New Digs

So... as of the summer of 2012, there have been some exciting changes in my professional life, and these have led me to consider a fresh start as far as work-related blogging is concerned.

Accordingly, effective immediately, I'll be posting over at Connected Learnings, where (never fear) you'll also find all these posts from Relax. No, really. As well as an explanation for what's going on!

Please follow me up and/or swing by with some banana bread. :-)

Homework

(Photo used under Creative Commons license)

For the Evolution of Cooperation class on I'm currently taking with Howard Rheingold, our assignment this week was to write a response to the following question (which was proposed by one of the co-learners and selected by Howard):

How can we apply the concepts from the work of Axelrod and the others to the operation of an ordinary workgroup? Like a university department, a unit in a business, or maybe a local social club? In particular, how do we use new technologies for this purpose?

(Robert Axelrod's seminal "Three Conditions for Human Cooperation" is summarized here (.pdf).

“Once the word gets out that reciprocity works – among nations or among individuals - it becomes the thing to do.”  Robert Axelrod

My answer: Some work environments seem to operate with a deep structure of “every man for himself.” Cooperation grows out of a set of interconnected cultural conditions, some of which might well be in direct opposition to the prevailing “mainstream” mindset of some workers. In order to open up a space in which cooperation could thrive, one might need to undertake some inquiry around the cultural constraints - both intended and inadvertent - of the current system. What are the perceived rewards available to participants in the work group? Acknowledgment, money, status, perks, time off, formal or informal recognition, additional opportunities and/or responsibilities? When are these rewards tied specifically to outcomes, and when are they connected to process? Are rewards typically attached to individual acts or to collective ones? Do group members have a shared understanding of the workings of these systems of actions and rewards? Do incentives seem to support competition, reflection, cooperation, cross-pollination, stagnation, or... some combination thereof?

If the group shares common outcome goals, do the members also share some agreement about process, i.e. about how best to reach those goals? Should acknowledgment or rewards be moved away from individual efforts and towards instances of collaboration and cooperation? If one of the process goals of a group is increased cooperation, storytelling can play a vital role in helping to reinforce a shared sense of purpose. Stories of times when cooperation worked can be held up as positive examples. And moves which run counter to a stated goal of increased cooperation can both be acknowledged and framed within a context of forgiveness and re-dedication to the goal.

In addition to looking critically at the rewards structures and shared understandings within a group, members could also benefit from an analysis of the effects of their schedule and physical environment on their work together. How does a work day that runs from 9am to 5pm map onto individual workers’ biological rhythms? What are the affordances of a work space in which everyone works behind a closed door? Open work spaces can amplify the possibilities for collaboration by reducing barriers between people. They can also be distracting. (ref. David Korfhage)

Finally, what about all these screens to which we give more and more of our attention; can they simultaneously be drawing us both away from each other and towards each other? How do the technologies we use or resist enable, empower, and/or undermine cooperation? Could encouraging members to post questions and answers in a school- or company-wide forum help break down disciplinary “silos”? Might having a group leader who blogs about her failures open up a space for her team members to take more risks? Will the increasingly “on demand” availability of answers to content-based questions move us all beyond thinking of informationalhoarding as a legitimate strategy for gaining advantage? As we witness wide-scale collaborative endeavors take hold across a multitude of disciplines, will an increasing awareness of cooperative options result in an increased sense that “reciprocity works”? Or will we all just amuse ourselves, if not to death, then at least into ever cozier and tighter filter bubbles, like hermit crabs in reverse?

Who is creating new patterns of action? Which of these will be transparently shared? And of those shared, which will fall on fertile soil and take root?

(More questions than answers...

the usual!)

NAIS in Seattle

(Creative Commons licensed image via Flickr)

The last time I attended the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) annual conference was when it was in NYC a few years back. This year, the conference was in Seattle, and the likelihood of my being able to take time away from work to travel so many miles from home during application-review season seemed somewhat remote. But then the session proposal that two of my colleagues and I pulled together was accepted, and suddenly the trip to Seattle became non-negotiable!

The NAIS annual conference is a "big picture event." Many of the 4000 or so people who make the commitment to attend are entrusted with leadership roles within their school communities; heads of school, school trustees, deans of faculty, directors of development, that sort of thing. And blue blazers. Lots and lots of those.

The quality and range of the program offerings (the conference schedule booklet was 80 pages long!) was strong enough that session selection was a genuine challenge, with two of the sessions I would have been most interested in attending - Jonathan Martin's Schools of the Future Workshop, and Jamie Field Baker's session on Innovating the Strategic Plan - scheduled in the same time slot as our own! Thankfully, our session was well-attended and benefitted from the lively participation of some engaged and thoughtful people, which made it all seem worth it. It was also encouraging to have those moments of recognition, when a representative from another school talked about an initiative in an area that we've already made strides in, whether it was "the believing game," campus-wide wireless access to the internet for both students and faculty, globalization, sustainability, or research-driven pedagogy.

I thought that NAIS President Pat Bassett did a great job of both mapping out a vision for NAIS ("We want the organization to serve as a hub and a resource for those schools working to innovate"), and challenging member schools to push themselves and acknowledge the ways in which the learning landscape has fundamentally changed. "Power used to depend upon restricted access to knowledge and information. Until about ten years ago. Now it’s all available… anytime, anywhere, to anyone w/ an internet connection." He went on to cite some of the MacArthur Foundation's research on learning shifts, including the following shifts (which in turn are reminiscent of David Warlick's "Students vs. Learners" chart):

From knowing… to doing (project-based learning)

From teacher-centered... to student-centered

From the individual... to the team

From the consumption of info… to the construction of meaning

From schools… to networks (online peers & experts)

From single sourcing… to crowd sourcing

Pat's tone, while generally positive, was tinged with concern; I got the sense that he feels schools which are unable to make these shifts run the risk of contracting a terminal case of irrelevancy. Throughout the conference, I was struck by the implied tension between those who "get it" already, and those who are only just beginning to "get it." In Chris Bigenho's great session with Jason Kern & Larry Kahn about running a TEDx Youth Day at a school, some of those drawn to the conversation seemed to despair of ever getting "the powers that be" at their schools to agree to such an energy-hungry commitment, in part because of the already existing constraints on student and faculty time.

In addition to my continuing to muse on the questions Mathieu Plourde has been wrestling with around how people are moved to change their learning practices, my two biggest "take-aways" from this conference were related to alignment and reflection. In a session entitled, "Who's Really Teaching Our Kids? The Importance of Intentional School Cultures," Ellen Taussig and Lucinda Lee Katz made a compelling case for the need for us to be intentional about school cultures, because a "default" culture is neither common nor intentional. "Alignment of culture across the entire organization is of vital importance. The clearer and stronger you are able to be, with multiple points of re-iteration, the stronger you’ll be as a community," was the crux of their message, and of course it made me want to fly home and assess my own learning community's level of cultural intentionality.

And reflection? We've moved into an era of flows, rather than stocks, of information and knowledge. (And here I'm riffing on ideas from Jerry Michalski's initial TummelVision conversation, where he in turn cites Mark Lesser's book, LESS: Accomplishing More By Doing Less.) The now-defunct print version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was an inland sea; Wikipedia is a river. Comment streams on blogs are (usually) a trickle compared with Twitter's raging torrent. Our 24-hour media landscape is now non-stop flow flow flow, and we carry it with us seemingly everywhere. This makes carving out spaces that are supportive of reflection that much more difficult... and that much more necessary. Reflection is an essential ingredient to the formation of new ideas (at least it is for me), as well a foundation of greater awareness. But we're often too busy to reap those benefits.

How do we build spaces for reflection into our individual lives and into the culture of our communities? This is one of the big questions I brought home with me from Seattle. Next year, NAIS is coming to Philadelphia, and I hope many more members of my school community will be able to take advantage of the opportunity to swim in that particular sea. (Information on submitting a session proposal is here...)

(I didn't even mention John Hunter's amazing session

on The World Peace Game, which deserves a post all its own!

Luckily, Jonathan Martin has written just such a post.

Many thanks to our Head of School and Board of Trustees,

whose support made my attendance at this year's conference possible.)

Slow Thinking and Great Questions

"Close Your Eyes and Smile!"

Lisa Thuman & Liz Davis facilitating at EduCon2.4

(photo from Flickr, by Stephen Ransom, aka @ransomtech)

From David Jakes' powerful "What if..." framing to Zac Chase's investigation of inquiry as a tool, questions ruled the day at EduCon 2.4 this year.

It was my third year attending live (the first year I had to attend virtually because I had a terrible cold), and once again I collected pre- and post-reflections from other attendees in a digital archive.

I attended great sessions again this year, most of which have already been reflected upon by someone else by now.

It occurred to me, while sitting in a fantastic session facilitated by Kirsten Olson, Chad Sansing, Christina Cantrill, and Paul Oh (via Skype) and thinking about contributing, that maybe part of the reason I like collecting others' reflections on the experience is that I know it will take me a while to process my own reflections. That session was the first time I've ever "outed" myself as a slow thinker to a group of people. Later someone said to me, "You just need more processing time," which I think might be true.

Since then, I've told several more people about my "drink deeply, process, then reflect transparently" pattern, and have had some great conversations come out of that. It felt like a risky admission the first time, but has felt less and less so with each subsequent re-telling. (You'd think I would have been able to predict this classic "coming out" pattern!)

Another thread I noticed running through the sessions this year at EduCon was the increasing emergence of the "how can we ask this of students if we're not even willing to try it ourselves?" meme. I saw and hears more introspection on the part of educators about their roles... within their classrooms, their schools, and their learning communities.

Conferences like EduCon and the edcamps, coupled with Twitter, have changed how I think about thinking.

I'm more willing to share a thought that feels nascent and unformed, because I've seen others do so and been grateful for it. I'm much more interested in tapping into the genius of the room than I am in "standing and delivering" up at the front. (I've heard several people say that edcamp has "spoiled them" on traditional conferences... more on that in a future post.) I'm more aware than ever of who's NOT in the room, partially because of the continuing challenge of inclusivity, and because I can always feel myself leaning in when someone is speaking from their individual, lived experience. And my inability to coax, cajole, or otherwise convince anyone from my current school community to join me at EduCon makes me wonder... about my own abilities as a leader, and about how many different guises resistance to change can take.

I continue to long for the opportunity to hear more student voices, and wonder how EduCon would feel if the call for conversations explicitly stated that proposals which included student perspectives would be given preference. (It's a tribute to EduCon's focus on the idea of co-creation that I can even imagine such a thing; so many conferences seem to (rightly?) assume that students wouldn't want to have anything to do with such an event.) And everywhere I go, sensitized as I am, I see and hear other people asking questions about who's in the room:

In #AreWeThereYet panel at #SXSWedu, poll of audience makeup: teachers: 5, admins: 4, content/publishers: 20+, other biz: 5. Wow.

— Thor Prichard (@thorprichard) March 7, 2012

So... I left EduCon determined to nudge my work in schools closer to something that feels like co-creation. And I came home feeling clearer about the fact that I am now more interested in asking great questions than in finding right answers. I find that I'm lifting others' questions up for sharing more often as well. Questions like Bud Hunt's, who in this post asked, "How do you build love and care into your systems and infrastructures and learning environments and experiences?" Or Shelley Wright's, who recently asked, “What are you doing to fire up their curiosity, rather than just demanding their compliance?”

(I'm so pleased to be getting this post up!

It's over a month since EduCon2.4 wound down.

I wonder if I'll be the

totally unofficial EduCon2.4 archive's caboose...)

Are Ready for Your Closeup?

A friend recently asked if anyone had advice about preparing for a Skype interview. He was asking on behalf of an adult friend applying for an academic job, but I'm pulling together a response because it's relevant to students embarking on a college search as well; an increasing number of schools include webcam-enabled interviews as an optional part of their college process. So, here are my ten tips:

1) Know as much going in as possible. Who will you be speaking with? Do they have any kind of digital presence that you could check out beforehand? What kind of time constraints are they working under?

2) Do a screen test. Fire up your webcam in the spot where you think you'll be interviewing, and see what you think. If you know the platform you'll be working with, get a friend to do a dry-run with you and give you feedback on both visuals and audio.

3) De-clutter. A bookshelf in the background? Not a bad idea. But remember that you want your interviewer to be focused on YOU, so you may want to "stage" the space behind you in the interests of that.

4) Dress to impress. You want to feel both snazzy and comfortable. If those two things don't usually go together for you, take advantage of the limited view of your webcam... dress up above the waist, but as long as your feet are off-camera, go ahead and wear your fuzzy bunny slippers.

5) Give yourself something to look at. You'll be tempted, as the interviewee, to look at the visual of the person you're talking with. But in order for them to feel that, you have to look at the camera. Put a Post-It just above your camera with a note that says, "Look here," to remind yourself.

6) Smile early and often. There's all kinds of research out there about how we respond to smiles. It's hardwired; make it work for you.

7) Plan for the 3 things you think you HAVE to say in the interview. Put another Post-It note up near the first one, and write yourself a little three-word reminder, e.g. "Mentor" "Service-Learning" "Philly." Add a smiley face to the second Post-It. (See #3, above.)

8) Plan to listen actively. Think about what phrases you might use in order to draw your interviewer out. "You mentioned something earlier that got me thinking..."

9) Plan for the stumper. If you get asked a a question that is challenging for you, or that you didn't expect, you'll need to buy yourself a little time. Film yourself in that moment so you have a sense of what you look like when your wheels are turning.

10) Think about whether you might want to record yourself. You might find that it won't all sink in on the first pass, and that you'd be grateful, when working on your thank-you note, to be able to refer to some of the points covered with greater specificity. (Thank-you notes are increasingly rare and a good way to stand out in a positive way.)

What did I miss? Got any tips to share?

(Added later: If it's a "live and in person"

interview you've got coming up,

check out these great tips

from Carol Barash of Story to College fame.)

The Poppyseed Principle

(image via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license)

I used to work in an office that was just a few flights of stairs and courtyard away from a bagel place. Inevitably, then, on some rushed mornings, a bagel became my breakfast.

On one such day, I went into the bathroom down the hall from my office at about 4pm and was horrified to discover that I had a poppyseed stuck between two of my front teeth. It must have been there for hours!

At that moment, the Poppyseed Principle was born. Ever since then, if I see something that falls into the category of "I'd want someone to tell me," in my life, I try to take a moment to give them a friendly, private (when possible) heads up. It has been an unexpectedly nice way to connect with people; folks have been invariably grateful.

And back in the office where it all began? I switched to sesame seed bagels!

Badge Learning Stories

I'm participating in a collaborative conversation about the possibilities of Mozilla's proposed Open Badge project, and was inspired their call for imagined scenarios within our fields of interest. (Also inspired by Andy Duckworth's example; thanks again, Andy!) These two accounts are entirely fictitious, and are meant as an extended imagining of how these badges might play out. Enjoy!

Scene 1:

Carmen Pulido started taking piano lessons when she was seven, but taught herself to play the guitar. When the bass player for her fledgling garage band moved to South Carolina, Carmen started teaching herself bass. And shortly thereafter, as the Nilla Woofers ran through a song that sounded depressingly like their last one, she had an epiphany and realized that what she really needed was someone with a knack for arranging. “I bet there’s a badge for that!” said her tech-savvy friend and lyricist Gigi. So they hit up Facebook, and sure enough, the lead vocalist of a band they’d heard and liked on Radcast had an arranger badge posted in his public backpack. They clicked through to the issuing org, and discovered that of the 456 “Stave Master” badges posted that year, 23 were in New Jersey. Now all they had to do was post a badge-ad and start figuring who might be their best fit.

Scene 2:

Alan Brightman had developed a reputation for genius in the kitchen. His swimming teammates had credited his pre-meet power smoothies with at least one win. And whenever the going got tough -- for example, when midterms rolled around -- Alex’s response was to break out the measuring cups and bake up a storm. As Alex’s senior year of high school and its attendant stresses approached, he looked at his school’s elective course offerings and thought for the 100th time that what he really wanted to learn about was food. And then he noticed the paragraph on independent study, which had somehow never caught his eye before. “Any junior or senior student wishing to propose a course which would count as an independent study must first find a faculty member who is willing to serve as a mentor and sponsor to them for the duration of the semester in which the course is proposed.” Unfortunately, the application deadline was only two weeks away, and school wasn’t even in session yet. Alex remembered that when his friend Carl had been thinking about taking flying lessons last year, he had used the school’s Learning Community Portfolio portal to find an adult with a pilot’s license who he could reach out to with questions. Alex wondered if the faculty section of the Learning Community site would display the public badges of Upper School teachers. He logged in and started poking around, wishing that the search function was a little more intuitive. Okay, here was one teacher with a barbecue badge... kind of basic, but cause for hope... Alex kept scrolling...

In my work as an academic matchmaker, I work with some students who have not yet found their "tribes" as learners. For me, one of the exciting aspects of the Open Badge project is the possibilities for transparency.

"Transparency means showing others what's going on inside so that people can be attracted to what you do." — Douglas Rushkoff, http://vimeo.com/24609135

Image credit: photo used via cc license; detail, someone worked REALLY HARD, by rocket ship)