Some advice on cMOOCs – Part 2, the team

In this ongoing series on hindsights regarding #clmooc, I think that one of the most important elements of our success was the team.

I believe strongly that active facilitation is critical to cMOOC success. Those that have weak or nearly non-existent facilitation do not often thrive. This is, of course, a challenge of time, commitment, and sometimes budget, but it is essential. In this regard, #clmooc soared.

The team for #clmooc was in a word, amazing. There were many ways in which this team was assembled and then worked together that contributed to our success.

  • There were seven of us. That may seem like a lot, but I know that we couldn’t have done all the work we did with a smaller team. It was the right number for this project. Not so many that we couldn’t really get to know each other and meet together frequently, but enough that we could plow through a huge amount of work.
  • Each week, two people had primary responsibility for that week’s activities. One was the lead, and one was the helper. But everyone contributed every week in amazing ways.
  • We had a streamlined system of consistent activities that we developed together. We started each make cycle with a blog post and newsletter. Each week we had a “Make with Me” hangout and a Twitter chat. We participated in Connected Learning TV webinars and #literacies chats. We ended each make cycle with reflections, sharing, and Find Five Friday.
  • We planned and planned and planned. We met via Google hangout online every week for many hours before #clmooc began. We produced what seemed like hundreds of Google docs. We talked and talked and talked. And #clmooc was better for it.
  • Our team made everyone in #clmooc feel welcome and feel that however and whenever they participated was ok. If someone joined in Cycle 6 and was just starting with their introduction, we made sure they knew that was just great. Several participants said that this stance really helped encourage their participation.
  • Our team worked hard and was always present. As Terry said, it was a rare hour in the day when one of us wasn’t online in the community doing something. We spanned various time zones and had different times when we were able to jump in. And we posted and talked, tweeted and hung out, encouraged and reflected, 24/7.
  • We had shared values and a commitment to excellence.

And then there were the individuals themselves.

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Paul Oh, and Christina Cantrill brought bold and bright leadership. They had a vision, but also asked the team to bring our own vision to the project and to build out whatever new tools and ideas we had. Most importantly, they empowered us to be our very best as a team. We were given not only chances to use our voice at every turn, but also admin rights and lots of support, which was a huge part of #clmooc being what it was.

Joe Dillon reminded us at every turn that however participants took part was good and acted as a voice of encouragement. I will forever hear his strong, comforting voice saying “Karen, you are ok, and however you participate is ok.” He consistently reminded us that there were all kinds of people in the MOOC and that we should keep them all in mind as we proceeded. #clmooc was a better place for his leadership.

Chad Sansing took us to unexpected and often higher levels in our thinking about learning and was an ever-present hologram in our many spaces. He always encouraged us to hack, to make the web, and to think of our students in new and more meaningful ways. (And personally, I want to thank Chad for Walk Out, Walk On. It is changing me.)

Anna Smith joined us from a different locale each week and asked questions at every turn that took us to new points of departure. She brought clarity to us through these questions. Anna also prompted our noticing and sharing with Find Five Friday (#f5f).

Kevin Hodgson – ah, what a force of nature he is! Kevin made movies, made music, wrote posts, made makes, and much more. His words, pictures, thoughts, and feelings inspired and delighted. I will be continuing to catch up on Kevin’s prolific output for months to come. I feel lucky to have Kevin as a friend.

Stephanie West-Puckett helped us to understand and bring the Connected Learning principles and ethics into everything we did. She also brought the playful lightness of toys and children into #clmooc. I always felt that Stephanie was there to help boost me up when I fell short and for that I am grateful. There is nothing like feeling you have someone strong there for you when you need her.

Terry Elliot brought so many things to #clmooc that I am hard pressed to hone in on what to say about him. Always able to produce a perfectly delightful and simultaneously intellectually stimulating comment at just the right time, Terry was a special friend to me during this summer. He helped me to be more comfortable with my rough edges and he encouraged me to make my voice heard, especially when I felt unsure and not up to the level of the rest of the group. And of course, there are the roosters. :)

Jordan Lusink kept us organized and smiling! She performed many, many behind the scenes tasks that supported us, and #clmooc couldn’t have been without her and her team.

And of course, there was the community. There are too many to name, but so many of you took on leadership roles. That, to me, is the true proof that we achieved a vibrant peer learning community where we were all facilitators, all teachers and learners. For me, that was one of the biggest successes of #clmooc.

Thank you all for a truly great summer of making and Connected Learning. I appreciate each of you deeply.

Reflecting on sharing

I’ve been thinking a lot about community and sharing – online and f2f — what makes it work well for me and what the challenges can be.

This was brought to the forefront yesterday when I wrote something as a part of a f2f group. When asked to share (optionally), I declined, as I often do, but later, I posted this same piece online in an open space, perhaps for the whole world to see. Why the difference?

There are many reasons. First, in online spaces, no one has to read or view my work. It someone wants to look at it, they may, but no one is compelled, and in fact, it takes a special effort to do so. In f2f settings, there is a captive audience, one that I am uncomfortable with (increasingly more so lately).

In f2f environments, I rarely choose to be at the center or to read aloud. I wouldn’t say that I’m shy exactly (those who saw me once get up to speak impromptu for 45 minutes to a large crowd at ISTE can debunk that), but I don’t choose to put myself out there often. When I do, it is because I have been assigned that role.

In online spaces, I am just one of many, many voices and rarely at the center. While in online spaces, there seems to be less often a “center,” there are frequently one or two dominant voices in f2f spaces. The teacher, the presenter, the leader.

Of course, on my own blogs, I am the primary speaker, but this seems very different. For me, my blogs are a place for me to write, to think, to work through things. They are not primarily written for any audience (the possible exception being my personal blog, which is also the one about which I cringe most when I think about people I don’t know reading it, as some do, perhaps because it is also the most interesting blog I write). Because my blogs are for me, not for an audience, I don’t really care who reads them.

Reading or sharing something , though, screams out “I want you to hear this,” and really, I don’t. Not that I actively don’t want an audience to hear it, it’s just not my intent.

Thinking about this makes me reflect on the benefits of sharing. I mostly write for myself, and don’t think that I greatly benefit from sharing. However, it depends on the medium and the community. In f2f settings, the benefits of sharing seem close to zero to me. In social media, sharing is everything – that’s why I’m on social media – and I live for the responses and feedback.

Frankly, my eagerness to share also has to do with the particulars of the community. The more comfortable and bonded I am with the community, the more likely I will be to share. In nearly all the online communities I am a part of (e.g. my mini-constellation of Twitter, P2PU, NWP), I feel close and invested as a member of the group. That is much less often the case for me in a f2f group. There are probably many reasons, which include the length of time we are together, the degree to which I feel connected, and the communication medium itself.

#clmooc has exemplified the kind of community that I love to be a part of and to share with. On more than one occasion in the past few weeks, I’ve thought, “Oh, I can’t wait to share that with #clmooc.” I feel close to many people in #clmooc, some of whom I’ve known for years, others who I’ve just met. A community is more, though, that just the sum of its member people. A community is its values, its culture, its ethos. To me, #clmooc is about sharing, connecting, supporting, and being supported – more so than perhaps any community I’ve been a part of.

One thing #clmooc has made me more comfortable with is sharing my “rough edges.” I have shared thoughts that are half-baked; I have gone on hangouts when I feel unattractive and ill-prepared to say anything; I have tried things that I have been pretty sure wouldn’t work. It is unlike me to show these rough edges, but I have benefited as a result. Thank you #clmooc for that.

Mini maker day for kids

I’m working on a mini maker day for kids later this summer and am looking for feedback and suggestions.

Some unique considerations for this event are: 1) there will be no computers, 2) there will be a wide span of ages from 4-teens, and 3) we have no budget for materials. (Well, that last one isn’t that unique. :)

Here’s what I have so far:

Welcome and Introductions
Make your name tag
Make photos * Bring your own camera or use one of ours! [We did this last year, losely modeled after DS106 daily creates, and everyone loved it!]
BREAK
Make a mask
Yoga for kids
LUNCH
Make jewelry
Make a snack
BREAK
Make a puppet
Cardboard challenge
Wrap-Up

I’m thinking of a fairly loose structure and varied material set for several of these so that kids of different ages can work on what works for them.

Any thoughts are most welcome! I’m looking forward to this.

Some advice on cMOOCs (part 1)

In the midst of #clmooc and in the planning stages of some other massive (perhaps) open online collaborations, I’m thinking again about the dynamics of self-direction in a peer learning context.

At the P2PU School of Ed, we’ve played with this quite a bit with varying degrees of success. We’ve tried “hack the syllabus,” design your own activities, and other things. Nothing has been consistently effective.

Then I found #d106. The assignment bank there was a whole new brilliant paradigm.

And so, not needing to reinvent the wheel, we at #clmooc modeled a Make Bank after this (with much thanks to Alan Levine, Martha Burtis, and Jim Groom and the ds106 community). #clmooc is about making, and we wanted the community to be able to “make their own makes” with the Make Bank.

Technically, this was fairly straightforward. Using WordPress as our content management system, we set up Gravity Forms as the front end to capture user-generated data. The entries from this then generate WP posts (they would also generate WP pages), which are then held for moderation. When they are approved by a moderator, they automatically post to a page using a designated category and then using list category posts to publish them all to a given page.

In another similar implementation, we put a search box and tag cloud right on the main page using the widgets on pages plug-in. Another thing we did that really worked well is to include a Gravity Forms field to allow file upload (in this case images). Credit Paul Oh for that idea. It really made the whole thing more interesting and useful.

Technically, I love this approach of using a web-based way to populate a database. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while and have already put it into use on another project. I think I’ll use this for all kinds of things in the future.

From a learning standpoint, I love his model of peer content/course/collaboration development. It seems to be working better than other things I’ve tried. Three weeks into this MOOC and we have had about 45 “makes” submitted.

One of the lovely developments is that some makes have been collaboratively developed on (via Twitter chats or hangouts).

stopmotion

I suspect that some of the reasons that this Make Bank has been successful have been:

  • It’s core to the collaboration/course content. We’re all about makes and options for makes.
  • It’s simple. (We really worked to simplify the form. Thanks Terry and Joe.)
  • It seems somehow granular enough and separate enough that it’s not threatening (possibly unlike hacking a syllabus or an actual course page.)

I’d love to hear others thoughts about this. We’re always iterating!

So, my advice?

  • Encourage participant creation especially in terms of their “course”/learning experience.
  • Experiment. Try new things and see what works.
  • Borrow from others’ successes.

 

 

#clmooc-cutout

A little late (yes, I know…there is no “late” in #clmooc), but I finally got around to trying some cutout photos as we discussed.

And we’ve been talking about sharing more “work in process,” so here are pics from along the way and different things I tried. Captions included to tell about the steps and process.