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.

Preparing for Learning and Teaching Week

I'm currently working on developing three sessions for our annual Learning and Teaching week at Charles Darwin University. Each year it's a focused week of professional development opportunities with in-house presentations, panel discussions, webinars and guest speakers.

This year we're opening it up and, with a couple of my colleagues, I'll be hosting a series of sessions for lecturers interested in exploring the use of technology, digital tools and social media for professional development and networking.

The final session in the series is a Twitter edchat on the topic of "Industry engagement in VET", and we’re inviting VET practitioners from other Registered Training Organisations and representatives from industry to join us as we discuss why industry and RTOs need to engage, and some practical approaches to making it happen.

Please join us on Wednesday 14th from 1pm - 2pm ACST on Twitter #AusVETchat

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.

Curating - #BYOD4L

Hmmmmm.

As those who know me will testify, I kinda like to have my stuff all around me. Putting stuff away just isn't my strong point. And it's pretty much the same with curating. I see a website I like and "click" it's in my favourites. I currently have 12 active tabs on the iPad and 15 on the phone! But how to bring this all together?! So "reflect on my current practice" - well, it's pretty much non-existent. Great! Here's an area for improvement in 2016 :)

I can relate to the teacher in the video today because our trainers all say the same. And we say the same in relation to (what we think are) exciting things we include in our online staff PD.

A couple of years ago I (with a few other colleagues) participated in Gilly Salmon's "Carpe Diem" course: A team based approach to learning design. Many of us found the template provided for designing online activities particularly helpful, including a "spark" and a "what's in it for me" as part of the activity introduction. Check it out on page 21 of the Carpe Diem workbook. It's easy for us to get excited about new things and want to share everything, so I think we need to be able to articulate that excitement so that our students also get excited and want to try new things.

So for something to improve on this year, I'm going to try to curate my "stuff". I'm trying Pocket which has been mentioned in this course, as well as giving Evernote another try. I had looked at that a few years ago and didn't find it intuitive, but was recently reintroduced to it as part of the fun 12 Apps of Christmas.

I'm looking forward to a tidier desk by the end of the year!

Communicating - #BYOD4L

Day 2 of #BYOD4L is all about communicating. Specifically, thinking about how we communicate in our professional and private lives, the methods and tools we use.

Rather than just write a list, I found this neat website to create Venn diagrams - because I was sure there would be an overlap - and there is. When I sat down to think about it, there are very few tools that I use exclusively for professional or private use, with most sitting in a blur in the middle. Some, like Facebook, started as a purely social tool, but as more and more businesses and professional bodies create pages I find it an increasingly useful way to be informed and to raise questions.

I then considered which of these tools I use of choice and which I have to use because they are work based, or because that is where to find others with whom I want to communicate. Google tools fit in this latter category with a lot of MOOCs using google as the preferred platform. I'm getting used to it, but it's not my preferred choice.

The day 2 scenarios are interesting and I relate to the educator in the second, as I often hear similar comments from our trainers and assessors: "I'm all alone", "I can't get to that PD session because I'm teaching", "My colleagues are so far away" (At CDU we have over 22,000 students across 4 campuses and 4 training centres). 

To them, and to our man in the video, I would say, "I hear what you're saying. My colleagues are 1,500 km away too. I've been able to explore using technology to help us communicate better. Let's see what might work for you." And then begins a journey of exploration ...

So for me, where to next? I've just returned from long service leave where I spent time in Nepal facilitating training in MS Word and PowerPoint with groups of community development workers in remote regions (Read about that on my other blog), and also introducing them to Twitter and Padlet and blogs. It was exciting to see their enthusiasm. I'm continuing to work with some of them individually, slowly introducing tools and apps they can use on their limited bandwidth. In my day job, I'll be continuing to explore (through courses like this) tools and apps that I can share with our trainers and assessors to help them further develop their skills and give their training sessions some "bling". Exciting times!

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

Hello to HumanMOOCers

Hi from Pokhara, Nepal.
I think I've finally worked out a way to post my intro video - working round wifi access, power outages and device incompatibility is a challenge, but hopefully this link will work.
Greetings everyone!