What are your key elements in creating a vision for global learning?
My colleague Bill Fowler and I are catalyzing a discussion on this topic at the 
Building Learning Communities 2011 conference in Boston, July 25-28.

Let’s begin the conversation and thought process here, on GETideas.org,
engage the attendees at the conference, and then extend the dialogue
after Boston. Here are some questions to ignite your ideas:

On building communities of learning, both locally and globally …

What are the main opportunities from around the world in building
more effective learning communities?What binds learners from around the world, regardless of geography?Are you currently satisfied with relationships within your education
community (leadership, parents, community, etc)?

On the changing model of teaching and learning …

What can we employ to empower students to take more responsibility
for managing/leading their own learning?What are the process skills needed to leverage technology? 

We’ll follow the debate online and discuss your views with the audience at
our interactive keynote during the BLC 2011 conference. 

                         July 27-29, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

I thought I would get the discussions going from the United Kingdom

I encourage teachers and students in Telford to make effective and appropriate use of ICT. The face to face sessions tend to go really well with lots of positive feedback. However, I have yet to find an effective method of creating a ‘digital network’. I need it to store course notes, resources and most importantly to allow the delegates to interact and share materials/ideas after the course.

In the past I have used Ning but have not used it since it has become a paid service.

I am at the stage of thinking of going to a software company and getting them to create something for me

This is all about creating an effective local network as well as a global one.

I look forward to being involved in these exciting discussions

The offline/online challenge is one that we encounter daily as we work with teachers around the world. The social (and very subtle) interactions we have face to face, the questioning, the provoking, the prodding of ideas… all of this works when we can trust each other, something that my team and I work hard to develop in face to face situations.

Now, online, Tom Barrett (my learning partner) and I have worked hard, too, to develop trust and trusted networks. The biggest challenge we face is how we can enlargen that online, too, for new “audiences” and communities.

Thanks for the post Richard. Over the last few weeks I have been exploring Google Plus, which is promising much if rolled out successfully for education domains. I have been using Google Apps for Edu for many years in the schools I worked in and I always felt, like you, that there seemed a missing link that drew it all together.

Yet to be proven but the Google+ project does seem to have the functionality to support a local network or community. Have you had an opportunity to use it yet?

I have been reflecting for the last couple of days on what Ewan and Tom have said based on my original post.

To set up a successful ‘digital’ teacher network that encourages local as well as global collaboration I think we need

1. something that can be easily read on handheld devices (one of the reasons twitter is successful)

2. something that delivers updates to the user automatically (based on interests/subscriptions)

3. something that encourages users to widen their own network (to widen their views)

I haven’t had the opportunity to use google+ as subscriptions allocations had all been used up for the UK

I have however been learning lots from twitter communities such as #mathchat

I  look forward to the thoughts of the global community

I’m not convinced (yet) by the potential of any tool, old or spanking new, to make an impact on learning and teaching when the students it’s for aren’t quite reaching out with the same fervour to try it out. What excites the edtech brigade rarely, history shows, excites young people as much. The one rock and roll technology that has grabbed their imagination is the one that most schools are afraid of harnessing at all: Facebook. The Atlantic sums it up well:

But what excites teachers may not excite students. Whether students take to Google+ in the classroom will depend on whether they take to Google+ in their personal lives. Students, who may be less concerned with separating different parts of their lives, may stick to Facebook, if that’s where all their friends are, and avoid Google+, where teachers eagerly await their arrival.

Two aspects of the threads are interesting for me. The first is the importance of in-person interaction, especially its role in developing meaningful relationships, and more pointedly, its importance for establishing working relationships that last beyond a particular objective. 

The second, is the ascendance of consumer technology into the education space. This applies as much to Ewan’s comments re Facebook as it does to the devices favored by learners over those provided by, or prescribed by education institutions.

I suspect we are in for a long transition despite the rapid pace of technological evolution. I finally joined the iPad world and much like the iPhone and long ago the PC/Mac I find that what I expected would be useful and what I am actually doing with it are quite different. The challenge for practitioners is can they let go of the ideas and methods they have developed over the years and let learners find the way forward with all these new tools.

One other note on the process skills needed to leverage technology. Successful consumer technology has always depended on rapid user acceptance and the perception of value, whether for entertainment, connectedness or learning. (of the sort usually served by Google or Wikipedia)

In education technology I’ve previously talked and written about a two part test. 1) Is it easy to use, 2) Does it have obvious value. Tech pioneers put up with a lot of bugs, difficult user interfaces, and dubious time/value propositions as enthusiast early adopters. Everyone else waits for the usability/value equation to become obvious and irresistible. The failure of many technologies to really impact learning in my view was not a lack of intrinsic educational benefit but a lack of educational bang for the buck, actual $$$ and time spent.

Therefore the process skills needed look more an more like some of the same cognitive processes we have always valued, but with proportionately less effort directed at simply making the tools work as advertised.