Networking with colleagues, peers and other practitioners

Living in Central Australia, and with the rest of my team in Darwin, I’m very conscious that my opportunities for local professional development and networking are limited. As a result, I have actively sought to build my own Professional Learning Network, primarily through social media. This includes actively participating in several weekly educational chats on Twitter (#AussieED, #digitaledchat, #IncludEDau), participating in live streamed conferences, Twitter backchannels and Google Hangouts and joining conversations on LinkedIn.

I find some of our staff are reluctant to share their work, even with their own colleagues, and feel that they have ownership of it personally, rather than the organisation, and in comparison, I have been amazed at the openness and willingness to share of the wider education community. I don’t think anyone has done any research into why staff feel this way; anecdotally they don’t trust the IT systems, they genuinely think their work belongs to them, they don’t want their colleagues to have it easy when they’ve done the hard yards and some don’t want others to be judging their work.

I’m excited to have three sessions in our Learning and Teaching Week this year to share with our staff some of the benefits of seeking out professional development through social media and to introduce them to Twitter chats. I’m hopeful that some will see the opportunities that being open provides and will start to apply that internally as well as externally. (Oh, and if you want to join us - look out for #AusVETchat on Wednesday)

A year since Nepal - why are some learners more enthusiastic than others?

We've just been on holiday for a month, and although I had limited access to internet I did find time to write some thoughts on my training experiences here and overseas. Anyway, why would I want to be on the internet when there were whales, dolphins, bears and glaciers to be watching. (Highly recommend Alaska as a holiday destination.)

I’m starting to get Facebook reminders of our time in Nepal last year, and as each one pops up I’m thinking more about the training we did there, what I learned in those situations, what I’ve applied already and what I would do differently in those situations now.

The most significant experience at the time was seeing the enthusiasm displayed by each group of learners. These were people who were all experienced in their field (community development, nursing, community health, finance) but with limited or no experience of working with a computer. They were amazed that we had travelled to their remote communities to spend time providing training opportunities and were more excited than any learners I have come across in fifteen years training in Australia. This experience has deepened my sense of privilege of access to learning and reignited my passion for training.

Having had this experience, I now question why we don’t see that same level of enthusiasm here. One common reason / excuse for not attending professional development is “I don’t have time”. At the beginning of this year I came across a blog put together by four Educational Technologists from the UK who were experiencing the same issue with their staff. Their blog, “1 minute CPD”, offers daily bite sized, just-in-time, professional development. James Clay’s blog post “I don’t have a dog”, shared recently through my Twitter PLN, is both entertaining and enlightening as he shares his thoughts that we all have the same number of minutes in a day and how we choose to use them is a matter of personal priorities. 

Through following 1 minute CPD this year I have improved my ICT proficiency, acquired new skills in classroom technologies and learnt to use curation tools … and so much more – and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned on my social media and with my colleagues. Sharing the 1 minute CPD concept and James’ thoughts have already proved helpful to me in encouraging staff to re-evaluate their priorities and to see professional development as something desirable and enjoyable and not just a compliance “tick the box”.

I now need to build on this and, with my team, determine the best way ahead for our staff – being very conscious that one model doesn’t fit every situation.

Starting a Reflective Journal

Oh dear!
I'm really not the best at blogging! I find my personal stuff goes onto Facebook and recording some of my professional discoveries goes into Twitter, but I seldom sit down and consciously reflect on what I'm learning or doing and how that impacts on my professional practice.
I'm into the last few units of my Diploma of Training Design and Development and one of the assessment tasks is a reflection journal:

Undertake a reflective process throughout this course of current facilitation and assessment practice, include:

o   Techniques and strategies you have developed appropriate to professional practice

o   How you apply ethical and inclusive practices in professional practice

o   Reflection on professional practice of current knowledge and skills against appropriate benchmarks

o   Networking with colleagues, peers and other practitioners 

So, time to start actually documenting, rather than just doing and thinking.

As a first, here's a short Storify documenting some of the process of preparing for our Learning and Teaching Week in September. In preparing for the sessions I'll be facilitating I've drawn heavily on contacts through my Professional Learning Network (mostly through Twitter), and have had to learn how to use Storify - which actually wasn't hard at all. One of the things we want to share with staff is the enormous benefit of being part of an open community and I'm hoping they will see the genuine willingness of others to share resources and provide additional support through this Storify.

Learning on the move - #Fail! #BYOD4L is next.

So I didn't get to participate in #HumanMOOC. Changing locations, dodgy wifi and time zone differences all got too challenging. And then Christmas came along - and time with family was waaay more important. Hopefully #HumanMOOC will come round again.

So now back home and trying to get back into "normal" routines and I'm picking up on #BYOD4L. I lurked a bit here previously and got to share in what one of my colleagues was learning. It's a wild ride of a new topic each day for 5 days using The 5C Framework combined with Twitterchats. We're talking about Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating.

Check out the website from the image caption.

BYOD4L

New to blogging

So my second attempt at a blog to record my learning journey. This time I need to:

• Remember the title of my blog so I can find it again!
• Come here often to post
• Use it to expand my Personal (Professional, Peer) Learning Network

This attempt at blogging is prompted by an activity in an online course I'm doing - Hybrid Courses: Best of both worlds - for the second time round. I completed this 4 week course last year and enjoyed it so much I'm doing it again, partly to see how different it is with a different bunch of people and partly to see if it is any different (presumably having been reviewed since last year). So here I am doing the 2nd of the listed activities. 

Activity

Select at least ONE item from the following list to expand your online connections and resources as a step towards your reinvention of your self into a hybrid teacher:

1. Subscribe (via RSS feed) to at least one new online education blog. Here is a list of possible starting points: Useful Blogs

2. Start a blog yourself, either for your future hybrid class use or to document some aspect of your teaching life.  You can set one up at blogger.com or at wordpress.com. (I especially recommend this for someone who has never blogged before. It is an empowering experience for teachers and students.) Don't forget to add it to our Compilation Site!

3. Sign up for Google Alerts (or an alternate alert such as Mention) then start to use this tool to get up-to-the-minute articles published on the web. Topics you might sign up for are: hybrid teaching, online teaching, or anything related to your own subject matter.

4. Create your own hybrid class Facebook page that you can start developing for possible use in your own course. (For information on how to set up a private Facebook page, seethis article.)

5. Network online with people in this course. Tweet with the course hashtag #CNhybest.

6. Find your own way to be more connected online and let me know what you will do.

Click "next" to let me know what you have decided to do to make yourself more tech-savvy and connected.