Rabbit hole wrap-up

I’m sad to end another iteration of ONL. By the time the next one starts up, I wonder if I’ll have time to join again. Round 2 did not disappoint.

I enjoy so many things about the course, but I think the biggest one is divergence. New and different people, perspectives, and ideas are my jam. The experience is refreshing, inspiring and expansive. The world got bigger, and I have more energy and desire to create and explore.

As a follow-up to my last post, I am getting a start on closing open tabs. I’m creating a resource guide of all the interesting stuff I want to remember, reference, and/or invesigate further. The items below came from ONL referenced materials and course-inspired rabbit holes. I don’t know how I’ll organize it just yet, but it’s a place for the ideas, until I make a place for the ideas – highlighted items are for future investigation.

Co-Design¹ Community of Practice: Emma Blomkamp launched CoDesignCo in 2022, and I was soooo excited until I read that it’s already in sunset mode. This is something I wonder about CoPs – how often do they sustain life, without feeling like they are being forever rolled uphill? Searching for CoPs online for curriculum design, they seem to be affiliated with (and exclusive to employees of) specific universities. There’s more about CoDesignCo in this UX Magazine article, including this great nugget:

A framework for building learning networks for systems change, focusing on the enabling conditions: mindsets; relationships; processes; and structures. Image source: McKenzie 2021.

This framework is speaking to me. I especially like “install boundary spanners” and “build a collective memory” – but I like just about everything else, too.

The Walkshop Model: Teachers at Örebro University in Sweden developed this model for beginner programming students. I’ve seen some similar things before but here’s their process:

1. Divide students into random groups.
2. Post problems around the room on walls where you can also write (ie, post paper, whiteboards, etc).
3. For 2 hours, groups circulate around the room and work on problems. The teacher and senior students listen and observe, and assist when needed.
4. Occasionally students are told to talk with other groups to compare thinking and solutions.
5. Halfway through the time, students are prompted to reflect on the ways they learn, and the ways they are contributing to their group. This gives them an opportunity to change the way they behave in their group for the 2nd half, if they feel the need.
6. At the end, the students watch a video of the instructor with a colleague, talking through the way they solved it, and what guided their thinking. They can watch this video from home.

I really like 5 and 6. They are what make this activity complete and well developed, beyond what I’ve seen before. Hearing the instructor with a colleague, talking out their own thinking, is invaluable.

This model could be used for design challenges, ethical dilemmas, and many other kinds of problem-based learning.

Dancing with Systems: Now this is exactly the kind of woo introduction to a subject that I go crazy for. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist and systems thinker, who among other things was the lead author on Limits to Growth, which through computer simulation (in 1972!) posited that our economic and population growth trajectories with limited available resources aren’t sustainable. Seems controversial. 🙃² Dancing With Systems is a posthumously published work on how to disrupt systems for positive change. Hackernoon summarized her key guidelines well. The abbreviated list follows:

• Get the beat: get to know it before you muck with it
• Listen to the wisdom of the system: look for what’s good and self-sustaining
• Expose your mental models to the open air: put your assumptions out there to be challenged, and be open to change your ways of thinking
• Stay humble. Stay a learner.
• Locate responsibility in the system: look for the ways the system itself creates certain impacts, not just how it behaves to random outside stimuli (ie specific external events)
• Make feedback policies for feedback systems: create an evaluation culture
• Pay attention to what is important, not to what is quantifiable
• If something is ugly, say so
• Go for the good of the whole
• Expand time horizons: think about short term and long term
• Expand thought horizons: take an interdisciplinary approach
• Expand the boundary of caring: not just our immediate community
• Celebrate complexity
• Hold fast to the goal of goodness

DS106: AKA Digital Storytelling is… I think it’s an open online course which also runs at an actual university sometimes. Not exaggerating, it took me the better part of an hour to confirm that this is actually still a thing. The website feels like a ghost town that thrived in 2005, all broken links and outdated references. Posted content is almost exclusively from 2011-2013, back when the teacher was fresh and full of passion, or had a budget, or perhaps before they lost the password to the website back end. It’s like teaching that once-annual class and reaching that powerpoint slide and oh god I still have that data from 10 years ago dear lord why haven’t I updated that yet. But if you click just the right link, you can find evidence of recent activity. There are residents in the ghost town, after all.

I have so much curiosity³ – why hasn’t someone tidied it up? Are there enough open learners to foster a sense of community? If I start this course will I be sucked into a spooky alternate reality internet nerd drama (I hope so)?

Scanning the more recent activity, there’s mention of Daily Create prompts like “find the background code of a website and use it for art” or “explore poetry of endangered languages”. Fuuuuuuuunnn! After a little hunt, which included signing up for a twitter account only to find a twitter post pointing me somewhere else, I found the Daily Create site. Today’s prompted to leave a message at the anonymous answering machine at After the Beep. I did. Does this mean I’m registered?

1. As far as I can recall, this is my first introduction to the word Co-Design – defined as “a participatory approach to designing solutions, in which community members are treated as equal collaborators in the design process” – though it’s much of what I do. ↩︎
2. WHY have I only figured out TODAY that this is a sarcasm emoji? Where have you been all my life? ↩︎
3. Curiosity and mystery on the internet is something I want to investigate more. I almost never feel curious on social media. 2 hours worth of DS106 exploration was so refreshing and motivating! ↩︎

Sticky notes & Open tabs

I applied for a job recently, and it got me thinking about one of my shortcomings when interviewing with people who don’t know me already. I’m a great synthesizer – I can hear and process many pieces of information, and quickly articulate big-picture meaning in a way that many people have noticed and appreciated as exceptional. However, as soon as I have done this, my brain discards many of the details. I don’t care about the name of the theory, or the theorist. Perhaps in a connected way, I can re-experience favorite books and TV shows, because I’ve forgotten the details. In my working memory, I am very detail-oriented. I don’t miss things. I know I’m great at my job. I remember the names of a class full of students very quickly, but if I meet a new person on the street that I suspect I’ll never see again, I have forgotten their name by the time it’s out of their mouth.

Again, this is a problem for job interviews. It’s also difficult when I come across a piece of information that I know will be useful… but I haven’t hit the appropriate context yet.

My passion is curriculum design. In my perfect job I’d be helping instructors from diverse disciplines design learning activities, courses and programs, while teaching a course or two myself. Bigger picture, I’d love to be building teams, culture, and capacity. My current job isn’t too far from this, with about 50% paperwork thrown in. Thinking about applying for other jobs (with less paperwork), I realize I need to find a way to track and organize all the great ideas I’ve come across, and come up with. This iteration of ONL has added many new ones to the pile. Currently I have a few half-baked blogs, some folded-over book pages, a bazillion open tabs, and old work journals with sticky notes poking out. Realistically, I’m not sure I’ll go back into all the past stuff, but I need to develop a system for going forward. A blog with a good tag system? A wiki? A giant annotated bibliography for my brain?

I’m deeply curious about how other people’s brains work. Is your brain a filing cabinet, a map, a junk drawer? What systems have you developed to support your thinking (and not-thinking)? How are you integrating all the things you’ve learned in ONL?

The trouble with working in groups

Over the last couple of weeks, my PBL group members and I have been discussing the best ways to cultivate a collaborative learning environment. One concern that came up is how to deal with freeloaders. We discussed this from a teacher perspective, but thinking back on all my experiences with freeloaders (and my own failures to deal with it effectively), I’m left wondering what the internet recommends from a student perspective.

…and no surprises there. It’s the usual communicate, document, talk to the teacher combo. And no wonder students find group work so stressful, because this fails to acknowledge the complexity of the situations:

• I don’t want my grade to suffer. One point that came up in the research, and in PBL conversation, is that collaborating within a competitive landscape is difficult by design. Sometimes well-intentioned group members can be made into freeloaders, if they are regularly steamrolled by their more ambitious partners.
• If I complain to the teacher, it will only make me look bad. I have felt this as a student, and I’ve heard this from my own students. As an educator, I agree that students should work things out within their group whenever possible, but I also believe it’s my job to support them in this – through pedagogy, conversation, and intervention if necessary. As a student, when I’ve tried to approach teachers about this, more often than not I was met with annoyance. I felt that I lost esteem with the instructor, just by bringing it up. I think this is an effective (if lazy and irresponsible) strategy on their part.
• I want to maintain a positive relationship with my classmates. Perhaps there is a cohort, or perhaps even short-term social tension will be more draining than a few extra hours of homework.
• The teacher is only assigning group work so they have less marking to do. Cynical, perhaps, and probably true some of the time. In this case the student doesn’t believe that the teacher cares about their learning, and they don’t believe there is value in collaboration.
• I don’t have the skills to confront my group member. Especially with younger students, we can’t assume they have the interpersonal skills required to navigate group conflict on their own.
• I’d rather do it on my own anyways. If the learner is a lone wolf type, or if they have a string of negative group experiences behind them, there isn’t motivation to resolve the freeloading issue.

As I write, I’ve come to understand my teacher-identity better. My brain loves perspective shifts – sudden openings-up that make the world bigger, more complicated, and more interesting. They delight me like nothing else. As a teacher, I’m realizing I love to help students change perspective. I love to change their minds about their understandings of themselves and the world. I love to change their minds about group work, too! Here’s how I would start the work of building trust with a group-work-hating student.

• I don’t want my grade to suffer. Dr Randy Garrison recommends grading individual learners, and I agree. Shifting assessment to be more-process-and-less-product works too.
• If I complain to the teacher, it will only make me look bad. I am so mad at a few of my past instructors in hindsight. One way to address this is by incorporating collaborative learning outcomes into the course design. This way, the instructor is on the hook to support students as they learn how to muck through group dynamics – and it also acknowledges that students aren’t experts yet.
• I want to maintain a positive relationship with my classmates. While it’s hard to completely address this, the instructor can work to normalize conflict, and can require accountability checks as part of the group process. New groups can have a group member identity conversation to help align expectations early on: What grade are you aiming for? Do you feel comfortable leading? Do you like direct feedback, or do you prefer a feedback sandwich? What was the best group experience you ever had, and why? What was the worst?
  Another idea is to put students in groups with people they haven’t worked with yet.
• The teacher is only assigning group work so they have less marking to do. Again, this can be resolved with purposeful course design. If collaboration is represented in learning outcomes, it should address this cynicism. Better yet, a good instructor should introduce the course purpose and learning outcomes at the onset, and be prepared to justify the relevance of any course activity if needed.
• I don’t have the skills to confront my group member. Acknowledging that students aren’t experts, and giving them tools to choose from, can alleviate a lot of the pressure a conflict-adverse student is feeling. A great practice is for the teacher to facilitate a conversation early on, addressing students’ greatest group work fears. What will we do if one of our group members isn’t doing their fair share? What could we try if other group members aren’t listening to our ideas? What if we feel we don’t have anything valuable to contribute?
• I’d rather do it on my own anyways. This one is hard, because you can’t really address it other than providing a great experience that will hopefully change their mind for future. By including collaboration in learning outcomes, and by assessing process, at least you can make sure they don’t get out of it. 🙂
  One thing I do with my students in a particularly emotionally taxing course – where they address a rapid group design challenge for the first time in their program – is I get them to write love letters to future students. Think back to when you first started this course, and you were feeling overwhelmed about what was ahead. What would you say to the next students, who are in the same spot? I then share the kind notes, full of support and advice. I believe it helps the most anxious students trust that it won’t be so bad!

Learning a new tool together

I’m embedding the template I’m using to teach FigJam to my PBL group, mainly so I can test functionality and watch how it changes as we play with it. FigJam is very new to me as well, but I find it to be a fun tool so far, Miro-esque with more options for play and excellent AI functions.

How do gardens grow?

Another of my group members shares my nostalgia for the promise of the early internet, and it has me thinking more about what it was that excited me at the time. I remember poetry, busy background images, card games, forums, and chat rooms. A bit later – music pirating, blogs, early social network sites, skype, artfully designed websites, internet radio. And then chat roulette, and google maps street view, podcasts, and what felt (to me) like the mainstream settling in of online communities and social media as cultural phenomena that were here to stay. There was always this pesky, trollish aspect: endless pop-up windows, viruses, chat room trolls, rick rolls, Nigerian princes. Chat roulette felt like the perfect mascot for internet experience: One moment you could be dropped into a house party in Russia, then you’re awkwardly staring at someone in Japan who’s awkwardly staring at you, then you’re enjoying a piano practice session somewhere in America, and then there’s someone masturbating. So much random, so much magic, so many curious people, and then a troll. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I learned HTML, and flash, and photoshop. I built websites and discovered new music. I met two people IRL that I first met on the internet – one of them is still in my life, along with his whole family. The internet enriched my life, or at least it had the potential to. I was an explorer, a creator, an intrinsically motivated and empowered learner. The old internet felt like nerf-ball dodgeball and the internet now feels like constant unavoidable low-level radiation.

Last week my PBL group talked about the potential of open learning, and I couldn’t help but think about how the internet got it wrong. How could we do it better? I plan to apply for a job that would mean a lot of involvement in open learning strategy. It’s a wonderful thing, to imagine designing something that doesn’t yet have an archetype.

In my research, I came across an interview with Catherine Cronin. She said that our roles as educators should be to support learners in developing competencies, literacies & voice required to “contribute to the shared production of knowledge and culture.” I find this exciting, and baffling. If the internet felt out-of-control in the old days, like a vast, sprawling, underweeded garden, it feels like a different out-of-control now… Like unknown forces are playing god, regularly changing the rules as to what plants well with what, how deep to sow this, when to water that. I spend so much more time on the internet now, but I don’t have fun here anymore. How do I support learners to co-create an open learning landscape where we all have potential to be enriched, to develop mastery, to make friends, to have fun?

The death of authenticity?

I remember the first time I realized I was interacting with a chatbot customer service agent, rather than a real one. It took a while to figure it out, because many phone/utilities companies outsource their customer service to folks in developing countries, and agents often work from a script – in other words, scripted language and occasional circular misunderstandings didn’t raise red flags, at first.

Not too long ago, AI-supported blogging popped up, and I thought, of course! Blogs had (for the most part) already lost any real meaning, just a filler of space so you keep scrolling through interspersed ad content while you look for the hidden nugget. Does anybody read the preamble before a recipe?

When I first heard AI-generated songs, they sounded a lot like the auto-tuned earworm formulas on the radio. Give the people what they want to hear… much like crafting my resume to match the keywords in each job description.

So now my PBL group is talking about online reputation. Now, we must consider the potentially eternally searchable identity breadcrumbs we leave on the internet. I want to make sure that anything that is publicly searchable shows my best side. I should also be careful not to post jokes or anything that might be taken out of context or misunderstood in the future. And of course the moral compass of the future will be different, so I’ll keep all content positive and bland to avoid eventual controversy.

Citing Davis and Jurgenson (2014), Quintas-Mendez and Paiva speak of context collapsing – “the merging of multiple social settings in the same online space”. Imagine: you’re out at a pub with some work pals and you run into a group of old friends from high school. The high school crew calls you by a nickname you earned in grade 8, something that sounds jeuvenile and inappropriate suddenly. A couple of your work pals are carrying designer handbags, which embarasses you in the face of your vintage-loving past. You start to feel stressed, as your social standing in each group feels threatened. Online, this can happen anytime. As Quintas-Mendez and Paiva discuss, there are various approaches to managing your online selves, from a strictly compartmentalized strategy to a more fluid style.

I wonder how much of this is just the unfortunate growing pains of an evolving internet and the people who use it, who change more slowly. Still, I worry about the ways these technologies have colonized our minds. I listened to a podcast episode recently that still has me reeling: Is there a sane way to use the internet? It hit on the ways that the tools and platforms we use change the way we think and behave in the world, and it got me thinking more about how I can use the internet consciously and carefully.

_{Note: the image used for this post was AI-generated on Canva, with the prompt: “evil internet colonizes our minds”}

New learning journeys

It’s always so interesting learning with other educators. I often think about what my fellow learners would be like leading a classroom, as I’m reminded of how different I am as a learner vs. as a teacher.

I know I’m a great teacher. My growth trajectory has been to become more learner-centred over the years, more creative and experimental, and to leave more room for my students to build resilience – mainly by no longer trying to protect/save them from the lows in a learning experience. I try to share my appreciation for the messiness of learning, and validate their feelings: yeah, it’s frustrating sometimes, isn’t it? But isn’t it great, that we still have so much more to learn?

As a learner… I can be playful, appreciative and a positive group influence. I love learning, it’s absolutely crucial for my well-being. I am deeply inspired by good learning experiences. However, if the learning experience isn’t going so well, I have potential to be critical, rebellious, and impatient.

What makes the difference? I’m pretty good at making things my own, so even if the course is uninteresting or the assignments are dull, usually I can make it work. I think the big thing for me is autonomy and authenticity. If this is a situation where I should be able to stretch as an autonomous, authentic human being, and I feel controlled, suppressed, or condescended to, I lose all patience. Maybe that’s an understatement. I feel enraged. Of course, I can compartmentalize this. I’m a professional. But holy cow this bugs me!

I’m thinking of past students who were difficult in the classroom, and who are now excellent in the field. In a well-designed vocational setting, shouldn’t course performance be a decent indicator of career success? For some people, it is. What’s up with us complicated folk who stir up all the shit and then set a good example? Is it idealism? Is it a sense of responsibility to those who are leaning on us? Is it trauma?