Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Institutional Support for Personal Learning

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Half an Hour, Dec 14, 2020

This is an unedited Automated Transcription of a talk. There are also links to the full presentation audio and video on the presentation page.

All right, um, so hello everyone. This is Stephen Downes again, this is personal learning taking ownership of learning online parts seven now to get the best benefit you want to see what I'm sharing here fullscreen rather than and what they call gallery view or what some of us call Hollywood squares view.

So. If you look to the upper right of your screen, click on view and then click on speaker view. And that'll give you the best view.

And you can see what I'm doing here, right? I'm. Doing a. A different kind of output where I'm able to show my image, which is me hello and my slides all together on the same screen. And in case you're curious and you might be curious. I'm using a product called open broadcast systems to do that sorry about the infinite disappearing window, but open broadcast systems allows me to do that and to as you can see you share different applications easily and seamlessly it's kind of like sharing my screen only in a way better.

Or I could just share the screen directly couldn't I oh well, I like doing things the complicated way. So anyhow welcome to everyone. Just minimalize this. So and I'll put up the chat so I can see any comments that you may have. So to put what we're doing in context, we're gonna this personal learning thing for a while as several months now way back at the beginning.

I talked about relevance and usability and interactivity the three crucial things you need for personal learning from the perspective of the individual learner. You as a learner. Will be striving to achieve these things striving to achieve learning that's relevant to your immediate needs relevant to your long-term needs, but most of all relevant to you.

Striving for learning, that's usable. In the sense that it's consistently presented and in a language you understand which means very often that. You have to create the learning for yourself out of the raw materials, certainly that's what I've done over my career there's all kinds of stuff out there on the internet, but I find I have to rewrite it to make sense for me.

I meant third interactivity because we want to learn from others we want to learn with others and we find that learning is more interesting and more engaging when it's social that's why I have a group of us here instead of you each individually watching a video. Then we turn to personal learning from a theoretical perspective.

That is to say from the perspective of the provider. The perspective of maybe the learning institution or the teacher or the instructor. And here we looked at what personal learning is what the personal learning starting points are looking at things like say learning objectives. And the big difference between personal learning and other kinds of learning.

Is that personal learning is addressed toward the specific individual needs of the learner rather than the organizational objectives of the learning provider, so when we're looking at for example, what content is going to be learned? We're looking at what the individual wants to learn or needs to learn rather than you know, the curriculum or the sorts of things we think they ought to learn well there's some back fourth and interchange in that right this interchange allows us to help the person discover what they might want to learn or need to learn because they might not always know.

But it's a genuine two-sided interaction. Because they are telling us what they need to learn and that's something that we as instructors or as learning providers need to respect. Because ultimately the beneficiary of the learning in personal learning is intended to be the individual learner themselves. So we looked at that.

We looked at as well forming networks. And this is something that's useful both from a learning perspective remember we talked about interactivity, but also from the perspective of a provider of learning. The idea of forming networks is to enable individuals to engage with other people who have their same interests or who are in their same community, or who they just might want to engage with in a network.

And so we're talking about the different ways that these networks can form. This is the last of these sections. Part 7. And it's going to be about the actual mechanisms for providing support for personal learning from an institutional perspective. So and that's my plan for today is to talk about that but before I jump into that.

Respecting the concept of personal learning. I want to check and see if there's anything you might want to comment or say or directions, you might want to go. You can use the chatroom. I'm able to see the chat. Or you can jump right in and make a comment.

Hi Shana.

Yes, all of us. Yeah. Yeah, all of this will be available. There's recordings and yeah all of that will be available and. Both on my website and then also Manisha I think that the college also provides access to resources, perhaps you can help me with that.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So for this for this presentation, I believe it's already online. Let me just check because. And here's here's what I used to do this this is my own application. I've created myself so you can't go buy this or find this anywhere it works for me but. It's. Okay, so yeah, there it is.

So this is number five thirty nine.

Five three nine. Yeah, so you know how much there yet um, but here are the slides and those slides oh no even the slides aren't up yet, but here is where you'll find this stuff. I don't know what a slide turned. I think really should be.

Yeah, yeah in a lobby there and. And you know from this from these slides you can get all of the other links to all of the other slides.

And and there it is in chat, so let's see. Part seven point seven, where is part seven hope that's audio? I'm just showing you how the courses are making the background here because I thought you might be curious to see what I do, maybe not but this way I can do it.

Yeah. Yeah, this is all about data management so on the left-hand side here, these are my own files on my own computer on the right-hand side here, these are my files on my website and what I'm doing is you can see. I just uploaded the slides to my website you see how I organize my files.

Right so these are my documents so I have websites different websites. I have video recordings photos quality photos because I'm a photographer so this is also the background for my screen publication presentations stuff to do with my employer library of PDFs and articles that I keep code projects that's all the programming that I do this is all my audio recordings audacity is a wonderful program.

It's there it is, let me let me show you better version.

There it is, that's the program. I used to do all of my audio management. And. Throw things in like that so that that's what that is and then Adobe makes one of those automatically but I don't use it for anything so you know, I mean and so I keep my online and my offline, you know, my my website and then I also have because we should always have a backup of everything I have.

Was my web browser, come on. I went browsers being silly. So here's my web browser, let's zoom meaning. I just opened. This is a home page I made for myself on my web browser with all my frequent websites that I go to. You can make one of these for yourself too right because all you have to do is I did a right click there a few page source and you could just download this file and then save as and then put in your own things or use mine.

But anyhow this but I keep my online version of stuff, here's Google Drive. So I have Google Drive for all of my stuff and you'll see. Similar folders. Well, maybe not similar folders, but there's videos there's photos and stuff. And I also use Microsoft OneDrive. You might ask why do I use two different providers let's because I don't want to be locked into one provider, so here we go, library presentations website audio courses all-time radio, which I love and and other things.

All-time radio just. I really like fill up marble. 1950s era detective in Los Angeles way off topic. I keep all of that the blue beetle, so I thought you might want to see that. So yeah, that's file management so that link should be working now. Where did I put it?

Yeah. Yeah, so but here's slides. Yeah and now yeah you just click on it and there are other slides so that's you know, you remember I uploaded it to my website and now it's behind this link on my website anyhow so yeah, you can access all of this content from all of these different pages, it's in various stages of uploading.

I'm still working on making sure everything is up there for people but you can go back and listen to or look at any of the previous slides or discussions. Okay any other comments request. I was a great one that took me off topic for a while.

Not a problem.

Yeah.

Yeah, oh you're welcome at all make sure like they're not all uploaded so I'll make sure that they're all uploaded for you so that you can access the whole set. Because they certainly exist.

Alright so let me move into this topic then and you know, I want to remind you that you can interrupt with a comment or a question at any time. I'll probably stop I will have an awkward pause for a bit while I see if there are any comments or questions, but but you know do feel free to ask any comments or questions anytime through this one of the things we've learned in these presentations is I'm not locked into the content and of course that's one of the lessons right it's not about me getting through the content.

It's about me providing value to all of you. So if you want to learn more about the content or if you want to go off in a different direction, please, do you know and then what I'll do is you know, I'll go in the direction that you want in a way that is as useful as possible to everybody in the group.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it, all, right? So. This is seven it's supporting personal learning online and the model that I've used for many years to describe the support for personal learning is something called the online host provider framework. And the idea here is that in personal learning there are three major I don't want to say players the three major actors three major parts three major roles, which you can see here on the slide there's the education provider in this case, that's me.

That's the subject matter experts sometimes the education provider will also provide assessment services in my model those are two separate and distinct roles. That play equal parts and equip away wrong script, you know. There typically not close to you, they're typically away somewhere. I'm across the country based in a little town in rural Ontario, which is about what you would expect and you know.

There may offer learning support and learning resources to any number of different colleges university schools community groups, etc and and you can see that high in fact do that, there's a link here. I'll type it in.

There we go and and that's the presentations that I do but if you look at that you can see all the different organizations and places that I provide this to and that's that's the role of the subject matter expert they're not necessarily professional educators, although certainly helps if they have training or background generally they're authorities in their own field.

And what's what's really important here to keep in mind is they're not necessarily connected to the community where you live or to use an individual student and that's you know, let's just the the nature of the engagement where the as I say the the subject matter expert may well be outside your own community and the reason why we do that is it gives you access to many more experts in many more subjects.

From many more places, so creates a rich diverse experience for you at the price of being a bit impersonal. So okay. So and if you're wondering if you go to that presentations page, you won't see these classes on that presentation page because I separate out the formal presentations that I do from the classes that I give so the presentations are the formal presentations in the classes are the classes.

Okay, so that's me then the second part of the host provider framework is the host right and that's where it gets its name from right host to provider in our scenario the host is Manisha. She's going to be local to you. Her role in this framework is to be your advocate.

The person who speaks for you in case you might not be able to or if you might feel intimidated or if you might not have the words she's able to represent your interest so if I'm doing something stupid as an education provider, which is always a possibility, she's there to correct me and say, you know, this is well, maybe this is not appropriate for that community or you're.

Going to need to provide some background information about this or you know, they've already covered this you can move on to the next subject, whatever. If I were doing assessment which I'm not because I hate assessment but if I were doing assessment then she would be the advocate to make sure that that assessment was fair that it respected your context and your background and that the the result would be an accurate assessment of the work and the skills and the abilities that you have.

For example, she also has a role in your community as your advocate to help you be better as a learner to offer coaching to offer support, you know, things like file management she would help you with that, you know, I can show you quickly the kind of things that I do but that's just the kind of things that I do the show have the knowledge of working with with other subject matter experts as well as well as her own education and background.

Be able to help you acquire these skills that you need in order to benefit more from learning it's probably also teaching you about doing references pro tip. I know and get off track a lot. This is something called zotero, this is what I use for references. And you might and this these are the references for a paper an ethics web papers more like a book now on ethics and artificial intelligence and learning that I'm doing why do I like Zotero well first of all it's on the internet so I can access my same zotero library from any number of different sources.

Second I can share my Zotero library with other people third. I can take my library of references you see I can actually make several libraries here's for firefighters training this is a community one we're doing 3d visual training for rural firefighters in emergency, you know, like a train derails or a truck goes off the highway or something here's one for a personal learning team, but I ran a few years ago, so you can have different.

Library. Is way you can do is create your bibliography from the collection look at all these different formats, right? Chicago manual of style APA. I don't know what style you guys are using.

Right so APA so and now. I can create all I do is click OK. And. Something happens, well eventually a bibliography is created. Oh I think right I have to select maybe let's try that.

Yeah, sorry about that. I love doing things wrong just to show you. All right. Oh it copied the clipboard that's why so okay so copy the clipboard means it's copied to the clipboard which means that I can open up any document like say the paper that I'm working on let's say.

And find some space to put it and I can paste it right click or control v. And there are all of my APA references perfectly formatted. I don't need to worry about it. That's a pro tip so. Zotero is free yes free. I'll type the link in the URL for anything for you and so yeah, it's useful to know how to create these.

You know these systems. I don't know the links so I'll look it up.

There we go.

But yeah, it's just for me, it's so much easier fill some forms and then don't worry about the format. All right, that was me going way off topic. So sorry about that or bonus. So okay, that's the provider and that's the host. And then the third part is the learner that you.

And you know again there may be one or more than one learner and in personal learning the key things there are more than just these things but the key things are first of all as learning you set your own objectives. And you select your own resources and then put them in a buildingography as in Zotero.

You know, there are so many resources out there in the world, some of them work for you some of them don't rather than just depend on the resources that have been assigned to you by say the subject matter expert I tell you what I know but you can choose your own resources, for example, if you didn't like Zotero.

Well there are other services that do bibliographies for you like Mendelee and I don't know I think ever know might but I'm not sure I use this one so I don't know so much about the others but also to. And I really should put this on this slide. Lerner defines what counts as success for themselves now.

I know there are tests there are assignments and all of that and you may succeed in them and you may fail in them, but ultimately it's up to you. As learners to decide what counts as success in your learning experience, if you are doing it to get the the certificate or the degree then yeah, you have to pass the test if you are doing it to get learning then maybe the tests are useful, maybe the tests are not I find that a lot of the stuff that I do.

I'll go through part of it and I got what I need a lot of the times my learning objectives are very specific like yeah how to write a specific programming interface to connect this program with that program. And so I go searching for a learning resource. I find it a zero in on that particular piece of information that I use use that information write the connection the connection works great.

I'm done. I don't need to do any tasks or anything like that. I've done what I needed to do. So it's up to you. And as always in your life, it's a balance between what your personal expectations are and what other expectations are set in your community or your profession or your workplace or wherever or your school or institution.

So that's the host provider framework, that's kind of the overall view. Of personal learning supporting personal learning that I work with personally. So I'll stop we'll have an awkward pause here while I see if there are any comments or questions anybody have any comments or questions on this.

If you wonder why I keep looking away like that, that's where my other screen is.

So you see him keeping track of you? And that's the screen hoops. It's kind of hard to see isn't it? So, here's my presentation screen. And here's my work screen. A lot of computers today. Have adopters where you can have two monitors and I find that really useful. Okay, I haven't seen any questions or comments again feel free to jump in any time or to put something in the chat.

You know, I've got the chest you can see now. I've got the chat right here so I can look at it and I do look at it every time I look away it's me looking at the chat or looking at you to make sure you're still here. All right.

So, This is an example of a host provider framework. It's one that was set up between the Aboriginal financial officers association of Alberta and Athabaski University's becom project and MS aside my own experience in this framework comes from my own experience working with Athabasca University. I worked with them for seven years and learned a ton while working with them and they're still doing a lot of this stuff.

So basically here we have the the host provider framework the the host is the aboriginal financial officers association, they're going to know a lot about the unique needs and issues of their members. Athabas could be calm is going to be providing the expertise.

Alexa, did you want to jump in?

Nope, okay. So and and so. What the what the host does as it says there they created a psychologically safe environment away from the quote unquote norm an off-site location. Oh the host has muted me.

Okay, so the host muted me but that's okay. I know how to unbeat I have the power. So anyhow, they provide this psychologically safe environment away from the norm a place where people can come together and create their own learning community and the ideas that these learning communities form in various locations around the province are around the country.

And they're very local and the expertise that comes into them are provincial national or even global.

So, here's another one and this is in downtown Toronto or Ottawa, rather? Oh yeah, right auto, okay. So this is hosted by Shopify. Shopify's company. They do internet commercial technology, and in this case, my experience was as a learner and so on based in Ottawa or that's where I work right now.

I'm based out of the country. But so I just go down to downtown Ottawa right across from City Hall they have a building there and on the fifth floor of that building they have that lounge that's pictured there. They advertise it with platform called Meetup or also Google events and so I went there I learned about graph technology.

And this is algorithms and procedures for working with graph representations of communities pretty esoteric. I'm not gonna get that information just by going to your typical college or university class, but it was available to me at this community learning center so Shopify provided the space they acted as the host and then they brought in an external expert and voila host provider framework we had a great time we all learned a bunch of stuff about graphs, we were able to get together as.

A graph creating community in Ottawa and that's the example of the host provider framework at work. These are really common and you know, this is an older model of learning where people who wanted to learn organize themselves into a community and then would invite experts in and this was how the original universities were organized.

It was the learners themselves that organized the university as a community of learners and then invited. In professors and then later on the professors made themselves a community that would offer these services to an even larger community of learners and then eventually the managers came in and we got what we got now but originally that's how it started.

People organizing themselves and then finding somebody who knew what they wanted to learn. This is one that I found in Toronto. And. It was out of staples. Staples is store that sells office equipment stationary computer parts things like that and what they did is in the back of the store they set up a working learning store.

So staples was the host Staples customers or people who just dropped in like me were the learners and then they would bring in experts either in person or sometimes on a big video screen they'd bring an expert to talk about different aspects of working in offices professional organizing how to conduct a meeting stuff like that building teams and sometimes they had stupid names like, you know, your building team.

To be success but but you know, most of the time it was just good practical solid knowledge, you might see these. In large grocery stores as well, you know in major cities where a safe way or a soby's or a metro or whatever store that you've gone to they'll set up there, you know the safe way kitchen and it's the same sort of thing but you know, there's no reason why you have to depend on.

A large store like that again, this is the sort of thing that can be done is done in communities where people in the community who are interested in learning they get together someone acts as a host to to help organize stuff, they might do meet up invitations online. I'm just going to show you meet up occasion you're not familiar with it.

So what meetup is an application. We have a train going by everything shaking so what you do well it's first of all you join it but see here are some events and so service designed for victims of violence auto a young professionals toastmasters club so that's about how to make a speech cryptocurrency roundtable table the shipping oh any shipping news, okay, well I knew that a bit I'm reading BART skins right now, so by the same author here's one of the, Most be a better communicator and meter online the speaker's corner, that's yes outdoor adventure learning, etc.

These are things organized people by people in their own community for themselves and that's again is the is the own informal way of setting up the host provider framework. You don't have to have an educational institution, but educational institutions more and more are moving toward this kind of model.

What do you think about that? How much questions?

So education providers, so. Here's something intergenerational learning. Again, it's the sort of thing that can be done by a company or buy an employer in our C. Does that by bringing an interns same kind of thing except in this case the learners are paid. There are some unpaid internships.

I consider those first of all to be rip-offs and secondly a way to allow rich people to get an education that poor people can't because if you can afford to take an unpaid internship you are automatically to my mind rich. So we make sure an energy we pay our interns and that's the way at the co organizations work.

So the interns themselves are the learners they're doing stuff, they're getting actual real concrete practice, they go to our meetings and discover how boring our meetings are but they also see professionals doing research doing presentations working on a problem with each other and they realize that. They feel like that sometimes professionals fight with each other and aren't nice.

But that's the exception rather than the role, actually. In other model teaching from home. Also known as my retirement plan just kidding. Yeah, again, a lot of people do stuff where where maybe they are retired or maybe they're a professional engineer or or an architect or whatever. I was thinking my brother who's an engineer and, You know, it's especially teaching from home you listened as big a commitment as it used to be to have to go into the the classroom and get in front of a bunch of people teaching from home, especially if you know the technology and you can set it up kind of like this.

That's a really easy way for professional to. Share their knowledge and contribute to them next generation of people working in the field. And again, typically, you'd want a host institution to organize that because. You see people teaching from home they believe you know, they don't want to be doing marketing and advertising and all of that all they want to do is get online and talk about the stuff that they know.

The tools there are many tools to make this possible and knowing the tools makes it a lot easier.

Especially to my mind collaborative tools one thing that I use a lot. I know I've got the example creately here mostly because I like to be image on the slide but what I use a lot is Google Docs.

And I should docs got Google.com.

And I'll just paste that link into the chat.

So this is stuff right so it's owned by anyone most of the stuff. I do is on my knee but look at all the stuff by other people that I'm using on Google Docs, right so I'm running my book on ethics using Google Docs, so here's my book on ethics, this is one of the chapters.

So and what's neat about this and and I've actually done this in Google Docs is I can share. My my book on ethics with other people and you see here anyone on the internet can find and comment. I could make it so that they could actually edit documents but here I'll copy the link and done now if I shared that link with you which I've just done in the chat you could go into this document and make comments on this document.

When the pandemic first hit. I created a document. I'm trying to remember what I called it.

Let's search for it.

No well search.

I can only remember how quick event detect list, that's what I call it, there we go. I created this document oops, that's not this document. Oh okay somebody has made some suggestions.

So that's pretty interesting and deleted my entire document, all right so originally. I made it so anyone could edit this. I changed it to anyone can comment. Now. And and this person has indeed commented and then for some reason decided to remove all of my stuff, so I am going to delete their comment.

And restore it to its original form. And and now you can see other comments that people have made. I'm gonna scroll this content that they added down to the bottom of review it later. So. See I don't want to get resist they took the time to do that so that's nice not so nice that they deleted all my content but the idea here right is that I wanted to provide a really fast way for people to find tools that they needed in a hurry so I set up this document and oh, so let's click on the proper link.

Okay get link copy link. I'll put it into the chat.

And done so this grew from just a little short list over time some people made suggestions mostly I wrote it but I made it open for anyone to edit so that it could be a community resource and now is a very comprehensive guide to all the different tools that you can use to do different kinds of things in online learning and what's important about these tools is that they're cloud tools, which means you can use them in your web browser.

They're free or very cheap but basically free they don't ask you for credit cards or anything like that and they're not apps they're not limited to your phone because phone's phone apps are very platformed dependent so I wanted tools that you can use on the web, you can still use web tools on your phone, but you can't use apps on anything other than the specific phone they're designed for I don't like them.

And there are other reasons why I don't like apps anyhow. If you ever have a need for inspiration about what tool to use or what learning strategy to use that kind of list we're really help you a lot.

So this is something I stole. So it's a. An image by 10 me vera. And she's working off a presentation by John Stepper and the idea here is called working out loud. And working out loud. Is the concept of doing your job or your profession in such a way that you share.

The process of doing that job out loud with other people. Back when I used to fly to places I would fly sometimes on United Airlines. And United Airlines, they had these audio channels, you know, country music jazz music never any death metal channels. I never understood that well, one of their channels was called channel 10.

And all it was was the radio from the cockpit, so it would be incoming messages. And then whatever the pilot or co-pilot said in reply so you'd get you know instructions from air traffic control, you know fly to such and such an altitude you'd get requests from the cockpit to change courses, you know, adjust their altitude whatever and you might think crashingly boring.

And yeah it was crashingly boring but I love flying. I love the whole concept of flight I look at a 747 and I think two things first it can't fly there's no way it can fly and second it probably the most beautiful thing we've ever built. I love flying and so to me the air traffic control messages are really interesting they're not for everybody, obviously.

And that's the thing with working out loud. You know, all the details of an architect's job from you know, meeting with the client to doing their first conceptual graph to working their way through to the final design. That might be really boring to a lot of people including me but to people who are really interested in architecture, it's all very fascinating and it's a great way to learn about being an art architect because I've said often and I think this is true.

Learning to be a professional in any discipline isn't just learning all the facts it isn't just learning all the theories it isn't even just getting all the skills. Sometimes school makes you think that way, but it isn't. It's learning how to think and see the world in a way that that person does.

And that's different from just the facts the skills the knowledge it includes knowing the vocabulary knowing how they talk it includes finding some things that count as evidence and other things that don't it includes the shared sets of problems the shared ways of approaching those problems, it's the shared worldview.

Now we're not locked into that, you know, you can switch from one perspective to another perspective. I do that a lot, you know, one moment. I have my computer programmer hat on I walk. I talk I think like a computer programmer a lot of people don't like that persona because.

This face of these not very nice anything sometimes of algorithms and formulas our times. I have my teacher had on and actually different persona other times. I have my philosopher hat on that's a different persona again often equally annoying so you know there there but the point here is.

Being you know becoming an architect or an engineer or a doctor means becoming one being able to adopt that language that waves seeing that world view and the way you obtain that. Is by being immersed in that world, they can't teach it to you. That's why in practices like law medicine electronics plumbing, you know, the they they give you an internship or an apprenticeship reaction go work with professionals in the field.

And learn to think and see the world the way they do. You wouldn't be able to just go from education to professional and I think that's true with most things so I teachers spend time a student teachers, you know, that's why pilots sit for hours and flight simulators and before then they used to sit, you know, as coal pilots or you know, as as observers watching pilots do their thing, that's what I can go on and on and on this examples, you can think of examples here.

So yourself. So when the aspects of working out loud, how do you work out? Which is the key question here right if you want to help support people and learning. And John Stepper offers five different things his perception. I don't know if I totally agree with it, but I thought it was useful, so I thought I'd share it.

Relationships. So, you know actually getting to know and better or more importantly they get to know you.

You know, that's the big reason why I connect with teachers around the world, you know. I learn from them, they learn from me we form this relationship we build that professional community of practice. Generosity. Sometimes you'll read especially in the business press, you know join a network and have your network do things for you.

Totally the totally the wrong perspective working out loud working with a network working with others the best principal to my mind is generosity. In other words you go into these situations into these environments thinking what can I share? How can I be useful? How can I help the other people in this network or community achieve their objectives?

And this is a real thing and and this is an old and important thing. You know, I first discovered it in the principles of Daoism from ancient China where Lao Tsu would write things like you know, if you want to accumulate wealth the way to doing that is to give away your wealth.

If you want to accumulate knowledge the way to do that is to give away knowledge and the objective shouldn't be to accumulate wealth or to accumulate knowledge. Alright people who seek power are often the least likely to obtain power. And I think that's you know, really important or or in the words of Bob Dylan.

In I guess the 1980s you got to serve someone. Invisible work is the third element and you know, this is the idea of making it clear how you do what you do. Channel 10 is an example of that me showing you Zotero and Google Docs. Even if I make mistakes, you know showing you that I make mistakes.

All of that is part of it. Purposeful Discovery. Yeah, okay. A lot of times we'll have a learning goal in mind if I'm just sharing. I'll just I'll I don't typically have a learning goal in money. I have thoughts about how things should be but more it's about for me it's about you know, whatever occurs to me.

I'll share that and then I'll just go through the process of doing whatever I do. But you know on the other side of it is. You know from from the perspective of the learner, they will have certain things that they may be trying to get from me from their association with me there's there's the five of you here.

You know, you eat there that means there's five different stories of you know, who are you know of the sorts of things that you expect to get from me, there might be more than five. I recall I don't always see all the people were in these and then finally what sometimes called the growth mindset hate that term hate that term hate that term.

I hate the idea of mindsets because you know, there's a whole industry. Dedicated to using mindset terminology to blame people for not being successful and if you're not successful there are many reasons and it's almost never your mind set. But underneath that heading there are some useful things developing and open curious approach to work in life.

And if anything characterizes me as a learner, it's curious curiosity. I'm curious can't pronounce my words. I'm curious about everything. I'm the person who stops and watches construction crews to try to figure out what they're doing we we had a plumber in because our hot water heater decided to stop being a hot water heater.

And I watched him install what was it called a hydrostatic mixing valve? It mixes your hot water in your cold water so that you can store the hot water in your water tank and extremely hot temperatures and so that way you don't get harmful bacteria growing in your hot water tank like legion air disease, but it also prevents prevents that water from scalding you from injuring you so like so the water comes out of the tank.

And then it's still hot water but it mixes on my hands are backwards it mixes a bit with the cold water and then continues on so it's still hot water but it's not super hot water anymore. And so it's a safety thing. So that valve filled on this and so instead of getting hot water out of our hot water tank even when it was working we got cold water out of our hot water tank, which is not what you want from a hot water tank so we had to get one of those changed so I learned all about hydrostatic mixing valves.

Because it's interesting you know, and it's easy to say well, I'm not a plumber. I don't need to learn anything about plumbing but yeah, maybe you do and so I challenge all of you. If you're living in a house or if you're living in a situation where you have access to a hot water tank, go check your hot water tank.

And see if there's a hydrostatic mixing valve there. Because if there is great it's a thing that one day in the future you may have to pay for and if not then either your hot water in the tank, isn't hot enough and there's a risk of disease or. There's a risk of scalding yourself or worse scalding small children if they turn on the hot without thinking.

So you know, it's a minor thing but it's an important thing. And I'd never know about it. 61 years and old and I discovered that now. So yeah, it's because most of my life. I lived in apartments and never knew about those things and then when I finally was able to live in a house it never broke or I didn't have one.

I don't know. And so I only learned about it two days ago. So be curious. You never know what you'll find. How are we doing on time yeah it's getting to quarter to the hour so open educational resources stuff. I've used a lot. I you know, all of these diagrams in my slides I've taken from somewhere the thing about recent open education.

I think about resources in general to me there to me, there's only one rule because there there will be commercial resources, there will be open educational resources, but 99% of what I do. Falls under the domain of what they call fair use. I'm not selling these slides, you know, I'm not doing this as a business so to me it all falls under fair use but the main thing whether or not you know, no matter what you think the rules are is to provide credit.

See if if you got an image from somewhere. Put down on the slide where you got the image from. And the reason for that is that allows whoever produced the image to find you your use of the image because sometimes people search for their own stuff. Yeah. I searched for my own stuff.

Usually because I forgot where I put it but sometimes because I'm curious to see if other people are using it. They're not mostly but sometimes they do. So you want to make it available and also to to give credit to people I didn't make this beautiful diagram. Sylvia Tennesseeo made this beautiful diagram.

They're so vain at Tennessee who made this beautiful diagram. And she deserves credit for that.

It's an architecture they say Doug Bell Shaw says of participation. Working openly isn't you know, this this presentation has been a lot about me talking and sometimes it works out that way. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we'll spend the entire session talking about PowerPoint. That's fine. But in this President, you know, someone's a mix.

But an architecture of participation, I'm not so big on strong leadership and clear mission. I've up to me those who are like yeah big deal. Invitation to participate yeah really important giving people permission to join. Easy onboarding very important. Make it easy for people to join. That's why I love zoom, right.

You send out a link ha zoom click you're in. Those are the main things to me for creating an architecture of participation, but you can read more looking at Doug Belcher, he's very good, by the way. And that's what I have to say that's personal learning that's all personal learning in seven parts over three months.

So, We have maybe ten minutes maybe less if you want to break so I'll see if there's any comments or questions or anything like that before we close this off.

I look better. Oh, I looked better over there no time.

Oh.

Okay, Shawna you you looks like you got beauty again, so you have to unmute yourself.

Or maybe you're not saying anything but hello you're thinking so thank you.

Backup audio recording so I have nice clear sound of everything. I said, so you can review that if for some reason it didn't come out well on your end.

Bye.

Yeah, so I'll be taking a break in the last two weeks of December so it's like, you know starting almost well at the end of this week actually so we should arrange that starting in January or something like that and yeah, I'd be I'd be happy yeah I could do the series of short things on here's a tool here's how I use it here's how you know, something like that and just show how the tool is used.

If that's helpful.

Yeah.

So yeah, so I have Google this is a Google pixel phone. And it does automated transcription for me and so. That's why I bought this particular phone a Google phone rather than saying iPhone or whatever so that's one thing this will automatically do it another thing. I've used is I'm just trying to remember the name of it and I have to look it up, so give me a second here.

Email email.

I also use Gmail transcription here we go, this is just something I tried for the first time actually it's called really.

I'll put it into the chat. And this was to transcribe. An MP3 file automatically now this wasn't free this cost me. About twenty dollars a year plus six dollars an hour for automated transcriptions of mp3 files, which is pretty good back even ten years ago. I used to hire a company to do it which I really couldn't afford but I did it anyways because I wanted the transcription so much and you know, it would cost me like $150 for an hour so I didn't do it very much but now six dollars for an hour that's pretty good yeah.

And again, they're just running it through automated transcription, so there will be errors still quite a few errors, but it's good enough to make it available right away. And and people can get a sense of what I talked about.

All right.

Sure. All right.

Bye everyone.
 

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- Institutional Support For Personal Learning, Dec 14, 2020



Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 11, 2024 10:08 a.m.

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