Read the feature story Online Communities of Practice: What Works? (THE, May 2012)

Wearing my hat as the Coordinator of Content & Capacity Building at Powerful Learning Practice, I thought it would be both fun and worthwhile to curate a list of Sheryl’s many interviews over the past several years.

So here they are (at least I think I’ve found them all; not even Sheryl is absolutely sure!). I’ve compiled the text and video Q&As in chronological order – most recent first – and included annotations to help readers select chats that best suit their interests.

Teaching Teachers, Honoring Learners: Interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

It’s no exaggeration to say that Howard Rheingold, who is credited with coining the term “virtual communities,” helped invent Web 2.0. His history as an innovator traces back to Xerox PARC, time spent as editor of the Whole Earth Review, early involvement in listserv and online communities, and writing prescient books like Virtual Reality (1991), Smart Mobs (2002) and the brand-new Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. His interest in interviewing Sheryl grew with the publication of her 2012 co-authored book (with Lani Ritter Hall) The Connected Educator. The Rheingold-Beach chat is hosted by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at UC-Irvine, supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

The interview: After a brief introduction by Howard, you can watch their live video conversation, which Rheingold describes this way: We talked about big questions with practical, local implications: What do global, online communities of practice mean for day to day life in classrooms? How do educators use personal learning networks purposefully in their practice? How can teachers bring their questions and problems to solve to networked communities of inquiry? How do connected learning communities form? Watch the interview.

Powerful Learning Practice Actualizes Educators, Improves Schools, One Project at a Time

Sheryl was interviewed by Bob Lasiewicz for the online journal JUST: Media and Social Change and his own website, Crossroads of Learning. Sheryl says this is one of her best efforts to get ideas across that are always evolving.

The Interview: Lasiewicz, an educator and web entrepreneur, asked Sheryl some important questions about the “self-actualization” philosophy behind PLP’s approach to professional learning and probed for the difference Sheryl sees in connectivism’s self-discovery (“the knowledge is in the network”) and PLP’s three-pronged community approach to adult learning, which includes the use of “connected coaches.” This interview is an excellent companion piece to the 2012 book, The Connected Educator. Read the interview.

Connected Educators: An Interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

The Connected Educators website is part of an ambitious project to document notable online communities where educators engage in professional learning. Funded by a major US Department of Education grant, the Connected Online Communities of Practice project aims to increase “the quality, accessibility, and connectedness of existing and emerging online communities of practice.” Connected Educators has thus far identified a half-dozen “Notable” communities, including Powerful Learning Practice, “the most popular community in our directory.”

The Interview: The project leaders who devised Sheryl’s interview questions were particularly interested in garnering her insights about what it takes to launch, nurture, grow and sustain communities of practice that are highly active and can show evidence of deep engagement and learning. Sheryl decided to “go deep” herself and share much of what she’s learned after more than a decade as a participant, creator, leader, and manager of multiple CoPs. It’s a remarkable tour de force that should come with graduate credit! Read the interview.

Passion-Based Learning: An Interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Edutopia hosts some of the most popular education blogs in the blogosphere, including the writings of California middle school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron, who’s also a book author, a contributor to Huffington Post, and the keeper of her own widely followed blog TweenTeacher. Heather interviewed Sheryl late last spring and you can tell they  had a good time. As one of 20+ comments noted, “It’s always nice when you can not only be informed, but also entertained!”

The Interview: Heather summed it up well in her opening paragraph: When we talk about teaching, we are never just talking about a profession, but a passion. Unfortunately, while dodging the bullets of criticism and shielding ourselves behind the mediocrity of the standardization movement, we have found our eagerness to teach being chipped away. Educator Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach challenges us to rediscover our own passion for teaching by helping our students become passionate seekers of knowledge and understanding. Read the interview.

Washington Post/Education Week: What 21st Century Teaching, Learning Really Means

This particular interview with Sheryl was drawn from nearly eight hours of phone conversation she and I had during December of 2010, over the course of three interview sessions. It was these conversations that convinced me I wanted to be a part of the work Sheryl and her staff and consultants were doing. About 2000 words of our epic 30,000-word transcript appeared on the website of Education Week Teacher, and most of that was also published at the Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet.

The Interview: Sheryl covered some familiar ground, explained the big ideas behind PLP’s model of 21st century “connected” professional development, and told why she prefers the word “passion” to the word “interest” when talking about a student-centered approach to teaching. She also offers examples of what passion-based learning might look like in the classroom. You can follow the links to each of the publications, above, to see their version of the interview. Or you can read the longer version I originally offered to Ed Week. (It’s about 3000 words – not 30,000! – and offers more details about passion-based and inquiry learning.)

Larry Ferlazzo’s Interview of the Month: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

If you’re among the 16,000 followers of California teacher and resources guru Larry Ferlazzo (if not, go here), you may know that he likes to feature monthly interviews with interesting educators at his blog. Sheryl visited in November 2011, just as her first book was about to be published. (Larry is about to publish his fourth book himself. We interviewed him at our PLP Voices blog last year.)

The Interview: Among the interesting questions Sheryl answered was this one: Where do you imagine your work going over the next 3-5 years? What excites you most about the future of professional learning? Read the interview.

TeachersCount Interview: The Connected Educator

TeachersCount is a NYC-based organization that reminds the public that teaching is both a rewarding and a challenging profession — and that great teachers make a huge difference in the lives of millions of children every generation. The TeachersCount website regularly interviews prominent educators from across the USA.

The interview: TeachersCount asked Sheryl to talk about what it means to be a “connected teacher” in the 21st century. She also talked about her own unusual path to a career in education and why she’s an advocate of passionate learning. A favorite question of mine has her explaining what she means when she says to teachers (as she so often does): “You don’t have to change the way you teach. You have to change the way you learn.” Read the interview.

That’s the round-up! As new interviews appear, I’ll amend this post to include them.

The Connected Online Communities of Practice project is all about increasing the quality, accessibility, and connectedness of existing and emerging online communities of practice in education. Supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the  work is being carried out by a project team drawn from a six-organization partnership that’s led by the American Institutes for Research.

One project focus (see more here) is to “undertake case studies of both interesting communities of practice and of individual educational professionals’ use of online communities and other forms of social media to connect.”

Powerful Learning Practice is among a half-dozen “Notable” case-study communities currently featured at the project’s Connected Educators website. You can read the PLP profile here — and browse nearly 30 comments and responses from PLPeeps and other educators familiar with our work.

One strategy of the project is to produce in-depth interviews with leaders in the online community-of-practice world, and the Connected Educators site is currently featuring an informative Q&A with PLP leader and CEO Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. Here’s their description:

“…the founder of the most popular community in our directory talks about effective moderation, sustainability, building-level communities, and much, much more…”

We’re smiling at the “much, much more” because (as you’ll see) Sheryl took the CCOP request seriously and offered up many of the insights she’s gained during nearly 10 years of creating, designing, leading, and participating in successful online communities of professional educators.

“We’re a company that’s open, transparent, that shares what we know,” she says. “We don’t hoard our secrets. When we say that all of us are smarter than any of us, we believe it and live it. We’re transparent about our work and we hope others will be, so we can all be better servant leaders.”

If you’d like to learn for yourself some of the secrets of building and sustained highly active, deeply thoughtful virtual communities of practice, don’t miss this interview.

Voices logo by John Norton via Flickr

Our Powerful Learning Practice group blog — Voices from the Learning Revolution — has just published its 100th post! And every one of them was written by a PLP community member!

We’ve titled this group blog “Voices from the Learning Revolution” not because our bloggers are necessarily revolutionary leaders — but because they are leaving behind outdated practices and mindsets and shifting toward the kind of connected, digitally infused teaching and learning that we know our 21st century students need.

It’s up to us — the educators who understand teaching’s place in the 21st century — to convince the public that educators can never be replaced by apps.

One of the great ideas of PLP is the use of experienced voices. These are people who have established a clear online presence and have spent considerable time connecting and sharing in much the same ways as the we hope the participants of PLP will aspire to.
In the Ontario-Lower Hudson cohort Ira Socol, Scott Floyd, Tom Barrett and Susan Carter-Morgan all led groups around their areas of passion and expertise. In each case, quality discussions blossomed.
One example came in Ira’s group which centered around the concepts of Universal Access and Social Justice. In one discussion Ira asked,

If you look at your school, really look at your school, who do you think it is designed for? Consider everything, from architectural cues to time schedules, classroom shapes and furniture, “important” courses, rules of behaviour, places to eat, to rest, styles of “teaching.” Who made these choices? Why? Which students do “better” because of those choices? Which do “worse”?

Here are some highly insightful responses:

In my first classroom, the chairs were attached to the desks. This made group work or collaboration difficult. These desks fit into the room best when they were placed in rows. Sometimes you could group 4 together. For most students, it made sitting very uncomfortable. Even now, the desks seem small in most high school classrooms. They are designed for children and not for young adults. I remember the black board in my first classroom was on one wall only and power supplies were designed in such a way that if I wanted to rearrange the room I would have needed an electrician. This made the black board the front of the room. The bulletin boards were at the back and side, so posted student work was visible to me when I stood at the front, but not to students who faced forward. The clock was above or near the door and served to countdown the time until students could exit….Kim McGill

Despite making claims to be a progressive high school, my school is designed for teacher centered industrialized education. Students travel from class to class each day, and experience each course in segregation from one another. There a few school rules, which enable students to explore there own learning, and have freedom to explore during the school day when they are not programmed to be in a classroom.
I fully agree with Ira’s comment that we are ingrained in our environment. I almost think it would be better for my school district to be more progressive if we made the capital expense to tear down the school and rebuild it.
As a digital person, teaching in a school like this is difficult for me. My mind doesn’t work in a linear fashion, whether that be because of growing up in a digital society, or possibly an undiagnosed educational disability that I might or might not have. I am not sure how we expect students to learn that way.
I don’t think we know what is natural or un-natural, since society is so ingrained in the physical and mental structure of a school…. Josh Block

And the conversation continued….

What I find interesting in this process is that Ira served to illicit ideas that I’m sure both Kim and Josh had considered before but were given a platform and someone with background and research that confirmed or expanded their ideas. Again, this is just one example and it happened in Scott’s, Tom’s and Susan’s groups as well. Experienced voices are a very key part of the work of PLP.

One of my favourite lines from the Cisco video “The Human Network” is

Welcome to world where people subscribe to people, not magazines.

There so much about the sentence that rings true everyday for me. The ability we have to connect with each other, not simply as learners but as humans is what is so completely revolutionary that is changing the world. As we connect and share, learning often takes care of itself.

The New Jersey PLP network has been talking about the personal side of learning in a discussion called “What’s your story?” The idea was to have folks share there personal stories of technology; not necessarily as educators but as everyday people with families, friends and and interests the go way beyond school. Here are a few examples of how people have used technology to share and connect in personal ways.

We use a family Christmas wiki where we all share wish lists. It is fun to watch what my nieces add – it gives me insight into who they are becoming and their interests. My friend doesnt live near her grandchild so they use Skype for bedtime stories….Sheryl

Earlier this year, my wife and I traveled to San Francisco with her parents to attend a family wedding. Several weeks before we left, I began placemarking famous San Francisco sites in GE on my laptop, knowing that I would have my laptop there. A few days before the trip, my in laws were at our house and we began talking about our upcoming trip. I turned to my laptop, and we began planning out our day, virtually. My in laws could not get over how “virtual” GE was. We searched for restaurants near the hotel, placemarked them, and noted what other sites were close to that restaurant. Knowing that my parents were staying at my house babysitting my kids while we were on the trip, I also saved the placemarks on my home computer. I gave my dad a quick tutorial with this before we left. While we were in SF, we called home frequently to report our location. Dad ‘flew’ around SF and found our location, sharing the exacts sights with my kids. Really neat stuff!…Scott

Our families are spread out all over and rather than emailing pictures individually to each family, and writing a note we decided to create a space for all of us to share what was going on in our lives. It has been great! Not only for my husband and I, but for our children, their cousins, aunts, uncles and everyone else. It has been wonderful for all of us to share our lives, in real time, with one another, more so than we have done in years, and a wonderful way for my 83 year old mom to be connected to everyone far and near….Robin

I’m reminded of a blog post by a grandmother, (Ewan Mcintosh’s mother) who was so thrilled to be able to see her grandaughter and stay a part of her life even though she lived far away. It’s been my experience that when people begin to understand how and when to use a technology to enrich their personal lives, it’s not long before they begin to see how it will enrich the lives of their students.

One of the challenges of my position in the district where I work has been how to “teach” others about social networking, how do you convey the benefits of virtual personal learning communities / networks, in a 3 hour workshop? How do you cover all the options, explore all the tools available to assist in creating those communities, and also build a comfort level for those interested, but who most likely have never been involved in something like this? As I reflect on my participation in PLP over the past several months and look at the foundations that have been laid for all teams across the cohorts participating this year and examine the structure in place it helps to answer the questions I struggle with. My conclusion is I don’t think you can adequately teach these concepts in an hour or two, to honestly understand the value, having the opportunity to be immersed in the conversations/immersed in the environment is the best way to learn.

What I have been able to see throughout all of the cohorts is the growth of individuals in this environment, there are emerging voices, those who are becoming comfortable are beginning to start discussions, add comments to posts others have made, share their own teaching experiences, as well as personal experience. Here is an example of one who has begun to incorporate some of the tools we have been learning about in PLP in her personal life.

One of the things I remember Will saying at our first meeting was a way to be successful with technology this year. He said that we are all so busy, so technology can’t be added to your life, but must take the place of something you already do. He used the example of how he used to watch the news, but now he uses technology to stay informed. I really thought that was important for me to remember this year. So what I’ve tried to do is use and learn about technology in the things I am already spending much time on. I attended a workshop on gifted students. The keynote speaker was talking about using technology with gifted students, he talked about 21st century skills, web 2.0, wikis, blogs, nings, etc.  I understood everything he was talking about and used much of what he talked about with my students. This is the first time ever that I have understood more technology than many other teachers. I am so proud of what I have done the past few months and how much I have learned.

New Jersey cohort member Laura Sipes.

She started using tools she had been introduced to in her cohort, in her personal life, and as a result has gained confidence and understanding in the value of using technology as an integral part of what you do every day rather than add it on to your daily life.

Another portion of a post, from Scott Godshalk, principal, Tohickon Valley Elementary School.

Last year, I tried, unsuccessfully, to facilitate the use of a wiki at our school. I asked teachers to post a reflective document of their work during their Collaboration Sessions. As I reflected on this, I realized I dove in headfirst with the concept of a wiki. This was a new idea for the teachers, and a new way to collaborate. Teachers followed through with this expectation, and posted their Collaboration Session reflections, but there weren’t any additional comments, posts, or discussions about the content of their work. This year, I took a couple steps back, but pushed forward with the idea of a wiki. I send out a weekly bulletin to share my reflections and give teachers my thoughts on school and district initiatives. I spend a great deal of time preparing the weekly bulletin. Recently, I had an epiphany. Why am I working so hard on this? There is a school full of brilliant teachers who have fantastic ideas. They should help me with this! For the last two weeks, I posted a simple question on the wiki site, and had the teachers write a brief response to this question. The results have been phenomenal. Last week, I asked teachers what it means to teach in the year 2008. To be an effective teacher, what are the words that come to mind? Their response was awesome. Our staff is beginning to enter a new phase of collaboration.

Others are beginning to blog, some are sharing classroom experience, resources for teaching and professional development, creating Delicious accounts and sharing web sites with their cohorts. It is remarkable to see the growth of individuals who are supported and encouraged as they expand their knowledge and level of comfort in an area, just a few short months ago; many had never been introduced to before. This is the work of PLP, creating environments for collaboration and learning in ways that are relevant to all of us.

I am happily paddling, running in and out with the discussion waves, splashing a bit in the groups, occasionally sticking my head under and blowing a few small blogging bubbles. Feeling I can’t yet go too long with out taking a breath to edit and definitely still need my Google goggles, although am learning to keep my eyes open for new ideas and applications. I’m still, perhaps irrationally, scared of sharks and so sticking close to the shore. Perfectly happy to watch and learn from those who can swim competently. Enjoying my day at the beach.

International Cohort Member- Amanda Ritter, Melbourne, Australia

For many educators sharing and posting in a situated community of practice is awkward and risky business. It is a process of slowly building trust and taking small steps while trying to find their online voice. It takes time before many of the team members in PLP feel like their input is going to contribute much to the discussion. Amanda describes it as not wanting to get in over her head but looking towards relinquishing her “Ning floatie ring” and “swimming on her own into open water while building her cyber confidence.”

Part of the mission of PLP is to help participants build their cyber confidence while at the same time starting to build their personal and professional learning networks. One way we do that is by bringing in Expert Voices. The idea behind “Expert Voices” is twofold. First, it’s to bring into the PLP communities folks knowledgeable about both the tools and the pedagogy, and have them help PLP members explore various topics related to teaching and learning in the 21st century. Second, it’s a way to help PLPers slowly expand their learning networks by giving them some thoughtful folks to learn from and to follow.

It is with great pleasure that Powerful Learning Practice welcomes this year’s Expert Voices.

International Cohort
Graham Wegner – Building a Personal Learning Network
Ben Hazzard – Classrooms as Communities
John Evans – Podcasting Purpose
Chris Harbeck – Classroom Blogging
Alanah King – Collaborative Tools

Independent Cohort
Kim Harrison – virtual worlds, particularly Second Life
John Hendron – blogs and other read/write tools in education
Chris O’Neal – developing technology leaders, particularly school administrators
Meg Swecker – Voice Thread as well as other collaborative tools such as wikis
Paula White – Web 2.0 tools in the classroom

Illinois/Ohio Cohort
Kathy Cassidy – on Blogging
Alec Couros – on Building a PLN
Brian Crosby – on Collaborative Tools
John Evans – on Podcasting
Jo McCleay – on Social Networking

ADVIS Cohort
Kim Cofino – Collaborative Projects with Multiple Schools
Ben Wilkoff – Blogging (with RSS and Social Bookmarking thrown in)
Scott McLeod – Disruptive Innovation: What School Leaders Should Be Doing Now in Their Schools and Classrooms
Kristin Hokanson – My Digital Responsibility in a Global World
Wes Fryer – Wikis and Digital Storytelling

Archdiocese of Philadelphia Cohort
Barbara Barreda – Leadership and Change
Bill Kist – Wikis and Digital Storytelling
Susan Sedro – Technology Integration
Sara Kajder – New Literacies
Jo McLeay – Social Networking

New Jersey State Cohort
Michelle Bourgeois - Collaborative Learning
Scott Elias – Balancing Your Real and Virtual Lives
Dean Shareski - Lesson 1- Share
Brian C. Smith – Educator as Learner
Adina Sullivan – Audio and Visuals to Support Learning for All

PEARLS NYC Cohort
Tom Barrett- Publishing Tools
Graham Wegner- Blogging
Lee Kolbert- Social Networks
Darren Draper- Dimensions of Change
Jeff Utecht- PLN