My co-workers do not understand why I do not spend every waking moment of conferences hanging out with them. I spend every day with them. At conferences I get the chance to be with everyone else. Most importantly, I get to learn from everyone else. At the conference most of my learning comes from unexpected places and in unexpected ways.
I knew many of the people I follow on Twitter were going to be at the conference - many of them presenting sessions throughout the days. I also planned to go to the tweetup event the conference had scheduled in hopes of meeting many of them. Beyond meeting them, I was on the shuttle with most of them and shared a table with many of them. They are as wonderfully real people as they are brilliant educators who are shaping the future of education more profoundly than 90% of the conference presenters. They actively connect educators in ways that a sit-and-get conference never will. The conversations, the stories, the experiences, the visions they have for education cannot be unheard. Sitting at the table listening to them share enhanced my vision of education in a way that I can never function again in some of the ways I have in the past.
Even more profound was the random conversation I had with a gentleman at the bar where I stopped with some other conference goers prior to retiring to my hotel room for the night. He had nothing to do with education (he would have been one of my nightmare students had he gone to my school) yet he built a successful, by any definition, career without the help of any higher education. Because of his success, he was able to walk away from that career and now is doing the things he enjoys doing because he has the means to do them. He refers to himself as a technologist. I refer to myself as an educator (with a bit of tech-geek thrown in). I cannot say how much of an educator he understands himself to be. Throughout our conversation, I realized he knows things about education I do not understand and that I know things I want technology to do for me that programmers do not understand. According to his philosophy of technology all the things I want technology to do are quite possible. I had to wonder if my philosophy of education is flexible enough to accommodate the things he understands. As much as I learned from the professional educators, I was more inspired by the professional technologist. Things are possible in education that even professional educators do not yet imagine.
I must confess that I have been somewhat of an educational snob. I welcome input and knowledge from other educators. I resent business people (legislators) input on education. I could always find a flaw in their thinking with ample educational research to disprove what they claim. The random conversation with a technologist who is as passionate about his craft as I am about mine forced me to rethink who it is that I learn from. Do I only want to have educators with a Master’s degree or higher in my Twitter feed?
If I limit my focus, I am as guilty as the major educational organizations who only focus on best-selling authors for keynote speakers and session presenters. In one position I held was tasked with bringing in presenters for professional development who addressed a specific program the district had implemented. The more I read resumes, the more I realized how incestuously the connections between the experts was. Common backgrounds appeared in the resume. Common affiliations with universities and professional organizations stood out. I realized that everyone I was considering knew everyone else I was considering. There are vast opportunities outside the educational community for learning about education.
Those thoughts were reinforced the next morning when I shared a table in the overflow area with a school superintendent who teaches a leadership course for his local university. Because the course focuses on leadership, not educational leadership, his students have included employees of Fortune 500 companies, small business owners, educators, and military personnel. He affirmed my belief that the conversation was richer with the diversity of perspectives. In the next term, only educators have registered for the class and he is concerned about the shifts he has to make in presenting the curriculum. The variety that comes from a mixed classroom shifts the quantity of knowledge the participants bring.
While at a conference, and in my hours online from home, I prefer the company of others with that divergent perspective an un-common experiences to hearing the voices of my co-workers. That does not mean I do not value the input and expertise of my peers. Because of our shared experience we often understand that experience better than anyone else. Even though we are housed in the same building, just as eyewitnesses to a car crash have a different perspective depending on which corner they were standing, so do the staff with whom I work. From the classroom, to the specialist, to adminstration, we see each situation through our own unique lens. Each one brings powerful knowledge to solving the ongoing challenges we face.
As I continue to build my personal learning network, I keep finding valuable new sources that inform me in ways I did not expect. That is the power of a PLN - as much as the collection of experts from whom to glean gems of wisdom- it is an opening of one’s own mind to new ideas. One idea from the conference has so dwelt in my mind that I am determined to see it to fruition though I do not even know the first step to take - but I know people who do! With an open mind and the expertise to help me through, I look forward to fulfilling the dream. That is the kind of PLN I want.
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