Connectivism and Things to Connect With

I loved learning about Connectivism this week. Like Communities of Practice, this is one of my favorite learning theories discusses this semester. Perhaps it's because it's newer and applies to our very modern age of all things technology and connectedness, but regardless, it's a pretty awesome concept.

So far I have checked out a number of different sites to help me engage more with the topic. I really like Stephen Downes blogs. He has a professional blog geared towards his work: http://www.downes.ca/index.html, and a personal blog called Half an Hour: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/ where he expounds on all sorts of topics, but many are also related to his work and education. Stephen has a strong presence on YouTube, too. His videos can be a little dry, but they are jam packed with good information. Plus he reminds me of my Uncle Jim, so I sort of enjoy watching him talking on and on.

MOOC List is a great collection of MOOCs for all! https://www.mooc-list.com/. It's a captures all the MOOCs out in the Internet ether and lists them in one place by date, which is super convenient! Of course you can search the site any way you like.

I don't know if you are an anglophile like me, but I was VERY excited to learn that Oxford is launching its first MOOC. Here's an article about it from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-37975359 - of course it's an Econ course they're running through edX with Harvard and MIT...boring! but it's still great they are doing it. I hope they will do more, because I would LOVE to "take" a course with Oxford. (notice I said "with" and not "at")

More on my love of all things British - I was able to find Bodleian Libraries on Twitter, which just rocked my little world! And led me to find all sorts of other British biblio-profiles. So, my PLN on Brits and books and lit, has just expanded 20-fold!

That's all I have for the moment...more later!

Communities of Practice

I thoroughly enjoyed researching, writing about, and presenting on Communities of Practice (CoP). It is my favorite theory that we've reviewed so far in the course. I like that CoP's can be completely organic. They can just evolve out of a small group of like-minded people interested in a specific area of practice. I think the group only truly becomes a CoP when they cross the line from just talking about individual experience to actively collecting, sharing, and mapping their collective knowledge.

I keep going back to my quilting bee, but it just fits in perfectly to so many aspects of what we're learning. The group is a CoP, because it's all about sharing information and experience with each other so that everyone learns and develops personally, but also develops the collective knowledge of the group. People start out on the periphery - like me! When I first joined up, I sat quietly and observed and listened and did as I was told, soaking in as much as I could from our guru instructor and all the women around me with varying degrees of experience. Slowly, I am moving closer to the center of the group. I am by no means a pro, like the women at the very center and our guru instructor, but I am learning and my experience is deepening, so that I have something to share now rather than just being and observer. It's exciting! 

Another thing that excites me about learning this theory, is that I can now see CoP's everywhere and I can see where they would be useful, too! I think I just didn't have a name for them before, but they are truly all around us. I'm coordinating a women in technology and engineering group for my company and without even realizing it until now, I've been coordinating an CoP this whole time. Now that I know and have more tools to make it better, I'm really excited to push us into new territory.

YEAH!

Internships and Experientail Learning

I ran an intern program for my company for the past 3.5 years. It is a pretty amazing opportunity for students in engineering, computer science, economics, and business. Students get to work full-time at our company for 11 weeks during the summer. They work on projects that are the equivalent of what we give entry level employees, so it's real work. They're surrounded by mentors and coaches from their department, so they get tons of support. They get to learn about the power industry through training, field trips to industry sites, and presentations by our senior staff. We also put them through job preparation workshops to teach them about how to get a job when they get done with school. What's more, they get paid a ridiculous amount of money!

I would have LOVED to have an opportunity like this when I was in college. Unfortunately, these types of opportunities were not available to me as a liberal arts major. My summer internships was at an arts foundation in Chicago. They couldn't pay, but luckily my college gave me a small stipend so I could at least afford rent for a couple months, but I was on my own for everything else. The work I did for the foundation was all over the place. I filled in at the welcome desk when the receptionist was out. I made copies and stuffed envelopes for mailings. I called donors and asked for money. I rearranged and cataloged the library. I developed brochures for one of their programs, and then I printed and folded about 400 copies of those brochures. I hung art work in the gallery. I participated in critiques of student work. I swept out the sculpture classroom to remove dust from plaster molds. I took notes at meetings. I provided college advising for high schoolers. I co-taught a workshop on making tin retablos for Chicago public school teachers. I co-taught a class on mural making with a group of high schoolers who were training to work with elementary and middle school students on a city-wide mural project. I served wine at a donor party. I walked the Executive Director's dog.

I learned many things that summer. Some of which were sort of applicable to the working world and my future adult life, but most of which were about myself and life in a big city. It was not a waste of time, but it was a very different experience from the students who intern at my company. They are actually learning how to be engineers, what it's like to work in a professional environment, what's going on in the industry that they may choose to work in, and what it's like to make money. These are very important skills to learn at an early age in order to get a leg up in life.

Constructivism - Speed Limits Question 1

Topic 1:  Do you think the speed limits in your state/area make sense? (e.g. MA and UT have different speed limits for the same types of roads; why? Does it make sense? Should it be changed? Etc.)

I am a speeder. I am constantly annoyed by the speed limits on Massachusetts roads. Reviewing the information and resources provided by the Constructivism group on this subject, helped solidify some of my views. The information about raising speed limits to meet the preference of 85% of drivers makes complete logical sense to me. Through observation and over 20 years of experience driving in Massachusetts, many other states in the US, and some foreign countries, I believe that it's the differential in speeds that cause the most accidents. Speeding certainly plays it's part in this, but it's the combination of people going too fast, going moderate speeds, and going too slow that create the potential for more accidents, beyond those caused solely by speeding.

However, if you ask me if the speed limits in Massachusetts as compared to Utah make sense, then I say yes, they do make sense...as much as I wish we could drive 80 on Mass interstates. All interstates and roads are not created equal. Utah's rural and urban freeways are very different than Massachusetts' rural and urban freeways. A rural freeway in Utah could be a two lane divided highway that stretches the length of the state, like Interstate 15. You will pass through a few "urban" areas that are densely populated and several rural areas with very small populations, but most of the road is straight and surrounded by the great wide open where there are no people and very few other cars on the road. An 80 mile per hour speed limit on this road makes sense.

Compare this to Interstate 90 in Massachusetts where you've got a road that crosses the entire state east and west, passes through many urban areas and where even the rural areas are populated for the most part. There are far more cars on I-90 at any given time and in any given location, whereas on I-15 in UT, you might see a good number of cars at rush hour going through Salt Lake City, but that's the exception to the rule and only for a short distance relative to the rest of the road. So, slower speed limits on an interstate in Massachusetts makes sense (begrudgingly).

Another consideration is that alcohol consumption and drunk driving rates in the two states are radically different. The number of incidents of drunk driving in Massachusetts is more than double what it is in Utah. Driving drunk on roads with more cars and higher population density is a recipe for disaster, so of course there are more deaths in Massachusetts from drunk driving than there are in Utah. This is another reason why speed limits should be kept lower in Massachusetts. Although I'm not sure if there is any correlation between lower speed limits minimizing accidents caused by drunk drivers - I hate to imagine a drunk driver giving themselves permission to follow an 80 mile per hour speed limit on any given road in Massachusetts. Very scary.

Roller Derby and Bruner's Spiral Curriculum

In a former life I played roller derby. I was one of a few women who helped launch Boston's roller derby league - originally called the Boston Derby Dames, more recently renamed to Boston Roller Derby to be more inclusive. I skated and helped manage the league for five years and then retired. I'm really proud that the league is still active today.

The resurgence of roller derby started back in 2000 in Texas. A bunch of gals started TXRD - Texas Roller Derby, which was a banked track league like the ones you saw on TV from the 70s. There was some inhouse fighting among the leadership, which resulted in the league splitting. TXRD remained a banked track league, and Texas Rollergirls formed a flat track league. Flat track roller derby took off like wild fire, because it was so easy to set up a track - you could do it on any flat surface that was large enough to accommodate the oval track size with a little room on the outside. Whereas with banked track...you actually needed a banked track, which was generally constructed of wood panels that had to be connected together to form the upright track, you needed a place to store it, and more importantly a place you could set it up so people could come and watch.

So as I said, flat track derby exploded all over the US. Boston was one of the first leagues in the country to jump on board, and was a big part in the early rule making and development of the first association - the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, or WFTDA, or "woof-tih-duh" (a mouth full!)

Most of us who came to derby were not professional skaters by any means. Most of us hadn't roller skated since elementary school, so there was a lot to learn or relearn. The women who were designated as coaches did a lot of talking through online forums to share knowledge around how best to get new skaters up to snuff and ready to bout (a bout being the actual sporting event).

In reading about Bruner's spiral curriculum, I thought about derby immediately. You must learn the absolute basics of skating before you can move on to anything remotely like the game of derby. A skater the mechanics of skating forward and backward, using crossovers, turning on a track and turning on a dime, stopping (and there are so many ways to stop), falling safely, jumping, turning while jumping, balancing on one leg, and so much more. Once these skills are mastered, then you can begin contact...imagine if you didn't have these foundational skills and someone came hurling at you from across the track with the intention of knocking you on your ass! So, yeah, foundational skills must be mastered before contact can be taught. Once you learn basic contact skills, then you can move on to more complex blocking moves. And this is how it goes, one set of skills stacked on top of the foundation skills, slowly building you up to be able to participate in a full bout.

The skaters who are really good are taking their skills to a whole new level. They build on their foundation and constantly innovate new moves to help them manipulate the rules of the game and to get advantages over other teams. Once that new skill gets out there, it's adopted by all the other teams and becomes a common skill within the giant repertoire of derby moves. And next thing you know, someone has invented the next big thing. It's pretty exciting and fun to watch the sport evolve.

For your reference:
http://www.txrd.com/
http://www.texasrollergirls.org/
https://wftda.com/
http://www.bostonrollerderby.com/

Using Behaviorism to Develop Ambassadors

Before I got into ID, I was a college recruiter for our company. I attended career fairs and all sort of other recruitment events in an effort to teach students about our company and of course, to recruit them for internships and full-time jobs. When attending recruitment events, I always took at least one employee, who was usually an engineer and often a former intern. Students generally want to talk with “actual” engineers and not just HR representatives, and they also like to talk with more recent graduates, who they can more easily identify with. Having these employees along was always hugely beneficial to me, especially when students wanted to have more technical conversations that I was just not qualified to have.

When selecting people to take on the road, I mostly chose people who I knew had good communication skills. On the very few occasions where I did not do this, but just took someone who happened to be an alum of the particular school, I learned quickly that communication skills and the ability to talk with (and not at) students is very important. What ended up happening, is that I would tap the same people over and over to go on these trips. I was starting to worry that managers were getting a little antsy about me taking their staff out of the office, and taking only certain staff and not others, so I began to devise a plan to solve this issue.

That plan has now morphed into a training program to develop ambassadors for the company. There will be several modules in the training to support the required knowledge/skills for each type of recruitment event that we attend. To start out with, we will be giving everyone foundational skills needed for any form of recruitment or networking when representing the company. One aspect of the training will be around Stump Speeches – what they are and how to write and deliver one. This aspect of the training will be all behavior based.

We will describe what stump speeches are, why they’re important and how they work. We will demonstrate how to deliver the company stump speech – the basics about who we are and what we do. Then we will give the learners opportunities to practice giving the company stump speech and we’ll use feedback and positive reinforcement to encourage them.

While we are still early on in the development stage of the modules, I imagine we will be using similar models to teach other communication and presentation skills to this group. Once they complete a module, learners will be rewarded by moving on to the next module and therefore moving up tiers of competency. So, after gaining skills in the foundational areas, they will be able to attend the easier events. Then they will move on to more advanced modules and be able to attend more complex events – events that require more skill to maneuver. (that sounds a bit like cognitivism, ay?)

They benefit from gaining these important leadership skills, which will help them grow at our company. We benefit from having a deep bench of ambassadors to call on for the various types of recruitment events that require more than just HR reps. Win win!

Okay, I'm not doing such a good job at blogging...I must admit I do not enjoy it. I'm sorry if this feels forced!

In the discussion post for Change, I talked about my switch from working in retail to higher ed, which is the change that set me on a path to a career. I would like to elaborate on that here.

I was an English major in college and just assumed I would work in publishing when I graduated. I didn’t understand the job market or what networking was at the time, and was woefully unprepared for the professional world when I graduated, so needless to say, I didn’t get a publishing job. 

After a number of miserable, low-paying temp jobs, I discovered that I could make decent money working for a retail makeup company - MAC Cosmetics. Initially, it was really fun, quirky, and creative. I had a background in art, so I enjoyed the artistic aspect of it. I got into the company while it was still young and in demand, and the vibe was really alternative and artsy. At the time there was only one store location in the Boston area and it was in a rich suburb outside of the city. Otherwise there were a few counter locations in various department stores like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Nordstrom. Working at the store felt pretty special. Because we were the only store near Boston, people came from all over New England to shop there. We had our drag queen regulars that came in to spend their paychecks once a month, which was always a fun break from the rich soccer moms that were our daily clientele. We also got all the local media, celebrities, and working makeup artists  who needed access to high quality makeup for film and TV and didn't want to go all the way to New York to get it (this was before you could buy everything on the internet, y'all). We also got a lot of attention from the MAC corporate office so a ton of amazing makeup artists worked there and there were always Senior MAC artists from NYC coming through to offer workshops and special in-store demos for our clients. I was a novice, completely self taught, but working in this thriving environment with these incredible artists, I was able to learn a ton and fast. I absolutely loved it. Ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters was a regular. I got to do Alicia Keys' makeup for a Kiss 108 music festival. I got to make up models for various runway shows in the city. I also got flown down to Atlanta to do wedding makeup for a woman who randomly came into the store to try false lashes, and who I was lucky enough to wait on. It was a wild and very fun time in my life.

Of course, I was only part-time at the store, because the full-time positions were highly coveted and people held onto them forever. If a spot did open up, it was usually filled by seniority (which I did not have). So, to supplement my makeup job, I also worked as a counter girl for a couple hair salons...an exercise in survival - that is, working with catty, gossipy, back-stabbing humans. Oh I learned so many things in the beauty industry!

MAC grew quickly in the early 2000's and before I knew it there were new counter locations popping up all over New England and they opened a second store in a suburban mall north of Boston. I was starting to crave more challenges and hoping for a full time position, so when an assistant manager position opened up at the new store, I jumped at it. This change was more difficult than I anticipated. I went from the comfort of our fun store at a low key mall, to the insanity of a high-traffic mall and a brand new store. It was certainly challenging, but not entirely in a good way. I learned a lot about managing staff (especially unmotivated staff), but it quickly turned into the retail grind. The realities and drudgery of working long hours, nights, weekends, and holidays, the insanity of working in a high volume mall (especially during holidays), and the pressure to meet numbers to boost the bottom line, sucked the fun right out of it. I still have nightmares about that mall at christmas time. I can't even drive by it without having a panic attack! (truth)

So, without boring you with my long sordid history with MAC, let's just say that I worked for MAC in a variety of capacities, in different locations, for many years. At some point, I hit a wall and was bored and fed up with retail and the service industry in general. I couldn’t match another foundation or find the perfect lipstick for anyone else. I was done. I wanted to use my liberal arts education and was itching for more intellectual pursuits.

Breaking into a new field after working in retail was daunting. I didn't know where exactly to begin. The world was so big. I knew I wanted to do something meaningful, so I looked at non-profits, rather than corporate, but the field was broad and I had to figure out how my skills related to the posted jobs. This was my first foray into the art of resume writing (read as manipulating) – demonstrating how the skill set from your totally unrelated job, matches the skill set of your desired job - a skill I have refined over the years and have taught to hundreds of college students.

I was not having much luck on my own, and needed to make some money, so I added my name to the roster for a local temp agency. I was very specific about the types of jobs I would take. Luckily they were good at their job and found me a decent placement at a local college. Thus begins my illustrious career (JK) in Higher Education.

Stay tuned...