Author Archive for Michael

Agile learning - an alternative learning model

Published
by
Michael
on 11/9/2007
in agile, education, learning and programming
. 2 Comments

Since the 1990’s Agile software development has been evolving as an alternative method of project management for motivating and empowering teams of developers to develop and release great software for customers. But are “agile methodologies” applicable to learning and education? Could they help us learn? The more I learn about and try out agile software development, the more I reckon that the answer is “yes”.

Agile methods came about because most software development projects were being managed in a similar way that you would manage a 3-lane bridge construction project - with slow, bureaucratic and, at times, demeaning processes that assume the project manager can:

  • plan the whole sequence of steps from start to finish in advance, including determining the specific work that each team member will do,
  • assume that there will be very minimal changes in project requirements once implementation begins,
  • know each team member’s needs and abilities in advance and
  • direct the whole show from the top down.

During the 1990s people were realising that this traditional “waterfall model” was not necessarily the best model for delivering great software - and perhaps now we are also realising that it isn’t necessarily the best model for delivering great educational programs. If you’re building a 3-lane bridge your client cannot come to you and say, “uh, sorry, I think I now want a 4-lane bridge rather than a 3-lane bridge”, nor can you allow your workers to self-manage the tasks that need to get done. Everything needs to be set down in stone before the construction begins. But that’s not the case in software development - often clients don’t know exactly what they want until they start using the software that you’re creating. Similarly, often members in a software development team are much more productive if they self-organise to get things done (rather than being told what they have to do next). And I reckon that an educational course has more in common with a software development project than it does with building a bridge.

Of course, there’s been loads of iterative development methods that have been around for a while (prototyping and feedback loops as part of the development process), and any teacher worth their salt adapts their lessons and activities to the needs of learners. So why am I so excited about applying Agile development practises in education? For the first time there seems to be a well-documented successful alternative to the traditional approach that seems very applicable to many (but not all) educational contexts. I believe that agile learning can provide an alternative self-empowering-yet-co-dependent, flexible-yet-well-planned model for learning in a face-to-face social group environment.

Example 1: The daily stand-up meeting (or daily Scrum)

To give a taste of how agile principles might be applied in a self-paced-yet-social educational environment, let’s take a look at the daily stand-up meeting (or Scrum meeting). The daily stand-up meeting is a pattern that seems to be part of most agile methodologies - a short daily meeting focusing on:

  • What have I achieved (learned?) since yesterday?
  • What am I working on today?
  • What obstacles are in-front of me?

But it’s definitely not a status update for superiors (for project managers or teachers). The theme of the daily stand-up is self-organisation - helping members and stakeholders understand each others’ issues and accomplishments so that they can organise to help each other get things done. According to Jason Yip (a Sydney developer working for Thoughtworks) in his article It’s not just standing up: patterns of daily stand-up meetings:

This is not just because self-organisation leads to better productivity but also, and perhaps more so, because it leads to a more humane, respectful, and mature work environment.

The purpose of the daily standup is:

  • share commitment
  • communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
  • identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
  • set direction and focus for the day
  • build a team

There’s an incredible crossover here with educational goals in the classroom context as well as numerous issues. Reconciling the task-based focus of software development (where the whole team is working off a backlog of to-do items) with the less-tangible, varied focus of the learning environment may be difficult. Another difficulty will be the commitment factor - people are more likely to miss a day of learning than a day at work (although this is also dependent on how stimulating that day is!)

Over the next while, I hope to get some time to look at other aspects of agile software development, examining how they might be applied in an educational context. Next up: iterations (or sprints - short-term milestones with mini-deliverables).

For more:

Five things all clients want to know

Published
by
Michael
on 16/7/2007
in webclass and webdesign
. 0 Comments

A few days ago, Russ posted a list of 5 things that all clients want to know. Things like:

Can you deliver what we want, on time and within the budget?

Can you explain a simple, logical process for delivering the website to the client? Can you explain how problems can be avoided or resolved?

The list is a compact summary of things we need to be ready to answer, but to me the most important point is the underlying reason why these points are always coming up:

Over the years, I have found that most clients don’t want a sales pitch, they want reassurance. They want to know if you can be trusted to help them solve their problem.

How do these questions help you demonstrate to a client that you can be trusted to help them solve their problem? Read through the five points again and you’ll see that they require you to:

  1. first and foremost, demonstrate your ability to communicate effectively on a range of levels,
  2. demonstrate from your experience your own insight into common problems that may arise and simple processes that you use to get the job done, and,
  3. provide examples of your skills through previous work,

And these three things are often things that are hard for people starting out in web design to learn as part of a course - as they require experiencing common problems, experiencing simple processes, and needing to communicate these to get your next pay (hopefully activities like the 3Hr Full Code Press help to some degree!)

Of course, the next best thing would be to have a professional come in to class and share their first-hand experiences… but how often does that happen? Well, thanks to the generosity of Russ at MaxDesign, we’ll get to learn from his experiences and pick his brain on the 20th August at 2pm! Whether you’re a current student or a prospective (or another web designer in the Blue Mountains area - just let us know), keep the date free!

(BTW: It’ll also be right after the real FullCodePress event, so we’ll also get to hear how it all went as well as some of Russ’ ideas for a student version of the competition!)

Tip 5: Gradually hand over control of learning

Published
by
Michael
on 11/6/2007
in learning, reflection, teachertips, teaching and webdesign
. 1 Comment

In our particular Web Design course, we have lots of learners who attend full-time, a handful who attend two-days per week (depending on their availability), a mum of two who can only attend one day per week and others whose attendance is unpredictable for health and/or family reasons. Some learners start with excellent technical skills, others are learning basic computing skills as part of the course and some just need more time to digest certain concepts. We want to support anyone who is keen to learn.

Delivering your contentWhen you find yourself with such varied learners (and I’m sure anyone working in public education will), if you ‘teach’ this class in the traditional sense I reckon you can expect around 15-20% of your class to be able to “keep up” with your delivery of the content. The rest will be either frustrated or bored and lose motivation.

So what do you do? Set up “flexible delivery” options? (I sometimes cringe at the term because it can be used to mean “no preparation necessary”) The danger there is that, even if you have the best individualised e-learning interactive web2 [insert your own jargon] solution in the world, people can easily become socially isolated in the class and lose their motivation for turning up. Sure, there’s the 10-15% of your class who are highly motivated and would have learned the skills anyway had you just shut them up in a closed room with an Internet connection for 6 months, who come through fine, but the rest?

So what do you do? How do you:

  • meet the individual learning needs of a diverse bunch of learners, and
  • provide a social learning environment where people see the inherent benefit of turning up to learn together, and
  • assess individuals in their mix of individual and group learning in a fair, valid, sustainable way?

I wish I knew a complete answer, or a system which would do this (if you have an idea…) All I can do is reflect on the successes and failures of the things that we’ve tried. The biggest success, in my opinion, has been gradually handing over control for individual learning and assessment to the learners themselves enabling us facilitators to focus on (1) providing social, relevant, engaging learning experiences that can suite a diverse range of skills and knowledge, while all the time (2) supporting/coaching learners in their individual learning and assessment skills (goal setting, evidence collection and evaluation etc). In fact, I reckon this second point is more important than the content itself.

As an example of this gradual handing over of control, when a new bunch of learners for our Web Design class begin, we initially provide them with some limited control over the learning activities they begin with (too much choice early on can be overwhelming.) See Welcome class of 2007 for an example of the choices we provide.

As learners progress and begin demonstrating skills, we begin the process of coaching our learners in how they can match their activities against the official national competencies that they need to demonstrate (probably the hardest task to learn.) I think we currently do this a little too quickly, but the aim is to nurture the learning skills of our learners so that they can:

  • understand exactly what they are expected to be able to do for each unit of competency (and therefore hold their facilitators accountable to some degree),
  • choose the resources and/or projects that they will use to learn the required skills (including classroom activities provided by a facilitator)
  • plan milestones and execute their learning,
  • gather and record evidence of their skills as they learn,
  • demonstrate the required skills using a combination of their own projects and relevant assessment items where necessary, but most importantly
  • begin a lifelong process of learning to plan, manage, assess and evaluate their own learning goals.

(for more details about how we try to achieve this and the obstacles we face, see a vision for learning in the 21st Century)

Gradually handing over control of much of the learning and assessment for individuals, in addition to the obvious benefit to the learner, allows us to focus more on providing fun, relevant, engaging activities that accommodate all levels of interaction and help nurture the all-important social learning environment (or ‘learning 2.0 ecology’ if you’re into that. For an example of a recent social learning activity see our 3Hr Full Code Press - something that we’re going to do monthly for a while.) Helping people learn is after all the main reason why we love working in education, right?

It needs to be said that some students - not many, but some - don’t want to control their own learning. Often these are the same students who aren’t interested in learning how to do X, they just want to know “What do I need to hand in to pass”, but not always. Sometimes some of us have had unfortunate schooling experiences where we’re drilled so hard in how to be dependant on the person standing up the front that we’re not willing to let go of that control over our learning. After a few frustrating experiences for learners, we’ve gotten to the point now where we simply explain upfront that if that’s what you’re after, you’re in the wrong course.

So there you have it. For what it’s worth, my 5 Top tips for new teachers:

  1. Model learning not teaching
  2. Act on the needs of your learners
  3. Provide relevant and practical activities to learn through doing
  4. Become a filter (not creator) of relevant content for your learners, and
  5. Gradually hand over control of learning to your learners

If they help just one new teacher at some point in the future, I’ll be very happy!

3 Hour Full Code Press

Published
by
Michael
on 5/6/2007
in education, reflection, teaching, webclass and webdesign
. 5 Comments

Full Code PressIn August this year, there’s an event being run by the Australian Web Industry Professionals Association and New Zealands Webstock event called FullCodePress:

It’s a geek Olympics! Web teams take each other on to build a complete website for a non-profit organisation in 24 hours. No excuses, no extensions, no budget overruns.

Wow… what a learning opportunity! Something like this, tailored for beginners, would be great for a web design course - with a few small administrative difficulties (like staying at TAFE overnight!). Nonetheless, inspired by the learning opportunities of FullCodePress, our class has decided to trial a very scaled-down 3 hour version once a month.

The idea is that those people who are confident with the process can lead a team 3 people, with the not-so-confident or new students participating to the degree that they are comfortable while seeing a small project from idea to html/css prototype (see Web design challenges for more details). Three hours obviously limits the scope drastically, but we don’t want to create yet another on-going project as students already have enough in their ToDo lists.

To keep the activities both relevant and yet re-usable in a class context, we’re basing them around national awareness weeks (such as Reconciliatin week, or Drug Action week), providing students with the purpose, goals, target audiences and content description for the prototype.

Our class has just had their first 3Hr Full Code Press this morning, so I’m looking forward to the debrief in our team meeting this afternoon (I get the feeling some teams worked well together and others struggled together)! I think there’s so many opportunities for learning in this kind of activity, such as reflecting on team skills, cooperation, design processes, technical skills, seeing different solutions and learning from each other at all levels. I’m particularly excited because it accomodates the type of classroom we have where there’s lots of learners with very different background skills and knowledge.

If anyone is interested in trialling the activity, you can find it (and add to/improve it) on Wikiversity under Web design challenges. Hopefully some of our students can provide some feedback on the experience from their point of view…

Tip 4: Become a filter of relevant content for your learners

Published
by
Michael
on 30/5/2007
in learning, reflection and teachertips
. 0 Comments

Tip 3 was all about creating relevant and practical activities to learn through doing - and this is where the bulk of my preparation time is spent (well, the time that’s not assessing). But note that these are practical learning activities - not learning content. These days I hardly ever create learning content for my classes… but do spend lots of time filtering content for students.

If your teaching or learning area is anything like mine (Information Technology) you’ll have a myriad of excellent learning content being created for you as you sleep by working professionals and companies promoting their products. There is virtually no need for me to create content for our classes - there’s better material written by more qualified professionals being published daily out there on the web (see Do we need teachers of Web Design for examples and discussion).

That said, given the vastness of the internet, new learners won’t always have the skills to find, filter and process these excellent resources – let alone, find them in a sensible order to learn them - which is why I reckon it’s the teacher’s role to filter, evaluate and structure these materials for new learners. But to be able to do that, we teachers need to be keeping current ourselves, reading the latest professional articles or blog posts, evaluating new tutorials for relevance and quality, etc. Learning to find and filter information has always been useful for our own professional development, as well as for modelling our own learning to our students, but the point here is that being skilled at filtering relevant content for individuals has become even more essential with the proliferation of available content on the internet (both good and bad). One of our web students puts it like this (in a comment on Do we need teachers of web design):

There is so much out there and sometimes it’s all to much. Having a teacher, and being in a learning environment, where everyone is looking for the most helpful and affecting information is vital, for me anyway.

One of the best things about working on your filtering skills is that as your skills improve and you connect with more and more relevant professional blogs, you’ll find that without realising it you have yourself become absorbed in learning - rather than content creation!