Activity 5 - Professional Connections Map

Question: Activity 5: Professional connection map

Draw a map which demonstrates your current and potential professional connections. Based on the map, make goal(s) for extending your professional connections. 

1. What other professional communities intersect with or lie at the borders of your own profession? What impact do these communities have on your practice and professional community?
2. What are or what would be the benefits and challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment?

You need to explain the map of professional connections and evaluate one or two connections you have. This can be done in written form or using embedded media (presentation, video, etc,..)

My own Professional Network

My PREBBLE Map

1. What other professional communities intersect with or lie at the borders of your own profession? What impact do these communities have on your practice and professional community?
1. The Royal Society NZ runs the CREST Challenge in conjunction with the IITP TechHub in Schools (formally ICT-Connect). The CREST challenge allowed Y10 students to work in groups to design an app whilst being mentored by industry experts, which they then presented in a 'Dragon's Den' style to a panel of expert judges.
2.  The IITP TechHub in School also brought industry experts into schools to talk to the students and tell them about the benefits and challenges of careers in the wide ranging IT fields. The impact of inviting these speakers in to my classes was to give the students a deeper and broader appreciation for how the subject may be relevant to their future aspirations. This in turn boosted morale and student engagement and so reduced behavioral issue as students enjoyed the course more. More students chose the subject for their options. This increase in numbers permitted me to sway the senior leadership to allow more classes and, most significantly, to split 4 multilevel classes (Y11-13) into 5 separate year level classes ( 3 x Y11, 2 x Y12 and 1 x Y13). The impact of this was to improve teacher/student contact time and in doing so improve grades. This virtuous cycle
3. Computer Science for High Schools by Google @ Victoria University Wellington and @Unitec
   These CS4HS conferences are some of the most valuable Professional Development (PD) throughout the year. They connect high school teachers and encourage the sharing of experience. The CS university professors from Cantrebury, VUW and Unitec give invluable insight and advice and help to upskill teachers through theory and hands-on workshops. The impact of these CS4HS have been I have redeveloped the curriculum in school and supported other staff to deliver the new achievement standards to Levels 1-3 (Y11-13). I have also scaffolded this by rewriting the courses for junior digital technology students to introduce basic CS and coding to Years 7-10.
1. Individual sessions / workshops have included:
1. codeavengers.com with Mike Walmsley
2. Gather Workshops by Tanya Gray
3. Arduino robotics with Elf Eldridge @ VUW ECS
4. Mobile app development by Mahsa Mohahhegh @ Unitec
2. What are or what would be the benefits and challenges of working in a more interdisciplinary environment?

Benefits:

1. removes siloed approach an allows cross-curricula project based learning that can foster students' and teachers' interests. Students can combine interests in other subjects an take a more Renaissance approach, e.g. combining Arts and Science or STEM, or music and digital technology. 
2. encourage student collaboration through modelling best practice of staff collaboration
3. staff will gain a better overview of the students' experiences in other subjects and how they relate to them
4. students will have opportunity to experience more realistic multi-disciplinary teamworking as this is the 'norm' in industry.
5. staff will benefit from up-skilling in tangential subjects
6. students can explore their interests and passions and make real world links with their community through project based learning.

Challenges: 

1. time allowance for planning, moderation, 
2. time pressures from timetables currently split into sigle lessons
3. resistance from existing siloed stakeholders, parents, students
4. to balance the project so that the other disciplines are not used tokenistically, as is sometimes the case when other subjects use ICT non critically, e.g. "make a poster" or use wikipedia for research.

References

Mathison,S.. & Freeman, M.(1997). The logic of interdisciplinary studies. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 1997. Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/cela/reports/mathisonlogic12004.pdf

Noble, A (2014, June 13). CS + X: What's your X? Retreived from http://google-au.blogspot.co.nz/2014/06/cs-x-whats-your-x.html 

TEDx Talks (2001, April 6). TEDxBYU - David Wiley - An Interdisciplinary Path to Innovation. [video file].Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ytjMDongp4