3 things you should know about blogging

I'm on a crusade. I want to encourage as many educators as possible to engage online with their professional community. One of the best ways to do this is through blogging - sharing your thoughts, ideas, best practice, and so on, using a public online platform. Following on from various blog posts such as 7 reasons teachers should blog, and a recent video I produced called 3 things you should know about Twitter, here is another short video. I intend to produce more of these if people find them useful. Let me know what you think in the comments box below. Do watch the video, feel free to share it, comment on it, or use it in any constructive way you wish. And then get blogging!



3 things you should know about blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creativity unleashed!

One of my workshops is proving particularly popular wherever I present it. It's a workshop about how to promote creativity in learning, and as you might imagine, I get the audience involved in lots of activities, exercises and games and give them some fun challenges and problems to solve. We also enjoy a lot of dialogue around questions that evolve during the workshop. I challenge teachers to tell me how they recognise when their learners are being creative. It's a difficult task, because most of the time we can't even agree what creativity is. Is music I don't like creative? What about graffiti on a wall? Or a new building design that I think is hideous? Creativity means different things to different people, and polarises our responses, and that is part of the appeal of discussing the topic. There are always some great answers in the workshops, such as: 'students are quiet and focused', 'they lose track of time', or 'they surprise me with great ideas or solutions'. I decided to crowd source some more comments from my Twitter community to see what teachers currently think about creativity and how best to promote it in formal learning contexts. What follows is a sample of the conversation:

I see students being creative when they challenge my own thinking. Emma Rutherford (@erutherford247), a teacher in Melbourne, Australia, said: 'Avoid 'guess what's in the teacher's head' - ask questions you DON'T already know the answers to'. London based Catherine Hughes (aka @CatherineHughe7) tweeted something similar today: 'their solution surprises, inspires, challenges me'. I agree that this is a tell tale sign of creativity in the classroom, but it's only one of many. I have challenged my own students to come up with something new, surprising or inspiring - and they don't disappoint me. In fact, I know my students are being creative when they teach me things I didn't know. That's a real bonus, but a teachers' professional pride has to be put to one side. Be humble and admit to them that you learnt from them. There is always more to learn.

Kim Pascoe (@acorns47) a nurse in Hampshire came up with the most comical response: 'When your tutor tells you to be creative with your artbook, so you tear out all the pages to make a paper mache model with it.' This reminds me of a conversation I heard on a train on Father's Day. A little girl two seats behind me was writing out her card to her Father, and her Mother was 'directing' the proceedings. She drew a heart and asked the little girl to colour it in. The little girl started colouring it in blue, and her mother said: 'No, darling, it should be red'. 'Why?' asked the little girl. 'Because hearts are always red darling' said her mother. The little girl wasn't convinced by the answer, and said 'well this heart is blue'. She also coloured outside the lines, which drew another criticism from her mother. I was thinking, please, please stop and let the little girl write the card the way she wants to! Isn't this a little like the mentality we see in school classrooms? Follow the rules... Don't colour outside the lines...

Which brings me on to another question I often ask during my Creative Learning workshops: What do teachers do to promote creative learning environments? How do we unstop the bottle that contains all this untapped imagination and energy? How do we ensure it is released in the form of creativity? Ann Michaelsen in Oslo, Norway (@annmic) suggests letting students ask more questions and decide on the topics that interest them, a sentiment echoed by Hawaiin teacher Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) who said that 'most important is freedom and time...but I find offering inspirational examples helps.' But do teachers have that much time to promote creative learning, tinkering, play? How can they break out of the endless cycle of delivering curriculum content and teaching 'to the test'.  Clearly some radical approaches are called for. Malyn Mawby (@malynmawby) an educator in Sydney, Australia sent a link to an entire collection of blog posts on creative learning that is good reading.

Heidi Hass Gabel, (@HHG) a teacher in Canada, relates the story of a gifted LD child who is incredibly creative, but feels the pressure to conform when in the larger classroom. This raises a number of pertinent questions not only about the way classrooms in traditional settings are managed, but also the lack of personalised learning opportunities for children in mass education systems. Are we being realistic if we expect creativity in classrooms, when the school system stifles this in its very nature? Heidi asks: 'We say we want creativity, but how do we model alternatives and value diversity in practice?' Good question. Do you have any answers?

Which brings us to Helena Gillespie (@helenauea) at the University of East Anglia in England, who believes that learners' ideas can often be better than teachers' ideas. I see that comment as advocating more leading from students and teachers taking more of a back seat. In my own experience, if I do just that and let the students lead, the full session and often the direction of the entire module can take a different, and richer trajectory, encompassing content that might not have been considered by the lecturer. This is also the point in crowdsourcing comments for blog posts such as this one. A few simple questions sent out onto Twitter have reaped a wealth of comments and ideas, far more than I can feature in this short piece, but all thought provoking, challenging and exceeding any thoughts I might have been able to generate on my own.

Thanks to all those who responded to my Twitter questions this morning. There is plenty of space for you to continue the conversation below in the comments box. But be creative! ;)

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Creativity unleashed! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

3 things you should know about Twitter

I was asked by Wayne Macintosh - founder of WikiEducator - if I would produce a short video explaining why I use Twitter. I was a little surprised because I had assumed that anyone who was going to use Twitter was probably on board and already familiar with the social media tool. Not so of course, as Wayne pointed out to me. He tells me there are many people who still need to know about Twitter and how to use it effectively. There are also many more who need to know why it is such an important tool for professionals. So here it is. My two minutes or so of opinion on why I use Twitter:



3 things you should know about Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

... and then our tools shape us

My series of retrospective reviews of seminal  learning and technology books continues. I have scoured my personal book library in search of a dozen books that have influenced my own thinking, and share a synopsis of their contents with you. For previous reviews start here. Today's book recommendation is the fifth in the series:

Howard Rheingold (2002) Smart Mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

There are several books that make an impact as soon as you pick them up and start reading. Smart Mobs is one of those books. I first read it whilst a new academic and still finding my way, and I read it in a time that pre-dated what we now know as social media. Mobile (cellular) phones were just beginning to make their impact on society, and were starting to penetrate sufficiently into the public consciousness to provide the media with occasional stories. In writing Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold, one of the pioneers of virtual communities and internet communication, created a land-mark volume on the social revolution that at the time was only just gaining ground. I don't believe it is too early to declare that Smart Mobs has been instrumental in shaping the way we have come to understand how smart phones can be used as tools to organise, motivate and sustain social movements. The book remains a significant contribution to the discourse around learning technology.

Rhiengold takes us on a global odyssey of mobile communication, telepresence, pervasive computing, RFID, barcode readers, alludes to crowdsourcing and the 'wisdom of crowds' (before these concepts were defined) and even predicts wearable computers and the emergence of tangible computing - the internet of things - as he draws together his arguments to describe a future that is defined by, and through prolific ownership of personal devices. In an envisioned world where information is ubiquitous, Rheingold uses down to earth, accessible prose to argue that the only barrier to accessing this information is the ability to use a mobile device:

'Think of all the public places where inexpensive chips could squirt up-to-the-second information of particular interest to you - such as the time your flight leaves and animated directions to your destination in an unfamiliar city - direct to your phone. Point your hand-held computer at a restaurant, and find out what the last dozen customers said about the food. Point your device at a billboard, and see clips of the film or music it advertises, and then buy tickets or download a copy on the spot. Not only will products and locations have websites, but many will have message boards and chat-rooms' (p 95).

Howard Rheingold is prescient indeed in his predictions. He uses the language of the time, declaring correctly that customers will demand conversation to supplement business and retail experiences, but within a decade, this functionality would be taken up by Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. The implications for education were also implied within this passage of text. Any educational organisation still ignoring the supplementary techno-social dimensions of the learning experience is anachronistic, and out of touch with reality.

The final chapter of Smart Mobs poses some interesting philosophical questions. He exposes many of the psychological and moral dilemmas around wholesale adoption of new technologies, describing the impact of technological disruption including the changing (and possible eroded?) role of centralised media and services, personal choice, privacy, freedom and democracy, relationships, and legal issues. He reveals some rich complexity when he says:

'For most people, individual decisions about the roles of mobile and pervasive technologies in our lives are more likely to involve matters of degree rather than crisply binary choices. I suspect that thoughtful technology usage in the future will require each person and family to decide which settings and which times should be sequestered from the reach of communication media' (p 184).

Rheingold then poses perhaps the most important question in the entire book:

'Will we be wiser in our choices of how to use the small screen in our hands than we were with the TV screen in what used to be the family room? (p 184).

In hindsight, we failed to learn from the lessons of the television. As Marshall McLuhan once said: 'We shape out tools and then our tools shape us.' Just how has the smart phone shaped us? Perhaps we are still finding out. The final word in my review comes from a conversation Rheingold reported he had about new technologies with an Amish gentleman:

'It's not just how we use technology that concerns us. We're also concerned about what kind of people we become when we use it' (p 185).

Photo by Biser Todorov (Wikimedia Commons)


... and then our tools shape us by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All together now

This is a continuation of my series of retrospective reviews of seminal  learning and technology books. I have scoured my personal book library in search of a dozen books that have influenced my own thinking, and share a synopsis of their contents with you. For previous reviews start here. Today's book recommendation is the fourth in the series:

Clay Shirky (2008) Here Comes Everybody. London: Penguin.

The strapline to Clay Shirky's book is 'How change happens when people come together.' From the very early days of civilisation, people have been teaming up to achieve change. In fact, human civilisation has been founded upon change, and without teamwork, collective action, social movements and group effort, much of that change would not have been achievable. Shirky's book delivers that message strongly, and there are clear implications for education, especially where groups use new tools to promote change. Shirky says:

'Collective action, where a group acts as a whole, is even more complex than collaborative production, but here again new tools give life to new forms of action. This in turn challenges existing institutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination' (p 143).

The book features a number of examples of collective action using new tools, including the creation of the world's largest repository of knowledge, Wikipedia, which didn't even exist prior to 2001. Shirky shows how, similar to hive and swarm behaviour seen in animals, humans perform in networks and thrive within 'architectures of participation' - so whilst bees make hives, humans create mobile telephone networks and the internet. Shirky also underlines the importance of one specific aspect of the internet - social media tools - as 'amplifiers' of ideas and collective actions. He points out that collective action is harder to promote than individual action, but once it gets going, it is very difficult to stop. He draws on a variety of examples from social history, but if a new updated edition of this book were to be published, I have no doubt he would draw on recent social events such as the Arab Spring and citizen journalism as examples of effective social collective action using new media tools. For educators, the question is how much of this potential we can harness within formal learning contexts. We know instinctively and empirically that people learn best when they are in rich social contexts. It is probable that many of the world's most trenchant problems could be addressed through education with social tools to amplify the process. Shirky remarks:

'There are real and permanent social dilemmas, which can only be optimised for, never completely resolved. The human social repertoire includes many such optimisations, which social tools can amplify' (p 188).

This book makes it clear that in an ever increasingly social world, telecommunication and social media are connecting us more richly. Education still has a long way to go before we can begin to claim that  harnessing the power of the collective worldwide intelligence to provide equally rich learning opportunities for our students. But if we consider the 'here comes everybody' ethos Shirky advocates, we will begin to understand that everyone, teachers and students together, can equally create knowledge, organise and share it, and in so doing we will benefit together as a global learning community.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


All together now by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.