HAWAII ... the Power of Building a Learning Community on Values and Blending

I began this trip through a window of opportunity you almost could say, between two potential terrorist attacks. Well that is how they were considered by the authorities and rightly so. On the day before I was to fly, a bag of white powder was discovered left on a plane and it threw Adelaide airport into a spin with delayed flights. I flew out the next morning to Sydney at the early hour of 6.00am with a routine departure. Only hours later more white powder was discovered and the spin turned to chaos with such bad delays people actually missed international connections. Me I got out in the corridor of quiet in between. I never heard of the disruption of course until I got to Hawaii.

My connection was made smoothly in Sydney and the flight to Honolulu was great. I think this is about the 15th time I have done this but it never looses its appeal, especially returning to the islands were our family lived for nine years. As the plane approached Honolulu aiport it was close to midnight local time and I knew the graveyard stopover was upon me. What I mean is that I was destined for Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii a different island to that of Honolulu and the connecting flight was not for 6 hours after we landed. Not enough time to get a room but long enough to cause you to miss a night's sleep so there appears a community of people huddled around the airport terminal waiting for the first interisland flight the next morning. It gets even funnier when you see travellers wheeling their trolleys around this large airport looking for power outlets to recharge their laptops because the battery was flattened on the long flight across the Pacific.

I would like to say I am writing this blog from one of the typical airport seats at Honolulu, but by the time my own laptop was recharged I was too tired to see/work the keyboard so this blog is a few days late. My visit to the University of the Nations (UofN) where we were volunteers for 9 years was everything I had hoped for. Besides seeing again some very dear friends, I connected with four other Subject Matter Experts (SME's) online from mainland US universities and a mate from Australia and we ran a webinar on Learning and Teaching with Technology for the UofN community.

As I reflect on my time in Hawaii (this is being written at 35,000 feet some where over continental USA on the way to Madison WI) there have been some significant "ah ahas". One is a deeper commitment to Blended Learning. Why? Well I have been chatting and connecting online with some of these people in Kona on a frequent regular basis for the last 5 years. This was when I last visited and yet our relationship was deeply enriched by me being there face-to-face. Now that richness will be a part of further online collaboration and learning - that has got to be the strength of blended learning surely.

Another is a commitment to make my life count. For it to be all it can be to make a difference. It always blows me away when hanging out with these YWAMers (members of Youth With A Mission) they start to tell me what they are about to do as if it was going to MacDonalds. Remember they are volunteers with little to no resources and no centralized funding or grants like we normally expect in a University environment. I was with a couple of good friends and asked what are you working on. I sat almost envious, as they described working for nine months to find a way to reach an extremely isolated atoll in the middle of the Pacific which is only visited by a couple of ships that dont usually drop passengers. Why? because this rock which is 3m above sea level at its highest point, has a population of 2500 people with a major water problem. Water reserves come from shallow wells and many are polluted or infiltrated with sea water. The most acute problem is waterborne disease, which results in the death of about 30% of children under the age of 1, and a life expectancy of 52 years. Older people get diabetes when they add sugar to the water to cut the salt taste. So these ordinary people are doing extraordinary things, they are going to build water catchment facilities and train locals to do the same to catch rain water. - this is community development which will dramatically impact the lifes of these 2500 people, and it is being done with no central institutional funding, just faith and sacrifice. I am now further committed to a "Just do it" and "Nothing is impossible" work ethic.

Just How Effective Can Virtual Learning Community Be?

In my last podcast I introduced the idea that mutually agreed values are vital to building online learning communities This concept is best understood reading Palloff and Pratt's award winning book "Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace" The more I think about this concept the more convinced I am that if teachers or instructors are properly trained in facilitation or emoderation the more successful the online learning community will be. Moderators need to successfully anchor the community in its early stages of birth and development, and get members to reach consensus in accepting mutually agreed values. Also if learning contracts can be secured from all participants that they are willing to allow the learning community to hold them accountable for them upholding these values the more the learning will deepen and be life changing for all involved.

So what are these values that are vital to maintain in an online learning community for it to thrive? Palloff and Pratt say they are; honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness and empowerment (Palloff & Pratt, 1999). They say they are critical to the success of online learning and without any one of them, a learning community cannot function. as well they are catalysts for learning.

Please listen to this second podcast and I look forward to your comments. Next stop the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Regards
Allan