These are two buzzwords that emerged from a great piece by Timothy R. Clark and Conrad A. Gottfredson

titled Agile Learning: Thriving in the New Normal. 

They aren't new, but they resonated with me at a relevant time. The article contained triggers regarding a key aspect of education/training/learning in the K-12 environment in the Northern Territory - Teachers. To be more specific, T 'n' T or Teachers and Technology.

Apart from buzzwords, I am a sucker for lists. One of the lists contained in the article mentioned above is contained here (because the fact this will land in your email intray I need to entice you to click and read the article). High-agility organisations support learners at the following five moments of learning need:

    1. Learning how to do something new for the first time.

    2. Learning more based on prior learning experience.

    3. Learning at the moment when learners apply what they have learned in the context of workflow.

    4. Learning when things change in order to adapt to new ways of doing things.

    5. Learning when things go wrong in order to solve a problem.

Now we could ask who drives the learning need and the answer would only be in part the department. Society drives the need. People use facebook, YouTube, twitter and blogs in daily life and now many educators are promoting the benefits of their use in the learning environment. Why?

People are using them and liking them. People are more receptive to things they like. Students, Parents and You are People.

Suddenly a teacher with little computer experience has the expectation thrust on them of not only being able to use the teacher laptop they were given years ago, but to be a wizard in preparing PowerPoint presentations, posting items to the web and integrating digital media assets into a classroom event that passes knowledge onto their students.

Couple that with the fact that suddenly every student in year 9 through 12 will have their own laptop and before long every student will go to school with a laptop (or an iPod like device) a teacher sitting at the bottom of the IT knowledge tree will be looking for that rope ladder to fast track them back into a position of being in some semblance of control.

The traditional answer is time away from the classroom to attend what I once knew as inservice but like many things (and because it is a buzzword of sorts I should like it) PD or Professional Development. This is where agility or the lack of it comes in...

To conduct PD you generally engage a paid expert who gathers a group of teachers together in a location which is rarely the place in which they work and there always seems to be a catering component to the Professional Development. Transport has to be arranged or parking sought. We have to go around the table and introduce everyone and find out why they are attending the Professional Development.

A five hour PD which is probably 3 hours at best or more like 2.5 hours with the balance being taken up with driving to and from the event, registration and introductions, tea break, smoking break, ice breakers and "networking time" plus the obligatory "how did I go" questionnaire at the end of the session which apart from being marked on the quality of the presentation, will also receive favourable points if the presenter gives the students an early mark and of course the quality of the morning tea is also a KPI in the overall rating.

I am being a little over the top here and some of it is tongue in cheek... but I have two points I would like to make. When a teacher says they are too busy to attend a 5 hour PD session, the tragedy is that they will probably only receive 2.5 hours of learning during that time if delivered using the traditional group face to face method. They may have had time for 2.5 hours.

They may have had time for 5 thirty minute sessions after work (without the one hour travel time atteched to each session). If they are learning about online course delivery or IT or learning related to digital media wouldn't it be better to experience the Professional Development using one of our video conferencing tools?

To experience both the ease and challenge of running a virtual class? To practise what we will be preaching... to reduce that 5 hours to one delivery of 3 hours with playback for those who couldn't get the time off... To reduce our carbon usage and the possibility of car accidents. That is agile learning and that is what a large number of the readers of this blog will be delivering to students in 2010.

For those tut tutting at the back of the classroom, I acknowledge that there are some problems with at desk delivery of agile eLearning. I have seen the staffrooms where teachers retreat to and some remind me of a cross between a third world country's hospital waiting area, the bookshop out of Black Books and the potions classroom in Harry Potter.

If we don't have an agile learning environment in our schools or homes for our teachers, then we need to create one. I personally don't like lying on the grass under a tree elearning - it's too hot, there are insects and I am allergic to grass seeds. I don't care if the bandwidth is great... I prefer to sit in my office at home or at my desk at work, put the headphones on and run through the session.

Think about your agile eLearning environment... Apart from the physical location, are you free from interruption? I know that if you are involved in eLearning, everyone wants a piece of you and you sometimes need that cone of silence to focus on what is being delivered. No point having a quality presentation when due to environmental factors you are unable to provide a quality listening environment.

Take the next step. Is your environment good for listening but bad for talking?

Could you present a lesson from where you sit or would you need an opaque cone of silence so you don't feel self conscious blathering away to an invisible listener while a work colleague sits 1.8 metres away from you wondering what the heck you are talking about. Another issue is that sometimes the technology will fail. We all fly on aircraft and they are very safe. If it wasn't for the pioneers who did experiment and occasionally crashed we wouldn't have what we have today.

The problem situation that manifests itself while you are participating in or delivering PD to other teaching professionals should be relished, solved and noted in a discoverable way so that you and others can benefit from the experience. So if your pioneering spirit is alive and well, then this a journey for you, because our students are agile learners and maybe they should become the teachers, but that is another story...

The three articles that inspired this piece (all of them are extremely worth reading and have very little to do with this entry in their own right) are:

These views are my personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

 

This entry was posted on December 30, 2009 at 12:26 PM and has received 341 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.