Reflecting on my TAFE Workshop Approach

Phew! I’ve run workshops in 7 Australian TAFEs in Victoria and Tasmania states in the past three weeks – 3 hours of “intro” in the morning and 3 hours for “advanced” practitioners in the afternoon. Time to debrief!

I had a couple of underlying principles: provide the participants options and agency in the workshops, and to “walk the talk” of engagement rather than simply presenting.  At dinner one night just past the mid-point, my host Brad Beach and I were debriefing and he wondered if this approach was recognized or “seen” by the participants (between 20-35 people per session. It led me to wonder about those who also saw me for a keynote, an advanced online facilitation workshop, and 30 or so at KMLF and another 10 in a medical practitioners community of practice workshop. Wow, more than 650 people in 10 days! Reflect, reflect, reflect.

I have been thinking about this and have two somewhat contrary thoughts. One is really a question:  does it matter if they explicitly understood my approach? The other is, if we can’t walk our talk, then we can’t keep moving our teaching and learning practices forward.

First, a bit about my approach – I welcome your feedback. Based on some preparation with the workshop sponsors (all TAFEs (Technical and Further Education, sort of like our community colleges in the US but not really…) in Victoria and Tasmania states), we identified 7 “clumps” or areas related to teaching and learning online including:

  • using a communities of practice lens to help make the social aspects of learning more visible/usable
  • critically looking if “community” is useful in any particular context
  • purpose
  • relationship
  • engagement and support
  • activities
  • monitoring and evaluation

To back this up I prepared a huge slide deck of back up material we could select from depending on what people wanted to hear about. Of course as a whole this heaps too much.  In retrospect, too much even for choosing, especially with the diverse groups I had. And it requires spending quite a bit of time “explaining” to even begin to select. So I realized I had to structure some activities to surface what issues people were interested in.

For the morning sessions I used the paired face drawing  (for details, see  here and here) to both make space for paired introductions and as a metaphor for how we work online with others… being open, trusting, not-knowing, and the power of open turn taking. Plus its unexpected and fun. Then I was going to do the “35” exercise (which I did not know by this name until a weekend last week with Viv McWaters and Geoff Brown.. credit to Thiagi) but the rooms I was in didn’t have enough space for the circulating needed.

In the smaller groups, we went around the circle sharing names and “what brought you here today.” In most cases, each person’s reason prompted a comment from me which sometimes turned into mini conversations so this took up to an hour.  I kept a flip chart of these ideas and referred back to it throughout the workshop. But the concept was that even just sharing what we were interested in brought us deep into domain conversations without a presentation or “content” delivered by me.

At this point I asked if people were interested in a short presentation on the communities of practice perspective and some reflections on how it might be useful in designing, doing and evaluating teaching and learning online. (By the way, these few slides were the ONLY slides I ended up using, but you can find the whole, annotated deck at the end of this post.)  As the week proceeded, I realized that this design approach was a nice way “in” on these conversations and I built on it, combining with a “design for at LEAST three perspectives” of institution/administration, teacher/facilitator/leader and learner/student. All week long as I heard people’s stories I heard, I felt, a lot of pressure to design for compliance and administrative needs, even while there is a ton of emphasis on the learners. I kept feeling that if we were able to look across these three audiences and across the “community-domain-practice” of the CoP lens, that we’d see a fuller perspective of the online learning offerings and find a fuller way to evaluate the whole, instead of just on completion rates, compliance to government vocational training requirements and student satisfaction surveys. But I’ll write more about that in a future blog post.

After that, we needed to mix things up with a break. In some of the workshops we did Dave Gray’s “empathy map” exercise to expand what we consider about ourselves and the learners. It is a useful, visual way to test if we ARE designing for students.

Other times — both in the morning and afternoon sessions — we did case clinics using various “fishbowl” formats. I think the Samoan Circle variation worked best because we did not fall into the challenging whole circle – everyone wanting to talk problem. The bottom line with these case clinics was that one person with a real problem or opportunity benefited from the experience of the group, everyone saw more clearly that each other was a resource and that this online learning offering is not a solo practice. I could have just thrown up a few slides and said that in 5 minutes, but I think the conversations in the fishbowl were some of the most engaging in all the workshops.

The afternoon workshops were intended for teachers who have been teaching online for some time. To surface both their context and what they wanted to talk about, we first brainstormed some of their major challenges. We picked one and ran a reverse brainstorm in teams of 5.  Some of the challenges they picked to design for “100% failure” ranged from the generic “all online learning” to “focusing student engagement.” As usual, this activity generates laughter, then good reflective conversations about real issues in their institutions. Sometimes I probed with the “four why’s” approach as it can be easy to sit at the symptom level, rather than get to the underlying or systemic issue.  Again, through a conversational format using small and large group issues were surfaced. I like the reverse brainstorm better than a straight up brainstorm as I think it is easy to get stuck both in our ruts and our “that’s the way it always is” attitude. By designing for failure rather than success, we shift our frame far enough that new perceptions can emerge.

The afternoon then also had some sort of fishbowl case clinic. The clinics seem to tap into the knowledge and experience in the room and most people mentioned in the debrief how useful this was. We did a modified fishbowl “Samoan Circle” style where we started with three people in the middle, with one of the people being the person with a challenge or case, one colleague they picked and me. We started by hearing the case person’s story and then asked clarifying questions. Those questions alone can trigger a great deal of insight. Then we’d segue into ideas, followed by the case person reviewing what they heard/learned and planned to do. People said they planned to use this method back at work!

In some of the workshops people had technology questions and we were able to successfully play using Twitter as both a note taking and “tapping into the outside world” experiment. I need to write this up separately as there were many insights. (Ah more time, eh?)

Finally, in all the workshops I asked people to “Pay it forward” by suggesting what they heard in the workshop I should make sure to share with the next group. This was a twist on “what did you learn.” You can see what they said in the early slides in the deck annotated below.  Sometimes we finished with a round of “just three words” on “your experience of the last three hours.” I always love the words – predictable and unpredictable – which come out.

Here is the PDF file of the annotated resources slides…NOT a presentation!  FacilitatingOnlineInteractionforLearningAU11

 

Transcript from Google+ Workshop Experiment

After posting about my conVerge11 workshop, I realized it might be good to capture the notes out of Google+. So here they are:

Nancy White  –  Nov 24, 2011  –  Public
About to start a small workshop on advanced online facilitation practices in elearning in Melbourne. Our agenda is a short intro activity (tags!), then looking at multiple perspectives through empathy mapping. I’m putting this on G+ in case any one else wants to chime in! Hashtag #conVerge11. If you are doing this at home, google +Dave Gray and “empathy mapping.”
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+6

–  Tim Bonnemann, Luis Suarez, Hayley De Oliveira and 3 more

1 share  –  Gabrielle Harrison
55 comments

Greg Bird's profile photo

Greg Bird  –  Looking fwd to your prezo!
Nov 24, 2011

Gabrielle Harrison's profile photo

Gabrielle Harrison  –  This should be fun
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  I have just asked everyone to write one or two words on their badges that describe their strength as a teacher. Online folks, write yours here.
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  The room is full of talking. (And happy Thanksgiving to my American netfriends!)
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Gabrielle Harrison's profile photo

Gabrielle Harrison  –  I’m not a teacher in the true sense, but I guide and coach people
Nov 24, 2011

Mick Pope's profile photo

Mick Pope  –  enthusiastic
Nov 24, 2011

Jill Koppel's profile photo

Jill Koppel  –  At last! A technology I can engage with…

Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  We noted that none of the words would NOT apply online. Cool!
Hello, this is Evan and I’m scribing for Nancy White.
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Rob Cottingham's profile photo

Rob Cottingham  –  Wit. Doodling. Enthusiasm. Finding the funny. Weird but helpful metaphors.
Nov 24, 2011

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nicholas V  –  Respectful, Humorous, Responsive

Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Enthusiastic – online & offline. Make relevant (kick butt!). Understanding motivation.
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Lynne Gibb's profile photo

Lynne Gibb  –  Great so far Nancy! My two words were Patience and enthusiasm
Nov 24, 2011

michael chalk's profile photo

michael chalk  –  Empathy map created by Dave(?): think, see, say, feel, hear. Did anyone catch who created the map?
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Empathy map, (delegating!), engagement – generalised reciprocity, generosity
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nicholas V  –  Dave Gray and “empathy mapping.”
http://davegray.nextslide.com/empathy-map-exercise
Nov 24, 2011

Greg Bird's profile photo

Greg Bird  –  Michael – Dave Gray (I think)
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  What are you thinking/hearing/seeing/feeling/saying about your role as an online educator?
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Empathy Mapping – Dave Gray – www.davegrayinfo.com/

Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nicholas V  –  Receptive, facilitative, responsive, stimulating

Nov 24, 2011

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nov 24, 2011

Lynne Gibb's profile photo

Lynne Gibb  –  Thinking: Its actually quite hard work but its really exciting
Hearing: Student “I love learnng in my pyjamas at home!”
Sayng: ” I will lead you and then I will get out of the way and let you explore and discover on your own. But I will be beside you if you need me.”
Seeing: More and more teachers and students havng a go – yay!

Nov 24, 2011

Gabrielle Harrison's profile photo

Gabrielle Harrison  –  I am finding this very hard in this context. Nancy says this is not surprising. I like seeing the lights go on!
Nov 24, 2011

Michelle Hollister's profile photo

Michelle Hollister  –  Changing relationship – when you have a light-bulb moment with something finally becoming clear.
Nov 24, 2011

michael chalk's profile photo

michael chalk  –  Feeling: often i feel excited and engaged about meeting in a web conferencing space, especially when well-prepared. i try to feel the energy of the room, to add positive energy to the environment, even though it’s a virtual place.

Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  When relationships change online – conflict is a clever breakthrough technology! Creating the connection – mirroring, conflict, authentic storytelling – talking from experience.
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Mick Pope's profile photo

Mick Pope  –  dare to be loled at

Nov 24, 2011

ian knox's profile photo

ian knox  –  I love !!!! marks. You don’t always have to agree with students
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Are we perfect?! No! Allowing ourselves to learn from our mistakes (online leaves a trail!)… Use empathy map to learn where your strengths are and how you might shift your focus a bit.
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nicholas V  –  Are you an “invisible” facilitator online or an “in-your-face” one? Not wrong or right either way, but responding to your online class’ comments, reactions and being prepared to switch camps when you need to is important.
Nov 24, 2011

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nicholas V  –  I like… 😉
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Visual methods express things differently, can show the holes in what you’re trying to communicate.

Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Cat Manning's profile photo

Cat Manning  –  Idea/ using map online students

Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  What do we have in common? What are the “out-liers”?
What are THEY thinking/seeing/hearing/feeling/saying?
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  “Outliers” = something outside the norm/defined understanding
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Ask your students, “what are you thinking/feeling/hearing…?” – building more awareness of what’s going on with the learner and yourself
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  community of practice approach – who, what, how – build reflective practice in the learner
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  social artist – using visuals (not just about drawing)
sometimes it’s not best to use the “feeling” word, depending on the context
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

ian knox's profile photo

ian knox  –  network approach to reframing failure great concept
Nov 24, 2011

Nicholas V's profile photo

Nov 24, 2011

ian knox's profile photo

ian knox  –  Thanks I was just wondering how to spell it!
Nov 24, 2011

Gabrielle Harrison's profile photo

Gabrielle Harrison  –  excellent example of how to transform a face to face activity into an effective online tool. I want more chocolate though.
Nov 24, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  human spectogram
thanks, everyone
Nov 24, 2011  –  Edit

Jill Koppel's profile photo

Jill Koppel  –  Those choccies were good… thanks for all the ideas, Nancy.
Nov 24, 2011

michael chalk's profile photo

michael chalk  –  Applause Nancy, thanks! Will definitely use that spectrogram in a web conference.
Nov 24, 2011

Luis Suarez's profile photo

Luis Suarez  –  Whoaahhh! Fantastic exercise, +Nancy White ! Catching up with it after it’s all over now, for sure, but having a blast seeing the flow of how it went, even virtually! I have been wondering about this and how G+ provides perhaps a much better user experience w.r.t. engagement in this type of exercises where folks can convene in almost real-time virtually, just as if they were F2F. What was the experience like, Nancy, to conduct it? Can you share a line or two? Would love to know more… And thanks for starting the thread over here! 🙂
Nov 25, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  Luis, it figures you would notice this. I ran a 50 minute workshop yesterday at the ConVerge11 conf (#converge11 for interesting tweetflowage) and after probably leaving people dazed and confused with my keynote the day before, I knew I wanted to be both concrete, but to hold space for being, for being the change, for recognizing that our interactions via technology still hold their humanity. And to be USEFUL to the group.

I also knew I wanted to use visual methods, so I settled on the empathy map, picking up on comments on day one about how we talk about designing FOR students, but recognizing we need to design for ourselves, for other teachers, admin, etc. So I thought the mapping and comparing between maps might be interesting.

THEN when I rocked up to the room, I just had this idea to tap my network (even though the time zone was not hot for European frends and all US friends were offline with Thanksgiving. I was hoping some Canadian’s would find it and sure enough, +Rob Cottingham did.. THANKS Rob. I plugged your cartoons. Google+ seemed likely. I quickly could not facilitate and type, so Evan volunteered to scribe. Obviously we did not capture everything, but I could probably go back and create a narrative from the notes when I have a bit of time. But now it is day off in OZ and I am going to enjoy the beauty of Bells Beach and the pleasure of visiting with “imaginary” friends, now well met F2F.

Expand this comment »

Nov 25, 2011  –  Edit

Luis Suarez's profile photo

Luis Suarez  –  +Nancy White WOW!! Absolutely fantastic, Nancy! Thanks much for taking the time to detail so nicely what the event was like and how folks were participating and what they got out of it. Fascinating to use the empathy map for such exercise to demonstrate how it is all about a dual lane highway, going both ways! Really sorry the timing was not right with me, I would have wanted to chime in as well. Sounded like lots of good fun! 🙂

Have a wonderful weekend and safe travels back home! Speak soon! 🙂

Nov 25, 2011

Pauline Wilson's profile photo

Pauline Wilson  –  Hi Nancy, I thoroughly enjoyed your presentations at ConVerge. Unfortunately my iPhone was playing up and I couldn’t contribute to this Google+ stream at the time. This was disappointing because I thought it was such a great idea to use this tool. I think Google+ has huge potential in education. Also really enjoyed Ian Knox’s presentation on using Google+ for communicating in a Social Media course. Thanks for “adding me back”! I look forward to following you on Google+
Nov 25, 2011

Junita Lyon's profile photo

Junita Lyon  –  Hi Nancy hope the weather picks up for your visit to prom, you will find Gippsland also beautiful in the rain..Thankyou for your pearls of wisdom.. Great to meet you..Cheers
Nov 25, 2011

Dave Gray's profile photo

Dave Gray  –  Hi Nancy, cool to see you doing innovative work with empathy mapping!

Nov 25, 2011

Manjit Bhamral's profile photo

Manjit Bhamral  –  Hi Nancy
All your presentations were great- ver inspiring! Thanks for adding me back on Google+

Nov 25, 2011

Jayne Cravens's profile photo

Jayne Cravens  –  I found audiences in Melbourne and all over Eastern Australia very receptive to using the Internet to engage & support volunteers – Western Australia, not so much (still a lot of apprehension). On another note – the Pho in Melbourne is to die for.

Nov 28, 2011

Nancy White's profile photo

Nancy White  –  I had Pho last night in Melbourne! Natch! And I have to say, the networks of change and interesting people in Melb are WONDERFUL. #KMLF #CalmintheCity#improv etc..

Nov 28, 2011  –  Edit

Alfred Penny's profile photo

Alfred Penny  –  Will be following closely. You have some very interesting things to say. Glad to see here on Google+ as we become new friends.
Dec 3, 2011
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conVerge11 Keynote, Workshop and Reflections

I’ve been home just over a week after three great weeks in Australia, which started off with a keynote and workshop at ConVerge11 in Melbourne. (You can access all the session notes here.) The keynote was at 4pm on the first, packed day and I was asked to help encourage people to come to the cocktail reception afterwards. So I took my charge as “drive them to drink!”

Keynote

My goal was to provoke some thought about how we step beyond this idea of “creating communities for learning online” and instead think about connecting for learning — across cohorts, with the outside world, with our sponsoring institutions and with ourselves. After all, we can’t simply keep joining more groups. That does not scale. When we do utilize community approaches, we also need to think about how we make them the best they can be.  So I wove in the idea of the social artist (borrowing from Wenger and Houston). I confess, I dumped a LOT on people in an hour. If they didn’t need a drink when we started, I’m sure they did when I finished!

Below are my annotated slides because, as usual, my slides make no sense on their own. First is the Slideshare deck, and below is the PDF handout which is actually easier for reading the annotations.

Workshop: Advanced Online Facilitation Practices
Friday afternoon we had a great group for the workshop. Since I dumped a million ideas on everyone the day before, my approach to the workshop was full on participatory. At the last minute I decided to run an online experiment with Google+ at the same time to both capture what we did and to bring in any outside voices from my network who happened to be awake. (Not many… it was Thanksgiving weekend in the US.) 55 comments later… Do read the comments. There is a lot of insight that people contributed and a big thanks to Evan for scribing! (most of the comments under my name are Evan capturing conversation from the room.)
I started by asking people to write their teaching and learning strengths via key words on paper, then share and talk about them with others around them — especially to move away from the people they know. Sort of unmasking the superpowers in the room.
We then went with Dave Gray’s Empathy Mapping exercise to help surface different perspectives. That generated some fantastic insights about our own teaching approaches and what we know or assume about our learners. Somehow someone asked about how to get people in a comfortable place to talk about what they think and I mentioned the Human Spectrogram. Instead of telling, we DID it!  By the time we did both of these activities the 50 minutes had disappeared, we were running five minutes late and everyone was coming in for the closing session. Poof! And ConVerge11 was history.
I also have a Tweetdoc of the Tweets I was able to capture Nancy-White-at-Converge11
All in all, it was a great re-entry into my network of teachers and learners in Australia, a well run conference and …as always, when I present, I present from my own edge to deepen my own learning.

Trolling for keynote inspiration #1

Every time I prepare for a keynote presentation (Title: LEFT AND RIGHT, UP AND DOWN: CONNECTING GROUPS AND NETWORKS) I sit with three big buckets to work on:

  1. What IS the focus (as I have a busy, full brain that can go down ratholes in a nanosecond)
  2. What is the balance of performance, sharing and engagement?
  3. Who is inspiring me right now.

I wanted to share some of my answers as a way of thinking and prepping for my keynote next Thursday in Melbourne at ConVerge, and a subsequent massive set of shorter workshops on facilitating online learning in the following weeks. Thinking out loud with you really helps me. Did you know that? Thank you.

In this first post I’m going to start with the inspiration, because that’s where I feel the need this morning. I seriously don’t want to start in old PPT. I have tons of glorious images. I can DRAW glorious images. So what. Who cares. I want to MOVE people when I’m in Australia and I want to be OF VALUE. So there! Let’s talk inspiration…

Jim Groom – Occupy Education

I love Jim and he drives me crazy. In a good way. Clearly he leads with passion. He follows with conviction and he IS a performer. He blends the three buckets into a nice stew. He also alienates me a itty bit, which is good. I can’t step away. The edginess is something I often lack — authentic edginess. Not performance edginess.

I have seriously considered doing this:

Any other inspiring clips to share with me? As I scanned my YouTube favorites, clearly I have not been keeping track of great keynote presentations. I mean, look, THIS inspires me!