Unfortunately the ICEQ (International Conference of Education Quality) conference in Morocco was unable to run due to the pandemic. (I was heeing and hawing on whether I would go.) I think partly because they canceled the conference that community held a number of remote workshops. I decided to attend today’s workshop given by Devin Thornburg. Holy Cow, That Was Useful! THANK YOU DEVIN! AMAZING WORKSHOP!

To me, a complete novice, Action Research seemed as framework for implementing high quality change in the education world (see the figure below). Having been both a physicist and a management consultant, this is right up my alley and exactly how we usually go about solving problems. I love it! Because it was applied to such a variety of fields, it is very general.

And to have so many wonderful people from different walks of life, from different countries, all working together to share solutions, discussion, and experiences was AMAZING. Interacting with people and being exposed to new ideas was the best part. For example, I got to think about the digital divide in Morocco, which is something I hadn’t even considered before today.

There was interesting discussion in my breakout room about how folks from different communities deal with accessibility to technology during the pandemic. (Is technology even the solution?) Its nice to hear the sudden counter opinions from people that work with different populations. One idea that was expressed was how many students crave the human connection in education. However, right away, there was counter discussion on how some students are benefiting from moving to the virtual learning environments, thus happy with the lack of human connection.

Of course this discussion was 100% professional. With all the blah blah and yelling on the news every night, it is nice to have an intellectual conversation with real smart people trying to solve real difficult problems. I used to have these discussions in the hallways or at the dining hall. I MISS THEM!

There wasn’t enough time! I would have loved to have more time to chat with the folks and help them reframe my world view. I got ideas for TWO APPS I could build on a smart phone! Don’t worry, I won’t because I have too much else going on. I will go to one of these conference’s with Devin in the future. It is exactly the kind of horizontal cross-disciplinary work we need to do more of in society.

Max Benefit

Learning about something new and powerful is always worthwhile. But the biggest takeaway today was what it was like to be in an interactive classroom (being a student) on online.

• Holy cow, it 100% stinks when your Zoom break out room ends mid-thought. Someone was speaking about something relevant and I was listening but then it just ended! I do that to my students all the time. 🙁
• My wifi connection kept going in and out toward the end. It was hard to follow the speaker’s discussion. 🙁 Imagine if I had a test on this stuff. 🙁
• It is difficult to get started when you, as an instructor, give an open-ended question.