Being agile as a teacher means staying true to your purpose, fixed in your intent to provide excellent in education but always adapting and adopting new methods of achieving that goal where prompted to by changes in the world around you: the Internet demonstrates how agility is now a key aspect of knowledge work – make it part of your teaching
In using a knowledge networking approach, educators need to become agile in their teaching, responsive to and adapting to rapid changes in the way students are learning, both from semester to semester and also within a single unit. Agility relocates the primary emphasis in teaching away from the mastery of content which, once mastered, is then presented again and again, with small variations, from year to year. Agile teachers, instead, change what they are doing regularly and focus on the processes by which innovative uses of Web 2.0 applications, within the public knowledge networking arena, can unleash students’ creativity.
Agile teaching helps us to solve the apparent problems of the contingency of knowledge working tools and knowledgeable outcomes. An agile approach means that, if a website you are using is ‘down’, then you switch to a different one; with the multiple communications channels now available. For example, recently at Curtin there were problems with the Elluminate chat service: tutors switched to the readily available tinychat service and, via Twitter, the discussion group and other means, propagated the information needed for students to find this alternative. Agile teaching requires knowledge of the potential of Web 2.0 applications even if they are not, at first, being used so that, if required, these tools can be exploited. Agility is not just an outcome but a predisposition to respond to the problems of teaching and learning as problems of the complexity of collaborative knowledge work, and use the publicly available means by which flexible, innovative solutions can be formed with minimal overheads, investment or complexity.
Finally, agile teaching means moving outside of the required zones of interaction in which students come to their teacher and, without overly interfering in informal learning, pushing information and activity out into the places where students are increasingly comfortable in living a connected existence. It has been noted that many younger Internet users deprecate email and chat now in favour of Facebook which combines, in one place, varieties of email, chat and asynchronous communication. An agile response to this situation would neither involve ignoring it, nor giving in to it: but, rather, it could be productive to establish a Facebook page or group which serves simply to ‘push’ key information and communication into the spaces where students are often attending most closely. Agility might also involve linking other channels of communication and interaction (through which the learning networks form) to Facebook, again while not necessarily using it directly.
Reading
Razmov. 2006. Experiences with Agile Teaching in Project-Based Courses – agility here is drawn from software development models and used in a similar manner to my approach.
<blockquote>Whenever you think you have had an original idea, Google will tell you someone already thought of it!</blockquote>
