A frequent criticism leveled at MOOCs is the low completion rate. I consider that criticism muddled and unfair. Like you said, you signed up knowing you might not have time to completely participate, because it was free. I say, THAT IS OK.
I disagree with “you don’t want too many people like that signing up”. If 9 out of 10 will drop out, isn’t it much better to have 1500 sign-ups than 150?  Signups in these courses cost nothing (except the time invested by the participant, so that’s his/her own business, not the critic’s).

You signed up and found out it was a really great course. That alone was a benefit to you. Beyond that, you continue to engage in this conversation and evidence a strong desire for more participation in the future. Much better you should sign up and find out, than not sign up out of fear of being seen as a failure.

It is totally unfair that the stigma of failure that falls on college students who, having invested time and money traveling to campus and paying fees*, drop out because of inadequate preparation, unfair I say to place that stigma on someone who signs up to a free course to “see how it goes”. Now, I have serious questions about the justice of the stigma placed upon the former as well, but it has even less legitimacy when it is imputed to a voluntary participant who is satisfying a curiosity that may or may not lead to becoming an active member of a learning community this time.

So don’t feel bad about dropping out. I celebrate that you engaged.

*Stephen Downes www.downes.ca/post/58698

Just in time for this topic, the Mathletics activities ‘Prime or Composite’ and ‘Highest Common Multiple’ became iPad ready, which was a bonus.

Next week, as we wrap up the topic, students will be using Strip Design to produce a short comic strip on either How to find the Highest Common Factor, How to find the Lowest Common Multiple, or The difference between Prime and Composite Numbers. They’ll upload this to Edmodo to share with others, and to their Blog. This was very successful  with last year’s group (sample below).

A sudden problem uploading Paperport Notes to DropBox lead, thanks to Clare Rafferty, to the discovery of another great tool, Showbie This app makes it really simple for students to upload work from their iPads to a personal folder. The teacher creates a class and gives the students the code, their folder appears in the teacher’s class and all work can be accessed in a central place. Most apps are supported and the Showbie developers encourage you to contact them if there’s an app you need that isn’t yet available. Students Share and/or Open in, and the Showbie icon appears, it’s all pretty straightforward. Once work is submitted, teachers can write notes, or record voice messages to the students to give feedback on the work. There are a heap of support videos available if you need them.

Our Playground Design measurement assignment is due this Friday. Most students are completing the task on the iPad, using PaperPort Notes; inserting photos of the suggested site, grid paper for draft drawings. Many have chosen to do their final design on graph paper, but some will photograph this to include in their PaperPort note. They will then be able to submit the entire document to Showbie. I’m looking forward to what they come up with.

Let’s keep this relatively short and simple shall we? I’ve spent just a month shy of 10 years in education, and I feel as though some days I know just about as much as I did on day one in the teaching field. I’m not going to call it an industry, because that term would only serve to acknowledge the increasingly perverse ways that educational institutions are being transmogrified (or at least attempted) into for-profit institutions that no longer server the public, only public shareholders. No, let’s not tap that keg of dynamite….yet.

Instead, let’s take a few moments to lament that the more things change, the more they stay the same, including technology. It would seem that the more creative, collaborative, and integral technological tools become to education, the quicker people are to turn these new tools into nothing more than digital pencils. Desktops and laptops quickly become “electronic typewriters” despite their ability to edit movies, produce music, manipulate imagery, and reach out to the web. iPads and other mobile devices become “portable televisions” despite their feature set begging these devices to be mobile digital video production units and windows capable of capturing small glimpses into the educational progress of learners.

We’re given Google Docs, and we find new ways for students to share writing and comments with JUST their teacher. We ignore the precipice of unabridged transformational writing that we stand at with real-time collaborative and revisioning tools like Google Docs. We’re given iPads, and we find new ways for students to play rote math and emergent literacy games. We ignore the sublime valley of digital storytelling and learner narration of the world around them through video, audio, and text. We’re given electronic interactive surfaces covering our walls, and we find new ways to present slideshows. We don’t even risk allowing learners to build their own simulations and interactives to share with the rest of the class, demonstrating how they perceive the world.

Before you fire up some flaming hot comments below, especially if you work with me currently, please understand these are not the realities of every classroom that I observe. But they are the reality in many more classrooms than should be the norm. Even as we profess our desires for every student to have access to a device for learning and growing numbers of educator clamor for professional development “our way, meeting our needs”, far too many of us are too slow on transforming our own learning environments and realities. When we get access to the technology, we find ways to replace or substitute analog learning quite rapidly, many of us even going so far as to adapt and transform activities and units in subtle and slight ways. Then we start to slip. Instead of trying to push forward to some sort of true transformational experience, the “shininess” wears off. The grind, or the test, or the standards, or some other mass of excuses stunts our growth. We find ourselves slowly sliding backward, unable to make the final leap to some new level of deeper understanding of how the small rectangular pieces of plastic and metal on our desks will truly help our students in new ways. We go back to waiting for the next push; the next new thing.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re still moving forward, we’re still growing, we’re still discovering new instructional realities in ever so incremental steps. It’s just that some days it feels like we’re only retreading a path we’ve already pushed forward down once before, and will likely retrace yet again. Our RSS readers and inboxes are full of links from “the best” educational technology resource sharing blogs, many of which seem now to merely present rehashed tools, websites, and apps that only re-arrange our sandboxes for learning, rather than create new ones. The tools, social networks, and silver bullets of yesteryear become the digital dust beneath our feet as we try to trod along the weary paths.

Perhaps I’m being too melancholy, or reacting poorly after a small string of failures. I can’t help but ask though if I’m not too far off the mark, or if there truly is some large upswell of transformative teaching and learning through technology that I’m missing. Perhaps one more trip around will tell.

If A=B and B=C, then A=C.

And it jumped off my iPhone screen this morning while I was reading my morning stream of tweets on Twitter.

I spend a lot of time thinking about peer instruction with clickers, like this, this and this, which naturally leads to discussions about “flipping the classroom.” That’s when students do work before class, like reading the text in a  guided way or watching videos created of the instructor, where they learn the simple, background material. Then, they come to class prepared to engage in deeper, conceptually challenging analysis and discussion, often driven by peer instruction.

If you look on Twitter for #flipclass (that’s the Twitter hashtag or keyword the community includes in relevant tweets), it’s not long before you find Jen Ebbeler (@jenebbeler). She teaches Classics using a flipped class model. This morning, Jen tweeted

part of difficulty is that there are so many varieties and ways to flip a class, not about the videos but what instructor does in class.

— Jen Ebbeler (@jenebbeler) May 24, 2013

The last part, it’s “not about the videos but what the instructor does in class” evoked another quote familiar to most everyone involved in astronomy education research and teaching the introductory, survey course we call Astro 101. At the heart of the Lecture-Tutorials and subsequent work by Tim Slater (@caperteam), Ed Prather, Gina Brissenden (@CAEgina) lies this mantra

It’s not what the teacher does that matters; rather it’s what the students do that matters.

And therefore, by the transitive property, when it comes to flipping the classroom,

it’s not about the videos, it’s what the students do in class that matters.

Which is precisely what Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) concluded after he flipped in introduction to proofs class. When you flip your class,

1. you have time in class to doing other things, like clickers, because you’re not wasting time going over the easy stuff anymore,
2. the students are prepared to engage in the conceptually challenging, “juicy” stuff you want to uncover together.

It’s what you do with that time that matters.

My math teachers always said learning abstract relationships like the transitive property would come in handy in the future. Yep.

How have you shifted from being a  “stranded evangelist” to a  “connected educator”? What have you learned from the people around you? How has your practice shifted as you listen to the teachers with diverse perspectives? How have they shaped your current best practice?

This model could explain the “how”…

Retrieved from: http://www.added-value.com/source/2011/01/roberto-suros-commentary-on-cultural-openness/

Or I could explain Open Learning IMO – In My Opinion

Open Learning is NOT just about being a rock star and following a set of “rules”.

Instead….

I believe that students, teachers, parents, admin and everyone else learn together – when I say “learner” I am referring to everyone.

I learn more about educational technology from my son than from anyone else, and he is 7.

Chris Hadfield is an inspiration to many learners, and not to others. That’s ok.

I felt like a stranded evangelist when I first started my new job – and now I don’t.

Some people feel uncomfortable with the term stranded evangelist, some aren’t.

I am practicing being an open learner by writing this blog- and the replies – in an open forum.

Being an open learner to me means being vulnerable, being intimidated and pushing through – while often being pushed back.

Being an open learner means listening to other people’s perspectives – really listening….

I have rethought something Alan November told me awhile back….”Verena, when you go in and ask teachers about how they would like to integrate technology, ask them about a project that they love and have already developed. Ask them what they could do to make it even more engaging for students. Discuss how technology can save them time and meet the needs of a wide variety of learners….then sit back and listen with a cup of tea. And every time you want to say something, take a sip of tea – and listen.

But never, never give up on trying to make a difference in meeting the needs of learners.”

Listen, really listen It’s ok to feel differently, but you still need to listen. It helps if you believe in yourself and to that “voice” that is inside of you as well. Listen to different perspectives in the open world.

On a different note, as a colleague just said to me – “Your blog post on Hadfield was exactly like a lesson I taught where the students seemed to focus on a totally different topic than the one “presented”.” Have you ever taught one of those “lessons” where you started in one spot and ended in a totally different place?

It’s ok to create untethered learning environments - it’s ok to let the discussion go into uncharted waters.

In an open learning forum, I have no way to control the learners or the learning – I give up my “control” over my words, the moment I click accept on a blog post. Learning how to be vulnerable and accept “push backs” in an open forum is extremely difficult. I create an “untethered” experience.

The last blog post, comments, twitter chat and backchannel discussions have demonstrated that it is possible to have an open online dialogue in a safe and open learning environment – but it can be really hard as well.

I would not say that I have felt entirely safe in this open learning environment called the Internet.  I have had tweets taken out of context with storify’s created out of them, I have had openly aggressive people keep tweeting at me, I have had people encourage others to tweet about me because of some perception of what I have said, I have been trolled and I have had a variety  of blog post comments. That is part of what being an open learner is all about too – its open for everyone.

When I was at Educon I was asking the students about youtube because creating videos is such an important part of the way teens learn and “where” they are learning today. One girl told me a story about her first video  where she was singing a song she wrote. She was so proud of herself. I asked if I could see it, and she said no because she had to take it down because of all the hurtful comments. I asked her if that mattered to her, and she said, “no” – it wasn’t worth it.

The intimidation factor and comments keep her song, her voice,  out of the open.

Although some comments made on my blog were not inappropriate, they were hurtful and hard to hear for me – and they were in the open. I didn’t take them down though. I responded.

From the point of view of a woman, who has only recently come back to education after working part time and staying home with kids – it has been particularly difficult to be an open learner. I am not only learning how to be an open learner, but learning how to survive in the education profession today. As such, I have a mom’s perspective on what is happening in my kid’s schools – while living in a professional world. Those perspectives will come up in my blog, and I am proud of who I am as a mom and educator today. There is no one quite like me.

Just like there is no one quite like any of you. I have learned to encourage differences.

It was also suggested that I talk about my learners in my open forum and give them a voice.

My students didn’t feel ready to comment  about what they are up to – in an open forum. From my perspectives on being an open learner over the last week, I would agree with them.  Being an open learner takes some practice, perseverance and loads of guts. They have to feel safe and ready. The first steps have to be on their own terms.

Who am I learning with?  I am learning with some grade 7 and 8 First Nations learners who are piloting an  “immersive” (virtual) world program in Atlantis Remixed. They are starting with a unit about being proud of their cultural identity and not hiding it. With Kory, (a fellow teacher) we have all created a team teaching, computer mediated model to help first nation youth engage in authentic learning experiences.

I am so proud to learn with the teens and as they strive to develop their own cultural and digital identity. Their struggles and perseverance remind me how hard it is to learn something new. Their passion reminds me how important it is to keep trying.  Their smiles remind me of how important it is to have fun while you learn.

Their openness is expressed by the fact that they have let someone into their community and they are willing to learn with this person. Their trust in me is truly special. Think about it – I skype in and talk to them, they chat with me as if I am just another “head” in the classroom. It boggles my mind at the Jetsons like culture.

Getting back to whom I learn the most from: my 7 year old – who created lego videos at 5 on youtube and showed the world our house and me in the kitchen….We all have to work on our digital identities and knowing how much is “too much” to share in the open.

What is “open” and what it means to learn “in the open” is up to the individual learner. I can only help to encourage each person’s unique openness.

It’s been quite a week and I am thankful for all the learning.

V:)