TPOL book and questions from Doc S.

1. What role did you play in this group and what would you point to as your particular contribution? What key elements do you feel others contributed?

I played a combination of roles – part cheerleader, part translator, part facilitator. I instigated the weekly TI meetings early (as soon as we had all picked the book), so that we could have a formal weekly time an place to discuss and reflect on what we read in a real-time group setting. I often found myself encouraging others in their contributions and also synthesizing the various contributions and then bringing them together into a common set of ideas. Finally, I helped bring our discussions, ideas, reading, and reflections together in to the final artifact, our website. Each member of our team made several significant contributions. Xing and Chris brought to the table the perspective of working in the “school” environment. This was extremely helpful for me, as occasionally my thinking and reflecting became a bit stuck in the corporate “training” world and I lost sight of other contexts where Communities of Learning can thrive and evolve. Bernard, Jim, and Kari, like me, work in a more corporate environment. Actually – Bernard is a bit of a mix, his work is within the environment of schools, but with the educators more than the students. He and Chris really helped me understand the difference between training (task-based learning) and education (knowledge-based learning). It was good to have dialogue with others who are facing some of the same challenges that I am. Bernard especially helped me to see a broader set of possibilities for Communities of Learning in the corporate world. I’m still frustrated by the lack of support I currently feel (in my own workplace) for instructional design that promotes CoLs and CoPs, but the work that Jim, Bernard, and Kari are doing has helped me see the possibilities. Just being part of this Cadre has also given me a visceral understanding of those possibilities.

2. If you were to do a project like this again, what would you do differently?

The Type A part of my psyche would like to come up with the artifact plan and presentation a bit sooner in the process and thus have more time to critique it within the group and possibly as for critiques from other groups. I would also have liked to have more interaction and dialogue with the other reading groups. I did “lurk” in their Bb discussions but was unsure of the etiquette for responding “out of turn.” I was so pleased and impressed when we were all asked by the Power of Mindful learning group to participate in their research. I wish we had thought of a way to include participation for other groups into our project as well.

3. What 2-3 key concepts did you learn from working on this project? (This can be a mix of elements from concepts you learned from the book to concepts you learned from working together as part of an online team.)

There were several of varying degrees. I began to form a clearer understanding of the difference between a Community of Learning and a Community of Practice. Members of a CoL generally fill some fairly well defined roles (teacher, student) and while students may sometimes perform instructor/teacher like actions, they are still primarily students or learners. Teachers do learn from their students, but they are the facilitator in the community, the first architect of it (although the learners take on this role as well), and ultimately the one who validates much of what is learned. In communities of practice, the roles of novice, practitioner, and expert are (I think) more mutable. A person in a CoP moves from the outside through the center and back out again… maybe several times. There is no constant center. Finally, in a CoL learning is the goal, while in a CoP the exchange of ideas and experiences associated with each individuals practice is the focus. Learning certainly takes place in a functioning CoP, but it is not the number one goal.

Another key concept I took away from this project, perhaps the most significant one for my own professional practice, was the distinction between “education” and “training.” Now, this seems obvious to me, but when I first started reading TPOL, I don’t think I’d really made that distinction in my own thinking. Task-based learning experiences can be very different from knowledge-based ones. Learning something simply so that you can perform a task can have a different focus from learning it to enhance your general knowledge. This was difficult for me, as I tend to just want to know things and worry about the application later. This distinction has caused me to question the purpose of some of the instructional design work I current do professionally. I wonder if we need to stop calling it training? If, perhaps, by calling it “training” we are limiting not only our selves (as the designers and developers) but also our audience (the ‘learners’). However – I also wonder if there are perhaps circumstances where “training” is the appropriate choice. I’m still asking the questions, I haven’t found the answers yet.

T - 2 days

Things I am thankful for:

Coffee so thick and black that the light has to bend around it.
The smell of rain in the desert
My family
My friends
Dance
Movement
Fire
Film
Music
Conversation
Chocolate
Sunflower Market
A sweet little house
Glitter
False eyelashes
Fake hair
Books
Authors
The dog I don't have yet, but will.
Soap
All the color in the world and the little things that remind me each day to stop and notice it.
My green chair.
Hummus

Deadlines, Expectations, Jazz, and Slack.

The talk of deadlines and expectations in Gary's class has led to some significant personal reflection. I figured I'd better post some of it in my Blog. This applies to both my general coursework and to my ARP - so I'm going to cross post this in both blogs. Later - I hope to elaborate on the correlation between my optional book for Gary's class (see title below), the book SLACK (currently reading that for ARP lit-review), the discussion of deadlines/expectations, etc. For now, I only mention that correlation briefly at the end of this blog - to remind myself of what I want to reflect on later.

I've always been (or identified myself anyway) as a rather "goal oriented" ("Type A") personality; the "perform well under pressure" type. As such - I never much minded deadlines and, in fact, I used them as sort of a litmus test for my own proficiency. I'm the girl that generally shows up on time for every meeting, always tries to leave in plenty of time to get to where she's going, HATES missing the previews at the cinema or the pre-concert discussion at the symphony, etc. The really annoying type. :)

The idea of no pre-set (pre-stated) deadlines (or of soft/flexible deadlines) was a bit disconcerting for me at first (to say the least). However, as I work with it, I find it liberating in many ways. Rather than focus on a due date and the limit of what I think I can accomplish within a pre-specified amount of time, I find that I focus more on what I'm learning, accomplishing, and struggling with at any given moment. I don't watch the clock or the calendar, I watch the (forgive me) process. The work becomes about the work and not about the time. I find that I like this approach so much that I'm trying to incorporate into other parts of my life. Ironically, I find that I generally work faster w/o a hard deadline. Possibly as a byproduct of the corporate world (can anyone say "efficiency"?), if I am given a hard deadline, I tend to plan everything around that timeline so that I don't finish too soon or too late. Without a deadline, I find that I work until I feel I am done (or done w/ a stage). I also get more excited and deeply involved in the work that I do for the sake of the work and not for the sake of meeting a specific date or specific set of pre-defined expectations. When I observe this tendency from outside myself, I find that I've always worked that way on personal projects (art work, costume design and creation, creative writing, DIY projects, pleasure reading, hiking, etc.).

My new challenge is - how do I bring this practice into my professional life while still remaining accountable for someone else’s timeline? How do I approach work that has a pre-defined due date (and list of expectations/criteria) with the same open attitude and attention to the process? This is something I will continue to contemplate throughout my ARP work, as it may have a significant impact on both team-communication and team-project management (which are central to my ARP).
Currently, I'm reading Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. Concurrently, I'm reading Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. The correlation between these two books, my current ARP questions, and this discussion of deadlines/expectations is stronger than I might have imagined when I picked up these two books.

Epistemological Pluralism, Papert/Turkle, and MicroWorlds

I'm not going to be able to hold out much longer. I've now read Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete twice - all the while working on patches, quilts, and other fun projects in MicroWorlds. The correlation is so obvious - I want (need) to post about it in Bb. I keep waiting, hoping another cadre member will post first. I feel like I'm overplaying the role of early adopter and first to post. I remember what it's like to be that kid in class who always raises their hand first - the other kids don't always like that kid very much. There was a time when I didn't care about that so much, now it seems that I do. Ironically - being the "first" is not (and I don't think ever really was) my motivation. I'm just so honestly and fundamentally excited about each new project, each new reading, each new discussion. I want to talk/discuss/debate! I want to know if others are seeing the correlations that I'm seeing, and, if they aren't, I want to know what they are seeing, how they are applying it to their experience. I think I waited too long to go back to school, I should have done this years ago.... I forgot how nourishing intelligent, deep, discourse and dialogue about a focused subject is.

As I work on my patches, quilts, and other little creations, I begin to observe myself work. I become a sort of disembodied third party and try to establish whether I favor the soft approach or hard approach to knowledge. I wonder if it is abnormal to use both, to move from one to the other based on ... well... based on what? I read about Lisa - who is a poet and believes she is "bad at math," "good with words, not numbers," who is most comfortable with a distinctly 'soft' approach. I look for the connection to my own ways of seeing, ways of knowing. I ask myself, do I identify with Lisa? I too write poetry, create art in a variety of mediums; in these ways, I am like her. But - I also like numbers and have always 'known' that I was good at math. So - I am not completely like her. I read about Robin, the musician, who "masters her music by perfecting the smallest little bits of pieces and then building up." This is how I learn both choreography and dance technique, this is also how I choreograph. But - unlike Lisa and Robin, I don't mind the idea of 'black-boxing' so much... I do suppose I would prefer to create the black boxes myself though. When I write my turtle procedures for instance, I write them a step at a time, a movement at a time... but once I establish the movement pattern I want (the picture I want) - then I turn the whole series of steps into a procedure and give it some kind of code name... I black-box them. Of course - since I'm the one who created the procedure, there is transparency (at least for me) and I am able to change it later if I want to... so maybe this is still a predominantly soft approach.

Another question: is the difference between the soft approach and the hard approach really akin to the difference between the abstract and the concrete? If so... and if, as the article postulates, girls demonstrate a greater affinity for the soft approach and boys for the hard approach, then does that explain why girls are (or seem to be) 'good at math' in the early grades but boys excel in the later grades? After all - the majority of mathematics taught in the early grades is fairly concrete - or is demonstrated w/ predominantly concrete applications. Math in later grades becomes increasingly abstract. If I continue down this road of questioning, then does the fact that I loved the higher math (algebra, calculus, physics) mean that I favor a hard approach or does it simply mean that I see concrete applications rather than purely abstract ones? What about the logic puzzles I love so much - are they an example of something that requires a hard or soft approach - or will either work?

This comparison between abstract and concrete brings me back to MicroWorlds = this time to making a quilt. As I think back on my methods, I realize that I approached creating a quilt similar to the way I approach choreographing a dance, designing/creating a costume, or creating a piece of visual art (photograph, collage, painting, etc). I could not create a quilt by simply writing a bunch of lines of code. Rather, I brought all the various patches onto the stage and then began to move them around, place them adjacent to other patches, rotate them, etc. I kept manipulating the patches until what I saw on the stage was pleasing to my eye. That is, in fact, how I created my own individual patches too... moving lines and patterns around within the frame until it felt finished. Once I created a pattern that felt right visually, then I went about figuring out how to move the turtles to created it. I didn't try to write the most efficient way of creating it either. Rather, I found as I watch myself work, that the pathways the turtles took to get to each spot on the quilt were also important to me. Here again - the analogy, for me, is that of choreographing a dance. The creating of the visual pattern itself (the map) was more like creating a costume design, a photo, or a painting, but because the turtles had to move to make the quilt, it was also a dance. Come to think of it - much of choreography is about creating a visual picture - a dynamic, evolving, visual picture in motion, but a visual picture none the less. So - when I look at all these steps from the outside - I see a predominantly soft approach - in fact, I see a completely soft approach. Ironically, as I made my decisions about which pathways on the stage each turtle would take to get to its next place, I recognized that there were often more efficient ways of getting there and consciously rejected most of them in favor of paths that I found more aesthetically pleasing. I didn't even ask myself why I found them more aesthetically pleasing, I just accepted that I did.

This project in combination with he article has been something of a revelation for me. I've always thought of myself (identified myself even) as someone who has achieved and maintains a balance between the "hard" ("mathematical," "logical," "scientific") approach and the "soft" ("creative," "artistic," "expressive," "emotional," "physical") approach. Reading this article and working with MicroWorlds leads me to question that. I don't question that I am good at math, science, logic, etc. and I don't question that I am also a talented and accomplished artist (in several respects) - but I wonder if what I always viewed as the "Left Brain" side of my interests and talents are really demonstrative of the same "soft" approach that I associate with the "Right Brain" side. I think I'll be pondering this for quite some time.