Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Digital Curation

Digital Curation sounds fancy, but it could basically be summarized as “organize your stuff so you can find it later.” Our instructor Michael, ended his presentation with “Start Early“. Flagging a note for Michael that it would have been nice to get this talk at the beginning of the semester, rather than the end! As it stands, I’ve already accumulated a mired of helpful webpages (spread out between two different web browsers), a Google drive folder containing many documents but exactly zero teaching related folders or any type of organization, and a random assortment of downloads on my hard drive. In fact, I could have used this talk at the beginning of my undergraduate degree. I genuinely mourn all the lost syllabi, lecture notes, and essays that I tossed out during my undergraduate studies in preparation for one bit move or another, not realizing that several years later I would be wanting to teaching those same materials and concepts to my own students.

As someone with ADHD, I struggle with organization. I have heard the analogy having an ADHD brain is like a messy desk; all the important information is up there, it’s just loose papers in random piles mixed in with random grocery receipts and the plot of your favourite movie. If my brain is like a messy desk, well, I also have a messy desk. And messy digital filing systems. Going into teaching, I can see how important this will be to work on. Our work is very creative, coming up with a lesson plans and activities is a creative process. But it also requires sourcing a LOT of material. Activity sheets, images, research, rubrics, presentations, video clips, the list goes on and on. I for one was sold on the importance of developing a good digital curation system and will be booking in a day or two over winter break to go through all my course materials and organize them. I am very interested in trying something like Obsidian, or Notion (if you’ve used either of these let me know in the comments below!) to keep everything organized. Both are organizational apps/software. But I already use both Google and Microsoft suite and have notes in Keep and OneNote, so maybe I should stick with that. Perhaps we have too many options these days? No wonder my organization system is a mess.

EdCamp

Okay, switching gears entirely. Last week we also ran a mini EdCamp.

Basically, EdCamp is a newer type of professional development conference for educators that is “bottom up” rather than “top down.” Rather than having to sit though a professional development topic chosen my your administrators or district, educators arrive and democratically decide which topics and workshops they want to run. Then, once decisions are made on topics, attendees can present in areas where they feel knowledge. Attendees can also move around freely to seek out those ideas they find the most useful.

I genuinely love this in theory, but in practice I didn’t have a great time, and this could be partially my fault for not moving around to different topic discussions, but I think it’s also my current gripe with educational trends towards learner driven, inquiry based models, where students direct their own learning. The EdCamp model echos this kind of self-direction. My gripe, is that, call me old fashioned, but I actually really like listening to lectures from people who are experts on subjects I don’t know much about. I learned a heck of a lot in my undergrad in exactly this way. Someone who’d spent 30 years immersed in the academic literature and research on a subject, distilled down the most important and relevant parts and told me stories that helped me construct an understanding of how the world works. It was incredibly valuable, and I don’t think that I’d have come away from my studies with the same level of knowledge and understanding if all of my courses were inquiry and discussion based, or if they were led by other undergraduates. Granted, and actual EdCamp would be open to a much wider variety of educators with different background and experiences than my first-year cohort of teacher candidates.

What appeals to me about EdCamps, and the usefulness of this model, is that often leadership doesn’t really have a good sense about what is going on for their employees, what problems are being faced, and what practical solutions could look like. I’m not saying this to disparage any leadership, it’s a problem created by the nature of the role. In education, if your days are taken up with paperwork, running a school or district, and dealing with administrative problems, you’re necessarily removed from frontline classroom practice, and will be less familiar with what’s going on there than practicing teachers or students. This isn’t unique to education, it’s an issue that spans all types of bureaucracy. My perspective here is heavily influence by my study of Anthropology. In anthropology, many practitioners today employ community based research. I think this model straddles the best of both world. Research problems and questions are directed by the community and what is important to them, but it employs the specific expertise of researchers, whether that is in data sampling and modelling, or some other subject specialty. I want to marry EdCamp to traditional PD. Direction can be bottom up, but I think it’s important to include experts in knowledge dissemination.