1. Just because you’ve got five tickets and can take five pieces of hand luggage doesn’t mean you should use them all. But, the flip-side of this is that you’ll definitely have your hand luggage at the end of your trip (our check-in luggage didn’t get on the connecting plane with us in London).
2. Always let people who happen to be sitting beneath your “Kids entertainment” bag (that you access every few hours) know when you’re going to drop their laptop on their head (or they tend to get a little bit upset),
3. The death-stares that seem to be directed at you and your screaming baby during the “night” section of the trip are really a sign of affection - people will lie through their teeth tell you afterwards how wonderfully behaved your kids are.
4. Don’t stand in a queue for a British Airways connection while a bunch of Finnish retirees monopolise one of the two staff who aren’t currently on their lunch break only to be told after 45 minutes of waiting that you (and your family with 3 kids, 5 hand-luggages and two car seats) can make a run for the gate (over a km away) for your plane which is due to board right now.
5. Family support is a wonderful thing.

(Fran’s written more details of our trip.) Right now I’m just enjoying settling into our temporary accommodation in Charlottenburg, Berlin, visiting some of the sights with the kids (M, E and I climbed to the top of the Siegesaeule - the tower in the photo above) and absorbing the vibe of a foreign city!

Already the past two months of preparation have been the biggest project that I’ve managed yet (thanks Basecamp), but with lots of help and support of family on both sides of the globe, everything has fallen into place relatively smoothly. We’ve now got some temporary furnished accommodation in Berlin for the first month right near family.

I feel like I can now appreciate why people talk of “uprooting” when moving overseas - uprooting a tree involves breaking so many of the smaller roots as you rip it out of the ground. I feel as though our lives have had lots of small tears and rips for the past 6 weeks saying goodbye to friends and family… but that is the reality of “uprooting” our family.

So for the next while I’ll be learning to live in a new culture with a relatively new language. My 4-year-old, who likes to correct my German grammatical errors, keeps saying to me: “When we go to Germany Daddy, I’ll help you speak right” - let’s hope we all learn and adjust well! From this Sunday we’ll be spending time with family in Berlin and seeking out some permanent accommodation before our shipped belongings arrive. I’ll be starting work as soon as my visa is processed (4 weeks from arrival) but in the mean-time will enjoy exploring a new colourful city! Please keep in touch!

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find.

The survey contains analysed data such as:

• Perceived relevance of education
• Perceived age/gender bias
• Job satisfaction
• Break down of salaries
• Hours worked
• Methods of staying current,
• etc.

Never before has this kind of data (from over 30,000 respondants) been available… did I say I love working/teaching/learning in this field??

At the start of every semester I give a spiel to new learners in our class about how one of my main aims is to make myself redundant (as a source of web design and development knowledge). Today a few learners in class politely informed me that they’ve already read the articles that I’m posting. They’re connecting with professionals in the industry, finding their own favourite ‘mentors’ and reading their strategies and technical tips because they want to learn.

It’s a great day.

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:

• It’s not just standing up
  
• Google Tech-talk: Scrum et al
• Release and iteration planning with Innovation games
• Agile Education Methodologies?

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!)

When 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!

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…

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!

Relevant

Not in the sense that your activity meets the criteria of a training package (although that’s important too), but in the sense that your activity is immediately useful to the learner who is genuinely interested in the topic (”Hey, I could use this on the next site that I create!”). In an ideal world, official training packages would reflect the real-world skills that are relevant right now, but unfortunately that’s not always the case*. I can’t remember who said it, but if you have to explain to your participants why some activity is relevant, then your activity is probably not relevant enough!

Practical/hands-on

This doesn’t need much explanation - just make sure the learner gets to learn the process by doing the process. The biggest danger is learner frustration so be ready to intervene if necessary (and only if necessary!) You might scaffold the activity through a variety of demonstrations, quizzes, games or other group-activities, etc., but remember that these other activities are only the scaffold to help learners do the process themselves.

Progressive

In the sense that learners can progress through activities, always building on the skills of the previous activity as they spiral outwards at a pace that suits their needs.

Some of the most successful activities that we’ve created to meet these needs are the CSS Challenges, Javascript Challenges, PHP Challenges and XML Chalenges. Each has around 10 challenges that aim to be immediately useful (creating a CSS layout, input validation with Javascript, responding to an HTML form with PHP), hands-on (they are based on participants doing the real activity), and progressive (learners can gauge their progress as they move through the activities, building on their skills). They’re not perfect, but the option is always there for students and facilitators alike to improve and contribute (with a full version history.)

* The most obvious example a national unit in need of update for our course is the “Create a simple markup language document” which insists that students format their text and colours using HTML (a technique that should have stopped around 6 years ago now). And this unit was updated late last year…