Building Windmills 09…

Posted by: mimanifesto on: February 13, 2009

• In: capacity-building | CPD | GLOW | ICT | networking | PLN
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Mike Coulter, one of the country’s leading web 2.0  exponents has produced a superb slideshow of the ‘Twitterati’ in action at the recent National CPD team conference ‘Building Windmills’. You can find it on the CPD team blog. It’s a superb example of how personal learning networks can utilise the power of web 2.0 social networking sites such as Twitter. Now, I was pleased, (and quite flattered actually) to have been asked by Con Morris to present a couple of workshop/seminar sessions and facilitate one of the groups throughout the two days of this conference last week in Stirling. Andrew Brown from LTS kicked off the proceedings posing some thought-provoking questions. I gave a presentation on on-line personal learning networks together with Ollie Bray. I have to say what a pleasure it was to finally get to sit in on one of Ollie’s presentations, and to get some time to chat with him over the two days or so. He’s truly one of the real innovators in Scottish education today, and absolutely inspirational to watch in action and talk with. You can see his excellent presentation by following the link to his own site (above). It was great to finally meet Katie Barrowman from LTS ‘in the flesh’ as well…

I have to admit to having had some doubts as to how qualified I actually was to take on such a role in this conference, however, when I sat down to think about what I wanted to say, everything really seemed to fall into place as I realised just how much my own development of an on-line personal learning network had contributed to my own career development over the past four years or so. When I went back to the start of my career, I realised that I had actually got my job through networking on the TESS on-line forum when I arrived back in the UK from a stint working abroad and noticed that a member of staff from my school had posted about how they were really struggling to find a Biology teacher. A couple of emails and phone calls followed, and I suddenly found myself employed !. You can see the rest of my on-line PLN as it developed over the years by having a look at my presentation slides….on sliderocket…It covers all the major milestones in my own on-line journey to date.

I had a great two days at this conference – hard work facilitating and presenting, flicking between applications to make sure the group’s thoughts were recorded in the #windmills09 GLOW group and live on Twitter, as well as working through CPD reflect in GLOW, but a great chance to network and discuss. And of course, the conference extended beyond the walls of Stirling management centre across the whole of the UK via Twitter and GLOW with many folk joining in or just grazing on what was on offer.

I think particularly in the current challenging economic climate, on-line CPD will become a significant part of many teachers activity in this area. I also think that the traditional ‘twilight’ model of after-school meetings will become less important as folk start to focus their attention towards on-line environments with their greater scope for personalised and individual CPD programmes and access to like minded colleagues with expertise and experience in so many different areas. I’ve been involved in so much of this kind of activity, particularly over the past couple of years and am convinced of its true worth. My own PLN involves people who I could probably never hope to see regularly face to face, but can debate with most days through such sites as Twitter. GLOW is becoming a big player in this field as well and is now a major source of information and advice (as well as networking) for increasing numbers of Scots educationalists who are using it to suit their own particular need at a given specific point in time.

It will be interesting to look back in a year’s time at the developments in on-line CPD. I’m looking forward to #windmills10 already…

Tags: CPD, GLOW, Personal Learning Networks, Twitter