Efficient Sharing in a Learning Community

As most Radical readers know, I'm pretty fascinated by books that explore group dynamics and collective intelligence.  I guess when you're an active member of a sixth grade professional learning team that is working together to improve the instruction in their language arts and social studies classes, knowing as much as you can about the dynamics of human interactions is just plain valuable!

And if you haven't picked up on it yet, I'm also a bit of a digital junkie.  I've spent the better part of the past few years exploring how digital tools can be used to make good teaching easier, to engage students and to make my own work more meaningful and efficient.  I guess that all started when I joined TLN---which some members describe as a "digital teacher workroom on steroids!"

So you'll understand why Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody---which focuses on the complex changes that digital tools have had on the work of groups has left me completely jazzed!  Finally, someone is describing in approachable terms the changes that I'm experiencing first-hand as I introduce the teachers of my team to online applications that can change the way we work together.

Early in Everybody, Clay explains that group activities often scaffold upon one another, starting simply and becoming more complex over time.  In his thinking, the three levels of group interactions are sharing, cooperation and collective action.  Each of these levels, Shirky argues, can be supported by digital tools. 

For anyone that has ever worked with new learning teams, Shirky's levels feel right, don't they?  Rarely do teams jump into complicated tasks that require deep collaboration from day one.  Lacking shared experiences with one another---and the trust that those experiences generate---teams tend to focus on simple tasks that are focused on meeting the immediate demands of the classroom. 

Often, those early tasks involve the sharing of resources.  Teachers create digital copies of handouts or presentations that address elements of the required curriculum and pass them along to their peers.  They also identify websites that can be used in instruction or preparation.   Articles are gathered, assessments are written, and  videos are identified. 

While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences. 

What's more, resource sharing will play a permanent role for most learning teams---even as they move beyond the novice conversations described above.  Highly accomplished teachers and teams are constantly wrestling with and reviewing their practices----which by default means that highly accomplished teams and teachers will always be identifying and generating new materials for use with students. 

The challenge, then, lies in managing the flood of potential resources, right?  With limited time, how can teams sift through materials, select those that are of value, and communicate new discoveries with their peers? 

For my learning team, this has always been a difficult challenge.  Each of us is nothing short of incredibly motivated to improve----and as a result, we've always got new materials to share with one another.  Until recently, sharing those resources most frequently happened by sending an email to our team mailing list.   We'd insert links to new websites or attach documents that we thought our colleagues would find valuable. 

And while email was serving its purpose, there was one huge hitch:  I hate email!

I don't know about you, but I drown in digital messages.  If I don't check my email every three hours, I spend another three hours trying to dig through complaints from parents, emergency messages from Nigerian princesses, updates on the fire drill schedule, pictures of the new faculty baby and urgent changes to the supply ordering procedures.

So the resources that my team sent out on an almost daily basis were getting lost in the electronic shuffle.  As much as I wanted to check out every new website that someone had discovered, I wanted to curse the email that it came in!

My solution was a simple one that's going to take a bit of explaining.  Are you comfortable with the challenge of reading a bit about digital ideas that may seem intimidating at first blush?  If so, keep reading:

I turned my team on to two of my favorite tech tools:  Delicious and Pageflakes.  Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to keep online records of the resources that they are exploring.  In its simplest form, that's all Delicious needs to be. 

But Delicious also allows users to add tags to the sites that they find.  Tags are short titles that are added by users that define the category that they believe best describes a particular weblink.  Once tagged, the resource that you've labeled is grouped with every other resource that has been tagged with the same label---and is available to any other Delicious user poking through the "Delicious Library" by tag!

So if you found this blog post interesting, you might tag it "PLCs" because it describes the work of a learning team, "Tech" because it describes how to use digital tools, or "Tempered_Radical" because it is a piece that you found here. Better yet, you might tag it with all three phrases----making it easier to find for Delicious users interested in any of those three topics! 

(Not that I'm trying to promote my piece or anything?!)

Knowing that sharing websites was something that was super important to the members of our team---and that our email only system of sharing was ridiculously inefficient---I convinced everyone on to sign up for a free Delicious account and download the Delicious browser buttons to their computers.  By doing so, they could instantly begin bookmarking and tagging websites that were related to the topics we were studying in class. 

In order to make following one another's tags easy, though, we had to decide on a common "tagging language."  A tagging language is nothing more than a set group of categories that we all agreed to use when we were bookmarking websites for school. 

We sat down in a meeting and decided on the kinds of resources that we typically find and share with each other.  For language arts, that included reading, writing, problem solution, evaluation and poetry resources.  For social studies, that included Greece, Rome, World Wars, Middle Ages, Europe, South America and current event resources. 

Together, we created a set of common tags that we would add to each website we bookmarked in Delicious.  Our tagging language looks like this:

salem6la_reading
salem6la_writing
salem6la_ps
salem6la_eval
salem6la_poetry

salem6ss_rome
salem6ss_greece
salem6ss_ce

(Is this starting to make sense to you?!)

Now I know what you're thinking:  This all seems a bit confusing, right? 

It really isn't!  Bookmarking a site in Delicious is no different than adding it to your favorites in any web browser.  The only difference for our team is that we add a specific tag to each site we bookmark.  By doing so, Delicious automatically sorts our sites for us and allows us to easily see any other resource that shares the same tag.

The other neat thing about Delicious is that it provides an RSS feed for every tag.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication---and its a bunch of digital gobbledygook for a really easy way to automatically see updates to websites or lists that are constantly changing.  (Check out this neat tutorial that explains RSS in Plain English.)  Tools like Pageflakes allows users to follow changes to websites with RSS feeds. 

To take advantage of the ability to follow changes to our Delicious groups automatically, I created a Pageflakes Pagecast that included lists of all of the new resources posted in Delicious by our teachers.  You can check out the Language Arts Pagecast here and you can check out the Social Studies Pagecast here.

What you'll see is exactly what the teachers of our team see:  A collection of boxes that contain weblinks to each of the topics that we study in our classes.  If you hover over one of the links, you'll also see a short description of the resource.  So now, whenever we want to see what resources the other members of our learning team has been exploring, we come to these two Pagecasts. 

The best part:  RSS feed readers like Pageflakes update themselves automatically!  As long as members of our team remember to use the right tag language when bookmarking something in Delicious, Pageflakes will find those new resources and add them to the right category in our Pagecasts. 

That's it.  Nothing more.  Visit one Pageflakes link and see everything that has been found by every other member of our learning team.  No writing emails.  No reading emails.  No jotting notes or sharing rambling conversations on the way to the restroom!

Oh yeah----and Delicious and Pageflakes are completely free services.

It's hard to beat free, ain't it?

For our team, this system has been nothing short of remarkable.  In Shirky's terms, we've decreased the "cost" of each of our group's transactions.  No longer do we resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. 

Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning (Our meeting to decide on shared tags and install Delicious took 40 minutes, then I spent 60 minutes pointing Pageflakes to each of the groups of resources we were growing in Delicious), we've made sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.

If you're interested, here's a handout that I used to introduce the process of tagging to my team:

Download Salem_Sixth_Grade_Delicious_Tags.pdf

(Image credit:  MG_8663 by Nicolas Raymond, licensed Creative Commons: Attribution)

    

Comments

[Ben]

I think this is a great idea for sharing resources and you have done a nice job explaining it. However, (and I hate to be pessimistic) it seems that we struggle to get some teachers involved in just digital communication let alone using social bookmarking tools and RSS feeds. What tips would you have for those of us who would like to utilize something like this but struggle with a basic-digital-knowledge community?

[matt]

Hi,

Great to hear about getting more involved with RSS feeds and start pages. Another site to consider is Odysen at http://www.odysen.com. Similar but with free-formatting widgets instead of fixed-column.

Regarding your last point of needing more of an instructional tool to help people get started, there is a blog available at http://odysen.blogspot.com/ that both goes into detail of many of features & how to use them but also is loaded with page examples.

Hope this helps!