Coming About

It hardly seems possible that we’ve reached the end of the semester, but papers are graded and the academic term has come to an end.  As a final assignment, I asked our master’s degree students to take stock of the distance they’ve traveled in Edublogs this semester by reviewing the posts they’ve written. Now’s the time for a little meta-reflection of my own, hence, the semester in review.

Since beginning my blog in Summer 08 in preparation for introducing blogging in the Adult Learning program, I’ve written twelve posts and engaged in written dialogue with others in 26 comments posted to my blog.  If I’ve counted correctly, I’ve also written more than 100 posts on students’ blogs over the semester. That’s a lot of writing, theirs and mine.

I suspect our students in Adult Learning have written even more, and, in the Org Learning class in particular, have a good many more comments since they have participated in the Reflector-Mirror exercise each week in which triads responded to each other’s posts. There are 30 students in my classes. That’s a fair amount of reflection going on. Keeping up with their posts on a weekly basis has been a challenge for me, some weeks more than others. I’ve found it immensely rewarding, however, and hope they have, too.

Fall 2008 Semester Highlights

In Program Planning, Management and Evaluation (ADLT 602), nine students developed plans for implementing a program, workshop, or course for learners that are as diverse as they are. From Sarah’s program for teaching seniors to use the computer to Ed’s on teaching Spanish to law enforcement and  Laura’s on a workshop for new School of Pharmacy professors, their plans were innovative, well thought-out, and well designed. Rosemary Caffarella,  who authored our text, would be proud. As the culminating assignment, these students created an academic-style conference poster session to provide an overview of their work. Take a look! 

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Learners in this class found the process worthwhile. Here are a few of their comments and reflections at semester’s end: 

I am coming away from this semester with a newfound appreciation for program planning and evaluation. I honestly came into this course with few expectations. All I knew about program planning was that my own experience had been frantic, disjointed and generally without structure. In contrast, the time that we spent reading about and working with the model presented by Caffarella was akin to the heavens opening up.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had work experiences, internships and involvement in school activities that have helped me with my own learning this semester. I mentioned in class last week how I want to try to take what I’ve learned and what I’m learning about adults and bring it into my workplace now. It’s my own personal goal to find little ways to do this.

I also learned over this semester what makes an effective program and what doesn’t. Over the years I’ve been a part of programs within work and school that really impacted me and others that I could have done without. I think having these experiences helped me plan my HRD internship program, because I tried to imagine if I were a student involved in it.

We spent the semester in ADLT 610, Consulting Skills for Adult Learning Environments, reflecting on the meaning of what it means to be in a helping relationship. Peter Block and Edgar Schein offer wise commentary on the nature of consultation, which is a far cry from what most people assume the consulting process involves.

Here are a few of their comments on what they learned about process consultation:

So, where am I now compared with the beginning of the semester?  I think my final thought is that I realize how much I learn from my colleagues and classmates.  As my blogs show, I am constantly relating new learning experiences with prior experiences.  These prior experiences include the stories and comments I have heard from other people.  This class is a perfect example of how well I learn from other people because some of the most important lessons learned came from challenges encountered by other groups.  Through classroom discussions and following their progress on the wiki, I was able to learn from the challenges faced by other groups and by their reactions to those challenges.  I have learned a great deal about the difficulty of entry, the importance of contracting, and the critical need for excellent communication.  I think everyone should always remember how much we learn from one another every day. 

As I read through my blog, it was made apparent to me that my thinking has developed over the semester.  At the beginning of this course, I felt a bit overwhelmed with the idea of “flawless consulting”.  I thought to myself, “Who is flawless?”  Well, I came to discover that Block provided the clear cut steps to encourage consulting that is nearly flawless. 

Although at the beginning of this course, I was a bit unsure of the new skills I was learning in the context of the classroom, I was even more unsure of how I would implement them outside of the classroom.  As we practiced inside the classroom walls, I felt a bit more secure in my new found skills.  I learned very quickly that there is no way to be prepared for every reaction that the client may throw at you and that I needed to take things in stride. 

Through our class discussions, I have learned through my peers experiences.  As a class when we provided advice, I felt that it was a valuable lesson.  Not only were we given the opportunity to assist our peers we were given the opportunity to learn from their frustration.  In addition to learning consulting skills, the class discussions have allowed me to learn new ways to use technology. 

 In this Consulting Skills class, we experimented with VoiceThreads as a form of digital conversation and learned what to do (and not do!) next time around. The scenario around which our enactment of a consulting assignment occurred was a merger of two securities firms. With the recent financial industry meltdown, the reality of such mergers and the challenges for organizations in successfully navigating them is all too real.  There will be a big demand for effective process consultants in the months ahead.

Our semester in Organizational Learning (ADLT 623) involved creating a concept map as a group. We created two maps: one on the nature of organizational learning, and the other on organizational culture. 
All the interactivity of CMap is somewhat lost in depicting them as a slideshow in this post, but we are keenly aware of copyright issues for articles that were attached to concepts. The maps are best viewed by clicking on the slideshow “full view” indicator.

The richness of concept map media for linking ideas, relationships, and resources is incredibly powerful, but most powerful of all is collective learning that happens as we struggle to depict the connections between our ideas through group dialogue. The cultural analyses that our students produced as their final assignment were rich with insights and learning, some of which are captured in these comments:  

Schein’s book on organizational culture and leadership will continue to be an important resource for me in my career. Understanding (or at least trying to understand) what makes up the culture at my organization will help me as I do my part to move the company towards becoming a learning organization.  I have much to learn and experience, but I am very grateful for what I have learned in this class because it has beeb a great springboard from which to jump into “the pool” of organizational culture and leadership.

Nancy Dixon’s book on organizational learning was mind-expanding. Building organizational learning into an enterprise is daunting, since it substantially goes against the grain of “normal” organizational life. Instead of withholding information to maintain power or avoid offense, organizational learning demonstrates the value of everyone at every level acquiring and spreading knowledge. Instead of withdrawing into specialized departments, organizational learning invites borders to be permeable and disparate people to mix substantively and frequently. And instead of depending on a command-and-control style of leadership, organizational learning opens up for all the opportunity to interpret information and assist in taking responsible action. Now that’s a challenge!

I never imagined that I would learn as much as I have over the last few months. Many of us have had ups and downs throughout the course of the semester, and we were all able to learn from those experiences. I have recently been told of my promotion that I have been after for quite some time, and I can’t wait to incorporate the strategies I have gathered throughout this program. The new year will indeed bring many new challenges for me and my department…and I welcome them all with open arms. Chatting with you all throughout the semester has given more confidence in my own abilities. The blogging over the last few months has been a wonderful experience, and I hope to continue the process. It really helps me put things in perspective. Furthermore, the Cmap exercise was extremely helpful and I have actually referenced it many times. It is amazing how much we incorporated into the map…and how BIG that thing got!

What I’ve Learned about Working with Web 2.0 Tools.  So, what have I learned about using Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, wikis, Voice Threads, and more as part of the graduate classroom experience? Here are a few of my thoughts.

Blogging is a Unique Writing Genre
The blogs of my learners were as individual as they each are, from the designs they chose to display their work to each one’s mode of expression and type of reflection. The blog appears to be a more natural venue for expressing voice in a way that I seldom see in traditional academic papers. For some reason, writing papers in APA style has a tendency to mask much of the uniqueness of individual expression, or perhaps it simply takes more skill to have voice emerge from the pages of an academic document. The weblog seems to me to be a free-flowing medium, less constrained by convention. It may be that the author simply feels freer to say what she thinks, and in so going, gives voice to ideas that might not have emerged otherwise. I’m still pondering on this and why it is so. Your comments are welcome!

Learners (Students in the Adult Learning Program) Have Much to Say!

This exercise of voice was quite liberating for most, intimidating for some, and, eventually, embraced [I think!] by all this semeser, even though learners admitted that writing to the blog “added” more work to the assignments. Micro-publishing is an exciting endeavor, and seeing their own words in print seemed to bring pleasure and a sense of accomplishment to assignments that I’ve not seen in work submitted for “my eyes” only. This online journaliing was healing to some who had workplace trauma in the form of lost jobs, and enlightening to those of us who could give added meaning to our readings by incorporating the experiences of others. Most expressed their ideas boldly when they were clear in their convictions, cautiously when they considered the public nature of their comments and potentially adverse consequences, and reflectively when new ideas bumped up against old thinking. This online conversations were better than any we’ve ever had in class dialogues: troubling, but true!

Working with Wikis and Blogs Demands (and Creates) New Assignment Formats

Okay, I admit it. The first time I saw the blog posts on interviewing a program planner from a non-traditional background in working with adult learners (those with disabilities, the elderly, non-native English speakers, etc.), I was stunned.  This was an assignment I’d used before in the ADLT 602, Program Planning class.  The results of this assignment didn’t look anything at all like the papers submitted by last years’ class: they were shorter (some of them MUCH shorter), more succinct, and, well, DIFFERENT!  It was then that it hit me: this is a very different genre, and the work that appears in it is going to have a distinctively different feel and flavor. 

These interivew assignments were actually very well done; however, I was surprised by qualitites that were different from what I had expected based on previous years’ experiences.  Since that day, I’ve noticed differences in other assignments posted to the blog, as well.  After much reflection, It finally dawned on me that (1) this was okay; (2) I should have expected it, since a blog is a different form of expression than a paper written in APA style; and (3) I need to be selective in what gets posted as an assignment to a blog, and what remains a traditional, research-based, APA-cited paper. Our learners need to become adept at both. 

This also means that I need to re-think my assignments and the goals that I have for learners in accomplishing them, and find the right medium that best accomplishes these goals — whether it be a blog assignment, a wiki posting, or a traditional APA paper.  I’ve learned that as an instructor, you simply can’t “move” a course from a paper-based format to blogs and wikis without adjustments. Big learning.

 It Takes Time, but It’s Worth It

There is no doubt that writing in a publically viewable format, using technology that can go “blip” in a moment and lose your work, and adding rich media in the form of audio, video, and photo content, takes more time … much more.  I think it’s been worth that investment (mine and theirs) in the quality of learning that our Adult Learning students have acquired … deep learning, in which they have actively, and socially, acquired new meaning and constructed more complex understandings of their worlds in relation to Adult Learning.

We’ll Continue in the Semester Ahead

Next semester, I’m abandoning Blackboard for everything except the gradebook. It’s a duplication to post on Blackboard and also to a wiki.  We will use Wetpaint wikis for each of my three classes instead, and learners will have an opportunity to continue their online reflective journaling with the blogs. The experiment continues.  More to come!