All The Young (Edu)Punks

There’s a lot of talk out there amongst y’all about distributed learning. Considering that we’re on the web and all, that’s a fairly insightful statement. Crowd sourcing was an interesting concept that I hadn’t heard about before, of course I’m not up to date on my marketing theories. I started thinking about how this is partially a business to individuals relationship and how it really emphasizes the power of crowds. Of course, marketing has always been about public opinion and (in my opinion) the power of many to influence.

Originally I read crowd sourcing as crowd surfing, which in my head, could describe the way individuals survey ideas on the web. Pick and choose from search results, go on facebook and ask your network of people questions, search on twitter for tweets about it, read wikipedia – you get the idea. Anyways, like a crowd surfer – you ride the crowd like a wave, eventually crashing to the floor when you have enough information to make a concrete connection to reality again – whether that’s to buy a product, engage in a service, or not do any of that at all.

I like that description of how online activities work sometimes. Plus it’s a nice tie-in to edupunk.

1. What influenced your perceptions and beliefs about faciliation roles and responsiblities in relation to context?

Well, simply, roles of facilitators will change depending on the context they are facilitating. For instance, if a facilitator faces a particularly acrimonious setting, they will need to take a different role on than one who is going into a meeting to push forward a stalled project that has no acrimonious tone.

2. How aware were you / are you about the affect of these influences?

I am usually very aware of external influences on how you approach situations. Working in a political environment, one has to be aware of their audience, and how to approach them with suggestions and constructive criticism. I expected that a poor facilitator would be able to miss many of these points when dealing with a group; whereas a good facilitator would be able to innately sense them, and capitalize on their existence.

3. What do you suppose is the basis for your perception?

I would further the theory that knowing how emotional people can get when things involve their personal work is the basis for my understanding of how facilitators work well.

4. What new learning do you take from this exercise?

I am taking a few new methods of dealing with different situations as a facilitator.

5. How might you apply your learning?

I will take some of the scenarios that were played out as good and bad examples of facilitation – especially how one facilitator ensured that all parties had an opportunity to speak and kept everyone involved. He was particularly aware of body language and facial expressions as cues to encourage people to speak.

1. Think about your teaching practise, what are you passionate about?

I really love those moments where you can see the learner just grasping the material and taking it somewhere that you never envisioned. That moment where they realize they get it, and you in turn can give yourself a short little pat on the back (which is a bit higher than one probably deserves).

2. How is that evidenced in your practise?

Well, I try to build in those a-ha moments and allow learners to run with the ball I’ve tossed them. I’m not locked into my material, and we have plenty of time to deviate from what I bring to class. In fact, I’m liable to be short when we don’t deviate from the planned course of action, which is why I’ve always brought in some sort of back up “oh, this is an interesting sidebar to the topic tonight” kind of moments.

3. Where do you hope this will all lead?

I’m kind of fortunate in that I get to teach computer skills that are probably going to be life skills. Searching the Internet is a very fundamental skill to have in a modern society, so it’s important to understand what you’re doing when you’re searching and what you’ve got when you find it. It’s very open ended. I hope my introduction to this huge topic begins their journey to being able to discover whatever information they need to that’s out there, and to have some level of confidence in the information that they’ve found. Hopefully, when things change in the future, they won’t have to take a class to figure out the new way of doing things, they can discover it themselves.