The Year Of The Diagram?

Two days in to the new year, and already my mind is reeling at the eduthinking going on. In particular, some diagrams from two different sources may help clarify some of the issues that I believe education faces this year.

The first post of the 2008 from David Warlick has him thinking about the differences between School1.0 and School2.0. Warlick says that:

I’ve been trying to reconcile some ideas about teaching and learning that I’d formulated a few years ago, with some of the shifts that have been happening since…

As part of this process, and in an attempt to bring clarity, he’s created the following diagram.

(Click to embiggen!)

For me, the interest lies in the easy way we can recognise the changes that he notes on the ‘School2.0’ side of the page. What he highlights is the quantity and diversity of information that is available to us today… and importantly, the realisation that, though the future may be unpredictable, we have moved to an information rich era where the means of accessing this information is easier and cheaper than at any other time in human history. This suggests that we need to re-think our approach to teaching and to school, but there is always the problem of making teachers appreciate just how big the changes are… until now!

Enter Alec Couros – Stage Left

Sometimes all it takes is a diagram to bring clarity to the process… and on page 182 (pdf version) of Alec Couros’ Doctoral thesis I found two which effectively illustrate my life before and after beginning blogging. More importantly, they are a graphic representation of the difference between School1.0 and School2.0 because Couros clearly understands the difference between what he calls “The Teacher Network” and “The Networked Teacher”:

(Diagrams from EXAMINING THE OPEN MOVEMENT: POSSIBILITIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION (pdf. p182, doc, p.172) – Reproduced under a Creative Commons License – Alec Couros, Dec 2006)

If you already know what connected learning can do for you, then you’ll recognise the diagrams. I hadn’t appreciated just how much of a connected learner/teacher I was until I recognised all the links in the second diagram… and here’s why I believe this is important for Scottish Education in particular…

2007 saw the live launch of Glow, 2008 sees it being rolled out to even more Scottish educators and learners…. and what I think Couros’ has made me realise is that Glow is going to require the teachers to move from being in a network to being networked. As a Glow mentor, I will be in a position where I will need to explain the importance of Glow and also the pedagogical shift it represents because, if Glow is to thrive, we will need educators to adopt and embrace the Social tools built into it. It will not be enough for teachers to simply say “Aye, we’ve got Glow in the school…” though I’m sure that is something we will hear all too often. No, what is needed are teachers with the will to learn and adopt and participate in the truly global wall-less world of education that Glow represents, and which so many of us have been participating in for the past few years.

I think and hope that, as (the) Glow spreads across Scotland, we will begin to hear from more and more Scottish Networked Teachers… I think that’s a suitably optimistic start to a New Year which promises so much… so what are you all optimistic about this year?