Module 5: New Technologies

Over the last few years my own teenagers’ involvement in social networking brought out the curiosity in me. I have since become an avid user of Facebook as a means to keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues around the world. As I arrived at a new school this year, I suddenly began to receive invitations to become “friends” with staff members from my school. Our interactions became social rather than work-related.
When I learned about Ning, a social networking site that can be created and designed for one’s own interests and purposes, I realized that the implications for professional development were great. I designed a Ning site specifically to provide professional development opportunities for our teachers. The site was unveiled at a faculty meeting. While the concept was welcomed with enthusiasm and interest, I am disappointed by the lack of engagement in its use.
I have begun to ask myself what I can do to motivate my staff to use this tool. The staff falls upon a continuum of novice users of technology (they do email and that’s about it) to technology guru’s who are highly competent and confident. John M. Keller has put forward a model of motivational design that has given me insight into where I may have gone wrong. According to Keller, the essential conditions of motivation are attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction which are commonly known by the acronym ARCS (Driscoll, 2005). Though I feel that I sufficiently gained the staff’s attention and highlighted the relevance of Ning to professional development, I certainly neglected to allow the opportunity for the staff to build confidence. I introduced the tool and then expected that they go try it out independently. Only a handful of teachers actually went in and tried it out. Satisfaction was not generated because they haven’t had the opportunities to learn the platform enough to generate confidence or feel its relevance. I also think that the staff did not feel a sense of urgency to use the tool. If I were to add an incentive or a requirement that using Ning would fulfill, I imagine that there would be more motivation to use it. I believe that urgency could be another component easily added to Keller’s model for motivation though Keller might include urgency under relevance.
My plan to remedy this situation is to ramp up my attempts to motivate my teachers to use Ning. Building confidence will only happen if I give teachers opportunities to use the platform in a non-threatening way. If I use the gradual release of responsibility model, I will provide them with the scaffolded support that they need until they become ready to be independent users. As they become more confident and independent, they will realize that the use of Ning is worthwhile and helpful to their job, resulting in a strong sense of satisfaction, thus leading to increased motivation to use it.
Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Module 4: Connectivism

When I moved overseas 6 years ago, my opportunities for professional development became quite scarce. Due to my geographic isolation and budgetary constraints, I found myself unable to attend professional conferences as I once had while living stateside. I turned to reading books, online articles, conversations with colleagues and an occasional class offered locally or online. My learning network looked like this:



I was feeling professionally isolated until one day when I found a particularly interesting podcast online. I began to subscribe to the weekly podcast called PD to Go. This podcast was primarily about using Smart Boards in the classroom. But each hour-long podcast also included highlights and tips about cutting edge technology. During one weeklong road trip during spring break, I listened to the podcasts that had been downloaded to my iPod and I took notes about all of the sites and technologies that sounded interesting to me. When I got home, I began joining and exploring the networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Ning and others. And so, the beginning of my digital learning network began. I chose people to follow on Twitter who are knowledgeable in the area of educational technology. I joined discussion boards, blogs and wikis. Now my learning is centered on my interests and allows me to explore to find the gaps in my own knowledge. I find myself grateful for social bookmarking sites like Delicious that allow me to save bookmarks and organize them for future use. I realize that each network has the potential to take me deeper into my interest and gives me the opportunity to see perspectives that I had never even considered. I am grateful for learning about Google Reader to help keep my massive network connections organized. I have moved from a one dimensional recipient of information to an interactive participant in a multidimensional interactive world. Here is what my network has evolved into over the last few years:



I have to admit that I am probably more of a lurker than a participant in many networks where I do not have an established relationship with the participants. That is probably just characteristic of me as a person and a learner. I would normally be the kind of learner who craves the face-to-face interactions and collaborative climate of getting to know my classmates in a traditional classroom, but the tools like Skype, Google Chat, Google Docs give me that immediate interaction that I enjoy. Because of the collaborative nature of these social networking technologies, it is not difficult to find answers to questions. I am comfortable asking “friends” within my networks or searching for answers on my own using search engines and tags in blogs and wikis. Though I know that I must use Google with caution, it is still my favorite search engine for finding the answers to questions. What a different experience education is at this time in my life as compared to my undergraduate days before computers, the internet and Web 2.0 technologies.

Module 3: Collaboration

I do believe that humans have a basic instinct to interact and work as a group. One can observe children (and even adults) who do not know each other, placed in a room together, who will naturally gravitate toward each other for social interaction. It does not necessarily mean that they will work cooperatively or interact appropriately, but it illustrates that by human nature we gravitate toward one another. According to James Fowler (2005), “Human beings frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers whom they will never meet again, even when such cooperation is individually costly” (pg. 7047).
In his video Way-new Collaboration, Howard Rheingold made a strong case regarding the nature of and the natural evolution of collective knowledge in our society. With advances in technology and the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, the internet is no longer a one-way giver of information. The flow of information and constructed knowledge has the potential to flow two ways as well as to branch out into further tributaries. In true constructivist form, the Web 2.0 user takes the information and reconstructs the knowledge by making sense of it based upon his/her own experiences. This knowledge then flows back into collaborative spaces (like social networks, wikis, blogs, etc.) and is processed and reconstructed by another user with different experiences and different perspectives. However, in that process other users who are in the network of the original user take that knowledge and reconstruct it based upon their unique perspectives. It is quite probable that the original piece of information has become transformed into an entirely new piece of knowledge with the process ready to cycle on. As George Siemens (2006) says, “The end of a process is a product. Our internet-era knowledge is no longer suitable as a product-we can continue to revise, connect, and alter indefinitely” (pg. 53).

Fowler, James H. (2005). Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(19), 7047-7049. Retrieved January 10, 2010, from Research Library. (Document ID: 836453451).

Siemens, George. (2006). Knowing knowledge. ISBN 978-1-4303-0230-8. A Creative Commons licensed version is available online at http://www.elearnspace.org/KnowingKnowledge_LowRes.pdf.