Mimi Ito, Vera Michalchik, and Bill Penuel take us into the wonderfully intriguing deep end of the Connected Learning swimming pool in the latest Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) session, as anyone who attended the live version or catches it through the archived recording can confirm. And that’s a great thing since the deep end of any body of water is often where we find the interesting signs of life. Continuing the massive open online course’s current two-week exploration of what drives the learning process ("Why We Need a Why"), the three educators interact with their online learners by exploring connections between learning (particularly connected learning), learning assessments, and learning outcomes. This is far from the usual review of how well learners do within the confines of an explicitly defined learning experience—a semester-long course or, by extension, the sort of workplace learning and performance (staff training) offering that so many of us as trainer-teacher-learners provide and then review through a formal assessment process. It’s a connected-learning session that takes us into the outer reaches of models like Donald Kirkpatrick’s four levels of learning, where the gold standard is to ask what impact the learning eventually has not only on the learner, but on the community the learner ultimately serves. And it encourages us to take the learner’s point of view into account rather than focusing solely on the learning facilitator’s or learning organization’s vantage point. "When you look from the perspective of the learner…the learning ecosystem looks very different than when you’re looking from the perspective of the class," Ito reminds us during the session; it requires that we are as cognizant of what the learners bring to the learning space as we are of our own approach to facilitating the learning process—thinking about the learners "and how our practices in the classroom connect back out." "We want to take a long view of the outcomes," Penuel suggests. "Do kids get to where they want to go next?…Where did this class lead them?"—questions we should just as firmly be asking within any training-teaching-learning setting. All three presenters lead us into the deeper, far more significant question: Do we follow up with our learners to see "whether learning made a difference in their lives?" "We have so few tools and practices that enable us to know what happened to students over time…a lot of these outcomes play out over time…you don’t really know what happens a few years down the line because nobody actually studies that," Ito says. But the picture is not completely bleak, she adds. A Gallup-Purdue University study released in May 2014 and designed to document post-graduation levels of workplace engagement and overall "well-being" provides some guidance for learning facilitators seeking ways to provide long-term positive benefits through their efforts. Learning that was project-based and that provided meaningful connections between the learners and those facilitating their learning led to significantly higher levels of workplace engagement and overall chances that the learners would thrive "in all areas of well-being." "It’s not just what kids got out of the course…but what happens next, "Ito reiterated. Much of this, of course, leads us back to the goal of better understanding what connected-learning practices (fostering learner-centric approaches, finding ways to "harness the advances and innovations of our connected age to serve learning," and nurturing deeper learning and understanding) might provide for learners of all ages, in a variety of training-teaching-learning settings. "Interest is the beginning point, but the idea of cultivating an interest is that you don’t know where it is going to go," Penuel notes. "Our interests are really a starting point, and we really do need experiences of various kinds that allow us to learn in order to deepen them—so develop knowledge related to our interests, to engage with others in relation to our interests—to find out what others are interested in and to perhaps do something with them. I think interests evolve, and I think new interests emerge from this deep engagement." All three presenters, as the session draws to an end, remind us that we are not lacking resources if we want to join them in their explorations. The Connected Learning Research Network, for example, engages in learning research, design, and practice. And the National Survey of Student Engagement is currently looking into how much time and effort students in higher education put into their learning—as well as how our colleagues in higher education are "deploying resources" to foster engagement among learners. As we reflect upon what #ccourses and another current connectivist MOOC—the Open  and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc)—offer trainer-teacher-learners in terms of guidance and inspiration, we can’t help but be encouraged. They remind us to reflect upon what our own learning produces. They also consistently and continually serve as examples of how the connections these connected-learning opportunities contribute to our own growth, productivity, and satisfaction within the extended communities of learning we create, nurture, and sustain over a very long period of time. N.B.: This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.

In the world of connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs), the days are beginning to blend seamlessly together. Immersed in the opening segments of the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) over the past few weeks and diving in as a "co-conspirator" at the formal launch of the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) in an online session this evening is leaving me a bit breathless. Dazed. Inspired. And ready for even more after seeing and hearing keynote presenter/facilitator Dave Cormier dazzle participants with an overview of how to learn effectively within connectivist MOOCs. Part of the thrill of learning from and with Cormier, of course, is knowing that he is the person credited with coining the term MOOC in 2008, as we are reminded in a wonderful and concise overview of the development of MOOCs posted on Canvas. The "What Is a Connectivist MOOC?" page online, with a link to his "What Is a MOOC?" video, has been a magnificent starting point for any of us interested in understanding what MOOCs are and how they work. So spending an hour online with him and more than a dozen other trainer-teacher-learners exploring how MOOCs fit into our learning landscape reminds us -as another MOOCmate observed this week—that "massive" doesn’t need to mean "massive numbers of people"; it can mean "massive potential"—as in potentially transformative. Members of our #oclmooc community of learning—like the community of learning that is developing in #ccourses—join these sessions to become more conversant in online learning and all that connected learning suggests and offers. And the learning in embedded in the experience of participating in the sessions since we interact in online environments including Blackboard Collaborate and Google Hangouts while carrying the conversation outside the virtual classroom by way of live interactions on Twitter. And we continue the learning, conversations, and collaborations—we can’t have one without the others in the world of connected learning—via postings in our Google+ #oclmooc and #ccourses communities, via blog postings where learners respond to one another and carry conversations across blog sites, and in many other ways. This extended online connectivist network, Cormier reminded us, is never coherent; it’s always "messy" and "real"—"like life." But that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible or impossible to navigate. In #oclmooc, we have our base camp in a WordPress site that allows us to provide and access updates through a table of contents extending down the right side of that home page; it’s a great resource designed to help learners keep their bearings whether they are completely new to the course or returning days, weeks, months, or even years after its initial offering. In #ccourses, we have a similar base camp that operates at an even more sophisticated level; the table of contents extends from left to right near the top of the home page, and engagement begins directly below that banner in the form of continually updated links to blog postings and tweets that create the rhizomatically-expanding connections between those who are actively participating in the #ccourses connected-learning experience. If all of this somehow suggests that we are in an era of abundant learning and opportunities to be connected within our communities of learning, we are right where Cormier has tried to lead us. Reviewing centuries of learning methodology in a very brief presentation, he suggested that we are returning to what we once cherished in face-to-face verbal engagement. The twist that connectivist MOOCs provide is that we no longer have to be face-to-face for that level of engagement, he reminded us. The rhizomatic nature of learning within connectivist MOOCs, he continued, makes our learning wild, uncontrollable, difficult to manage—and powerful. And at the heart of the process is the realization that "the community is the curriculum," he said.  (The community, as I noted recently in an article for the New Media Consortium blog, is also immersed in creating the "textbooks" that facilitate our learning, with the MOOCs functioning as multimedia and multifaceted textbooks developed by the communities of learning themselves. Cormier quotes his colleague George Siemens as saying that MOOCs are "the Internet happening to education"; I would add that connectivist MOOCs are communities of learning happening to textbooks, and every active participant is, in a very real sense, a co-conspirator.) Anyone new to connectivist MOOCs had, by the end of the session, not only been engaged in helping create the learning experience through contributing to content within online whiteboards, but had also heard Cormier recap five learning tips he includes in his online video: take time to become effectively oriented to the learning landscape rather than letting it overwhelm you; "declare" yourself within your learning community by sharing information about yourself with your learning colleagues; network by posting content and responding to content posted by others; "cluster" by working within subgroups of the learning community rather than unrealistically expecting to read and respond to every online contribution; and "focus" in a way that keeps you from burning out and succumbing to the idea that you have better things to do than to stay with the learning community as long as it is continuing to support the learning needs that initially attracted you to the MOOC. It’s the job of learners to give each other a chance to know each other, he noted, and it’s essential to engage with a broad range of people: "You can’t collaborate alone!" As if to remind us that we are our own worst critics, Cormier facetiously referred to himself as a "slacker" as the session was reaching its conclusion. When pressed, he attempted a clarification: he’s "lazy," but "an enthusiast." Which, in the world of connectivist MOOCs and connected learning, may leave us with a wonderfully apt description that applies to each of us—"lazy enthusiasts"—which keeps our collective sense of humor intact while we navigate those wild, uncontrollable, difficult to manage, and powerful learning moments that are endemic through courses like #oclmooc and #ccourses. N.B.: This is the fifth in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.

When learning turns in on itself, the results are magnificent—as is the case when we learn about personal learning networks (PLNs) by engaging with members of our personal learning networks, for example. It’s something I’ve seen repeatedly in my own communities of learning, and it’s something I have explored and documented extensively through the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC (#xplrlrn) and other connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs). Those explorations are continuing through two MOOCs—the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) and the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc)—and it feels as if #ccourses hit a training-teaching-learning home run this evening with a live (and now archived) one-hour online session "Social Capital and PLNs: Discovering, Building, and Cultivating Networks of Learners." Social Capital and PLNs, the opening session in a two-week exploration of "Trust and Network Fluency" through the three-month #ccourses MOOC, brought together a dynamic panel of experts (Kira Baker-Doyle as moderator, with Cristina Cantrill, Meenoo Rami, Howard Rheingold, and Shelly Sanchez Terrell as participants). The tips and reminders were wonderful; the interactions with those panelists and with #ccourses learners via Twitter were engaging reminders that this is a community of learning that is quickly connecting numerous personal learning networks around the world. And each individual learner is a node within that ever-growing network of networks. The session, early on, included a reminder that, for many teachers (and other learning facilitators, I would add), Twitter is a starting point in developing social capital. Just as Twitter can rapidly increase our contacts with valuable colleagues we might otherwise not encounter, our PLNs can serve as "social magnifiers," Rheingold suggested. Bringing value to our online interactions is essential, he continued: when we give away things of value (e.g., shared resources and links to useful information), we draw upon a "reservoir of reciprocity," contribute to the value of the PLNs, and strengthen our own positions as valuable members within those interwoven and incredibly extensive personal learning networks—as all of us participating saw time and time again during our hour together. Acknowledging the reciprocity and uniqueness of social capital helps us better appreciate it, he continued: the more social capital we spend, the more we have. This was obvious throughout the session. As we provided resources for each other, we gathered even more, including links to a Storify document containing Rheingold’s tweeted tips for developing PLNs at one point, for example,  and to the Peeragogy handbook—a "collection of techniques for collaborative learning and collaborative work"—at another. PLNs, we were reminded, are not just about learning; they provide emotional support and can be important resources that sustain us when we are beginning to feel overwhelmed, Terrell suggested. They also are among the resources we need to help our learners master—by helping those learners acquire the skills to effectively function within and use them; helping them understand that online social networks are not necessarily just for fun; and promoting the idea that good PLNs ask as much of their members as they offer. Developing PLNs can include relatively simple steps: finding "your hashtag," for example—the hashtag that brings someone together with other members of his or her learning community. What helps those communities coalesce is the realization that making and building things together is an essential part of cementing relationships within communities—which suggests that for those of us creating teaching-training-learning opportunities through active participation in #ccourses, #oclmooc, and other first-rate learning opportunities, there is positive result of drawing ever closer to having even stronger learning communities and personal learning networks than we previously believed possible. N.B.: This is the seventh in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc. For a wonderful example of how PLNs develop, please see Howard Rheingold’s Digital Media Laboratory and Learning Research Hub article about Shelley Terrell—originally published online in October 2010.  

Connected learning went over the top again this evening as members of the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) community of learning engaged in their/our first tweet chat as a group coalescing through a connectivist massive open online course (MOOC). It’s difficult to know where to start in describing how the learning connections expanded rapidly and rhizomatically during that one-hour session that was fast-paced and well-facilitated by #oclmooc co-conspirator Verena Roberts. There’s a temptation to talk about the obvious connections to be made between #oclmooc and the equally fabulous Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) community of learning since at least a few of us are participating in both and extending conversations between the two MOOC communities. There’s also the temptation to talk about how the #oclmooc session and so much of what we’re doing in #ccourses is making us more aware and appreciative of the importance of personal learning networks in learning—particularly since #ccourses just produced an engaging and inspiring session on "Social Capital and PLNs: Discovering, Building, and Cultivating Networks of Learners," as I documented in a blog article posted yesterday. There is even a temptation to focus on the fact that what was originally designed to be a MOOC to connect educators in Alberta (Canada) quickly morphed into a MOOC open to—and attracting participation from—trainer-teacher-learners around the world (an obviously brazen and much-appreciated attempt by our Alberta colleagues to make the entire world a protectorate of Alberta and its innovative onsite-online learning community!). But what was most interesting to me at a personal level was how the open conversation taking place within Twitter drew in colleagues not previously connected through either MOOC. This has happened to me in other MOOCs, as I wrote in an earlier article, and I would be surprised if it hasn’t happened to others engaged in connected-learning environments. What was noteworthy and unexpected this time was how quickly everyone naturally and playfully fell into exchanges that suggest the blossoming of new learning—and, more importantly for explorations and documentation of how connected-learning works, the blossoming of new learning relationships, as Verena quipped when it became obvious that one of my New Mexico-based colleagues from the New Media Consortium had seen one of my tweets and retweeted it to her own followers. Not more than a few minutes passed before a Kansas-based colleague from an entirely different community of learning—the American Library Association Learning Round Table—saw my online admission that I hadn’t yet participated in edcamp activities. "You, of all people, need to crash an edcamp," she commanded with mock consternation shared openly with other #oclmooc participants. "Get with it." And to emphasize yet another element of these connected-learning rhizomatically-expanding interactions—the idea that our online interactions are not and need not all be conducted synchronously—I later realized, while reviewing a record of the #oclmooc tweet chat, that a North Carolina-based colleague that I know well from yet another first-rate community of learning (#lrnchat) had also responded with an edcamp response directed to two #oclmooc members and one other #lrnchat colleague. The tally of net gains (networked gains?) from the session, then, include a strengthening of the #oclmooc community, which was designed to foster greater communication between teacher-trainer-learners; more cross-pollination between #oclmooc and #ccourses through the tweets and this follow-up blog post; the possible beginning of interactions between various members of my own personal learning network outside of the MOOCs and members of the two connectivist MOOCs—with no need for me to remain anywhere near the center of those interactions; additional interactions between all of us and a group of young connected-learning students we were encouraged to contact through their own group blogging efforts; and the pleasure of encountering new ideas through articles—including Clay Shirky’s essay "Why I Just Asked My Students to Put Away Their Laptops," and Laura Hilliger’s article "Teach the Web (MOOC)"—mentioned during the live tweet chat. And there clearly is much more to come. N.B.: This is the eighth in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.  

We shouldn’t be surprised when we discover that our communities—onsite as well as online—are less safe than we expect them to be. But we are. Because we really do want to believe the best of people even though so many of them/us prove to be less than worthy of that trust. Which is probably why "trust" and "community and collaboration" are among the important aspects of online learning currently receiving attention both in the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses) and the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) communities of learning. These two connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs) are creating a wonderful sense of what is possible in well-managed and well-supported communities of learning. They are also providing ample opportunities—some of them unanticipated—for us to celebrate the positive side of online interactions and to react and respond to the less savory side of the online world—rather than abandoning online interactions completely. Posts by two of our colleagues—Alec Couros and Alan Levine—recently made us aware of what happens when others violate that trust. Couros describes how he and others had their trust violated through an unethical practice known as "catfishing"—a form of Internet fraud in which "individuals or groups create false identities to lure victims into online, romantic relationships."  There are the obvious victims: the men or women who fall for the fraudulent online postings. There are also the less obvious victims: people like Couros and Levine, who discovered that their photographs have been used as part of the fraudulent online accounts that entrap people who haven’t fully developed first-rate digital literacy skills, including what Howard Rheingold calls "crap detection." An experience two online learning colleagues described earlier today reminded me that regardless of how digitally literate we become, we are going to have to ready for and confront online violations within our communities—particularly when we least expect them. It serves us well to be as prepared as possible to react strongly and positively when that moment arrives. My colleagues—both well versed in online interactions via a variety of mainstream platforms including Twitter and Google+ Hangouts—had their moment today when someone posing as a member of one of their learning communities joined a Hangout they were facilitating. Before they knew what was happening, they were exposed to an obviously unwanted sight: a close-up image of the man’s genitals. They quickly shut the session down, and then engaged in a debrief of what we all might learn. This is where our connected learning efforts provide positive options for us. While recognizing that we’re never going to be able to completely eradicate this unwelcome behavior, we also recognize that the best way to combat it is to shine light on it. Connect with others to share resources and ideas of how to most quickly push it aside so our communities remain as positive and unsoiled as they possible can be (e.g., by publicly disseminating guides like Google’s "Report Abuse in Public Video Hangouts in Google+"). And make sure that, for every individual subjected to this sort of violation, thousands of other people are vigilantly acting together to object to and push away those unwanted acts of aggression. I hope my colleagues will follow through on their plan to document what happened to them. I hope that all of us find ways to marginalize those who want to make our communities less than they should be. And I hope that we take the time to do what I’m about to do: support our proactive colleagues by drawing more attention to their best work—like the work of Sarah Houghton, who blogs as Librarian in Black. Sarah is a trusted and cherished colleague who tirelessly addresses issues—like face-to-face and online harassment—consistently, directly, and often with a sense of humor even when she is documenting the most distressing, disgusting situations imaginable. Many of us—after moving beyond the initial shock we felt upon reading what she was describing—stood up and cheered (privately and publicly) when she first described the levels of harassment to which she had been subjected by members of her profession; we supported her because what was done to her hurt (and continues to hurt) all of us, and we wanted to be sure that others knew that when they disrupted our community, we would do all we could to stop the disruption. When she addressed the controversy brewing around efforts to create a code of conduct for conference attendees, we were right there with her to be sure those posting anonymous obscene responses were drowned out by calls for positive action. And when Sarah recently wrote a deeply personal article about the toll violations have taken on her, we were quick to publicly and vocally outnumber the first anonymous respondent who was naïve enough to believe that abusive comments online would be allowed to stand unchallenged on our virtual community’s turf. That’s what we do for Sarah. That’s what we do for our #ccourses colleagues. That’s what we do for our #oclmooc colleagues. And that’s what we do for ourselves. Because we care. Because we trust that connected learning and connectivist MOOCs and the care and cultivation of our online communities matters. And because we must. N.B.: This is the ninth in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.  

When San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) and San Francisco Parks Alliance (SFPA) representatives gathered over the weekend to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Street Parks Program, they were honoring something that is both quintessentially San Franciscan and something seen throughout the United States: our ability to find abundance where others see cast-offs. It’s the sort of commitment documented by Peter Block and John McKnight through their Abundant Community book, website, and online discussions. It’s a movement beautifully grounded in Tactical Urbanism. And it’s a sustainable, community-based, volunteer-driven effort that celebrates the work of people we don’t often notice: the people behind the projects that make our communities far more rich than they otherwise would be. Not bad for country where we so often hear about how badly divided we are. "The [Street Parks] project was started to enable and assist community members in adopting DPW parcels and then turning them from blighted lots into verdant gardens and community gathering spaces," Julia Brashares, Director of Street Parks for the Parks Alliance, reminds us in a brief video prepared for the Alliance by students from San Francisco State University. "We, with community members, have seen the development of over 120 gardens in every district of the city." Those Street Parks projects are part of an ongoing program that brings City/County elected officials and employees, Parks Alliance staff, and hundreds of volunteers together to "activate" a string of City-owned parcels that, when combined, include approximately 500 acres of potential parkland. It’s an amazingly complex undertaking and, at the same time, it is amazingly simple. The complexity comes from the large number of stakeholders who have to be engaged to bring Street Park Projects to fruition; the simplicity comes from the idea that the projects begin when as few as two or three neighbors see the potential in an unused piece of public property and make the commitment to foster the numerous community collaborations required to produce positive results. What’s even more fascinating is the obvious interest in transforming unused public land into additional green open space in a city that already has a magnificent, nationally-acclaimed park system, a reclaimed bayside gem in Crissy Field and an equally ambitious counterpart in the Blue Greenway project that is already in progress; the Green Connections project that is also underway as another effort to increase access to green open spaces throughout the City; an effort to create more vibrant plazas throughout the City; and many other local efforts where volunteers work with an amazing network of nonprofit organizations, City/County representatives, neighborhood organizations, local business representatives, and anyone else who sees abundant possibilities for community development and enrichment. Street Park Program projects are, in many ways, the epitome of individuals setting aside individual interests to collaboratively produce a public good—often something designed to last far longer than the lifetimes of those who initially gather to produce the street park. We see individuals bringing neighbors together to turn a short, blighted cul-de-sac along a freeway into a community garden that attracted a new coffee shop to the block. We see neighbors next to another stretch of land adjacent to a freeway create a dog park where members of the community meet and enjoy each other’s company. A third stretch of blighted land becomes Progress Park—the site where we gathered last weekend to celebrate 10 years of Street Parks progress. A median strip in the Outer Sunset District becomes La Playa Park. Another lot becomes Pennsylvania Garden. And a set of concrete steps originally built in 1926 becomes the Hidden Garden Steps—the second set to be transformed into volunteer-maintained gardens and a beautiful ceramic-tiled mosaic (designed and fabricated by project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher) in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District. Visitors on the Steps The real payoff for any local or extended community comes when we spend time at any of those sites, as I so often do on the Hidden Garden Steps. I see my neighbors come out every Friday afternoon to sweep the steps so the site looks clean and inviting to weekend visitors. I see volunteers gather onsite monthly to maintain and add to the gardens. I see the results generated by the volunteers who maintain the project website, blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. And I see and talk with visitors from all over the world as they enjoy and admire the site, marvel over how the extended community adds to all the site offers, and blurt out wonderful observations such as "It’s like being in a rainbow." Working on any Street Park Program project is, in fact like being in a rainbow. It’s inspiring. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful. And it hints at greater aspects of life than most of us would otherwise encounter. The 10th-anniversary Street Parks Program celebration documents a bit of what that rainbow offers and brought volunteers together to dream of even bigger rainbows—those we can produce during the next 10 years. If we are successful, we will use what we have learned and done to inspire others to seek similar community-based collaborations to positively change our world. N.B.: Numerous articles documenting the Hidden Garden Steps project remain available on this Building Creative Bridges blog. Steps updates can be found on the Friends of the Hidden Garden Steps blog. Stories provided by donors to the Hidden Garden Steps project are currently being added to the project website by Steps volunteer Liz McLoughlin, and a step-by-step virtual tour created by McLoughlin and by project volunteer Gilbert Johnson is also under development.

It’s not often that I feel inspired to try live tweeting during a cross-country flight. But then again, I don’t often have the opportunity to explore the extreme edges of connected learning with colleagues while more than 37,000 feet above the surface of our planet. There’s something very satisfying about this sort of learning experience that becomes an ouroboros-like example of itself, and I’m trying to literally go full circle by blogging about it before my WiFi-enabled flight from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco lands. We can start with this connected-learning ouroboros by noting that many of us in several countries are currently learning about connected learning by participating in at least one of two connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs): the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) and the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses). We can then follow the curve of this figurative ouroboros by adding the fact that a live Week 3 ("Collaboration and Community") event within #oclmooc connected us, via Blackboard Collaborate, to a highly interactive session about The Global Read Aloud that connects young learners, teachers, parents, librarians, and others around the world through the reading of a specific book within a well-defined period of time. The #oclmooc interwoven connections circle around further by bringing us together with Global Read Aloud creator Pernille Ripp and with Kelli Holden, an Alberta-based fourth-grade teacher involved in The Global Read Aloud. We see our growing interconnections circling back to their point of origin through online connections fostered by live-tweeting from a few of us who were participating in the session in the United States and Canada. And I find my own connected-learning experience enhanced by trying something new—something inspired by necessity: participating in this session from the air rather than on ground because it is taking place while I’m in transit—something that previously kept me from being part of learning opportunities I had not wanted to miss. Once we move past the novelty of engaging in this level of air-to-earth connected learning (in this case, learning about the Global Read Aloud with colleagues spread over an enormous geographic range), we realize once again that the technology takes a back seat to the content—and the learning. We hear Pernille talking about how she was inspired by a dream of a world connected by a book when she was creating Project Read Aloud. We visit the project website and read her reminder that "[g]lobal collaboration is necessary to show students that they are part of something bigger than them" and that endeavors such as The Global Read Aloud provide opportunities for them to speak to each other. We learn that more than 300,000 students are currently connecting through the project, and that more than 500,000 from more than 60 countries have participated since Project Read Aloud began in summer 2010. And we wonder what we might be doing to translate that sort of massive open online and onsite labor of love into efforts that would be equally compelling, engaging, and rewarding for adult learners around the world. Holden then builds upon her own connected-learning efforts in this arena by letting us know that the participants are using many of the same tools we use within our connectivist MOOCs, including Twitter and Google+ communities. She tells us that using a Twitter backchannel can be as rewarding and engaging for the young Global Read Aloud participants as it can be for the adult communities of learning that foster effective backchannels. We see through chat exchanges that the end of this session will not be the end of the connections #oclmooc is inspiring. And the world begins to look even more connected from 37,000 feet than I ever imagined it could be. N.B.: This is the tenth in a series of posts documenting learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.  

A recent week-long trip to spend time with Association for Talent Development (ATD) colleagues and other friends in the Washington, D.C. area provided yet another reminder of how seamlessly interwoven our blended (onsite-online) communities have become. Walls are permeable. Distances become negligible. And connections—and connected learning—are abundant in many parts of the world. The "Perfect Blend: Seamlessly Serving [Chapter] Members Onsite and Online" session I designed and co-presented with New Media Consortium colleague Samantha Adams Becker and Larry Straining (serving as our tweet-stream manager) at the 2014 ATD Chapter Leaders Conference was designed to demonstrate how well-blended we all are becoming through training-teaching-learning. What it really did for me, at a personal level, was serve as a central example of a weeklong intensive immersion in pushing the envelope of what the combination of people and easy-to-use tech tools can produce. What made "Perfect Blend" work for so many of us was the onsite interactions my colleagues and I had with Samantha, who participated in the session, from her home in the Chicago area, via a Google Hangout. Samantha and I had successfully engaged in this level of interaction with other ATD colleagues several times, so the gist of what she, Larry, and I were attempting to convey was that tools such as Hangouts and Twitter, when used effectively, make it possible for us to feel as if we’re physically in the same space with people who are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s telepresence without the associated high price tag. And, once again, it worked very well as we quickly jettisoned the formal presentation we had prepared and simply engaged with our colleagues face-to-face, via the Hangout, and via the Twitter stream that Larry so masterfully managed during the hour-long session. As the session came to an end, we knew that we had effectively answered a question I asked at the beginning of the hour ("how big is this room?") with the obvious answer: our room—our learning space—is as big as our use of technology makes it—700 miles wide if we consider the distance between Chicago (where Samantha was sitting) and the Washington, D.C. area, where most of us were participating. Or a couple of thousand miles wide if we consider some of the interactions we had via Twitter with others during and after the formal session. It was clear to everyone that, as we said during the session, we (trainer-teacher-learners) are social people who are frequently drawn together in social situations, so we’re becoming increasingly comfortable with our ability to socialize while we learn onsite and online. It’s equally clear that the technology we’re exploring allows us to create social learning spaces that are variations on the Third Place that Ray Oldenburg first described in 1989 in his book The Great Good Place. It’s very much a part of what we see through our interactions within connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc), the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses), the Educational Technology & Media MOOC (#etmooc), and the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC (#xplrpln). It’s also very much a part of a world where connections overlap with connections that, in turn, overlap with other connections. And that’s what I saw throughout the week. The conversations during the "Perfect Blend" session were interwoven with face-to-face and online exchanges in the days preceding and following that learning opportunity. Some were with ATD colleagues; others were with my #oclmooc and #ccourses colleagues. They even carried over, via the conference backchannel, into exchanges with training-teaching-learning colleagues who were completely unfamiliar with the ATD Chapter Leaders Conference, but entered the conversations a bit and interacted directly with each other without any previous face-to-face or online contact by retweeting comments from the conference and offering their own observations about the various topics we were discussing. They extended further as I had brief exchanges with learners in the "Rethinking Library Instruction: Libraries as Social Learning Centers" I’m currently facilitating for the American Library Association, and carried some of those learners’ thoughts back to my ATD Chapter Leaders Conference colleagues. But it didn’t stop there. After the conference ended and after I had a couple of days to relax in our nation’s capital while continuing to interact with various members of my overlapping communities of learning, I saw one additional enlargement of the room: I was able to interact, from 37,000 feet above our planet, with #oclmooc colleagues in a live session that connected my cross-country flight with trainer-teacher-learners in Alberta (Canada) and several places throughout the United States. So I return to the expansive question—how big is our room?—and see, as I shared with many of those colleagues, that the room is as big as we and our technology can make it. Cross-country. International. And even above the planet. Which makes our social learning space a wonderfully large and magnificent place to be. N.B.: This is the eleventh in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.

The most obvious thing missing at Stephen Dante Holland’s funeral this morning was his magnificent, all-encompassing smile. Steve Holland with colleague Martha Rios at SFPL Everyone who rose to speak about Steve during that memorial service mentioned it—and with good reason. You couldn’t walk into the Borrower Services area of San Francisco’s Main Library, where he worked for 20 years, without feeling the warmth of that smile and the generous personality and spirit behind it. You couldn’t have even the briefest of conversations with him without feeling as if you had been drawn under the protection of an all-encompassing force that seemed to melt any sadness and ephemeral concerns you had faster than an ice cream cone melts on a hot summer day. It was the kind of smile that always felt genuine. Heartfelt. Drawn from some deep inner core. And capable of making everyone around him want to smile back—which is quite an achievement for someone working in public service and often facing all sorts of unhappy people with all sorts of complaints. But that’s just one of many parts of Steve that made him so special. So cherished. And now, so obviously missed. So, how do we cope with that moment when the phone call arrives telling us that a 43-year-old friend/colleague/source of inspiration has suddenly, unexpectedly been taken from our lives because of a health problem many of us never knew he had? We gather, as so many of us did this morning, to tell and hear stories that deepen our understanding of just how magnificent he was, and just how much we have lost. We hear that he moved, with his mother, from Memphis to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was eight years old. We hear from a Riordan High School classmate about the time Steve ignored a coach’s plan and ended up scoring for his team—then incurring a penalty because of his exuberant behavior in the end zone after scoring that touchdown just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch and run with a ball that unexpectedly remained in play. We hear about how this most gentle of men stepped in to help a high-school-aged niece at a time of need and ended up scaring the bejeezus out of everyone on her campus. (And no, we can’t imagine someone like Steve being the least bit frightening, so the story only makes us laugh that much harder at a time when we so desperately need to laugh.) There are the stories about his love of children—the five he and his wife, Shari, raised during their 25 years together, and the more than 25 foster children they took in over the years (the last of whom was scheduled to return to her own mother the day Steve passed away). "Steve, being the loving gentle soul that he was, didn’t mind having the children underfoot," we are told in what had to be one of the greatest smile-inducing understatements included in the eulogy delivered in that San Francisco Mission District church that all-too-briefly served as sanctuary for so many of us this morning. Looking around the standing-room-only space during the two-hour gathering gave us a reminder of what one person accomplishes in creating and nurturing family and community. We saw the obvious extended-family core of Steve’s family there. We saw what was referred to as his "library family"—a group of which I was proud to remain even though I formally left to pursue other endeavors more than seven years ago (and I note, in tribute to Steve, that I wasn’t the only former library employee to push everything else aside this morning to join the community which held him at its center). All of which makes me ask the obvious question: what did we learn from Steve, and what can we continue to do to make the sort of positive difference Steve made in the lives of all he touched? And the obvious answer comes from that same deep place from which Steve seemed to draw that smile of his: we take a deep breath, look as deeply within ourselves as we can, and find a way to pass along our own version of his genuine, heartfelt, all-encompassing smile and warmth to all we see. And, as I once again discovered during the brief walk from a subway station to that Mission District church in the San Francisco autumn-morning sun, it was the greatest tribute I could pay to Steve. For even though my heart was aching from the loss I feel and I wanted to do little more than let pent-up tears flow freely, I found a way to pass on smiles which, in turn, drew smiles from nearly all of those I passed. It doesn’t make me miss him less; I already know, from all-too-many losses, that we never stop missing those who are no longer physically with us. But it does remind me, as the minister reminded us so many times during the service, that we’re all eventually headed where Steve has already gone. And the best lesson we can learn from those who have preceded us is that a shared smile is one of the greatest gifts we can create and offer others—and the best way to keep their spirits and their contributions alive.

Frequent flyers, at one time or another, have the disorienting experience of having to consciously look for reminders of where we are; our minds simply can’t keep up with the frequent leaps between cities, states, and, occasionally, countries. Frequent learners engaged in co-learning (what Edward Brantmeier describes as the act of changing roles so teachers and learners become "joint sojourners on the quest for knowledge, understanding, and…wisdom") within the world of connected learning may be facing a parallel challenge in at least a couple of ways; when interacting with connected-learning colleagues, we need to remind ourselves which of our wonderfully overlapping communities of learning we are currently engaging (Is this #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course? #xplrpln—the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC? #oclmooc—the Open and Connected Learning MOOC? #ccourses—the Connected Courses MOOC? Or all of the above?), and we have to remember that the line between teacher/trainer and learner is increasingly dissipating in the best of teaching-training-learning opportunities. "The Case of #etmooc"—a learning opportunity that is less than two hours away as I write these words—shows us just how all-encompassing, rewarding, and intricately interwoven co-learning can be when it is effectively supported. The one-hour webinar, which initiates a two-week-long exploration of co-learning within the Connected Learning MOOC (#ccourses) and will be archived online for viewing, promises to be an example of how co-learning works to the benefit of everyone involved. Start with the idea that #ccourses facilitators are using the session to examine how co-learning in #etmooc contributed to the creation of a community of learning that still continues more than 18 months after that connectivist MOOC formally concluded. Continue with the fact that the learning facilitators have transformed several of us who are current #ccourses learners into co-learners by inviting us to join them in the formal discussion and recording of the session this evening. Then consider the idea that one of those #ccourses facilitators, Alec Couros, was among those who introduced so many of us to connected learning and connectivist MOOCs while deepening our appreciation of co-learning through all he and his "co-conspirators" did to bring #etmooc to fruition. And that’s not all. Among the co-learners are colleagues from #etmooc, #xplrpln, and #oclmooc. But not just any colleagues. We’ll be with Jeff Merrell, an #etmooc learner who crossed the co-learning line last year by playing a key role in designing and facilitating #xplrpln. And we’ll be there with several of the #etmooc learners who, having sustained the #etmooc community since the course ended, reunited earlier this year to design and deliver #oclmooc. If it’s beginning to sound as if "The Case of #etmooc" is another homecoming party for many of us, a celebration of how co-learning in online environments fosters training-teaching-learning opportunities unlike any we could have imagined a decade or two ago, and an invitation to the ball, then #etmooc, #xplrpln, #oclmooc, and #ccourses are doing exactly what great learning opportunities should do: providing learning spaces where no one stands alone at the front or in the center of the room, where new long-lasting cohorts of learners/co-learners gather and coalesce, and where everyone with the least amount of interest is welcome. And the best is yet to come since so many of us continually engage in the overlapping roles of teacher-trainer-learner: we will, no doubt, continue to adapt our ongoing co-learning experiences in ways that invite our own learners to, sooner than later, become co-learners in our jointly-shared endeavors. N.B.: This is the twelfth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and #oclmooc.  

We may have a new corollary to one of the most famous lines from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life ("Teacher says, ‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’"): Every time #etmooc is mentioned, a learner gets new learning wings. Which, apparently, is exactly what happened as the Connected Learning MOOC (#ccourses) webinar about #etmooc—the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course—and the development of online communities of learning drew to an end last night. No more than 15 minutes after "The Case of #etmooc" concluded, an audience member posted the following tweet: "Just watched the live #ccourses webinar about #etmooc. Impressed = signed up for my 1st MOOC. Excited to learn." And if that means another teacher-trainer-learner finds the pleasures and rewards of participating in connectivist MOOCs and the sustainable communities of learning they are capable of spawning, then we have yet another example of what well-designed and well-facilitated MOOCs along the lines of #etmooc and #ccourses can and do offer. There was something wonderfully circular, encouraging, and tremendously important there for all teacher-trainer-learners to absorb. The hour-long session began with #etmooc’s Alec Couros, two of his #ccourses co-facilitators (Howard Rheingold and Mia Zamora), and several #etmooc alums discussing what made #etmooc different from other MOOCs and, more broadly, from other learning experiences we had had up to the time we joined that course. As part of the current two-week-long #ccourses exploration of co-learning within connected learning opportunities, the session also served as an example of co-learning in action since the lines between learning facilitators (Couros, Rheingold, and Zamora) and learners (the #etmooc alums) quickly blurred—all of us were learning plenty from each other (and probably thinking about what we would next be doing to share those learned lessons with others). And it circled back to the idea of how interwoven our communities of learning are when Zamora surprised at least a few of us by telling us that she learned about connected learning by observing us in action while #etmooc was in progress. Turns out she had signed up for #etmooc when it was first offered in early 2013, but had little time to become actively involved: "I watched from afar," she said. "I learned something from all of you…because I watched, because I lurked. "Transformation," she continued, "happens in places that you cannot even see it happening, not even in yourself….Watching community build is also a powerful learning process. I think that’s what #etmooc gave me as a sort of out-of-the-gate kind of experience for this" experience of helping develop and facilitate the equally dynamic Connected Courses MOOC. And have no doubts: one of the most significant results of that hour-long session last night was that transformations were occurring. We could see that our explorations of what transformed #etmooc into a vibrant, vital, sustainable community of learning were also helping solidify #ccourses as another learning community that is likely to continue far longer than the formal period during which all of us are interacting within the current course structure. We could see that the same sense of openness—the commitment Couros and his #etmooc "co-conspirators" maintained to injecting a very human, personal element into that massive open online learning environment—was and is in play in the Connected Courses MOOC. We could see that the playful interactions among the session panelists reflected the playfulness that flows through #ccourses and just about every other successful, inspiring, and memorable learning experience we have—a reminder that we need to carry that level of playfulness, as much as possible, into the face-to-face and online learning environments we help create and nurture. Most importantly, we could see that all-too-rare occurrence in learning: the transformation of a group of learners from students to collaborators to long-term friends—"which is really amazing," #etmooc alum Susan Spellman Cann observed during the conversation. "I did not expect that from a MOOC." Among the reasons cited for the transformation from student to collaborator to friend were Couros’s tremendous skills at facilitating conversations, his natural inclination to make participants feel welcome into that developing community of learning, and the playful introductory activities that included a crowdsourced communal "lip dub" that quickly drew #etmooc participants together while using the educational technology and media tools explored at that point in the course. As to the underlying question of what #ccourses facilitators and participants (and members of other learning communities) can do to create communities that outlast courses: there was an acknowledgment that connected learning endeavors have a tool we haven’t thought to develop in our more traditional learning environments—the learning environments (e.g., Google+ and Twitter communities united around a hashtag such as #etmooc or #ccourses) that don’t shut down as courses usually do when content within a learning management system is closed and archived beyond the reach of course participants. It’s not as if "we’re turning the lights off now" when a connectivist MOOC delivers its final lesson, #etmooc and #ccourses co-learner Rhonda Jessen observed. "Opening up the doors…was really cool," our co-learner Erin Luong added. And as long as we keep those lights on and those doors open, we’re likely to see an extension and continuation of learning communities unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And many more wings. N.B.: This is the thirteenth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and other MOOCs.

Let’s create and play a trainer-teacher-learner’s version of blog-hopping (specifically crafted for connected-learning students and aficionados) by seeing how many blogs we can link together into a cohesive asynchronous discussion. Our goal is to see whether the process leads us through the act of making something (e.g., a virtual, sprawling, multi-site learning object) that contributes to our understanding of our own learning, co-learning, and the learning process—and perhaps even to other people’s learning. This particular learning object is already a work in progress thanks to interactions among a few of us connected via the Connected Courses (#ccourses) massive open online course (MOOC). It started with a self-contained set of reflections, by long-time learning colleague Alan Levine, on what constitutes "a make" (something created as part of the learning process to facilitate the learning process itself) within a connectivist MOOC (#ccourses, in this case). It grew a bit through #ccourses co-learner Maha Bali’s reflections inspired by Alan’s article and something I had written about the development of communities of learning similar to what we’re seeing in #ccourses. It continued growing rhizomatically as I posted individual responses to Alan’s and Maha’s posts and then realized that my own comments, if carried over into the article you’re now reading, could provide the foundations for what paradoxically is a self-contained lesson/make on "makes" that, at the same time, is interwoven into other makes—some of which are yet to come. Alan deserves the credit for unintentionally inspiring this admittedly complex yet intentionally playful attempt at showing how a blog can be a make. He begins by suggesting that blog posts are "part of the regular things to do" in the connected-learning process and he explicitly says that he does not "see blog posts or comments as ‘makes.’" Maha responds by acknowledging how engaging and supportive of the learning process a collaborative make can be, then circles back to suggest that "for some people, blogging is ‘their thing,’" just as other learners may immerse themselves in equally engaging and productive makes. Our colleague Kevin Hodgson, for example, has produced course-related cartoons that are very much his version of a make and inspire the rest of us to absorb Connected Courses lessons through those playful makes. And, she continues, "every blogpost of Simon [Ensor]’s is a make." I initially inadvertently extended our make-in-progress by commenting on Alan’s blog. As a big supporter of experiential learning, I assured him that I agree that some level of making is essential in the learning process, and I obviously do believe that blogging can fit that category when we see our blogs as more than personal reflections. Blog postings, I suggested, can also be self-contained lessons (particularly through the use of hyperlinks that lead our co-learners to other learning resources). I’m ultimately not very concerned about what my co-learners and I make; an instructor’s recommended "makes," in fact, often simply don’t support my own learning goals. I am, however, concerned that we make something that is seamlessly integrated into the learning experience so we have learned something useful, quantifiable, and rewarding to ourselves and others who learn with and from us. The theme seemed to grow without much effort on my part as I turned back to Maha’s blog to assure her that I agreed about Kevin Hodgson’s cartoons and Simon Ensor’s blog articles being makes for them as learners and for others who see and are inspired by their work. As we’re seeing through the current Connected Courses two-week module on co-learning, we have countless ways to creatively and effectively engage in making. I would even suggest, as I wrote to Maha, that participating in the "Case of #etmooc [the Educational Tecnology & Media MOOC]" panel discussion earlier this week was a form of making in that it produced a learning object—that online archived recording that is stimulating plenty of conversation and will continue to be a learning resource for anyone interested in knowing how sustainable communities of learning can develop out of well-designed, well-facilitated connectivist MOOCs. It all very nicely wraps around and draws upon some of the other learning objects we have accessed during our co-learning explorations this week: the Howard Rheingold/Alec Couros interview about building communities of learning, the video of Dean Shareski discussing educators’ "moral imperative" to share, and Rheingold’s "Toward Peeragogy" article for the dmlcentral blog. If some of the makes that Alan so rightly admires are grounded in collaborative efforts that shape new learning objects from mashups of open educational resources and other freely-shared items, then makes like the one you’re reading—drawing upon a variety of resources to create a unique learning object springing from the learning process itself—most certainly should qualify as makes. The beauty of this type of make is that, like the idea of MOOCs serving as a new form of open textbook, it is never completely finished. If you build upon this in your own blog or contribute through a comment to this piece, you’re contributing to the make—and, more importantly, to the rhizomatically-expanding set of learning resources available to us all benefiting from co-learning through connected learning efforts. N.B.: This is the fourteenth in a series of posts documenting connected learning through #ccourses and other MOOCs.

R. David Lankes, A.K.A. author of the recently-released The Boring Patient, is a very dangerous man. In everything he does, he casts out his line. Hooks us. Slowly reels us in without at all making us aware of what he’s doing while he is doing it. And then he does what he always does so well: he makes us learn in ways that transform the way we see the world we all inhabit. He is, in other words, the consummate scholar, speaker, writer, teacher, storyteller, library advocate, and so much more. But above all, he’s the sort of character Anne Lamott describes in Bird by Bird, her wonderful book about writing and the creative process: the type of character we would follow anywhere—even to the county dump. Or, in The Boring Patient, to doctors’ offices, hospitals, cancer treatment centers, and, at one point, to Disney World. Written to share the experiences he had after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the book "is not about cancer. It is about my response to being diagnosed, living with, and being treated for cancer," he tells us in the first few pages. "That is an important distinction because cancer is not funny. Cancer sucks. Cancer does not teach, cancer does not preach, cancer does not comfort, or inspire, or inform. Cancer kills." From beginning to end, this brief (138-page) book is a finely-crafted story that displays humor in deep moments of despair without in any way diminishing the seriousness of Lankes’s situation. He never loses sight of his well-honed ability to teach. He occasionally does (very effectively) preach—as is the case in the first sections of the book, when he addresses poignant yet no-holds-barred letters addressed "Dear Doctors," "Dear Medical Students," "Dear Heroic Noble Inspiring Cancer Survivor," and "Dear Everyone Else" in a way that makes us want to buy multiple copies of the book and send them to every doctor and medical student we know. He invokes his wonderfully wicked sense of humor to recall how he and his wife had to comfort others who were finding it very difficult to deal with the life-threatening situations Lankes so often faced in spite of having been assured that those with Hodgkin’s had an extremely high recovery rate. And he continually finds ways to inspire us to find the reserves of emotional strength he found within himself through the support of his family, friends, and colleagues. The cast of characters is far-reaching and well-drawn. We meet "The Bringer of Doom," an oncology fellow so lacking in social skills that she coldly tells Lankes and his wife that he has Hodgkin’s, then immediately separates the couple so she can whisk him away for a bone marrow biopsy "as the lab was about to close." The Bringer resurfaces much later in the book with an equally abrupt report on the state of his health that turns out to be emotionally devastating—and completely inaccurate. There are, on the other side of the spectrum of people we meet, the nurses and doctors who seem to understand that "[b]eing a good doctor means being concerned with my life, not what might end it." Through brief, poignant passages, we meet his wife (Anne Marie) who becomes "Xena the Patient Advocate"—a reminder that the advocates in our lives are among the most valuable assets and resources we have, as anyone familiar with the American medical system knows before reading even a few pages of The Boring Patient. And we even meet Bambi the pole dancer, who accompanies him through some of the most trying phases of his treatment—but let’s not ruin the punchline here: you’ll have to read the book to learn more about Bambi. Most impressively and importantly for those of us involved in training-teaching-learning, Lankes never loses sight of the important role he plays for his readers—the role of someone who makes information (i.e., information about what he has experienced) meaningful to those of us receiving it through the book: "Doctor, professor, teacher, librarian all can no longer believe that simply pushing information at someone and if necessary fixing it later is acceptable," he says both as someone who received plenty of information about cancer and as someone who consistently encourages and inspires us to think about the role of information providers in society. "When I learn, when I am ‘informed,’ it is more than my memory and reason you affect. It is my emotions, my needs, my image of self" (p. 111). And if we can carry that learner-centric view of what we do as information providers and facilitators of learning, we will have emerged from our journey with this not-so-boring patient the better for having joined him.

There’s an interesting, temporary migration taking place this week in Lost Pines, Texas—a spectacular rural setting on a slow-flowing segment of the Colorado River roughly 20 miles southeast of Austin. Many of the "birds" involved in this migration have flown in, from a variety of spots around the world, to nest for less than 48 hours. They/we can be observed eating and interacting together for brief, concentrated periods of time in ever-changing groupings that are far from predicable at any given time. And, if we are successful once we return to our regular habitats (schools, colleges, universities, classrooms, museums, libraries, and other educational organizations around the world), the eggs we lay and hatch here in Lost Pines could help change the way teaching-training-learning takes place. Our gathering—"The Black Swan Ball"—is a by-invitation-only educational-technology symposium unlike any I have ever seen before. Organized and produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC), it has attracted approximately 50 of us who have varying levels of involvement in NMC’s Horizon Project—that ongoing global endeavor to document and examine "key trends, significant challenges, and emerging technologies for their potential impact" in a variety of educational settings. What makes this particular gathering unusual and tremendously intriguing is that it has been framed around a specific book—Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable—and appears to be structured to produce what Taleb promotes in his book: a greater awareness of the incorrect assumptions we make in formulating predictions, and, with that enhanced awareness, a better ability to react to events and situations we previously considered "improbable"—particularly at that lovely intersection of the teaching-training-learning process and the educational technology that supports that process. The "improbable" element that originally gave Taleb’s book (and our NMC symposium) its title was the long-held belief in Europe that all swans were white—a belief maintained until a Dutch explorer, in 1697, encountered black swans in Australia, a Wikipedia article reminds us. From this, Taleb draws (on the first page of the prologue to his book) the conclusion that a "single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans." NMC CEO Larry Johnson at the Black Swan Ball Taleb, in his book, is extremely specific about what a Black Swan is in the world he inhabits: "First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable" (pp. xvii-xviii). This makes the idea of a "Black Swan Ball" intriguing—not just for those of us in Lost Pines, but for anyone who wants to move from the familiar nest of ed-tech trends as we perceive them into the Black Swan world of teaching-training-learning where we look to what we see as the improbable to imagine how we might effectively react to it to the benefit of those we serve. Where the "central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness particularly the large deviations" (p. xix), a central element of this NMC gathering seems to be an exploration of how we can move beyond documenting and examining ed-tech trends, challenges, and emerging technologies so we set aside our existing assumptions about what is or is not improbable in the settings in which we work and live and play—a process that began unfolding yesterday as we arrived onsite in Lost Pines and gathered for an opening-night reception. It didn’t take me very long to start seeing parallels between what Taleb has written and what at least a few of us are already experiencing at the Black Swan Ball. He begins, for example, with that story of the "discovery" of a black swan by a European visiting Australia; my own evening began with an unexpected face-to-face conversation with an Australian colleague I had previously only encountered via Twitter. Taleb, furthermore, consistently encourages us to set aside the pervasive, inaccurate assumptions that blind us to the existence of what we previously saw as improbable—just as my wonderful Australian colleague spoke eloquently of the need for many of us to look beyond the assumptions me make within our own countries so we can learn from what our worldwide colleagues—in places including Australia, for example—are doing. And in what may be a completely inaccurate reading of where the Black Swan Ball is going, I left the opening-night reception wondering whether our playful and innovative colleagues at the NMC were recreating at least a bit of what Taleb describes to inspire significant Black-Swan thinking: an exercise designed to draw groups of us together so we could discover what we had in common led to inconclusive results among the members of the group to which I had been assigned—which makes me wonder, in the early-morning hours before the symposium reconvenes, whether we had been "purposely assigned" to groups with strong, shared connections simply to see whether we would "concoct explanations" for those assignments even though the assignments were actually random. Detail from graphic facilitator Giselle Chow’s work at the Ball I’m not sure whether I’ll encounter any Black Swans here in Lost Pines. But I do know that, in the spirit of that European who found his swans in Australia more than 300 years ago, I’ve already had the pleasure of literally seeing unexpected birds I had not previously seen—Carolina chickadees, Black vultures, Common nighthawks, and Eastern bluebirds—during an hour-long walk I took along the Colorado River before joining colleagues at the opening-night reception. If attending and documenting even a little of what comes out of this gathering helps all of us better identify and work with the Black swans and other lovely, infrequently-encountered birds in the world of training-teaching-learning, we will have been engaged in yet another rewarding intellectual migration thanks to our NMC colleagues and those who did all that was necessary to pull themselves away from the routine in search of wonderfully rewarding improbables.

Those of us involved in training-teaching-learning viscerally understand the power of a good story and the value of a good storyteller. So when New York Times columnist Bob Herbert left the newspaper in 2011 to accept a position with the public policy organization Demos, some of us felt as if one of the great storytellers in American journalism was vanishing—and that our world, consequently, would be a bit less vibrant. Herbert’s writing in the Times was always strong, passionate, inspiring, and laser-sharp in its focus on stories that provided context and gave meaning to the overwhelming flow of reports that inundate us day after day. His final column ("Losing Our Way"), in fact, began with the observation "So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home." Those words provided a searing reminder to that learning, libraries, and involvement in the setting of public policy are integral parts of the overall responsibility each of us has to actively working to create the world we would like to have. It’s a pleasure, therefore, to find that the storyteller has returned with a book that effectively and engagingly expands the thoughts included in that final New York Times column—Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America—and continues what he has occasionally produced via columns for Demos. Losing Our Way focuses "most intently on four specific areas: the employment crisis, which was badly underestimated and poorly understood; the need to rebuild and modernize the nation’s infrastructure and the relationship of that vast project to employment; the critical task of revitalizing the public schools in a way that meets the profound educational imperatives of the twenty-first century; and the essential obligation that we have as rational and civilized beings to stop fighting pointless and profoundly debilitating wars," he tells us in his introductory author’s note (p. 6). As always, the real strength and value of what Herbert produces is in his attention to the human side of the story—just as so much of what we do in training-teaching-learning benefits from focusing on the human element of our efforts. We don’t, in Losing Our Way, find the typical unengaging diatribe against our failing infrastructure; we follow—and are moved by—the story of Mercedes Gordon, a woman who was driving across the I-35 bridge across the Mississippi River the day the bridge collapsed and sent Gordon and others into a plunge that shattered and took lives. We don’t find ourselves in another exploration of the financial cost of wars; we follow Dan Berschinski from the moment he loses his legs in Afghanistan, through the unexpected story of how he struggles to regain an incredible amount of mobility, and then muse, with Herbert, over the way the honoring of Berschinski for his achievements carries with it the deeper question of why "there seemed to be no collective sense that it was insane to allow the maiming of men like Dan…to continue so may long years after the attacks of September 11, 2001….What was the point?" (p. 169) And when we move into the realm of learning, via an exploration of what is happening in our public schools, we don’t simply rehash the failed policies that, according to Herbert, have undercut rather than enhanced our educational system; we see how individuals including Jessie Ramey and Kathy Newman, in Pennsylvania, refused to accept billion-dollar cuts to educational programs and, through hard work, created partnerships that drew attention to the human cost of those reductions. "The United States needs to be reimagined…" Herbert writes at the conclusion of his book. "Ordinary citizens far from the traditional centers of power…profoundly changed American society. Through sustained, thoughtful, and courageous efforts they…shifted the nation onto a better path. A comparable effort by ordinary citizens is needed today if the United States is to regain its great promise of fairness and opportunity for all" (pp. 245, 247). As I sit here in Chicago, about to join colleagues for a variety of discussions at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, I think about Herbert’s earlier references to the closing of libraries, about the challenges we face in providing effective learning opportunities, and about his call for reimagining the world around us—and I think I couldn’t be in better company to explore what training-teaching-learning, effective collaborations, and engagement in active communities of learning and communities of practice can produce.

We’ve known, for a long time, that having key players in the room is an essential part of fostering achievements in training-teaching-learning and many other endeavors. What wasn’t as obvious until recently is that drawing those essential colleagues into the room is becoming increasingly simple by redefining what the room actually is. Attending the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project retreat—"The Black Swan Ball"—in Austin, Texas a couple of weeks ago provided a fabulous reminder of how our concepts of meeting spaces are changing. Arriving in Chicago yesterday for the American Library Association (ALA) 2015 Midwinter Meeting is supplying another dynamic example of this development. And other ongoing personal experiments in creating a virtual presence within onsite meetings convince me that we’re seeing a major shift in how our changing concepts of meeting spaces, learning spaces, participation, and collaboration are working to our advantage. While drawing an offsite colleague into onsite meetings as a co-presenter via Google Hangouts over the past couple of years, I have asked onsite meeting participants to describe how big our meeting spaces are. It quickly becomes obvious to everyone that our videoconferencing capabilities have improved to the point where those offsite participants feel as if they are physically present with us—and we with them—so the room is no longer defined by the immediate four walls that surround us—it extends over the hundreds (or thousands) of miles that would separate us if our technology didn’t create a visceral, virtual presence for all involved. Our NMC colleagues at the Black Swan Ball—an event inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and designed to help us develop the skills needed to adapt when what seemed improbably quickly becomes commonplace—were exemplary in creating a meeting space that transcended physical walls. Even though we were all in the same conference center room for much of the discussion, we were also using virtual spaces created online by NMC staff so we could create, in the moment, learning objects that would carry the discussion out of the room so the explorations would not end when the conference did. And, by the simple act of tweeting observations while those discussions were underway, we found the discussions spreading far beyond the conference center premises even while invited participants were still onsite. Our ALA colleagues are taking this expansion-of-the-room concept further than what I have seen most organizations attempt. Acknowledging that there is frequently a conference backchannel conversation nurtured by those who consider themselves "left behind" by their inability to be onsite (united via the hashtag #ALALeftBehind), conference representatives have already encouraged the "left behind" crowd to expand the size of the room and join the conversation via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and pages on the Association’s website: "You can get a flavor of the event and insights by following American Libraries coverage at http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/alamw15 and the show daily, Cognotes, at http://alamw15.ala.org/cognotes. "You can also track #alamw15 on Twitter at https://twitter.com/search?q=%23alamw15 join the Facebook Event at http://bit.ly/mw15event get the latest on Google+ at http://bit.ly/alamw15gp follow the Pinterest board at http://www.pinterest.com/alamidwinter/ keep up on Tumblr at http://americanlibraryassoc.tumblr.com/ follow the fun on Instagram at http://bit.ly/ALAinstagram "And looking ahead-for information about the 2015 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition June 25-30, and to find resources to help you make your case for attending, visit http://alaannual.org." This is a magnificent example of how a commitment to inclusivity and a bit of advance planning can create opportunities for extended conversations; greater levels of engagement among members of an association, a community of learning, a community of practice, or any other collaborative body; and an awareness of how existing tools and resources can create possibilities where barriers once existed. If each of us at the Midwinter Meeting (or any other onsite convocation) contributes to the effort to draw our offsite colleagues into the onsite conversations, and our offsite colleagues reciprocate by contributing via the channels available to them, we will have taken another positive, productive step toward expanding the size of our room and fostering the levels of collaboration that produce results beyond anything we previously imagined.

When as association like the American Library Association (ALA) sets out to empower its members by fostering collaboration, magic happens, as a few of us saw again yesterday while attending an open discussion about online learning in libraries at the ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting here in Chicago. Arriving early for a 90-minute session, seven of us who had not previously met engaged in brief, informal conversation for several minutes while waiting for the session facilitator to arrive. And when it became clear that the facilitator was not going to arrive, we quickly decided we weren’t going to take the typical tact of assuming we should leave because the session had been cancelled. ALA, after all, does many things very, very well—including creating opportunities where members interact informally, help shape the conversations we want to join, and extend conversations across onsite and online platforms to be sure no interested member is left behind. Because most of the members in that room are involved in training-teaching-learning endeavors in university libraries, we’re familiar with how to design and facilitate effective learning opportunities, so we quickly agreed to start by introducing ourselves and the work we do. We then agreed that we wanted a couple of  clear-cut learning objectives: an exchange of ideas about the current state of online learning in libraries, and the possibility of initiating a conversation that would continue long after that initial 90-minute session came to an end. So we exchanged business cards, took a few minutes to describe what we hoped to learn from each other during our time together, and even, thanks to one participant’s action, created an online document to capture highlights from the conversation in the hope that the document would quickly evolve into an ongoing "learning space" where we could continue to learn with and from each other. One of the most striking elements of this entire meeting created on the fly was how it reflected so much of what is happening in training-teaching-learning today: a recognition that learners gain by shaping their own learning experiences—as we did during those 90 minutes of conversation. And that collaborative or connected learning is most effective when there is no one dominant voice in a learning situation. If everyone contributes, everyone gains—which is what ALA so effectively nurtures by bringing colleagues together in ways that combine formal and informal learning while connecting onsite and offsite colleagues in engaging ways. As we created our own meeting/discussion within the overall Midwinter Meeting context, we found immediate payoffs. In sharing observations about what is happening among undergraduates engaged in online learning, we learned that the University of Arizona University Libraries has an open source program called Guide on the Side and that is has been successful enough to be adopted by others. We explored the challenge so many of us face in trying to define and support digital literacy and shared links to resources including Doug Belshaw’s online Ph.D. thesis on digital literacy: What Is Digital Literacy? A Pragmatic Investigation. We briefly explored the challenges of working with learners in online environments when those learners have been inadequately prepared to thrive in online learning environments, and heard a bit about the first-rate report Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas, by Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars, published through the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, at Columbia University. Moving on to the topic of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in learning, we heard a colleague summarize what she had learned earlier in the day while attending an Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) OER session here at the Midwinter Meeting. OERs, she noted, are offering great benefits for international distance learners—including access to OERs in a timely fashion instead of making those learners wait weeks for standard printed textbooks to arrive via mail. We learned that Rice University is doing great work with OER textbooks through its OpenStax College and that more libraries are beginning to work in this area—actually appointing "OER librarians." We heard about colleagues who are first-rate resources for us on the topic of OERs, e.g., Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education for SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition); David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University; and Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian Temple University, through his work on open textbooks. We heard numerous examples of how colleagues are engaging learners by creating and embedding personal videos in online courses, facilitating online forums that include audio feedback to learners, and using Twitter, Facebook, and Google Hangouts for online office hours and other learning opportunities that are showing online learning can be every bit as personal and engaging as face-to-face learning can be. A frequently-used tagline used by ALA to describe its conferences and large-scale meetings is "the conversation begins here." Conversations certainly began in that small conference room yesterday afternoon, and may well continue through extended interactions in virtual "learning spaces" including live tweet chats, development of that shared online document, and even blog articles along the lines of this one. They key is that we are responsible for fostering our own learning, creating our own meetings, and taking full advantage of the learning opportunities that continue to come our way through the simple act of association.

With informal help and encouragement from our staff colleagues in the American Library Association (ALA), several of us successfully managed, this afternoon, to reduce the number of people "left behind" during the current ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting being held here in Chicago. And, in the process, we produced a learning object designed to help members of ALA and other associations achieve similarly rewarding results. "ALALeftBehind" has been a bittersweet movement for quite a while now: those unable to be onsite for the Midwinter Meeting held early each year and the Annual Conference held early each summer contact onsite Association members via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms for news about what is happening onsite. They also, via the #ALALeftBehind hashtag, comment on how much they wish they could be part of the onsite action. This was the year we reduced the onsite-online gap a bit more. Largely thanks to the efforts of ALA staff, those who could not attend the conference received tips about resources that could help connect them to onsite activities and colleagues. That commitment to offsite members as well as to the onsite members who could afford the time and cost of traveling to Chicago inspired at least a few of us onsite to seek ways to support that effort and find ways to further draw our offsite colleagues into the onsite rooms. As we were meeting (during the first day of the conference) in the Midwinter Meeting Networking Uncommons—a wonderful space meant to facilitate unplanned encounters and conversations at a significant level—a few of us were expressing the same sort of comments expressed by those left behind: sadness that familiar faces weren’t present for Midwinter 2015 conversations. One person who is particularly important to us is our training-teaching-learning colleague Maurice Coleman, who brings us together online through his biweekly T is for Training conversations/podcasts and has been making audio-recordings of live face-to-face T is for Training sessions at ALA Midwinter Meetings and Annual Conferences for the past few years. Without Maurice onsite, we realized we would miss our semi-annual face-to-face session—until we decided that if we couldn’t bring Maurice and "T" into the Uncommons and the rest of the conference, we would bring the Uncommons and the conference to Maurice. We were lucky enough to be sitting with Jenny Levine, the ALA staff member who remains the driving force behind the Uncommons (and much more), as our plan began to develop; she quickly confirmed a reservation for the final 30-minute slot remaining for formal use of the Uncommons during the 2015 Midwinter Meeting. We then contacted Maurice and a few other T is for Training colleagues who were offsite to see whether they wanted to participate in a unique T is for Training session via a Google Hangout rather than the usual audio-only format we use through TalkShoe. There was a conscious decision that we weren’t going to make the Hangout appear too well-rehearsed, and we also agreed that we would rely on our improvisational skills to address any unexpected problems that came up during the session. Having experimented with blended onsite-online conference attendance via Twitter and blended learning opportunities via Google Hangouts, I saw this as an opportunity to pull a session together with minimal planning, preparation, and rehearsal so that #alaleftbehind colleagues would see how easily similar gatherings could be arranged while also seeing what can go wrong with this sort of impromptu erasing of the Left Behind brand. Virtual Maurice Coleman before he joined the live Hangout That’s exactly how it played out during the live session earlier this afternoon. The opening segment with guest host Kate Kosturski, T is for Training colleague Jules Shore, and me in the Networking Uncommons began right on time and featured a decent quality of audio and video. Our first (not-unexpected) glitch occurred when Maurice was unable to join the Hangout in its recorded version, so came in through a virtual back door: my tablet. Figuring that low-quality Maurice was better than no Maurice, I took the only action I could imagine taking: I held the tablet up to the webcam and hoped for the best. Watching the archived recording shows that it was a gamble that paid off: the audio and video feed captured from the tablet was even better in the recording than it was for those of us in the Uncommons—which doesn’t mean it was great (far from it), but as a spur-of-the-moment solution, it worked. Better yet, it added the sort of levity to the session that is such a valuable and valued part of all T is for Training sessions. The experiment gained momentum about12 minutes into the session with Jill Hurst-Wahl, another key part of the T is for Training community, was able to join the Hangout from her home. After a moment or two of trouble-shooting, she was completely integrated into the exchange and the conversation resumed where it had stopped when Maurice first came in via the tablet. Our moment of success came just after the halfway point, when Maurice was able to switch from the tablet feed to the version visible in the archived recording. And, for the remainder of the program, we once again showed how a conference room can quickly expand from being a small onsite space to a space that extend across entire states. It could have been better; we should have been able to include other participants via the chat function in Google Hangouts. But as an example of how low-cost, high-impact technology can help us redefine our meeting and our learning spaces and how it can further reduce the size of our Left Behind groups, it offers an effective case study. And it will continue reducing that Left Behind group person by person as more people view the recording and use it to create their own no-longer-left-behind experiences.

You didn’t have to be in Chicago from Friday, January 30 to Tuesday, February 3 to avoid being left behind. American Library Association (ALA) staff, members, and presenters, during the Association’s 2015 Midwinter Meeting, displayed an amazing, noteworthy commitment to bringing colleagues together regardless of geographic, economic, and temporal barriers—and, in the process, provided an example every trainer-teacher-learner can benefit from exploring. Association staff began the process, in the days before the conference began, by reaching out to members with a set of tips on how to be part of the conference whether onsite or offsite; they also carried the popular ALA Youth Media Awards ceremony to offsite members through a live webcast of the event. This is clearly not an association that cares only for those paying registration fees and booking rooms in conference hotels. Onsite individual Association members helped augment these efforts connecting offsite colleagues to the conference in a variety of ways, including the use of a Google Hangout and an extremely active Twitter feed that fostered plenty of back and forth. The Hangout, designed to serve as an episode of Maurice Coleman’s T is for Training podcast series for those involved in training-teaching-learning within libraries, was a successful experiment in creating a gathering that, through the discussion of "bringing offsite colleagues into the room," engaged colleagues in the moment and produced a 30-minute archived recording demonstrating how Hangouts work (and, in their weaker moments, don’t work) to extend live conversations beyond the barriers of physical rooms and to further extend them beyond their initial synchronous interactions. And the multi-day #alamw15 flow of tweets from onsite and offsite Association members was so heavy during the ALA Youth Media Awards ceremony Monday morning (February 2) that it completely overwhelmed the feed from the social media tool (Twubs) I was using to monitor the exchanges; new tweets appeared to pop up at one-second intervals, and a notification at the top of the Twubs page confirmed, at one point, that more than 480 tweets were waiting to move from a queue into the actual Twubs feed I was observing on my mobile device—which means the feed was, at that point, a full eight minutes behind what all of us were producing. The fast, steady pulse of tweets flowing into the feed made me feel as if I were watching a heart monitor somehow attached to an Olympic athlete engaged in a sprint. It seemed that the ALA community’s commitment to inclusivity never faltered. When Atlas of New Librarianship author R. David Lankes began setting up for his hour-long "Radical Conversations on New Librarianship" session Monday morning, for example, he obviously was fully immersed in extending the conversation (and the size of his room) through the same efforts others had pursued. Using Adobe Connect to reach out to offsite participants and using a projector to display the chat feed so those of us inside the physical space at McCormick Place in Chicago could see what our offsite colleagues were saying, Lankes made it possible for us to at least be aware of both sides (onsite and offsite) of an ongoing, intriguing conversation about how librarianship is continuing to evolve to the benefit of all whom it serves. It was clear—as was the case with that Google Hangout Sunday afternoon—that the conversation would continue after the formal session ended: several entry portals to the conversation remain on Lankes’ blog, and the book that will come out of those conversations is sure to inspire additional exchanges long after the ALA 2015 Midwinter Meeting begins fading in our memories. Another extended no-one-left-behind conversation that was easy to join during the conference was the Association’s current efforts to update its strategic plan. We often hear, from ALA staff, that "the conversation starts here" at the Midwinter Meeting and the Annual (summer) Conference, but the current strategic planning process shows the conversations are also continuous—beginning before we arrive onsite, continuing (rather than starting) while we are face to face, and extending far beyond the few days we have together during those meetings and conferences. Three town hall meetings had been held online from November through December 2014, and archived recordings remain available for those who don’t want to be left behind; several 90-minute onsite "kitchen table conversation" sessions facilitated by Association members during the 2015 Midwinter Conference were open to anyone interested in helping shape the strategic planning process and, by extension, the near-term future of the Association itself. Conversations are scheduled to continue as the planning process proceeds, and anyone paying attention knows that this is yet another example of an association keenly aware of a foundational tenet: without membership engagement, there is no real association in any sense of that word. Those of us involved in training-teaching-learning—and nearly everyone in libraries falls into that category at some time during day-to-day library work—are far from unfamiliar with what was on display at the Midwinter Conference. The nurturing of community that took place there (as well as before and after the event) is what we strive to nurture as we develop and maintain the valuable communities of learning that provide meaningful experiences for those we serve. It’s what connects conferences. Workshops. Webinars. Courses. And every other learning opportunity part of our overall dynamic learning landscape. And I, for one, am glad to be part of associations that do more than understand that idea—they transform the concept from idea to reality in ways that make a difference to everyone they/we touch.

New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project reports on key trends, significant challenges, and developments in educational technology seem to be bursting beyond the boundaries of their virtual covers in spectacular ways, as the release of the 2015 Higher Education Edition this week makes abundantly clear. There was a time when reading these free online training-teaching-learning resources involved little more than downloading the documents, taking a couple of hours to absorb the content, and then following a few selected links to learn more about the topics covered. Then the ever-increasing amount of content included within the reports created a need for a video synopsis posted on the New Media Consortium YouTube channel; the lavishly-produced and well-paced 2015 Higher Education Edition video clocks in at nearly seven minutes (compared to just under four minutes for the 2014 Higher Education Edition video). A very helpful infographic that further synthesizes the report through a single well-designed image for those who want to quickly grasp the high points of the report. A chart on page 35 of the report mirrors the online resource that lists the more than 50 technologies followed through the Horizon Project—a great gateway for anyone interested in exploring individual technologies they haven’t yet encountered. Increasingly numerous resources available through endnotes—nearly 300 spread over two pages near the final pages of the latest report—offer information-hungry readers a chance to explore the topics in greater depth. And the usual access to report expert-panel discussions within a well-facilitated wiki make the process of producing the report as transparent as possible while also providing an educational-technology resource unlike any others currently available online. Simply compiling the endnotes for the report is a magnificent effort in collaboration, report lead writer Samantha Adams Becker explained via a recent email exchange: "Citations are split across three writers/researchers on the NMC team [Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada as co-authors]. Each of us is responsible for writing researching six of the 18 topics in the report. We have a rule to never write anything editorial or in our own opinion—we must back everything up with sources—hence the giant list of citations. We then review each other’s sections and provide feedback for improvement and check each other’s citations. We also have a research manager [Michele Cummins] who finds the further readings for each section, and I check that work as well. So while there are three writers of the report [supported by editor/Horizon Project founder Larry Johnson and Johnson’s co-principal investigator, Malcolm Brown], we meet weekly to critique each other’s work and then turn in revised drafts. I then compile all of our revised drafts into a master document and go over the entire report with a fine-toothed comb, editing for voice, cohesion, etc." The results are stimulating discussions of six key trends, six key challenges, and six technological developments expected to "inform policy, leadership, and practice at all levels impacting universities and colleges" in ways that have repercussions for any of us involved in training-teaching-learning within the ever-expanding lifelong learning landscape we inhabit. Key edtech trends documented within the Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition as "driving edtech adoption in higher education in five or more years" include "advancing cultures of change and innovation" and "increasing cross-institution collaboration." Those expected to drive edtech adoption in a three- to five-year horizon include a "growing focus on measuring learning" and a "proliferation of open educational resources." The short-term one- to two-year horizon includes an "increasing use of blended learning" and attention to "redesigning learning spaces." Key challenges impeding technology adoption in higher education within the short-term horizon include "blending formal and informal learning" and "improving digital literacy." Mid-horizon challenges include those posed by "personalized learning" and "teaching complex thinking." The "wicked" challenges—those "that are complex to even define, much less address"—include addressing "competing models of education" and finding ways to effectively reward teaching. Important developments in educational technology for higher education in one year or less include the "bring your own device (BYOD)" movement and, for the second consecutive year, the flipped classroom model. Makerspaces and wearable technology are placed in a two- to three-year time-to-adoption horizon. "Adaptive learning technologies" joins "the Internet of Things" in the four- to five-year horizon. What all of this means to those of us engaged in lifelong learning efforts will be explored more deeply in the remaining articles in this series of posts. In the meantime, those interested in playing a more active role in the Horizon Report process that many of us currently treasure are encouraged to complete the online application form. NB: This is the first in a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: Key Trends

If you’re noticing increasing amounts of attention given to collaboration, blended learning, and efforts to redesign learning spaces in training-teaching-learning, you’re not alone. And if you are new to or remain curious about these topics, you’ll find plenty to stimulate your interest in the "Key Trends" section of the newly-released New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition. Horizon Project reports, for more than a decade, have been guiding us through what is changing and what remains consistent in our learning landscape; the flagship Higher Education Edition, which currently is accompanied by K-12, Library and Museum editions, consistently helps us identify and become familiar with key trends that are "accelerating technology adoption in higher education"—and, I continue to maintain, in many other parts of our overall lifelong-learning landscape. Reading through the latest Key Trends section confirms, among other ideas, that collaboration is a common thread weaving the trends into a cohesive tapestry of ed-tech developments. We see, through the report, that key trends (in addition to an increasing use of blended learning and significant amounts of attention given to redesigning learning spaces) include advancing cultures of change and innovation; increasing cross-institution collaboration; a growing focus on measuring learning; and the proliferation of open educational resources—OERs. And the 2015 Higher Education Edition includes plenty of examples to help us see how we can adapt, in our own learning environments, what our more adventurous colleagues are already doing. Looking first at the long-term trends—those "driving ed tech adoption in higher education for five or more years"—we encounter examples of how learning organizations are advancing cultures of change and innovation and increasingly fostering cross-institution collaboration. We are, according to the Horizon Project team (New Media Consortium staff, along with the volunteers who serve on the report’s panel of experts), seeing an increasing awareness among "higher education thought leaders" that agile startup models and the lean startup movement  are stimulating positive change and "promoting a culture of innovation" in learning (p. 8). "It has become the responsibility of universities to foster environments that accelerate learning and creativity," report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada bluntly tell us—an assertion that I consistently apply to workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs as well. Among the examples provided are the University of Florida’s Innovation Academy, where students work innovatively in a variety of dynamic learning spaces to "learn more about creativity, entrepreneurship, ethics, and leadership," and the University of Colorado, Denver’s ten-week Online Skills Mastery training program "designed to prepare you for teaching with digital tools, with a focus on great digital pedagogy" and culminating with a project in which participants actually produce a learning module—experiential learning at its best. (Modules are available online for those of us interested in further exploring what the program offers.) And for one of the many examples of how learning organizations are engaging in productive collaborations, we can follow the report link to "7 Ways Higher Ed Institutions Are Increasingly Joining Forces" from EducationDive.com—yet another resource well worth pursuing. As we move into the mid-term trends—those "driving ed tech adoption in higher education for three to five years"—we turn our attention to the growing focus on measuring learning (think learning analytics) and the proliferation of open educational resources. With the growing focus on measuring learning, we are reminded, "The goal is to build better pedagogies, empower students to take an active part in their learning, target at-risk student populations, and assess factors affecting completion and student success" (p. 12); among the numerous first-rate resources cited in the 2015 Higher Education Edition are the "Code of Practice for Learning Analytics" prepared by Niall Sclater for Jisc, and records from the Asilomar Conference (here in California) that was designed to "inform the ethical use of data and technology in learning research" through development of six principals ("respect for the rights of learners, beneficence, justice, openness, the humanity of learning, and continuous consideration"). Turning to the trend toward increasing use of open educational resources, we see how they represent "a broad variety of digital content, including full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, and any other means of conveying knowledge" (p. 14). Among the open textbook projects receiving attention here are Rice University’s OpenStax College and College Open Textbooks; massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the North-West OER Network also receive much-justified attention for their ongoing collaborative and open approaches to learning. The Key Trends section of the report concludes with the two intriguing and fruitful short-term trends—those "driving ed tech adoption in higher education [and elsewhere] for the next one to two years": increasing use of blended learning and redesigning learning spaces. "[B]lended learning—the combination of online and face-to-face instruction—is a model currently being explored by many higher educational institutions" (p. 17) and some of us who work in other learning environments, as we’re reminded through a link to a blended-learning case study (written by Carrie Schulz, Jessica Vargas, and Anna Lohaus) from Rollins University. And changes in pedagogical approaches themselves are driving the need to re-examine and redesign our learning spaces: "A student-centered approach to education has taken root, prompting many higher education professionals to rethink how learning spaces should be configured," the report co-authors confirm (p. 18). If, for example, we are interested in having the learner at the center of the learning process, we’re going to have to rework the numerous lecture halls that continue to place the focus on learning facilitators. The FLEXspace interactive OER database and the Learning Spaces Collaboratory are among the wonderful resources cited for those of us interested in diving much more deeply into the world of learning-space redesign, and Tom Haymes’ Idea Spaces presentation provides additional food for thought while also serving as an example of how we can create online content in a way that creates its own type of learning space—the website itself. NB: This is part of a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: Key Challenges

Intriguing educational-technology challenges ranging from "solvable" to "wicked" remain on the horizon for trainer-teacher-learners, the recently-released New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition reminds us. Although focusing on learning in formal higher education settings, the report’s summary of six "significant challenges impeding technology adoption in higher education" covers a set of challenges trainer-teacher-learners in a variety of learning environments would do well to consider—and attempt to address. In the short term (a one- to -two-year horizon featuring challenges "that we understand and know how to solve"), there are the challenges of blending formal and informal learning and improving digital literacy. In the category of "difficult" challenges—those "that we understand but for which solutions are elusive"—we find personalized learning and teaching complex thinking. And in that wonderfully knotty area of "wicked" challenges—those which become more difficult the more we attempt to resolve them—are the efforts to address competing models of education (massive open online courses—MOOCs; competency-based degree programs; and other alternative models of learning) as well as the need to find effective ways to reward teaching. Report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada begin with the solvable challenges by noting that "there is an increasing interest in the kinds of self-directed, curiosity-based learning that has long been common in museums, science centers, and personal learning networks.…Many workplaces already encourage informal learning methods for professional development…" (p. 22).  They help us better appreciate the roles social media and other resources are playing in helping us blend formal and informal learning, expose us to innovations including the Cork City Lifelong Learning Festival that "promotes and celebrates learning of all kinds, across all ages, interests and abilities, from pre-school to post-retirement" on an annual basis, and discuss numerous "informal professional development opportunities," including NMC’s Academy; among the resources explored are the European Union’s Lisbon Recognition Convention—in essence promoting recognition of learning achievements across learning organizations—and the "Formalising Informal Learning" article written by Rory McGreal, Dianne Conrad, Angela Murphy, Gabi Witthouse, and Wayne Mackintosh and published in the Open Praxis distance- and e-learning journal in 2014. If we care to go beyond what is already copiously documented in the report, we might further explore efforts to support the blending of formal and informal learning by looking at proposals for a lifelong-learning database (item #6 in NMC’s 2014 Wikithon list of new topics in educational technology) and Stephen Downes’ efforts through the National Research Council of Canada to create and promote learning and performance support systems. Remaining in the realm of solvable challenges, we join the report co-authors in a brief survey of efforts to improve digital literacy. They begin by noting that "[l]ack of consensus on what comprises digital literacy is impeding many colleges and universities from formulating adequate policies and programs that address these challenges"—a failing that is equally prevalent in many other learning environments, including workplace learning and performance (staff training)—and point out that "[c]urrent definitions of literacy only account for the gaining of new knowledge, skills, and attitudes, but do not include the deeper components of intention, reflection, and generativity" (p. 24). But they don’t just leave us at that juncture where need and confusion intersect; they take us to "20 Things Educators Need to Know About Digital Literacy Skills" (from Innovation Excellence) and the "Jisc Developing Digital Literacies Infokit" as points for departure for addressing the challenge. The Public Library Association division of the American Library Association offers links to additional digital literacy resources for those interested in going beyond what the 2015 Higher Education Edition offers. When we follow the report into the area of personalized learning, we find ourselves immersed in the intriguing world of learning designed to "enable students to determine the strategy and pace at which they learn"—learning opportunities that support the learning process at an individual learner’s own pace: "The goal is to give the student the flexibility to make…learning as effective and efficient as possible" (p. 27). Those already familiar with self-paced learning in settings ranging from the online staff training efforts to the flexible learning environments provided by connectivist MOOCs will find themselves on familiar ground here, and those wanting to become more familiar with the challenge and possible solutions can follow the report links to "Personalized Learning Changes Everything," from the University of Maine at Presque Island, and Mike Keppell’s engaging "Personalised Learning Strategies for Higher Education" article that explores interrelated topics ranging from "learning in ubiquitous spaces" to "personalized learning strategies." Moving through the final three challenges (teaching complex thinking, working with competing models of education, and finding ways to effectively reward teaching), we find ourselves in areas interwoven with other topics covered in the report. We can’t, for example, explore competing models of education/learning without thinking about how we try to transform the formal-and-informal conversation from an either-or proposition into an and-and proposition. When we seek ways to effectively reward teaching, we find ourselves struggling to even define what "exemplary teaching" is: lecturing, facilitating learning in ways that encourage learner-centric approaches, guiding learners to a level of proficiency that allows them to pass competency-based tests, or a combination of these and additional learning goals and objectives we are still struggling to define within our various learning sandboxes? One of the many strengths of the Horizon Project reports is that they help us focus on these challenges and, in the process of fostering that level of attention, encourage us to actively participate in the creation of effective, creative responses to these and other challenges to which curious, dedicated, innovative trainer-teacher-learners are drawn. NB: This is part of a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: On the One-Year Horizon—Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) and Flipped Classrooms

It would be easy, while immersed in New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project reports, to miss a critically important word: potential. But that’s the word—and the world—we explore as we move into the "Important Developments in Educational Technology" section of NMC’s Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition: the six technologies, including Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and, for the second consecutive year, the Flipped Classroom model, "have the potential to foster real changes in education, particularly in the development of progressive pedagogies and learning strategies; the organization of teachers’ work; and the arrangement and delivery of content," Report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada remind us (p. 35). As always, the six highlighted technologies are placed within specific time frames (BYOD and the Flipped Classroom model within a time-to-adoption horizon of one year or less in higher education settings; makerspaces and wearable technology within a two- to three-year adoption horizon; and adaptive learning technologies and the Internet of Things within a four- to five-year adoption horizon). As we saw when reviewing the 2014 Higher Education Edition, the Flipped Classroom model—with its use of brief lectures online to free up students and learning facilitators for learner-centric experiential learning/project-based learning opportunities in onsite (or online) learning spaces—has repercussions that extend far beyond formal learning settings in higher education. It is already extending further and further into our lifelong learning landscape from its roots as a response to the need to reach young students who otherwise couldn’t be present for classroom lectures; workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs are also looking at how the Flipped Classroom model builds upon what is already in place and extends learning opportunities in the workplace—and beyond, if we consider the way in which learners within connectivist massive open online courses (MOOCs) initially watch videos and engage in other learning opportunities before coming together online to engage in collaborative learning opportunities. It’s when we take the time to see the repercussions of this simple yet far-reaching flip that we begin to also see how interwoven the content is throughout the 2015 Higher Education Edition. In viewing the Key Trends section, we explored advancing cultures of change and innovation along with the increasing use of blended learning and an increasing focus on redesigning learning spaces. While viewing the Key Challenges section, we explored efforts at personalizing learning and blending formal and informal learning. And as we now focus on the Flipped Classroom model, we see how that flip leads us to respond to the need for redesigned learning spaces that foster more personalized as well as collaborative learning, embrace cultures of change and innovation, blend formal and informal learning opportunities, and even engage in additional explorations of teacher-trainer-learning facilitators in the learning process. Our colleagues in the Flipped Learning Network offer one possible framework centered on a combination of flexible environments, learning cultures, intentional content, and evolving roles for professional educators (and other trainer-teacher-learners). Clyde Freeman Herreid and Nancy Schiller offer us "Case Studies and the Flipped Classroom." And our colleagues at the New Media Consortium remind us that there is still plenty of potential to nurture. The second technology included in that one-year-or-less-to-adoption timeframe, Bring Your Own Device, has equally far-reaching and abundantly-noted implications. As the Report co-writers note, increasingly large numbers of learners are bringing their own tech devices into our learning and work spaces. BYOD, furthermore, reduces overall spending, by organizations, on technology; increases productivity among those who are using their own (familiar) devices rather than having to spend time learning other (unfamiliar) devices; provides each user-learner with the personally-chosen content installed on those personal tech devices; and also creates potential disparities in learning and in workplace opportunities and performance among those who are not able to afford to provide their own devices. Perusing resources cited within the 2015 Higher Education Edition, we find plenty of guidance on how we can get the best devices into higher education and how innovative learning spaces incorporate BYOD into learning. Armed with this information and sensitive to the challenges, we’re better prepared to respond to the potential provided by BYOD while also working to address the challenges is poses in our learning and work environments. NB: This is part of a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: On the Mid-Range Horizon—Makerspaces and Wearable Technology

Helping trainer-teacher-learners place educational technology in a meaningful context remains one of the many strengths of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project—a strength fully and engagingly on display in the  Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition survey of how makerspaces and wearable technology are supporting positive learning opportunities in a variety of settings. Report co-authors Samantha Adams Becker, Alex Freeman, and Victoria Estrada go far beyond simply describing makerspaces (learning spaces where people, technology, and learning interact in creatively dynamic and innovative ways) and wearable technology (tech tools that can be worn to support learning and a variety of other endeavors). At the beginning of the makerspaces section of the 2015 Higher Education Edition, they remind us we are seeing a significant "shift in what types of skillsets have real, applicable value in a rapidly advancing world. In this landscape, creativity, design, and engineering are making their way to the forefront of educational consideration…" (p. 40). As we think through the need for and repercussions of developing new skillsets, we see that overtly working to develop the skills to effectively incorporate makerspaces and wearable technology into our training-teaching-learning endeavors is an often-overlooked part of our ever-evolving learning landscape. It’s not enough for us to simply enter a makerspace or put on the latest piece of wearable technology; we actually need and benefit from guidance in what these developments offer us and, more importantly, how we may have to rethink our approach to training-teaching-learning if we’re going to effectively incorporate them into our most stimulating and productive lifelong-learning efforts. Makerspaces and wearable technology, after all, have the potential to move us further away from a focus on lecture-based learning and closer to creatively-engaging experiential learning opportunities. Touring the Autodesk makerspaces on Pier 9 in San Francisco (July 2014) Walking into Autodesk’s high-tech makerspaces here in San Francisco several months ago with a colleague who had arranged for us to join a tour of the facilities, I was initially struck by the numerous unfamiliar tools on display and in use by those using the space. Although familiar with the expanding use of makerspaces in libraries, I had not yet had the opportunity to use a makerspace as a learning space. It didn’t take long for those of us on that Autodesk tour to move past the state-of-awe stage; through impromptu conversations with artist-learner-makers who were incorporating 3D printers, lasercutters, and other high-tech tools into their own learning and creative-production efforts, we began to understand what an engaging approach to learning and collaboration these spaces foster—something that would not have been so obvious and engaging without the guidance of Mark Gabriel, the Autodesk rep who was serving as an Autodesk intern when we were onsite. Our own learning-about-learning experience was, furthermore, tremendously supported by our onsite learning colleagues—the artists and others who contributed to our wonderful informal-learning experience by helping us take the first steps toward raising our own skill levels in ways that may eventually lead us to more active engagement in makerspaces wherever we encounter them. The need for that same relearning-how-to-learn guidance is obvious as we monitor and dive into the rapidly-changing environment of wearable technology and how that is going to affect our training-teaching-learning efforts. Watching (with admittedly great enthusiasm) the apparently inevitable move toward mainstream adoption of Google Glass—the 800-pound gorilla of wearable ed-tech—over the past couple of years made many of us involved in the Horizon Report expert-panel explorations last fall firmly place wearable technology in a two-to-three-year time-to-adoption horizon for higher education; we were already seeing numerous examples of how Google Glass prototypes were being incorporated into learning, and some of us were taking steps to hone the skillsets necessary to effectively connect wearable technology to training-teaching-learning. It was, therefore, a real Black Swan moment—that moment when we come face-to-face with something that had previously appeared improbable—when we read (shortly before the 2015 Higher Education Edition was released but long after the text for that report had been written and submitted for publication) that Google Glass in its current iteration was being pulled back for further development. There were the inevitable and completely predictable mainstream media stories and blog posts about how it had been clear that Google Glass was never going to work, and I was briefly among those who saw that two-to-three-year adoption-horizon rapidly slipping away (as horizons so often do in the extremely volatile world of ed-tech developments where today’s snapshot can unexpectedly fade, only to be restored later by additional Black Swan developments that make the improbably suddenly so obviously real). There were, however, new wearable-tech announcements within days of the announcement that Glass was being withdrawn, and a glance at the Tech Times website shows that wearable technology is not going to disappear in training-teaching-learning or other endeavors anytime soon.   Our eLearning Guild colleague David Kelly, in fact, was quick to point out intriguing ways in which Glass, even at this point, can be seen as a success because of the ways it "opened minds" and "explored important questions"—which brings to our attention the most important skillset we need to continue developing: the skillset which helps us to look beyond the momentary successes and setbacks, the changes in specific technologies’ placement within one-year, two-to-three-year, and four-to-five-year adoption horizons, so we’re not completely flummoxed when a black swan lands in our learning nests. NB: This is part of a series of articles exploring the latest Horizon Report. Next: On the Four- to Five-Year Horizon—Adaptive Learning Technologies and the Internet of Things.