Author Archives: stuberry

I grew up in a military family. There was never any question or doubt about the impact of war on the lives of my father, his brothers or their father (my grandfather). They all served during one of two significant global wars and my father continued to serve in the air force after WW2. That was my reality and this served to shape my contextual view of the annual event we call Remembrance Day.

Rain or shine I grew up knowing that there was an absolute obligation to attend a public Remembrance ceremony and solemnly observe silence in memory of those who gave their lives for our country. Over the years the ceremonies took on different tones based upon the global or local sentiment. At some point in the 1980’s attendance waned and those in attendance lamented the loss of appreciation of the acts taken by those for whom we were there to commemorate. It also seemed, at the time like the world was not interested in stopping to remember but the crass commercialization of so much of our lives seemed to be bulldozing Remembrance Day into oblivion. However world events altered that sentiment and focus returned to the events we stop to consider on November 11. It is a different generation and a different sentiment now yet I think we need to help everyone appreciate and understand the larger view of Remembrance Day.

I always take time from my classes (the last one before November 11) to talk to my students about the reasons for Remembrance Day. I try to help them to see far back into a history many can barely imagine. I want them to try and appreciate the world of my grandparents and what WW1 was and what it meant to the many Canadians who blithely went off to a hell none could have ever imagined and what it did to those who remained behind. I want my students to know how, on July 1, 1916 nearly 58,000 men became casualties on a single day in a senseless battle, how the entire male community of Walhachin BC went off to war and none returned causing the community to fade away as a result of this tragic loss, and how scores and scores of men returned from this war so scarred and damaged that for so many communities, an entire generation was lost and lives were forever changed. I want my students to have a better appreciation of what took place between 1939 and 1945 and what impact this war also had on the people directly involved as well as those at home in Canada. How do you console a mother who receives a letter from her son dated after the war is over saying “I survived and I will see you soon Mom” only to find out a week later that her son’s tank ran over a mine and all in the tank were lost. How do you reintegrate an airman back into life after the war when his job was to take photos of the other planes on his various missions when over half of the photos contain images of his friends being blown up or of airplanes spiralling down out of control knowing none of your friends can escape because of the ensuing fire. How does anyone reconcile this and how do these events shape our world?

My students need to reflect and understand what went into making their worlds today and how their communities have become what they are today, and as a result of this reflection to then take this one November day, or an hour of this day, or even just 2 minutes to try and think about their place in relation to a much larger world and the sacrifices that many have made before them. My students need to know that this ancient history sits at their doorstep as a constant reminder of who and what they are today and what shapes their world. All of this is not just fluff in a textbook or Wikipedia to be dismissed or ignored because it does not fit neatly into their 21^st century, networked, social world. Canadians still join up and go to distant lands and get killed or get maimed and then struggle to come back to this fairy tale-like world and struggle to reintegrate into today’s society in the same way my grandmother could never understand my grandfather and the thing he called “shell shock”. Grandpa was never right after his time spent in a damp and poisoned trench in 1916.

The greatest tragedy today however is that although we have learned to talk a good line with respect to our current military and we know how to put on a good show when the press is watching; we are treating our soldiers today as disposable characters that are never talked about after we have used their services and destroyed their world and the worlds of their families. We protest pipelines and make a huge show of stupid government decisions on prisons or health care but little is really known or talked about with respect to too many damaged service men and women who return from some far-away place doing a job no one at home really wants to talk about.

John McCrae got it right in his poem “In Flanders Fields”. However what we need to do is re-read this poem and hear it with a fresh understanding of our responsibilities. He states,

Take up our quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

I can’t stop the Taliban from fomenting terrible events affecting people elsewhere in the world and my influence with the United Nations is somewhat miniscule. But what I can do is to speak up in my country about the most disgusting treatment afforded Canadian military veterans such as Maj. Mark Douglas Campbell, 47, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian Forces who served in Cyprus, Bosnia and Afghanistan and after being severely wounded in Afghanistan in 2008 was given a paltry financial sum for his efforts and impending life challenges and then shipped off home to fend for himself. Maj. Campbell’s story is just one of many today regarding the men and women who return home damaged from their time spent engaged in wars Canada commits its troops to.

We have broken faith and sadly it appears that “the foe is us”. The enemy is not the Taliban bomb builder (this is another conversation), the enemy is a government who prances around the globe throwing its soldiers into whatever fray happens to serve whatever public policy is the current flavor of the month then ignores and attempts to hide the after effects of the lives of those who willingly stepped forward to participate.

McCrae talked about the pain of breaking faith with those who died. Let us move the meaning of these words slightly further and include the wounded, the shell shocked, the men and women whose lives have been permanently altered as a result of their willingness to step up for this country. How dare we break faith? Remembrance Day is and should be a powerful time for all of us to think about the sacrifices of all who stepped up to do what our country asked of them however November 11 cannot be a solitary day just remembering events from dusty history books. It must be a call to challenge our society to change what is clearly wrong. We must never forget my grandfather and my father and his friends. We must never forget all who laboured to keep and to shape my country into what it is BUT we must be vigilant, we must “take up the quarrel with our foe” otherwise all of this is in vain. Somehow Remembrance Day must help to become a catalyst for change. Bad guys will always surface somewhere in the world and Canada will always find a way to attempt to reach out and help our global neighbours but when all is said and done, how dare we callously dispose of this precious asset, our veterans, those who freely and willingly stepped up to help? Please speak up and let us make the care of returning veterans a priority we never forget. If not, “We (the dead) shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.”

#Kony2012 is trying again. You’ve got to be kidding – didn’t they learn anything the first time round? Well apparently they did but sadly I believe that their intended audiences got beaten up along the way and so this time it will be a bit of an uphill climb in order to get the required traction needed.

Let’s take a little side trip for a moment and talk about the concept of failure. I think that failure is only failure when there is no learning. We can trip and fall on our faces and make a large or small mess but if we learn something and evolve and became better at what it was we were trying to do in the first place then this is NOT failure. Failure is when one cannot, one will not, or one is unable to see what has transpired and thus there is no change and no learning. Vision plays a huge part in this process. Failure is mostly a conscious act although I do wonder at times if there are some circumstances where it is just plain impossible to learn and to change but I don’t think I want to go there at the moment. #Kony2012 was not and is not a failure. To suggest otherwise might create the impression that one lacks a level of personal vision or at least an inability to have seen the original vision.

I do not pretend to be an illuminated visionary but I am a baby-boomer whose passion and wonderful naivety about the potential for my world has never been lost. I may have allowed aspects of it to go to sleep, I may have wandered off and become a suit and did things that my society desired of me as useful and meaningful for the time, but my passionate DNA that came alive as a late 60’s teenager and young adult was excitedly reignited again when I first saw the March 5, 2012 #Kony2012 YouTube. I was entranced by the whole idea presented, not just the “Get Kony” aspect of the campaign but I felt I saw a phenomenal idea and an innovative concept for global communication and participation and I got excited and I shared my feelings with friends and others (Blog postings 1, 2, 3, 4).

There was no way anyone could have imagined what happened as a result of the airing of the #Kony2012, March 5 video: the excitement, the attention, and then the amazingly ugly backlash. I am still so very saddened by the nasty cynicism expressed by so many and the way that this cynicism was threaded into our daily diet of crap pabulum fed to the masses by a crass corporate agenda. Unfortunately no one could have foreseen the effects of this video. It was so unique and so publicly and glaringly personal on a global scale.

Why couldn’t we have allowed this somewhat naïve but fresh, innovative, and passionate group of individuals an opportunity to try out their global experiment? Why did we have to go out of our way to trash something so delicate and fabulously innocent? Of course there are real conspiracies and public projects that have rich and sinister undertones and hidden agendas but why couldn’t we globally believe that there was a group of individuals who really had no other agenda than to do what they claim in their brilliantly crafted set of videos? Why do we rather destroy and trash rather than support or at least stand aside and allow things to play out? The attempt to create a global public conversation about something that should have spoken to the rich part of all of our hearts got lost. It got lost in many ways because the #Kony2012 organization did not and could not have had any way to have prepared to handle the global response to their message and thus they appeared to be everything their detractors claimed they were. The #Kony2012 organization and their precious message became fodder in blood infested shark waters and for a long time all anyone could see was an ugly train wreck.

I live in a world where I believe in the goodness of humankind. I am not so naïve as to ignore the existence of bad and evil intent but I move forward every day with a sensory barometer and a good-first attitude about those I encounter and the ideas I am presented with. #Kony2012 is an idea worth keeping alive and worth supporting. I know that we may have to try and see past the residual damage and find a way to know that this detritus is only an artifact of misunderstanding and misdirection and an artifact we must just walk past. Are there lessons to be learned? Of course there are and one of the biggest lessons is that in this day of ubiquitous, global communication no one can really know the real effect of any of our utterances. All we can really hope for is that we can use this same global ubiquity to observe the impact of the waves we create and know that our message is changing and evolving at every stop along its way. In doing so we have to continue to be creative and innovative and evolve with the shaping of the outcome of our ever-changing message. The matrix of our world today shapes every aspect of our intention and we have to know that intention and reception are shaped by where the receiver sits in the matrix. Can we afford to be everywhere our message is received in order to help ensure it is heard as we intend? Of course not, but we had better have some sense of the receiver’s place or we risk a train wreck the likes of which we saw earlier this year.

I will continue to support #Kony2012 for many reasons not the least of which is that I still believe it is an amazing experiment in global communication and cooperation. Their latest video, albeit a little on the long side, really does show the heart and soul of their intent, and their beliefs, and their vision. This is a global experiment we should embrace and in doing so we must check our cynicism and our crass commercial corporate agendas at the door and join in with our hearts and minds wide open. Maybe then we could allow ourselves to be a part of an amazing global movement that truly changed and enriched all our lives.

Is there not a lot to lose if we do otherwise?

Our good friends at Wikipedia tell us that the Canadian Thanksgiving celebration has existed in various forms since the late 1500’s, it moved to being a fall harvest festival in the 1870’s, and finally in 1957 the Federal government passed legislation making the official date the second Monday in October. Not all Canadian jurisdictions recognize this time as an official statutory holiday however this date is deemed to be a national day of Thanksgiving.

So what’s the big deal in this 21st century, urban, globally interconnected world we live in? I would liken Thanksgiving to a purposeful reflection – not necessarily religious but possibly spiritual. Maybe for some this might seem forced (and maybe it is) however the whole idea of a purposeful reflection is that it should allow for a slowing down, it should allow for a time to enable us to look large beyond our daily lives and look small or close at those things which are at our feet and see who we are and where we are in relation to the world and to those around us. When else do we do this?

For example I am thankful that I can quietly sit here in my office on a sunny and warm Sunday and peacefully write this blog. I am also thankful that I am graced with the richness of a loving and supportive wife and family and I am also thankful that I live in a society that is not at war and I do not have to have bars on my windows or live in a guarded compound. I am thankful that my granddaughter can run around and happily play in our neighbourhood without great fear or concern for her well-being. And I am thankful that I have been able to become well educated and be employed in an industry that gives me great freedom of expression and thought and affords me the ability to live well. I am thankful that I have the time to continue to reflect and be challenged and write and work to finish a personal academic goal and ever so thankful that I am surrounded by supportive and caring individuals on this journey.

The list could be endless, however the sheer fact that I have taken the time to write this and reflect as I am writing is truly a gift worth taking the time to be thankful for. What about you?

Audrey Waters of Hack Education fame wrote in her weekly newsletter an article about the Chicago teachers strike and her tagline asks “Which side are you on?”. I do understand the question and the why of the question but I think that the whole issue becomes so greatly exacerbated by the asking of such a divisive question in the first place. I live in a jurisdiction (British Columbia, Canada) where teacher strikes and similar union issues seem to be everyday occurrences. Political polarization eats us as a society regardless of where you live. I think however that although many of our education issues and concerns are different (to begin with our two countries are culturally different) yet what is not different is that we are so influenced by our close proximity to each other and therefore our reaction to many of the issues and concerns does spill over and we look at our neighbours for encouragement and support. A major difference in the systems is that in the US, K-12 has a national federal connection (Dept of Education) whereas in Canada our federal system plays no part in the K-12 system – it is all controlled by the provinces.

The challenge however is still money and resources and control and curriculum and pedagogy and still all of the problems appear to be forever placed at the feet of the teachers. Teachers in Canada are paid significantly more than their counterparts in the US but from my perspective, apart from salary and a few benefits the woes of failed schooling systems still gets dumped on the lap of the teachers. In Audrey’s newsletter I read about issues of

“education reform”…  [including issues around] more charter schools, fewer unions, less job security for teachers, more standardized testing, and (here’s a particularly big sticking point for the Chicago Teachers Union) using those tests to in turn assess teachers’ performance.

In my local context I hear similar types of issues and I really struggle to understand why the public so quickly chimes in with the “blame the teacher” line and does not appear to care enough to see the bigger issues instead of the wrong-headed political/corporate agendized issues that avoid the real conversation of learning and teaching and of really helping our children. Is it that we just don’t give a damn and think that it is better to hide and hope that someone else can make it right and then I no longer need to be bothered? During a recent teacher’s job action in the spring of this year a young parent was interviewed about the school and teacher situation and when asked what she knew of the issues she responded that she knew nothing and could care less. She stated that all she cared about was whether her child’s school was open and she indicated that she shouldn’t have to take the time to care what the issues were – all she wanted was someone to look after her child.

Ouch – no wonder we have problems. So when you ask what side any one is on I think we all need to ask a whole bunch of other questions first. The Chicago issues are sadly quite American in nature however their potential real solutions are far more global. Stop blaming the teachers. Stop this industrialized testing system that has NO place in our classrooms. Get the corporate bean counters out of the education systems and stop seeing our children as nothing more than widgets to be tamed and shaped into industrial clones. How many times do we have to look at countries such as Finland to see what is right and what works?

It is all about philosophy in the end – Do we dare to continue to ask about taking sides or do we move forward believing that everything is a continuum and that right and wrong and good and bad and my world and your world are all just different perspectives of the same thing. We need to change our outlook and recognize that as long as we push people to take sides they will.

In my ever so lumbering academic journey and not so very long ago I came across the work of Ted Aoki, a curriculum scholar who in his early 90’s was still teaching at UBC. That fact alone grabbed me and told me that this profession is a life profession and is one that mars the lines between vocation and avocation. I started to read some of his lifetime of work however unfortunately other commitments pushed my focus elsewhere. I did however save links to various sources that I knew I would want to read sometime at a future date. I am glad I did.

Today I hear that this great scholar has passed away at the age of 92. A notice from the University of Lethbridge

Here is a link to a UBC resource that begins to show us who this great man was.

Pinar, W., et al. (December 2003). Dr. Ted T. Aoki Speaks Educational Insights, 8(2). [Available: http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v08n02/celebrate/index.html]

The other evening I was listening to a radio broadcast as I drove home. The interviewer was talking to MMA fighters, or MMA sports figures as some refer to themselves, and the question was asked if they ever enter the fight cage with a sense of fear. All but one answered in the positive. They indicated that the fear kept them sharp and it did not allow them to become complacent. In many ways fear protected them.

Over four years ago I began an education doctorate with a focus on distance and online learning models and I entered this wonderful academic endeavor with, what seemed like an unending supply of passion. I devoured the readings and pushed myself with the written assignments. My 24/7 conversations centred on my passionate interests in the area of knowledge creation and how we might alter online learning environments to enhance and add richness to the learning process. I love this stuff and I pushed hard to prepare my dissertation proposal and defend it so that I could begin my research. I did that and I finished all of the required courses and I pushed to the front of the line and jumped into my research. I actively engaged my research participants and scooped up my data and

Yes and that was over 16 months ago and yes the sentence above does end abruptly and unfinished because besides writing nothing for the better part of the first 8 of 16 months I now laboriously write a few words at a time trying to form a document that best represents the sum of my efforts in this great academic endeavor and have yet to arrive at a place that speaks to the research, the wealth of data collected and all of the passion imbued in the foundation of this personal effort. Something happened to my passion and yet unlike an MMA fighter, an element of fear has stepped up and impeded my momentum and created an internal imbalance. I do not intend to walk away but I spend way too much time writing way too little with a limited understanding as to the nature of the obvious impediments to this task. Something is standing in my way and it has been there way too long.

I celebrate the wonderful successes of my peers and intuitively know that I will, at some point arrive at that common gate of defense but the wall I sit before at this moment is coarse, uninformed, and lightless. It does little to allow that well of passion to resurface and I don’t know why. Passion is or should be just there, passion is a life-wind that grabs you and picks you up and envelopes you in all your being. There is nothing wrong with fear but fear without passion creates an imbalance that appears to consume the light.

I write this in the hope that these public doorways can serve to open other aspects of creativity and with these magical, virtual doors I trust that the winds of passion may reenter, envelope my being and offer back a vision to that which I love.

In a very tongue-and-cheek way, in an attempt to find inspiration, and who the heck knows where this came from, I thought of Ronald Reagan’s words, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity… if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-tear-down.htm

I too seek a bright hole through an asbestos-laden, dusty wall.

 

I don’t think I am different than most when it comes to clutter and mess. It becomes a distraction visually, physically and mentally.
I created this Edublog site as a home for my academic musings and as an attempt to publicly talk out some of my professional challenges as well as to push my research thinking to a broader audience. This didn’t happen and I realized that I found more time for personal rants and many other distractions. My academic agenda was silent and my personal academic journey became a struggle.

I have restructured this blog to focus on my education/academic journey and I have created a separate blog (stuartberry.com) to house my personal world. I have moved all of the personal posts and rants out of this blog and placed them into this new WordPress site. “A place for everything and everything in its place” Thanks Ben Franklin.

I know that I have said this before but I really feel fortunate to do what I do – I have always wanted to be in a position where my vocation and my avocation seamlessly meshed and although some aspects of one part of my world may push outside the bounds of the other, the nature of my whole being is engaged in rich and respectful conversation, collaboration, sharing, teaching, and learning. My family life, my spiritual life and my life of teaching and learning are all so very inter-meshed that each informs the other and each supports and complements the world’s the others inhabit.

I have just spent a very supportive and engaging day with some amazing educators at the 24th Annual Lilly-West Conference on College and University Teaching held at the Kellogg West Ranch at the California Polytechnic State University just outside of Los Angeles. (http://www.iats.com/conferences/lilly-conference/) In the 2 days of this conference (this is the end of day 1) there will be over 65 presentations with over 75 attendees primarily from across the US however there are a few from Canada, the UK, and Japan. Although I cannot pretend to be an expert on Lilly conferences (this is their 24^th year) I know them by reputation and now having spent today being a part of this event I found it well managed and supported, richly informative, as well as being very warm, respectful, and collegial. I have had the pleasure of attending equally rich and informative conferences in the past but I think that there is an intimacy here that adds to the event and has very much allowed me to feel embraced and respected.

The introductory keynote by Terry Doyle on “how brain research findings are changing our understanding of learning” nicely set the stage for the conversations throughout the day and if nothing else was a bit of a wake up call for me as a student and learner struggling to finish my dissertation let alone the other aspects of my life. There are five things the brain needs in order to function optimally: exercise – sleep – oxygen – hydration – food (glucose). I hope I hear this message clearly enough to look after myself.

I then attended several sessions on Faculty Learning Communities (FLC). Really interesting perspectives on what can be done to support and encourage faculty in the process of teaching and learning. John Williams from Principia College, Charles Finch and Tracy Middleton from Midwestern University, and Elizabeth Predeger, Randy Magen, and Deborah Periman from University of Alaska Anchorage all presented interesting and very different perspectives on this topic. Thank you all – I have a lot to think about and some very rich examples to assist in my quest in this area. I also attended a fascinating session on “the use of social annotation to support student reading of class texts” put on by Mark Rawlinson and Stuart Johnson from the University of Leicester in the UK. This was very engaging and the possibilities exciting yet I struggle at this moment to be able to describe the process. They are using online tools such as eMargin and Digress.it to allow students to socially annotate complex material. The context was literature but the application could very well be across disciplines. The content and method of presentation was extremely engaging – thank you Mark and Stuart for this great presentation. The final presentation of the day was Jeff Loats, a physicist from Metropolitan State College of Denver introducing us to the concept of “Just in Time Teaching”, a really exciting way of getting students more engaged with the material in a course. Jeff outlined how he uses this method in his physics classes and how this has improved retention and understanding. He suggested a quick Google search on the topic would provide a wealth of resources and I found lots to work with. Jeff was an engaging presenter.

After dinner there were poster presentations, coffee and goodies. I met really fascinating people doing really exciting things in their classrooms and working with their peers to improve our craft. I really enjoyed talking with Daniel Duarte from the University of Texas in El Paso on his online work and challenges. After all these sessions and conversations I am going to rethink my slides and my presentation for tomorrow as I feel that the bar has been set sufficiently high and I hope to offer something comparable. I don’t know that I will have the time to write a concluding post after tomorrow wraps up but if it is anything like today I know I will leave feeling energized and excited to get on with my writing and my daily engagement with my students and my peers. Thanks everyone.

Introducing online learning into a traditional face-to-face world is a reoccurring challenge across the spectrum of conversations from K-12 through graduate schools. My community college, like most is defined as a face-to-face institution however it has encouraged faculty to develop and offer different forms of DE or online courses for a number of years. This has been met with varying degrees of success primarily due to the perseverance and dedication of the faculty in pushing the bounds of their discipline and willingness to offer the best product they can to their students.

We are venturing into alternative delivery models with limited pedagogical understandings and structural supports to guide the building of either fully online or blended and in most of the examples I have seen to date there is an “ad hoc” nature about it: This is scary. I have grown to understand that this is neither bad nor good – it is just the nature of how many institutions are responding to challenging budgets and an ever-evolving set of expectations from the marketplace. So how can we continue to offer quality programs with standards that we believe our existing programs meet yet venture into this very different world of teaching and learning?

Small steps. I am using a combination of resources to attempt to build a set of process models that all faculty can use as they plan and build their blended or fully online offerings. I am using examples from Garrison and Vaughan’s (2008) book, Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. I have begun to use them to build a question and answer process for faculty. I recently spoke with Norm Vaughan and he also recommended the following two resources >> Blended Learning Toolkit http://blended.online.ucf.edu/ and Hybrid Courses http://www4.uwm.edu/ltc/hybrid/

In time I think we can build a set of custom online/blended design models that can allow faculty to ask questions most pertinent to their design goals and in the end have a set of models that can be a blueprint for future course offerings. I know there are lots of models and ideas out there and many institutions have well supported functional areas to help make this work but there are many of us who have well intentioned yet limited institutional resources and support –  so ideas from the blogosphere would be grand.

I tried a bit of an experiment today in my MIS class (second semester first year) and I was asked to blog my thoughts on this class. I am (as my grandmother would say) betwixt and between as to what to say. This course attempts to introduce business students to information systems  for managers mediated by information technology. This is not a technology course but one that uses technologies to assist managers as they make decisions in the modern workplace using information technologies. For second semester first-year business students with limited business experience the topic is obtuse and dense in the least and a tough one to get engagement from.

The last 2 chapters have been about understanding the IT department both from an operational stand point as well as looking at projects and the acquisition of systems through projects. OK so the stuff has the potential for the word pedantic to be a key descriptor but I was hoping to try some variations on a theme. I use my D2L site to make material available to my students and have attempted to encourage some use of the discussion forums but being that this is a face-to-face class this is a bit of a non-starter so I thought we could use technologies as communication tools to assist in the learning process. Instead of me lecturing on the content of the chapter I wanted to pass the responsibility for the content over to the class and let the class use Twitter as a way of broadcasting to each other and asking questions and adding to each others ideas and thoughts on the chapter material. Everyone was asked to create a Twitter account – we played with this in class the previous week and with the assistance of a few very eager and supportive students we used Tweet Grid along with some other tools to follow the hash-tagged conversations.

Well it was messy, somewhat chaotic, a bit of fun, a challenge for some, others I think just couldn’t see themselves either getting anything from the exercise or in contributing and yet when I go back and read the tweets I see some interesting and very respectful contributions to the discussion. It is too easy to be critical and to write off this messy experiment as having no value to one’s learning and I wonder about the larger issues at play. I will always question those who just won’t “play” but in this case I think they were in the minority. i was quite happy with the willingness of most to attempt to talk out their understandings of the chapter through the challenging medium of Twitter.

The tweets show engagement, struggles, frustration, and even just plain repetition from the text. Not everybody added to the discussion and it is clear that not everybody prepared for the class although having walked around the room during this exercise I was pleasantly surprised to see many trying to keep pace, trying to make sense of the environment and trying to find their meaning in the lesson. I was happy to see that a number took manual notes and others asked their questions or expressed their frustrations out loud. There was engagement and there was learning albeit not everything was spoken about and most were left to their own devices with respect to what should be considered relevant from the chapter.

In the future this type of exercise probably should be moderated, should have fewer focus points, and should be guided with specific questions or items needing attention – that was my responsibility and I did not do that. What I had hoped would happen (and to some degree it did happen) was that enough students would see this as an opportunity to push their understanding of the material and ask questions of each other while challenging what they were presented with through the fixed text material. I struggle as an educator because my interest is in ideas and how we might challenge our assumptions about what we have in front of us and what we might do to construct our worlds to allow us to move forward with new and exciting insights. I fail to recognize at times that many are not here for these altruistic broad-reaching reasons and that these courses are nothing more than tick marks in a path that leads very far from the content of the course at hand. It doesn’t matter – I harbour the belief that this type of class will stick in far greater ways than most can imagine.

There were a variety of neat aspects of today’s session such as students expressing concern about being very public (and permanent) and possibly being wrong or at least showing others their incorrect views. There is nothing wrong with this view – we hesitate because we want to only speak out when we have a certain belief in the veracity of our comments yet if we could find ways to phrase our understandings such that others might feel safe and supported then more might speak up.

Learning is a social activity. Knowledge is gained and developed as we interact with each other and share our ideas and beliefs. Granted we can read and view what others have said and gain insights in this way yet to be able to push and give in a shared environment enhances and helps to refine our understandings and ultimately our knowledge.

I am a social constructivist (some have suggested a constructionist but I still have not gotten my head around the difference) and I believe that not only do we construct our own meaning about the world around us but that if we do not regularly and purposefully engage our world in the process of building meaning we miss out on much of the richness that our rapidly changing world has to offer. Somewhere between the end of elementary school and into college/university our conscious engagement with the social construction of knowledge appears to be somehow lost. Many appear to arrive at the end of high school looking to be fed; looking for someone to tell them what to do, what to pay attention to, how to go about doing school work and when and where this work gets done. I know that this is a gross exaggeration but having been in the adult education business for the past 20 years I can’t help but question the struggles of my students as they attempt to figure things out for themselves. The work place is a world of “figure it out or fall by the wayside” so somehow in education we have to foster environments that encourage shared, social engagement, and collaborative knowledge building as we develop new understandings and push the paradigm of teaching and learning.

We need to allow for dynamic learning, using tools that may seem out of place for the current task but when rethought and/or re-purposed we may finally find that the lesson really is about the path and the journey and not the content. When I asked today about the whole concept of outsourcing in a business context, about what types of things we can walk away from in our business world today or into the future and what is it that we really need to focus on to stay competitive, I am not sure that enough really heard the big picture answer. Facts and figures – the black and white stuff in our lives is necessary but it can be automated; processes can be automated along with certain types of logic. What we most need are individuals who have the ability to talk to each other, to communicate, and to ask questions, and to challenge that which is in front of them on a daily basis. We need to find ways to continually use and reuse the stuff in our lives in new and creative ways. We all have access to the same stuff but we gain a competitive advantage when we are able to use this same stuff in ways that our competitors can’t or don’t and in ways that open doors to new opportunities.

What did I get from today’s class? I need to rethink the the use of the tool or find a different tool or just stay in the kitchen and keep pushing my students to find ways to engage the material and each other. What did my students get from today? The best time to ask this question would probably be 5 years from now but for today I hope one or two had fun and appreciated the journey.