On the Roads

I’m recording this because I want to remember what it’s like to be new in this world. So over the past few days I feel like I’ve been thrown into the deep end with connectivity.

On Monday I had my first opportunity to speak publicly about what I think it means to be online and connected. My talk was on using informed reflection to improve practice. Basically I was spruiking the value of blogs. I learned a few important things about how I’m going to play in this space:

My Story – It’s About My Transparency and My Words

My experience is broad; teaching, training, business process, technology fan. It’s hard to explain that I’ve learnt most of what I know either for fun, working with friends and family, helping my mum set up her classroom to integrate technology. That I work with lots of different people in lots of different ways to learn and achieve goals. But I have this feeling that in 10yrs it will be more the norm to have a varied of different experiences and perspectives. I also feel that being able to tell this story honestly is part of the process of gaining trust within communities. Living by transparency and letting my words and ideas speak for themselves is important.

Real People are Online

Research, writing and planning over the past few months. I have found so many people of interest to me. Some of them I follow on Twitter. I had a personal experience of my online work coming to life at the conference. Not only did I get to see John Travers one of the people who I work with at Edna in real-life and we both had the strange experience of feeling that we already knew each other because we had seen each others videos. But also my friends at Edna organised for me to meet the presenter Mark Pesce because they knew I had an interest in his work. It’s not all about what happens online.

It’s Not All About Computers

There was a lot of discussion at the conference about being too busy, computers not working and inability to assess in this way. The fact is we all need to learn not just how to play with others online, we need to learn to work together offline. For me the first step is to start listening to people who are online. Teachers can start doing this right now. They can communicate with each other and other educators easily online without having a class full of laptops. It’s going to take time for teachers to understand the full impact of learning online. Start listening now. Start participating yourself now.

Working Collaboratively – Goals and Spaces

Also I have started working on a collaboration with a couple of friends. Now that we are actively trying to arrange our spaces to be productive I’m learning so much about the collaborative process.

• Sharing common goals is important but not everything. Each of us and the world is changing fast. As new information comes to us. How to plan in productive but agile ways is really important.
• We all share a number of social and more formal online tools. Working out what is best on Twitter, chat, our project space, a wiki etc. is important and the ways they are different are subtle. For example on Twitter everyone can see and benefit. Chat is more personal and faster.