Professional Development, Complexity, and Mutual Responsibility

This week's exploration of technology professional development was probably one of the most intensely reflective weeks I have experienced in a long time. 1000 words is insufficient to describe this reflective journey so....here we go.

Short Version:

Like snowflakes, every professional is highly unique and complex. In order for each professional to develop we need professional development opportunities that honor this uniqueness and complexity. Shifting topics in seminars does not actually produce diverse experiences. Responsibility for the effectiveness of professional development falls on the shoulders of the designers AND the participants.

Setting the Stage:

A) If the learning opportunity is passive, doesn't meet the needs of the learner, and the designer doesn't understand the participants then development is unlikely:

Click here for a humorous but poignant example.

B) Each individual has unique and specific needs, wants, histories, beliefs, experiences, working contexts, and perceptions that can make meeting their needs very demanding:



Judi Harris in her four part series "One Sized Doesn't Fit All: Customizing Educational Technology Professional Development" (2008) does an excellent job of exploring these complexities. Over this four part series she lists the following factors to consider in terms of technological professional development:

• learning needs/preferences


• personal/school/district goals. In Part 1 of her series she lists awareness, curriculum integration, shifts in instructional techniques, curricular/instructional reform, organizational change, and social change.


• technological adoption style. In Part 3 of her series she suggests four highly distinct groups: innovators, early adopters, late adopters, and laggards. Individuals from each group vary in their openness to utilitzing new technologies and their ability to navigate the bumps and bruises along the way to adopting these new technologies.


• curriculum content


• pedagogical slants


• and the list goes on

Kimberley Ketterer (2007) deepens adds to this discussion of complexity by exposing that different professionals prefer to learn in different ways.

• Coach - "They are willing to take risks at integrating technology into their curriculum as long as they have support and encouragement from a colleague tbey can trust" (p. 21)


• Nurture - "They need a nurturing teaching partner who is willing to help develop and model lessons. Someone to provide encouragement to move forward applauding small achievements while at the same time, continually building self-confidence." (p. 21)


• Nudge - "only attend tecbnology integration workshops when attendance is mandated. They need to be gently pushed, prodded, and cajoled into learning how to integrate technology." (p. 21)

Hopefully the above points will support my claim that polarizing teachers into two camps (new school and old school) is not accurate.

As professionals we spend countless hours on differentiated instructional techniques for our students...why don't we apply the same principles to ourselves?

Implications:

1) We need to redefine ourselves as learners above all else. If teachers, administrators, librarians, and educational tech. support staff did this then maybe we would afford ourselves the same level of expertise and attention we give our students

So much of professional development is throwing everyone in a room and having them learn the same stuff. Maybe there is some choice in the offerings, but by and large there is very little attempt at creating a customized professional development curriculum for teachers...Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids. Will Richardson

2) Individualized development plans with a communal flavour is the recipe for success.

Technology-related professional development is undergoing a transformation. Previously, teachers were expected to become proficient with technology through a series of sessions and limited support resources (Plair,2008, p. 71)

According to Plair (2008) many plans lack the personal touch and the time investment needed to allow teachers to master the technology. Harris (2008) concurs:

"Research evidence indicates that 30 hours of focused professional development,
on average, is required to change teachers' professional practice...most
teachers probably have not had sufficient time or opportunity to engage in
the kinds of professional learning necessary to help them to use educational
technologies in new ways to assist their students'learning." (p. 18)

Personal learning networks may hold the key:

"A Personal Learning Network or PLN is a dedicated learning environment unique to each individual. What does that mean? It means that this is a place where people create their own environment which helps them to grow/learn. This can be done in many different ways through collaborating, blogging, social networking, etc. What makes PLN’s so great is that they are different for everybody but their goals are usually the same. That goal is to learn and share knowledge and to find a passion and follow it to the best of your ability." unquietlibrarian

In short, money and resources should be put behind teachers connecting with other professionals. These networks and communities mean more than sharing resources; they are mini research teams, instant "geek squad" tech support crews, midnight hour "Dr. Philish" emotional support teams, instantaneous/specific feedback syndicates and best of all...groups of professionals sharing real life examples of technological best practices. Thanks to web 2.0 tools there are countless ways to establish these networks with little or no expense. Cathy Nelson, David Kapuler provide some ideas on what these networks look like and how they can be set up.

3) Leaders are needed to make technology integration possible. Scott Macleod very bluntly asserts that "administrators are the only individuals with the ability to redesign school
organizations. They set the vision, control the budget, reassign personnel, empower others, alter school culture, establish priorities, facilitate buy-in, reallocate resources, and ensure organizational alignment." I agree with him that administrators are key as they can get creative to free teachers up to pursue professional networking opportunites and to play with technology. I would go one step further and say it is also the teachers' and librarians' responsibility to demand this type of leadership and creativity. If we don't demonstrate a desire for more effective professional development, if we don't persistently vocalize how present models hobble our effectiveness, and if we don't actively pursue technology integration ourselves then we are just as culpable for our inability to meet the needs of 21st century learners.

I am out of room for this week. Take a tour of my blog postings. I am the evidence for the power of sustained and focused professional development. Since September I have been part of a digital professional network and I can confidently say that I am a completely new teacher ready to tackle the 21st Century. Imagine the state of education if system wide professional development empowered every educator to make the same claim.

Nonhyperlinked resources (all of these are must reads):

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, February, 18-23.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, March/April, 22-26.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, May, 22-25.

Harris, J. (2008). One size doesn't fit all: Customizing educatonal technology professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, June/July, 24-27

Ketterner, K. (2007). Coach, nurture, or nudge: How do you learn technology best? Learning and Leading with Technology, May, 21.

Plair, S. (2008). Revamping professional development for technology integration and fluency. The Clearing House, 82(2), 70-74.

Trust and Privacy in a Knowledge Based Economy

Setting the Stage

"The knowledge-based economy: Developed economies have traditionally relied on the production and sale of manufactured goods, like steel, cars and consumer goods. In the modern knowledge-based economy, it is the creation and management of technology and information that drives commerce and the creation of jobs." Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA)


"There's an old saying. It's never the problem you see that gets you, it's the one you don't see. So it is with secondary uses of personal information. This hazard arises when information is collected for one legitimate and authorized purpose, and then later used for another, unauthorized or illegitimate purpose." Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA)


"Privacy seems to come down to trust. Trust that the people in charge are considering my best interest." Dawnelai's Blog



Short Version
Living on the internet is like walking through a mall with a group of corporate execs and shady characters with notepads documenting everything you do. The business execs learn what they can so your next walk through their mall will be more fruitful for you and for them. Who knows what the shady characters are doing...they're shady. Thank heavens for the giant bouncer you are walking with (the government) as he/she is trying to make sure you and your info are okay.


Longer Version

Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs offers a lot of great information about how public our privacy actually is:
1) "When we make a phone call, use our bank machine, or make a purchase at the store, we leave an electronic record of our whereabouts and habits."
2) Modern technology allows all the digital pieces of our travels to be collected. This includes info from cell phones, faxes, answering machines, debit cards, credit cards, emails....the list goes on.
3) Almost anything I do online creates some sort of record on my computer and on my internet service provider's servers.
4) You can delete your trails on your computer but:

"every time you connect to the Internet, you create an electronic record -- a data shadow -- that shows every web site you have visited while on-line. This kind of shadow is temporarily recorded on your Internet service provider's (your "ISP's") computer. Whether it is deleted frequently, or kept permanently depends on your ISP. Now governments have asked service providers to keep that data, to help fight the war on crime and terrorism." (OCA)

5) Communicating online through emails can be risky. Your messages can be intercepted and even if you are at work your correspondence could be viewed by your employer. Encrypting your email is a good idea.
6) Data cookies may be advertised benign and nonspecific information but they do say something about you and they are used to influence your online experience. If someone gathered all these little pieces of info. they could get a fairly accurate picture of who you are.

Watch the following videos about cookies and privacy settings. They are informative. As you are watching, ask yourself whose interests are truly being served? Do I trust the information being offered from a corporate entity who exists to make money?





Now compare the above message to the message in the video below. Before you watch below...ask yourself "Are social networking tools designed for me to share or for others to learn about me?"



So What?

I really appreciated my colleague's posting on this issue entitled "Privacy…we just can’t hide.". Dawnelai directed me to a quote by Danah Boyd who is quickly becoming a digital mentor to me:

"People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline. But what privacy means may not be what you think.

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting." Danah Boyd

I believe educators have the moral and ethical responsibility to teach students the critical components of trust. In Danah and Dawnelai's writings they reference trust. In the above quote, trust was linked to understanding and interpretation. If schools are going to spend millions of dollars on technology and in training librarians and teachers how to appropriate the strengths of web 2.0 then we need to equally focus on staff and students being critical consumers. Everything we do online leaves a trail. We trust the government and our ISP's to guard that trail and to make sure we have some measure of control over what is done with our information. We trust our friends and the friends of our friends to honour us by following unwritten codes of social conduct when it comes to our information. We trust businesses to protect our information as we believe they want to keep us as repeat customers.
The key words for me in Danah's quote are "interpretation and context". Schools need to become institutions filled with people who are professionals at critically interpreting immediate and broader contexts. For instance, it is important that we teach staff and students that the information they place on a social networking site actually may become the property of that site. This may not be a big deal if all people involved in the immediate context understand the rules of the game.

But what happens when the broader context changes like we are experiencing now? In order to protect us from terrorism and intellectual piracy, governments and corporations are changing how privacy and control are interpreted/experienced.




"In accordance with our conceptualization of the privacy of the act of reading, libraries have traditionally treated the privacy of readers as sacred. Privacy is a central, core value of libraries. This is the reason for librarians’ anger over provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that can force libraries to reveal information about the reading habits of their patrons to the FBI and other government investigators."
http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=68

"In 2007, the Conservative government amended copyright legislation. Under the new rules, making illegal movie recordings became a criminal offence punishable by six months in jail and a $25,000 fine.

Brand is concerned the enforcement of those piracy laws could violate Canada's privacy laws, because in order to monitor illegal uploads and downloads online, authorities would have to monitor a person's entire internet connection, he claims.

"Any prohibition on downloading works — that has a huge impact on the sort of privacy side of things. In order to know that I'm not downloading any works illegally, you have to monitor my internet connection. That's not the kind of society that I want to live in," Brand said"

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2010/03/17/bc-copyright-movie-pirate-conviction.html

This week was an eye opener for me. I am still pumped about teaching in the 21st Century. I was just reminded in a new way that we can't play school or hide our heads in the sand. If we take either of those options, our students may continue to express their fundamental freedoms online with no true understanding of what that may mean in an imperfect world full of rules, interpretations, corporate interests, and political contexts that are constantly in flux.

Creative Commons and A Tale of Two Traumas

Childhood Trauma #1

When I was just a lad sporting a lovely but lopsided afro (trauma for another posting) I often suffered from canker sores or aphthous ulcers if you prefer. One day I asked my mother how to get rid of them. Her instructions were to use a glass of hot salt water, and she emphasized hot. I took her advice without question and went on to rectify my problem. Long story shorter, I began drinking salt water!!! As you can imagine, something didn't feel quite right inside but an how could my mom be wrong? Much later, when she found out, she had a laugh and corrected me. "Gargle son, what would make you swallow salt water?" Traumatic.

Learning about intellectual property and copyright law has been a similar experience. Over the past week I have realized I have based much of how I teach on interpretations of other teachers' interpretations of these issues.

Key Lessons and Corrections:

1) Copyright Laws are Complicated: Okay, this belief was true. I defy any kid let alone any busy teacher to make sense of Canadian copyright law (Document found here). These laws do establish the rights of my students' intellectual property which is basically anything their minds can produce (Butler, 2005) but not the ideas themselves (intellectual freedom wiki). They establish what other people can and can't do but the language is so complicated it often turns people like me off.

2) Copyright Laws can be Restrictive: This I knew but Professor Lessig opened my eyes to how restrictive. He shared that our new digitial world founded on the idea that every user is a creator and the key function of creating is sharing. He also shares that copyright laws were created before this common reality and therefore limit the freedoms of creators who genuinely want to share. This brings in the new alternative...Creative Commons (Take the time to watch Professor Lessig's video below)



3) Creative Commons = anti-trauma device: Creative Commons is a relatively new movement(created in 2003) that provides creators of content a simple, clear, and effective way to share (not restrict the use)their content. In short, with the use of a few basic symbols people who access your intellectual property will know exactly how they can use, copy, remix, and share your property. Bye, bye insanely huge legal documents. For a full explanation view the video below and click here.



4) Educators aren't gods: Early on in my career multiple colleagues shared with me that as a teacher I could copy pretty much whatever I wanted as long as it was for school. As long as I could label the activity as educational...I was untouchable. Much of what I believed is actually only partly true and the myths I believed are common to many teachers (Matthew Neeldeman) Once I looked at Canada's fair dealing exceptions many of my materials are in direct violation of our laws. Did you know there are strict time restrictions on how long teachers can have recordings of television or radio broadcasts? Did you know that there "are no guidelines that define the number of words or passages that can be used without permission from the author. Only the courts can rule whether fair dealing or infringement is involved" (CIPO)

Implications and Trauma #2

My dad didn't really set curfews. He allowed me to decide when to go to bed. I interpreted that freedom as it didn't really matter to him or anybody else. I selectively ignored his important statement "Don't let your night life interfere with your day life." I stayed up super late every night and it took me a long time to realize that my dad, my teachers, and countless other people were impacted during the day by my poor decisions at night. You think I would have learned quicker as my dad always made a point of getting me up early after my latest nights.

1) Students have rights - I was reminded teachers and librarians have been tasked with protecting and facilitating students' intellectual freedoms. According to Lamb (2007) this includes allowing our students to participate in rich experiences that the read/write web has to offer. She also includes removing restrictions and increasing access. This fits perfectly with utilizing Creative Commons licenses and materials. If they have access to materials that were designed with sharing in mind, they can freely wander, borrow, and create...legally!!!

2) What we do matters - It seems weird saying this to teachers but...our students learn about how to exercise their rights and their freedoms from us so we need to know what we are doing. Mike Ribble (2008) wrote about the importance of digital citizenship to our students. In this article he outlines a four stage model for teaching digital citizenship. The stages are awareness, guided practice, modeling and demonsrtation, and feedback and analysis. Key statements from this article:

"Awareness means engaging students to become technologically literate....Students need to learn what is appropriate and not appropriate when using different digital
technologies." (p. 16)

"Following awareness activities, educators need to provide their students
with opportunities to use the technology under their guidance by focusing
on “appropriate use of technology.” (p. 16)

"Adults need to be positive role models of good digital citizenship so
students can follow their example." (p. 16)

I was short changing my students by not acknowledging issues like copyright and intellectual property. By modeling a wreckless abandon approach as I surfed, copied and pasted from the net I was modeling poor digital citizenship. In short, how can teachers participate in any of the above activities if they refuse to educate themselves and fully acknowledge the value intellectual property? Or as Jennifer Janesko asks "If we, teachers and parents, do not clearly understand copyright and fair use issues, how do we properly teach our students?" (2008, p. 9)

3) Change takes time - My colleagues and I discussed about how quick and easy it is to ignore copyright and just do whatever we want...after all it is for the kids. Learning about copyright laws and finding highly effective and engaging creative commons content will take time. BUT if we communally explore the commons we can help each other out (Click here to get started or try ccMixter)

4) Ignorance and apathy have consequences - Some people make their living through their intellectual property...through their creative works. Haphazardly stealing from others just because technology makes it easy harms real people. One of my colleagues this week shared how the intellectual theft of her husband's artwork profited the burglar but hurt them. Our actions do have consequences and we as educators need to act as if this is true and instill this truth in the hearts and minds of the next generation of digital citizens.

Non-hyperlinked Resources:

Butler, R. (2005). Social responsibility: Intellectual property defined. Knowledge Quest, 34(1), 41-42.

Janesco, J. (2008). Do students respect intellectual property? Learning & Leading with Technology,May, 8-9.

Lamb, A. (2007). Intellectual freedom for youth. Knowledge Quest, 36(2), 38-45.

Ribble, M. (2008). Passport to digital citizenship: Journey toward appropriate technology use at school and at home. Learning & Leading with Technology, December, 14-17.