Experience Required: Walking the Talk in Digital Teaching & Learning

“I don’t know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell you today I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else to tell you.”
– Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

So. Turns out picking up four humans and a cat and a hedgehog to drop them all somewhere new is…intense and amygdala-sparking and more Sisyphean than I realized. WHO KNEW?!? LOLweep. But it is December and Term One is done and it was good. And I have known myself long enough to know that only if I write will I ever start writing again so. So.

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I gave a talk and then a workshop at Northwestern last week: Experiential Approaches to Digital Teaching & Learning.

The sessions was an opportunity to tie together the threads of the experiential work I did at UPEI in my final year there with the digital work I’ve been doing over the last couple of decades, in institutional roles and in the open.

Spoiler alert: turns out, from a participatory perspective on education – ie. pretty much where I’m coming from – experiential & digital approaches have a LOT in common. Not only that, experiential approaches have helped me do things in digital spaces that emphasize the participatory capacity of the web and hands-on engagement. They help me walk my own talk, and they help me help learners find ways into digital practice that aren’t about telling them what to do, but getting them doing – and hopefully understanding things from a different perspective after the doing. With structure and reflection as bookends to the process, in classic experiential style.

A caveat: as I noted in my workshop last week, experiential learning can feel a bit like a buzzword these days…one of those business-speak catch-all terms deployed primarily to align programming with funding priorities. There is definitely a market within current senior leadership sectors for incantations combining the words “AI,” “millennials,” “disrupt,” and “experiential learning” – repeat them while wearing a well-cut blazer and watch a shiny budget line emerge from the hot mess of cultural anxiety that is the contemporary social contract! Well, sometimes.

But fashion is not the fault of experiential learning…think of it as an eighty-year old concept having a moment. And a handy one for many of us trying to find ways to do digital teaching and learning that focus on practices and critical reflection, rather than tools.

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Still. What *are* experiential approaches? Messy question. Important question. My bet is if you ask three different people what experiential learning or experiential education mean to them, you’ll get three different answers, because the term connotes a pretty wide swath of different things for different disciplines and in different institutional and geographic cultures.

Yes, most involve some form of doing, and some form of structured reflection upon doing. Experiential approaches can include labs, service learning placements, Co-op programs, formalized experiential teaching methods like case studies, and a slew of more informal experiential teaching methods that in some way incorporate Kolb or Dewey‘s reflexive (sometimes called interactive) cycles.

But like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, wherein each of the individuals extrapolates from his own context – tail, ear, trunk – to a larger absolute that fails to capture the complex reality in front of him, experiential learning is a pastiche of methods and practices that may not all look or feel like each other. Unlike the parable, I’m not even sure experiential learning *is* one single elephant. Or maybe that’s just not where my interest lies.

My interest lies in participatory learning. In ways to connect people to other people as part of their learning experience, and to have them contribute to each other’s learning through conversations and artifacts and reflective processes that continually work and re-work the ideas on the table.

In the slide deck, toward the end I share a few clips and screencaps from some of the experiential – read: mostly hands-on, immersive, application-focused, reflexive and participatory – approaches I’ve tried in different kinds of teaching over the last few years. I saved some of the most hands-on for the workshop rather than the talk, but everything from Twitter chats to sketchnoting & sharing reading responses to badging professional development all counts, IMO, under the broad experiential umbrella. So does working for public audiences of various sizes and privacy settings: work that’s just for me is unlikely to make much difference in a learner’s own professional practice or understanding of the world, IMO.

But the real core of what experiential offers the digital, I think, is not in any specific method or concept but in the fact that experiential learning is, ultimately, about navigating change. From where I sit, it’s a view of learning that recognizes change and complexity at its heart**.

Our digital culture forces change on us regularly, not just in technical learning curves but in the overwhelming, sensationalized narratives we have to sift through and make sense of daily just to be functional citizens of the worlds/nations/micro-cultures we inhabit. I teach teachers. I don’t need them to learn any one specific digital skill or platform,  but a cocktail of of confidence and criticality in their exploration to digital space and digital culture…a cocktail I know no better way to build but through experience and reflection. Experiential approaches help us integrate new and complexity-oriented practices into existing understandings. Worth a shot.

**YMMV (your mileage may vary) – just today, with this post half-written, I got into a Twitter exchange with a colleague that was based on my slides but framed experiential learning on the spectrum of mastery learning rather than experimental learning, which is TOTALLY not how I’ve traditionally seen it…but makes some sense given our very different disciplinary backgrounds. Because I see experiential as a big tent term, I’m not sure either of us is wrong…but I have some more thinking to do.

#engageMOOC – The Schedule

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)

Hear ye, hear ye…

Our pop up MOOC – Engagement in a Time of Polarization (#engageMOOC) – starts…MONDAY.

It’s only two weeks long, so sign up right here STAT and feel free to dip in & out however much works for you. There will be four topics over the two week run, some video interviews with people waaay cooler than us, one core provocation or reading for each topic, and one live hangout per topic. Plus some background readings for the keen amongst us…and some Twitter chats.

Here’s the schedule. Mark your calendars. Sign up: it all goes live Monday.

We’ve been thrilled with the uptake so far and encourage anybody half-thinking about it to just…join in! You can participate via the discussion boards, OR in the open – every topic will have a challenge we post publicly. You can engage through blog or video responses and post using the hashtag #engageMOOC. Contributions to the hashtag will be gathered and shared back to participants: we’re hoping for some distributed discussion, and welcome participants to open up new channels, too, as you wish.

The Monday Feb 12th intro hangout is a provocation in and of itself…we’ll be debating “Does engagement even matter today…and why?” Sign up or watch the hashtag to view live & throw in questions. See you there. :)

Engagement in a Time of Polarization: An #Antigonish2-style Open Course

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
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The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.”
– John Dewey, 1939

Thursday, the FCC voted to end #NetNeutrality.

Okay, I’m in Canada. But most of the platforms and providers I use – for my teaching, my professional presence, my research, my entertainment, and all the blurry spaces in between – are not. They’re primarily US platforms.

So the repeal and what it means for education concerns me – even up here in the Maritimes – as a scholar, a higher ed professional, and a member of society.

(Sure, the open internet is a TERRIBLE platform for speech and justice. Point. But as Tressie McMillan-Cottom states very clearly, “the end of net neutrality also means the regulation-by-capital of online spaces where minority groups shut out of traditional media, politics, and economies have thrived.” So things are only set to get more stratified from here on out. That’s a problem.)

It’s not a problem any of us has a tidy solution for. But. Maybe it’s time to announce that some of us are convening an open conversation to try to grapple with some of what’s at stake: politics and polarization and participatory models for engagement and change.

From February 12-26, 2018, Dr. Natalie Delia Deckard and myself will facilitate a two week “pop-up MOOC” on EdX, with Davidson Now.

We want to invite you to join us.

Engagement in a Time of Polarization will be a discussion as much as a course, with provocations and live hangouts with leaders of this cultural conversation of the moment. Mike CaulfieldChris GilliardKris Shaffer, and (hopefully) Zeynep Tufekci will all join us, supported by Davidson’s Sundi Richard and staff, faculty, students and alumni. And all of you. 

It’s the next step for #Antigonish2, as a concept and a network. We’ll explore some of the history and legacy of adult ed participatory engagement, then dive into what this means today, across education, government, and media.

All welcome. Please share.

Songs of…Experience?

(this post is crossposted from #Antigonish2.com)
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November.  Rolling on an Amtrak train across North Carolina, on my way to Triangle SCI. Our team – one of six chosen for the Institute, woot! – will spend four days in Chapel Hill working on scholarly storytelling and digital storytelling. I’m here because of #Antigonish2 and its emphasis on participatory engagement models…I’m excited to see where the conversation leads.

But the journey is a story already, really.

This is the first Amtrak train I’ve ever been on. I heard Tom T Hall songs on a jukebox in Charlotte last night that I hadn’t heard in years. This is a part of the world I only know from books and songs. Just being here feels like some kind of peak Americana.

We just whistled past a little brick house by the side of the tracks with a big hand-painted sign in front of it that reads “THANK YOU JESUS.”

It leaves me wondering about the versions of North Carolina I am prepped to recognize and absorb, and all I’m missing. Whose stories I’m missing because they were not the stories I grew up on as my own/not my own, north of the border but somehow part of a shared dominant cultural narrative. I think about Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story.”

I joke on FB that I flew from Charlottetown to Charlotte – both named after the same 18th century British Consort – and the airport promised me Billy Graham but I ended up with Burt Reynolds & I’d call it a win. All true. Still odd to visually revisit the white patriarchs of my 70s-80s childhood.

Anyway, I am here. Trying to tell it is never the same as the experience.

I am thinking about about storytelling as experience.

Academic and scholarly forms of storytelling – or knowledge dissemination, if you prefer the formal term – don’t tend to privilege the experiential. They tend to be abstracted, content-focused. Yet I keep seeing a FB link about how we can’t change people’s minds just with facts and content…I can’t find this FB link thanks to spotty train wifi, of course, and maybe it’s fake news (edit: it’s here, thanks Bob Gray!)….but with a grain of salt or two, I think we might want to begin to consider – from the big picture of academe – what we lose when we tell our stories the way we do. For the often-intentionally limited audiences we frame ’em for.

On the plane yesterday I read a blog post by Keith Hamon in which he explores the #MeToo hashtag as hyper-object and experiential…that there is no unity or single artifact to emerge from the hashtag, but rather the noise is the point. I also read an article in which major alt-right Twitter personas were just outed as Russian trolls. So much of what has shaped public narrative in the last 16-18 mos is still something we don’t fully have literacies to process, because tactical uses of Twitter make possible the unleashing of any narrative into an experiential environment that can convert biases and prejudices and positionality into perceived reality, into things people can’t unsee or unknow.

The combination of the two pieces got me thinking that being literate in a hashtag world involves recognizing that media are now experiential, full stop.

We are part of the circulation of this entity we cannot grasp as a whole. We need a new focus on literacies to make sense of it all…that was always the point of #Antigonish2…but the idea that they may be experiential literacies is one I’ve been bumbling towards. I hope to dig into more deeply this week.

And I want to find ways to put those diggings out there, where others can join.

When academic stories – academic knowledge – are mostly tied down in restricted and expensive journals and specialist language and reliant on journalists and audiences busy with nuclear threats and Nazis in the streets and catastrophic natural disasters and shootings, what gets lost?

This is what I’m thinking about, rolling across North Carolina with Amtrak spotty wifi.

Can Higher Ed Help Save the Web?

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
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Big news. :)

#Antigonish2 is in the New Horizons column of this issue of EDUCAUSE Review, replete with Jetsons & French Revolution references.

The article is part of a series on whether and how higher education can help save the participatory web. It’s a call for institutions to consider how we can contribute to a less polarized society, online and off.

Check it out here!

Share early, share often. ;) And big thanks to Mike Caulfield for the invitation to share the project with the EDUCAUSE audience.