Chapter 3 Narratives

Storytelling serves as an indispensable tool for illuminating new paths before us, connecting us into collaborative groups, and making seemingly insurmountable mountains into mole hills. #SquadGoalsNetwork formed through the sharing of stories - from casual chats over drinks to formal presentations and panels, the authors quickly gleaned that the impact of their connections was magnified through sharing tales of failures and successes alike. In line with this practice, the authors decided that they would establish storytelling as the cornerstone of their PLN. The website served as an ideal space to collect stories of others perceptions and interactions with PLNs, and reflection prompts were created to help frame the stories around key themes within the field of teaching and learning

3.1 Instrument

As previously mentioned, a space was created on the #SquadGoalsNetwork website that allows visitors to share stories on the power and effective practices stemming from the formation of PLNs. These narratives were then coded using the OLC quality pillars, illuminating the benefits and impact of participation in PLNs. The survey instrument used to collect narrative data is as follows:

Access: Does regular access to other individuals from other institutions and institutional perspectives challenge your definition of access and what it means? If so, how?

Faculty Satisfaction: How has your participation in the PLN benefitted faculty and colleagues at your home institution?

Learning Effectiveness: When you reflect on your work, how has meeting and learning from individuals from other institutions and institutional perspectives helped you to clarify or re-define what it means for learning to be effective?

Scale: Is the PLN scalable and/or replicable by others at other institutions/organizations? If so, how? What challenges do you encounter?

Student Satisfaction: Do you feel that your involvement and/or collaboration with the PLN has helped you create better student experiences at at your institution?

3.1.1 Email copy

In kicking off the data collection process, the authors generated a list of names of individuals they’d met at or liaised with at conferences that eventually became a part of their PLN. The authors also collaboratively created sample email content that was used as inspiration for the personalized invitations they sent out to their colleagues whom they hoped would submit narratives. The content of that sample email contentn is as follows:

[Salutation] -

We talk a lot about how our connections as educators make up a brilliant constellation of shared knowledge, inspiration and support. We glow brighter together, and the significant challenges that we face within higher education are made surmountable through our collaborations.

As a member of our group of connected educators (and more importantly, friends), we were hoping that you might join us in our initiative to document the ways in which our network has benefitted us as practitioners, researchers, and innovators within the field of higher education. For many of us, our origin story began with the Online Learning Consortium’s conferences, and the Technology Test Kitchen in particular. The conversations that began in that space (and within similar spaces and events) have allowed us to forge deep connections and engage in collaborative research, publishing, and the planning of new initiatives at our own institutions and at other conferences. Our efforts are strengthened by the brilliance and generosity of the company we’re lucky enough to keep.

As a means of capturing and documenting this lightning in a bottle, we’ve created a website to help us collect and curate our stories on the power of our personal learning networks. Many of us co-opted #squadgoals last year as a way to classify our connection, so we’ve decided to expand the goodness with Squad Goals Network (http://squadgoalsnetwork.com/). A combination of blog posts and podcasts collected on our site and aggregated from external sites, we hope that the website will serve as an artifact of our impact within higher education when we work towards a shared goal.

So flowery language aside, where do you come in? We are hoping to collect short stories on how your personal learning network has benefitted you professionally. We have five short questions on a form that we hoped you might share on our site. We plan to code the narratives and share them out in a white paper, but beyond that, the stories will help to inspire countless others to seek out their own partners in crime to do good within our field.

Share Your Story: http://squadgoalsnetwork.com/about/share-a-story/

As you’ll see, we’ve done a soft launch of our site, and are hoping that your additions (along with a few other tweaks) will set us up for a grand launch in the next month or so. Speaking of additions, if you have a blog or would like to submit blog posts to our site, let us know. We are hopeful that by opening this up to our trusted collaborators, that we’ll be able to scale our impact exponentially.

Thank you in advance for helping us with this, and if there are deeper ways you’d like to collaborate with our team, let us know. The more the merrier!

Cheers, [Name]

While the exactly content of the email was less important the spirit, this served as a good jumping-off point.

3.2 Coding Process

Inspired by the narratives collected as evidence of the impact of the Technology Test Kitchen, the authors decided to frame the coding process around stories sourced from colleagues and publicly shared on the website. Data was collected from individuals identified as collaborators in PLNs that worked with Online Learning Consortium initiatives, which then expanded to other events and collaborations. Narratives were gathered, grounded in questions defined by the Online Learning Consortium’s Five Pillars of Quality as defined at https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/about/quality-framework-five-pillars/.

Participants submitting narratives were invited to share their experiences with PLNs either on the #SquadGoalsNetwork website or on their own website. The content was presented dynamically using a WordPress plugin called Formidable, which compiled all of the responses and served them out in a standard layout and format.

3.3 Timeline for Future Data Collection

The authors frequently use the metaphor of constellations as a way to describe their connections within PLNs - linked stars creating a visual story of individuals working together. The hope of the team was to use the narrative collection process as an ongoing artifact of the ways in which the network had grown over the years, particularly the visualization of spheres of influence within the PLN. Future plans for narrative collection include the following:

• Invitations from contributors to members of their networks to submit narratives
• Identification of the individuals who connected those with narrative submissions to the site
• A survey to collect information on influencers within networks (i.e. “Who do you call for things like this?”)
• Regular blog prompts submitted over social media to generate the submission of additional narratives

With the permission of the submitters of content, the team plans to make this data available to visitors of the website in the form of visualizations, effective practices and white papers.