Cloudworks

I've been following the work of Gráinne Conole from UK's Open University for some time. I believe the first time I corresponded with her was during the Shaping Our Future conference in May, 2008 at SCoPE where we invited her to provide an international perspective on e-learning research, policy, and practice. Then later that year I participated in her remote presentation on Cloudworks at the 2008 Tech It Up conference at Thomposon Rivers University in Kamloops.

That Coudworks presentation really sparked my interest. At that time the website was still in the very early phases of development, but the potential was obvious. It reminded me of some of our early 90s work done in the Virtual-U project lab at Simon Fraser University when we were busy mocking up designs that would provide a way for instructors to share their online course activities in a way that provided implementation and iterative design context.

Cloudworks is a site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas, experiences and issues. The aims are to:

• enable people to find, share and discuss learning and teaching ideas
• connect people with similar educational interests through social networking
• provide inspiration on designing learning activities and developing resources
• showcase the work of individuals and communities who want to reach existing but also new audiences
• provide a place for different communities to discuss, collaborate and aggregate relevant materials, ideas and designs
• encourage sharing, especially among people who have not shared learning and teaching ideas and experiences before.

The appeal of Cloudworks is that the focus shifts away from sharing course resources (repositories) to representing teaching designs, practices, and resources in a way that is context rich and reusable by others. Moreover, members' contributions are open and available for others to build on in a number of interesting ways.

Unlike many existing educational repositories, the emphasis is on building a dynamic collection of ideas and experiences; via a variety of educational content (learning designs, case studies, resources and tools) plus active discussions about the use and effectiveness of this content in different contexts. The voice of users of the site, their experience, reviews and reflections on the content of the site is a central feature.

Last month I had the pleasure of spending some time with Gráinne at the ETUG Fall 2009 workshop in Vancouver, on an unexpected road trip to Kamloops because our flight was cancelled, then briefly at the TechItUp conference where we live-blogged John Seely Brown's keynote together. I was able to get immersed in Cloudworks and also experience Gráinne's enthusiasm. It was a great combination.

First... the ETUG Fall workshop. Gráinne Conole treated participants to a full-day workshop and plenary talk on learning design. She was also an extremely active participant in the 2-day event overall, first by helping the planning committee by creating a workshop 'cloudscape' at Cloudworks ahead of time, then by continuing to populate the various clouds with links, live blogs of sessions, comments, and keeping workshop the #etugdesign twitter stream active.

Aside from helping us to build a fantastic online resource for our 2-day event that we can continue to revisit and build over time, Gráinne really modelled for our community how we can (and should!) collectively create artefacts of our activities, and find ways to involve members who are unable to travel to f2f events. And it was very interesting to see Cloudworks in action!

Second...the unexpected road trip. We had a very early flight out of Vancouver I was returning home after the ETUG Workshop and Gráinne was going on the the TechItUp conference. We caught a 5:30 a.m. cab to the airport only to find that the flight had been cancelled due to fog. We're actually still trying to figure out why the flight was so early! We thought it was because Gráinne needed to be at the TechItUp conference. Anyway, we retrieved our luggage then headed off to the car rental area. No cars left! We tried one company after another. Then in the last line-up we started chatting with Jarrod Bell from School District #60 in Fort St. John. It turned out he was also heading to the TechItUp conference AND we found out there was a car available. So we all drove up together. What a terrific experience! We felt like we were playing hooky -- stopping at coffee shops, checking out the views, fitting in a little fine dining, and having a fantastic conversation.

Third...John Seely Brown's keynote at the TechItUp conference. Thanks to Tara Murray from School District #73 (Kamloops/Thompson), one of the conference organizers, I was able to pop in on Saturday morning just for the keynote. By this time I was very familiar with Cloudworks, so was able to quickly find the cloud Gráinne had created and start live blogging within seconds of opening my laptop.

I think this last point is what will really contribute to the increase in Cloudworks membership and the growth in valuable resources and opportunities for dialogue. It is so easy to use, and there are many ways to contribute. The idea is to:

• Ensure a low barrier to entry for new contributions. We believe that one of the main barriers to contribution to other repositories is the level of detail and metadata required, cumbersome quality control processes and issues around ownership.
• Give the site a people-orientated focus. It is conversation and shared experiences that will draw people to contribute to the site and make it sustainable. Finding the right person to talk to is often as important as finding the right resource.

When I returned home after my few days with Gráinne I began to think about how Cloudworks could be used for other projects I'm involved in. One that came to mind was an Improving Conferences (and other events) project I've been hoping to get off the ground with colleagues in BC as we gather ideas and feedback from the events we organize. We have so much material, but it needs to be brought together somehow. And obviously this won't be a static resource; we need to continue to build on it. Cloudworks! I fired up an Improving Conferences Cloudscape and a few clouds to get going. The next day I noticed that Martin Weller had started a cloud called Changing nature of conferences so I snapped that into my Cloudscape. I'll continue to look for other clouds related to this theme. I'll also continue to get the word out that the cloudscape exists. I haven't even mentioned it to my colleagues, and they might not be as keen to jump in. But that's okay. Even if we end up with A MANUAL , it can still be included in the cloudscape. And hopefully I'll bump into new people in the clouds who interested in this topic. In any case, I'll just pick away at this project, adding #improveconf to relevant tweets, links to interesting resources, questions and new clouds as they come to mind. Suddenly creating a good resource on improving conferences feels very manageable. :-)

Interested in learning about Cloudworks in a community of practice context? Mark your calendars for a Virtual Field Trip organized by SCoPE and CPSquare, November 16
November 16, 2009 12:00 PDT 20:00 GMT (your time zone). More details will be posted soon!

The Art of Teaching

This is a professional development opportunity at SCoPE for EVERYONE interested in teaching. It is free and open to the public. This event is organized as part of the Professional Learning Series, a collaborative partnership with eCampus Alberta, Alberta-North, and BCcampus. Invite your colleagues!

What: A 3-week asynchronous discussion combined with weekly Elluminate sessions on the art of teaching.

When: October 19 - November 6, 2009

Elluminate Sessions
Week 1: Intro, Bridging, Outcomes
Monday, October 19, 10 - 11:00 PDT (your time zone)

Week 2: Pre-assessment, Participation
Monday, October 26, 10 - 11:00 PDT (your time zone)

Week 3: Post-assessment, Summary
Monday, November 2, 10 - 11:00 PST (your time zone)

Facilitators:
Neil Smith, Professor, Faculty of Education, Vancouver Island University
Nancy Randall, Past Head of the Vancouver Island University Teaching and Learning Centre
Andrew Marchand, Educational Technologist, Vancouver Island University

How to participate:
Each week of this 3-week seminar will be launched with an Art of Teaching video and live discussion in Elluminate. To participate in the seminar discussion you will need to create an account on the SCoPE site. This is a quick process.

Copyright: Aftermath of the Canadian Copyright Consultation

eCampusAlberta, Alberta-North and BCcampus invite you to attend the second web conference in a new 2009 - 2010 Online Professional Learning Series.

When: Tuesday, October 6, 2009 13:30 - 15:00 (PDT) check your time zone

Presenters: Maureen Baron, President, Canadian Network for Innovation in Education

Agenda:
1. Context for copyright – users and developers
2. Issues for copyright in online learning
3. Canadian Copyright Consultation and Legislation
4. Course showcase
5. Upcoming events

To join the Elluminate live session on Tuesday, click the link below up to 30 minutes before the start of the session:
http://tinyurl.com/yb33utj
To log in, just type your first name, and the initials of the institution where you work (for example Bart UNBC).

You'll need an audio set up with a microphone, for example a headset with a mic, and Internet access.

If you have not previously attended an Elluminate Live web conference, please take 5 minutes well before the session and visit www.elluminate.com/support and follow the steps for first time users. A small Java applet will request access to your PC the first time you use Elluminate, but only the first time.

Randy LaBonte, Consultant and PD Coordinator for Alberta-North, will be moderating this series of practical and fascinating sessions this fall.

FLNW - thinking about change

Peter Grimmett, one of my top 10 most memorable professors, said to a group of graduate students in 1996:

YOU can make a difference, just maybe not in your life time.

The course was Developing Educational Programs and Practices for Diverse Educational Settings and we were talking about educational reform. After spending some time sharing stories about our own experiences in school, we were feeling that change was quite urgent. I remember scanning my grade 1 report card and watching the looks of horror when everyone saw the talks too much comment made by my teacher. They were also amused that the need for improvement was consistently checked for most of the school year. Unfortunately, I finally did "improve" by the 4th quarter. The report card didn't seem quite as alarming as I went on to share stories about Anthony, the unhappy, large, black boy who only occasionally showed up for school, getting hit over the head with a yard stick for not answering the teacher's question about what he ate for breakfast. I had my wrists tapped with that same yardstick for not singing the national anthem. I didn't know the words to the U.S. national anthem. My family moved to Kentucky from Quebec. Why would I know the national anthem?

Peter Grimmitt's statement was both motivating and depressing. My first questions for this group of mostly practicing teachers were about the opportunities for educators to talk about their experiences, their curriculum, their questions and dilemmas. It seemed that most "professional development" days were filled with workshops and other events that could be described as “contrived collegiality” (Hargreaves, 1994). Creating more opportunities for educators to connect online was an obvious solution. I can trace my interest in online communities to those conversations facilitated by Peter. As a final project for the course I developed an action research proposal called Supporting Communities of Teachers: Networked Technology as a Catalyst for Change. It was a start!

I thought about Peter's statement a lot during the past week as I travelled with a group of people on the Future of Learning in a Networked World pacific northwest tour. You see, these people don't seem very interested in waiting for somebody else's lifetime. The conversations were occasionally about current educational dilemmas, but more often we were leaping ahead, imagining a very different world -- earning a PhD without an institutional affiliation, doing away with copyright altogether, a day when schools no longer exist. It's useful and refreshing to think about extremes and design new possibilities without grinding through the issues we have with the current system.

I imagine the FLNW group -- Nancy White, Leigh Blackall, Derek Chirnside, Sunshine Connelly, and Michael Coghlan -- will get a chuckle out of this grade 1 report card. Sylvia talks too much?? Mostly on this trip I did some good listening, and the experience left me with a lot to think about. I'm now wondering how to engage others in these conversations about the future of education. We need more events like University of Manitoba's Future of Education online conference, but involve more practicing educators from a variety of disciplines. We need more opportunities for educators to find out for themselves that there are better ways.

Digital Habitats

I just ordered my copy of the long awaited book Digital Habitats. I have various draft versions of chapters on my hard drive which were made available for participants in the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. It was exciting to be involved in conversations back in April, 2008 about the content and ideas in this book, and trying them out first hand during the workshop. Just another fabulous CPSquare experience! I was also fortunate to have a preview of the book and the opportunity to snap this photo this past week while traveling with Nancy White on the FLNW tour.

I know I'll be pulling Digital Habitats off my shelf often, and I won't be able to part with it long enough to lend it out. So get your own copy! :-) It's available from the Technology for Communities blog now, and will be in bookstores soon.

Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). ISBN: 9780982503607.

Remembering Helen

Helen's Knowplace avatar
Last week my friend and colleague, Frances Long, delivered the sad news that our dear 'knowmate', Helen Kershaw, had lost her battle with cancer. I've spent a good part of my days since then trying to process this news.

I have many amazing memories of Helen, from the first time I met her at the BC Computer Curriculum Consortium in Kelowna almost ten years ago, to the many encounters online over the years through various online communities and social networking sites. I have a Helen History on my hard drive -- inspiring, sensible, witty, intelligent, warm, logical, and innovative, correspondence that I plan to keep forever.

In fact, reading back I realize that she had the answers to many burning questions, but work life was so fast and furious I didn't let it all sink in during the moment. I came across this post in SCoPE. We were trying to decide the best tags to use for posting resources to delicious during SCoPE seminars:

may I suggest that you use an underscore with the specific title 'scope_' followed by the particular discussion or topic 'informal'

if each type of tag begins with scope, then all tags no matter the discussion will be presented

thus scope_informal and scope_community would bring different results but scope itself would bring both

We've revisited this tagging question numerous times in SCoPE. Today, reading back on Helen's posts I discover that she had the solution back in 2006. I just didn't let it sink in at the moment. Now those moments are altogether gone.

In 2002 Helen, Frances, and I did a presentation called "Tools to Support Community", again at a BC Computer Curriculum Consortium conference. I wasn't able to attend in person, so we decided to beam me in using my webcam. During the test run just minutes before conference delegates started to arrive at the session, we had such a giggling fit that I had to go get a wet washcloth to get my face back to normal before displaying it on a big screen. I have no idea what set us off; it was just another very special experience with Helen.

Helen's twitter bio captures her passion about work:

I am a life-long learner who enjoys helping others discover how technology can enhance their lives.

I keep reading this simple sentence, thinking how her life-long learning was cut so short, how her entire life was devoted to thinking about others, and how her concern was for how technology can enhance lives when it couldn't even assist in allowing her to live.

Helen the Knowplace Tools Potluck person. Helen the life-long learner. Helen the incredible mom and grandma. We'll miss her so much.

From the Quesnel Cariboo Observer:

Kershaw, Helen Marie
Friday, 24 Jul 2009
Helen Marie Kershaw passed away on July 24, 2009 after a lengthy illness.
Helen was born on April 27, 1948 in Rossland, B.C.
She is survived by her husband of 40 years, Alan, children Alana (Bob) Kuehn, Lori (Ken) Wawryk, Steven (Michelle) Kershaw, sister, Kim and brothers Allan, Rick and Doug, grandsons, Trevor, Matthew, Leon and Zachary and granddaughters Katie and Sarah.
Helen was predeceased by her parents Joe and Effie Rausch.
In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Terry Fox Foundation (www.terryfoxrun.org) or CIBC Run for the Cure (www.cibcrunforthecure.com) in Helen’s memory.
Special thank you to the doctors and nurses of Royal Columbian Hospital.
Helen was a dedicated instructor at Continuing and Adult Education at the Helen Dixon Center. The true joy of her life was spending time with her grandchildren. She will be forever loved and missed by her family.
There is no funeral at her request. A memorial tea will be held at the Senior’s Center on Wednesday, August 5, 3 pm to 5 pm.

Exploring Networks of Communities

The July seminar discussion at SCoPE is one of my favourite topics, and facilitated by some of my favourite people! Exploring Networks of Communities runs July 6 - 24 with each week focusing on specific questions and issues and illustrated through case studies. The seminar is facilitated by Diego Leal, Project Manager for the Colombia National Program for ICT Use on Education in Higher Education, and John Smith, leader of CPsquare, the community of practice on communities of practice.

We're trying something a little different with this seminar -- it will be in both English and Spanish! (I predict Babelfish and other translation services will be getting a few hits over the next 3 weeks!)

These are the cases presentations we have lined up so far, scheduled for Monday of each week via Elluminate. The first case is scheduled for Monday, July 6 at 10:00 a.m. PDT (your time zone). Check the SCoPE forum description for up-to-date times and locations of all live sessions.

• Paul Stacey and Andrew Marchand, The Learn Together Collaboratory (English)
  
• Diego Leal, Colombia Ministry of Education project (Spanish)
  
• Nick Lothian, Education Network Australia (English)
  

Here is the description from the forum:

When does it make sense to have a network of communities? How do you go about supporting a network of communities? These are questions many of us are grappling with and we are finding there are many issues and challenges to consider! This 3-week seminar will be combined with weekly live "case study" sessions where we will hear from community leaders in higher education. Together we will explore the aspects and issues that can lead to a need for a network of communities based on these study cases and the practices of the participants. This is an initial exploration around this topic and we will identify new tasks, opportunities, and actions that emerge from the seminar.

All SCoPE events are facilitated by volunteers in the community and are free and open to the public. Registration is not required and you are welcome to participate according to your own your time and interest. Latecomers, newcomers, and passersby are always welcomed. All discussions and presentations are archived for future reference.

Please spread the word!