iNACOL13 Reflections

Reflections from iNACOL  

Three years ago I attended my first iNACOL conference. I was a little sponge soaking in every session. I had been challenged to design and implement a blended program for my school district and turned to iNACOL to learn how to make my task a reality. I had my first exposure to Keeping Pace and was hooked to the point where I managed to scurry home with about twenty copies to share. A lot has changed in the past three years and, ironically, much has stayed the same.

I still enjoy attending sessions and learning about how blended and online learning is improving educational outcomes for students across the globe. Only now, instead of just attending sessions and taking notes, I am an active learner in the sessions. Active learners listen, absorb, process, share, interact, reflect, and repeat this process to make meaning of new information. You see, three years ago I passively took notes for my own benefit. Now I use collaboration tools like Twitter and blogging for recording kernels of wisdom. When my thoughts get shared to a larger audience, I am able to interact with others, both at the conference and away, to hear their perspective on the ideas that I am sharing. I then reflect on how different people with varying experiences interpret the ideas that I am sharing. This puts things in a broader perspective and enables me to reflect and process information on a whole new level.

I share this story because successful blended learning implementations require students to be active learners. While sitting in a keynote address with a few thousand people, I was designing my own learner-centric experience and that gets to the heart of blended learning.

At my first iNACOL conference (VSS for oldtimers) I was a consumer of knowledge, plain and simple. I came to learn and since blended learning was new to me I felt I had little to share. Since that time I have been knee deep in blended learning. While I will always be learning more about blended learning, I have crossed a plane and am now a producer of knowledge. I presented at this year’s conference and had the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with others so that we can connect and continue to learn from each other. Quality blended learning programs ask students to go beyond being consumers of knowledge and urge them to create and share, thus enabling them to be producers of knowledge much earlier in life.

Blended learning was a relatively new concept in my area three years ago. I felt like what we were doing was cutting-edge stuff until I attended iNACOL and learned that there was a worldwide network of professionals that were designing a range blended learning programs. While blended learning is not the prevalent teaching model near me, it has grown in acceptance. If your blended learning model seems cutting-edge and innovative in your locale, I can almost guarantee you that there is an iNACOL member that is doing something similar. For this reason it is critical that you become involved with organizations like iNACOL that allow us to collaborate and grow. Education is not a competition. Education should always be collaborative because it’s about enabling students across the globe to achieve at their highest levels.

As I leave iNACOL 2013, I again depart with my copy of Keeping Pace, only this time a single copy will do because I plan on sharing what I read through social media so that I can gain a better understanding of the blended and online learning landscape. You see, I still see myself as sponge, only this year I am a living sponge. One that breathes in information, processes it, and breathes it back out to share and continue the cycle. Don’t let the connections and passion for blended learning that you experienced at iNACOL fade, instead breathe it all in, process it, and breathe it back out to share. Otherwise we’re no better off than the students of the past who crammed for a final, only to forget everything the next day.