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Tottering on the High Wire of Reform Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 Tottering on the high wire of reform My first activity at TelEd 95 was to be a day long workshop entitled "Gopher Growers / Web Weavers Workshop: Building Resources for Professional Development". I was already grateful to Andy Carvin for agreeing to fill in for Don Perkins, my co-presenter, who was not permitted to travel to the conference, given less than 48 hours notice. Andy is the creator of EdWeb, one of my favorite sites, and there could have been no stronger collaborator. After arriving late on Wednesday night, it was a real stretch to be down on the street in time to catch the 5:20 AM van ride to our workshop site, over an hour away to the south. The ride itself was an education, as we found Larry Anderson, Marianne Handler, Neal Strudler and John Perry already on board. We traded stories and hypotheses concerning the nature of the challenge we face in extending the benefits of networking to both the existing, as well as the entering members of our profession. It seemed that all of us would be teaching html in some form that day, something none of us would have predicted last year. Andy and I were very pleased to enter a lab that had been configured just as we'd asked, and proceeded to build a Web site just for the use of our participants. Meanwhile, I added another couple megs to each machine by downloading additional software from my powerbook that included utilities and a great set of directions for establishing gopher/www sites from Martin Huntley of BBN. Before going further, I'll cut to the end of the story: people said they enjoyed the workshop, that they got valuable information. Some ongoing staff development efforts that may have statewide and regional results were enhanced by the discussions that happened in pursuit of the instructions, and I salute the intrepid participants for hanging with the process. None of what follows is intended to downplay their effort or contributions to the workshop, it's mostly the dissonance that was going on in my head in trying to teach in a reform oriented way that got to me. I think they all deserve "I survived the Web Weavers Workshop" t-shirts ;-> Setting the stage for the High Wire Our participants arrived, and began to recover from their ride, which included a taste of South Florida gridlock. I began recalculating the flight plan to allow for the shortened time, fatigue and restlessness of our group, as well as the 80 degree morning weather that only the local folks were prepared for, and decided darkening the room to show my slide show intro was a Bad Idea. First, I tried some questions, in order to find out the backgrounds of the people who'd come to the session. About a quarter of the 22 people were familiar with html, three and a half were already running servers, five seemed to want to learn html and the rest were shopping for information on selecting servers and/or building large scale networks. So I asked a typically constructivist question: "What is it you'd like to build today?" "Of all the issues and challenges you face, in this smorgasbord of a session, what will you put on your plate first?" The room got, and stayed silent. The Rest of the Morning (Teetering) Andy was a powerful partner, and as I tried to improvise some approaches that could meet the goals of building a resource, he discussed the genesis of EdWeb, demonstrated its organization and we began to answer questions that people had on the basis of what they'd seen so far. The preponderence of these were of a technical nature (which server performs better, a unix box or a Mac? Which unix box is better?) The hard questions, "what are you trying to say" and "why would anybody want to read what you're putting on the web" went unaddressed.
After break, Before Lunch We decided that the group ought to be split into teams. Some folks clearly wanted the basics, from html to handling bookmarks, in order to be able to prepare materials offline, test them and perhaps mount them on a server some day. Others wanted to see the actual setup and configuration of a server, in this case an http server. One group of three people actually wanted to discuss professional development. Andy and I bounced between these groups, trying to keep any group from feeling abandoned and unsupported as we worked with another. During lunch, we put our heads together, and made a clickable graphic showing the focus areas we perceived from the morning. These were:
We spent the remainder of the afternoon bouncing between these groups, who discussed the topics. The largest group formed to watch Andy start over on building the MacHTTP server from scratch, and to map the image file we designed that showed our topics. Only the Professional Development people generated any content, which properly consisted of questions, or areas needing more discussion and strategies for meeting challenges and deciding next steps. At one point, as I listened to these three folks talking, I said "it sounds to me like you are all from the same district or school system. You know the problem so intimately, it's hard for me to remember that one is from Delaware, one from California and one from Arkansas". We all face tremendously similar problems,and although the solutions will of necessity be individual and idiosyncratic, there is so much to be gained by focused discussion. Post Mortem We wanted our web site to reflect this process, but it was clear there would be no web site "under construction" as a result of our work together. Did this make the session a failure? On the even longer bus ride home, Andy and I discussed this as we watched the remnants of Hurricane Andrew, still quite visible in the swamps we passed by. What could we do better? I felt responsible for not providing sufficient structure in terms of an agenda (I'd provided a map of topics required to make a comprehensive site instead, and asked people to select a topic as a focus). But this "mea culpa" didn't feel right either. There was no authentic way to predict a path for these folks, and people seemed to want to be told what they needed to learn, instead of learning it by doing something meaningful. We were being asked to teach a reform class in a traditional way. If our audience, clearly the cream of the crop of our profession, wasn't ready for this, did it mean we're all in big trouble? Or that we simply need more such experiences before we're ready to take such risks, or (from my perspective as leader) be more competent at leading such sessions? How will we ever get our students to learn in new ways if we can't learn with each other in similar ways? Lessons learned: Stephen Collins has already voiced his frustration with connectivity at TelEd. Perhaps it's because I know how much effort Margaret Riel and Cathy Hutchins put into organizing this massive event that I can't blame them, or believe that they were responsible for the "url police" (which I personally witnessed). My frustration goes in another direction, and Andy and I elaborated what we felt should have happened: Registration for this workshop should have been only online. Rather than saying "beginner, intermediate, or advanced" it would be more meaningful to have a WWW form that listed checkboxes (yes or no) for skills and familiarity.
and so on. After a week or two, workshop leaders would form groups based on this input. Introduction and discussion of identified areas would follow. People would bring materials to the session. Then, at the session, we'd meet face to face, and begin building together. Would we finish? Of course not! Taking what we'd learned from one another, we'd carry on when we got home, and perhaps involve other talented, dedicated folks who'd not been able to make the trip to TelEd. Perhaps the workshp would be one hour every morning, with the panel sessions reserved for the afternoon, and plenty of non-session time allowed so that it wasn't always a choice of interacting with someone you'd just encountered, or sitting in an illuminating session. I want to thank the people who attended the workshop for letting me learn some lessons that felt uncomfortable at first. It always feels better to do a "successful" workshop, where the planned objectives, however much a long shot, are met. But this one has left me with much more to chew on. And unless people were merely being polite, they got something useful out of the experience and seemed to enjoy it. Maybe my sights were set too high. Andy and I decided that if we got the chance to do this a couple more times, we'd have something really valuable to share. Who knows, it just may happen.... Ferdi |
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