Fluffing the Rocks

Yard work in Phoenix in the summer is a task that is easily delayed. The nice weather this past weekend allowed for no excuses to being outside after months of 100+ degree weekend days. After some general cleanup it was time to fluff the rocks.

For those who don’t call the desert home some explanation is in order.  For many homes in Phoenix, landscaping consists of a variety of desert trees and shrubs each watered by a “dripper” from the home’s irrigation system. The rest of the yard is often covered with crushed granite or some other stone material.  Grass uses lots of water which can get expensive. Some years ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his weekend and he said it had been very quiet and he had gone outside to “fluff the rocks.” It was funny and it stuck with me.

You see, the crushed granite material tends to flatten out with the wind, limited rain, and kids and dogs walking on the yard. Dust storms, too, tend to deposit debris which helps stick things together. By raking the rocks with an ironed tonged garden rake, the rocks separate and the color, shading and texture of the stone is restored. So there I was -- fluffing the rocks.

It came to mind that it isn’t just the rocks in the yard that can stick together and get a little flat. Skills, too, can become flattened and stuck together resulting in the loss of color and texture – just like the stones. What have you been doing to bring the color and texture back to your skills?  Have you tried something new?  Have you done some creative design project or development task using a new tool or technique?  Have you downloaded a free trial of some new software product and dedicated some significant effort to see how it works or how it could be used in addition to or in place of some old standard?

I’ve been playing around with some new (to me) tools this summer in an effort to fluff some of the rocks in my skill set.  I’ve shot and edited some videos for my YouTube channel related to my hobby. Some are pretty good, others not so much but I’ve developed a better and personal understanding of what “user-developed content” means. I started a podcast that also relates to user-developed content as well as writing and publishing to the web.  My website got some updates, I upgraded to a new version of Moodle and my Wordpress blog got some new plug-ins.

I’ve learned about dynamic and condenser microphones (for recording my podcasts), how to edit audio in Audacity (free download), publish to ITunes and upgraded my video editing software to something a little more powerful than Windows Movie-Maker. All of which is to fluff the rocks.  

Due to the heat, the learning season in Arizona for me is summer.  For many, learning season begins with the onset of cold weather.  I hope that your learning plans include something beyond your reading list. While reading is a start, commit to doing something or producing something that goes beyond just knowing. So… how will you fluff the rocks?

Flip Flops

Wired magazine has an interesting article about Khan Academy. http://bit.ly/nqw7o0 . For those who are unfamiliar with Khan, the article describes how by providing cross-country tutoring to a relative, Khan's closet-made video explanations of math problems made an impact.  Today, pilot projects are popping up where students view the videos at home for the explanations of sophisticated math problems and then do their practice at school where the teacher can assist.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and Google have donated millions to Khan Academy to help see where this can go.

The idea of flip flops  comes from moving the explanation of the problem to the homework phase of instruction and the practice to the in-school phase effectively flipping the current model on its head. The driver of all this of course is the technology and its creative application.  In this case, user developed video hosted on something like Vimeo or YouTube.

Technology advances have led to several flip flops over the years.  Early CBT systems and their limited graphic and branching capabilities resulted in primarily information dumps.  The basic stuff was put in CBT lessons so the instructor could liven things up when the class met in person. That flipped when more sophisticated authoring tools like Authorware and Toolbook allowed animations and other complex interactions to bring systems alive in a CBT lesson.  Sophisticated branching and programming allowed for multiple paths through the material based on learner responses and so on. With this flip the teacher became the one who introduced the topic and conducted reviews and further explanations while the CBT did much of the heavy lifting.

This all flipped back with the use of the web as a delivery mechanism. Early web tools didn't allow for the rich media we had learned how to embed in our CBTs distributed via CD-ROM or via a network. Broad access via the web, however, won the day and web-based training became the basic stuff once again with instructors providing the richness.  As web tools grows more powerful and bandwidth grows more plentiful, the march to more sophisticated web-delivered learning continues to the place where we now can flip back to the place where instructors  can allow web-based resources to do much of the lifting.

Kahn's use of simple user-developed videos and the readily available hosting services like YouTube further allow this flip to occur. The basics are available 24X7. They can be reviewed, backed up, stopped and started at will.  As the Wired article states, the teacher can then be the tutor to many. He or she can deal with each learner form where they are as opposed to trying to herd cats through the topic.

Video and bandwidth growth allow for this next opportunity to flip. It will be interesting to see which schools and companies are able to gain the advantage by flipping things around.