Lynn, the Huron Heights literacy facilitator came into the Community Resource & Learning Room today and we had a great talk about what I am doing and what she is doing regarding improving literacy at Huron Heights. I started sending her an e-mail with some links, then thought a blog post would be more appropos.

She was a very enthusiastic listener to my yaking about blogging, ICT and the like. I suggested Stephen Downes as a great starting point. I then pointed her to Will Richardson as a leading blogger educator in the high school realm (and other realms I’m sure). Following Will, I sent her off to Danah Boyd’s musings on youth culture and other insights. What would the list be, without including Leigh Blackall and his incredible list of resources that follow his excellent paper on digital learning. My final suggestion is the blog A Difference: A Growing Community of Fearless Educators some great posts from high school educators in Winnipeg.

It’s great that I met Lynn and in the coming months I hope we will move the discussion forward a few degrees if not a revolution or two.

Brent pre-smtwl

I finally heard from a Federal govenrment department that a grant that I (on behalf of my organization) submitted 15 months ago has cleared the last review hurdle and that the “cheque is in the mail”. This is great news for the Community Resource & Learning Room as if gives us the means to continue on our work at a local school in York Region.

My school has about 2000 students and is proving to be a great school to test out our thinking that a community organization can operate within a school and provide needed community resources and connect with youth who are disconnecting from school and the community. We operate 5 days a week in the school, offering a range of employment, community referral, general support, computer and IT resources, volunteer programming and support to teachers and school groups.

Funding has been alway a challenge for our organization as we don’t fit nicely into funding niches of many of the traditional government funding groups since our operations reside in a school. The prevailing view is that since we operate in a school, it’s a school funding responsibility and therefore we are not eligible for funding. This “catch 22″ has hamstrung us in the past, even though we (as a community non profit organization) are attempting to address some of the most wicked and complex problems that our community and society are facing. Receiving these funds, hopefully will mark the beginning of greater support from our funding sector.

As a community organization we provide services and support to youth in transition to the community, many of which (estimated at 50%) will not go on to post secondary education or training. Of these numbers, its estimated that one half could graduate if they chose to stay in school. My favourite research that connects to this trend is on Resiliency. The core premise of this research identifies that: opportunities for meaningful experiences; supportive and encouraging relationships with significant adults; and having challenging expectations placed on them are the key qualities that drive a young person forward with their development and growth. Bonnie Bernard has many reports and books that outline the resiliency research driven approach.

Our grant mentioned earlier is to conduct youth community mapping in York region. We will engage over 40 youth mappers who will create unique mapping projects that will eventually form one unified map that will illustrate youth poverty and homelessness in our area. Within this map, the youth community researchers/mappers will focus on adult – youth relations; health; and recreation as these elements connect to poverty & homelessness.

In this work and in my complementry work with students and community youth at the CR&LR, I am applying ICT tools, blogging etc whenerver and wherever I can. I hope to run mini workshops this winter on blogging and related tools to students and staff. I was very pleased to see blog called A Difference with a post called “A Growing Community of Fearless Educators”. There are some great posts and links here with a special one by the principal of the school where the author Dan Kuropatwa teaches. I will be pointing my school principal to this post as I work on generating interest in ICT and blogging at my school.

To close, I think working in a non profit organization as an educator and community activist/change agent is a great profession. It’s great even if you have to wait 15 months to receive funds to do a job that everyone agrees needs to be accomplished. Writing grants and then waiting long periods while your grant is evaluated is the norm for community organizations. It’s especially difficult as you depend so much on your community partners and volunteers to work with you and keeping your vision alive can be very challenging. The main premise of our community work in my school is that the problems in our schools are shared by all in the community and only by working together can we create the way out of these complex issues. I’m all for this vision and to close, I think I’ll celebrate with a deep sigh of relief and glass of my favourite bevy.

Brent pre-smtwl

This is the description found on the York Region District School Board web site of the the Quest Conference held November 15, 16, 17 at the Sheraton Hotel in Richmond Hill.

“The Quest For Communities That Work: Sustaining Student Improvement” Conference

Educators are increasingly aware of the importance of building community capacity as a means of enhancing student learning in a rapidly changing world. Schools must be interwoven into the fabric of communities, incorporating and reflecting the hopes, interests and values of the families they serve.

I attended the first day of the conference as that was all the time in my calendar. The Board of Education generously found enough money to assist my program and partnering community program by covering the registration fees for the one day.

I’m not dissappointed that I missed the other two days as I had a pretty good sense of the conference assumptions and approach after day one. I’m appreciative that the school board brought educators and community groups together, however I think the methods used by the conference organizers to raise the level of understanding of current issues just didn’t do the job. Danah Boyd in her Blog apophenia has a great article that addresses issues of homophily, diversity and learning at conferences.

The assumptions I saw been played out in the conference were:

• To work well with communities, educators need to know who all the service providers are so they could properely refer their students and families.
• Service providers are expert problem solvers of complex issues
• Having a “major dormo” super powered case coordinator will tie all the fragmented pieces of the service delivery “treatment” plan togother and that will resovle the student/families problems.
• Students (and families of students) in crisis and in need of help require specialized professional services to make them well and only these service can legitimately do this job.
• People in crisis (students & families) need fixing so lets not bother looking at what they think, feel, believe or what their strengths are because we specialists have a fixing job to do.

Anyways – I think you see were I’m going with this post. I’m pleased that the York Board brought people together around the theme of education and community working together but in my view the conference organizers just didn’t choose the means to elevate the learning of the practicionerse.

To help the participants understand how complex, problem solving can be, a half day long case management excersize was used. I think it was designed to make teachers and the few community representatives attending more aware of the complexity of working with kids and families. To be fair, the facilitator did explain that the goal was not to solve the problem but to bring awareness to the attendees of the inter-dependent relationships and expertise of the problem solvers.

The notion that the difficulties that kids and families are facing is not a school problem, not a health problem, not a police problem etc.. but a community problem, seems to be the new mantra that our mainstream groups have adopted. When the problem soliving time comes as evidenced in my group of some 60 or so members, all we can do is the same old problem management thing because we choose to use the same old lens for looking at what is happening in our communities and in the world.

Speaking of world, not once did I hear the words e-learning, digital literacy, Internent communication technologies, blogging, web 2 and on and on. Nor did I hear anything remotely describing the communities that our kids are growing up in as being inhabited by a constant need for refreshing ourselves as learners and managers of these tools. I know the one theme that will get air time at the conference is literacy, however I don’t think the conference definition of literacy connected to the digital literacy world. I may find out from reading about day 2 and 3 – if there is a report or any recommendations.

In my group of 6 or 7 practitioners I was confronted with some very experienced and expert problem solvers. The group approached the case management excersize like a delta force squad force that knew it’s battle objective. It was amazing to me how much my group members believed that because a service is offerred in a community and a student/family is sent to this service, the situation is on the mend or getting solved.

The conference lens used to get the participants thinking about community was that of the service provider clinitian. There was no mention or remote reference to more wholistic community and family driven approachs exemplified by John McKnight’s – Building Communities from the Inside Out, or the Wraparound approach developed by John Vandenberg or the research driven resiliency framework so well written about by Bonnie Bernard. At the core of these approaches the family and the informal community supporsts are the centre of the action planning, not the expert service providers. In addition, a strength and asset based lens is used to see these young people not at risk but at promise (with untapped resiliency strengths). The community, composed of informal supports (not the experts) are marshalled to shore up and wraparound these families and kids. Their web sites have detailed explanations of their approach and philosphy, far more than what I can offer in this already too long post.

I did appreciate some parts of the conference, particularly presentations by Marc Kielburger from Free the Children and Armand Lebarge from York Regional Police.

When I was leaving and completing my satisfaction survey I asked the quest student volunteer why she wasn’t in the conference room learning with all the others. She said, “it was a school staff and admin conference not something for students. I guess it was felt that their job of giving directions to the bathrooms and picking up stuff in the lobby and giving out satisfaction questions were enough of a learning experience for these students. I think having the young people in the conference hall as partners and contributors is a far more useful role and the diversity that would be present by including them would add immensily to the conference learning goals.

Research data says that over 50% of high school students do not go on to post secondary education or training and at least one half of these students have the ability to succeed but choose not to continue school. Several of the presenters talked about the issues facing students being a community problem, not a school, not a police, not a hospital problem etc… . I am pleased that the discourse is happening between community and school, however I believe we need to really put more effort (at least in my area of the world) into seeing what is happing in our communities and schools and what does learning and community really mean in this point in our evolution.

This conference really brought home how important our work is in the school. We are in a school because we want to assist youth in their transition to the community as local and world citizens, as workers, as life long learners and future parents and all the that goes with growing up in our community. We have much work ahead.

Brent pre-smtwl

growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpace – What a great post from Danah Boyd

She has written clearly and acutely on the suppression and control of youth culture by media and our societel structures (school, business, malls etc). Here is an excerpt from her Apophenia blog.

I’m tired of mass media perpetuating a culture of fear under the scapegoat of informing the public. Nowhere is this more apparent than how they discuss youth culture and use scare tactics to warn parents of the safety risks about the Internet. The choice to perpetually report on the possibility or rare occurrence of kidnapping / stalking / violence because of Internet sociability is not a neutral position – it is a position of power that the media chooses to take because it’s a story that sells. There’s something innately human about rubbernecking, about looking for fears, about reveling in the possibilities of demise. Mainstream media capitalizes on this, manipulating the public and magnifying the culture of fear. It sells horror films and it sells newspapers.

Brent pre-smtwl

I had an interesting time with a group of students from the alt ed program in my school. These students were in the grade 9-12 range but firmly immersed in the alt ed special programs. The alt ed focus is to prepare the students for eventual survivial in the community and eventual independence from care givers (parents, family, guardians etc). As a community organization operating in the school (Mon thru Fri) for the purpose of helping youth in transition to work and the community it was an excellent opportunity for us to contribute to the learning needs of these students. This group was a challenge for any teacher in that their interests were far outside of the classroom and academic learning, yet they had a vitality and eagerness to engage as much as any student I see in my resource room.

I wanted to have these students do a quick on line learning style quiz which I thought might be insightful for them and then have a discussion on what they learned about themselves. My plan fell apart when the shortcut I had placed on each pc desktop wouldn’t open up to my selected web site. I had used my furl bookmark to make the shortcut, not the right move! It would take too long to re-direct these students (and try everyone’s patience) so I chose to have them go to the new edu blog site and sign up for a learner blog.

What a time I had. These students struggled through the usual sign up hurdles but eventually they had their first blog. One of the 8 students was familiar with a blog – MSN my spaces, but the rest had no experience or awareness of blogs. At the end of my time with them, I thought they, to different degrees, grasped my main message that they could connect (link) their blog to their friend’s blogs and do more interesting stuff than what MSN chat could do. It was only a 45 min. experience with them and I wasn’t sure what impact if any, our time together had.

I didn’t think our session was very significant as I didn’t plan it well (back up plan only) but I was pleased when one of the students came by with a card signed by his class that thanked me for helping them set up their blogs. They had put a nice reference on the cover, calling my Community Resource & Learning Room a blog room and me a blog guy. In retrospect, I saw that the students were engaged with their work and were having a good time setting up their blogs.

The experience I had with these students led me to think again about using blogs in schools. Giving these youth an opportunity to blog and introducing them to connecting up with their friend’s blogs and other sites was a simple excersize, yet I believe something happenned with these students that was positive. They accomplished the registration which for them was quite a challenge; they chose their personal presentation template; they composed their first post and saw it in their blog; a few of them linked their friend’s blog to their blog; some of them e-mailed their blog url to their hotmail account; they came back the next day via their card and referred to the blog room. Since then, a few of them have dropped by my room to socialize and log back on to their blog.

Despite major learning challenges and social developmental issues, these students have a capacity for networking and connecting with others. These are strengths and to varying degrees, they demonstrated these strengths through this brief 45 min. exposure to blogs. I’m following George Siemens connectivism, Jay Cross informal learning and Stephen Downes article on elearning 2 and my experience certainly supports what they are saying. I found this excerpt on the blog of proximinal development – teaching.blogging.learning site authored by Etienne Wenger

What does look promising are inventive ways of engaging students in meaningful practices, of providing access to resources that enhance their participation, of opening their horizons so they can put themselves on learning trajectories they can identify with, and of involving them in actions, discussions, and reflections that make a difference to the communities that they value.

Participation engenders competence.

My experience with my alt ed student echoed closely to what he is saying. When I saw his article title Participation as Competence, I thought he had “hit the proverbial nail on the head” and captured much of what I am thinking about with blogs and students.

I’ll continue pushing blogs and other ICT tools when ever the opportunity strikes me, which is pretty often. Thanks to all those who are paddling in similiar directions.

Brent pre-smtwl

What an an astounding statement from the New Scientist journal. I don’t know much about the source, however on all appearances it looks like a reputable source in the science community. What does this mean and imply for how new products and choices are made?  For our mapping project and how we are engaging youth and adults on basic issues related to their experiences, I think it supports our chosen direction and approach to research.

“Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.”

Brent pre-smtwl

Here are two videos (one short, one long) of Etienne Wenger found on the Knowledgelab site. Learning, social networking, meaning, communities of practice are some of the subjects covered. It looks very good and I will be giving it a good listen as the material is solid looking stuff for solidifying our youth community mapping foundation.

Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of “Practiced Communities”. People are learning together – every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what competence and knowledge is. To know something or to be competent builds on the individuals experiences of being in the world – learning is a constant transformation or journey of the self.

Brent pre-smtwl

Brent pre-smtwl

Here is a great article from apophenia :: making connections where none previously existed. I liked this article because it has implications to our mapping ideas and what we may do and why we will do it. The article is about designing social software in the context of the author’s (Danah Boyd) theories of 3 critical life stages everyone goes through. I especially liked this line – “ Nowhere is this shift more apparent than blogging land. While youth are doing identity production in terms of sociability, adults are creating new tasks for themselves – documenting, informing, conversing. It’s all wrapped up in being part of the conversation, not in simply figuring out who you are.”

” When youth are coming into a sense of self, they move away from the home and look to the social world to build a socio-culturally situated identity. In other words, they engage in the public in order to make sense of social boundaries/norms and to develop a sense of self in relation to the broader social context. Youth go to the public to see and be seen and they negotiate a presentation of self depending on the reactions of peers and adults. Public performance is about getting those reactions in order to make sense of the world.”

Brent pre-smtwl