Walking the walk!

We should never underestimate the power of imitation! Human beings don't always learn well from following instructions, from listening to advice or from doing as they are told - far from it! The most profound impact we make on each others' learning comes from what we do in front of them. I think that is what my Dad was trying to teach me when, in an attempt to get his rebellious daughter to stop smoking he (a 20 a day man) said:
"Do as I say, not as I do"

Of course, despite promises otherwise I did not give up. Years later though, divorced, newly single and on the lookout for the man of my dreams (now hubbie no.2, non-smoker) it was not difficult to stop smoking to join the pub trips which facilitated our getting together :)

In education, we call it "modelling". No, not the glossy magazine sort, with its unrealistic portrayal of life that crushes the soul. The simple human process of leading by example, sharing what we do (including the mistakes and how we improve) and encouraging others to try it too. We do it to inspire, hoping others see that we value our activity and it brings us joy. That's what I try to do in my language teaching. 

So, this week I'm joining the #BYOD4L team as a moderator and over 5 days we will indulge in a feast of lively activities on 5 C themes, linked here to some of my earlier musings on this and other virtual spaces:

Connecting - let's be open and accessible to all! 
Communicating - informed by my experience with computer-mediated communication
Curating written some time ago now so a good reminder of how it felt! 
Collaborating takes time and interpersonal skills!
Creating made this brief alternative CV as part of #digiwrimo 2 years ago. 

I hope that we will all walk the walk, listen to each other and be ACCCCCE! 

Setting sail together.

Yesterday I presented a keynote to the LLAS #elearnllas symposium which charted the course of my professional development as a learning technologist over recent years. I did not set out to become a learning technologist, this was rather a necessary set of skills I needed to acquire in order to develop our blended learning provision. My objective had been to implement a platform to enable our tutors and students to share resources and connect beyond the classroom, given that we have just 2 or 3 hours a week contact time. 

The journey has not been without its challenges but I didn't want to dwell on these. What I wanted to share with my peers was the nature of the digital landscape and how we can be best prepared for embarking on such journeys from our own institutional contexts. I chose to map the territory using the thinglink above. This is offered as a tool which can be shared with others to encourage them to explore the digital environment and find affordances which are useful to their practice. The multimodal path through my presentation is available here and those who share the messages can collect a digital badge by submitting an evidence URL (blog post link, tweet etc) to this open badge claim. 

Inspirational talk by @WarwickLanguage at #elearnllas Language teachers need to get out more into the digital space! pic.twitter.com/2T8neCo3ix

— elearning symposium (@elearnLLAS) January 22, 2016

Open Education #FOS4L Getting creative

Open Education is dear to me, creating tailored learning resources has always been one of my favourite aspects of teaching, But what's the point of all that creation if you can't share it widely and be inspired by others who critique or improve on it? But the concept of open is often misunderstood. 

Since the advent of digital I have not only been able to clear out all the ancient worksheets from under my bed (25 years of dust collecting under there!) but I have also been able to refine the best ideas and develop them for digital practice, sharing using slideshare, TES resources, scribd, issu, dropbox, flickr and other sites and the engagement with them has helped me to realise how useful they are to others. It's not always easy to find sites that display the creative commons licence obviously, hence my campaign on slideshare recently. 

The new affordances of digital tools increase the impact that can be achieved from a teaching perspective considerably. Using digital video for example can revolutionise the authenticity of language teaching and learning scenarios. I have been involved in the EU Video for all project over the past year and a half and I have conducted piloting sessions with colleagues in HE to get their impressions of this approach to encouraging creativity. Of course using commercial video or "finding images on the web" can be problematic and sometimes teachers get caught like rabbits in the headlights, afraid to create or encourage creativity in case copyright is infringed. So for that reason I took one of the Video for All examples made by one of my students (using poetry for student creation) and made some resources about Creative Commons (including a wiki page here) to support language teachers in embarking on their own make to suit their context. 

I believe that supporting the confidence of teachers to create and within their Community of Practice is very important. We have been disempowered through a series of bureaucratic practices in education for too long, good teaching is a fundamentally creative process and skills development in the digital era should be a priority. This is why I embraced Terry Loane's suggestion of Open Guilds and participated recently in the webinar. I also set up an open badge for other language educators (see below, designed by @mearso) so we can start to build a cross sector CoP to promote such activity. If you know a language educator who practices openly, please share the badge claim link with them!

Where is the silliness in education?

This headline grabbed my attention recently. Politicians have decided it is time to stamp out low level disruption in classrooms and they plan to do so by appointing a behaviour management consultant Tom Bennett @tombennet71 -a former nighclub owner now reinvented as a teaching consultant, now fêted in the press as the latest "behavious tsar". I share Ken Robinson's exasperation at the outpourings of those in government office who wade in with "initiatives" to justify their existence. 

I spent 15 years in the secondary teaching system and I have seen my share of chair rocking, paper passing and giggling. Now having spent a further 15 years in H.E., teaching staff are more likely to complain about a lack of animation from their students, a passivity or disconnect that troubles them. Behaviour and body language are physical manifestations of our psychological state, I would not wish to suggest that they should be ignored. They can be vital clues for those charged with classroom management and should always be taken seriously - but branding such behaviour as "silliness" is to misunderstand the psychology of the developing young person in front of you and -far worse - to undermine the challenges faced every day by every teacher in the western world. Classrooms can be boring places,humdrum droning about targets, levels and exam requirements are often the dominant narrative, they can be anxiety incubators, pressure cookers which have faulty valves due to the enforced passivity for hours on end. Austerity means we won't be seeing government initiatives to increase access to open spaces (if they haven't been sold off already), participation in field trips or working in better buildings - just more young people crammed into unsuitable spaces with little opportunity for personalisation of their learning. 

At least during my secondary teaching days we had the flexibility to excite our learners, to recognise their need for activity through multi-sensory approaches, drama, music, cookery, creativity- many were the ways in which I could engage students with language learning. The opportunity to balance the activity over the course of a lesson, a term and a year making time for lively interaction and fun as well as time for quiet reflection and even a vocabulary test or tricky problem solving session. I don't dispute that there are challenging individuals in any classroom nor that it is helpful to provide strategies to support teachers in re-engaging them. However there is so little that can be fundamentally changed by an individual practitioner about a sytem which has lost sight of its purpose thanks to being used as a political football. This is where the real silliness is in education. The obsession with the superficial over the substance of learning. Teachers need the breathing space to reflect upon their classroom encounters, the energy to address them and the supportive professional community of fellow practitioners to implement innovation. The insights explained here make a good deal of sense to me:

Open to change!

I have just returned home from #oer15. My first #oer conference but a place where I met and consolidated friendships with many I have known online as like minds for many years. We were focusing on the issue of mainstreaming Open. Let me explain:

Open educational practitoners believe that education is not something you "do to" others, it is participation in a learning community, we are all learners. As such, we share and learn from each other. Few teachers have an issue with this ideal, (although some are less keen perhaps to learn from their students). Most practioners also feel that getting to grips with Creative Commons licences and searching banks of content is too big a task to contemplate. I think it is also too important to ignore. Watch David Wiley's Ted talk if you are unconvinced.

Basically: 

• Learning is vital if we are to survive as a species, the challenges that face us are bigger than we can imagine
• Learning is getting more exclusive, access is limited to a relatively small proportion of advantaged people
• The costs of learning are beyond the means of the many, this is unfair.

Open educational resources are (mainly) digital objects made available for retention, re-use, revision, re-mixing and redistribution. This is facilitated by a set of Creative Commons licences, the most "open" one being CC BY. This indicates a resource that is available for all of the above but the originator should be attributed. This offers a way of ensuring that work you produce (your worksheets for example) acknowledge your intellectual input. For me this is a way of helping to re-professionalise teaching, a "profession" that has largely been diminished, with teachers just the worker ants, a benign interface between the curriculum creators and exam authorities, under valued and bereft of influence.

So, along with my like minded colleagues, we agreed that we wish to support the journey to open practice, international open practice that opens locked minds, overcomes insularity and silos and empowers creativity and enagement. Great learners make great teachers..

Time however is an issue. There's never enough and we all prioritise accordingly. I proposed that we consider how #openbadges could be deployed in the context of the journey to becoming an Open Educational Practioner, recognition of investment in CPD (becoming a digital practitioner) which could become part of your professional credentials. Others also seemed to feel that this would help to go towards recognition of time invested. I hope this idea flies.

If you are a language teacher, please take a look at my contribution to the OpenContentToolkit here (thanks to @theokl) on images for language teaching. Becoming open is a process so you can take it at your own pace :)

Check out @WarwickLanguage ’s page on Language Teaching with images http://t.co/hilg3grnXl < toolkit join code 3KQ97DR #oer15 #ukedchat

— Theo Kuechel (@TheoKL) April 17, 2015

#ocTEL task 3.1 Creating your own materials.

I love to create resources for learning, have done ever since I first started teaching some 30 years ago. The digital revolution has made the creation process more empowering as it provides opportunities to create a more satisfying end product than my poor art skills could otherwise allow. Memorable breakthoughs came for me with the discovery on Microsoft Publisher many years ago, my worksheets became works of art :) These days I like to mix media using #popcorn and encourage students to create visual or audio resources to share with others.

Even in those early days of exploration I would carefully weigh up the relative advantage of producing a resource in a digital format compared with analogue equivalents - and there were many of those! Laminated project cards and images remain under my bed and in my office filing cabinets and, now and again, are used as more practical alternatives when the rooming is unsuitable or the hardware unavailable. After all, has any student ever said "how do you open this" when presented with a physical handout?! However, now it is the norm for me to start any resource creation with a digital focus and I have a virtual armoury which thankfully doesn't require dusting. Other benefits include:

• easier editing and tweaking once the resource has been tried out
• a large bank of possible starting points with hyperlinks to additional content making tasks extendible in any direction
• colourful, interactive and innovative resources to stimulate learner interest

So this week's #ocTEL focus on experimentation and materials creation really appeals to me. I was already familiar with most of the tools on the suggestions list and I favour tools which are platform agnostic so I am not interested in formats that require a particular hardware (such as Apple products) but I dived in to a screencasting tool I had not heard of before only to be surprised by what I found out! Here's the very brief recording.