Networked flippin’ learning

  by  Participatory Learning 

After Alec shared on Tuesday night his personal journey with social media and education,  and creating or revealing online identity, my first thoughts were, boy I’m glad I’m almost 50 when the advent of social media makes consideration of  private and public identities critical.  The EQ and judgement of a 50 year old, in most cases, is quite different that that of a 20 year old.   I was an emotional, impulsive, self-conscious 20 year old and the persistence, replicability , scalability, search-ability, invisible audience, collapsed context and public=private features of social media that Danah Boyd outlines in her presentation would have me immobilized in a chronic state of embarrassment and remorse.  I appreciated Boyd’s insight on teenagers being the same as always, but social media as a “hangout” providing a different venue in which they work out social structures and practice sociality.  Students don’t all get along, cliques still exist and class divides are perpetuated (via social media).  This is so important to understand before considering bringing social media into the classroom.  Her research  shows that students are hanging out online in OPEN SPACES with the implication for adults in their worlds to provide the frameworks to critically evaluate the information they are receiving.  She issues a strong caution – if we label and view this younger generation as digital natives we MUST NOT assume a skill set that yet needs to be developed – that of critical evaluation.

Back to the online identity question…. My private and public identities are  very congruous.  When I google myself, I see that I have left a lot of footprints, none of which cause me to cringe.   Anyone can see that I invest in real estate with my life and business partner,  our company puts out a newsletter, I’m in nursing education, raise funds and awareness for Kenyan orphans and have developed a few prezi’s that need some help!  These are things friends and family know already.  My facebook account has tight privacy settings, but my 114 friends can see that I’m posting family photos and links to social justice and health issues and comical but tasteful youtube videos, and sharing garden produce.  Although my online identity hasn’t yet hindered me in my professional life, I admit that, compared to my mentors, it could use some spiffing up.

Delicious is working well to collect the web resources I will need to reference in my papers.  I’ve organized 3 stacks and tagged articles within.

Re: Twitter, I have to decide if I need to scale it back to educational themes for a while to manage the reading volume.  Global health and social justice topics account for much of the content I’m reading.  Then I go to other’s papers to read more on education.

Project Planning and Progress

I’ve been exploring digital storytelling tools: Voicethread , as well as Camtasia.  Voicethread sounds easier to learn, maybe more realistic for a newbie, but Camtasia has more visual appeal because of the additional features.  I will begin to play around with my daughter’s wedding photos and create a Voicethread, then, depending on how that goes, I just might venture into Camtasia.

As I’ve begun planning my project and speaking to faculty that I’ll interview about their educational innovations involving technology, I realize that I need to be more intentional from this point on about connecting with these folks and learning from them.  I have access to a PLN in my very own faculty that, for various and sundry reasons  I’ve not optimized.  Because we all take students into clinical settings around the health region, scheduling a f2f chat is challenging, but that’s simply not a valid excuse anymore.  Skype is so easy to use.  One can download free recording programs and archive these interactions for future reference.  This is going into my Leadership Development Plan.

Since my nursing education idol referred to “flipping” her classroom, I had questions about what this means.  As I investigated, I realized that two of my faculty colleagues I’m planning to interview for my Project have implemented one feature of flipping.  They are using the online resources provided by the textbook publisher.  Students must complete online modules prior to class/labs so that they are ready to apply the learning when we meet together.  This approach to inquiry based learning makes a lot of sense to me, and I’m going to explore it further.

Are you a flipper?  Completely or partially?  What have you done to flip your learning spaces?