Gerald W. Aungst

Yes­ter­day, I wrote about two of my big pic­ture take­aways from the first day of Educon. Day 2 indeed con­tin­ued that pat­tern. I still heard ref­er­ences to stu­dent voice and stu­dent pas­sions in every ses­sion. And my assump­tions con­tin­ued to be chal­lenged, and are con­tin­u­ing to be chal­lenged today as the “Educon hang­over” sets in and the extra thoughts that didn’t fit into the week­end are leak­ing out into the Twittersphere.

There were a cou­ple of other big themes that sur­rounded every­thing at Educon this year. They aren’t any­thing new, but I believe that because they keep com­ing up and aren’t going away, they might qual­ify as endur­ing under­stand­ings about learning.

Connect

Ear­lier this evening, Dean Shareski tweeted:

I believe that con­nec­tion is a mul­ti­plier. When we learn some­thing alone, it has power. But when two peo­ple learn and share together, we both get twice as much out of it. There’s a (for­give the word) syn­ergy in the learn­ing process when we are con­nected with other learners.

Then when we share the learn­ing with oth­ers and they share it, it gets mul­ti­plied expo­nen­tially. There’s some truth to the crit­i­cism that the edublog com­mu­nity (and many of those who attend Educon) can become an echo cham­ber of the same ideas cir­cu­lat­ing round and round, over and over. But con­sider that every day, new faces join this com­mu­nity. They have some catch­ing up to do, and when we “rehash” an old idea in get­ting them up to speed, we can also refine and rework it.

Every per­son who chews on an idea and then passes it along to the next per­son adds a layer of value. Chris Lehmann con­stantly reminds those who praise him for what he has done at SLA that he “stands on the shoul­ders of giants.” We also stand on each oth­ers’ shoulders.

It can be intim­i­dat­ing to enter a con­nected com­mu­nity. It’s easy to bounce around, watch­ing every­one else who’s already con­nected and think that there’s no room left. I under­stand that a few peo­ple expe­ri­enced this at Educon and left feel­ing iso­lated. I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing whose respon­si­bil­ity it is to cor­rect this. I do believe this com­mu­nity is a wel­com­ing one: in the cou­ple of years that I’ve been actively Tweet­ing and blog­ging, I’ve found dozens if not hun­dreds of peo­ple will­ing to hear my ideas and engage in the con­ver­sa­tion with me. Those who jump in and start con­tribut­ing and look­ing for ways to con­nect won’t be dis­ap­pointed. (As if to rein­force this exact idea, as I was writ­ing this post, I saw a link to this doc­u­ment from Chris Lehmann’s ses­sion at Educon. Check out the high­lighted sen­tence that one of the par­tic­i­pants added.…)

But I think we also need to go out of our way to invite new voices into the con­ver­sa­tion. We need to model our own learn­ing com­mu­nity after the ones we want to see in our class­rooms and schools. If any stu­dent feels alien­ated, we’ve not done our jobs as edu­ca­tors. Like­wise, if a fel­low teacher-​​learner feels we’ve cre­ated bar­ri­ers to enter­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, what does that say about what we really value in a learn­ing community?

Act

The last theme is that we need to take action. This also hap­pens to be the even­tual cure for the echo cham­ber. This also hap­pens to be the hard part. In sev­eral ses­sions, we were really good at explain­ing our rea­son­ing, at expound­ing on the prin­ci­ples, at build­ing a case and build­ing a the­ory. When the leader asked, “So what do we do with it? How do we put it into prac­tice? How do we make this hap­pen?” There was gen­er­ally silence.

I’ll be bla­tantly hon­est: I’m not sure I know the answers to those ques­tions either. But I do know that this year—instead of hav­ing an awe­some week­end of con­nect­ing with other edu­ca­tors and learn­ing from them and reflect­ing on the process in a blog and then for­get­ting about it until next January—I’m going to fol­low Lisa Thumann’s lead and cre­ate an action plan.

At the same time, I’m reminded that talk­ing or writ­ing about some­thing is tak­ing an action. Words are pow­er­ful, and words can change the world. For me, words are often the best way for me to have an impact on some­one else, so blog­ging and talk­ing about these ideas is my first step at tak­ing action. But I don’t think we can stop there.

I wres­tled a great deal this week­end with whether change needs to hap­pen through evo­lu­tion or rev­o­lu­tion. This isn’t a new dilemma, but I thought about it from the action angle this week. In my sphere of influ­ence, it often feels like all I can do is chip slowly away at bits of the cor­ners, and I won­der if that will be enough to ever make any kind of dif­fer­ence for kids. Then I real­ize that while I’m chip­ping, I can also keep talk­ing about the ideas, and per­haps I can help oth­ers decide to start chip­ping at their own cor­ners of the prob­lem. If enough peo­ple chip slowly, it won’t be slow any more.