Sheer Stupidity?

This is a story that has passed into legend. In other words, I can’t specifically remember who was involved or where it even came from. Maybe it never happened.

But the lesson remains the same. Take feedback and advice for what it’s worth, but you do you.

Picture two whitewater kayakers making their way down a raging river. One is a little bit ahead and sees what’s coming. It looks a bit daunting. The rushing waters are very loud so he has to shout back his thoughts on the proceedings.

“Sheer Stupidity!”

The other kayaker also has a bit of a view of what’s coming. It looks exciting. He knows he can do it. He sees his partner is shouting back. What he hears:

“Shoosty booty!”

Emboldened by his excitement and the nonsensical words of encouragement coming from his friend he shouts back:

“Yeah! Shoosty booty, baby!”

and heads down the raging river, over some falls, through the rapids for the ride of his life.

Maybe it was sheer stupidity, but it was definitely shoosty booty. If advice is shouted to you as you are navigating the waters, try to hear it. But also trust your gut, believe in yourself and go for it as you see fit. You may just have the ride of your life.

“Rapids” flickr photo by Dawn Endico https://flickr.com/photos/candiedwomanire/18309480 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Sliding In

A fantastic new opportunity begins for me this week. I’ll be joining the wonderful folks at eCampusOntario as a Program Manager! Three other PMs are already well into the work: Jenni Hayman, Peg French, and Joanne Kehoe. The program managers work to aid Ontario colleges and universities in the pursuit of great technology-enabled learning. I’m more than pumped to join this team and get in on some of the amazing work they’ve been doing. Get your coattails ready for me, friends!

I know a few little tidbits of what I’ll be focusing on at first. Including helping to extend the Ontario Extend project (is that meta-extension?). What I promised to do for eCampusOntario in my interview is shared below. They asked for a three slide presentation. I went for minimalism; only adding one main word to each slide and to highlight the areas of the Anatomy of 21st Century Educators that these one-word promises hit hardest.

I missed one very important word that supersedes the others. It may be implied, but here I want to make it explicit.

I will listen.

And I mean Chuck Pearson levels of listening.

This listening, writing, speaking and (community) building will happen on the Web, in person, and on the radio. By promising to do these things, I don’t mean to just do it by myself. I will share the spaces, in any opportunity that arises, with any educator willing to share stories, plans, and ideas. This can help us all have a shorter climb to the top.

I hope you’ll join in. I think it’s going to be a wonderful experience and I can’t wait to get started. Add a comment below if you want to connect.

“Slide…..” flickr photo by Jinx! https://flickr.com/photos/span112/2350360329 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Dear Me

Ontario Extend #48 – Write a Letter to Your Past Student Self


Dear Me in 1996,

It’s me, your self. From the fuuuuutttturrree, oooooo! Good job getting through high school with barely good enough marks to get in to university. I’m so proud of you. I’m laughing at you right now because you’re about to go into a Forestry degree at the University of Alberta. To become a forester. Hahahahahahaha that’s not what’s going to happen! Not even close! You pick the right way for you eventually. But oh boy, you were way off! The foresters of the world are doing just fine without you. You are about to go in to a 4 year bachelor’s degree program that you’ll breeze through in 7 years because you’re not sure what you want to do and you keep switching and taking time off. And then you do a couple more programs after that. It’s not so clear cut, is it? Keep guessing and I’ll see you when you get here.

Love,

Terry

featured image”Clear cut – White Hill” flickr photo by Rob Hurson https://flickr.com/photos/robhurson/14962527635 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Beautiful Learning

It’s a bit funny our positions in the Learning Design & Support Team. We love teaching and learning and we are tasked with helping Fleming faculty in their own teaching, but we don’t get to do it all that often any more ourselves. To really teach. So when we get a chance like the Fleming New Faculty Experience, I hope we don’t come across too strongly. We’re just very excited. I think we all started this week excited for the experience and ended it even more so. Y’all were beautiful learners.

Keeping these reflective posts short and sweet will help keep us coming back to write more and readers coming back to read more so I won’t dig to deeply into the week, other than to say thank you to everyone for playing along with us. I really, really enjoy reading your thoughts on how things are going through your blog posts and I hope you will continue to share them. To anyone reading this interested in seeing some of the posts, you can see them listed in the sidebar of the The Teaching Hub, which is a weekly blog post for Fleming College faculty by the Learning  Design & Support Team.

Oh and I want to share the results of our “First Presentation Slide of the Semester Beauty Pageant”. Everyone tied for first place. Except Liz Stone’s was more first place than the others.

In first pace: Benjamin Walters for his Forest Management Using GIS opening slide.

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Also in first place, Tom Brooke, for his Limnology III opener.

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And in first place, Matt Ryan for setting the stage for COMM 201 with tears of… joy?

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And finally, in actual real first place, we have Liz Stone’s first slide for Indigenous Perspectives. Looks great, Liz!

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I love pretty slides. Thanks for playing along and can’t wait to hear the stories of how your teaching and learning goes throughout the semester.

featured image: “2nd Annual “More than a Beauty Pageant”” flickr photo by UrbanPromise Camden, NJ https://flickr.com/photos/shannonoberg/16260674029 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

 

 

A Hoot

We used Kahoot briefly yesterday in the Fleming New Faculty Experience. It’s a quizzing tool that lots of people seem to really enjoy. It was easy to set up, easy to deliver and, I think, quite fun.

The way Kahoot works was involved in making it fun, but here’s what I found the most fun about our “hooting”: the banter.

See, we’re just beginning to build a community or culture of we’re-in-this-togetherness with each other. We threw the “hoot” together to get us to start thinking about what we do know and don’t know about learning outcomes and also to show Kahoot as a possible tool to use in the future. I enjoyed the banter more than the “hooting” itself in that we kept talking throughout about how we may or may not have any clue about the answers to these questions yet. We may not be activating any prior knowledge but instead getting the ball rolling on knowing our first things about the topic at hand. And that is more than okay. I especially enjoyed the banter coming back at me (Mary) about my choice of words in some of the questions and whether or not they made any sense. Talking about the wording drew us more deeply into the topic we were introducing. I’d like to say my poor choice of words was therefore planned, but I’m grasping at straws here.

But please, keep up the banter. I also really hope my incessant ‘verbing’ of Kahoot sessions as “hooting” will catch on.

Hoot, hoot!

Featured image: “Owl” flickr photo by Matt Biddulph https://flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/4681820992 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Begets

One thing begets another. Sometimes in very cool ways. Here are cool things that lead to other things for me this summer.

Step 1. Jenni Hayman (@jennihayman) from eCampusOntario asks me to share my story about how I got into Open Education on the #101OpenStories series

Step 2: Write a post about that story to get my thoughts together.

Step 3: Go on the #101OpenStories video chat to share that story. Get upstaged by Alice in adorable ways. Just watch her:

Step 4: Doug Pete’s This Week in Ontario Edublogs features the aforementioned blog post “Things Open“. Colour me flattered.

Step 5: Doug Pete also chats about this post, with Stephen Hurley, on his radio show of the same name on the VoicEd.ca radio station which chats about education in Canada 24/7. Colour me extra flattered.

Step 6: Stephen Hurley from aforementioned VoicEd.ca has me on his own radio show “In Conversation with Stephen Hurley”. I am now painted a nice, deep red flattered colour.

Step 7: (not yet completed) Stephen Hurley offers me the opportunity to have some time on the station to do a thing… A show? A… what? A weekly chat about Open Education? Sharing student projects? I don’t know yet! What would you do with the air time if you were me? Comment below if you have any brilliant ideas or want to go on air with me at some point.

“Baguettes” flickr photo by SteveR- https://flickr.com/photos/git/200262036 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Things Open

How did I become involved in things open? Funny you should ask because I’ve been asked to contribute to www.101openstories.org to tell my Open Education origin story. I’ll be on a live video call on that site on July 27th telling this story. If my past video experience can predict the outcome of this one, it should be funny for you and embarrassing for me. Luckily for me I haven’t been in the open game long, so I seem to still have access to most of the memories. I’ll tell you the story here, too. Spoiler alert if you want to watch the video!

It was a dark and stormy night way back in the fall of 2015. And by dark and stormy night, I believe it was actually quite mild and the middle of the day. I was in the office of Judith Limkilde, then the Dean of General Arts and Science of Fleming College, for my performance review. As any good boss would do, Judith asked me what I would like to do for professional development over the next year. I knew this question would be coming and I had prepared an in depth answer that was probably something like: “Umm, I’d like to brush up on some, like, digital skills and stuff.” I had come across some weird, free thing that was called ds106 that promised to show you a thing or two about digital storytelling. I wanted to do it, but I wasn’t sure exactly why at the time. Judith said okay, go right ahead.

I know what it was that drew me in now. I wasnt looking for “open” or “free” or anything. Just some online learning. There’s a lot of learning stuff on the Internet: Coursera, Udacity, Lynda, whatever. It all looks slick and umm… what’s the word? Lifeless. ds106 was different though. It wasn’t all that polished looking, but here’s a lesson for all the other slicker than snot venture capital funded bore-o-systems: You could see the work of the students everywhere. What? I get to see what the other people do with these instructions? I can take their ideas and build off them? I could add my ideas for how to participate in the course? I might see my own stuff on this site?  That was my fire for open all lit up right there.

I’ve been opening up ever since.

Since then, and directly or indirectly from participating in ds106, I have been able to:

  • Grow a pretty darn good professional learning network on Twitter where I can actually ask questions of and get response from superheroes in Open Education. You can, too.
  • Volunteer with Virtually Connecting, where I get to be involved with and help others get access to educational conferences all over the world that we would not otherwise have access to. Another chance to connect with and have access to open thinkers around the world.
  • Participate and practice regular, reflective and creative open practice through a few different domains. These include one for my own personal professional learning banter (this one), a weekly professional learning blog for Fleming College faculty which adds about 500% more fun to my day job (The Teaching Hub) and The Open Faculty Patchbook. (More about that one in the next bullet point.)
  • Help create a how-to-teach manual for higher ed pedagogy called the Open Faculty Patchbook in which faculty from all over tell us how they deploy specific pedagogical skills. What we’ve collected so far is being published into the first iteration of the manual. You can see it on its Pressbook site here. All of the patches are wonderful tales of the trials and tribulations from people in the thick of higher ed teaching and learning. It’s a testament to the wonderful character of the people of open that these 21 people took the time to write a chapter of our book and share it openly with everyone for no incentive other than the desire to contribute.
  • Use and contribute to the Creative Commons by openly licensing my work and using the openly licensed work available. For those of you out there who openly license your photos, my blog posts and slide decks thank you dearly for the added panache!
  • Be added to the roster of Ontario’s Open Education Rangers by eCampusOntario. I believe this means I am able to deputize people into the movement.
  • Become known in certain open circles as the #crapbadge hander-outer. I wrote a reflective blog post after attending the Open Ed conference in Fall 2016: An Opening Move. In it I awarded a very poorly drawn badge to someone whom I thought did a great presentation. I now use my sub-par artistic skills and the Snipping Tool to award crap-badges for simple but awesome deeds on request. Sometimes on demand. Here’s my latest, awarded to Chuck Pearson for his amazing patch of the Open Faculty Patchbook. You can just see the artistry oozing out of it:DFQjOlNUMAADMlS.jpg
  • Oh and, to me, the ultimate sign of making it as a member of ds106 culture and open in general; look up and to your right and see that I am an Official Talky Tina character of the Internet. This fact will be on my gravestone or urn or whatever I end up in.

It’s been a pretty great time opening up so far. Join in! You can find me in twitter @greeneterry

“Open the door” flickr photo by hernanpba https://flickr.com/photos/hernanpc/15475728248 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

 

 

 

Summer’s Killing Us: Summer Reading List

It’s just read, read, read all day.

What’s on your summer reading list? For fun or for learning, what do you plan to read? Here’s mine:

Finish Mindstorms, Seymour Papert

#EdTechRations, David Hopkins

We Make the Road By Walking, Myles Horton and Paulo Friere

The Revenge of The Monsters of Educational Technology and anything Audrey Watters

Blogs or any writing from Alan Levine, Maha Bali, Amy Collier, Jim Groom, Adam Croom, Martin Weller, Gardner Campbell and on and on!

I also hope to read a bunch of blogs from Fleming faculty about what they’re thinking of doing this fall in their teaching. You can see some on the RSS feed sidebar on this page

By the way, Summer’s Killing Us is a song from that other Tragically Hip. The second one. The one we all thought wasn’t as good. The one I think I realize now is better than the first. They didn’t give us more of the same. They kept changing. Kept not being what we thought of them. I’m happy to realize it now because now I have all this great stuff to re-discover. It’s going to do me like the dishes.

What We Can Have With Open

Think of one of your favorite bands. Think of who influenced them and whom they in turn influenced further. Think of the bands that they toured with or were ‘competing with’ at the time. They all relied on each other to be what they were and are. They all knew what the other bands were doing with their craft. That’s what we can have if we share our teaching and learning more. Much more.

Music is not quite open like education can be. Musicians mostly retain their copyright and want to make money off of it. But it is open as in we mostly have access to hearing it. Whether it’s on the radio, online sharing or even actually buying music, we mostly all can pretty much hear what’s out there.

Not so much in education. Not enough anyway.

We wouldn’t have the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin without the blues. We wouldn’t have Kendrick Lamar without Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. We wouldn’t have much anything without The Beatles. Heck, Canada wouldn’t have The Tragically Hip without the Rolling Stones. This would make Canada sad.

We wouldn’t have lots of things without being able to hear about lots of other things. Look at how many sub-genres of “Rock” there are on the Free Music Archive

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What would music be like if the only time you could ever hear The Clash was inside the one classroom where Joe Strummer was teaching his Writing the Future class? It would be crap, I tells ya.

Here’s what we can have a lot more of if our educational practices were shared as openly as music:

We can have “influences”

I am influenced in my thinking about teaching and learning by Maha Bali, Alan Levine, Gardner Campbell, Audrey Watters and Robin DeRosa among a whole bunch of others. Good thing they are all super open, or I wouldn’t know who the heck they are. More sharing so I can have more influences, please.

We can have “scenes”

Did you hear that the Indie Ed-Tech scene in Oklahoma is so hot right now? Well, you can hear about it, because open. Let’s have Seattle Grunge, Montreal Indie Rock, and Chicago Hip Hop-like scenes for education.

We can have “new genres”

I for one want to be associated with the Trailing Cutting Edge genre in which we don’t think ed-tech is cool until it’s like ten years old at least. We’re weirdos.

How will this happen?

Not much to it but to get yourself writing about your teaching. And sharing that. On a blog, probably. And tweet it out, too. Tweet it to me (@greeneterry). I’ll check it out.

featured image: “Showcase @ Diablo •  Dia 3 • 10/05/2017” flickr photo by Festival Bananada 2017 https://flickr.com/photos/bananada2017/34428700640 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

 

The Huck Finnification of Education

“83” flickr photo by Sharon Gerald https://flickr.com/photos/sgerald/24608048596 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Earlier this week I attended a Creativity Workshop put on by the International Center for Studies in Creativity.

I want to share just one activity we went through in which I inadvertently Huck Finnified education. Now to be fair, all I really remember about Huck Finn is him + raft + river = freedom. That seems like a good direction for some (lots) of education to go.

The activity was a story-boarding exercise that is meant to help you to plan for reaching your goals. You get a 6 or 8 panel sheet and start by drawing your starting point in panel one and your end point in the last panel. You then fill in the blanks in between, making them up as you go. It being a creativity workshop you were free to be free thinking, so somehow mine involved a gondola and Huckleberry Finn. Despite (or maybe because of) those silly bits, I was able to maybe see some stepping stones to a less silly goal.

Here is the legend for what you are about to witness

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…and here is the sheet, pre-‘art’

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The beginning: a class with PowerPoint stinking onto students. PowerPoint really is the Nickelback of ed-tech, isn’t it?

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The end goal: learning whilst floating down a river on a raft like Huck Finn

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How do we get there? I don’t know! Maybe this is step one: Screen share from devices to screens on the side of the room.

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And then what? I don’t know! Maybe this is the next step. Why even those side screens. Step 2 was silly. Let’s just share device to device. Also less walls now somehow.

20170524_152148What is even the next step? Who knows! Maybe this ridiculous step. We can just share device to device now so we can take the imaginary gondola down to the river. How come gondolas aren’t used as public transit options by the way?20170524_152748

And then what? This is so ridiculous now does it even matter? Oh yeah! We’re at the river. Let’s get on these rafts. Huck Finn time.

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Now we can go full Ed-Huck Finn.

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The whole silly affair.20170526_131602

You may be able to use this story-boarding activity to actual good use yourself. try it out!

 

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