Wow – 4 years!

At the time of publishing this: 171 Post (including this one), 627 Comments (since moving my blog to davidtruss.com 2 years ago), 736 RSS Subscribers, and over 28,000 Visits (in my 4th year).

To me the numbers are staggering in that I really started this just for me. But the sharing of my blog is what makes it so special. The real ‘value’ of my blog is something I shared in my post a year ago about my 3rd blogiversary:

My Blog is My PhD (or rather my ‘PhB – Blogtorate’ as I coined it)

This blog has provided me with an opportunity to share my learning, and more than anything else it has challenged me to be accountable in a way that no other professional development ever has. It has reminded me that I love to learn and it is part of a learning process that I truly love. My blog may not get me any more letters after my name but more than anything else, it has set me on a journey I’m going to continue, not for some external reward, but rather for the intrinsic value and for the love of learning.

Thanks to all of my blog readers and to those that have taken the time to comment, I sincerely mean it when I say ‘thank you for contributing to my learning’! My blog to me is about participatory learning and engaging within my digital neighbourhood and I can’t show enough appreciation for the part you play!

Here is my blog’s year in review. The posts I’ve written and a sentence or two to summarize them. I hope that you will find something that appeals to you to read, to share and/or to comment on.  (Mouse-over the links to find out a bit more about each post.)

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A Gr8Tweet-ing Experience: Educators new to twitter, here is a little walk down memory lane… Remember that it takes work and effort to build a meaningful community of friends.

Black and White Education: How many channels of information do our students experience outside of our classes? How many in our classes?

Hargreaves and the 4th Way [Part 2]: Professionals acting responsibly and holding themselves, and others, accountable in the interest of teaching and learning.

The Road Less Traveled: Sometimes you can’t just take baby steps, and you’ve got to commit fully to experience something… I’m leaving my job, my home, and my country.

Collaboration, Contributors and a Comment on Classroom2.0: I think most of these ‘digital natives’ we talk about are very good at connecting to socialize and communicate with their peers, but not to collaborate and learn.

“Chasing the A”: I think that the ‘missing piece’ when it comes to education today, is that it tries to fill us with important things rather than make us feel important and valued… it feeds us content, but doesn’t leave us contented in any meaningful way.

Learning in Louisiana: When introducing ‘new’ tools to teachers what’s the right mix of breadth and depth? How much should we expose teachers to at one time? And how deep should we get with a single tool, a tool that may or may not interest all of the participants?

The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant- On SlideShare: “I can do that without technology” -Actually no you can’t!

The POD’s are Coming! BLC09: This is a story I think all educators need to hear. The question I wonder is, ‘Am I telling it in a way that they will listen?’

A letter to friends: I remember reading once that we, as human beings, have two consistent social difficulties, saying ‘hello’ and saying ‘goodbye’.

Destinations and Dispositions: …Perhaps I might have let persistence cloud my powers of observation, and I could have learned this lesson sooner.

Variable Flow: As I say in my ‘POD’s are Coming’ presentation, ‘Filters filter learning’ and I’m finding the lack of information flow rather challenging to deal with.

Bubble Wrap: I think schools have become a bit too bubble wrapped too. We protect the kids from impending harm, bubble wrapping their learning. However I think sometimes we harm them in our attempt to keep them safe.

Blogs as Learning Spaces: …the idea of a blog being a ‘learning space’ came up both when talking about my own blog and when I spoke of the classroom and what technology could do to expand the classroom space.

Openness and Acceptance, Mr Deng and his Allegories of Windows, Flies and Coloured Cats: This marked the first step in China opening many windows and doors to the outside world. Yes, with the fresh air, some flies will follow, but China has become a world economical powerhouse because of it’s choice to ‘open the windows’.

Facebook Revisited: So yes, to answer your question, I do have students as friends on Facebook. Here are my self-designated rules…

Caring across the curriculum: Sometimes I get tired of seeing the school day broken into subject-matter based courses. We don’t teach subjects we teach students, and students of all ages engage in a real life that matters across individual fields of study.

Cassie and Katie have blogs: I’ve added clustermaps and feedjit traffic feed information to their blog sidebars because I think an authentic global audience does a lot to maintain interest in blogging, as does getting comments and feedback.

moments: How would you define a moment?… I love it when teachers take a resource like this and make it meaningful to the classroom.

My 2009 Edublog Awards Nominations: I would like to thank the following people for contributing so much to my learning. I’m only nominating in categories where the impact has been powerful and potent.

Convergence, Cofino and a Connected World: As someone living in Asia now, Kim’s metaphors in Part 1 really hit a chord with me… Kim states,“We have to find ways of more nimbly, realistically and effectively adapting to the new status quo.”

Shifting Education: To the unshifted: Shift or retire… regardless of your age and number of years experience. We have the means to teach differently, now! It doesn’t start tomorrow, it starts today.

Nominations, Appreciation and Inquiry: This year I have been honoured with nominations in two categories for the 6th Annual Edublog Awards… to be placed in categories with bloggers and friends that I both admire and respect is wonderful.

Holiday-Christmas-Concert: We called it our Holiday Concert, but in hindsight it was just a Christmas Concert. It wasn’t intentional, it was unintentional bias, but all of the songs performed were either Christmas songs, or songs that we tend to associate with Christmas.

T’was two nights after Christmas… A story of lost innocence: It was only two nights after Christmas and both kids were tucked away in bed. Then the older of the two came from her bedroom and, doing all that she could to contain her tears, she sat on her mother’s lap…

Broken Presentations and Broken Photocopiers: There were a lot of reasons to roll my eyes and complain. There were a lot reasons to let frustration prevail… and there was an opportunity for me to model for everyone that it really isn’t about the technology.

Augmented Identity: … seeing someone’s Learning Resources and connecting to their Learning Environments… instantaneously… that’s something that can be very exciting for education!

Olympic and Blogging Fever: …as we encourage students to blog and connect online it is important for us to not just encourage but also to support these endeavors! One of the key things that makes blogging an effective learning tool is that it gives students a legitimate audience.

The Trap: In the last two Pro-D sessions that I ran, I provided ‘play time’ in the agenda. I also provided choice: “Here are a few different resources that you might find useful. Go to one of them now, ’start’ you learning here, use me as a resource too.”

Google Buzz and George Costanza – Worlds Collide: there is nothing in my Facebook profile that I am ashamed of or that I wouldn’t want others to see, but I talk differently there to my family and friends than I do on other networks. I tend to share my blog everywhere and so that too has a different voice than with other tools in other contexts.

Warning! We Filter Websites at School: If you are in a school where filters filter learning, here is a little poster for you to hang up in your front entrance…

Teachers as Lead Learners: I think that if a teacher goes into a class believing first and foremost that they are ‘model learners’ and that they will learn with their students, then that teacher will create a meaningful and engaging learning environment for their students.

Product You: It’s nothing new that we are the targets of advertising. And it’s nothing new that advertisers are getting better at targeting us. But…

The Role of a Principal: (You probably won’t find these in a job description, though you should!)

Shifting Learning: Here are 4 trends that education is moving towards: Greater Transparency, greater Responsibility, greater Individualization and greater Permanence.

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That’s a year of posts! I hope that you have or that you will find something valuable to your own learning, and as always, I welcome your feedback.

Think good thoughts, say good words, do good deeds.

If you haven’t joined Classroom2.0 yet, do so. It is a great network of teachers, of many different technological competencies, all sharing and contributing questions and ideas. I went there this morning to find a link to a Mathcast that was happening, but I ended up reading a discussion thread started by John McCullough, which took most of my attention away from the Mathcast.

In John’s discussion, Pre-service Education… Social Networking, not., he states:

I’m a college professor that teaches future teachers how to integrate technology. For a couple years, I’ve been teaching my students the awesome world of Blogs, Wikis, and other 2.0-related technologies, not just how to use them, but how to integrate them effectively as a teacher. However, even though they are digital natives of social networking, my students don’t seem to recognize the educational implications. They don’t see it, and the effective integration typically has never been modeled for them, (and I’m pretty sure I’m not helping very much). In addition, trying to take “I’m a student” thinking individuals and convert them into “I’m a teacher” thinking individuals in regards to social networking in education has been a battle that I seem to lose more often than I win.

And John asks:

What do you think about pre-service teachers’ skills and knowledge regarding social networking, as well as pre-service education on the same topic? I would love to read your comments, suggestions, and experiences.

This was my response, that I thought I’d also add here on Pairadimes:

Hi John,
I’d like to share a few ideas here although I’ve never taught pre-service teachers.
1. First I’ll share. I have presented to pre-service teachers before and I have some links I’d like to share.
This includes my ‘The Rant, I Can’t, the Elephant and the Ant‘ presentation I did to pre-service teachers and my newest addition to these links, Cindy Quach’s look at effectively using collaboration tools.
2. On the topic of collaboration, I think most of these ‘digital natives’ we talk about are very good at connecting to socialize and communicate with their peers, but not to collaborate and learn.
3. Digital collaboration is not intuitive and collaboration roles are context and purpose driven, not general in nature. Thus, learning intentions, purpose and expectations for collaboration need to be explicit or the contributor’s role in sharing and contributing isn’t clear. If these things aren’t clear, then how do I as a contributor add meaningful value?
4. ‘Ownership’ is key. I had a Ning network for Grade 10 Planning and it was teacher-driven until I opened up the forum for them to generate some topics, suddenly the site came alive. The topics varied from important issues, to favourite hockey teams, to a lively debate on whether ‘boys are better than girls’… but what happened after that was that the students started sharing more on each other’s blogs and class discussions.
With student teachers, I would think that generating the content of the site would be as important, or perhaps more important than with any other group since, as mentioned here many times, you want them to see themselves as teachers.
Hope this helps!

Reflecting now, I think my last point is incorrect:

We want ALL learners to see themselves as teachers and contributors to the learning… content creators.

A google document is a collaborative tool, but I’ve been a contributor to many such documents where others have not, and I have also been a non-contributor on a few. Putting a class on a google document does not necessarily make the process collaborative: It can create a group of contributors, participants, editors, and lurkers, but should we call that collaboration in any meaningful way, just because there is the potential for collaboration? What is the intent, purpose and expectations for the learners and contributors?How are they accountable for their contributions?

Things have changed and we need to change too. As I said in my comment on Cindy Quach’s post:

You said it well, “Most writing that is published electronically is, by nature, works in progress.”…A work in progress that can be collaborated on, linked to, added to, and elaborated on. What I really like about the differences in your three examples is that the roles of the contributors vary, and inadvertently you are teaching your students to understand that they can meaningfully contribute with and to others in different ways. A necessary skill in a new world of literacy and technology.

On a related topic, how important is the process in collaboration? I think the quality of the collaboration can be just as important as the quality of the finished product of that collaboration… but often the expectations for how to meaningfully participate/contribute/collaborate aren’t clearly defined, and seldom assessed. If we want to see, and teach, meaningful collaboration then we have to know what it is that we want to see, and clearly define that for our students.

If you know of any assignments or projects that clearly define the collaboration process, and/or assess that process, then please share them with me.

Until last year, this odd negative/neon image was the only public image you could find of me on the web. In fact currently, many of my online sites still have this image. I like the photo, people who know me recognize me in it, and it was taken on a hot air balloon trip with my wife, so it has fond memories attached. But I decided that since I have been very public with my thoughts and ideas, (as seen on this blog), I would share a bit more of who I am, while on the web. Slowly but surely I have been putting photos on the web with a greater likeness to me. Now I wonder if I should go back to this image? I wonder if I should make my family photos private again? Also, I am keenly aware that at some point in the future I may need to moderate comments on this blog, and I find that sad.

Today I read a horribly upsetting Kathy Sierra post on the Creating Passionate Users blog. Kathy has been the victim of some anonymous, vulgar, sexist vandals… that have gone so far as to issue death threats. I am not linking to the actual post since, although I truly empathize with how difficult this has been for her, I don’t like the approach of the post. Kathy shares, in detail, all of the words, images and internet pseudonyms of the people that have put her in considerable distress. Personally, I think that gives the vandals too much credit/recognition that they certainly don’t deserve (I said this in one of the 1,000+ comments currently on this post).

This comes after reading Kelly Christopherson’s post Masked Commentors just over a week ago. As he states about the first comment on his school blog, “it wasn’t necessarily positive and it used a bit of profanity… I know that even these comments have nuggets that I need to mine and use to become a better leader and person.”

I must admit to having difficulty seeing the nuggets sometimes. Instead, I see the miner covered in soot.

I got hit with this kind of abuse a couple years ago. I have a website that I go to for drawing faces in art. I used to sign my work with a pseudonym rather than my real name when I saved portraits that I created into the public gallery, (I expected the same from my students). I would use these saved images in the following years as examples of what students could do. Two years ago when I did a search for my pseudonym in the gallery there were derogatory sketches and comments that came up in the search that were directly aimed at ‘Mr. Truss’.

Neither of these last two situations compare with the anguish that Kathy is experiencing… in fact she may very well depart from the blogosphere as a result of this… (which would be horrible, and I am saddened by the potential loss). However, these situations do make me think of the potential perils of teachers and administrators having a public face on the internet. It only takes one malicious person to be hurtful, one ‘bad apple’ to spoil the pie.

This is fairly easy to do with an angry person… simply choose not to engage in their dirty approach.

However these kind of hurtful, hateful on-line vandals bring the mud to the fight. They hurl it at you and get you dirty whether or not you choose to engage. Combating this is not easy: It takes courage, it takes thick skin, it takes effort to choose a moral stance; to avoid slinging mud. As a result, it leaves me wondering… How do you stop these malicious people from getting the best of you? Beyond not giving the offenders any credit or notoriety, and beyond ‘turning the other cheek’, what else can be done?

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Anti-Cyberbullying Day – Friday, March 30th, 2007

An honest look at my blog.

The Good: • This site, elgg.net, is not going to be called EduFilter (seems my e-mail wasn’t the only complaint). Elgg is now EduSpaces, a name a number of us recommended – though I bear no claim to my voice being listened to since I also offered a dozen other alternatives.

The Bad: • All my links to the site need changing, this isn’t necessary since elgg rather than eduspaces in the address still works, but I would rather that my Flickr, Curriki, LinkedIn, & other blogs etc. all had my updated links.

The (I wish I was) Indifferent: • My Technorati URL needs to change. THE BIG QUESTION: Why did this bother me?

There are two reasons that I can think of: TIMING and EGO.

Timing:
My blog is getting more attention than it ever has. Some noted bloggers: Stephen Downes, Scott McLeod, Wesley Freyer, Miguel Guhlin, and Vicki Davis (on EdTech Talk ) have all given my Web2.0 Prophecy: an Adventure a plug and linked to it with my old elgg address. This attention has doubled traffic to my site and I thank them for this! Yet I sit here pretending it didn’t bother me that they are linked to my old Technorati address rather than the new one. This leads to the main reason the URL change bothered me…

Ego:
I while back I e-mailed Scott McLeod in response to his top edublogs? post and wrote this:

Here comes the honest part: I like to go to my sitemeter and see where people visit me from. I like seeing the dots grow, in number and in size, on my clustrmap… and I like when I see new links in Technorati. Why?

The fact is, that I want to be well read, and I want my blog to be recognized. Scott McLeod says it best at the end of his ‘top edublogs?’ post:

1. Square Peg, Round Hole – a collection of other people’s ideas around schools not fitting kids that I have been adding to until recently, now a second post is in the works.

2. Portal Needed to Connect Classrooms to the World: Global Citizens can Share Talents and Skills with Students and the accompanying wiki fieldfindr, (yesterday fieldfindr had more hits than my blog… almost a month after I created it as a mock-up to go along with the post). When will someone make this a reality?

3. The digital native, the digital naive, and the digital divide – among other things, the idea that maybe students of this generation aren’t fully at the digital native stage… yet.

4. Leadership Lesson Plans – found in my files rather than my blog. Thanks mostly to Curriki, these get visited and downloaded a number of times daily. I am glad I can offer these resourses that I have found useful in teaching Leadership.

And in my opinion, the most under-rated post: School 2.0 Participant’s Manifesto – Manifesto’s are big in education and schools2.0 but they mostly focus on the changes needed to the system. Here, I look at the responsibilities of the learner- remember them?… the people we are ‘doing this stuff to‘. (ok, that was a bit cheeky!)

To anyone reading my blog for the first time, Learning Conversations is a post that quotes a lot of my other posts and gives a sense for what this blog is about, and what it means to me.

The Good:
•Quality. I take pride in my posts and although I still do them primarily for myself, I am keenly aware that I have an audience. This has made me a much better writer… (and it can do the same for students!)
•Recognition. My site is slowly growing in readership. Fear not ‘A list’ bloggers your position is safe, I’m not tilting the blogosphere on its’ head here, but I do consider myself an agent of change, and I will make my world a better place!
•Meaningful dialogue. I have enjoyed the learning conversations that I have had online. I have not been this excited about learning- ever! Was it like this in school for anyone? Not me.

The Bad:
•In-click/Out-click. I am amazed at how ridiculous some of the Google Searches are that lead to my site. For example I have the phrase ‘Webkinz-dot-com’ in a post that happens to touch an image of a (totally unrelated) bridge. 2-5 times a week I get hits from Webkinz (stuffed animal) image searches – Hardly what I would call a meaningful hit.
•Time. I spend too much time on the computer. I can’t keep up with my feedreader. Both reading and writing are slow processes for me. I started highlighting ‘New Voices’ but have stopped recently because I haven’t read any recently. I resolve this by sleeping less, but I can’t keep this up much longer. Who is doing all this well? And what is your secret???
•Comments. I spend a bit of time each week commenting on blogs… continuing the conversation. But I seem to generate very few commenters on my blog. This might be a result of my next point.
•Post length. I am long-winded. Most of my posts are lengthy. Are readers even getting to the end of them? I think it was Vicki Davis who wrote ‘write it, then cut it in half.’ I have to learn to do this… it won’t be easy for me. Even this post is probably too long!
The Indifferent:
•Technorati. It took a few days but I’m over it. I really don’t mind that I am starting over. I will enjoy watching the links grow again. I have never gone to Technorati to see someone else’s ranking and judged their site as a result. In fact, in a comment on Christian Long’s post Stop Blogging Because You’re An Educator I state: “…Warlick and Richardson seem to be more about post-cards than edu-posts.” I’ve noticed that many of the really meaningful posts that I have read recently have not come from the ‘big boys’ but rather the boys and girls- like me – that are in the trenches, trying to make sense of where schools are now, and where they need to be.

Images: Foster City Reflections and Under The Bridge 2 are both by Peter Kaminski on Flickr.

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I have been participating in this on-line conference for the last few days (or rather nights!) This is the introduction to the conference that convinced me to participate:

“The evolution of teaching and learning is accelerated with technology. After several decades of duplicating classroom functionality with technology, new opportunities now exist to alter the spaces and structures of knowledge to align with both needs of learners today, and affordances of new tools and processes.

Yet our understanding of the impact on teaching and learning trails behind rapidly forming trends. What are critical trends? How does technology influence learning? Is learning fundamentally different today than when most prominent views of learning were first formulated (under the broad umbrellas of cognitivism, behaviourism, and constructivism)? Have the last 15 years of web, technology, and social trends altered the act of learning? How is knowledge itself, in a digital era, related to learning?”

The gem of the ‘Learning Conversations’, that have happened so far, has been a discussion thread started by presenter Bill Kerr tittled, “a challenge to connectivism”. A considerable amount of the discussion is theoretical and I will admit that some of it is ‘over my head’ in that I have a lack of background knowledge to fully appreciate all that is being said. What I have enjoyed in this discussion is the healthy discord that has occurred. Stephen Downes, web guru and another presenter at the conference, posted in this discussion thread, ‘What Connectivism Is‘. This spurred discourse after Tony Forster said in a post reply to Stephen, “I am disturbed by your statement…”

Two things have made this enjoyable:

1. The fact that at a Connectivism conference the very definition of the topic is open for debate by the presenters. This speaks volumes to the unchartedness/ the newness of this way of connecting to one another, and it embodies the idea that knowledge is both fluid and reconstructed/remixed in this new connected world. We are continually Synthesizing and Adding New Meaning as we connect in new ways.

2. This discourse is something that I have seldom seen in the world of educational blogs. There seems to be an unspoken etiquette about being non-confrontational when discussing ideas on other’s blogs. Essentially teachers don’t criticize others’ opinions. Even when there is disagreement it is often polite, reserved and… well, annoying. On the other hand, there seems to be thoughtful discord and discourse happening in the Connectivism conference forums.

I think that our concern that discourse and discord are forms of argument sometimes prevents us from having meaningful, healthy discourse. In their book Metaphors We Live By, Lakeoff & Johnson consider the metaphor ‘ARGUMENT is WAR’. This is the metaphor that often prevents us from having meaningful discourse.

Formal debates also fit neatly into this metaphor: point-counterpoint/attack-defend.
As a society, we aren’t going to change this embedded metaphor any time soon, but we can separate argument from discourse. Discourse, discord and disagreement need not be argumentative.

It is fascinating to me that in the blogosphere there is a noticeable shortage in meaningful discourse. Teachers encourage critical thinking, challenge students to consider alternative views and encourage meaningful discourse in the classroom… and then walk on proverbial egg shells when commenting on blogs.

Now, I am sure that there are some wonderful counter-examples to my point, (and I encourage anyone reading this to send me links:-). But I do wonder if it is just me- and the circles I hyper-surf around in- or do others notice this subdued politeness that hinders meaningful discourse?

I am encouraged by the healthy discourse and discord that I see happening at the Connectivism conference; I think a lot of new, innovative and creative ideas/concepts/theories can and will be born out of it!

So what is Connectivism?
George Siemens, conference organizer, says in his Connectivism Blog,”Connectivism is a learning theory for the digital age… For me – call it whatever you want – connectivism, social constructivism, navigationism (pick your own)…learning today must be seen as social, knowledge distributed across a network, capacity enhanced by enlarging the network, learning/knowledge as multi-faceted and complex, incorporating technology, etc. I’m generally not in a mood to argue against other learning theories (though, at times, it’s required simply to achieve a frame of reference). I’m much more interested in arguing for effective learning representative of what learners require in order to stay current today. Evangelizing connectivism is a secondary concern as compared with discussing effective, relevant, “sustainable” learning.”
In another post, he adds this interesting point about connecting in new ways, “Dialogue does not need to be direct in order to be effective. Dialogue of greatest value is what I call parallel, or dialogue of awareness. At this level, the comments and views of others are within our cognitive network (i.e. we know they exist) and their influence weighs in our reasoning and thought formation.”

In my small contribution to the discussion thread I say,
“My limited experience in blogging suggests to me that it is the cross-disciplinary meandering and hyper-linking that brings us deeper levels of understanding, as well as peripherally participating with a mentor or expert. In fact, I think innovation and meaningful learning/synthesis of ideas comes from the fringes… connectivism isn’t about the theory- the great body of knowledge to be shared, it is about the ability for any Joe (or Joan) Schmo to meaningfully add to the learning conversation. (As I hope this Schmo has )”
[Note: This has actually been adapted from my original post. Another contributor disagreed with a specific point I made- and I agreed with him! Originally I said 'as opposed to' instead of 'as well as' (italicized above)]

Please feel free to disagree!

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Reference: G. Lakoff & M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.(Paperback edition, 1981, *pg. 5, **pg. 4)

Image Credits:

“Arguments Yard, Whitby” by David Hastings (Flickr username: dr1066)

“Definition of Discourse”: Mac PowerBook Dictionary Version 1.0.1(1.0.1) Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc.

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Excerpt from My Feedback/Reflection post on the Connectivism Conference, (Feb. 10th, 2007).

About me:
Well I still have to look at/listen to the Stephen Downes presentation before I would feel comfortable saying that I have come close to concluding with the conference. As I say in [this] blog post, I have found both the discourse and even discord refreshing. I think best when I am surrounded by people who challenge what I say and what I think. At more than one point I felt misunderstood and had to clarify myself… but I believe that ‘the meaning of your communication is the response that you get’ and so I take full responsibility for my lack of communication. In an effort to clarify my words, I do the same with my thoughts… isn’t that what being a life-long learner is all about? This conference has provided a considerable amount of fodder for me to chew on for a while. I have had many opportunities to synthesize and add meaning to ideas both new and old alike. I have also found many new friends!

Thank you all for contributing to my learning!

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