Teach42

The Apple Learning Interchange has a workshop conducted by Alan November entitled Fearless Learners, Courageous Teachers. The session itself is definitely worth watching, particularly if you’ve never seen Alan in person. However, what’s got me jazzed up right now is the way it’s organized and presented.

This is basically no different than a workshop session he might present at a conference. In fact, it has much in common with his Teaching Zack to Think presentation. However, instead of standing in front of a group of 50-100 educators, he’s sitting in front of a camera. His power point slides are in the upper right hand corner and you can scroll through them as he’s talking. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what slide he’s on, perhaps they need the old school “beep” that filmstrips used to have to signal that it was time to go to the next frame!

In the lower left hand corner, you have a list of hyperlinks that he has chosen and will be mentioning during his presentation. Throughout the presentation, as he is talking about specific sites he suggests you go to visit them at the same time. When you open up the site in a new tab or window, the video continues so you can still hear him speaking. The workshop flows on uninterrupted as you go see for yourself the things that he’s talking about. Then, when you’ve had your taste, you simply return to the original window and keep watching.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is nowhere near as poignant or personal as seeing somebody speaking face to face. And I’ll bet that it was more difficult for Alan to create than when he has an audience in front of him. However, this really is a fantastic way to have the material presented to you. If I know I was going to see Alan speaking tomorrow, and I had the opportunity to see the entire presentation , explore what he was talking about and take some time to reflect upon the material, I’d do so in a heartbeat!

Think about it, by providing this sort of video presentation to people in advance, people can come to a workshop presentation prepared, informed, and ready to expand upon their knowledge. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and in dire need of time to synthesize the information, attendees would be able to collaborate together, identifying issues and exploring the material in depth. Think about how much more could be accomplished.

Conferences tend to be one of the very few times when you have large groups of intelligent, creative, forward thinking individuals who want to learn all congregate together. Couldn’t we accomplish so much more than sitting them in front of a few speakers and turning them all into passive listeners?

Think about how many times you’ve tried to explain to someone why a specific workshop was so fantastic only to shrug your shoulders and say, “I guess you had to be there.” Now you can actually send them there as well. With the click of a mouse, other people would be able to virtually attend the exact same workshop, days, weeks, months later.

Visit the site, check out the presentation, but while your watching it think about this being the introduction to a workshop, rather than the workshop itself. Then come back here and let me know what you think. Could we be making better use of our collective time?

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