Trust me. I know what I'm doing

E.M. Forster recognised the importance of trust in human relationships. In What I believe, he wrote: "One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life." Maish over at elearningpost links to Peter Andrews who provides some tips for avoiding virtual messes in Trust-building for a virtual team.

Update: Steven Cohen agrees: "Trust. That's how collaboration works." You demonstrate trustworthiness through your actions, but those actions, and hence your trustworthiness, are communicated through stories. As Larry Prusak says "…when people tell stories about other people, the motivations are usually reliability, trust and knowledge."

This is your life

With his lifestylist hat on, Jeremy's been thinking about "how people record, organize and display their experiences." (Following the conversation through the blogosphere led me to SmartMobs and a comment left by Steven Sidman which linked to MyLifeBits, an ambitious project which is well worth a look.)

It turns out Helen's been having similar thoughts as well. I'm particularly excited when Helen says:

Here is an opportunity for schools, as well, to bring this digital storytelling process to their communities, to match young people who have the technology skills with older people who have the stories to be preserved. Then, we can truly become a community of lifelong learners who share our knowledge and wisdom with each other.

This is very similar to Chris Bigum's work with Knowledge Producing Schools which I have blogged about previously.

If communities are going be telling digital stories, then the technological barriers need to be removed. Enter COINE, a European research project whose objective is to ensure the accessibility of digital storytelling. This feature from IST provides a clear overview of the project.

Will e-Learning be another flop?

Robert Paterson shares this great sporting story which highlights our resistance to change, especially when we have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo:

The problem with something revolutionary like that [the Fosbury flop] was that most of the elite athletes had invested so much time in their technique and movements that they didn't want to give it up, so they stuck with what they knew.

Hmm… sound familiar? Now, why did change occur?

The revolution came about from the kids who saw it, and had nothing to lose. The kids who saw it on TV and said, 'Gosh, that looks fun—let's do that.' Grade school kids who didn't have coaches who would say, 'No, you stick with the straddle.'

Teacher demographics show up an aging cohort, who in general, understandably want to "stick with what they know." Is there a lesson there for those involved with e-Learning? This time the revolution will not be televised!

Accentuate the positive

I first learned of Appreciative Inquiry (like I do many things) by reading Derek's blog. Later, when I became intrigued by storytelling, I realised Appreciative Inquiry, which seeks to appreciate the best by collecting people’s stories, serves as further proof of the power and ubiquity of story in our lives.

Thanks to Nancy I'm now a virtual delegate at the Second International Appreciative Inquiry Conference. I opted for the relative safety of my computer over the hurricane-lashed East Coast, despite the allure of the Doral Golf Resort and Spa!

Merrolee, a fellow FLLinNZ, sent me this link to Ann Perodeau's presentation discussing Appreciative Inquiry as adapted to the online learning environment. Make sure you read the speaker's notes where Ann offers specific suggestions and examples for responding to postings, reviewing assignments and dealing with difficult moments.

Boys will be boys

Julie Coates, the generational expert I linked to in my last post, has co-authored a book, Nine Shift, which describes the changing work, life and education landscapes in the 21st century. Check out the Nine Shift blog—no RSS feed yet though :-(

The title Nine Shift "derives from the phenomenon that nine hours in your day will be spent entirely differently in 2020 than they were spent in 2000." The authors suggest that the last time such a shift occurred in society was between 1900 and 1920 and was driven by the automobile. They go on to predict that this latest shift, driven by the Internet, will mirror the influence of the car exactly a century ago.

The UK book launch earlier this year appeared to make a bit of a splash, with the BBC asking "Will boys always be boys?" In the face of international evidence which shows girls out-performing boys in most subjects and at most ages, Coates and co-author William Draves posit that:

…it is not boys who are the problem but schools. For while boys are developing the skills they will need in the "knowledge jobs" of the future, schools are still preparing students for an industrial age which is passing.

Coates and Draves say boys are developing knowledge-age skills despite school, by tinkering with computers and the Internet in the same way their great-grandfathers did by tinkering with automobiles. Lawrence Lessig made the same point in Free Culture (although for different reasons) when he paraphrased John Seely Brown: "…we learn by tinkering."

Boys will be boys. As the BBC point out, "It is a seductive theory."

Update: The Nine Shift blog has er… shifted and now has an RSS feed. Yay!

Death of the classroom

Things have got a little morbid around here of late, what with talk of dead words on dead paper, dead authors and now unsubstantiated news of the death of the classroom!

The message that stood out for me when reading this "news" was that:

Faculty need to switch among learning modes within the same instructional period. That means switching from lecture, to team interaction, to individual reflection and study, to hands-on building or experiment, and back again, in the same or adjacent spaces.

This was an affirmation of what Mark McCrindle has said about engaging Generation Y. McCrindle talked about the importance of structuring the learning process to take advantage of multiple modalities; especially the kinesthetic mode, given its predominance among Gen Y.

What might these lessons look like? Well the team at California State University, Hayward have had a good think about Teaching Information Literacy to Generation Y.

For more on the traits of Gen Y take a look at Julie Coates' presentation from last year's LERN convention: Generation X vs Generation Y: What makes the younger generations tick.

The author's dead, long live the blogger

I want to elaborate a little on Will and Barbara's assertion that "Writing stops, blogging, continues." My position is that writing, like blogging, continues. As a reader I interact with the words on the (real or virtual) page inventing a response. It is the author who is dead, not the words. Through death, the author gives life to the blogger.

To quote Ken Smith in Stephen Downes' definitive Educational Blogging: "Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others." My blog gives me a place to archive my responses. Barbara insightfully highlights the metacognitive benefits of blogging when she quotes Forster from Aspects of the Novel: "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

But, what is really exciting is that, to quote Smith in Downes again:

If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you'll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.

Blogging is connecting.

Not bad for a bunch of kids, eh?

Pamela Travers talked of connecting individuals with the community. Chris Bigum believes schools are well placed to make this connection by acting as knowledge producers:

The one thing that a community can, and increasingly will need to have expertise in, is knowledge about itself. In a world which appears destined to be increasingly shaped by financial and information forces which operate globally, having a rich source of knowledge about itself will provide a local community with a good basis on which to read and act on the global influences that it encounters.

Schools are already producing knowledge about their communities:

• In Vermont, Hector is busy collaborator in The Community Digital Storytelling Collaborative which aims to work together with high school students "to create inquiry-based digital stories about community issues."


• In Australia a group of year seven students have produced an oral history quilt using interactive multimedia. As someone commented "Not bad for a bunch of kids, eh?"

Update: Barbara blogs about "new localism" and the role of social software and local government.

Dead words on dead paper

Pamela Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was also influenced by E.M. Forster's epigraph "Only connect." In her essay of the same name she writes of the theme's meaning:

…the attempt to link a passionate scepticism with the desire for meaning, to find the human key to the inhuman world about us; to connect the individual with the community, the known with the unknown; to relate the past to the present and both to the future.

Travers describes the origin of the essay's title. Students would crowd into her apartment to talk. On one such occasion Travers noted that "thinking was linking"—to which a student cried out "Yes! Only connect!" When the student reached for pen and paper to record this newly made connection she was implored by Travers to resist, saying:

Once you write things down you've lost them. They are simply dead words on dead paper.

Is this what Will and Barbara mean when they suggest "Writing stops, blogging continues."? Hector's sceptical and I think I will agree to disagree too. Although, like Will and Barbara, I find it hard to avoid the temptation to try and connect the blogging and writing worlds in my desire to find meaning.

I wonder then what Travers would make of the blog phenomenon? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?!