During the poster session at the TLT Symposium this past Saturday, I had the chance to talk with Glenn Johnson, the Project Manager of Penn State's e-Portfolio Initiative. I had previously attended one of Mr. Johnson's training sessions last semester so I was familiar with the e-Portfolio Initiative. The initiative provides students with help in creating their own portfolio. Although there is no set template, students can model their portfolio off of other sample portfolios. I have had previous experience in creating an e-Portfolio. As a Masters student at The College of New Jersey in 2005, I created an e-Portfolio for my expertise in Mathematics and Computer Science Education. I coded in html using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash to bring together images and video for an interactive page. I was very happy with the site but it was what we would call web 1.0 or 1.1 technologies. At the poster session, I was interested in how e-Portfolios could be combined with web 2.0 technologies, so I engaged Mr. Johnson in conversation. Mr. Johnson suggested going away from the normal old e-portfolio and instead using blogs@psu.edu or similar technologies to form an electronic portfolio.This brings me to my idea for further research. I would like to take Mr. Johnson's ideas of combining e-Portfolios and web 2.0 technologies and go one step further. In the near future, I would like to create an e-Portfolio system (SaaS) that serves as a Mash-Up of our Identity on the internet. Instead of just using a blog or other tool as an e-Portfolio, I would like to make a Mash-Up of all the communities, blogs, and technologies that we are involved in on the internet. In other words, I would like to create an application that is very similar to Pownce but with the specific goal of using it as an e-Portfolio. For those that do not know, Pownce puts links to users many accounts on one page. On my Pownce page, I have a link to my facebook, myspace, flickr, aim messenger, msn messenger, and twitter accounts.My research question would be to find out if students (who use this new e-Portfolio Mash-Up) are less likely to post incriminating pictures and vulgar text or blog posts. I think this research would be significant because it could provide a start of responsible social networking and web 2.0 living. In this context, responsible = fun yet smart, appropriate, and professional.
March 2008 Archives
Saturday's Symposium was a great learning experience. Lessig's keynote address drew very interesting parallels to the past, with the one about Latin standing out for me. When the masses did not speak the same language as the elite, each group became irrelevant to the other. As educators, we need to recognize where the students are coming from and work with them rather than ignoring their backgrounds and forcing our material upon them. I think I felt personally challenged because I felt like the giant Uncle Sam finger was pointing directly at me. The sessions that I attended were very informative and taught me about new technologies that I am already telling others about (zotero). The conference was designed to make people aware of what is already happening at Penn State. Drawing speakers from the branch campuses highlighted the university-wide prevalence of emerging technologies. Building in time for questions and leaving plenty of time to walk down the hallway facilitated face to face conversations that let me walk away with most of my questions answered. The designation of a hashtag for the symposium allowed the community members to share their updates with each other. This helped for all the tweets people were authoring throughout the day. I had heard about a conference at which people tweeted and had a lot of activity, but I grossly underestimated the volume of tweets that would take place over the span of eight hours. I felt that I got more out of sessions when I was able to read the realtime thoughts of others in the room. The backchannel communication also permitted me to find out what was occurring in the other rooms and provided me with laughs on several occasions. Many people made twitter contributions, but a lot of people did not - was there another backchannel or were they trying to avoid possibly being considered "rude"? The tradeoff to audience members (micro)blogging during presentations is a lack of eye contact and uncertainty for presenters. The community came together throughout the day. People were having face-to-face conversations and technology facilitated conversations. On some occasions I would speak to the person next to me, on others I would electronically send my thoughts through a tweet or a google doc. I found myself reading updates from people I have never met and vice versa. What mattered was that each person was at the symposium and communicating about the symposium. The community seemed to be largely faculty, which makes sense because they are the ones using the technology at Penn State, but I think a larger student presence would be nice. I think undergraduate education majors and minors should be encouraged to attend to provide an additional viewpoint for the benefit of all and to make them aware of new technologies for potential use in their future classrooms. Thank you to those who put the symposium together and those who presented. Thanks to Cole and Scott for having us attend.
Assignment: Find a video on youtube(http://www.youtube.com), which you find interesting in educational sense and be able to access in class. Be prepared to discuss: 1. Why did you select this video? 2. How does it apply to teaching and learning? Have fun guys..:)
At the AERA conference in NYC last week, Dr. Roy Pea spoke as the Keynote speaker for the Technology as an Agent for Change in Teaching and Learning (TACTL) Special Interest Group. I was very interested in attending for a few reasons. First, we have already read Roy Pea's "Distributed Intelligence" in class and I wanted to meet the author. Also, the title of his presentation "Learning Environments Transformed" caught my attention and seemed very interesting. Although it was nice shaking his hand and introducing myself after his presentation, I enjoyed listening to his ideas the most.In the presentation, Pea discussed the properties of emerging learning environments. They are 1. fast growing as part of a participatory culture, 2. created as Software as a Service (SaaS), 3. social networks, 4. search engines, 5. gaming worlds, and 6. pervasive (i.e. ubiquitous) and mobile. He also discussed an initiative that he helped put together for the National Science Foundation. The initiative entitled "Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Learning for the Future: A Vision and Research Agenda" (CELF) was created to find out where we need to be (as educators) in this new web 2.0 rich world. You can find the CELF initiative at http://www.cra.org/reports/cyberinfrastructure.pdf. In the next few paragraphs, I want to discuss a few of the words in the Chapter entitled "Communities of Learning" and relate it to CI 597."Cyberinfrastructure will make it possible for students in school settings to be more directly engaged with life beyond the classroom, and to observe and interact with communities of professionals and others who develop products and results that matter, both within and outside of their communities."This is already evident in our class' use of Twitter outside of the classroom walls. At the TLT Symposium, our class met with a community of professionals. Twitter will enable us to stay in touch with these professionals and learn more from them long after the symposium."Virtual communities of learning can help address many of the issues raised about the need to retain qualified and talented teachers and support them in their professional practice. They can provide personal support as well as access to professionally interesting conversations and resources; connections to practicing scientists and education researchers; and more opportunities for advancement than the local context often can offer."Online communities are available that allow teachers to share resources. Along with social networks and blogs, these online communities also provide easy access to conversations with others in their field. Our class blogs and podcasts have created many conversations that would have never happened if we kept those conversations inside the classroom walls.I am providing the end of the Chapter below in the hope that it will help foster future research questions for anyone reading this. I am interested in a few of the challenges and providing some research in the future to address them. Specifically, I am interested in providing research for the challenge of community and member feedback."CELF research challenges include: Managing the need for large-scale, robust production systems upon which practitioners can rely and researchers can do research, coupled with the ongoing need for innovative experiments. Developing shared standards and specifications to enable the collection and analysis of data about communities of learning. Understanding and planning for educating teacher practitioners to use Cyberinfrastructure for learning collaboratively and across groups. Understanding the affordances of the virtual context for individuals and groups to develop multiple competencies and various senses of belonging that they and others can manage to construct, and adapt the learning environments to their needs. Understanding how social capital influences the participation of different types of learners and, in turn, how various forms of participation impact learning. Identifying and learning to assess criteria for engagement and success within communities of learning. Integrating across different forms of assessment data, such as interviews and observation, discourse and conversation analysis, log analysis, and performance evaluations. Developing effective community feedback mechanisms for "reading" member engagement and perspectives and facilitating various forms of decision making. Understanding how access, availability, and ubiquity affect the development of Communities of Learners enabled by CELF. Understanding how pedagogical content knowledge and related principles should influence the design of infrastructures to support communities of learning. Understanding how to support cross-project collaboration and fertilization. Understanding how Cyberinfrastructure can bridge projects both within and across traditional disciplines. Understanding how projects move from pilots to large-scale efforts and from grant-funded to sustainable. Understanding the global nature of Cyberinfrastructure. Although the Internet and much of industry are already internationally oriented, education in the United States is remarkably parochial. Cyberinfrastructure can help bridge learners across countries (pilots, and small-scale individual efforts) and make it possible (time zones notwithstanding) for class projects to consist of team members worldwide, and to bring in experts from around the world."
During the Facebook session of the Penn State Teaching and Learning Symposium, the fascination with Facebook and the desire to communicate intrigued me. I began to think about how we have previously defined community, and I think that the definition needs to include communication. In a community, you are constantly communicating both verbally and nonverbally. You are confirming and rejecting ideas, thoughts, perceptions, and actions. Communication is essential in a community (I think). From there, my thoughts wandered into whether communication was innate. After all groups of animals, be it herds of cattle, flocks of geese, schools of fish, and even communities of people, all have to communicate in order to function and survive. The rise in popularity of the social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) confirmed my thoughts about our natural desires to communicate with others and create community.
Okay, I'm sure that little riff on Twitter has probably been used a million times, but one of the main takeaways I got from the TLT Symposium was not from the content itself (though the content was really powerful) but was the use of Twitter during the day. I got on board with Twitter probably about a month ago and found it to be an interesting way of connecting with my classmates outside of class hours. As a writer, I find the activity of capturing my current activities in 140 characters or less to be a good brain exercise. It is easier than e-mail to write and read. Those of us in 597 who are in the Twitter group have shared not only interesting insights about class, but also provided glimpses into our personal lives as well. Some have shared news of family deaths and illnesses, some have shared funny stories of pets or children, some have asked technical questions, some share what they had for dinner. It varies, but the key is that it's all in 140 characters or less. Having many of us "tweeting" during TLT was a grand experiment for me, in that it allowed me to be a fly on the wall on breakout sessions where I wasn't physically able to be, and allowed me to share my insights and comments with my classmates without having to be physically with them, or even lean over to whisper. Or, on a less serious use, how else would I have been able to share during Lessig's keynote that I thought Sousa's "Infernal Machines" term would be a great name for a band? How else would Becky and I have been able to have our wiki "stud2stud" exchange? Which begs the question, is "virtual notepassing" an unintended consequence of Twitter? Several of us began wondering, via Twitter, during the sessions, whether all of this Twittering is distracting to, or impacting the presenters. I do think it impacts, but is it just that presenters need to adjust their expectations and know and assume that their audience members are doing this? Or should they demand complete attention? One of us noted that there were many laptops open during a session, but few were Twittering; they were doing other things online. My 597 group led the wiki discussion in class on 3/20 and it
was my first experience facilitating a session where so many eyes of
were on laptops, with fingers flying on keyboard. It was a bit distracting to me, but I assumed that was what the class was doing, and I was proven correct when I read the Twitter "transcript" that took place during our presentation. On the other hand, I teach Comm 471 (public relations media & methods) to undergrads and purposely schedule this to be held in a traditional classroom instead of a computer lab where most of the other 471 courses are held-- mainly because I don't want people straying into checking email, etc., during class. Am I an old fogey for wanting to do this, and am I hindering their abilities to build community with one another in the same way our 597 class has done as a result? Does the answer change depending on who is being taught? Is it okay for "adults" like us to Twitter during class because we're generally just commenting on the content and building community, whereas younger students, like HS and undergrads, would likely be doing other things? Is that generalization fair to them? Also, with students' developing capacity to be able to be surreptitiously texting underneath a desk with eyes generally still up front, what then? Should that bother me as an instructor? The "instructor me" from pre-597 would have said absolutely. The "instructor me" for post-597, I'm not so sure.
Everybody loves an acronym...right? I spent the last week at NASA lunar educational workshops and the NSTA (National Science Teacher's Association) conference in Boston. To be honest, the NSTA conference was very overwhelming. There were sooo many people and booths. It seemed that every booth was trying to sell an educational "product" of some kind, so I had to approach with caution. I don't really have any money to spend or a classroom to spend it on, so the vendors didn't like me very much. I did see the Toyota trumpet playing robot. (Very cool... but also very creepy). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqubUfKrDIY&feature=related>. There was lots of talk about technology at the conference, but I didn't pick up on too much Web 2.0 stuff. A good idea I did hear was to create wikis centered around curriculum. As teachers modified and tried out the lessons, they could post comments and revisions to a common wiki.
Made you look. Actually, thanks to bburns you will not have readings this week. Please post on your experience at TLT symposium this weekend (or whatever alternative activity you were involved in). Obviously, you should try and connect to the three themes (identity, community, and design if you forgot). Next week I will post another section of the Wenger book along with an interesting article about the Web 2.0 mindset and its impact on education/learning. Hopefully you all enjoyed and learned from your TLT experience and will insights to share. See you on Thursday.
Thoughts on the TLT Symposium will be forthcoming, but first I wanted to share our the next installment of our podcast, Tweet Talk. This episode features our discussion on the Wikipedia entry for Twitter, and our brainstorming for how we can enhance the entry with our own efforts.
tweets2.mp3
Team Tweet would like to remind everyone to create a Twitter account prior to Saturday's TLT Symposium so that you are able to tweet (the official name for a message you send via Twitter) your experiences throughout the day. A great portion of our presentation in April will center around our experiences at the symposium.Here are instructions for creating a Twitter account and finding classmates to follow. If you already have a Twitter account, my next blog entry will help you find CI597C classmates and other pertinent people (like the TLT Symposium) who are on Twitter:1. Go to Twitter.com2. Click on "Get Started - Join!"3. On this page, fill in the required information (your Username is your Twitter identity -- choose wisely!) and click "I accept. Create my account."4. The next step is to find some friends on Twitter. There are several ways to do this. If you just want to add friends from CI597C, see this blog entry listing 597C classmates on Twitter. Otherwise, continue following the rest of these instructions. Enter your email address and password, and to let Twitter compare your address book to their records. This will let you know of any accounts in your address book who has a Twitter account -- family, friends, professor from undergrad who is still in your address book, etc. One flaw with this method is that it only works if the address in your address book matches the address on file with Twitter. For example, you won't find my account if you have my PSU address (bsr11) or alias (brandonr) in your address book; this is because my Twitter account is linked to my gmail account (my full name at gmail.com).5. Twitter will show you the results of their search. You can select or deselect anyone you would like to follow. Following someone means you will receive their tweets (messages sent through Twitter) in your stream. 6. Congratulations! You now have a Twitter account! To become a full member of the community, start answering the question, "What are you doing?', which you can always find on the Twitter home page or on your personal page (www.twitter.com/[yourusername]). See my entry on CI597 classmates on Twitter to find more people to follow, including the TLT Symposium feed.
So you have a Twitter account (if not, check out How To Create a Twitter Account), but can't find your fellow classmates (or TLT Symposium Feed) to follow.Here you go:1. Log in to your Twitter account.2. Go to an individual's Twitter page (a full list is below). The address for any individual's profile page is www.twitter.com/[username]. For example, Cole's username is colecamplese, so his profile page is www.twitter.com/colecamplese3. Click on "Follow", which is under the username.4. You are now following that person (in this example, Cole Camplese). Rinse, repeat. Well, don't rinse, but repeat the steps 2-3 for each person you want to follow. Another option is to look through any user's "Following" list, which is located on the bottom right of their profile page. Hovering your mouse over any user icons reveals the users name. Simply click on that icon and you will be taken directly to that user's profile page so you can complete step 3.CI597C Classmates (and other pertinent users) on Twitter:Here are the usernames for CI 597C classmates. To follow any user, just go to their profile page - www.twitter.com/[username]1. The TLT Symposium feed: twitter.com/TLTSymposium2. Me - rubywahooOther classmates (I won't share real names since it is their choice to protect their identity and this blog is publicly available):3. smcdonald4. rookmdc5. donnamar6. psugal7. teamtweet8. dbrunner029. bennettulmer10. bburns11. jjd2412. JeanMarieDEnjoy!
This webcomic has little to do with the class, except that the last guy is unmistakably Cole Camplese.
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/032308/quandaries-of-affluence.gif
http://explore.twitter.com/blocks/
Oh my…..click on any of the blocks and you can upload tweets from anyone and their friends and so on ans so on. Amazing!! We can see who is making the BUZZ about anything, Cole you will LOVE this!!
Two great Twitter articles:
Twitter in general, nothing we have not said.
Twitter's Evan Williams is giving and invited talk at ICWSM and just showed a great quote from Leisa Reichelt.
* Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they've redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they're hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they're having drinks with tonight.*
IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, AT LEAST READ THE FIRST PARAGRAPH!I just realized I have been heavily involved in using web 2.0 to create
community but that I haven't really shared any of my efforts with the
class in which I am further exploring some of these concepts. This
entry started with the intention of sharing a podcast that I had just
created and
then expanded into a full blown entry recounting all of my online
endeavors. It's partly to share with you the way I am already using
blogs, videos, flickr, social networks, podcasts and wikis, but it also became
a great way for me to record my efforts and progress. It is interesting to be involved in and responsible for the comprehensive creation of a
brand new community for the camp during the past 10 months, and I look forward to the
future implications of the technology and this class. Without further
adieu...
For those who don't know, I am the Program Director for Golden Slipper Camp (GSC). Last summer, I decided to start a GSC blog
where I gave little, periodic reports on things happening at the camp
(Johnny won the talent show by burping the ABC's, or Bunk 4 won Honor
Bunk for being cleanest, etc.) -- it was one of my ideas to generate
some excitement with parents and alumni. Little did I realize how
popular the blog would be! Parents were sending emails and phone calls
sharing how much they loved knowing what was going on, and that they
felt more like a part of their child's experience.
The next step was that I set up a GSC Flickr
account so that we could share the photos taken by Alisa, our camp
photographer. She ended up taking nearly 14,000 pictures, and I even
found ways to link them to the blog, like when we had a rainy day
activity that ended with a GSC mascot contest. We had each bunk create a mascot for the camp, then took their pictures and posted them on Flickr (mascot picture pages) where families could view them and vote through the blog. We ended up crowing the winning bunk at the camp -- and reporting the winner on the blog -- a week later.As soon as the summer ended, I started uploading GSC videos onto YouTube and embedding them into the blog, further generating interest from campers, alumni, parents/families, staff, and club members. I have 40 more hours of skits, songs, and fun things to upload, but my miniDV camera is on the fritz (Tweet or email me if you have one I can borrow!). One piece of advice if you do something similar for one of your organizations: set up a separate YouTube account! I have to be careful now that my identity is directly linked to the camps' -- I can't upload some of the videos I made as an undergrad (PG-13 rated language or plots) or display my favorites for fear that a camper will see them and it will open a can of worms.Since the summer ended, I have been using the blog to share news that is passed on to me. At this point it primarily contains announcements of things happening at the camp, contests, alumni marriages, births, and engagements. I hope to start including camper news (Honor Roll on report cards, awards won, graduations and college acceptances, etc.).
The final two pieces of this are an exploding alumni social networking site (400 members in 3 weeks!) and a brand new podcast. I realize that this is long, but just wanted to share. It is interesting to be involved in the comprehensive creation of a brand new community over the past 10 months, and I look forward to the future implications of the technology and this class.Phew! Sorry for the length! I am very interested in having further conversations about this, and look forward to helping others enact similar efforts.
In a previous entry I describe a Camp on the Web. I originally intended to simply share a new podcast I had created for Golden Slipper Camp, but went off in another direction. This entry, therefore, is dedicated to the podcast.The first podcast features myself and Uncle Spoon, the camp's Evening Activities Specialist, explaining our idea and plan for the podcast. Basically, we hope it helps to contribute to the blossoming online community that has developed, as described in the other post.For now, enjoy the podcast =)Listen to the GSC Podcast
Please sign up for the TLT Tag Team. Â This is the stuff we'll be asking for you to be helpful with:Tag your photos [Flickr]Tag your writing [blogs@PSU]Tag your web sites [del.icio.us]Tag your activity [Twitter]Tag yourself [stickers]
Whole Class:2nd Life & Online Gaming Presentation by Bart Pursel. What did you take away from the presentation about identity?Mixed Groups:Identity1) "We're all onions", Shrek analogy post by dmd - layers to identity?2) Multiple identities (jjd) vs. One identity with different aspects (mtt) or One identity as a member or different communities (sck).Report back to whole class major discussion points in mixed groups.
- Tag your photos [Flickr]
- Tag your writing [blogs@PSU]
- Tag your web sites [del.icio.us]
- Tag your activity [Twitter]
- Tag yourself [stickers]
This article talks about professors expressing themselves online and letting the students know more about them as people.
This poodcast could have been 2 hours long with everything we wanted to include, so we decided to focus on one presentation on ipods in the k-12 classroom. We had a great time in Vegas but of course were thinking of you all on Thursday afternoon :) Enjoy!Tweet_talk_vegas.m4aHave a listen to
How do you feel before you have to speak publicly in front of an audience? Do you get nervous? Clammy hands? Butterflies in the stomach? Tongue-tied? Dry mouth? Other nervous symptoms? For me, that's exactly how I feel when I podcast. For me, I much prefer to present to a live audience than through a radio or video medium. I began to notice this concept in our class. I'm not one to be shy when participating in class, but the moment that Cole pulls out the microphone and turns it on, I instantly feel my cheeks flush and my words flee. I feel completely choked. The same symptoms have happened when I have been interviewed for television. I just don't understand why I have this phobia. In an attempt to try to understand my reactions, I have been thinking about the potential causes. When I present, the communication is two-way. Even if I am using a transmission model, I still am receiving instantaneous feedback from my audience from their body language. When I podcast, I can't see my audience. I have no idea what they are thinking, and I feel my stuttering and nervous actions impact my ability to think clearly. Ultimately it's incredibly frustrating, but I guess that the only way to overcome your fears is to face them. I'll keep trying. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again..."Do you suffer from this disease?
A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.
Media Importing
Upload your presentations and images and transform them into collaborative conversations. Use images: JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG; docs: PPT, PPS, PDF, DOC, XLS; and videos. If you’ve got a Flickr or Facebook account, you can import from those as well.
Video Doodling
Video Doodling allows you to control the playback of a video as you comment using a mic or webcam, giving you the power to voice comment over specific segments of video. Move to a spot, doodle, then move to another, all while commenting.
Sharing
Any way you want it - from completely private to completely open and many many stops in between. Simple security settings allow you to adjust who can do what. Change settings as often as you like, so invite, uninvite, and then re-invite uncle Monte.
Moderation
Comment moderation puts you in charge of the conversation. Safely curate one hundred comments down to the best 5 and turn an epic into a blast of succinct story-telling. Think competitive poetry slams, debates, singing - just to name a few.
Commenting
By Voice (mic or phone), Text, Audio file, or Webcam. Really simple voice recording within your web browser allows you to collect the voices of an entire group on a single page. All you need is a mic and Flash Player 7+. Capturing voices couldn’t be easier.
Doodling
The Doodler is a new way of annotating. It captures your drawing as an animation synced to your voice or text commentary. Instead of seeing the final product of your thoughts, viewers can see the actual process. Doodling delivers a sense of live presence.
Embedding
Put your VoiceThread on any site you want, or better yet, put it on many. Embedding is easy and allows you to add group collaboration to any website. Whether it’s feedback, critique, or group story-telling you’re after, collect it how you want, where you want.
Identities
One account can have many identities. So a family, a classroom or an interesting person can switch identities on-the-fly without having to sign-out. Think 22 kids, 45 minutes, and a project to complete - and you’ll understand the wonder.
Copyright © VoiceThread 2007-08 · Terms of Use
Those of you still trying to figure out what Twitter is should watch the new Twitter video from the folks at Common Craft. Those of you hooked into the "TwitterStream" can leave comments here about why you have gotten engaged -- I know some of you are Twitter people, so let's hear from you!
Those of you still trying to figure out what Twitter is should watch the new Twitter video from the folks at Common Craft. Those of you hooked into the "TwitterStream" can leave comments here about why you have gotten engaged -- I know some of you are Twitter people, so let's hear from you!
Must read. I think it spells out why we are all living with at least one foot in the door with all of the web 2.0 stuff.
http://melaniemcbride.net/2008/02/10/classroom20-twitter-delicious-and-participatory-learning/
obituary for one of the creators of dungeons and dragons - worth reading
I put in a really early post about what I learned these last few weeks about Twitter. There is an amazing underground educator grassroots use of Twitter and realted technologies, even among the older teachers. If you missed it, check out Dive Dive Dive at the link above and check out the embedded links in the post. It leads to some pretty nifty (who says nifty anymore?) applications for Web 2.0 in actual k-12 classrooms.
An identity, then, is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience ant its social interpretation inform each other. As we encounter our effects on the world and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificatave projections. Bringing the two together through the negotiation of meaning, we construct who we are. In the same way meaning exists in its negotiation, identity exists- not as an object in and of itself , but in the constant work of negotiating the self. It is in this cascading interplay of participation and reification that our experience of life becomes one of identity, an indeed of human existence and consciousness. (Wenger, 151)
Teacher, friend, daughter, peer, theatre person, writer, student, and learner , these are some of the roles that I play. These are the roles that help to make up my identity. How, when and where I participate determine the meaning that I create from these experiences which I then translate into an ever evolving definition of who I am. Does one role dominate the other? Yes. If you ask me, I'll tell you I'm a teacher first. But I'll tell you that my experiences as a theater person help me shape who I am as a teacher and those experiences as a teacher help me shape my experiences as a theater person.
I think we are always conscious of the different roles we play. We also need to be open to take on and try out new ones. It helps develop character and creates a stronger identity. There has always been someone at some point to bring me into that role.
How do we as educators help develop the identities of our students? How do we help them negotiate new experiences and ideas to create strong identities that are resistant to many of the harmful social messages? Is it through our lessons or possibly mentoring an extra curricular activity? What about learning the roles that they play in their families out side of school? Part of our job as educators is to educate the whole person. We must acknowledge the process by which identity is formed in order to be successful.
Hi all ... Bart Pursel from the College of Information Sciences and Technology will be in class on Thursday to talk to you a bit about virtual worlds and how they play out in a learning landscape.  Bart maintains a blog that you might want to take a look at it.  He also passed a link along to a PDF he'd like you to skim over.  It should be a fun and interesting discussion, so please try to come ready to  participate.
Sorry for the delay - my whole response got deleted yesterday so here is an abridged version today.I am a son, brother, friend, student, teacher, and many more things because of my roles within various communities of practice. There are plenty of things that I am not because I do not belong to certain communities of practice.Wenger writes:"In practice, we know who we are by what is familiar, understandable, usable, negotiable;we know who we are not by what is foreign, opaque, unwieldy, unproductive."It is what we do and what we do not do that shape who we are; our participation and non-participation determine our identities. The notion of identity as a nexus is the one with which I am most comfortable. All the identities and trajectories we have in different settings all influence one another because they all affect us an individuals. There is mutual exclusivity or pure fractioning possible. Our identities as teachers are influenced by our identities as students because we can identify with what the students are experiencing. Our identities as younger or older teachers are influenced by older or younger teachers through inter-generational interactions. The conversations provide history and new insight. In this course, our community of practice, all sorts of interactions between members help guide individual trajectories in different ways.
Referring back to the discussion of Paul Revere, I want to extend my comment about Revere as a broker to include him as a peripheral participant with multimembership on a boundary trajectory.According to Wenger, boundary trajectories are a form of trajectory that find their value in spanning boundaries and liking communities of practice. Sustaining an identity across boundaries, she says, is one of the most delicate challenges of this kind of brokering work (p. 154).Relating the example of Paul Revere's ride, as presented in The Tipping Point, to Wenger's notion of boundaries and brokers in chapters 3/4 in Communities of Practice, a strong connection seems to exist by which we can identify Paul Revere as a broker. As a broker, Paul Revere acted as an information trader who held a position of authority, yet who did not fully belong to the communities of practice the (his)story highlights. In other words, Revere was not a member of the political elite, or (necessarily) a member of communities of practice to whom he communicated warnings along his ride. Yet, as the story suggests, he operated at the boundaries of these communities; facilitating information exchange between them. To accomplish this facilitation, Revere did not have to be a member of the communities (as Wenger would define membership), he just needed to be aware of the essential peripheral nodes (i.e. the communities' information diffusers) to tap into and offload the information; letting them do the rest of the work, so he could move on to do his. However, his success as a messenger in communicating to townspeople of the imminent danger (i.e. the British invasion) is apparent, and it was more so than his counterpart Dawes. Perhaps then, Revere's success in this suggests that he was in fact a member of many different communities of practice whose affiliate members were the people he had contact with at various points along his route. Positioning Revere as a member of many communities of practice who was invested enough in them to be trusted by them and autonomous enough to move among them so that his message could link them seems a more likely explanation of his success than accrediting it solely to his political savvy, for instance.
Asking all Educators: Have you ever felt like you did not want to write those lesson plans on Sunday night? Have you ever let procrastination get the best of you? Have you ever stopped to consider how nice it would be to leave work and not have to spend any more (mental and/or physical) time on your work? You, my friends, are strategizing your non-participation. In Chapter 7 of "Communities of Practice," Etienne Wenger presents the Strategy of Non-Participation as a form of identity. He states that many individuals "see their identity mainly outside their job as 'I don't want it to be, like, my life is my job'" (Wenger 1998). These people don't want their work lives to invade their personal lives. Is there a solution in education? Yes, if you consider the alternatives. In my opinion, teaching is one of the more enjoyable and rewarding jobs one can hold. In order to be a teacher, you constantly need to learn and stay up with the times and adequately prepare and plan your classes. With teaching comes the responsibility of planning and participation. What then is the solution? Well, have you ever considered a job that allows for non-participation? Have you worked at a job where the work becomes tedious and boring and you look forward to your days of non-participation? The solution is a change of strategy and ideology. Instead of strategizing your non-participation, start to strategize your participation. Value and treasure the participation that teaching requires because this participation keeps your work fresh and fun. Also, change your attitude about non-participation. Although non-participation looks good now (the grass is always greener on the other side), always remember that while you need to do lesson plans and study-up on the next new web 2.0. technology (in anticipation for your next day of work that you are looking forward to), your friends are dreading that job that they need to wake up at 6 a.m. for. Knowing the benefits of participation and the negative side to the strategy of non-participation, I feel I am more likely to encourage my students to follow careers of participation.
Well, it has been a long day. I just got home and I'm tired, so my comments will be brief and probably simplistic.
While I will not say that fully comprehend everything here, I was not troubled by anything he said about identity. I liked the one line at the beginning that said "the concept of identity serves as a pivot between the social and the individual, so that each can be talked about in terms of the other." I think that this was an aptly stated reason for why we need to define identity. Through all my reading, I stopped to think about my identity and I was easily able to see how all the influence and "interconnectedness" that he talks about have indeed played a role for me (some more than other, but I think that is the point). The most interesting topic to me was trajectories and how they apply to identity and learning. From page 155: "Understanding something new is not just a local act of learning. Rather, each is an event on a trajectory through which they give meaning to their engagement in practice in terms of the identity they are developing." Trajectories provide the context for learning and the development identity. If we encounter something that does not lie on one of many trajectories that constitute the nexus, or perhaps provide a potential tangent trajectory to pursue, that event will provide little 'affordance' for learning and and influence on identity. I think that think concept is paramount to trying to help students learn. That is to find a way to position our teaching along the trajectories of our students.
That's it for now.
While slowly reading and re-reading Wenger's chapters on identity, I was particularly intrigued by his descriptions of "multimembership" and reconciliation. A couple weeks ago my post mentioned some people's preferences for multiple social sites because of the different cultures they represented, and the ability to be part of several cultures at once. For these people, the multimembership is a benefit and a desire; reconciling these identities would lose the luxury of having many. In other words, if I linked my dozens of separate but distinct forum identities to my facebook, the tweaked personas and little white lies while be diluted because people will see the truth. Those kids in the Tuner Car Racing forums who thought I was a bad-ass will be unpleasantly surprised to see my identity linked to the Rainbow Brite mailing list...
I agree with Wenger that reconciliation is a tremendous and deeply complicated task, especially considering the variations between them and falsehoods that might be uncovered. For those who want to take the plunge and converge their identities, good luck, but many people would rather stay separated. Do you imagine that if a universal social profile was available from the beginning of the Internet, we would have separated so much? I believe there would still be plenty of folks with unconnected identities, even on sites where there is no privacy or moral reason to keep covert.
I wonder if anyone in are class is currently in the process of reconciliation, trying to connect different profiles and resolve differences in their identities - any anecdotes? Or advice?
According to Wenger's "Communities of Practice," identity in practice can be described using the following six characteristics: 1. lived 2. negotiated 3. social 4. a learning process 5. nexus and 6. local-global interplay (Wenger 1998). In the following post, I will analyze each characteristic with respect to our current vs. (my idea of our) future classroom. First, I will need to define current and future classrooms. Current classrooms are classrooms that are in the current standards movement. The classroom walls serve as the community space. Social networks and instant messaging tools are prevalent among students but not used in the classroom or if they are, not to their full potential. The internet allows for much research and knowledge but is not the first place to find knowledge. Teachers are the leaders of the classroom and engage their students in activities. Also, in the K-12 curriculum, many but not all classroom teachers teach to the (high-stake) test. Future classrooms are classrooms that may still be in the standards movement, but allow for more authentic and alternative assessment. Social networks and instant messaging tools are used to engage students in the classroom and beyond. There are no classroom walls. The classroom space exists as a meeting place. The teachers are guides and motivators. The internet is the main source of knowledge and thus, students are trained at a much earlier age to evaluate internet sources and information. 1. Lived = an experience that involves both participation and reification. In the current classroom, identity is formed through experience within the school walls. In the future classroom, identity is now also formed through experience in class chat rooms, discussion boards, blogs, and other web 2.0. technologies outside the classroom walls. Through the internet, students interact with and learn from other students and teachers around the world instead of just students in their local communities. These other students and teachers can be considered periphery members of the class. 2. Negotiated = identity is ongoing and pervasive. Identity is ongoing within both the current classroom and future classroom. The only difference here is that identity is negotiated among members of the classroom in the current system. In the future system, identity is negotiated also among periphery members only accessible through the internet. 3. Social = identity a fundamentally social character. Identity is shaped by the familiar social experiences within the community. Similar to 2, here the only difference is in the periphery members that also contribute to identity. 4. a Learning Process = incorporates both past and future into the meaning of the present. In our current classrooms, students are initially set on an inbound trajectory
(of identity) in order to attain full membership in the learning
community. However, the overarching trajectory for a student is an
outbound trajectory. Students are constantly set to move on to the
next stage of their schooling. From Pre-K to grammar school to high
school to college to graduate school or professional work. Throughout
this process, students are given paradigmatic trajectories or models to
follow. For instance, a student that wants to be a college professor
will have a very different trajectory than one that wants to be an auto
mechanic. In our future classrooms, students can more easily interact and follow actual college professors and auto mechanics. There is no longer a sense of reading about trajectories in a book. Students can actually talk to professionals and learn from their successes and failures on a personal level. 5. Nexus = combines multiple forms of membership through a process of reconciliation across boundaries of practice. The nexus in the current classroom system revolves around a student's many different classes, extracurricular activities, jobs, friendships, relationships, and family life. In the future classroom, the nexus also revolves around a student's online identity. 6. Local-Global Interplay = neither narrowly local to activities nor abstractly global. The current classroom system enables a local-global interplay that is skewed to the local end. Students learn how to exist in their local school and how their classroom fits into the broader scheme of things. In the future classroom system, students will exist in their local school and also in their online system. They will become brokers of knowledge between students half-way across the world. The future classroom system will enable a local-global interplay that is more skewed to the global end.
One of the points that Wegner made was that "Community membership gives the formation of identity" and that whether someone is looked up to or down upon depends on the context of the community. I think a very interesting aspect of this influence on identity is when there is more than one community simultaneously affecting a person's identity, especially when the communities are "contrasting" like workers and managers. Expanding on the example that Wenger often uses of the unit supervisor, what happens when upper level managers stop by to review the office manager's performance? Here the office manager, who was once one of the workers, has to act in a manner that appeals to both the workers and the managers. What if this is not possible? Would she choose to alienate the workers which she was once a member and must work with on a daily basis in order impress the higher ups or would she stand up for the workers and risk losing a promotion?
A similar situation was discussed in an article I read about a school where many of the students were often just as concerned (if not more) about maintaining their street credibility as impressing their teachers. This credibility was more than about popularity, it could also influence the student's safety and whether other students would consider harming him or her. In this situation students could maintain or improve their status outside of the classroom by being disrespectful or doing poorly in the classroom. Teachers need to be aware of the influences of other communities on that of the ones in their classrooms. This is one of the reasons that I mentioned homophily in a previous post (Diffusion Across the Digital Gap). Someone with a similar background to their students would more likely consider the power of the influence of these outside communities and take them into account when developing the classroom community. Had I not read this article I would not have considered survival as a reason why the students may be doing poorly or are confrontational.
Wenger summarized most of the things I've been thinking since the first readings pretty well. In one of my previous posts, I ranted about not having multiple identities and "multiple identities" vs. "multiple aspects." Wenger calls this idea "multimembership" and states that identity is a nexus of multimembership: one's identity is defined in one's connections between different communities and communities of practice. This makes complete sense; as I stated in another previous post, "the meaning [identity] lies in the connections."And now, boundaries (although not boundary objects) makes more sense to me, because Wenger described boundaries in the context of identity and community. "Multimembership is the living experience of boundaries." Those seven words make more sense than the other five chapters we've read of Wenger so far. It's interesting to note, though, that some people do not know how to experience multimembership, or do not know how to "import and export" practices from one community to another. Take, for instance, that kid who only knows how to talk about marching band and date others in marching band, and uses marching band as every example in every class. Does this mean that his identity is more "unified" (unimembership?) than others'? Or, does it simply mean that his marching band community of practice is the most prominent in his life? (The contrast here is between oneness of self vs. dominance of one aspect of self.)
And if you have not seen the Shrek scene about the onions, check out my actual blog for the clip…
Wenger's discussion on identity talks about how we're all the sum of our parts-- we have many different identities, depending on where we are, who we're with, what we've experienced, etc. What if there's a big part of your identity that you're not even aware of? Does it still contribute? Who gets to decide one's identity? My sister works in retail, but she is also a Realtor. If someone asks her what she does, she says she's a Realtor. If someone sees her working at the mall, they have assigned her an identity of mall worker, whether she wants it or not. I may think that I am an accomplished professional and that I produce good work in my job; I may even have the evaluations to prove it. As a result, I have "accomplished professional" as part of my identity. However, if I am a jerk to work with, or if my work is substandard and my boss is just conflict-averse and passes me along with "good" evaluations, and everyone at work knows this except me, is "accomplished professional" still part of my identity even if my co-workers would vehemently disagree? We talked in another post about ratemyprofessors.com. There are probably many professors at Penn State who receive decent SRTEs and feel they have earned the identity of a great professor. Some of that group may not even be aware of ratemprofessors.com. If they are trashed in that environment, but they aren't aware of it, is "great professor" still part of their identity? I realize this brings up a bit of a "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" head-hurter, but since this is Wenger we're talking about, it seemed appropriate to bring up.
Ok, so the articles I discuss in this entry aren't secret, but they may be hidden from you -- until now!As previously mentioned, I am enrolled in a class that studies Community Informatics - the study of how communities use information technology to accomplish and develop their goals.In week 7 we read some articles that studied the development of community and engagement in virtual communities. I previously mentioned a paper by Blanchard and Markus that provides definitions for physical and virtual communities, and Sense of Community and Sense of Virtual Communities. That article is available on the Week 7 section of our class website (click here) or on my previous blog post.The theme of this week's class is Identity, and it directly coincides with the theme of this week's Wenger's readings, which Scott and Cole mentioned are moving into the realm of Identity. The Week 8 section of the class web site (click here) has three articles on the subject that you may find interesting, relevant, or helpful in making sense of our class themes.Take a look around the site. I think you will find multiple weeks with topics and readings that you may find applicable to our discussions on community, identity, and design. Some of them are even mildly interesting =)
Donkey: Hey, what’s your problem, Shrek, what you got against the whole world anyway, huh?
Shrek: Look, I’m not the one with the problem, okay? It’s the world that seems to have a problem with *me! People take one look at me and go “Aargh! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre!” They judge me before they even know me - that’s why I’m better off alone… *
Wenger talks about an identity being a “layering of the events of participation and reification” (p.151), which made me think of Shrek when he was describing himself to Princess Fiona so he would not be judged by what she assumed by only seeing his outer layer…
We are all “onions”, as it were, with the crisp outer veneer of thin skin that we show to the world. Wenger continues, “The experience of identity in practice is a way of being in a world” ( p. 151). We are constructed and defined by our layers of experience that we collect from our participation in the various communities and communities of practice as we move through life in this world. As I am Shrek-like in my articulation, I will borrow Wenger’s rich prose, “As we encounter our effects on the world and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections”(p. 151).
Who defines this identity? WE do. Each individual takes the collected experiences and finds meaning from participation, and WE construct who WE are. Identity is not a tangible that can be objectified. It is “the constant work of negotiating the self”. [My favorite line] “It is in this cascading interplay of participation and reification that our experience of life becomes one of identity, and indeed of human existence and consciousness” (p. 151).
What Shrek was really trying to explain by using the onion metaphor was Wenger’s trajectories. As Shrek was constantly re-inventing himself as he moved between life contexts— the royals, the nursery rhyme folk and his forest dwellers— he struggled to reconcile the “familiar, understandable, usable and negotiable” with the “foreign, opaque, unwieldy, and unproductive”(p. 155). In this case study, Shrek’s identity resided deep within self. Peeling the onion is where the metaphor breaks down, because as layers are removed, other layers are added with each engagement in practice.
The trajectories Shrek encountered on his journey forced him to re-negotiate who he appeared to be, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not-so-successfully. Sometimes he had to reach down deep in his layers and show the aspect of his identity that would affiliate him with the community that he was engaging in at the moment. Some identities we only construct if we are peripherally engaging with a community and its practice, and this identity may not become prominent. As Shrek was inbound to the royal community, he was a newcomer and his identity was invested in future participation with this culture as future husband to a princess and leader of the common folk. In his relationship with Fiona, his identity was also on an inbound trajectory as a loved-one and person who cares deeply about others (opposed to the Ogre identity of hatred of all and self).
On an insider trajectory with the fairy tale community, Shrek was constantly reinventing his identity, not resting on laurels as the needs changed and evolved for his participation in that group. Wenger postulates that new events, new demands, new inventions and new generations all create occasions for “renegotiating” one’s identity. New friends, such as
DONKEY, can also serve to shape the re-negotiation.
Shrek was even less a “peeling onion”, but a broker of sorts as he spanned boundaries between communities of practice while sustaining his identity. His confusion and lamentation about himself and where he belonged and how he should behave is very typical of the delicate balance that brokering individuals must sustain and examine while engaged in a boundary trajectory.
As the Shrek story line finally resolves in the third part of the trilogy about finding self, making life journeys and the like, Wenger’s trajectory theme can be evoked one more time to include the outbound track. The way out of a community of practice “involves developing new relationships, finding different positions with respect to the new community, and seeing the world and oneself in new ways” (p. 155).
If you have seen all the movies in the Shrek trilogy you have witnessed Wenger’s notion that the temporal quality of identity is neither merely individual nor simply linear. “The past, the present and the future are not in a simple straight line, but embodied in interlocked trajectories” (p. 156) . Socially, across multiple contexts the trajectories are shaped by the effort of living and finding meaning. Past, present and future all serve equally in real time to contribute layers of identity. Therefore, although most tales like Shrek’s and Fiona’s end happily ever after, according to Wenger, the identities possessed at the conclusion of the last movie are fleeting and could set the stage for many, many more sequels….
Wenger's idea that identity is constantly being negotiated and changing spoke to me in comparison to conversations and blogs earlier in the semester that talked about identity as multiple, or having a different identity for each community. I don't think that people have multiple identity, whether that be an online identity, a spousal identity, a mother/father identity, a work identity, etc. Instead I believe as Wenger does that an individual has one identity and is a member of multiple communities. Granted showing some parts of an identity are more appropriate in some communities than others but what forms an identity is multiple community memberships and changes and identity and membership. I can see how it would be easy to be a periphery member of many communities and a central member in a few. It would also be easy to be transitioning in and out of multiple communities at the same time and throughout a lifetime. What does this mean for Web 2.0? Avatars, online identities - even if you have one of these by a name different than your own, you are still representing yourself, your identity through this alias. So I contend that the avatar is still you and a part of your one identity.
Noticed the buds on the trees outside of Chambers this morning, take a look, it's worth unplugging for!
Last night I was interrupting my husband's swing on Tiger Woods '07 by reading aloud passages from Wenger, annotated by loud "That makes total sense!" and "Holy crap I feel smart!" He thought I was nuts and was annoyed that his score was rising but it was so fun for me. My geekdome was shining through and it felt comfortable; like a warm sweater on a fall day. Pieces of me were finally coming together and my continued struggles were making sense. I have always sort of felt like I was an imposter, someone having to piece together who I was when everyone else had a script but Wenger said that identity was not an object but rather a "constant becoming" (154). Identity is not scripted, is not something we pick up one day and carry with us but rather a piece of a very complicated puzzle that we put together throughout the entirety of life. Identity is, a "lived experience of participation" (151). Each community of practice we enter changes us as we change it. As newcomers into a community of practice we seek to understand not only the norms and reifications of the community but also how our identity is intertwined to the future of the practice. When we are full members of a community or rather "insiders" our identity evolves with changes in the practice and when we leave a community we open ourselves up to knew possible identities while carrying with us the self we have become through our participation in the community. Each step we take, each trajectory, frees us to explore who we are becoming. I imagine my future self calling me forward, reassuring me that the perceived mistakes I make are needed steps in my life; propelling me toward who I am. Wenger has given me a framework of reassurance; I am not pretending at life just because I seek additional pieces. My search does not mean I am inadequate but rather that I am simply becoming.
Wenger's notions of identity and community intertwine when I think of my experiences as a new teacher. When I was a first-year teacher, I remember the difficulties of entering my new school's community. Tension existed between the "veterans" and the "rookies." On page 157, Wenger discussions the concerns a newcomer has when entering a new community and the challenges that both the established and the entering members have as membership in the community changes. Wenger says that, "They (old-timers or veterans) might thus welcome the new potentials afforded by new generations who are less hostage to the past," but they also can frown upon the extreme energy, perceived lack of competence, and naivety that rookies bring to the job. This interaction shapes identities of both parties, but I also want to throw in another term from our course (dare I say the "d" word) design. This tension has design implications for schools and more particularly building principals who are charged with building community (of practice) with their staff members. How does (or should) a principal recognize the complex interplay of community and identity when crafting (designing) the interactions necessary to create the desired community (of practice)?
Okay, I must confess that Wenger is starting to win me over. I have these grandiose ideas about identity; however, my vocabulary to describe such thoughts is quite lacking. Where Wenger excels (and the reason I am becoming an aficionado) is his ability to use eloquent language to explain his theories. On page 169, Wenger talks about institutionalized non-participation in that aspects of the institution or context create and/or promote non-participation of its members. Wenger uses the examples of claims processors who claim to not want to discuss job-related topics during breaks yet their conversations are saturated with such aspects. This example made me think of talk in the teacher's lounge at school. During lunch, teachers formed groups, or communities if you will. I remember that they, too, had a similar rule of outlawing talk related to school during that time, but just like claims processors, realized the fact that that which is forbidden quickly finds entrance. To me, the job of teaching provided the common experience, the focus, around which the community had a shared experience, but this potential bond was marginalized. Why do we outlaw the glue that could hold the pieces of the puzzle together permanently?Wenger also talks about the balance between the institution and its workers by saying, "You give me your time, and I'll give you money; you don't invest yourself in me, and I won't invest myself in you." This quote made me think of teacher unions and their role in institutionalized non-participation. I was often told not to extend myself too much, otherwise administration would expect that standard from me and give me nothing in return. It seems as if this institutionalized non-participation can be detrimental to both the COP within the school and to the students. How does one combat institutionalized non-participation if it is an undesired trait (to which I am inferring in this case)?
I am finding Wenger's discussion of identity much more palatable than his discussion of communities of practice. I feel that he is concerning himself more with the application of identity and not trying to define the indefinable. (He even admits that identity is constantly changing throughout time and space and is only relevant to discuss when taken in context!) As teachers, when we branch out into more communities of practice with our students (such as entering more Web 2.0 communities), we will change our identity as teachers. Remember the reading we had before when it discussed how students could hardly believe that teachers have lives outside of the classroom? Imagine how our student's perception of our identities will change when we enter more of their communities. I know there is always a fine line between being a personable, caring teacher, and encroaching upon areas that a teacher shouldn't. I think this will become a big issue for teachers in Web 2.0 communities. I have always set up a screen name for communication with my students; if they had a quick question while working on an assignment, they could just send me an IM and get an almost instantaneous response. I had many students wanting to "chat" and talk about matters (for example, where they were going to party that weekend or which student was dating someone else from the class). I do not feel comfortable talking to my students about such things (unless the personal issues were negatively affecting the students performance in class) and normally (in face to face and e-mail conversations) my students would not discuss such things with me either. On AIM, for some reason, my perceived identity changed drastically enough to change the behavior of my students. I would have to politely steer them back to more "academic" matters by asking if they had any more questions on the assignment. Another important issue brought up in these chapters is the issue of reconciliation of identity between communities of practice. I'm sure we all have know that gorgeous blonde, who deep down, is probably pretty intelligent, but acts stupid because his/her identity in his/her academic community of practice cannot be reconciled with his/her social community of practice. This student would be an example of a willful non-participant. In order to help teach students with difficulties in reconciling identities (differences in culture, religion, socioeconomic background, etc.), we need to be aware of the many different identities each student holds. Also, we will have to help our students (and ourselves) with the transitions from their "Web 2.0" identities to their other identities with respect to learning.
Hi All,I shaved Tweet Talk 1 down to 23 minutes, and I added
some music tracks that I made up for the intro, transitions, and
finale. I also converted it to mp3.Listen to this new version and enjoy!Tweet Talk 1 (edited).mp3
A Twitter like tool that is being developed called edmodo.
In my CI 550 class we read an article by Levine (2007) which, coincidentally, lends a bit of credence to paragraph last of my most recent posting…
And although Penn State College of Ed does a wonderful job with the PDS, maybe there can be more OTJ
interning using Web.2.0?
It was sent on Angel, but hard to read so when I searched for it online I discovered this Web 2.0 Mashup about the issues at hand which contained my article.
I subscribed to the feed about higher ed and tech.
Did you ever have a time in your life where the synergy was just right on? I may be getting a message from the mother ship…
http://www.cefrio.qc.ca/pdf/%C9tienneWengerSeminaire_2005.pdf
Just seems funny to see a Power Point like this when his writing is sooooooo heavy….
20 degrees, down bubble…
I subscribe to several feeds that came up in my Terraminds Twitter search. I have devoted one hour a day to just exploring what Twitter can really be used for. By selecting random links and people who come up in these feeds, I am getting a bigger picture of the Web 2.0 apps for education. The community is huge and so many teachers ARE trying these applications in the cloud. I get it!
I would just love to get back to the classroom and begin to teach using these technologies to build community in my classrooms. It takes down the walls of the “room”. If you recall the discussion we had where Team Heather was asserting that we need to remove (kill off) a generation of teachers and administrators to change education. That day, I was tending to agree.
Now, however, I see that there is a grassroots movement that is running below the radar. It is rather exciting to this old dog. Teachers are banding together informally to discover how to make education better. The network is silent on the surface, but Deep Running….beep beep beep
In our class all of this is new. To the communities of practice (yes. I said it) that exist in Twitter-land, the future is now. I have had a glimpse in the last few weeks of the promise for American education that is so positive. Educators are not waiting for teacher education or professional developers to bring the Matrix to them, they are listening to the airwaves, seeking new information, boldly going where no teacher has gone before…da da….da da da duh da…..
Talking about identity and how we are sometimes identified by what we appear to others in our community—I was pegged as a dystopian—If you recall that I was a doomsayer about how the poorer classes and the 50% of people who do not use the computer will be left out. Identity shift. Now I want to declare another change in my belief—that the use of Web 2.0 will not be for the masses. It will be for the leaders and educators who will change the classrooms one at a time, who will use Web 2.0 to learn and grow as lifelong and sustained participants of a global community (maybe eventually of practice). The educators with formal training and the community leaders, informal educators(camp directors, homeschoolers, no-schoolers, church groups, cyber schools, and computer lurkers) all have equal access to knowledge. Equal access to the community. I would not have believed it but Twitter is one key to that access (cannot believe I just wrote that).
The quote I love the best is by a fellow in a random Web. 2.0 feed that I follow:
*
* Twitter is like the CB radio of Web 2.0.**
If you are too young to remember that wonderful technology that allowed people to chat “off the grid” and “on the go” so to speak, spend some time in Twitterland and use the apps. The freedom away from agencies and administrators and authority figures who determine what you SHOULD learn and how you SHOULD teach is priceless. WE do not have to spark a movement in education to take down classroom walls. It has already happened. Knowledge is no longer held only by people at the top of the educational
pyramid. It is out there, folks, for the taking. A veritable smorgasbord of tools, tricks and sound educational pedagogy. I even found a Twitter feed for science education and policy with links to blogs like this. For science educators debating science literacy, this is real time, real issues.
We are only peripherally engaged with this cloud in our C! 597 class at this juncture. Don’t get me wrong, I am loving what I am learning in this class and loving being part of this community and getting to know all of you outside of class and learning with you and from you. I love my very cool professorial types. They are inspiring and are true educators as they are letting us make meaning of what we are learning instead of defining that meaning for us. I wlll be so sorry when it ends. But I am realizing that the best thing that I am taking away from this interaction is a new personal paradigm. As an old former wanna-be hippie ( just caught the tail end as a teen in the late 60’s) I am revisiting my Carl Rogers and Dewian roots, redefining my personal ecology and even my learning context needs. Not the free love part, but free learning in the underground….the free U of old….in Web 2.0.
I realize and love that I am at a cutting edge science education department. I have learned a lot in two semesters about what is important in the field of science education from the researcher prospective but I must ask this next question. I should not even put this out in the public and will probably suffer the horrible consequences of opening my big mouth in this university forum, but ..here goes….is formal university education necessary for experienced educators to move to the next level of teacher as researcher, or to dig my hole even deeper, is the research we are doing about professional development and sustainable education, teacher prep and new teacher induction included really tapping into what is happening on the front lines of even the surface runners? And, is it even marginally aware of the deeper running professional development occurring in cyberville?
As I heard a wonderful department head say yesterday, he has a healthy skepticism for research in the areas of the sociological pieces of teaching and learning. That maybe we have not even scratched the surface of that bubble where teacher action creates learner meaning. That too is deeper running.
I will end my rant with another fave of mine…If we keep doing what we have always done, we will get what we always have got…
That said, for my own protection,
DIve DIve Dive….
Recent Comments