Sharing: The Moral Imperative

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Duration: 25 minutes and 55 seconds

Country: Canada

Language: English

License: CC - Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike

Genre: Video Podcast

Producer: Dean Shareski

Director: Dean Shareski

Views: 6,210 (4,934 embedded)

Posted by: k12online on Oct 3, 2010

Dean Shareski's K12online pre-conference keynote. This keynote looks at the new obligation of sharing for educators. With stories from the a variety of sources, the fact that we now have the ability to teach and share beyond our classrooms is moving from "nice to do" to "necessary to do". See if you agree. Twitter ID: @shareski

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Sharing: The Moral Imperative
By Dean Shareski for the 2010 K12 Online Conference
I'm a giant derivative
♫
Think of that opening as credits or
A bibliography of what I know.
Obviously, I can´t possibly show you
every place and person that I learn from
but i hope you get a sense of the
tremendous learning network I participate in.
I owe those people so much.
Collectively they have been a huge
part of my learning journey for the past
several years. Because everyone of them
embraces a culture of sharing, I benefit.
I won´t pretend that I'm going to share
something new and original. That's really hard.
As I scan the mountains of data
that I've created over the past 6 years
of posting regularly online in all types of forms
I'm not sure there's anything there that's
completely original and mine.
I've been blessed to work as part of a
larger community of learners, teachers,
explorers and innovators who, in the
spirit of sharing have thrown their ideas
onto a giant whiteboard for others
to use, critique and mash up.
In the end, it's difficult to claim
much ownership. I'm okay with that.
We all seek recognition for our contributions
but the moment we focus on protecting our
work, we are in some ways the antithesis
of a teacher. We, as David Wiley says,
"invoke our inner two year old" and undermine
the entire premise upon which education
is built: that is sharing.
♫
Sharing, and sharing online specifically, is not
in addition to the work of being an educator.
It is the work. Ewan Mcintosh
The first time I read this quote by Ewan
I did agree with, but wondered if it might
be a bit overstated. I mean
"it is the work" seems a bit strong.
You mean our work is to share
things online?
I'm been thinking about that one for a while
♫
After listening to Wiley speak,
I now agree.
David talks about the obligations
of institutions to teach not only the students
in the buildings, but beyond.
And if indeed we believe that teaching
is sharing, then if there is no sharing,
there is no education.
Our factory model of education
meant that we had to confine learning
to a space and a specific audience.
As we know, this had its efficiencies
and benefits for years. We're all products
of this very closed, targeted environment.
We didn't think of it as closed at the time
because we didn´t know anything else.
We're in the very early stages
of a sharing revolution.
And that sharing includes everything
from your immediate presence, your location,
your photos, your thoughts, your videos,
your reading lists and more.
For some it's too much,
and for others, they can't get enough.
In this early stage we've witnessed
some important success that have proven
the test of time.
Social bookmarking, for example
has been around for over a decade
I remember using a service called
ikeepbookmarks back in the early 2000's
which is still around in fact.
Social bookmarking as an educational
sharing tool might be the most prevalent
and easiest entry into the sharing culture.
It's a pretty easy sell.
You get to peek into the virtual
bookshelves of anyone willing to share
and use whatever you wish.
It´s a great system.
very unobtrusive and anonymus.
You´re not required to invest or share
anymore than you have to.
It´s educational voyeurism that
everyone feels comfortable with.
But the moment you begin to ask
about the people behind the shared resources
and favorites, you move away from safe
and into some vulnerability.
All kinds of questions and concerns
emerge as you venture into this world
of sharing.
Is it safe?
Why would I do this?
Is it worth my time?
How do I make it valuable and meaningful?
Those are all important questions
I want to focus on something else
I want to talk a little bit about
Is this an obligation?
Does my institution see value in this?
And how will it help my students?
♫
Before the internet, we never really consider
an obligation to share beyond our buildings.
I mean, how could we even do that?
Maybe you got invited to present at
a staff meeting or conference, maybe
your old college friend asked to use some
resource you created, but these were rare.
It was often the case that the teacher next door
had no idea what you did in your classroom
let alone someone from another school.
Sharing was hard, sharing was a luxury,
sharing was only for the students in your room.
My experience is that most teachers
love to share.
Again, if sharing is education
that makes sense that educators
love to share.
While there are exceptions, generally
teachers are wonderful sharers.
The sharing part is not the hard sell,
it's the who and the where and the how
do I share that not enough have understood.
Remember the days when resources were scarce?
I've been teaching now for over 20 years
and had a single shelf of material when i began.
Outside of a few textbooks for certain subjects,
I had to scrounge to find resources for the
eight or so curriculum that i was responsible for.
I spent hours trying to develop learning activities
to meet outcomes and had little energy left
to spend on reflection and whether or not
it was even effective.
Today our problems are more about vetting
and filtering information and ideas to find
the stuff that's most relevant and useful
for our students.
Who better to vet and filter information
about education that educators?
What if you could share with the very best
educators in the world.
Today you can.
♫
Dan Meyer is a mathematics teacher from California.
He's been teaching less than 10 years,
but 4 years ago decided a blog might be
an interesting thing to begin. He says:
blogging was the cheapest, most risk-free investment
I could have made of my personal time into
my job. You start by writing things down
that are interesting to you. practices you
don´t want to forget. And then you start trying new
things just so you can blog about them later; picking
them apart, and dialogging over them with strangers.
Periods of stagnancy in your blogging start to correspond
to periods of stagnancy in your teaching.
You start to muse on your job when you're stuck in traffic,
in line for groceries, that sort of thing.
That transformation has been nothing but good for me
and it all began on a free Blogspot blog.
Dan's done a lot more than simple muse
about his job. He's created some
outstanding math resources that he's
shared for free. These resources could easily
be packaged and published by large
companies and sold to educators for
significant dollars. One such resources
was a video series called graphing stories.
Dan Meyer. Santa Cruz, California
...resources in my third year of teaching
I was really unhappy with the, a particular
transition between math topics,
the transition to a graphing, from single
variables, and i got this idea and i spent
I recall, about 18 hours on a weekend.
so, total of 40 hours, 18 of those
were spent either, filming this
the raw materials for this lesson or
editing them on my computer or
putting them into a format that I can use in the classroom,
this is a long lesson and i mentioned them on a blog
that I've done this and a lot of people said
look this is a recipe for burn out, to spend
that much time on web lesson.
Instinctively I told myself
well, look, i can reuse this
every year here after if it's good.
And it was very effective for my goals
and then to give a credit to their concerns
I put it online the day after in a
format that could be downloadable by anybody anywhere
I put it a dvd disc image so you could download
this image and create a physical dvd that i use in class
that has the generic handouts on it, some instructions for using it
yeah, I just put it up there, just like that
I figured that the more you use it,
the more, the less, cost those 18 hours worth to me.
So I was really interested in a lot of people
getting whatever use out of it they could, so
If someone, I offered people I'd mail them the dvd,
the first 30 people who posted about it on their blog
So i got some traffic on my way
and eventually at the end of two weeks
i checked my stats and 6,000 people had downloaded the disc image
in those two weeks, so in an instant my 18 hour time cost
felt like nothing to me, it was
much more worthwhile.
I asked Dan if he had anyone who could speak to
using his resources in his classroom
I found an educator in Scotland, his name is Chris Smith
Here is what he has to say about using Dan's stories.
Chris Smith, Scotland
....
...
....
my department just to share ideas
... for lessons.
.... useful websites
that you may want to look at
..... in the classrooms
....
.....
.......
...blog
just .... really fresh and....
ideas and ....
.......
I was able to
share that in my ....
...for myself....
......
something that should be
... should be.... should be....
active instead of doing that ....
.......
......
.... this is an opportunity for them to....
...real life scenarios...
attention....
a lot more sense to....
something out of the
.......
I think the .... students....
.........
................
Every single day you are the beneficiary of sharing.
Whether it's a published textbook,
a district created resource,
a book you read or as often is the case today,
something you found online.
Does your district have any idea
how much you save them by using these freely
available resources and ideas?
Your students lives and education are so much
richer by having access to people like Dan
and countless others because they've embraced
a culture of sharing.
Are we willing to share even a little bit of
what we have and know?
We're not all having to share in the same fashion
of Dan Meyer, and as he said, the benefits of
one lucid comment or idea can be golden to someone.
Your experience, your insights are worth sharing.
It costs you nothing but your time
and the Return On Investment can be exponential.
Recently, George Couros, a principal at an
elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta, shared a project
he had done at his school called the Identity Fair.
And unlike Dan, who spent countless hours developing
a very polished resource. George, simply as
part of his day and excitement over what was
happening in his school shared bits of a very
simple idea that had some pretty significant outcomes.
George Couros, Story Plain, Alberta.
One of the things that was happening
....just got this idea that
as we had this event called identity fair, identity...
day, whatever you want to call it.
the kids brought this .... of display...
the science fair concept, but it was about themselves
what they are passionate about.
I just went around with my blackberry
and took pictures of the topics and so
I put the tag identity fair
so i could actually go back and
look at the information later so i just made it
easier for myself and then .. people wanted to
look then i had these resource that I was
creating for the... We had a girl that
has Tourette Syndrome and that was her identity fair
display, where she had, she talked about
Tourette Syndrome so that she could explain
...understand part of who she was
and it was like a, it's even talking about it,
anytime I talk about it, I get a teary eye immediately
because it was such a moving day
it was something she was so passionate about
and then, I wrote about her first and a lot of
people were writing me comments
because I shared that with her mother
so, she actually wrote back on my blog, so
she used that as a forum, and then, that was
my blog post was used by the national like the Canadian Tourette Syndrome
Society or something like that, so they used that
as something that they picture on their facebook page
and so they add maybe this connection with this national society
and then I wrote about the process of that day, kind of what we did
so we got a lot of comments about it
so they actually set that up in Texas
so we are in Story Plane, Alberta
which is like a small town just outside of Edmonton
And she is somewhere in Texas
with her school, and she decided that
that was going to be what their school did
as an opening activity and before we walked to the school she had
sent me an email but first she sent me a message saying we just did
day q, it was amazing, so i took that email and
i posted it and blog about it and wrote about it
and how it is in my opinion to
as we do share this good practices because
i've been at six schools and
or five or six schools, and no matter what
I always love the kids
And i find out, if i go to ten more schols
I'll always love the kids
and if we are really advocates for education
we want to make sure we are sharing
our best practices with other people
and open to them.... and so
when she did that, she put ....wasn't exactly
..... it was amazing that
it was inspired by us, and then i showed her
... this is something that we did.
....got to see and
my idea.. now was...
it wasnt about sharing something amazing
it was sharing something amazing that
i was inspired and the staff has done
our kids were also part of, it was just