Overdue Reflections on Learning 2.011

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My trip to Learning2 this year was my second consecutive year in attendance so it was interesting to see the differences from one year to the next. Last year, I was new in Asia (as I had just joined New International School of Thailand as a Technology teacher about a month prior to the conference) and had so many new things on my plate with relocating continents, starting at a new school and all the accoutrement that accompanies such things. This year, I felt much more comfortable with my expectations of the conference and, as I have been involved in the COETAIL program here in Bangkok, I had been doing quite a bit of consideration and learning about technology from an educational point of view. While this helped me to participate more confidently in discussions, strangely enough, I actually feel I took a less active role in unconferences this year, which was a bit of a disappointment as I had quite enjoyed the unexpected learning that had come out of those in 2010.

My lower involvement in unconferences had little to do with my own desires and more to do with the changes that had been made in the organization of the conference. In 2010, I think that people spent so much time trying to understand unconferences and how they worked that this year’s organizers tried to compensate (likely based on feedback from last year) by having more structured sessions available. While these structured sessions were great, they took away from the spur of the moment unconferences which offered a chance to further explore areas of interest that might not be on offer in the structured sessions (or to delve deeper into the same topic for another session). After speaking with Jeff Utecht and others from the COETAIL program, this seemed to be a fairly widely held piece of feedback so I’m sure it will be taken into consideration before next year’s conference in Beijing.

While I had been putting a fair bit of consideration into how best to effectively use technology in education through the COETAIL course, Learning2 really amped me up and had my mind racing for days afterwards. It was a few nights before I could sleep through the night without visions of educational technology dancing through my head. While I learned countless new things, I think my biggest takeaways from the conference were expansion of my Personal Learning Network (PLN), the value of Creative Commons and, as a technology teacher, refocusing on what truly are the 21^st century skills that my students need to have before they move on from secondary school.

A large proportion of my takeaways came through my cohort which was a relief as last year I was underwhelmed with my cohort with Kim Cofino and Darren Kuropatwa (which is ironic as I quite enjoyed sessions and discussions with them this year). My cohort this year was the Empowering Teacher Leaders & Personal Learning Networks with Alec Couros & Jeff Utecht. While I was quite familiar with Jeff through the COETAIL course, and had met Alec last year, I enjoyed the laid back, open approach from both of them and was able to take away some things that I have already implemented in my classroom.

For a while now, I have understood the power of Twitter as a resource for learning information from other, like-minded educators but after this conference, as I added more ‘tweeps’ and started to put faces to Twitter names and engage in some real world conversations with many of these people, I have gained much more value from my tweeting interactions. Shortly after the conference, I started to put some of my ideas together for restructuring what I am teaching my students (more on that below) and I solicited some resources on effective search strategies through some people on Twitter. Within one day, I had received enough resources that there was no way I could possibly use them all in my teaching. I’ve since filtered through them and narrowed them down to the most suitable ones and have already been using them with some of my students. Without my PLN and Twitter, there is no way I would have come up with such a range of useful resources and surely not so quickly. I really appreciate that my PLN helps me to ‘work smart, not hard’ and my next step, as I develop more resources myself, is to share back more by making my resources open and available for others to use.

That brings me to my second takeaway of Creative Commons or open-licensed creative works. When it comes to sharing school resources, I’ve always been more than happy to save another teacher the time of recreating the wheel by sharing my resources but this has tended to be on a more micro, within-my-school situation. Making these resources more widely available (and findable) online is near the top of my to-do list. While I’ve always been happy to share these kinds of resources, I’ve always been a little more apprehensive about sharing more creative things like videos and photographs but I’m starting to see the value in making these creative works more publicly available. As Darren Kuropatwa mentioned during his ‘21st Century Bricoleurs’ session; “without publishing, the information dies.” With that in mind, rather than letting my “works of art” perish in obscurity, I will soon start to contribute more to Flickr’s Creative Commons galleries.

On the note of Creative Commons (CC), Alec Couros shared (under CC license) a video of him and his daughter learning to ride her bike for the first time online which eventually got used in a UK advertisement for  Nokia. I have shown this example to some of my classes and it has definitely served as a great jumping off point for getting students interested and on board with the idea of CC. This was just one of the changes I’ve made with regards to emphasis in my classes but, with a new trimester less than a month away, rather than coasting on what I’ve been doing and teaching all the same things over and over, I’ve restructured my units of work for years seven, eight and nine. Despite the extra work for me, I’m actually quite excited for the next semester to start as I feel a rejuvenated passion and purpose for what I’m teaching. That’s not to say that what I have planned is exceptional but I hope think that it’s going to make a more substantial contribution to my students’ learning. Hopefully my enthusiasm catches on with some of them.

As with most anything (other than maybe Keith Richards), the Learning2.011 conference had to come to an end but the spark of learning and the connections made will carry on. I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my new ideas play out in class and, while I’m not expecting to fall flat on my face, I’m pretty sure that not everything will go smoothly and to plan. And that’s ok. If I can’t model the willingness to take a risk with my students and show them how to fail gracefully, learning from the experience, then I’m not really setting my students up for long term success and enjoyment of life.