Unit 3: Networking

I have to admit that in this course thus far I seem to be doing alright on the P and the L but not so good on the N!

 

I signed up for this course because I was becoming aware of the potential power of online communities to enhance my own professional practice and of those around me at school. I work in a technologically well-supported school, but I was also becoming aware that we are relatively insular with regards to new communication tools being used ‘out there’ in the wider education and teaching community.

 

Many years ago, when I was at uni, I remember doing some work on ‘discourse communities’ and how knowledge is shaped and shared through these communities constituted through a common language and practice. It links nicely with the idea of reflective practice, as I find that it is in conversations with colleagues and finding out what others have done in their classrooms that I am prompted to reflect on my own practice and extend my repertoire of teaching strategies.

 

I think ‘discourse communities’ was an idea from Michel Foucault, and he was writing before Web 2.0. Nonetheless, as I navigated through Twitter, and finally worked out that I needed to make a new email account so that I could make a new (professional) Facebook page, I made a connection in my mind between that old learning about ‘discourse communities’ and this new learning about PLNs. It struck me that this is what it is about – developing, extending, participating in and enhancing a community of practice using online tools. I could see right away that this could be a great – and cheap! – way of staying in touch with discussions happening in the English teacher world beyond the faculty where I work.

 

I have ‘followed’ VATE (Victorian Association for the Teaching of English) on Twitter, as well as SLVPLN, Inside a Dog, Centre for Youth Literature, the Wheeler Centre, Bright Ideas, and some publishers, authors and reviewers whose work I would like to know more about. I am always on the look-out for new reads for my students. As a faculty, many of us are also perpetually on the look-out for suitable texts for the classroom and literature circles, and I can see that social networking tools may be a great way to source information about these reads and how they have been taught elsewhere.

 

However, there is a rub. I find that social media can take a lot of very precious time without necessarily delivering quality – my Twitter page has featured ‘pushed’ tweets from some corporate or marketing entity every day for the past two weeks. Also, I am not a TL, so I feel a bit of an outlier in this course — my main game is not dealing with information tools for a school library but with students in the English classroom. Marking, lesson planning, assessment, reporting, and communicating with parents are the major demands on my time. I have no input about the school’s ‘web-presence’, tools put on the intranet, or even in-house pages like the library portal.

 

Facebook and Twitter are not blocked for personal use in my school, but they are not part of the endorsed ‘tech toolbox’. I would like to someday teach my students how to develop their own PLN, but, as mentioned in a previous post, the rules governing the use of online social media tools in our school make this potentially treacherous ground. Students can access Facebook at school, but it is for personal use. Staff are explicitly discouraged from using Facebook as members of the school – we only use it as private individuals. I have had a Facebook account for some years, but I just use it to keep up with news about my family and friends.

 

I do think there may be some redundancy in signing up for many tools. I tried Scoop.It after a SLVPLN member recommended it on Diigo, but I suspect it may be a replication of what I might get out of EverNote or Pocket – both of which I have found myself using quite happily to file away useful information. The tagging function is just beautiful.

 

I can see the value in the online sharing of information, knowledge and ideas around a particular professional interest.  For me, it is about enlarging the scope of where I can source and share information about professional practice, without having to get approval and funding to go to conferences (an increasingly difficult feat!). Twitter and Facebook are ways of tapping into professional conversations beyond staff room partitions. My hope for my PLN is that it can make for more immediate and timely information and more reflective practice.

PLN Unit 2 Reflection – Organising information

This unit was great – although it took a long time to slog through all those new interfaces. Some I had met before, but I had not been able to work out how they worked or what the point was. I enjoyed having the tutorials to show me through the not-very-intuitive (for me) buttons and functions. Diigo in particular looks like it has been made by someone who speaks Vulcan. By contrast, I found EverNote much more intuitive and it has the advantage of clipping content, so that if links disappear, I can still keep the information. The searchable tagging feature of both seems very useful as a way of filing and retrieving information.

The reflection questions actually stimulated a lot of thinking on my part. Here goes …

Like a lot of teachers of the ‘Gen-X’ age bracket, my information organising and information sharing methods are transitional between old and new technologies. I keep a commonplace book (of which I think EverNote is a digital version). I have a school-issued pen-and-paper diary (which my school tells me is in its final year). I have folders in my Outlook email account. I have ring binders on shelves with lesson plans, worksheets, newspaper clippings and so on, labelled by year level or by the text taught. I also use my computer to save things in ‘Documents’ files, and Word is the main program where I do store information. I periodically back up these files to an external hard drive and I use DropBox for my photos. I love big-memory USBs for moving information around, especially large student projects like Photo Stories and short films that our school server does not like.

My digital information is splintered and stored in lots of different places. In some ways I find this gives me a sense of security, as online tools can disappear. On the other hand, I have the digital equivalent of the messy desk. I am hoping to address this with the tools we are learning in the PLN 2013 course.

When I use digital information storage I do miss the spatial-tactile memory function of storing and finding information – I tend to think of where an item is, as well as under which topic it is. I will think, “It’s in the red folder on the top shelf.” Of course, this tactic only works for very limited amounts of information and nowadays it is an inadequate approach to sourcing and managing the vast piles of information we have available. I find this experience also with reading on my Kindle, which I love, but which suppresses my sense of where, in a physical sense, a passage occurs – at the beginning or at the back of a book. Searchable tags try to replace this, but I still find the experience engages fewer aspects of memory and there is a ‘flattening’ effect.  Perhaps one day we will have searchable virtual archives that engage the functions of both the Web 2.0 environment and our sensory memories.

As for sharing information with my workplace colleagues and students, I tend to only use tools made available on the intranet – namely email, wikis and, very occasionally, in-house blogs. In some cases this is dictated by student well-being policies and the imperatives of school marketing. I am very cautious about adopting some of the social bookmarking and networking tools examined in this unit in the classroom; but I am happy to use them ‘freelance’ in my life as part of the wider community of educators.

Many of us have our own private accounts with Twitter, Facebook, content aggregators and blogging sites, but these are not directly connected to our work life in the way that I have seen suggested by practitioners like Joyce Valenza and Buffy Hamilton.

When information sharing occurs between staff at my school, it all happens behind the firewall. We do not use external, Web-based social bookmarking, networking, blogging or the like in any official capacity to make ‘groups’, share curriculum materials, lesson plans, worksheets, resources or collegial discussion. Again, I use these aspects of professional learning and collegiality in my connections to the wider teaching profession, rather than in direct relation to the classes I teach.

What we do have is wikis. Wikis can be created for a class as an audience or as participants. For example, for a unit on documentary film with my Year 8 English class, I made a wiki for every student in the class where they shared their work and commented on each other’s’ ideas. I also had a ‘class wiki’ where I uploaded activities, assessments, resources, and links.

Teaching teams also use wikis to share lesson plans, resources and assessment rubrics. These can work quite well when all team members participate; but what I notice is that in the end everyone ends up emailing each other the work because no-one has the time to keep checking wikis when many of them remain static. There is no way to set up a ‘reader’ for all the wikis one subscribes to within the school.

EverNote, which has recently been endorsed by my school as a tool we can use, has great potential for creating shared resources and for keeping track of new information found on the Web. I am looking forward to learning about how I could use it with colleagues and students for content curation and organisation as part of the research process and for resourcing the curriculum. I wonder whether, like a blog reader, there is some way of setting up alerts if new material is added by another member of an EverNote group?

For information organisation on the Web, I have been struggling with working out how to shepherd information streams into something resembling a useable order. I have ended up opting for the Reader bundled with my account with WordPress, which is a good way to collate blogs that I am interested in, rather than having to visit each one separately. With EverNote I can definitely see the benefits of storing and organising information ‘in the cloud’ as this means that crashes and changes of devices do not result in data loss.

At first glance, the idea of ‘workflow’ itself was a little alien for me. My day at work feels more like a work blizzard, rather than the stately progress implied by the word ‘flow’! Ideally, the ‘flow’ of my work as an English teacher is determined by the recurrent cycle of preparation, resourcing, teaching, reflection, assessment and evaluation of units of work. That said, I can definitely see junctures in this process where having some model for how to go about sourcing and organising information would be useful.

At the planning and resourcing stages I could use Pocket, EverNote and Diigo to keep track of interesting resources.  These tools will help me create a focussed collection of resources for my students. Despite their apparent facility in using Web 2.0 tools, especially Tumblr and Facebook, I find that students do need to be explicitly taught how to search for, organise, share and make sense of web-based information in purposeful ways. To use their nomenclature, teenagers tend to be a bit ‘random’ in how they use information.

Unfortunately, scant time is allocated to research skills, information literacy and using new tools. Our library staff teach the students many skills in specially designed subjects, but I suspect most regular classroom teachers are unaware of this and the skills are not reinforced elsewhere. The students tend not to generalise information literacy to other areas of their learning – they think it’s just a ‘library thing’.

Digital technologies and internet access are changing the way we work, socialise and use our leisure time. We use information on the run, between many devices, and blend our domestic, professional and social lives through our tablets or smartphones. We seek news, opinion and analysis from traditional sources, but also from social networking and blogs. An author can now have a readership having never published a book. A social media phenomenon can influence public opinion outside the channels of talk-back radio and mainstream media. At the same time, the big media interests can have influence in digital, far-reaching ways.

This certainly sets me a challenge to keep learning about tools in which I do not feel fluent. Schools, also, are grappling with the dual demands of remaining current and maintaining control of their profile in the public domain.

To finish:

Here is my first note from EverNote.