Education - Teacher Inquiry into Student Learning, Inquiry learning, Robotics and AI

Week 15

Teacher Inquiry into Student Learning

Inquiry Learning, Robotics and AI

This class started by pondering about which jobs might still exist in 20 years time, our group came up with jobs and industries such as Pro gamer, IT Infrastructure, AI and Singers. We then searched for them in this website to see if our hunches were correct.

Apparently the word robot originally came from Czech ‘robota’ which translated means ‘forced labour’ or ‘slavery’. We discussed many different definitions, and I teach aspects of robotics to our students at school. Our Lego Robots consist of motors for movement and sensors to react to the environment. Sensors include sound, light, colour ultra-sonic etc. It is always fun talking about how robots can be used to automate what humans can do and how they can sometimes even do a better job. For example the ultrasonic sensors are a sense we humans don’t have, bats and dolphins use echolocation for navigation which is what these sensors are replicating. I also love talking about our cars like my Lexus which has this kind of sensor to help me park and plays a huge part in the safety of using the cruise control features. Through the use of ultrasonic/sonar sensors our cars know how close they are to other objects.

We also breifly looked at Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There are many ethical dilemmas that will be programmed into AI systems and robotics. We must educate our future developers to understand the complexities of the ethical dilemmas that are presented because of our technological capabilities. Sometimes we must ask ourselves just because we do something - should we do it? What is the impact of our technological advances to all stakeholders? Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have also backed some principles to ensure humanity benefits from technological advances.

We then moved on to looking at an Inquiry Based Learning Video - We have experienced this growing up and trying to make sense of the world. We have asked questions like how do cars move? It is our natural urge to inquire, and think to make meaning. IB learning starts with a question. Traditionally done as Sage on a Stage with teacher knowing correct answer. Now days inquiry is more dynamic and involves student agency as they drive their own learning through constructivism, asking questions and gathering new knowledge and reflect.

Here are some ideas from Harpaz (2005) on six characteristics of 'fertile' questions that might be used in an inquiry:

• Open - there are several different or competing answers
• Undermining - makes the learner question their basic assumptions
• Rich - cannot be answered without careful and lengthy research, often able to be broken into subsidiary questions
• Connected - relevant to the learners
• Charged - has an ethical dimension
• Practical - is able to be researched given the available resources

We also had a brief look at the NZ Ministry Teaching as Inquiry Model and the updated Spiral of Inquiry Model also often used with more focus on agency and collaboration.

One of the last activities was to have a go with some different kinds of robotics kits. As my partner and I were very unfamiliar with the robotic arm we had a go with this. I had no real idea about how to work the electronics and programme the Arduino in the time frame given would have had to look up most of it. So my partner got it going and after the coding was done I got the gist of it. A great day all round.

References
Harpaz, N. (2005). Teaching and Learning in a Community of Thinking. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 20(2), 136-157. Retrieved from http://yoramharpaz.com/pubs/en_learning/teaching-learning.pdf

Education - Multicultural & International Perspectives, engagement & agency.

Week 14 - Multicultural and International Perspectives, engagement & agency

PISA

This week started by viewing this video about PISA. Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing is used to measure international success of students from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD is a combination of 34 countries who come together to come up with better policies to improve people's lives. In the 1990’s they looked at how prepared 15 year olds were for their futures as most have finished compulsory formal education by then. They came up with a 2 hour test for core subjects like reading math and science. Participating countries ran this test every 3 years, rotating the 3 subjects each year.

PISA tests if students can use what they have learnt in school and apply these to real life situations and problems. PISA takes the results of all students and analyses this data to compare how countries have ranked. Similarities and differences are shown so governments can analyse results and change education policies if needed. PISA looks at how successful all students are and looks for the characterics of the more successful countries and trends and patterns. Such as girls often outperform boys in reading, and in math boys tend to outperform girls. Another finding is that deciding student pathways early on does not necessarily impact the performance of the student. Also all children have the potential to succeed if given the opportunity and are supported despite their home background also having a major impact on student success.

Engagement

Prior to class I also read an article from Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). ‘Engagement in Australian Schools’. This discussed the ambiguity of ‘engagement’ which is hard to define. Often policy makers have been focused on ‘disengaged’ behaviour rather than promoting engagement. Some ideas from Fredericks et. al. (2003) suggests it involves three types of engagement:

Cognitive - which is hard to measure, involves students investment in their own learning. Cognitively engaged learners are focused, resilient, flexible, and goal orientated. We can use physical signs to measure this such as facial expressions, reaction times, question asking/answering etc.

Behavioural - involves behaviour that enhances high performance such as collaboration and communication with others, and participation in other areas of their lives. Essentially are the learners ready to learn and this will help with being cognitively involved. Physical signs may be easier to measure such as attendance, reading and writing achievement data, social withdrawal, negative interactions etc.

Emotional - how the learner is feeling in relation to other learners, teachers, family and friends do they feel emotionally bonded with others. Can measure by asking students about their attitudes and beliefs etc.

We can improve engagement by having flexible, individualised teaching, in a supportive learning environment, like project based learning. Also by strong student-teacher relationships and regular monitoring, trying to make learning feel more relevant to the student, providing choice in future pathways and developing an environment where it is OK to make mistakes.

We then moved on to the ‘don’t ask me where I’m from video’. This was about how to define culture. Nationality is quite different to culture. Essentially your culture is about where are you might be a local. This includes rituals, relationships, and restrictions (where you are able to live, work, travel etc).

The World Economic Forum (2016) lists 16 skills for 21st century learning and they have included cultural & civic literacy and social and cultural awareness etc.



I think this is a great way to describe a holistic approach to curriculum development as it takes into account relevant competencies and personal character, not too sure about how the foundation literacies have been split up but good to see cultural and social awareness were explicitly included.

It was also interesting to learn which three NZ curriculum principles were the least well represented in classrooms based on research by ERO in a review done in 20012. Cultural diversity, future focus and treaty of waitangi were least well represented. I guess for most schools we are all trying to improve in these areas and probably could do with more help and professional learning in these areas.

We then dived into having a look at curriculum in other countries, and having spent a bit of time in Singapore back in the day I suggested we could have a quick look into this curriculum. We found some interesting information. Singapore includes civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills and social awareness as part of their 21st century competencies;



We were also wondering how well students from Singapore were rated in PISA and found that they were ranked top in math, science and reading in 2015 and also ranked highest in collaborative skills. They also seem to have a small number of bottom performers and a high number of top performers so the education system appears to be very successful for all students.

Agency

We then moved on to looking at learner agency which can be defined as the capability to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference to the learners life.

We watched a video from Tim Gander about learner agency. He was a teacher who inquired about how he could give his students more choice and how best to help develop their own agency. He developed and co-constructed what this would be for individuals. He create agency with the learners, and looked into how they could take action and deal with barriers, credits, timetables time pressures etc. Many of this they could not change but they did implement 20% time for self directed learning which they shared in an online learning community that also fed into assessments. They created a credits barrier hack by rewriting all the internal assessments to make them more authentic for the class. They developed a flow chart about what they were interested and boys could choose their own path and what they did to enable the choices. Many learners were initially lost and had trouble making the decisions and Tim wondered if by having agency essentially they had chosen to opt out. So they went back to redefine agency to include choices needing to make a difference to yourself and others. There was the ongoing tension of freedom to choose meaning they could choose to engage or not, and having a balance of academic rigour and freedom. This video brought up loads of themes around ways to engage students and how to handle assessments. Some food for thought.

We have just introduced some independent learning time at our school and have been looking at ways to support students to set realistic goals and actions. Many teachers have found some simple ways to engage students in meaningful learning and I look forward to seeing how this evolves over time.

References

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). Engagement in Australian schools. Retrieved from http://www.acleadersresource.sa.edu.au/features/engagement-in-learning/workshop-1/Handout_4_Engagement_in_Australian_Schools.pdf

Fredericks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C. & Paris, A. H. (2004). School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59-109.

World Economic Forum. (2016). New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_New_Vision_for_Education.pdf

Education - Games and Educational Game Design

Week 13 - Games and Educational Game Design

Prior to class we were asked to play a game for 10 mins and think about what makes us play and keep playing the game? So as I was reading this instruction at home I was sitting at our kitchen table with our two children Mr 7 and Miss 8 who were playing Roblox. They are now only allowed play for limited times on the weekend as they were getting so addicted and turning into rude zombies during the week. So I asked them why do they play and what makes them keep playing?

Mr 7 said “I play because it’s fun and entertaining, and I keep playing because it it gets more fun and I save up for something like more than 3000 so I can buy my 2nd floor of my noob invasion house.”

Miss 8 said “I like listening to all the music, and I like saving up for stuff I even make lists of all the stuff I want to save up for. I love being pretend characters too”

I have on occasion played things like Tetris back in the day or the Farmville game on Facebook and I guess for me it has been a way of escaping, switching off or procrastinating from doing other things and there was always something just out of reach that I could achieve if I just kept playing. So I guess in terms of learning it is bit like how we scaffold learning or work on things just out of our reach or our comfort zone and then when we get there we a satisfied for a moment then start working on learning the next thing. It also reminds me of my martial arts training, there is always another belt grade to look forward to or something to improve or new to learn, there are others just ahead of us showing us the way which keeps us motivated and inspired. There is something addictive about ‘levelling up’. But are we ‘addicted’ to healthy habits/games or unhealthy habits/games or both at times? Despite doing a fair bit of exercise during the week I do enjoy indulging in food too.

We were also asked to watch the Seth Priebatsch's 4 game mechanics video. He talks about 4 game dynamics that can be used to influence behaviour. He describes a game layer on top of the world that has started to develop but it is just kind of boring and sux. He talks about examples such as loyalty cards etc. He says we can design better games and it has started in the last decade with the social layer of connections with Facebook etc. The next decade is the game layer which we will develop further which is all about influencing behaviour, including what, where and how you do things. The tools to build this layer are game dynamics which we have to be purposeful about using. He talks about 4 important ones:

• Appointment dynamic - Players do something at a particular place and time. In real life this is like the ‘happy hour’ idea. An extremely popular game example is Farmville, you have to water your plants within a timeframe or they die. Another example is an app that helps people take their medication on time.
• Influence and status dynamic - Players want to work hard to achieve something like a badge/status etc. For example in games you play to move up levels like school.
• Progressions dynamic - Gradual success displayed through completion of tasks. For example % complete displays for setting up profiles on Linkedin. We want to finish things when reminded such as progress bars.
• Communal discovery - everyone works together to achieve something. On Digg.com people find and source the best stories and you get points, people worked together to remain on top of the leaderboard. This made me think of countdowns cards, where together people swapped cards etc to get complete sets.

So the challenge is how can we build in some game dynamics to keep people motivated and influence desired behaviours when learning and leading?

We further explored these ideas by playing as a whole class group. The game was called Cat on Yer Head, it starts with everyone standing around but within touching distance of others, then one person starts as the cat who repeats ‘cat, cat, etc’ until they touch another person who becomes the cat. At the same time someone starts as the mouse and repeats ‘mouse, mouse, etc’ until they touch someone and they become the mouse. The objective is for the cat to catch the mouse, so if you get tagged by a cat or a mouse you are switching roles to help the mouse escape or get the cat to catch the mouse. It was crazy trying to switch and keep up at times.

We had a few goes then went inside to reflect and try to modify the game to try to enhance the experience. To make it more engaging we decided to use ping pong balls as the mouse or the cat to pass around rather than speaking and the balls were more easily hidden so everyone had to pay more attention in the game. This kept everyone on their toes. Then we decided to add a dog to chase the cat and mouse, this kept it even more interesting.

So we found ways to improve the flow of the game. Flow theory is the essence of games, it is the balance between the skill you have and the difficulty of the game. So it is a moving target and your target changes as your skills develop. You can change the rules of a game to improve the flow experience. I guess as a teacher I have always thought of this as knowing the learner so you can provide collapsing scaffolds and try to find that zone of proximal development (Vygotsky). I just hadn’t really realised how much this flow idea in good game development was related to effective learning experiences.

We also took a look at 4 keys to fun from Nicole Lazzaro which is focused on 4 key emotions as follows:

• People Fun (friendship)
• Hard Fun (challenge)
• Easy Fun (novelty)
• Serious Fun (meaning)

According to Amory (2007), Educational computer games should:

• Be relevant, explorative, emotive and engaging
• Include complex challenges, puzzles or quests
• Be gender-inclusive and non-confrontational
• Provide appropriate role models
• Develop democracy and social capital through dialogue
• Support authentic learning activities
• Support the construction of tacit knowledge

We played http://www.kupuhono.co.nz/ and looks at aspects of game design within this game. James Paul Gee also has some interesting ideas about video games, theory of learning and how you can play games instead of teaching and taking tests because while you play the game you are completing the test and learning as you go along so you don’t need at test as such at the end.

Now going back to Mr 7 and Miss 8 maybe they weren't so much turning into rude zombies, they were actually in the flow state of playing the game, but I guess the bigger question is about the impact of particular games on our children and how can we harness this flow state for purposeful learning.

So lots of great themes this week and I guess it boils down to the classic reflection as a teacher about how can we have more fun with our learning as well as what can we do to make sure we are supporting students with challenges that push the students enough to not be bored and on the flip side are not too tricky leaving them to struggle too much as we want to ensure the learners are often in the flow state. So this must involve getting to know your learners and understanding the impact you are having in trying support students in their flow of learning and maybe ultimately helping them to be more aware of how they can take charge of their own learner agency and flow state. Much to ponder after this weeks learning.

References
Amory, A. (2007). Game object model version II: a theoretical framework for educational game development. Educational Technology Research & Development, 55(1), 51–77

Davis, R. (2014). Cat On Yer Head. Playniac Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.catonyerhead.com/

Education - Innovative Learning Spaces and The Maker Movement

Week 12 - Innovative Learning Spaces and The Maker Movement

So I started by checking out this video before class - Steve Collis: Different spaces within a learning environment : Cave, Campfire and Watering Hole. Having now worked in an Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) at a new school the purpose of the different kinds of furniture and classroom setup makes a lot more sense. The way the environment is setup does allow for flexible learner centered activities. The video discusses how ILE ‘s puts relationships at the heart of the learning. Steve talks about these three broad kinds of spaces and intended relationships:

• Cave - reflective space, free of stimulation, so learners can withdraw slightly, relationship of student to self. In a virtual space an example could be blogging as I am doing now. In our learning spaces we have some furniture that is a single desk with sides for time when students wish to complete work on their own with minimal disruptions.
• Campfire - one to many relationship, essentially broadcasting expertise from a guru shared with the learners (often the teacher I guess could be another student too as we often get students to share expertise). In a virtual setting this could be like the flipped learning idea where students complete some online learning prior to the class where time can be spent refining, applying and consolidating the learning. In our learning spaces examples of this could be groups of students together on desks or seats with a teacher/student using a screen or whiteboard or other resources to facilitate a workshop or discussion etc.
• Watering Hole - many to many relationships, free improvised problems discussions, great for collaboration. Virtual examples would be any web 2.0 tool, an example I think of would be any kind of collaborative tool such as a Padlet or even a shared google doc for brainstorming or sharing or reflective learning etc. When I think of physical spaces at our school for this to occur I think of students working in small groups of tables joined together or seats/ lillypads/beanbags on the floor with a whiteboard table in the middle etc. 

During class this week we started by looking at Maker spaces - Learning by doing, hands on, student centred, can be as big or small as student wants and students have control over their own learning. I really love the idea of maker spaces and I run a class at our school which is focused on Robotics which is much like a maker space but I guess with a narrower focus. I have to say that it is extremely popular as the students love the tactile learning involved and learn to code the robot in a practical trial and error way, learning throughout the whole process.

Then we moved on to selecting and completing 3 out of 6 learning stations. Station 1 caught my eye as it was about having a look at ILE research. We are often questioned about our approaches to teaching and learning in our new ILE and there are many pros and cons so I was keen to find out what the research had to say. This research by Imms, W., Mahat, M., Byers, T. & Murphy, D. (2017) is from the University of Melbourne and included a number of NZ school so is quite relevant.

Basically what we found after wading through a lot of graphs and analysis was that deeper learning is related to the teaching approach and teacher mindset. An ILE helps with moving towards a more learner centred approach, however, it is actually the teacher mindset and willingness to move from the more teacher centred traditional approach to more learner focused pedagogy that really makes the difference. This can be done in an ILE or a more traditional classroom, it's all about the pedagogy.

References
Imms, W., Mahat, M., Byers, T. & Murphy, D. (2017). Type and Use of Innovative Learning Environments in Australasian Schools. ILETC Survey No. 1. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, LEaRN, Retrieved from: http://www.iletc.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/TechnicalReport_Web.pdf

Other related articles that refer to the ILETC report:

• Classroom design should follow evidence, not architectural fads
• Learning Spaces in Australia and New Zealand
• How open should a learning space be – acoustically?

Education - Entrepreneurialism, Real World Learning, Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

Week 11 - Entrepreneurialism, Real World Learning, Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

Well I have to start this weeks blog with a bit of a confession - I really like being on time and organised, however, this week I never made it to class or did the flipped learning requirements. There was loads going on in my life and it included a 3 day school camp etc. So I’ve got some good excuses and I’m now backtracking and have spend a little time catching up so this one has been done in retrospect of the class.

I watched the Crowdsourcing Video, basically crowdsourcing is about connecting with people online to solve problems and produce things utilising people’s time expertise or resources. Crowdfunding is about raising capital funds from many people who donate a small amount of money towards what is required. This is becoming quite popular and is how real problems can be solved and makes use of how connected we now are with other people via the internet etc.

These are examples of how we can utilise technology to solve real world problems which is one of the key 21st century skills we would like our students learn as per the ITL research mentioned in previous blog posts. Authentic real world problems should involve real people, solutions for a particular audience (not the teacher or student etc), have specific/explicit contexts, and involve real data. We should be designing these sorts of learning experiences. There are many online tools that could be used:

Zooniverse - is a large people-powered platform for research problems are solved by enlisting volunteers to help out. People work with scientists to view, record, analyse, process and answer very large amounts of data that would not be possible by the scientists doing the research alone. The first project, Galaxy Zoo, received 70,000 classifications per hour and more than 50,000,000 classifications in the first year (Graham et al., 2015).

OpenIDO - This is another online site where people can connect and design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges.

Hacking NZ Education - a crowdsourcing platform set up by The Mind Lab by Unitec to collaboratively brainstorm ideas of what the future of education in New Zealand could look like.

Along with problem solving skills it is vital that students are supported to develop skills in enterprise and entrepreneurship it may help them to setup their own enterprise and take part in global enterprises which is part of the NZ Curriculum (2016).

Aileron (2017) suggests the following skills are vital for being an entrepreneur - resilience, focus, invest for the long-term, find and manage people, sell, learn, self-reflection, self-reliance. If we design learning around solving real world problems I have no doubt that students and teachers would develop these skills and dispositions as part of the journey. Lots to ponder and think about and I guess the challenge is to explore some of these tools with the students in class to see if there are any problems they would like to get involved with that are relevant to the learning in our classes.

References
Aileron. (2017). The Top Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs. Forbes.com. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/aileron/2013/11/26/the-top-skills-every-entrepreneur-needs/

Graham, C.G., Cox, J, Simmons, B, Lintott, C, Masters, K, Greenhill, A. & Holmes, K. (2015). Defining and Measuring Success in Online Citizen Science: A Case Study of Zooniverse Projects. Computing in Science & Engineering, 17(4), 28-41.

The NZ Curriculum Online. (2016). The NZ Curriculum: Vision. Ministry of Education. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum

Education - Agile Leadership , Servant Leadership, Agile Education and Lean Education

Week 10 Agile Leadership , Servant Leadership, Agile Education and Lean Education
We started with the provocation - “Can the notions of servant and leader co-exist, can someone who puts the needs of others before their own also gain respect as a leader?”. We may not necessary believe this is possible but Greenleaf suggests this is possible.

Greenleaf, R. K. (1970) suggests servant leadership starts with the desire to serve and secondary to this is to leading, as opposed to leading first, it’s not about power or acquisition. A servant ensures that the needs of others are meet first. However, does this result in the people served becoming healthier, wiser, freer, or more independent etc? Greenleaf suggests we have new views of power and authority and we can relate to people in more supportive ways.

If we look at it from a teaching perspective the servant teacher tries to remove barriers to students learning and helps them to find their passions and motivations to learn leading them to discover their own destiny.

I then checked out this video about Lean Education and came up with these key points:

• Lean is manufacturing approach which came about in the 20th century
• Then applied in 21st century to software development (post agile) 
• Can be applied to educational context
• Book ‘The Machine that Changed the World’ by Womak J, Jones D, and Roos D, (1990) explains how Toyota moved from mass production to lean production.
• There were many benefits, cut waste, improved quality and variety of products
• The next book ‘Lean Thinking’ looked at how these methods could be applied to other industries.
• Lean is a slow and complicated long process and when applying this to the educational context it doesn’t make sense if we look at cutting waste etc as we are an ‘intellectual’ business not a physical ‘product’ as such. So must view education from a different lense about quality and value.

Womak says education is a process involving designing of knowledge, making learning experiences and use these experiences to continue learning, essentially design, make and use. Can we make these three processes lean?Value in education can be tricky to define, educators tend to do what they already know, and learners tend to expect something similar to what they have previously experienced.

A Lean approach looks at the value stream and constantly questions does this curriculum/approach/activity add value for the learner? It also looks at waste that can be eliminated. Move away from batch and ‘pushed’ content to the learner in time frame decided by the organisation and move towards the learner ‘pulling’ from the system what they need.

The value chain involves all stakeholders and may span organisations. Lean approach in education might involved personalised self paced learning, life long enrolment, no set time/place, blended learning modes, and instant feedback. The focus should be on thinking and problem solving, this should be visible and rigorous.

Agile is about creating a culture of learning - www.agilemanifesto.org. There are four values that are involved. A slightly different version of these values was adapted by Steve Peha to make them more relevant for educational organisations:

• Individual and interactions over processes and tools
• Meaningful learning over measurement of learning
• Stakeholder collaboration over constant negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile teams are self organising teams so we moved onto the next activity which involved forming some small teams. The objective of the team was to get as many pingpong balls to pass through the hands of each team member in 2 minutes Boris Gloger’s Ball Point game (Gloger, 2008). Each team were ask to estimate the number first, then have a go, then repeat this process 4 times. There were 4 rules:

• As each ball is passed between team members, it must have air time
• Every team member must touch each ball for it to count
• No ball to your direct neighbour on either side, you must pass to your front
• Every ball must end where it started. For each ball that does, the team scores 1 point (make sure you count your points)

Our team had a lot of fun, we started with a W formation passing the balls in a zig zag. Then we thought about doing more than one at a time so went with handfuls. Then the idea of coming close together and dropping the balls down like a waterfall marble run. So in each iteration we came up with better and better ideas. After small quick iterations or Sprints we learnt and applied new ideas with great success we did at least 4 times better by the end of our quick 2min sprints.

The idea of the 4 iterations has come from Mike Rother’s Kata in the Classroom (Rother, 2015). Kata is a term used in martial arts. It is a way of practicing and refining techniques. The Improvement Kata is a repeating four-step routine for continuous improvement: Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA).

After reporting back we had done very well and worked well as a team. One other team basically stopped after a couple of goes and thought that was the best they could do and were happy - do we often tend to stop when we think solutions are good enough or do we keep trying? Agile is about a mindset of continual improvement. Being an agile leader involves Scrums which are a lightweight process framework for agile development which involves a series of sprints that each deliver something useful.

We then moved on to looking at Kanban (visual cards in japanese) & Trello a great online organisational tool that I’ve used before. Basically a kanban is a bunch of visual cards orgainised into three categories/lists - to do, doing and done lists with a set number of maximum cards to limit the amount of things to manage.

In a classroom this could be based on the learning backlog - what do we need to learn, things we are learning, things we have learnt. User stories should be short and actually able to be achieved. A story that is too big is called an Epic and needs to be broken down into smaller stories. These user story needs can then be written down as things to be done and organised via a form of Kanban.

References
Greenleaf, R. K. (1970). The Servant as Leader, The Robert K. Greenleaf Center, Indianapolis, IN.

Gloger, B. (2008). Ball Point Game: A game to feel what Scrum is. Retrieved from https://kanemar.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/theballpointgame.pdf

Peha, S. (2011). Agile Schools: How Technology Saves Education (Just Not the Way We Thought it Would). InfoQ. Retrieved from https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-schools-education

Education - Personal Learning Networks, Connectivism and Leading Change

Week 9 - Personal Learning Networks, Connectivism and Leading Change

This weeks class started with a challenge - we were given 10min to find out where John P Kotter might be right now. We worked in small groups and each of us had some different ideas, some used social networks like Facebook, Linkedin and other digital tools like wikipedia, whitepages, Google Maps or world clocks etc. Together we worked quickly in putting together and cross checking our information. We found out his age, home address, and work location etc. This was a great example of connectivism in action, technology has enabled us to connect and collaborate beyond our physical environment and we are able to draw on a range of perspectives and collaboratively generate and critique new ideas. This is a relatively new view of how technology has changed how, and what we learn.

Prior to class were were asked to read part of ‘A Learning Theory for the Digital Age’ by Siemens, G. (2004). These were some of the key ideas about this theory of connectivism:

• Many learning theories were developed prior to the digital age such as behaviourism and constructivism. Informal learning is now a big part of our lives. Most older learning theories focus on learning that occurs within a person and don’t address learning that happens outside of themselves like learning that is stored and manipulated by technology.
• Older learning theories don’t really describe learning that happens within organisations.
• Older learning theories tend to focus on how we learn not so much what is learnt.
• Connectivism looks at the complexities of learning as a network and environment that cannot be entirely controlled by an individual. 
• Connectivism is based on decisions being made on rapiding moving foundations.
• It is vital to understand the flow of information in an organisation and how it is formed as links between people.
• Connectivism realises that complete knowledge doesn’t lie in the mind of one person so requires a different approach to leadership.
• Diverse teams and innovation are key in truely exploring ideas.

I think the view of connectivism is very relevant and evident in the underlying philosophies of our school. We believe that the ability to learn is more important that what you have learnt. That given the uncertain future and impact of digital technologies students will need to be able to work out what they know and what they need to do next to solve problems and interact with their environment and connected networks to learn and create the required knowledge. Connectivism is way to understand the skills and dispositions needed for students to be successful in the 21st century.

At our school this is kind of understanding is very evident in our vision statement and underlying philosophies that were based on some interesting New Zealand research such as this report about future orientated teaching and learning from the OECD. Our school vision is ‘To empower our people to be connected, collaborative, community minded learners inspired to soar’. We acknowledge that learning occurs in all aspects of our lives and that learning happens within the wider the social and emotional contexts and that our interaction and connection with the environment and networks is infact how we learn. This is very much like the view of connectivism in that our ability to learn what is needed for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. I feel connectivism is a great progressive description of how we view learning at our school.

This week we also looked at a Personal Learning Networks video. A PLN consists of the people or organisations that influence our learning. In pairs we discussed each others networks and created an infographic. We used online tools such as Piktochart or Canva. Again it was a reminder about how technology has enabled us to be so well connected personally, nationally, and globally.

We then went on to look at how connectivism has come about as it a fairly recent theory, which makes sense as the developments in technology are really quite recent. It also now makes sense to me that Massive Online Learning Communities (MOOCs) came about as a response to the new ideas of connectivism, and also reminds me of ‘un-conference’ and ‘pechakucha’ type learning sessions I've experienced.

This lead on to looking at a collection of essays that Stephen Downes had put together about connectivism. Some really interesting ideas were presented and in summary we found that connectivism is about creating learning objects on the fly, learning is what we create with others, and we have the tools.

We also looked at influences on leadership and we used an online tool called Coggle to create a collaborative brainstorm/diagram. We briefly looked at the differences between management and leadership, and came to the conclusion that we probably have a good idea about the differences but it’s probably not always so easy to implement. I believe we have all probably had great discussions at some point with people about aspects like I vs we, command vs ask, know vs shows etc.

Kotters’ views for successful change suggests a vision is very important. Getting people involved to collaborate a vision for change and then we need to communicate the vision often. We should remove obstacles and focus energy there and also recognise people’s efforts.

Kotter (1996) describes 8 steps for successfully leading change.

1. Create a sense of urgency (identify crises and opportunities)
2. Build a guiding team
3. Develop a vision and strategy
4. Communicate the vision
5. Enable action by removing barriers
6. Creating and celebrating short term wins
7. Sustain change by building on gains
8. Embed the change in culture

The first 3 steps are vital in creating the climate for change, the next 3 involve and enable the organisation to change, the last two are about implementing and sustaining the change. It can be a messy process and by developing the vision it can guide people through and less errors might be made along the way.

People will be intrinsically motivated if they share the vision and have a sense of purpose, and work with peers to solve difficult problems. I will need to keep this in mind when planning and implementing e-learning objectives at our school. There is more information here about Kotters 8 Step Process for change. Also the PPTA have a toolkit for change mangement - PPTA toolkit for change management.

References
Bolstad, R. Gilbert, J. McDowall, S. Bull, A. Boyd, S. & Hipkins, R. (21012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching: A New Zealand perspective. New Zealand Council for Educational Research.Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/supporting-future-oriented-learning-and-teaching-a-new-zealand-perspective. Accessed 3 Feb. 2018.

Kotter, J. (1996). Leading Change. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press.

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. eLearnSpace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm. Accessed 3 Feb. 2018.