Personal Blogs

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• understand the benefits of networks to the online teacher

• discuss the concepts of communities of practice and network weather

• develop useful online networks to augment your teaching practice

Teacher who has tried:

• Private Facebook Group for pupils and pupils parents

• A community within the students

• Students supporting each other and congratulating each other on their successes.

Teach academic subjects online via Twitter > astonished.

• Conferences

• Fellow professionals

• Aspergers, Austic High Functioning End.

‘Most of the benefits of networking can be divided into two generic categories: connectivity and sharing’.  (Kozierok, 2005)

As you will have seen in the previous weeks of this course, teaching online requires thought, planning, and perhaps a little bravery in trying new technologies and techniques.

• Thought
• Planning
• Bravery

‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly'. 

JV: We need a digital campaign to inform and persaude. 

I have five years experience in the production of such a newsletter to a community of over 6,000 and quickly recognised that recreating something that by design looks like it should be printed off is hugely limiting. There should be analytics attached to the item so it is understood what is opened (if at all) and by whom. 

We need 'shared domains of interest’

There is no shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short, a shared practice.

1. A shared domain of interest

2. An active community, sharing and exploring the domain

3. A shared repertoire of resources.

They go on to say that ‘it is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community’. 

(Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015)

Conversations should be just that > a two way dialogue with meetings centred aroun an agenda and action points resulting. 

Where might you begin to look for easy networking opportunities that may be available to you that you simply don’t yet know exist? In which of these would you wish to begin as a ‘lurker’? Are there any that you might feel sufficiently confident to actively participate in now?

A shared experience works at The Western Front Association because of the last three years we have built up a community centred around someone with the time and energy to oversee activities and bring others in. I have been a lurker in a number of groups, and after a time I have gravitated towards their centre, indeed being given ‘moderator’ status in a massive LinkedIn group on elearning. I have also set up a number of such groups and facilitated and moderated discussions. 

What networking activity do you already participate in that could be modified or refocused to bring you networking benefits?

For The Western Front Association I put out two to five Tweets a day and manage the ensuing conversation. I have a 2,000 member LinkedIn group on swimming which sort of looks after itself. I have tried to instigate the creation of a Lewes District Green Group with no success. What I have learned from managing such groups, and setting them up, is that it requires time and energy > 8 hours a week is my benchmark starting point. 

How could you harness the power of the ‘weather’ that is already around you to benefit your online teaching practice?

The ‘weather’ is bad with poor wifi, low speed computers, poor desktop setups and in general a limited desire to improve things from the grassroots up - instead everything if thought of ‘on high’ and imposed from above. 

Connect with like-minded people by establishing and developing networks.

How to Tweet (what we used to call microblogging)

You'll need to identify the tasks you wish to perform:

• gathering information on a particular subject:
  make a list of keywords or hashtags that you may wish to search for (hashtags can include phrases and acronyms, but always without spaces, for example #teachingonline, #OpenLearn or #cccotc18.

• following and learning from experts in a particular subject:
  list the names of the experts you wish to search for.

• making connections with people in a similar position to yourself: brainstorm how you might find those people – how will you search for them? You may need to combine some keywords or hashtags into a single search, to enable you to filter out information that is related but not precisely what you are looking for.

• sharing your own work: identify precisely which items you would like to share, list some keywords and hashtags that might describe your work, and practise creating a short microblogging message of the correct length that describes your work succinctly.

There are of course other tasks you may wish to do as well, such as following particular celebrities or information sources unrelated to your work environment.

Twitter 

If you wish to use Twitter, these instructions could help you to maximise the benefits. If you wish to use a different tool, the principles of the instructions will remain valid, but you will need to alter the method and tools to suit your platform.

1. Create an account (on Twitter, or your preferred microblogging site).

2. Use your Twitter account to register with Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is a very good way to make sense of the vast amount of information rushing by on Twitter, and helps you to arrange the information you need in easily managed columns.

3. Use the search function in Tweetdeck to generate new columns relating to your keywords or hashtags of interest, or search for experts and follow them – all tweets from accounts that you follow will appear in your Home column in Tweetdeck, in chronological order.

4. If you are looking for peers, first find and follow likely individuals – with any luck they will follow you back (it is good Twitter etiquette to follow individuals who follow you). Once you are familiar with one another’s tweets you could then suggest forming a List (a column in your Tweetdeck that gathers together the tweets from your selected individuals, and that others can subscribe to).

5. If you want to share your own work, learn from how others do it, observe how they use their tweets, how they ask for feedback or for others to retweet them. You need to have built up a good number of followers before sharing your work, so that their retweets will exponentially increase your reach

Think about any networks and communities you already belong to (formal and informal). How do these communities share information? What tools do they use? How could they use other channels or media to improve that flow of information?

How could you increase your connections and reach? How might tools like Twitter, Weibo or other social networking sites help you?

Each of marketing and digital put out a newsletter and what I can only call a flyer - it is not readable. It is content chosen for consumption in a one way fashion and about as readable as the back of a packet of cereal and uses similar design skills. Neither group talks to the other. Elsewhere recognising the difference with digital is that you can change the shape, length and nature of any emailed communication, and change when it goes out, we have learnt to communicate in long or short form, just with text or more magazine style with images … but we do not try to create a magazine or flyer that looks like it would normally been printed out. 

The Western Front Association uses Facebook and Twitter extensively, Instagram a bit more and should open up LinkedIn. It is absolutely the case that by driving traffic to the website and having new contact all the time, we have built our followers considerably and our membership too. All if this task time and skills, not least to listen to the audience before ‘writing’ to them and be prepared to feedback, discuss or debate rather than having communications that are entirely one way,

In education, authentic learning is an instructional approach that allows students to explore, discuss, and meaningfully construct concepts and relationships in contexts that involve real-world problems and projects that are relevant to the learner.

There are four basic types of communities:

• Helping Communities. provide a forum for community members to help each other with everyday work needs.

• Best Practice Communities. develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines, and strategies for their members' use.

• Knowledge Stewarding Communities. ...

• Innovation Communities.

Kozierok, C. (2005) The TCP/IP Guide [Online]. Available at www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_TheAdvantagesBenefitsofNetworking.htm (Accessed 10 Nov 2017).

Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Introduction to communities of practice [Online]. Available at www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ (Accessed 10 Nov 2017).

Over the last few weeks I've followed a number of FutureLearn Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). These have been and are:

1. World War One: Trauma and Memory. Anika Mombauer. The OU. Just Started.
2. Start Writing Fiction. Derek Neal. The OU. Week one of eight 1/8
3. World War One: Aviation Comes of Age. Peter Gray. The University of Birmingham. Completed. 3/3
4. World War One: Paris 1919: A New World ... Christian Tams. The University of Glasgow. Completed. 3/3
5. How to Succeed At: Writing Applications: The University of Sheffield. Completed. 3/3

By now a pattern is emerging.

All these creators will learn from the experience. Learners tool will become used to this kind of massive, collaborative experience as well. Quite often learners so that it isn't pitched right - most often in some of the above that it is too 'lite', though I have found some here and elsewhere daunting. None of the above are aimed at postgraduate research students, though that is what some in the audience had hoped for. The writing applications split between Sixth Formers applying to uni and 50 year olds looking for a career change. 

Fragmentation will occur if too many courses are offered at different levels on the same subject.

The appeal of Open learning is that it attracts all types. Those new to the subject should be given enough in the daily pieces of content something to get them started, while references and links give those who know the subject something fresh to look at. The audience diversity creates a stimulating conversation that is never overwhelming once you are used to it. There can be 5,000, 10,000 even 20,000 registered on the course and threads can run to 1000 posts and be updated by the minute. You don't have to read everything. I say 'all comers' but this precludes some levels of accessibility, different languages and most broadly of all those who don't have the kit or network to get online. They have more pressing concerns. 

The content is as usable on a large screen or a small one: on your Smart TV or a Smart phone.

FutureLearn give you three ways to filter the content that most people miss:

Activity

In a unit, or topic you can see the latest from:

• Everyone - speaks for itself
• Following - those you have chosen to follow on this course
• Replies - responses to things you have posted.

Once you get a sense of who is there and whether you want to follow all or some of it you can make these choices. I find I follow a couple of people who are incredibly knowledgeable and on the ball, a couple who have some knowledge like me, and then a few newbie enthusiasts who I gravitate towards to encourage - embolden some of the most observant and insightful questions come from them because they haven't been cocooned in the 'commonly held view'.

From a learning perspectives I'd call upon:

• 'Communities of Practice' (Lave & Wenger)
• 'Learning from the periphery' from John Seely Brown
• ideas of 'Learning vicariously' from Cox.

There are possibly 30 or 40 posts on each of these in my blog here.

I am on a national panel advising universities and institutions in the creative arts on how to develop MOOCs. FutureLearn is certainly a platform for some of them. The challenge, which I have seen attempted here at The OU is to create a platform where students can collaborate using visualizations and visuals: stills, graphics and photos will do for now, but in due course sharing sound files and video clips will be needed as well. I like the idea of a motion capture system recording how a student draws or paints, as you would with an elite athlete - there is a way to do these things that can be taught and corrected so long as it is obsered. 

What these MOOCs create, when they get it right, is a hub, or bazaar like buzz of human interaction between the 'elders and the wise' and others in a broad community. It is not always or necessarily the 'expert', the Professor that knows the most. In these platforms it works best when they set the scene, offer some content and ideas, then let the conversations do the rest. I find that myths and half-figured out ideas are debunked and shaped as first one person, then another adds this piece of evidence or that idea, or explains something in a slightly different way that suddenly makes sense.

There a pattern in here for me: the First World War, writing fiction ... and here with the OU - French. I have, on and off, researched and written a couple of stories set in this era: one a woman who flies over the Western Front which I might have spent over two years on, another involving the antics of the young Edward, Prince of Wales which I only started five weeks ago. Immersing myself in the place and the language helps.

Fig.1 12 Key Learning Theories

Based on three/four books on learning theory:
Double click on the above should take you to a shared Dropbox or Picasa Web Album of the original 'Simple Mind' mindmap.

Authors such as Knud Illiris, Grainne Conole, Yrjo Engestrom and Helen Beetham identify three to five key groupings of 'Learning Theories'. Etienne Wenger offered five theories excluding his own 'Communities of Practice' while David Leonard covers 150 or so in his 'A to Z of Learning Theories'.

For now I rest with the following, though there is of course overlap. We would struggle surely to exclude any in describing how it is that from as soon as the brain forms during foetal development we are learning - and continue to do so until the body that serves the brain ceases to function.

1) Organisational Learning
2) Neurophysiological Learning
3) Whole person - body and mind - physiological and neurobiological
4) Behaviourist Learning
5) Cognitive Learning
6) Resistance to - or defence against learning (i.e. to not learn or to block learning is to learn?)
7) Activity Theory
8) Communities of Practice
9) Accommodative Learning
10) Social Learning
11) Transformative Learning
13) Constructivist Learning

REFERENCES
I'll add these in due course - see below.

1. What artefacts inside and outside your organisation have created (or could create) points of focus for you and your colleagues when it comes to developing accessible learning resources?

Examples of internal artefacts might include a policy, an inaccessible resource that a student has complained about or a new module outline that you are developing.

Examples of external artefacts might include an article you have read, a proprietary authoring tool or guidelines on a website.

(AGENCY = a 50 or less web agency that specialises in the creation of e-learning. Some the 'Kall-Kwik' for e-learning, what would have been leaflets, posters, linear video or afternoon workshops turned into e-learning on a tight budget and schedule - slick production in a team of six+ specialists - previously linear video for facilitated workshops, or video with a workbook, then interactive on disc, before moving to intranets and online.)

(CLIENT = a national or multinational of 10,000+ employees hungry for training, both compliance and management training. Keen to exploit e-learning tools and eagerly trying to use social learning too. I have worked for very many and inside a few.)

Professionally I have worked 20 years in the latter and 2 years in the former.

(SWIMMING = from the perspective of a 1000+ club that is five clubs in one offering: teaching and competitive swimming, mastes, waterpolo and disability swimming. As a coach and club officer I have been involved in teaching, coaching, swimming, implementing change and undertaking every four years a mamoth audit called 'Swim21' that leads to the creation of an Improvement Plan. Equity, Disability and Child Protection, Data Protection and Personal Development are key relevant issues)

AGENCY -  Style Guide, ISO 9000?, Web Usability, Training, Experience, Exposure …

CLIENT - Style Guide, Mission, Vision, Corporate Responsibility …

SWIMMING - Improvement Plan for Swim21, Disability Officer Role Description, National Disability Classification for competitive swimmers, CPD as workshops and online. Two groups of for disabled swimmers. Regional hub. +ve/-ve outcomes of the Paralympics.

2. Are there any artefacts that you think you and your colleagues have over-relied on or misused to the point that they are now negatively influencing your practice? If so, why do you think this is?

AGENCY - JAWS Screenreader, the browser will sought it out …  a PDF once we’ve finished.

CLIENT - policy and a person, Style Guide

SWIMMING - Swim21, the experience of those working with disabled people.

3. Is there any evidence for mutual engagement, joint enterprise or shared repertoire in the community (or communities) you belong to?

AGENCY - none

CLIENT - token, until you see Take3 video

SWIMMING - with local special needs schools, severe disabilities, dyslexia and in mainstream.

4. What has influenced whether or not the people in your community are all working in pursuit of the same accessibility enterprise or objective?

AGENCY - None

CLIENT - HR by organisation

SWIMMING - forcing hand to get one or one or two into an equity course, more onto disability and as a requirement onto child protection which is relevant.

5. Seale discusses the development of accessibility within an organisation as the creation of a constellation of practice rather than a community of practice. How helpful do you think this approach is?

AGENCY - piecemeal, turn it on like a switch, distraction for the most junior.

CLIENT -  probably

SWIMMING - Yes, with the ASA the sun, outlying planets and their satellites.

Yes, as the efforts of one trying to be everyone and be everywhere doesn’t work, not will a constellation of people in silos.

6. Do you think that the model shown in Figure 13.1 on page 182 would be useful as a trigger for discussion within your organisation?

The McKinsey model also highlights the fact that, in creating whole organisational change, attention must be paid to different elements of the organisation. This supports our findings about the need to take a multi-pronged approach, be systematic and holistic, take an embedded approach, and target multiple institutional functions. May and Bridger (2010:96) The Seale (2006) puts people into silos.

I find the constellation of communities works as a metaphor that might be a children’s round-about or the petals of a flower. It gets everything into one place, but it doesn’t suggest how they interact. The MsKinsey 7S model on the other hand, developed by a global management consultancy and regularly applied to organizational and team problems, is a tool that can be understood and applied in your context to help identify and solve complex problems.

See The McKinsey 7S Framework, Mind Tools (1995–2009) http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_91.htm

7. Would it enable you and your colleagues to identify what changes or developments are needed and why they are needed?

AGENCY - yes, if a crisis occurs or there is a budget to stand back and take a look at what is going on.

CLIENT - bottom line and society …

SWIMMING - audit, action team, top to bottom, holistic, time … introduce, understand, apply.

8. Would the labels on the figure be different for your organisation? If so, how and why?

Yes, because none of my contexts are in Higher Education. I look at the diagram, then at a room full of people. Many people will be in several ‘communities’ so the model quickly breaks down.

REFERENCE

May, H. and Bridger, K. (2010) Developing and Embedding Inclusive Policy and Practice in Higher Education, York, The Higher Education Academy; also available online at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ assets/ York/ documents/ ourwork/ inclusion/ DevelopingEmbeddingInclusivePolicyPractice_ReportFinal.pdf (last accessed 28 August 2012).

Seale, J. (2006) E-Learning and Disability in Higher Education: Accessibility Research and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge; also available online at http://learn2.open.ac.uk/ mod/ subpage/ view.php?id=153062 (last accessed 28 August 2012).

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.