Community Engagement

Janie McOmish from Adult Learning Australia participated in the recent presentation in Canberra by Alan Levine. The following words are from Janie as she reflected on this opportunity to listen and learn from Alan.

Presentations in eight Australian cities in eleven days, that’s the programme ALAN LEVINE undertook on his Australian Flexible Learning Framework in October.

The Vice-President of NMC Community has spent years promoting creative uses of technology in learning for the Maricopa Community Colleges and is currently involved in using a campus on Second Life (a 3D online virtual world) to explore educational gaming and the potential of virtual world environments.

Alan presented six engaging discourses during his tour.

In Canberra, he engaged his audience on the topic “Being There”. Building on the themes emerging on the Peter Sellers film of the same name, he explored the notion that we need to face the future of social networking in an open ‘wide eyed’ manner. He stressed that we need to ‘be there’ not just look in and observe.

People, he said, should not worry about being an expert, rather we should ‘stand up’, trust and connect.

Using the example of the rapid growth of such social networking groups as Facebook (which he pointed out had grown by 80% in the month of June 2007 in Australia), he recounted that we should not think about how we could best use such emerging networks but that once we were engaged, we would “find a use”.

The figures he presented were astounding. Would you believe that 120 blogs are created each day, in May 2007, 70 million blogs were tracked or that 17 posts are created each second?

The audience were given an extensive look at Twitter (another social network ) and were amazed at how many responses Alan received during the time he spent talking to us.

A number of other premises surfaced:

• you can’t blame the technology for inappropriate content, only the people controlling it
• always remember that a sense of play is important – it keeps you interested and makes engagement easier
• people don’t have to ‘master’ everything – it’s fine to make mistakes – it’s all part of the learning experience and
• just like Hansel and Gretel, leave yourself a trail – it makes it easier for you and others to return.

So, as Alan emphasised, dive into it; you’re a part of it, so make the most of it!

Members of the Project Team for the Community Engagement Project recently attended a day which featured Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, as keynote speaker and a Panel Discussion and Workshop facilitated by Mark Pesce. The project team members, Mary Hannan and Janie McOmish, attended the day hosted by education.au hoping to increase their knowledge and understanding of the uses and benefits of wikis.

The Community Engagement Project wiki, established in 2006, is seen by the team as a valuable, user-friendly tool whose extended use will enable information to be disseminated and explored by the many and varied community participants in even more effective and efficient ways.

However, as happened with Wikipedia, the team believes they need to develop people’s belief and trust in this new medium. In the six years since it has been launched, Wikipedia has become the thirteenth most visited website in the world but its existence has raised questions as to how readers decipher fact from fiction when multiple users have the capacity to both create and edit content. Jimmy Wales believes everyone should be given free access to information. Intrinsically, this belief brings problems:

• How can one ensure that this information is neither biased nor incorrect?
• How can one ensure that all changes will be comprehensively tracked?
• How can users store earlier versions or return to information or ideas that have been previously entered?

Therefore, Wales and his team set about developing guidelines that would allow these potential difficulties to be overcome. In doing so they faced the same problem that face today’s educators:

• What are the implications for education in using an online culture?
• What opportunities exist to best develop and utilise collaborative learning in our global community?
• Who holds knowledge in the world today?
• What barriers may stop us sharing knowledge?

The protocols Wikipedia developed have led to the online encyclopedia becoming one of the most recognised wikis in the world; one which utilises “a culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather intellectual exchange.” As Wales states, “communities are becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them.” He added that educators must continue to build on these concepts and let communities of learners manage themselves rather than educators taking on the role of an umpire.

These words reflect the environment that the project team is dealing with. Community engagement programs appear to be fertile ground for developments such as wikis but, just as Wales has had to encourage participants to feel “safe” when they contribute to the on-line encyclopedia, so community leaders need to feel safe when they contribute their content. Just as Elites revel in the concept that “knowledge is power”, participants need to be assured that their knowledge and integrity will be protected and that other special interest groups will not be able to shape existent knowledge to suit their own ends.

With all fledgling development, people need to pool information and one of the strategies Wales suggested to instil confidence in wary stakeholders was to encourage them to examine the progress and protocols that have been developed at Wikipedia.

It would seem that this, together with the team’s continual fostering of the use of the online environment, the Community Engagement Project wiki will become a valuable tool that will permit intelligence to be more widely distributed.

Another session from the eDayz experience - very useful for people working with young people.Our favourite agent of chaos and creativity, Marie Jasinski, this year worked with the staff at TafeSA, Regency Campus, to find out what was going wrong in their attempts to teach the “next generation”. Research had come out of the USA, but they wanted to verify some of the results themselves.

Who is Gen Y?

• Born/grew up in late 70’s - mid-90’s
• had ‘programmed activities’ from an early age, grew up in relative affluence - choices
• media-saturated, visually stimulating, connected, always known digital technology
• always lived with accelerating change
• personal relations with adults, involved in family decisions
• constantly rewarded, “seen and heard”
• “self-esteem on steroids” (P Sheahan).

Results of their research

These people:

• expect to be treated with respect and as a peer in all situations, and by all people, no matter what the relationship (79%).
• Say NO to lectures and boring presentations, say YES to collaboration and working with peers.
• Love variety, and expect to have choices; they expect that their opinions will matter, that the teacher will support them always, no matter what. They prefer to see and discuss, rather than read.
• Like technology, problems to solve, support of others, challenging levels of thinking, opportunities to be innovative and creative when learning, as well as levels of risk.

So, what happens? The teachers give them everything.

They do however like clearly defined tasks, and ongoing, immediate feedback.

An interesting feature of this project was the way it was conducted. The institute gave all staff Monday morning off .. to sit around and talk. No classes Monday morning, and an optional “Conversation Cafe”, so that teachers could brainstorm problems and solutions every week for a whole year. Reportedly a huge success. Teachers are not going to abandon lectures, but discover ways to make them more interactive.

More info about Gen Y, in Research from the Dusseldorp Forum, here.