Education Rambler

This week, we’re fortunate to have Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach working with us.  The crux of what we’re learning about is not so much about technology, but the power of technology to create networks of people so that they can share ideas and information.  In the age of 21st Century Skills, global awareness, communication, and collaboration are all important skills and themes to develop and be aware of.  Web 2.0 tools help to foster those networks and build bridges across vast distances.

During our week with Sheryl, one of the things that struck me was the idea that Sheryl is like the guy on the Verizon Wireless commericals.  (No, Sheryl doesn’t walk around asking “Can you hear me now?  Can you hear me now?”).  I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials where the Verizon guy–or a Verizon customer–is walking around with their phone and a vast network of people following him.  The idea is that wherever you go, your network follows.  In Sheryl’s case this is definitely true.

I think in education we’re all accustomed to having consultants come in and do work with groups of educators.  Sometimes it’s a keynote, and sometimes it’s a few days of intensive workshop work.  In nearly every case to this point, my experience has been that national and international consultants have brought their information with them, but they don’t necessarily share their network.  Last week, I was inspired by how Sheryl chose to share her network.

In the five days that she worked with us, we had several conversations with people outside of walls of the room.  Sheryl tapped into her network in several ways and invited a wide variety of experts to share information with the participants in the room.  Sheryl modeled global awareness, communication, and collaboration in a true 21st century direction.  In the five days she exposed us to the following great models of using Web 2.0 tools to share her network with us:

• Skype:  To connect with a single open-source specialist.
• Plurk and Twitter: To announce that we were inviting people to our UStream and Elluminate Sessions and to ask questions to the network such as “How do you define creativity?”  “What web 2.0 examples do you have for a 4-12 music teacher?” etc. etc.
• UStream: To broadcast to folks on Plurk and Twitter who were not in our physical space.
• Elluminate: To speak with consultants from all over the United States as well as Canada and New Zealand.
• Elluminate: To speak with a panel of high school and college students about how they use technology and how they think technology could have been used in K-12 and also college.

The important piece of all of this was that it wasn’t about the technology.  The technology is not the network.  People make up the network.  The technology is simply a tool and a catalyst for creating networks.  The technolgy makes it easy for the collaboration and communication to happen among such a wide array of people, but I had never seen someone model it so well and so consistently.  It drove home the fact that building a network of professional contacts is critical to success in the 21st century, and was glad to see it modeled rather than just outlined in a PowerPoint.

For me, I think it means I’ll continue to nurture my network and to expand it.

Attending NECC 2008, I was not surprised to see so many vendors and presentations mentioning the concept of 21st Century Skills.  It’s true that we’re in the 21st Century, and many people have seen the proverbial light when it comes to the concept of a flat world, but I’m concerned that 21st Century Skills may become too diluted as more and more vendors bend 21st Century concepts to fit their products.

I’ll first state that I have personally subscribed to the framework of 21st Century Skills proposed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  I find them to represent a wide range of skills which I believe to be necessary for success in navigating the world of the 21st century.  One of the skills listed is the theme of global awareness.  Walking around NECC I saw many vendors taking advantage of 21st century buzz words, but didn’t necessarily see the vendors “walking the walk” though they had certainly been coached in “talking the talk.”

The best example of global awareness was at Tuesday’s keynote event with Jim Carleton and Mali Bickley.  Jim and Mali described themselves as educators who had lost their fire and passion for teaching, but were lit up again by global connections through technology.  A theme of their conversation was that their connections weren’t so much about the technology, but about the connections technology afforded them.  It wasn’t about specific products, and it wasn’t about which tools are better tools.  It was about the end result: students learning about students from other parts of the world.

Learning about students from around the world sounds like an easy thing to do, and on a surface level it probably is.  Jim and Mali described how at first their students were writing to their international student colleagues about day-to-day things like favorite foods and favorite colors, but then it got interesting.  Suddenly themes like war, peace, and culture came into play in ways that Jim and Mali probably only half anticipated.  THIS is where the true global awareness developed.

Global awareness is like reading comprehension.  In reading we talk about surface understanding, and really deep comprehension.  I think most educators would agree that we need to develop surface understanding to get to the really good thinking around what students read, and we should never settle for surface comprehension to be good enough.  Mali and Jim started with global awareness at a surface level and took it much, much deeper.  It wasn’t good enough to have students trading trivial information–though this is an important first step in building the relationships–the global awareness their students exerienced built true global awareness about the lives and experiences of students with vastly different lives than many students living in North America.

Jim and Mali’s presentation inspired me to think more about global awareness and the power it brings.  I look forward to seeing true global awareness in the years to come, and hope we all can remember not to settle for the surface, but get to the good stuff!