Wrapping Up Flat Classroom Certification

I remember the first experience I had with Vicki Davis and Julie Lyndsay. It was the first NetGenEd Project, a couple of years ago. I have even written about it a few times. It all started when a couple of administrators had asked me if I would be interested in participating in a Flat Classroom Project. To be honest, I am not sure that they thought my application would be accepted. I am glad to say that it was the beginning of a valuable professional relationship with two of the busiest women I know.

Still, in the school where I work, I was the teacher that would most likely have the desire to do something as progressive and outside-the-box in my classroom. Also, with a background in edtech, I also have the strength of will to persevere through the inevitable obstacles that would lay along the path of participating in a globally collaborative project that leveraged so many Web 2.0 tools. They were right, I am glad to say, and I was accepted. Better still, it began a valuable professional relationship with two of the busiest women I know.

Since then I have done another project, that time the original Flat Classroom variety, and now intend on it being an annual part of my practice. Yet, one one of Vicki’s statements has stuck with me from the very first teacher orientation meeting, “The thing about working on the bleeding edge is sometimes you bleed.” That sentiment was all that I needed to get hooked, because that is where I wanted to be, asking my students to take big risks, solve complex and messy problems, and sort out more of the meaning and value after some immersive wayfinding that provided no tidy, easily found answers. I want them to do some scholarly pioneering. Thus, being a member of the first Flat Classroom Certification course has mirrored that desire, as well as being a valuable peek behind the curtain of how the wild ride is built from the ground up.

Participating in a globally collaborative project that has been designed by someone else, with a set of criteria, expectations, and assessment strategies, is an entirely different experience than building one. This course peeled back the finish of all the Flat Classroom flavors and showed the how they were built and why. Then we participants were asked to begin building our own.

The process of designing a globally collaborative project is no small task. Defining a problem or topic that is accessible around the world requires a kind of depth and breadth of vision and awareness that not as altogether common. It crosses disciplinary, as well as geographic, boundaries. Teachers designing and operating in this new unbound educational space need to be both generalists and specialists. More than anything though, they need to be expert learners, modeling an openness, curiosity, and cultural sensitivity, not to mention a facility with the technology tools that have flattened our world.

As onerous as designing a project modeled on the Flat Classroom approach can seem, the course provides a scaffold for meeting the challenge. More importantly, the course was a constant reminder to me that building, and even managing projects of this nature, is a recursive, iterative process. It is truly rooted in a design ethos. Prototyping ideas, testing them, assessing, revising, collaborating, expanding the network of connections, revising more are all aspects of “flattening” and expanding a classroom through designing a project.

Picking up on the notion of collaboration, this course allowed the participants to instantly become part of a Personal Learning Environment and Network. In so doing, all of the teachers involved are actively modeling precisely the kind of learning and practices that global collaborative projects like the Flat Classroom Project demand. Just being a participant offered a platform for collaboration, and collaboration by its nature is a recursive and iterative process, sharing and building on the sum of the course’s parts.

Coinciding with the drafting of their forthcoming book, Vicki and Julie continued their vivid efforts to make their groundbreaking work even more transparent then they are already wont to do. They share because their vision is broad and deep, and their evangelism holds a sincere recognition that they cannot be agents of change alone. Connecting classrooms around the globe and promoting collaborative efforts of inter-cultural synthesis requires an ever-growing network of like-minded educators. This course provides the seedbed for that network to take root and grow. While this course is only one of many efforts, the community of educators that has begun developing has fostered relationships that will remain long after completing the course. I encourage anyone that has the opportunity to take it to do so.

Examining the Craft of Connection & Global Projects

Reading the chapter Connection, from the forthcoming Flat Classroom Book, took a little adjusting to the format. Since it is being prepped for publication, it is filled with   page layout mark-up, which threw the sequence off a bit. Still, it is ambitious and covers a lot of ground.

With the early focus on the tools and technology to build the foundation of personalized professional development that will get any educator connected, I did not find a lot of new material. Then again, this is information that is more targeted for the newbie. I did find a few interesting wrinkles and some new terminology however.

Having long been onto RSS, I am someone who reads a lot. In fact, I harvest enough websites that I regularly stare at the bold All Items (1000+) unread posts in my Google Reader. This fact made me pause a little bit longer on the Mark Hurst quote from Bit Literacy about the need to “say ‘no’ – early and often and to say ‘yes’ rarely.” Regardless, I think starting off with RSS is particularly shrewd. I too advocate that if there is one technology tool that any educator should understand it is RSS. It simply opens up the world, bringing it right to the desktop or portable device.

Some new terms to me were Classroom Monitoring Panel (CMP) and Brand Monitoring Platform (BMP). Ironically, I have been employing these strategies for some time but never really thought there was a name for them. I have more readily used Pageflakes to build a CMP each time I led a class through a Flat Classroom Project. My forays into brand monitoring are a bit less formal, but the way they are presented in the chapter makes me rethink investing a bit more time into the practice, as well as discussing it in more depth with some of the administrators at my school and district.

I wrote a whole lot more about Personal Learning Networks and Personal Learning Environments recently as part of the massively open online course (MOOC) PLENK10, in which I have been following and participating concurrently.

Additionally, I liked the way the text both breaks down a lot of the jargon and provides a lot of definitions, which would be enough to make any newbies head spin. More than anything, I like the general kind of call to action that is present with the challenges and steps that would enable any reader to get themselves connected and build a network with themselves squarely at the center. I also liked the testimonials and knowing that I wrote some material for their potential use a while back, I am wondering if it might make an appearance in any of the chapters. Beyond that, reading the reflections of T. Salim al Busaidi and Anne Mirtschin, a teacher I worked with on one of the past projects, inspired me to write my own testimonial.

Yet, without question, I think the most valuable information in the chapter is the section on Taxonomy of Global Connection. Presented as five levels, it is an easy to understand and very applicable framework for designing an interconnected project with hopes of international connections. This is the kind of information that can and likely will get cited by others as foundational knowledge.

Finally, I was glad that the references were included as endnotes for the chapter. While I was familiar with some of the resources I am interested in taking a longer look at some of the others. The work by Sadoski and Paivio, Rizzolatti and Hurst were all new to me and piqued my interest. I was also glad to see how prominently the work of Henry Jenkins in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture featured, which for me is a keystone text for anyone trying to get a handle on all of this.

PLNs versus PLEs and Goals of Participating

Reviewing the resources from the first week of PLENK10 has been an interesting and more formal introduction to the concepts of what are the similarities and distinction between the personal learning network (PLN) and personal learning environment (PLE).

Prior to this course, the only real distinction I had seen regarding personal learning was differentiating the notion of a networks from communities. Having attended a presentation by Bronwyn Stuckey earlier this summer, however, gave me a much deeper grasp of what qualifies as a community, specifically a community of practice, which has a slightly higher threshold for qualification. In this sense the concept of the personal learning environment (PLE) was a new variation to me.

The material has definitely been informative. Reading the recap of Alec Couros’ 2008 course was a fascinating, in-depth look a course that essentially became a long running event. Having previously failed at participating in the last two connectivism open courses, it was comforting to see a structured reflection on what happened during the run of the course. Since a MOOC can seem so chaotic and overwhelming, especially at first, this document serves as a kind of map of expectations for anyone new to the experience. It also provides a great outline of theoretical underpinnings of the open online course.

As I think of the distinctions of the PLN and PLE, I am reminded of my previous experiences with the connectivism courses, brief though they may have been. A PLN strikes me as being the concrete representation of a connectivist learner in action – not necessarily surprising. In fact, while the “N” in PLN stands for “network” could just as easily stand for the word “nodes,” as it is the array of nodes connected in some way that make a network. The connections are made or, maybe a better word, managed by the person in an organic and emergent fashion. Yet, the person is just one node in the network. Thus, the PLN grows and through the nodes, connections, and generated artifacts almost takes on a life of its own, or at least a kind of alter-ego.

Similarly, the last letter associated with a PLE also could be easily substituted. Instead of “environment” I would substitute “ecology,” which I think of as being a subtle but significant distinction. Ecology denotes the relations between the organisms and the environment. In my thinking the organism is, in fact, the PLN or perhaps even PLNs of connected people that exist within the PLE. I perceive the PLE almost like a landscape that allows the PLN to thrive. it is the “space” where the learning and networking takes place, and the space is also organic, growing, and emergent too. This also seems like the “personal” has arguably less currency in the term PLE.

All of this thinking made me feel a certain affinity for Dave Cormier’s Point 2 from his blogpost “5 Points about PLEs PLNs for PLENK10.” I was already onto this line of thought as I read his post. Despite reading it earlier than some of the other pieces, the other material I have been investigation only continues to strengthen my conceptualization about this.

Of course, when Rita Kop mentioned that the main difference in the terms is cultural in the mid week recording it makes me wonder whether it is necessary to distinguish the two. Still, it is an interesting question to consider. Either way, the distinction that Stephen Downes made, in the same recording, focused more closely on the pairing of “personal” and “learning” seems most important. The terms network or environment prove secondary to the learner being at the heart of the experience. That maybe the most important aspect to me as a teacher and learner interested in investigating this course.

It also fits with my general goals for participating. My interest is in some of the theoretical and pedagogical approaches to constructing an open course and encouraging my own students to participate in learning that is more akin to the kind that a MOOC engenders. I am hoping to glean some bits that I can incorporate into my own practice at the secondary, high school level to empower students with greater autonomy and self-directed learning.

So the adventure has officially begun, again.