Something I have been interested in for a while is the difference between teaching someone something and training them to do something. With the rise of so-called “eLearning” in both business and education, the lines between the two terms are blurred. Is corporate education teaching or training? Is job skills education training or teaching?

The staff at The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL), where I work as learning technology support, has had many conversations about teaching and training at our staff meetings. The technology side of CIEL runs workshops nearly year-round on different technologies, and we have discussed at length how to make these more useful for the faculty who attend them.

What it all comes down to, at least in my opinion, is answering why. Why does the technology work that way, why do you have to do things in that order (and is there a better way)? “Why” is the difference between teaching and training – teachers help students understand the “why” of what they are doing, trainers simply want the buttons pressed in the right order.

It might sound like I am belittling the role of trainers – and I want to say that I am certainly not. There is a place for training and place for teaching, and often a little of both must be used to achieve the best outcomes for students and trainees. The really challenging question is when to train and when to teach.

If I don’t know a faculty member well enough to know what is going to work best for them, and if they perhaps aren’t sure what they want, I usually err on the side of teaching. I will help them go through the steps, but explain why we are doing things a certain way at all stages. I also tend to let the faculty member think more, struggle a bit, and then intervene when necessary. Much like when I was a high school tutor – nothing is gained when an answer is provided before other person gets a chance to think about it.

What does this all have to do with collaborating?

I noticed when I began supporting my cohort with Desire2Learn that I moved into much more of a training mode. Part of that has to do with the asynchronous nature of the support – I assume they have gone through the struggle stage before getting in touch with me. Communication via email also doesn’t lend itself to longer explanations – I know from experience a paragraph of text explaining something is generally a lot less approachable then a numbered list.

But is that approach really helping anyone? I’m hoping to get some feedback from my group nearer the end of Week 3 to see what they thought. Luckily, some of my group members are also faculty at VIU, so perhaps they can speak to the different approaches to support.

What challenges and opportunities do you see for the realization of your philosophy of education in the evolution of eLearning as we know it?

I think that as online tools become ubiquitous in everyday life, they will need to become more entrenched into education as a whole.

The Challenges

I feel like the issue of security and privacy when using educational technology is going to be very important going forward. All the stakeholders, from students and parents to school boards and government, need to balance protecting students’ privacy with using new and interesting tools in the classroom. Teachers need to work closely with parents in order to ensure that the safety of the students is being protected at school, and at home as well.

I also feel there needs to be significant classroom development for teachers in order to use educational technology effectively and safely in their specific context. Teachers without a lot of digital experience are going to struggle when introducing technology in the classroom – especially because most educational technologies require an up-front time investment to learn how to use them effectively. As well, teachers need to feel comfortable enough with the technology to help students. Although many students enjoy using technology within the classroom, they do require training to use it effectively. Many teachers believe that students are native to digital technologies and understand how to use them, but there is an intrinsic difference between students’ use of digital technology in their everyday lives and using it in the context of learning.

The huge number of different educational technologies, from LMSs to social networking platforms, means that teachers need to be careful what tools they choose to use. It is easy to be swept up into a new tool without developing a pedagogically sound plan for it. Some teachers run into this obstacle because they feel pressure from students, parents or other teachers to use technology.

For all of the reasons above I need to be careful when trying to realize my pedagogy in a real classroom context. Without much in-classroom experience, I feel that being swept up in using technology will be especially dangerous for me.

The Opportunities

The growing pressure to integrate more digital and “new” media into the classroom is also creating new and different opportunities for students to interact with each other in meaningful ways. Technology can also help students to organize, express and share their work in ways that were not possible before. An especially apt example is available on teachinquiry.com (http://www.teachinquiry.com/index/Introduction.html). Teachers were able to leverage technology to enhance a powerful inquiry-based laboratory on decomposition.

I feel the other really exciting opportunities for STEM teachers include the ability to conduct remote laboratories with “real” scientific equipment, as well as the opportunities to use a variety of remarkable virtual reality tools to enhance poorly-equipped Science classrooms. I truly believe that Science is a way of thinking about and interacting with your world. All students, even those that “don’t like Science”, can benefit from “doing” Science in a meaningful way.

Additionally, there is greater opportunity to bring in experts from beyond the surrounding community to interact with students. Personally, the most important thing to do is inspire students, and who better to do that than those who have devoted their lives to their field? During my teacher training I was immensely lucky to be involved in a school-wide Science Fair where members of the University of Alberta took the time to support students during their projects and then come back to the school to see the students present their learning. There was a lot of powerful learning and inspiration catalyzed over the course of that Science Fair – in part because the students could see that the larger community cared about what they were doing which inspired them to push themselves. I believe these kinds of experiences can be possible for all students using technology for communication, community building and presentation of learning.

There is so much power and potential in technology in STEM fields, but the risks and concerns associated with technology use must be balanced.

 

Inspired by:

Ansell, S. E., & Park, J. (2003, May). Tracking Tech Trends. Education Week, 22(35), 43-52. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/tc/archives/TC03full.pdf

Gros, B., Garcia, I., & Escofet, A. (2012). Beyond the Net Generation Debate: A Comparison of Digital Learners in Face-to-Face and Virtual Universities. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(4). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1305/2311

Kear, K. (2011). Online and Social Networking Communities: A Best Practice Guide for Educators. [Kobo Version]. Retrieved from http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/online-and-social-networking-communities

Sauter, M., Uttal, D. H., Rapp, D. N., Downing, M., & Jona, K. (2013). Getting real: The authenticity of remote labs and simulations for science learning. Distance Education, 34(1), 37-47. doi:10.1080/01587919.2013.770431

Although I haven’t been testing Diigo very long, I can already see the utility of it – and I wish this tool existed (and/or I knew about it) back when I was completing my undergraduate degree.

On the surface, Diigo reminds me of RefWorks (http://www.refworks.com/) only instead of focusing on academic papers and research; Diigo focuses on the Internet – the whole internet. RefWorks allowed me to keep the research from multiple papers organized in folders, and gave me a quick “Author, date and title” view of the papers I had imported. Diigo lets me apply tags to the bookmarks, screenshots or highlighted text I bring in, allowing me to categorize the same item multiple ways. I’ve only been using it a few days, and I’m hooked!

I liked Diigo so much, I approached one of my co-workers would does a lot of web research and suggested she try using it. She very nicely laughed me off – she’s been using Diigo for years. Her other tool of choice is EndNote, and she tends to use them both depending on what specific project she is working on.

There are also Diigo groups, which I’m excited to learn more about. There is a specific group for education here: https://groups.diigo.com/group/diigoineducation . There seems to be a lot of resources around using Diigo in education, a couple of which I’ve included at the bottom of this post.

I think that Diigo will be an excellent tool to help me keep myself organized when researching for assignments throughout the rest of the OLTD program. I also think it would be an interesting tool to build resource areas to help jump start student projects.

 

Taking Diigo Beyond the Bookmark: http://www.knowthenetwork.com/2010/01/taking-diigo-beyond-the-bookmark/

Using Diigo in the Classroom: https://sites.google.com/site/team8project9440/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-2

As I do not have my classroom (at date of writing) this week’s seminar exploring of online communication tools didn’t have a lot of practical context for me. I was glad that the other members of my cohort shared so opening and honestly about their experiences, as I feel I learned a lot from them.

I did enjoy participating the Twitter chat (#bcedchat) as it provided me with some valuable professional networking and exposure to different people’s opinions. My successful participation in the chat also encouraged me to reply to a few tweets from people I follow this week, which has increased my appreciation of Twitter as a sharing platform in addition to a networking platform.

Sharing on Google+ was a less transformative experience for me. Although I do receive updates when items are shared in the OLTD cohort, I sometimes find the sheer volume overwhelming. That in itself is a helpful lesson for me on how much can be too much for students. It is also good for me to gain some experience with the Google+ platform, as prior to this course I had not used it, but I still see it as more a bulletin board of interesting articles and links then as a tool for collaboration and networking.

As one of my missions in teaching is to create an appreciation for Science and develop scientific literacy in students, I am very interested in using collaborative tools, such as discussion forums and wikis, to help students develop meaningful dialogues and produce materials that can be presented the the greater online community. I feel like microblogging and blogging would be a safe way to begin working on collaborative skills with students, and help them gain confidence with online tools.

Before I adopted any tools in my classroom, however, I would need to carefully consider who my students are and what their level of comfort with different tools may be. I dislike the term “digital natives” as I feel it can give educators a false sense of the skill levels and understanding student have in using digital tools. Any tools adopted would need to have a relatively low barrier to use, and I would need to be fully prepared to support students as they learn the tool – or have someone available who could.

I think the successful adoption of tools really depends on the understanding of what they are being used for and who is using them primarily.

Reference:
Kear, K. (2011). Online and Social Networking Communities: A Best Practice Guide for Educators. [Kobo Version]. Retrieved from http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/online-and-social-networking-communities

I signed up for my Twitter account this year, in June. The reason I signed up for my account was simple: I was attending a large, international conference in July and was terrified I would miss a lot of the information and sharing without Twitter. I was also terrified I wouldn’t be able to “figure out” Twitter unless I gave myself plenty of time to learn it, and a month seemed like plenty of time to me.

I went about learning how to use Twitter the same way I’ve learned most new technologies – I jumped in and mucked around. I started by following musicians and podcasters (as well as some celebrities) that I knew and enjoyed. This was a mistake.

After a couple of weeks I had fallen out of love with Twitter. What was the point anyway? It seemed as if all Twitter was about was reading what other people thought. I was missing that network piece everyone seemed to talk about when they spoke about Twitter.

The conference rolled around, and some of my first tweets were quotes from talks I went to (this actually ended up being helpful for tracking down some information later). I learned a lot more about the hashtag system, though I didn’t really “get” the difference between between a # and an @. Now, I think of a # as a conversation I’m adding a comment to, where I have no idea who as heard me. I think of an @ sign as tapping on someone’s shoulder at a party – they will probably hear what I have to say, but others might as well. (Am I wrong? Let me know in the comments!)

During the conference I started following more interesting people (including people I had the chance to meet in person) and was being followed by a few more people. I started to see two-way conversations happening – and Twitter suddenly made a lot more sense.

After the conference and before the new school year started there were a series of Twitter gaffs that happened to people I knew as well as myself. I’m not ashamed to say – I dropped Twitter like a hot potato for about a month because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the world wide web. After a while I realized that the Twitter community was pretty forgiving – in part because the information put out there doesn’t stick around too long. There seems to be a near-constant stream of information passing through Twitter.

In the last couple of months I seem to have reached a “critical mass” – I’m following just shy of 200 people, and have about 40 followers – and I’m starting to see my tweets getting shared out. I re-tweet articles I read from others or share ed-tech news about once a day. I’m very careful about my hashtags – I would rather share without a hashtag then share to wrong one. I’ve download and am learning how best to use Hootsuite – which is great because of the ability to watch multiple streams of hashtags.

Overall, my experience with Twitter and “putting myself out there” has been pretty positive. I’ve been able to build my online presence and start connecting with professionals in my field. I’m hoping that I can continue to build my professional learning network and online footprint.

I recently attended a CEET Meet geared toward cyber citizenship education (the archive for the meet is located here and more CEET meets are available here ).

The content of the CEET meet, cyber citizenship education, was very interesting. The resources provided by the meet coordinator were varied and engaging.

One of my favourite resource was an article and series of videos titled “Turning Students into Good Digital Citizens” (located here ). The direction in the meet itself was to discuss to what extent is it each teacher’s responsibility to help students to become good Cyber Citizens, but the conversation turned into how we define cyber citizenship and what it looks like to teach it in the classroom – a much more applicable conversation.

In the social media segment of the course there was another off-topic but highly informative conversation about tweeting and using social media. I was amazed at the level of support the online meet attendees offered to each other.

With all that being said, although I enjoyed reading the articles and resources, as well as keeping up the discussion posts, I had a hard time participating with the meet. After the first three days worth of posts, I became more of a lurker then a participant. My biggest struggle was that given the quality of posts and the experience of the other participants, I didn’t feel I had anything valuable to add to discussions. Since I was not an active participant in the discussions, I didn’t really make any new contacts through the CEET Meet, which was disappointing.

I am also planning to attend the Global Education Conference (http://www.globaleducationconference.com/ ) starting on Monday. I am hoping that because the Global Education Conference bills itself as “involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels” that I will have more to add to the conversations and be more active in the communities overall.