#NTPoC Unit 3: SNA Artifact Challenge

In Unit 3 of our Power of Connections learning experience, Stacy asked us to map our social networks using the tools she had suggested. Here are some of my "findings."

My Twitter map doesn't show anything surprising. Most of my connections are in the US, with the exception of a small group scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Here is the second map of my Twitter connections and it tells the same story, only in percentages.

My LinkedIn social network is actually much more interesting.

For starters, it is much more diverse than my Twitter network. My connections on LinkedIn have been formed while I was at different companies focused on different parts of the education industry. I have contacts in publishing, educational technology, publishing technologies, content management, Higher Education and learning design. Not surprisingly, while my network is sizable, it is not incredibly interconnected. In other words, few of these people would not be connected in any way without me.

Interestingly, that lack of "connectedness" does not diminish the value of this network, at least in the way that I use it. For me, LinkedIn is about staying connected to multiple industries, and about having access to experts in those industries. It's like a professional reference (a professional Wikipedia). In that context, it continues to serve me extremely well.

Power of Connections: Make a Connection

The first Artifact Challenge in our Power of Connections learning experience is to introduce yourself through a picture of your desktop, bookshelf or some other selfie that captures your identity.

I started out by taking a "staged" picture of my bookshelf (the shoes were an addition).

Unfortunately, my bookshelf mostly consists of the sad remnants of a former life in which I actually collected print books. What remains are a few literary and Latin American novels (top shelf), religious books and more literary stuff (second shelf), math, science, and notebooks (third shelf), and then more notebooks, running shoes, and, last but not least, my FAVORITE TRILOGY OF ALL TIME, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (bottom shelf).

While all this says plenty about me, I suppose, It's not the clear, iconic lens I was hoping for.

Then it occurred to me. I do have an object that sums me up in a whole different way. My favorite belt buckle.

In its own way, it is a great snapshot of an either-handed, bilingual kid who has deep roots in the Southwest, loves Westerns (movies and books), but who is also at home in a big city.

Power of Connections: Teacher Engagement and the Iceberg Dilemma

As part of the build-out of Power of Connections, I've been giving a great deal of thought to the notion of teacher engagement (see here and here). As part of this reflecting process, I've been thinking about how course creation and delivery differ in online and face-to-face environments.

Specifically, it seems to me that we often fall prey ot what I call the "iceberg dilemma" when it comes to online design and instruction. This dilemma, I think, can be attributed to a fundamental difference/assumption between teaching face-to-face and online.

When we're preparing and teaching face-to-face courses, we generally look at the course content as a foundation for the actual course, but are keenly aware that this is only a point of departure. Once the content is prepared we, as instructors, must go in and present that content. We must also elaborate iteratively throughout the course of the curriculum based on feedback we receive from students, and work to connect students and information beyond the base content. Using my iceberg model, we realize that content, and even initial delivery, are only the tip of the iceberg. The real teaching engagement and learning happens beyond that (beneath the content surface).

While it certainly doesn't have to be that way, many of our models for online course design and delivery focus almost exclusively on content, or just the tip of the iceberg. We design our content and build it within a platform, and then we allow the platform to do the majority of the delivery. This is the majority of the course apart from managing assignments. In other words, there is little in-course iteration and sparse effort at student engagement through connection.

The realization I am coming to is that, in online learning, teacher engagement is what happens after the content is built and delivered (with exceptions like Laura Gibbs who build her content openly and engages even at that level). Again, it doesn't have to be that way but it seems to be the rule as opposed to the exception.

What excites me about Power of Connections is that we are going to be spending so much time "beyond the content," working on the part of the iceberg beneath the surface. I think this is where teacher engagement really happens (at least for me), and it's certainly where I'll have lots of fun.

Power of Connections: What Do We Mean When We Say Student Engagement?

Laura Gibbs commented on my Google+ post yesterday that she was voting for PARTICIPANT CREATION (all caps and bold are hers). She said this with regards to my post on design decisions for our Power of Connections Course, and it reminded me why Stacy and I have been working on this in the first place -- we believe that learner creation is a core component of student engagement.

Without it, in fact, we would argue that it is highly difficult to create learning that endures.

Admittedly, talking about learner creation as a key part of what we call student engagement doesn't explain the different ways we can facilitate such creation in our courses, or how/when it leads to meaningful learning engagement.

This question or learning design challenge --  how/when do we create learner creation that leads to meaningful student engagement? -- is actually a driving philosophical force running through Power of Connections. And, as we have worked through the learning design process, we have designed with the following guiding principles.

• Effective learner creation is about the "why" as much as it is about  the "what" -- Stacy and I have been working on Artefact Challenges for Power of Connections and, while there are so many cool things we could have participants create, we find that the value of their creation is directly dependent on its purposeful integration into a learning objective objective. Meaningful engagement comes when we can get learners to move past the act of creation into the acts of learning and accruing wisdom through experience.
• For optimum student engagement, learner creation should be personalized/personalizable -- Good creation prompts appeal to a diverse group (meaning they are valuable or interesting to a heterogeneous class cohort), but they are also activities that can be personalized to a degree by each individual learner. This makes every creation truly unique and personal, and gives the learner creations greater meaning.
• Ideally, learner creation should be sharable if we want it to result in real engagement --For creation to be engaging it must matter. It is important that the created work having visibility within the learning community, that it get out of the learner's head and into reality. This leads to multiple possible levels of impactfulness. It also, quite oftten, leads to greater reflection.
• Creation is more than just making stuff -- it can also be active engagement with and personal internalization of information --This last one may seem strange but it is extremely important. Learner creation is also about students engaging in the formation (creation) of their own ideas and opinions about information. It is about helping them move beyond passive consumption, which is fairly antithetical to real student engagement. A key to facilitating this type of creation is to find good models for turning information into something that feels more "active" and "dynamic" to students. In Power of Connections for example, we do this with dialogues, which are intended to invite learners into a discussion about the information. By doing this we model information engagement as well as create a gravitational pull that, hopefully, gets the student to do more than skim the information at a surface level.

Power of Connections: Initial Design Decisions

Yesterday, I posted about the self-imposed design constraints Stacy and I have placed on our Power of Connections course. Today, I want to elaborate a bit on some of the initial course design decisions we have made based on those design constraints. In the spirit innovation, I would like to think that our constraints have made us more creative. However, I am aware that we are at the early stages on our design thinking and that some of our decisions may prove problematic once the actual learning experience begins July 13.

Here, in a nutshell are, our initial design decisions for Power of Connections.

• Focus on a limited set of content types that can be elaborated in many ways -- We have tossed out many, many content types and ideas as part of our planning. In the end, we decided to go deep instead of broad. We have stuck to a few, basic content types -- those available to everyone and that can be executed by pretty much anyone -- and have focused our design on elaborating these types in different ways. We believe that this will help us achieve out goal of modeling student engagement activities for the largest audience set possible.
• Focus on a limited set of activity or technology types -- We do not want Power of Connections to be about cool technology or student engagement activities that necessarily require learning new technologies. So, as with content types, we are sticking to the basics when it comes to technology. We want the activities we explore and discuss in this experience to be accessible and usable by instructors with a broad range of online/hybrid teaching experience and technology expertise.
• Encourage as wide a range of participant creation as possible -- The first two design decisions certainly address our goal of making Power of Connections work for teachers and course designer with different backgrounds and differing levels of expertise. However, we also want participants to be able to "engage" according to their own personal preferences with regards to how and where they create content and conversations. We also want participants to be able to engage when they want and with only the content that interests them. That means designing the experience in a modular fashion so that someone can engage only with a particular activity from week three and still receive tremendous learning benefit.
• Encourage dialogue in as many places as possible and make it our responsibility to aggregate and connect the community -- Of course, all of this puts a bit pressure on Stacy and me because it means we must be committed to supporting/integrating both a closed learning environment as well as open Web activity and communication (for blogs, social media, and public access to course content). It's usually an either/or proposition when it comes to course design, but we're trying to do both (and it could be a miserable failure -- i.e. there may be a good reason we never mix the two).
• Ensure that all content can be accessed from multiple environments -- both open and closed -- One of the goals of Power of Connections is to create a catalog of sharable information, activities and ideas related to student engagement. We want to make sure that all the work created in this experience lives on after the experience and remains discoverable, editable, and sharable by others. We also want to encourage participation in our experience by everyone, particularly those who don't have time to engage in the course experience but who want to view what's going on or add to the conversation casually through social media.
• Commit to engaging with the community as facilitators for as long as its active -- As I have said, this is not a traditional course, it is a learning and community experience. And, Stacy and I are not acting as instructors, but rather as facilitators for the learning community. To that end, we are committed to supporting community conversation and the curation of community content/ideas as long as people are interested.

Power of Connections: Course Design Constraints

Okay, while it's taken some time in various planning stages (mainly because my attention has been pulled away by other projects), Stacy Zemke and I are happy to announce our Power of Connections open learning experience, which will commence July 13. You can follow the link above to watch our promo video and enroll, or check out my more formal description post here.

What I would like to do in this post is begin sharing information about our actual approach to designing this experience, and to explain some of the decisions we are making about the experience structure and platform/technology usage. To kick this off, I want to talk a bit about our self-imposed design constraints.

Constraints

To begin with, I should note that part of our thinking is informed by beliefs about the importance of constraints in shaping innovation and creativity. Essentially, we find that teachers and learners are often more inventive and willing to stretch their thinking when they have fewer options to work with. You will see us model this notion of constraint throughout the experience n the form our improvisations and artefact activities.

For the purposes of designing this experience, we established the following as our initial design constraints.

1. It should be  more of a learning experience and not a course in a traditional sense -- We felt that we should design something we would want to take, something that was more about doing and connecting with others, something from which participants could take away valuable experiences and ideas that could incorporated easily into their own teaching or learning design.

2. It needs to be both structured and unstructured -- This may seem like a strange one to some, but if you've taught with journals or blogs you probably know what we're getting at here. Some find the completely unstructured, "build your own experience" adventure to be exhilarating. Others find it terrifying because they want a much greater sense of linear structure. By the way, this seems ot apply to teachers as well. So, for this experience, we wanted to constrain oursleves to a design that would, the the greatest extent possible, satisfy both those wanting to explore freely as well as those desiring more structure.

3. Content and content design should model what average instructor can do in almost any learning environment -- Again, call us pragmatists. Stacy and I both work with traditional institutions and instructors, many of whom are not ready to embrace new technologies or  innovative approaches to teaching. With that in mind, we wanted to design content that pretty much any teacher/instructor could create and implement. We also realize that all teachers/designers work with additional environment/tool constraints (beyond their own expertise ar willingness to innovate), so we are also focusing on content models that can work pretty much anywhere.

 4. The experience needs to be both closed and open -- It is important to Stacy and me that we model something that can be incorporated into a wide range of institutions and teaching environments. We want our colleagues at every point on the teaching spectrum to be able to use some of the concepts in modeled in this experience. As a result, we feel like we need to embrace both open and closed environments. For those constrained by traditional LMS environments, and who feel constrained to  work entirely within those platforms, we wanted to show that you can create incredible engagement  there. However, we also wanted to support teachers/designers working in more open environments, and those wanting to add open options to a closed environment.

5. The focus should be learner-centric -- If we're going to focus on "student engagement," the design of the experience should place the learner at the center of his/her learning network as much as possible. As much as possible, all energy should be generated by individual learners and learner groups/communities.

6. Participants should have the ability to see what is going on within the community network  -- One of our beliefs about student engagement is that the more genuine engagement/activity achieved by a student within her/his learning network, the more meaningful and enduring the actual learning will be. To that end, we feel it is important to find diverse ways to help "show" learners how both they and the learning community are engaging, and how they might benefit form more or different types of engagement.

7. Participants should be able to join and leave at any time -- If we are designing an experience for the learner (as opposed to for the institution or instructor), it should be as flexible as possible. People should be able to come and go, regardless of whether or not they are talking of Michelangelo . They should be able to drop in for a single activity, a lesson, or the whole experience. They should also be able to do this in the order of their won desire.