Top #EdBlogs2013 Posts

2013 was a productive year that saw quite a bit of professional development and new thinking, highlighted by traveling, where I made new colleagues, and attending the Google Teacher Academy in Chicago. In reflecting on this year, +Eric Saibel has inspired colleagues who blog to share their most influential posts of 2013 for the #EdBlogs2013 series he's collecting, and I'm honored to participate (read his own post here). Taking a page from +David Theriault, who reworked the organization of the #EdBlog2013 idea (cf. his fantastic #EdBlogs2013 post), I'll reflect on 2013 thematically, organizing my post around some of the ideas that I've been interested in this year. And I'll keep the summaries of each post, so be sure to give them the love they deserve.

Innovation and Mindfulness

I've been very interested in creativity and innovation, along with the part that mindfulness plays, thanks to my PLN. I now believe that creativity is one of the most important skills that we should be teaching (alongside collaboration and empathy), and the following posts are just of the few of a growing body of literature that has helped me to think this way.

• Daniel Goleman, whose book Focus I enjoyed, has a couple of posts shared in LinkedIn on mindfulness and creativity that I enjoyed reading: Three Must-Haves for Team Creativity and Mindfulness: When Focus Means Single-Tasking.

New Pioneers blog

• Collisions of Creativity from the magazine Mindful is a good piece on the relationship between mindfulness and creativity.

• Lee-Anne Gray (@DrLeeAnneG) wrote a great post on the need for mindfulness in education as a source of innovation titled Why Mindfulness is Needed For Education Innovation.

• I love the idea of starting a "life hacker" club build around the modern world, as outlined in Start a Life Hacker Club at Your School by Adam Renfro in the +Getting Smart blog.

• Stephanie Harrison's (@cultivace) This will make you happier at work is a great post on bringing mindfulness into the workplace, offering several suggestions for doing so. Creating a mindful culture within the workplace is one of my long-term goals, assuming that, if teachers are generally more mindful and happy, we can also help students to be more mindful and happy.

• Finally, this academic year I began to realize the importance of the relationship between pedagogy and physical space and never fully appreciated it, until +Alice Keeler led a revelatory session at #edcampSFBay last August on the topic. The conversation was inspiring, and +Kevin Ashworth followed it up with his own room redesign in a 2-part blog post on his work (Part 1 | Part 2). We're undertaking our own room redesigns of History, Visual Arts, and World Languages classrooms, and Kevin's work will serve as a source of inspiration for us to craft true collaborative space for our students in a mindful manner.

Design Thinking

Mindfulness and design thinking are very similar in a number of ways; to my mind, mindfulness is an internal application of the external principles of design thinking, and they're both critically dependent on problem definition and system awareness. In designing new forms of pedagogy, especially around technology, I've tried to keep a number of basic principles in mind, and the following posts.

• Last winter/spring's #etmooc was the first digital experience that opened me up to the value of taking risks and the importance of building a PLN. In particular, +Christina Hendricks wrote a post Etmooc: Rhizomatic Learning In Philosophy Courses on the concept of "rhizomatic learning." which was one of the first blog posts I read that challenged the way I thought about learning and pedagogy.

Creative Confidence

• Eric Saibel wrote a great piece The Art of Coaching: Or, Disrupting the Echo Chamber that has helped to give me a framework to apply design thinking at our school, particularly the concept of the disruption and the "echo chamber," or the repetitiveness of thinking that we can find ourselves stuck in as a group that too often prevents us from identifying the core of a problem.

• Grant Wiggins, in his post Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking, has some great thoughts on what design thinking means in education, and he share some of the same ideas I have about the ways that the ego gets in the way of creating this type of environment.

• In an important discussion about transparency in education, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@Braddo) asks the question Can a radical transparency replace grading?. It's short but asks a great question that opens up discussion of standards-based grading and general openness, of which we still have far too little.

• Though not published in 2013, Cathy Davidson's (@CathyNDavidson) idea of crowdsourced grading in How to Crowdsource Grading grabbed my attention. I haven't yet put this idea to use in this form, but I love the approach to empowering students in this way.

Gamification

2013 was the year of gamification for me. I got to know the concept in the spring, though through some ideas of the summer, and now I'm working toward creating a gamified Latin IA course around our new 1:1 BYOL program. Fortunately, a number of excellent blog posts have helped me with the work.

• Tanya Sasser's (@TanyaSasser) post 3 Things I Wish Everyone Knew about Gamification corrects some common misconceptions about the role of game-based learning and gamification in education.

playwaresrudios.com

• +Rory Newcomb has a fantastic blog series on gamification, starting with Gamification 101: Why Gamify? Part I. It's a minefield of great ideas for anyone interested in game-based learning.

• +Jennifer Roberts has some helpful words of advice on the importance of good game design  in her post Broken Games.

• And last but certainly not least, IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley have a great post on the real-world value that games have for learning with How Daydreams and Videogames Can Make Us Confident In Real Life (Yes).

Quisquiliae

I'll close with some random yet influential posts on professional development, the MOOC, language study and the humanities in general.

• +David Theriault's The Magnificent 60: Introducing Your #gtachi Participants is brilliant for so many reasons, mostly because it paints such a colorful picture of all the amazing people who participated in the #gtachi last July.

• At the beginning of last summer, +Jennifer Peyrot shared her Summer Learning Fun on her blog, which helped me to rethink how I approach the summer. In particular, it's a good idea to plan out some activities to ensure a fairly high level of productivity, lest it go by too quickly.

• In August, I had the opportunity to help +Nancy Minicozzi organize and run the PlaydateLA conference. Her reflections in Playdate L.A. capture the excitement I also felt for providing PD to over 100 people, rather than receiving it at an event. It was such a positive experience that the PlaydateLA team is already looking forward to doing it again next August.

• If you're not yet a regular reader of the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy, run in part by +Jesse Stommel, I highly recommend having a look. His post The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses, along with the #moocmooc event last summer, helped me to see the larger possibilities of connectivism and constructivism that the MOOC can bring to education.

• Language teachers are always concerned with promoting language programs, especially as STEM disciplines grow in popularity. +Dana Ariss wrote a great post Learning Languages: Who Says You Can't? that underscores the value that language study has for resilience and taking control of learning. I'm now interested in promoting an "Hour of Language" in a way similar to December's Hour of Code event.

• Along with the diminishing interest in language study, the Humanities have also been suffering (cf. what's happening at the university level). Ben Stern understands Why Humanities Still Matter In 2013, however, and argues a strong case for the importance of the Humanities in understanding the world we interact with.

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That wraps up my 2013, more or less. In addition to blogs, I've also been reading a fair number of books that have all shaped my thinking to a large degree, and I've share some thoughts here on a few of them. But as we begin 2014 (and now that my coding streak has finished!), I plan on carving time to read more blogs, and I'll be looking forward to the ideas that develop from them in this year.

Liquid Networks and the Adjacent Possible

At ISTE this past June, I picked up Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From (reading notes here) and, after his fantastic keynote address, looked forward to reading it. After just finishing it, the book didn't disappoint, leaving me with quite a bit to think about on the verge of beginning a new academic year.

Using parallels from evolutionary biology, Johnson discusses how innovation happens and great ideas are formed, dispelling the myth of the "eureka moment" in the formation of ideas. He outlines 7 patterns that they typically fall into, and I'll outline a few of the patterns that I intend to focus on in the coming academic year. Johnson's TED talk on the topic gives a great introduction to his ideas, if unable to read the book.

Stuart Kauffman's concept of the adjacent possible, which he used to describe all of the combinatory possibilities of the molecular soup of early Earth, plays a prominent role in Johnson's arguments. The adjacent possible presents us with a "map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself" (31), and new combinations serve to expand the adjacent possible. Using this idea, Johnson argues that "[g]ood ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time" (35).

Johnson stresses that "to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share the same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible" (47). He calls this a liquid network, where ideas can freely flow from one node to another to build upon each other, and it's precisely this kind of environment that allows us to explore the adjacent possible. Importantly, "the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network" (58) and the diversity that it brings to our thinking.

The "long zoom" that allows to
identify patterns within ideas (20)

Good ideas don't simply happen; rather, they must be cultivated over time, which Johnson names the slow hunch (81). As was the case with some of the most revolutionary ideas in our intellectual history (e.g. Darwin's theory of evolution), it's most often the case that a good idea comes into form as little more than a hunch. These hunches, in order to grow into something more, must interact with other hunches through the liquid network to open up the adjacent possible.

Finally, Johnson shows that error is an inherent part of innovation. According to the British economist William Stanley Jevons, "[i]n all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one" (137). That is to say, most brilliant ideas are founded upon failed efforts. Fear of failure is so pervasive in the edusphere today, though, that it's become a serious hindrance to creativity and the construction of liquid networks. Contrary to what many of us in academia were trained to believe, it's ok to fail, when working on a new idea.

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"Chance favors the connected mind." (174)

The experiences I had at InstCon, ISTE, and GTACHI were so profound that I'm still having difficulty putting them into material form. The networks that have grown on account of these PD opportunities have already paid dividends for my own thinking about how I want to change my teaching and how I want to approach PD in the future. So after a productive summer of professional development, it's now more clear to me than ever that we need to emphasize the construction of environments that facilitate good ideas by building more and larger "liquid networks".

A 17th-century commonplace book

It was practice in Europe in the Enlightenment Era to keep a "commonplace book" (cf. Johnson 84) with notes, quotations, and other ideas that allowed for reflection, which is critical for nurturing the slow hunch. Today, though, we're also able to share our reflections to a wider audience (i.e., our PLN, or Personal Learning Network) than ever, thanks to Twitter, blogs, and other social media tools. It's important to us that, within our liquid networks, we emphasize both reflection and sharing with regularity, while dispelling as much fear of failure as we can.

Despite our collective emphasis on using technology, we must also understand that "the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop," as Johnson reminds us (61). That's why face-to-face conversations of the sort that happen at EdCamps and #CoffeeCUE meetings are so valuable. Twitter, etc. are amazing tools, but I'm now ready to create a stronger face-to-face network on campus.

As we know all too well, however, there simply isn't enough time for us to do everything that our jobs require of us, while adding enough reflection time onto the pile of administrative tasks. For us to even have the chance to build a stronger liquid network, we need to rethink how we handle some of our administrative duties by exploring the adjacent possible within the educational structure.

The ideas of "20% time" and passion-based learning have grown very popular of late, as they indeed should, but I haven't yet seen many discussions about giving teachers and administrators similar blocked time devoted to reflection. For instance, why not create an occasional "unconference" forum for interested faculty to gather during the workday (not on our own time!) to talk about what's on our mind and share some of the ideas that we've been thinking through (e.g. readings, project ideas, PD experiences, etc.). Shouldn't this our standard model for faculty meetings, rather than the usual "sit and get"? If we had this kind of regular opportunity built into our schedule, perhaps we could encourage more creative thinking and 20% time work from faculty, in addition to students.

How else can we construct liquid networks within our schools? I greatly enjoyed reading this book and look forward to future discussions about how we can build a stronger liquid network. Feel free to share ideas either below or on Twitter on how we can build stronger liquid networks.

Pink's Drive and Motivation

Thanks to a bit of extra free time over spring break, I finally had some time to read Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, since I've been lately thinking about the sometimes tenuous relationship that faculty have with professional development (PD.  The first half of the book focuses on the problems of motivation mainly from the perspective of the the business world, but it has clear applications to other fields, especially teaching (Pink offers suggestions for parents and educators later in the book).  The book is fantastic, and Pink is able to articulate much of what most people know from intuition but don't put to practice.  I'll briefly underscore only a few of Pink's points that I found salient to me:

Pink argues compellingly that now is the time for "motivation 3.0", which is based on intrinsic nature in humans "to learn, to create, and to better the world" (225), to supplant reward vs. punishment-based motivation 2.0.  His arguments are all based on scientific studies, which he cites fully in his rather convincing attempt to prove that motivation 3.0 is a real phenomenon that the world just hasn't yet adjusted to.

Pink criticizes the "carrot and stick" model for motivating people to complete tasks in that it simply doesn't work.  While it may have some positive effect for more "algorithmic" tasks, it does nothing for "heuristic" work that requires creative and independent thought (27ff.).  Unfortunately, much of what we do in education is driven by algorithm (e.g. excessive lecturing, needless homework, standardized testing, etc.).

To break from this model, Pink underscores the role that autonomy plays in creating the intrinsic motivation that drives people both to be productive in a given task and to feel fulfilled in their work (83ff.).  He then offers several examples of the "results-only work environment" (ROWE), in which companies have given employees "FedEx" Days (e.g. Atlassian; cf. p. 91) and "20% time" (e.g. Google; cf. p. 94) to use for whatever creative projects they wish to work on, and the results have spoken volumes.

Ch. 6 discusses purpose and the "most underused word in the modern workplace: Why" (137).  I wholeheartedly agree that we don't often enough discuss the "whys" of what we do.  Failing to do so, I fear, can prevent the formation of a strong community, when the goals of a given project aren't immediately clear to those asked to support it.

While considering these ideas, I've been trying to think of ways to implement more 3.0 strategies in education.  My focus right now isn't in the classroom, however, but with faculty ourselves, given that it's very difficult for me to believe we can continue to be strong teachers if we're not doing regular PD.  We're too often busied with administrative tasks (albeit many of which are self-imposed) that we don't have a chance to explore, create, and stay "fresh".  Consequently, even potentially exciting PD work can seem like drudgery for some, rather than creating a sense of "flow" (a somewhat opaque "Zen" concept discussed on pp. 114ff.).

Based on these points, I've listed some ideas I've been churning:

• I'm interested in giving a "flow test" (153-4) or doing an "autonomy audit" (166-7) for both faculty and students.  I will be heading the Student Workload Committee at our school next year and will certainly incorporate some of these ideas.

• I'm thinking about ways to give faculty a periodic "FedEx" day to use as they please.  How would this look?  Is it even practical?  It's important, to my mind, to give faculty as much autonomy and freedom as we would like to give to our students.

• How could faculty then use "FedEx" days inside the classroom while simultaneously supporting their curriculum?  Cf. Mike Jackson's blog post on his own thoughts for giving students more autonomy.

• How can we restructure our current "team" models to give faculty more autonomy in what they do in their classes?

• Finally, we need to have more "why" conversations to foster community. They need to happen frequently and in small groups, where people can ask questions and feel open in voicing their opinions, even if dissenting.  The lack of teacher collaboration is well known (cf. this article from the Atlantic) and needs to be addressed.

I have more questions than answers right now, but I'm also optimistic that we have the opportunity on the horizon to do some interesting things.  I'd love to hear other reactions from those who have read Drive.  Alternatively, I welcome suggestions for other books.  Find me at @mosspike on Twitter to start a conversation.