Transcript for Sharing: The Moral Imperative

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