Randy Fisher - Community-Builder

Inspiring Passion and Loyalty in Learners

Can WikiEducator, or using it and other elearning tools inspire this type of passion and loyalty? It depends on who you talk to....(read on)...

Willis Konick, looking a little like Groucho Marx without the cigar, asks a student to slap him. He prances from desktop to desktop. He rolls his arms wildly, screeching a little. And he lures one student into an elaborate discussion about moving with him to a place called "Easy Vista."

Kronick, 77, started his UW undergraduate degree 60 years ago and never really left, save for a three-year spell in the Army. He began teaching at the UW in 1952, and officials think he could be the longest-serving faculty member.

While other professors were squirreled away writing research papers and climbing the career ladder, Konick was reveling in the classroom and his theatrical teaching style. His somewhat obscure classes grew from 10 students to 100 or more and then sprouted waiting lists.

See: Local News | Beloved professor retires after 60 years at the UW | Seattle Times Newspaper.

I think WikiEducator is a very new paradigm, that involves a radical re-think of how to effect learning and collaboration - and this new platform creates a foundation for people to "do" and "experiment" and "learn". It's much more of a peer playing field, where teachers and learners can learn from each other; introverts and extroverts have precisely the same opportunities, and the only barrier is when one is stymied by the WikiSyntax itself.

We have a solution: WikiNeighbours in WikiEducator - there are people roaming about, who will actually help you put up a page, when you're stuck...and the beauty of it is, that once you learn how to do it, you can become a WikiNeighbour yourself.

When I look at the passion and loyalty of the people involved in the WikiEducator peer community, I am struck as to how much opportunity there is for people to express themselves, explore ideas, champion projects, and innovate in a supportive community. There's even room for some drama and theatricality - just check out the whole CC-BY-SA copyright debate!

Conveying Personal Presence for Personalized Learning Enviroments

My WikiEducator colleague Brent Simpson, posts an interesting article / presentation on his blog from James Farmer -  Pedagogy of the Compressed: And on that farm he had a blog

It argues that current discussion-board WebCT, Blackboard Learning Management Systems, were developed with a far greater emphasis on "management" instead of fostering actual "learner" capability. (also, listen to James' presentation - "Blogs as Personal Learning Environments")

Instead, where the real action is, is in terms of each learner developing a personal identity, and aggregation if you wish, around they types of communities, connections, materials and learning resources that s/he is interested in, particularly as collected over time...These are simply not reflected in discussion group forums, which he argues are to some extent "disembodied".

I agree - the future, and we are moving in that direction, is where blogs have become a supplementary resource to existing Learning Management Systems - one can't help but wonder if the open space, or even the corporate space will develop LMS that incorporates, or at the very least links to this extra functionality, and user-driven design.

On a personal note, I am considering pursuing a MA, in Organizational Management & Development, at Fielding Graduate University, and this institution uses a software called "SiteScape". I'm wondering if anyone has checked it out, and if it incorporates some of the features of a personalized learning environment.

Redux: Wanted: Course Revision Without Pain

I've come across this post -  The Technology Source Archives - Wanted: Course Revision Without Pain by Jo B. Paoletti through a Google Search - "course revisions software" - as I wrestle with how to manage the course reviews and revisions in my day job. (RF note: This is an old, but timely subject. His ideas were presented at the 2001 WebCT conference in Vancouver.)

MS Excel and MS Project are nice tools, but they just don't cut it - especially when it comes to keeping track of all of the iddly-piddly information, such as supplementary materials, content sources, who's doing what, timelines, percentage of completion, to-do's, etc. Copyright is an issue too.

As Jo says:

All I ask is that the same creative minds turn some attention to course revision and maintenance. More and more, the challenge for online educators is not getting a course online but keeping it there. Everyone involved needs to start paying more attention to course revision as a critical task and to work together to develop software that supports the revision process, rather than complicating it."

How does this apply to WikiEducator?

As we move into the course development cycle, it is likely that we will run into the very same issues, perhaps with the exception of copyright. However, as I look at the eXe software, I notice that educators / learning designers can designate the types of licences that they are using, for their content development.

This is for Phase I of the learning content development. Subsequent phases involve the review and revision of material. I mean, content doesn't stay static - there are always updates, innovations and new ideas coming along - these have to be reflected in the content.

Facilitating Questions:

• Has the WikiEducator community thought about how it will actually manage the course development process? How will this be accomplished / shared with others? Where will this information reside? On the Wiki?
• Does anyone know of / have used software to manage the course review / revisions process?
• What has been your / their experience?
• Is there an open source opportunity development here - public service and / or business?
  (I know that any organization that develops learning content, struggles with managing the course review / revision process
• What user groups / communities are thinking about this? What have been their approach, practices, etc.

 

Where's the US Participation

In response to a post on this blog: Sunfell's Earth Walk - Commonwealth of Learning.

He wrote: Here's something that the Internet is really going to amplify: free education for everyone.

Commonwealth of Learning

Sadly, the US is not (yet) a signatory to this organization.

Wiki Educator

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My reply:

I just wanted to let you know that there are a number of people from the US, actively working with WikiEducator to help it to be a success. Recently, I attended the Tectonic Shift Think Tank conference held at Commonwealth of Learning (www.col.org).

There were a number of participants (aka "Thought Leaders") present and actively engaged....Among them:

* Chris Geith, MSU Global
* Samuel Klein, One Laptop per Child
* Mike Halm, Penn State University
* Murugan Pal, CK12 FlexBooks for Every Student
* Joel Thierstein, Connexions, USA
* Ken Udas, World Campus, USA

The full list of participants is at: http://www.wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank#Participant_List

The level of participation and interaction was awesome - I felt privileged to be a part of this unique event. The challenge is, to spread the word, and to get people to find their passion within the WikiEducator community. There are many roles and opportunities...

Social Volunteering

This author refers to Seth Godin's post covering an interesting community / social volunteering opportunity - called Family-to Family.

 

I've just posted a comment on I've Got Something to Say: Social Volunteering. (It wasn't picked up by Technorati, so I decided to post it here, to see what happens.)

"[This} is very cool, and I can see how it can be leveraged for different purposes and within different communities.

I am a community-builder / facilitator within the WikiEducator community. Wikieducator (http://www.wikieducator.org) is a collaborative authoring environment for educators, who are interested in developing content for the developing world.

In the next few months, the Wikieducator community will shift gears to the next phase of its evolution - engaging educators to develop free content (i.e., open educational resources), around the world. A link for the content already developed is at: http://www.wikieducator.org/Content

I can see that there is an opportunity here, in that groups of people might gather together to support a group of learners in say , a remote school in Zimbabwe; or adopt a school in Papua New Guinea, and self-organize to support that effort through the development of these types of materials, or related support. Very powerful indeed!"