Category Archives: adult learning

A Respect for Your Audience

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I enjoyed reading Scott McLeod’s series on issues related to outside consultants.  Scott does a great job pulling together lots of good ideas related to providing quality professional development.  He references both the National Speakers Association’s Code of Professional Ethics and the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) Code of Ethics as two excellent resources for guiding professional development planning.  (My colleague Chris O’Neal and I designed our presentation about professional development around the NSDC standards.) Scott also provides detailed tips for what organizers should look for in an outside consultant.   His post is a good start in terms of thinking about how we can be most useful to the people with whom we are working.  I would highly recommend all four posts.

Scott asked what we would add to his ideas.  As someone who does a variety of consulting from public speaking to developing courses to facilitating planning, here’s my bottom line: The key to being or hiring a successful consultant is to have the utmost respect for those with whom you are working.   That means respect for their time, certainly, but, more importantly, for their ideas and experiences.

I think Scott hinted at this in all four posts, but I want to mention it explicitly because I believe it needs to the starting point for any kind of professional development.  All those standards and suggestions seem obvious if you begin from a posture of respect.  You’re a learner along with the group. You’re there to address their needs and concerns. Certainly, you have knowledge and ideas to share but you couple that with a strong contextual understanding.

For me, the greatest indicator of respect relates to what Scott calls service:

We can charge whatever we think our time and expertise are worth (and the market will bear), but we should be providing something of value. Usually that means something practical that members of the organization can start using and acting upon tomorrow.

Offering something practical means that you have to take the time to learn about your participants because it is only by knowing about them that you can really make your work relevant to their lives and work.

ITRT Mini Conference Keynote: Fred Scott

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Here are my notes from Fred’s excellent keynote.  (Now, I’m sitting in his breakout session.)

ITRT Mini Conference
Keynote Speaker: Fred Scott, Manager, Instructional Technology, Chesterfield County Public Schools
7/25/2008

Hardware? Software?  No…Let’s Connect With HUMANware

Humanware refers to people.  We have been investing in hardware, software and webware, but what about the people?  We need to invest in the people in order to improve instruction with technology.  We need to connect humanware to school goals, student goals, etc?  When our kids leave the school system there is a whole world out there.  They may not stay in their community…we have no idea where they will be and what they will be doing.  Fred’s framework asks how we connect IRTRs with the humanware: teaching, coaching, training, and learning.

Where does humanware fit in?  Alignment for success:  are you aware of your technology master plan in your district? professional development; curriculum blue prints; if teachers are only going to teach the SOLs, then we are still behind.  The last piece is school improvement so you should be aware of the school improvement plan.  How do we get connected with those people?

Data Wise from Harvard University includes 8 steps that begins with organizing for collaborative work and ends with acting and assessing.   He has a matrix of tools that will help the team be effective.  He aligned the school improvement process with technology tools.  The ITRTs need to understand the school data such as the report card.

Training:  Rich Allen, Train Smart, 2001  Five Pillars of Training:  Engage, Frame, Explore, Debrief, Reflect
Engage: Prepare the mind, you have 5 minutes to establish the connection with an adult; teach people NOT content; teach WITH people to understand the content
Frame: establish relevance, you have one minute to establish relevance, what are you going to help them learn, why is choice good?  Because then people can make connections, now you have the next 30 minutes to involve the key concepts
Explore: Learning + Enjoyment = Concepts; people remember the good and the ugly
Debrief: Consolidating learning: how are they going to apply it to the real world?
Reflect: Embed Learning: give them stories.

Quotes Confucious: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.

Teaching:  connect the goals and objectives, what are we doing and trying to get across
The ABCD method of writing objectives
Audience
Behavior
Condition: how should they be able to do it?
Degree: how much should they be able to do it?

Be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant/Results
Time Dependancy

Discusses Marzano’s strategies:  we don’t see it as much as we should
The nine strategies are very powerful: the top three are reinforcing effort and providing recognition, summarizing and notetaking, similarities and differences

New book: Using Technology With Classroom Instruction the Works

He outlines planning question and instructional strategies.

He suggests applying the Madeleine Hunter model: from purpose to closer
Hal Portner, Workshops that Really Work

Showed the A Vision of K-12 Students Today

Coaching: NSDC says that effective coaching means you are with a person one on one.    In the coaching model, there is some risk.  There are three major levels of risk; are you going to be conservative, moderate or aggressive?

Kimberly Ketterer, “Coach, Nurture or Nudge?”  L&L

Coach:  there is a paradigm shift from a traditional classroom to one who integrates technology.  The adult is now a risk taker who trusts the coach.  They are willing to embrace the information and collaborate.

Nurture: The adult is not confident and are still learning skills and applications.  But they are willing to try.  this adult lacks the confidence and they want to watch you do it.  They will say that time is a major problem.  They like small achievements.

Nudge: This is the person that is satisfied with the way things are.  These people are uncertain and anxious.

Learning:  How do ITRTs connect to the learning process to get adults to learn?
Showed a graphic of the basic neuron types:  what does it take to help teachers understand the make up of the brain and what’s happening inside.  He talked about Howard Gardner and multiple intelligence theory.  http://literacyworks.org/mi/home.html  You can assess your learning style here.

Marcia Tate: Sit & Get Won’t Grow Dendrites:  she talks about adult learning and strategies and activities for how to work with adults.

How do we connect Humanware to Web 2.0 for professional development and learning?  He pointed to
•    http://www.wetpaint.com
•    http://talkingletter.com
•    http://www.wonderfile.net
•    Center for Learning & Performance Technologies http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html

Here’s what ITRTs need to do:
•    We have to know the goals and objectives of the school.
•    We have to develop collegial relationships.
•    We have to recognize that the adults have the expertise.
•    We have to align activities with the curriculum.
•    We have to help them understand that technology can help improve instruction and delivery.

We must provide our children the best possible learning environments to foster critical thinking, innovations and problem solving to better our society.  Fred Scott

ITRTs Lead Out Loud: http://www.leadoutloud.ca

To get results with technology integration, we need to invest in people…nurture, cultivate and develop them to ensure that tools make a difference in learning.

Remember, FRED:
Facilitate
Resources
Educate and
Develop

They did a share fair at his school division for the school board so they could understand the ITRT position.

http://fredwscott.edublogs.com  for downloading the presentation

Learning Welsh

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Just spent some time creating the header image for this wordpress template. I chose the picture of the wolf that my husband snapped along the Bow Parkway in Banff National Park last summer. We had a wonderful trip, which I documented on Google Maps.

Now, I’m working on maps of England and Wales for a trip I’m going to take this fall with my parents. I know I ask this every time I plan a trip, but how DID we plan trips before the web? And, now that Google has added collaboration to its maps, I was able to share it with my parents so they could add their places and see what I had in mind. I haven’t investigated to see what kind of Internet access there is to see how easy it will be to upload photos and even edit the map.

I would have gotten further on the Wales map this morning, but the database I was using crashed and has yet to come back up. It is Sunday and Easter at that so I guess it’s not a surprise. But, it is a reminder that, while the information is generally available at your finger tips, we must be careful about taking it for granted. Networks still go down, as Oprah learned in a very public way recently.

That being said, I’m still excited about the possibilities of Google Maps for organizing learning in almost every content area class. Over at the VSTE Ning site, Mike Scott, an ITRT from Botetourt County, commented that he thought it should be illegal to teach geography with using Google Earth. I agree…and ditto for lots of other content. My content area is English, and I have had a blast plotting my literary and historical tour of England. I have only just started assigning different markers to different themes. For now, the yellow markers are sites related to Llywelyn the Great, a great Welsh warlord who brought Wales as close as it had ever been to independence from England. He was married to King James’ illegitimate daughter, Joan, and their lives are fictionalized in Here Be Dragons, by Sharon Kay Penman. I prefer learning history from historical fiction. Penman’s work is generally accurate and she generally provides notes about can be documented and what she embellished. And, through the story, I learn more than just names and dates. I get a real sense of what it was like to live in Wales in the 13th century.

I can also learn Welsh online from the BBC. I was tagged as rank beginner when I took the placement quiz and was directed to Colin and Cumberland, a pretty impressive interactive website. I particularly like the speech bubbles you can add to the video in either English or Welsh. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: Bore da is “good morning,” and hwyl is “goodbye.” And, hwyl is pronounced hoyle. Who would have guessed?

I also discovered that the BBC runs a Welsh-language radio station that can be streamed over the web. It’s a testament to universal web design that I was able to pick out the play box and open up the BBC player that offers the various program choices.

As I poked around the web collecting Welsh related resources and toyed with the idea of actually learning Welsh, I was reminded of a classmate I had in an adult learning course I took in the fall of 2006. (I used this blog to reflect on my course experiences.) As part of the course, each student developed a learning contract that outlined what they would be learning over the course of the semester. After much wrestling, this particular classmate went from an academic topic to learning French for a trip she was going to take. She basically immersed herself in French from words on the refrigerator to email exchanges with a French colleague, learning about both the language and the culture. She made a commitment to herself to learn it, and she did.

But, even as I think about doing the same for learning Welsh, I hesitate. I’m busy with my dissertation and other projects. Could I really commit to this? Write a personal learning contract? One of the things we discussed in the course was the difficulty of making time for our own learning. And, in this case, I would not even have the pressure of a class. Just me and a desire to at least understand Welsh. For now, I’m going to tinker with the BBC website. I’d be happy just to be able to accurately pronounce Welsh words even if I don’t know what they mean. That’s a feat in itself I think.

I’ll close before I start waxing too rhapsodically about the wonderfulness of the web to support learning. Well, how about just one more chorus before I go to bed. I’m reading “The Living” by Annie Dillard, which is set in the Pacific Northwest in the late 19th century. Dillard lived in the area for 5 years and the novel is historically accurate, even painstakingly so, according to this interview with her. As I’ve confessed before, I love to read; I also love the way the web allows me to explore behind the scenes, to understand both the author and her content in deeper ways.

Digital Storytelling

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I would like to start by saying that I love my job. Right now, I am preparing for a digital storytelling workshop that I’ll provide over the next two weeks. It is Windows based so I fired up the Dell laptop I’ve got and have spent the last few days playing with PhotoStory and MovieMaker.  I’ll post both video sonce they’re uploaded to YouTube.  (I’ve got them on TeacherTube but didn’t have any luck with embedding them.)  First, I’ll reflect a little bit on the process.

I should start by confessing up front that I use Mac computers exclusively and have even managed to avoid Backpack. I had done a little work with MovieMaker but had only every seen demos of PhotoStory. I was prepared to like the latter program but was sure I would be unimpressed with MovieMaker. I was wrong.

First, I should say that I did like PhotoStory. I drew from digital photos that I already had available and it took about three hours to put together a fully narrated story with a music soundtrack. The only problem I ran into was in using the built-in music creator. I really liked the idea, but it crashed my computer each and every time I tried to save the movie file. I finally resorted to a public domain song I already had and the export worked just fine. Editing was easy, and I’m very happy with the final results.

This morning, I was up early prepared to tackle MovieMaker. I drew on the only material I’ve got: my yard. I shot all the video with my Flip Camera since that’s what my workshop participants will have available. I’ve used the Flip with my macintosh and had only so so results. It seemed much easier with MovieMaker. I just imported the files I had saved from the camera, renamed them, then did some basic editing. A few titles and then I needed some music.

Vivaldi seemed like a good choice. The Mutopia Project had a midi file licensed under the BSD license. I had to convert the midi to wma and used jetAudio, from Cowon to do the conversion.

All in all, I have had a wonderful two days making stories. I put together a wiki page as well.

Think Twice

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From a colleague of mine as part of a discussion of protecting privacy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIGtf_ula8k&rel=1]

Sorry, if you’re offended that I embedded it, but you need the effect before the story. Here’s the AP version. And, here’s Doug Feaver’s take on it at the Washington Post. Feaver reviews comments from readers on the story. He says, “I’m with the kid, but of course a recording of whatever message he left has not been made available so perhaps I would have a different view if it were.” That’s what I thought was interesting. The only person who can publish Kori’s message is the administrator’s wife. And, as long as we can’t hear Kori’s message, we really can’t judge for ourselves. Did she delete it? Or, is she just not adding fuel? Or was it a pretty reasonable message and she just overreacted? In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but like, Feaver, I wonder in whose favor the pendulum of public opinion would swing if we heard the original phone message.

Here were two of my favorite back and forth comments about the incident:

readerny said, “I don’t agree with the tirade by the woman who answered the call, BUT as an employer of young adults, I can say that there are some (not all) who are overempowered and think that they know the whole story, or more than you do, and should be running the show themselves…”

But Nicester wrote, “Overempowered kid” and “self-centered youth” – OK, that’s one perspective. Sounds a bit like “whippersnapper” or whatever the Greatest Generation was calling the Baby Boomers when they were dropping acid and rolling in the mud at Woodstock…”

I just feel sorry for this woman, sacrificed on the altar of the digital generation gap. And, like the story about Heath Ledger and the blogs, it’s a story about the future of “news” in the 21st century. What if the kid hadn’t had access to the Internet? He might have sent the tape to the television news, but they have may have demanded to have his recording. He gets to bypass all those gatekeepers and tell his side of the story in a way that kids have never been able to do.

In the end, I find her tirade to be funny rather than offensive. “Snot-nosed brats” was the worst of it. It is more important as a reminder that digital recording and distribution is almost transparent, and perhaps will finally lead to people living by the old adage, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” We have left behind the era of deniability.

I’m tagging this one 21st century skills because I wonder how this fits in? I’m also going to tag it adult learning 😉

Continued Learning

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I’ve been working on my final project for Adult Education…a video that reflects on my own learning and learning in general.  I started, as I usually would, with about four pages of single spaced text.  Something just felt wrong…too many words for a movie.  So, the first step was to start thinking visually…what pictures and video clips was I going to use to tell the story of my learning this semester.  How could they tell the story along with fewer words from me.  I think I have accomplished that.  Once I had the script, I could start collecting the materials which mostly consist of clips from films I’ve watched this semester.  I took care of that on Thursday.   And here’s the secret:  with a clean script and all the materials in one place, putting the film together has gone relatively smoothly.  I still have a ways to go, but writing and editing the script and thinking about the clips as I captured them really put the film in my head before I ever opened Final Cut Pro.  It’s funny in a way because it is very similar to the process I use for writing.  I read, I jot notes, I blog a bit, I start constructing sentences in my head, so that by the time I get to the actual writing, the paper is almost done.  The biggest difference here is that I started putting the visuals together in my head.

My only concern is that I am using single, lengthy clips from the films rather than several shorter pieces.  It seems to work but it isn’t typical from what I’ve seen.  I would like to do one sequence of short, quick shots.  I’ve seen that in some movies and it looks cool.  I dropped in a quote from Knowles at the beginning and I’ve got a great one from Eartha Kitt for the end but dropped the idea of splicing in quotes throughout the film.  I may go back to that but for now I like the transitions between sections.

As with each project I’ve done, I’m experimenting…in this case, it’s using music or the soundtrack of the films along with a voice over.  I may need to redo the voice overs at the end and figure out how to make the films quieter when I’m talking but for a first step, it’s not too bad.  All in all, it’s been a productive film day.

And I keep learning:

1.  After spending about an hour trying to copy the captured clips from the computer in the media center to my hard drive, I discovered that because my hard drive is Windows formatted, I can only copy about 3 gigs at a time.  Since I didn’t want to reformat the drive, I borrowed one from Troy, but I may need to invest in another one. They are so small now.

2. I needed some soundtrack music so I bought a couple songs from iTunes.  (Remember when you had to go to a store?)  After downloading them, I discovered they weren’t in a format that FCP can use and because they were purchased, I couldn’t convert them.  (That seems like a violation of my rights as a buyer.  I would be able to convert them if I bought them on CD.)  So, undaunted, I went to the web and in just a few minutes discovered the work around:  burn them to CD and then re-import them into iTunes and you can convert them.

King Rail at Assateague

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Can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve posted…working on my field-based research project as well as thinking about my final project for adult education. More on that later…meanwhile, I am trying to start a weekly schedule of posting little videos. Here’s one of a King Rail hunting in the marshes at Assateague National Wildlife Refuge. I wanted to play around more with titles so there’s no voice over.

[googlevideo= http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1125855174698099852]

An Early Morning Revelation

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I have been waking up at 5:10 AM every morning for the past week. For the past two mornings, I’ve decided to get up. And, it’s amazing how much you can get done while it is still dark outside and everyone else is in bed. This morning, I decided to get some reading done for my ed tech pro dev class. We’re reading about andragogy, which overlaps with my adult learning class. In an article by Sharan Merriam that I had already read for the adult learning class , Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning: Pillars of Adult Learning Theory, the opening sentences struck me in a way they did not the first time I read them: “The central question of how adults learn has occupied the attention of scholars and practitioners since the founding of adult education as a professional field of practice in the 1920s. Some eighty years later, we have no single answer, no one theory or model of adult learning that explains all that we know about adult learners, the various contexts where learning takes place, and the process of learning itself. What we do have is a mosaic of theories, models, sets of principles, and explanations that, combined, compose the knowledge base of adult learning. Two important pieces of that mosaic are andragogy and self-directed learning.”

It occured to me that you could substitute children, student and pedagogy, and this would describe all educational endeavors! And, as I scanned the article again, I was struck more and more by this notion of the artificial divide between children and adults that leads to assumptions about adult learners that simply may not apply to all adults and assumptions about child learners that simply may not apply to all children. In the post-modern educational world in which we know so much more about how the brain works, I think the only assumption you can make is that we are each individual learners who may ourselves differ in the ways we want to learn depending on the circumstance and content of the learning. I would not have wanted to be a self-directed learner of statistics but I am happy to be a self-directed learner of Final Cut Pro.

Video Production Time

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After doing the update, I actually re-read my learning contract where I said I was going to create a weekly vodcast of videos. In retrospect, I was underestimating the amount of time it takes to create even a short video. The Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary movie must have taken 20 hours or more. Of course, I was learning how to use Final Cut Pro so that explains some of the time. But creating videos that tell a real story takes time: importing, reviewing, choosing, adding audio, adding titles, applying the “Ken Burns” effect.

So, I asked myself, what could you do on a weekly basis? In just about two hours, I was able to create this 30 second video of a whimbrel and upload it to YouTube. It includes a voice over, opening title, and transitions. The footage was already imported so it was just a matter of identifying which clips I wanted. I also had to look up the directions for how to create the fade to black transition. (Basically, you just add a cross-dissolve transition to the end of the clip.) I also spent 10 or 15 minutes fooling around with export options and decided on using m-peg 4 with the pre-set for broadband high.

NB: Add another 15 minutes and who knows how much more time since I uploaded the video to YouTube only to discover that when they converted it, the opening title is gone.  So I’ve got some research to do.  I did discover that YouTube has a video guide that looks helpful.  Unfortunately, it didn’t answer my question about what happened to my title?

Learning Contract Update

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I will admit up front that I am procrastinating.  I *should* be doing some bibliography work for my media literacy research project.  Instead, I am doing everything else–watching Triumph of the Will, canceling my cell phone, doing laundry.  It is amazing how much I get done when I am procrastinating!  Is there some adult learning principle at work here?  What we learn we were are supposed to be learning something else?

Anyway, as part of that procrastination, I thought I would doing a learning contract update.  I have taken the first steps towards learning Final Cut Pro.  I am pretty happy with my first movie and got lots of positive feedback from the class.  This weekend, I want to dig into some of the Lewis and Clark footage I’ve got.  I’m considering doing something that combines footage from our trip with excerpts from my journal and the L&C journals.  Contrast their journey with ours.  First, though, I need to get a look at what’s there.  It’s been seven or eight years since we took the trip.  I reviewed some of the footage this summer, but need to go back through it with a “cinematographer’s” eye.

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