No Substitute for Experience

​Module 7, Collaborative Communities

​I guess just about all things in life are more challenging than you think they will be until you fully experience them and learn their secrets. True professionalism cannot be faked because it is based on experience - the constant leveler! No substitute for experience. It's an aspect of being on the physical plane that absolutely insists that we fully descend into 3-D if we're really going to learn anything here. Maybe with experience we can fake it till we make it, but with life we won't learn a durned thing unless we immerse ourselves in it and experience it for real - fully.

And this is again why we need a full measure of humility. If we're to learn anything and extract life's value from it, we must first acknowledge that we don't already know how to do it!

So I'm now a beginning teacher. I've decided to call where I'm at in the teaching profession a beginner - which is true. I have taught informally with a bit of formality thrown in. I have in some ways a lot of experience in teaching because there are so many ways to teach that aren't called teaching yet nevertheless are - like parenting. Being an auntie. Advising. Modeling friendship.

So this week I actually got to teach! Formally - in front of my teachers and fellow students - so now I really am a beginning teacher. I was the last temporary facilitator of our small group discussion forum and this last week we had to do something new: hold a synchronous chat. Which means: talk together in real time from locations around the world! In this case it was typing-talking together at the same time. Now this may seem an obviously simple thing to the uninitiated to eLearning; why not simply pick up the phone? Make a conference call? Or even Skype? Why not?

Good question!

Here's the reason why: We're not just learning how to hold an online meeting. We're learning how to do our level best to ensure the technology works when we do so! We're learning how to make sure the event is archived, which means the software keeps a record of what we typed. We're learning how to schedule 3 out of the 5 people in our group who live across the oceans from U.S. We're having this real-life-virtual experience to show us what can go wrong! And, hopefully, how to fix it if it does. And if not, what to do from there. And in the meantime, actually have an educational conversation that enlightens us and furthers our understanding of how to collaborate in the classroom.

And I in the meantime learned so much because of this opportunity to facilitate this synchronous chat, or "synch chat," as I have been calling it. Facilitating, just like everything else, is not what it seems when you look under the surface and actually experience it. You have to prepare your students for what's coming but not overload them with details. You have to try out the tech beforehand to make sure your version of it, at least, is going to work when the time comes. You have to learn new software and give just enough information that your students can absorb it, too, but more easily than you did. Because they have you.

And scheduling! Did you ever try to schedule a trip to the movies with 5 different people? Never think it is a simple thing! Or maybe it is and I have yet to experience that. Actually, I did experience it; it just took time. There's an online free scheduling program called Doodle.com that if you program it correctly - which just means inputting email addresses correctly and making sure the time zone differential is accounted for - it will show a small calendar with the times you have available in an email to your other group members. Then they get to check off what times they're available that you are, too. And then it presents back to you one schedule showing everyone else's availability. And I had to have the faith in my teacher that the program really would translate the time zones correctly so everyone would have that information already calculated on their schedule - and it worked! When I checked off a box that asked them to do so. Doodle.com was a thing of beauty because it was simple, it made sense, and it worked. It just took time for all the emails to go back and forth and the program to float across the oceans so we could all agree. And then when one person couldn't make it we asked nicely and then they could so we all met at 9:00 on Thursday morning - almost all of us, because for one of us the technology wouldn't work despite 6 hours of trying.

I had a beautiful experience actually facilitating the meeting, because compared to setting it up, facilitating was easy! Well, kind of, but I knew my subject matter well enough and I had pre-planned the questions so was actually prepared and ready. My experience validated the 70/30 rule that Kay Lehmann (my teacher in Collaborative Classrooms) and her writing partner Lisa Chamberlin came up with their in the online teaching book they wrote in 2009. The premise of the 70/30 rule is that it'll take 70% of your teaching time to prepare for your online class and get through its first week, and then only 30 percent to actually continue the class to its end. That's about the breakdown of the work it took me to facilitate.

Facilitating was really fun because I got to ask and answer a question I had really wanted to deal with in our class: What does critical thinking mean to you? My answer: thinking for yourself. Everyone else had cool answers, too.

We could have filled out our ending discussion (not the synchronous one, just our regular one) a little bit more but I have a feeling everyone was burnt out. I gotta find out more about that.

And I had flurries in August. That's the humble part. I kept forgetting things to communicate to my class members so I'd send off another email to include that last important bit of information, but there were too many details, I know. Too confusing. At another point I took pictures of a process but the email program would only send one pic at a time so I had to send it as four or five emails. As facilitator it's important - I now know from experience - to present the necessary information to your group members that they need to know in a timely and calm manner that prepares them without overwhelming them!

So I'm learning. Again! One of my favorite things to do.