Learning Is A Team Sport...

I've been thinking a lot lately about how learning is changing (has changed?), influenced by paradigm shifts away from books and content towards the Internet, connections, and learning communities.

I chaired a round table discussion on "Learning Is a Team Sport" at our college's Festival of Learning. This post covers the highlights of that discussion and some of the thoughts we all came up with.

Here are my opening premises for the discussion:

• There is so much information out there and so many information sources, that it is becoming (or maybe already is) impossible to learn on your own, that as educators we need to be aware of this fundamental change and be prepared to teach and learn differently.
• This means more collaboration and cooperation between learners and between educators, an awareness of learning styles and a need to develop authentic curriculum and assessment
• Technology of all types will be increasingly important

With these points in mind we began our discussion. One of the first points raised is how different our learning environments were to the learning environments of our learners. When I went to school, individual learning was paramount - the term paper and tests were king. The main sources of my learning information were:

• Books
• Encyclopedia
• Newspapers
• Radio

Today's learners have a different set of information sources:

• Internet - Podcasts, RSS, Web sites, vidcasts...
  
• YouTube
• iTunes
• 24/7 500 Channel TV
• Books
• Newspapers
• Radio
• And more not yet even thought of...
  

The sheer volume of information is overwhelming - how do you make sense of it all? What is true and what is false? How do you apply context to all this "stuff"? (In this instance, "stuff" is a technical term...)

So what does all this information mean? It means that new approaches to learning are required:

• New approaches to information gathering
• Information evaluation, validation and interpretation - new literacy skills
• Collaboration and cooperation in information gathering and analysis
• “Skimming” or “Diving” the information sea - breadth or depth of knowledge

The rest of our discussions centred around the so whats - here are some of the highlights:

• Need to understand learners and how the not only learn but how they find information and what they do with it -“while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…” - Innovate - Will Richardson

• When does collaboration become cheating?
  “Students see collaboration where their teachers see cheating. They're not even talking the same language. They don't have the same understanding of the world.” - NSCC Colleague

There was an awful lot of discussion around the second point as it is a current "hot button" topic. We encourage collaboration and cooperation and then we accuse learners of cheating. I personally think we need to re-invent exactly what we mean by cheating (plagiarism, copying, non-citing of sources, cutting and pasting from the Web...) so that we are on the same page as our learners (see the first bullet).

So what do we have to do as educators to engage in this new playing field?

• Be Tech savvy
• Understand our learners
• Use project and problem-based approaches to learning (connecting learners to their world)
• Stay in touch with industry
• Allow learners to learn how THEY learn, not how WE learn
• Emphasize collaboration and cooperation - know the new paradigm

These were the main points presented for discussion - there was a level of concern expressed about how to best do this - it's a work in progress for many educators who not only learned in the individual learning days, but have delivered that style of learning for many years. Most see the need to engage in team learning, the problem is we need to know the rules in order to play the game.

It was an interesting, informative, and somewhat passionate discussion that gave all of us lots to think about. The key from my perspective is that learning is now a team sport and we have to get on the field and into the game. If we don't we will be doing our learners a great disservice. Hmmm...

(If you want to see my presentation it's up on SlideShare)

NISOD 2008 - Sculpting And Spanning Spaces - The Learning-Centred Community College Course

This session was presented by Claudine Lowry, Dean of Organizational Learning and Craig Collins, Principal of the Lunenburg Campus of the Nova Scotia Community College. (NSCC) I am an academic chair at NSCC and attended this session to provide support to my colleagues and to see what other attendees thought about our amazing faculty and staff development programme - the Community College Education Diploma Programme (CCEDP).

This session focussed on one of the ten courses that learners in the CCEDP (all new faculty and professional support staff at NSCC must take CCEDP to get regular status) - The Learning-Centred Community College. This course introduces learners to what it means to be learning-centred and to work in a learning-centred college.

The session was conducted very informally as a talking circle, one of the actual tools and techniques used in the course - it was a very cool way to present the course after having sat in on so many formal presentations that revolved around the screen at the front. It was interesting to hear the questions being asked by the audience - it made me realize just how blessed we are at NSCC to have such an amazing learning opportunity that CCEDP is. I'm so glad that I chose to sit in on this session - sometime you have to leave home to realize just how good you have it...

Festival of Learning

I have the distinct privilege and honour of belonging to the most amazing learning organization - The Nova Scotia Community College. This past Thursday the most amazing event took place at our Truro campus. The College celebrated its first Festival of Learning, a day to share and celebrate the learning happening at the College. Colleagues presented on what they had learned, how they had learned and the transformations that occurred through their learning. The presentations were diverse and amazing in their power and quality.

I was asked to participate in a "Learning Market", where various presenters set up in a market stall sort of fashion and presented what they had done over lunch. My presentation was on my experience with conference blogging at STLHE 2007 (see my June posts).

What is conference blogging you say? Well it's blogging a conference while you are there - I find it to be a great reflective tool and a good way to share my conference experiences. When NSCC sends someone to an event or conference, they return to the College and share what they have learned - by blogging while at the conference, I find it more immediate and relevant, and the sharing begins before I even get home!

But enough about me - the festival was amazing - I have never seen so many engaged, energized, and passionate learners in one place - and the very cool thing is that as a presenter I learned more than most of the people who dropped by my display - I got to explain and contextualize what I did and got some great ideas on how to make it even better - so cool.

The other major event of the day was the graduation of the CCEDP (Community College Education Diploma Program) class. CCEDP is NSCC's staff and faculty development program and it is absolutely transformational. I have a MEd in Adult Education and Training and I learned more from the CCEDP program that I could actually use in the classroom than I ever did from grad school. There were 40 grads from the program. Here is a picture of those who attended the convocation. Congratulations to all of you!

New faculty orientation was also held this week in Truro, so 33 new faculty members from all across the College came together for a week of orientation and introductions. To all of you, welcome to NSCC, you have made a great choice - I look forward to working with all of you.

What an amazing day! As educators we so rarely get an opportunity to get together and share what we do, and what an opportunity the festival was, and perfect timing too - now we can take all of that energy and enthusiasm into a new academic year - the possibilities are endless!

I'd like to thank all of those who organized, setup, managed, ran, facilitated, presented, attended, and made the festival such a success, but I really want to thank my friend, my mentor, my colleague Libby for asking me to be a part of such an incredible day and Bobbi for all of her creativity and vision in making such an amazing day happen. Thanks Libby!! Thanks Bobbi!!...