cutting-edge community of  learning centered on “lifelong learning with lifelong friends,” and I’ve never felt that vision in action more strongly than during this extended “moment” that is obviously far from finished as I write these words well after midnight between days one and two of the conference. We came. We interacted. We learned. And we will continue to do so as long as we remain committed to maintaining a strong sense of curiosity, a commitment to innovation, and a focus on serving those who rely on us to support them in their own lifelong learning efforts.

NMC17: Joining the Edunauts

A well-run conference like the annual NMC (New Media Consortium) Summer Conference always sends me into the stratosphere. And the one that officially opens tomorrow in the Boston area with pre-conference workshops has already thrust me into the lovely lofty heights of the teaching-training-learning-doing endeavors I pursue as part of my own lifelong-learning efforts.

Arriving a couple of days early and rooming with Apple Distinguished Educator/Henderson Prize Winner/Future-U Founder/entrepreneur/innovator/NMC Ambassador/colleague/friend (yes, I am a bit fond and in awe of him) guaranteed that I would be flying high very early this time around. As we sat down to dinner last night here in Cambridge an hour after I arrived, Jonathan began telling me about his latest creation, Future-U, and his efforts to “build a framework to scaffold the next phase of work and education into a thriving future.”

The three-hour workshop he will be facilitating here tomorrow afternoon (June 13, 2017) will more fully explore the themes he and I discussed last night, and his workshop description captured the essence of what we discussed:

“With up to 70% of future jobs under threat, education systems need to do more than provide digital skills. A new mindset is needed to help students bypass the ‘know-what game’ that is being mastered by artificial intelligence. Instead, the future belongs to those who can think, unthink, and rethink well enough to make their own jobs. This workshop will benefit anyone interested in unpacking this proposition by canvasing the ‘Agile Thinking’ approach, the Future-u.org framework, and NMC Horizon Reports to build out discussion of where education is heading and how it can get there.

One of the many elements that always intrigues me about the conversations I have with Jonathan and other NMC colleagues/co-conspirators as we are drawn together at NMC summer conferences is the way they zoom back and forth between views that seem to be at the 33,000-feet-above-ground level while never failing at some point to dive to ground zero with an eye toward responding in concrete ways to real challenges we face. The initial conversation in 2014 with Jonathan,  Palm Beach State College Director of Innovation and Instructional Technology/NMC Ambassador Lisa Gustinelli, and others initiated a discussion that has literally extended with numerous training-teaching-learning-doing colleagues over a three-year period in a variety of onsite, online, and blended environments: trying to find a word or group of words that adequately describe what we all do.

It was an exploration that continued last night as Jonathan described the work he is doing through Future-U on “future literacies” (which to my eyes seems to share turf with what Doug Belshaw has described in terms of eight elements of digital literacy and other ideas I’ve encountered over the past few years) and Jonathan mentioned, almost in passing, the term “edunaut” that he has been using to describe “educators, experts, and [others] who are ahead of the curve and working to aid a transition to a successful tomorrow.”

Looking to see if others had stumbled on to the same term this afternoon as I was writing this piece, we struck gold in a Czech-language site that described edunauts as people “who are continuing to find new teaching methods, new skills and new learning objects, daringly venturing into places where no teacher has ever been…” and a Danish-language site that describes edunauts as ‘teachers, educators, and executives who will create strong visions, new knowledge and change of educational practice.”

So, there we are: a word that for me captures so much of what I see in training-teaching-learning-doing environments that include onsite and online gatherings of colleagues in ATD (the Association for Talent Development). And similar gatherings of colleagues who are working in libraries—onsite and online environments that are an essential part of our lifelong learning landscape. And so many other gatherings of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who share a passion for helping create a world that works better.

Yes, the thoughts are flowing. The colleagues are arriving. And the best is yet to come here at the NMC 2017 Summer Conference at this latest convocation of the edunauts.

N.B.—Those interested in meeting other edunauts can request an invitation to the private community space at https://future-u.mn.co/

NMC 2014 Summer Conference: Not In My Wildest Dreams!

The words “ambassadors” and “learning spaces” might not be at the forefront of your mind if you’re attending an educational-technology conference, but they certainly were for me while I was in Portland, Oregon for the New Media Consortium (NMC) 2014 Summer [ed-tech] Conference earlier this week.
It was, in fact, at the intersection of ambassadors and learning spaces that I again saw what most attracts me to ed-tech and all other aspects of training-teaching-learning: the learners themselves. And what I saw needs to be seen by every one of us involved in and passionate about learning.

The ambassador connection initially came within hours of my arrival onsite early in the week through my conference roommate, Jonathan Nalder—an Australian educator/ed-tech enthusiast who partially funded his trip to the conference by running an online fundraising campaign via Kickstarter. Nalder was among the more than 20 ed-tech aficionados worldwide chosen to serve in the first cohort of NMC ambassadors for their willingness to play the role of “knowledgeable members of NMC Horizon Project K-12 Advisory Boards in the discussions that lead to future K-12 editions of the NMC Horizon Report series, be the experts in their field in the NMC Commons, and gain recognition among an international body of colleagues as innovative educators,” as we are reminded on the NMC website. (The ambassadors earned their positions by submitting video applications that describe the innovations taking place at their schools and also give us a wonderful overview of what was happening in the world of K-12 ed-tech at the time those videos were submitted.) So it was an unexpected pleasure to join him and several other ambassadors for dinner—which is when the learning-spaces connections began.

Hearing NMC Ambassador Lisa Gustinelli chat, during dinner, about a library that had become an “innovation center” she recently joined in a private high school in Florida teed up the topic nicely because it connected transformations I have been following: learning spaces that feature equipment and furniture that can easily be moved to accommodate the needs of learners and learning facilitators; collaborative environments; and the continuing evolution of libraries in ways that more overtly acknowledge and promote their long-standing role as learning centers. My own extremely rewarding onsite conference explorations of learning spaces continued during the week through a series of experiences including attendance at Houston Community College Northwest Director of Technology and Instructional Computing Tom Haymes’ session on idea spaces, and Al Biles’ engaging session providing an overview of innovations at the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC)—which is beautifully described on the MAGIC website.

The ambassador-and-learning-spaces connection came full circle early in the afternoon of the final day of the conference when I joined colleagues in exploring the conference “Idea Lab”—a stimulating ed-tech version of poster sessions designed to serve as “a dynamic place where creativity flows,” and where displays took various shapes including simple yet elegantly-designed stand-alone posters and informal presentations that incorporated content viewable on tablets.

 

Cheryl Steighner with students

Walking over to the “Social Media: Connecting Young Learners to the World” session organized by NMC Ambassador Cheryl Steighner, I found what I hadn’t even known I was seeking: learners at the center of an Idea Lab session about the training-teaching-learning process. And not just any learners: Steighner’s co-presenters (lovingly referred to as her “Steighnerds”—were an amazing group of fourth- and fifth-grade students who were the youngest presenters ever to be included in an NMC Summer Conference, conference organizers confirmed. With Steighner standing nearby and intentionally taking a back seat to her learners, the students described how they had studied an interwoven variety of subjects by using Skype, Twitter, and other social media tools. Via Skype, for example, they interviewed students from other parts of the United States; their initial challenge, shaped through gamification techniques and involving a series of yes-no questions, was to determine where their Skype colleagues were physically located. Once they determined the geographical setting inhabited by their fellow students, they located and marked those places on a map that is usually kept in their classroom and was brought onsite to the NMC conference to be incorporated into their Idea Lab display. But the learning didn’t stop at that elementary level during the Skype sessions; the students learned about their Skype-partners’ cities and states through conversations during those online sessions. The students also honed their English reading and writing skills by composing grammatically correct sentences that became tweets, and by using iPads to compose writing assignments on a variety of topics including the civil rights movement in America.

Skyping to learn geography…and more

Most striking about this blended learning/blended presentation approach is that it made me think far more broadly about the interwoven nature of our learning spaces than I ever had before. The Idea Lab space was a temporary learning space in which adults were learning about Steighner’s approach to teaching as well as about her learners’ sophisticated and enthusiastic approach to learning. The students’ learning space is an intriguingly blended onsite-online classroom that reaches as far as Steighner, Skype, Twitter, and NMC Summer Conference attendance will take them. The conference itself was a dynamically-inspiring learning space comprised of numerous elements: the smaller overlapping learning spaces ranging from the Idea Lab displays, workshops on massive open online courses (MOOCS) and other topics, and session break-out rooms to the larger ballroom settings where plenary sessions were held—and then beyond the hotel where the conference took place, extending into the restaurant where the ambassadors and I talked about innovation spaces and so much more Monday night, then extending even further into another restaurant the following evening with a slightly expanded group that included NMC staff, a workshop facilitator, and one of the conference plenary speakers.

NMC CEO Larry Johnson chats with one of the youngest conference presenters

I clearly wasn’t the only one to notice the spectacular nature of what was occurring in this wonderfully expansive learning space. NMC CEO Larry Johnson, visiting with Steighner’s learners during the Idea Lab session, was clearly as moved by the experience as any of us were. After listening to the students describe what they have gained, he reached into his pocket and in what was clearly an unplanned act, handed each of them a business card and told them that when these fourth- and fifth-grade students were ready to enter the workforce, there would be a place waiting for them at the New Media Consortium.

“When NMC started the Ambassador Program a year ago, did you have any idea that people like Cheryl would be producing results like this at an NMC conference?” I asked him a few minutes later.

“Not in my wildest dreams,” he responded without hesitation.

It simply has to be said: the ambassador project is one well worth observing and emulating, and those fourth- and fifth-grade learners who are becoming our partners merit all the attention we can give them, for they are going to be entering our workplaces sooner than we think. And the learning experiences and expectations they bring with them are going to offer us magnificent opportunities to continue growing with and responding to the evolving challenges of training-teaching-learning—or they are going to leave us in the dust.

“They are going to change the world,” Steighner predicts in a way that cannot be denied, for they already are as we spend time with them. Learn from them. And are inspired to be even better than we are at what we do.