Am I transformed? (a final reflection)

  by  Ciorra Photography 

Little did I know what I was venturing into when I embarked on my Masters in nursing a few years ago.  I’ve heard it said that returning for a MN degree is “refreshing your nursing education”.  Indeed, I have found that it has been that and much more for me.  When I registered for this course, I just knew I wanted something different and something related to education.  Again, I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’m a risk-taker, and it usually serves me.  Once again, I believe I’m further ahead for venturing out into unknown territory, “feel(ing) the fear and do(ing) it anyway”!

Transformative Learning  is the process of “perspective transformation”, with three dimensions: psychological (changes in understanding of the self), convictional (revision of belief systems), and behavioral (changes in lifestyle).

Mezirow (1995) inductively identified ten phases of perspective transformation from his study of 83 women returning to college after a long hiatus from schooling.  As I read through the list, I could identify with every single one.

1. A disorienting dilemma

• Nursing education is highly guarded on use of social media out of legitimate ethical concern around breach of  patient privacy.  The official party line from my immediate social system has seemed to be NO GOOD CAN COME FROM TWITTER and other social media!  Only one of my colleagues within our program is active on Twitter.

2 Self-examination with feelings of guilt or shame or fear

• What do I think I’m doing in this course?  Am I simply rebellious to my dying day?  (see above concern for context).  I do not measure up to my classmates in my background of educational theory.  This may not be a legitimate elective.  I will be exposed and shamed.

3. A critical assessment of assumptions

• My colleague who is on Twitter is a leader and innovator and highly ethical practitioner.  I have the utmost respect for her and she has been a marvelous informal mentor to me.  She is always “out in front” regarding tech integration.  She is better informed than many of us on evidence, be it evidence for pedagogical or nursing science.   Maybe she is onto something!

4. Recognition that one’s discontent and process of transformation are shared and that others have negotiated a similar change.

• Simply refer to EC&I831 classmates’ blogs from the first several weeks for validation.

5. Exploration of options for new roles, relationships, and actions

• Getting on Twitter and following classmates and a few social justice and nursing related hashtags opened my eyes to the possibility that Twitter could be the most effective gateway to lifelong learning.  
• Reflecting on my own and others’ learning as documented in our blogs revealed that learning happens in the spaces between people, when they come together to process ideas and behaviors.

6. Planning of a course of action

• I adopted http://www.paper.li in October to make Twitter more ergonomic and esthetic for me.
• As I considered our faculty’s learning needs and innovations taking place within our new nursing education program, I planned a project that would transfer, or at least, share knowledge, in my face-to-face PLN.
• I would complete the course requirements to the best of my ability and see where this takes me…I need this elective, darnit, non-completion is not an option!

7. Acquisition of knowledge and skills for implementing one’s plans

• We all learned to use WordPress.com or similar for documenting our learning journeys.
• We all learned to locate and attribute to their to author/creator, engaging images.
• We all were challenged to learn new Web2.0 digital storytelling tools.  
• Applicable theory related to the objectives of my final project “Innovation Showcase” had to be reviewed and learned “deeper”.  

8. Provisionally trying out new roles

• This course has occurred concurrently with taking on the role of course leader in our new program.  In my third year as nursing educator, I consider myself an advanced novice.  Taking on course leadership is a  big stretch.  I am thankful for the timing of the Nursing Leadership 812, that I’ve just completed, in which I created a personal leadership plan tailored primarily to this new role.  I will be  integrating some learning from ECI831 in trialling VoiceThread as a means of asynchronous discussion between faculty who rarely see each other while working in community agencies with students for experiential learning.  Effective communication skills are imperative for a leader to be transformational – empowering.

9. Building of competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships

• I certainly perceive an increase in confidence as a result of the things I’ve learned and the relationships I’ve formed.

10. A reintegration into one’s life on the basis of conditions dictated by one’s new perspective.

• I do not believe I am the same learner that I was back in early September.  Neither am I the same teacher. On this point, I hope, and choose to believe, that I am transformed and on my way to being transformative as an educator.

How am I different?

My face-to-face learning network is more developed, in part(s) as a result of my project, my increased confidence and my need for expertise and resources as I move into a new role.

My virtual network was birthed with the commencement of this course and has evolved and sculpted over the months.  Although I follow 100 on Twitter now, up from 3 back in August 2011, my best learning resources are @NIH (National Instititute for Health), @globaltechnurse, @SafetyNurse, @nursetim, @JNE (Journal of Nursing Education) and @Jone_Tiffany for nursing.  I like @Unicef, @ONE.org, @impatientoptimists, @gatesfoundation and @WHOnews for social justice topics.  And I follow educause, and edutopia for general education.

I invited my students to follow me on Twitter on our last day together Dec. 4th.  Most are not on twitter but two have signed on to follow me.  I find myself talking to colleagues about what I learned via twitter this week and educating them about the overlooked goldmine of knowledge and information on twitter.

So I’m better connected as a learner and educator and I believe, as my basic values convictions have changed, I will continue to develop connections to learn and share.  I’m amazed by the things I’m learning from my network and find this so nurturing and energizing that I can’t imagine why I’d slow down now.

I’ve always told stories to help students engage through emotion with ideas and concepts, but I will do even more of this, and I will integrate digital storytelling tools.

Where I want to go yet with social media is to connect with our government officials and health policy makers on a regular basis to give them feedback – positive and negative – and encourage others to do the same.  As I tweeted out to Alec’s community meeting on Thursday, I believe social media gives the individual citizen a voice.  The question is: will we take it up and use it?

sharing a taste of my final project…Innovation Showcase

My final project, entitled ” Innovation Showcase”, is now complete and in the process of uploading to a dropbox file for Alec – all 230 megabytes of video and slides.  This is a presentation that I will give in person in our February faculty meeting.  I’m very pleased with the final product and although not perfect, it is beyond anything I’ve done before.  I learned how to edit video via iMovie and upload into my slideshow.   I played with Skitch on 2 of the slides, and added my ToonDo creation and have those new tools in my storytelling belt.  I watched several slideshows on how to create a killer presentation, using CRAP; contrast, repetition (this needs some improvement in this work), alignment and proximity.  I managed to keep my text on all but three slides very minimal, as recommended by experts.  I would really like to make this into a movie, recording someone’s voice to accompany the slides, someday…  I feel a smile coming on each time I listen to my colleagues tell their stories of innovation and their own personal learning.  It will be wonderful to share these stories in February.  I expect that faculty will be inspired and provoked to trial these strategies as well.  Although the entire file is too large to embed, with 18 minutes of video and 39 slides,I will give you a sampling of slides and skitched screenshots.

Below is only one of the six responses to each of challenges of innovation and ideas for future pursuits.

Telling my colleagues’ stories…of pioneering in nursing ed.

  by  LParisi 

 

v.tr. 1.a. To open up (an area) or prepare (a way): rockets that pioneered outer space. b. To settle (a region). 2. To initiate or participate in the development of

from the free dictionary.

My spare time this last week has been spent editing videotaped interviews of 7 innovative colleagues and 6 second year students.  I’m distilling about 2 hours of footage down to 12-15 minutes, including transition and explanation slides.  Prior to this course, I  left these tech-jobs to  hubby, who I considered more adept… and truthfully, I had no interest in learning this skill.  Now that I know how to do this, I can easily imagine creating other projects for personal or professional use.   iMovie is very user-friendly, especially combined with the youtube video from helpful tween-experts.

I’m excited to have this presentation ready to go for our January faculty meeting.  Just as we’ve so much enjoyed learning from each other in this course, we love learning from each other within our own faculty, but the reality of clinical teaching in nursing education poses a unique challenge to synchronous dialogue about practice.  So I think, or hope, anyway, that the stories that the innovators in the “movie” tell will inspire, encourage, provoke and teach the rest of us.  They will acknowledge the innovators, who all sacrificed their personal time and energy, beyond work hours, to break the ground and prepare the way for the early  adopters, the early and late majority and eventually, the laggards .   I am thrilled to have learned the skills to be the vehicle for the stories!

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  by  Roobee 

What do you think of this pictorial sum-up of twitter?  Is this accurate?  I think I’m a 3.  Where are you on the graphic?

Judy’s Voicethread Learning Summary

Voicethread is fairly easy to use.  The most challenging part for me was to get into a groove of speaking naturally and conversationally …to a computer.  I re-recorded umpteen times, hoping my voice would morph into Catherine Deneauvre’s (sp?)  Clearly, that did not happen.  You’ll notice the volume ups and downs as I recorded some slides on my laptop and some on my desktop with different microphone settings (next time I’ll know better).

So here’s the link, as you can’t embed to wordpress…

http://voicethread.com/share/2430892/

Wordle powerful summarization tool.

I entered the text from my EC&I831 personal class notes to create this poster.  It’s poignant to me that PEOPLE and LEARNING and COMMUNITY  are  the over-arching themes.  I also like the random positioning of “need” and  “get” so close to “people” .  Also, “online”, “course”, and “open” fall just above “Alec”.  That’s all for now as I continue to slog on my overly ambitious, I fear, final project.

Just for fun, I tried 2 more, by entering the text of 2 papers I wrote for another course this term.

Look forward to all of your learning summary presentations!

too much fun!!!

Thanks Allan Levine for a wonderful presentation on digital storytelling tools that make us unartistic folks look creative and artistic. Thanks Mick for the inspiration!  The creation was relatively easy. Figuring out the saving was not straightforward.  

Experiential Learning re: VoiceThread

  by  ggrosseck 

Google images don’t present clear and crisp so I had to replace those with others from flickr, which was actually very straightforward as VoiceThread gives you 4 options other than your own photos: flickr, the New York Public Library, your photos on Facebook and your photos on other of your VoiceThread projects. And yes, I understand it’s best not to use google images in any case because attribution information is not provided.

It was not easy to figure out how to delete a recorded comment, but I eventually found a site that explained this and it wasn’t the actual VoiceThread site.

I am considering inhaling a helium balloon or part of one prior to my next recording session to elevate the pitch of my voice.

MOOC success step five: focus on a project to apply at work

  by  ecstaticist 

Is anyone else  overwhelmed with all that you’re learning and have yet to learn to finish this course?  How are you doing with your projects?

I returned to Dave Cormier’s Success in a MOOC this morning for some re-orienting.  Now, I’m reflecting on how well I’ve done the 5 tasks:

1. orient (I think I’ve done this fairly well)
2. declare (not tagging consistently!)
3. network (I’m getting networked in the course and now will add more nurse educators in undergraduate programs for resource sharing)
4. cluster (I count Laura, Shauna, and Reenie in my cluster, and I see that Tannis and I share a passion for social justice, but I am learning from every single person in the course) and finally
5. FOCUS on the project that I will apply to my job.

As I attempt to write a text and visual script for this presentation, I’m reflecting on the purpose I’d stated last week.

  by  kevin dooley 

Purpose of Project: to share within and without one nursing program’s community of practice, via a digital presentation, innovations undertaken to integrate ICT in our learning spaces with the expectation that faculty’s self-efficacy (expectations of mastery and success) beliefs will increase as a result of vicarious experience via successful peer modelling and persuasion from credible, trustworthy sources (Bandura, 1996).

I’m wondering if it is ambitious or comprehensive enough.  I’m wondering if I should be attempting to share a snippit of Sieman’s theory of connectivism as a new framework for learning that takes into account technology, the decreasing half-life of knowledge and the organizational implications for “deploying instruction”.  Hmm, maybe it’s impossible to take a snippit from his theory!   Maybe I need to reference a technology acceptance model too?

I’m wondering if I should share any of my new learning from this course in this presentation, or if that’s to be explored in a blog that I’d share with my colleagues after EC&I 831 is over in which I might embed my Learning Summary which might prompt some to take up twitter or blogging.  Hmmm, yes.  I think the latter.  What do you think?  This will be presented in a faculty meeting and later posted to youtube on a private channel.

I’m thinking that I’d like to share a clip from Deans SHARE-ski’s Sharing, the Moral Imperative as an intro in my Project.  I’d like to stir some passion and create a vision for sharing within and without our organization.

I already have 90 minutes of videotaped interviews and I’m doing at least 2 more, so I have some significant editing to do.  I want the finished product to be 10 – 15 minutes or shorter, but deliver lots of punch.  I’ve never done anything like this before.  Any words of wisdom for me born of experience?

I realize that this project is quite different that what many of you are doing in that your projects focus directly on students, but if you have any ideas to help me move forward, I’d sure welcome them.  And I’d love to hear how your project is going…. and now I need to get going on mine!

  by  Colette Cassinelli 

Progress Report on Final Project

Final Project

My project is entitled :

Showcasing Innovation in Information and Communications

Technology (ICT) in Our  Nursing Program

The Project entails creating a digital audiovisual presentation highlighting innovations in technology integration that support contemporary learner-centered pedagogy in nursing education (Weimer, 2002).

Purpose of Project: to share within and without one nursing program’s community of practice, innovations undertaken to integrate ICT in our learning spaces with the expectation that faculty’s self-efficacy (expectations of mastery and success) beliefs will increase as a result of vicarious experience via successful peer modelling and persuasion from credible, trustworthy sources (Bandura, 1996).

Other theoretical underpinnings: Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation Theory and possibly Fullan as well.

Rationale for Project: faculty have been busy developing new curriculum and working hard within particular courses, such that they may not be aware of what technologies others are implementing in their courses.  Lessons learned in innovation may save early and late adopters valuable time and energy.  Champions and resource people will emerge to lead innovation.

Background:  There are two reasons why nursing educators must be intentional about integrating ICT into learning spaces.

1) These skills are essential for clinical practice.  E-health is where we are going.

•  Electronic Health Record looms on the horizon with 6 of 11 building blocks are in place here in SK (Canada Health Infoway, n.d.)
• Tele-health useage is increasing by 35% annually .  (Canada Health Infoway, n.d.).
• Evidence-based practice (EBP) is mandated as a foundational competency by our provincial licensing body (SRNA, p. 8) and EBP relies upon accessing electronic databases where research articles and clinical practice guidelines are housed.
• Patients are becoming increasingly educated related to access to the worldwide web, and patient support groups.

2)  The online landscape is part of the learning context or platform for students born after 1982, the Net Generation (Junco & Timm, 2008).

To be continued…