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In today's podcast, Ilona talks to Sean Nash, a Marine Biology teacher in the St. Joseph Missouri Public School District. After eighteen years of dedication to the classroom, he transitioned to the position of Instructional Coach to support teacher professional development efforts in his building. More recently, he assumed the title Academic Technology Instructional Specialist, which is a district-level position supporting teachers and principals across 25 different schools in the district. He specializes in helping teachers maintain relevance and learn new technologies that strengthen and develop their teaching in step with the tech-saturated world of their students. Sean has a passion for staying current and using social media to empower his students to become engaged and independent learners. In that spirit, Sean created several online learning networks on the Ning platform that are focused on science for both teachers and students, which have received national attention and become quite successful. [12:19]
Full transcript
ILONA MIKO: Welcome to NatureEdCast. I'm Ilona Miko. And today we're talking to Sean Nash, an academic technology specialist. Sean Nash is a marine biology teacher in the St. Joseph, Missouri, public school district, where after eighteen years of dedication to the classroom, he transitioned to the position of instructional coach to support teacher professional development efforts in his building. More recently he assumed the title Academic Technology Instructional Specialist, which is a district-level position supporting teachers and principals across 25 different schools in the district.
He specializes in helping teachers maintain relevance and learn new technologies that strengthen and develop their teaching in step with the tech-saturated world of their students. Sean has a passion for staying current and using social media to empower his students to become engaged and independent learners. In that spirit, Sean created several online learning networks on the Ning platform that are focused on science for both teachers and students, which have received national attention and become quite successful. Welcome, Sean.
SEAN NASH: Thank you.
MIKO: I'm glad you could join us today. So you have a rich background in science education and an interesting story to tell. Can we first begin by describing for everyone what is a Ning platform?
NASH: Yes, sure. Ning is actually one of several platforms that really facilitate the building of online networks. These are places that allow for both synchronous and asynchronous communication between the members. So in other words, there's the ability to have a real time chat as well as the ability to respond to ongoing discussions and debates sort of at your own time and at your own pace when you can get to it. So these networks are also the kinds of things that are really potentially valuable aggregators of content resources. So the members of our networks tend to bring in content of all sorts that's been valuable to them as a teacher, and so that content can be in the form of articles or hyperlinks, images, video, information about upcoming events, and so on. So they bring it back to the network and they tag those things, they're archived, and then that makes them searchable far into the future.
MIKO: So you created a really popular learning network for high school biology teachers called the Synapse and it's exploded in membership over a very short time. It now includes over 600 members. Would you tell us how it got started and what it has become today?
NASH: It actually started with another social media tool that I've really purposely used for professional learning and that's Twitter. And while the perception of Twitter and its ilk outside of education is somewhat of incessant babble about what strangers had for breakfast, many educators have already sort of spontaneously formed loose networks of professional interest using Twitter to communicate, share resources. That being said, one particular night almost three ago, several of my contacts on Twitter who are biology teachers were having a pretty intense discussion about the issue surrounding the topic of evolution in American schools. And so the seven or eight of us — really, these are people that were all over, from Utah and Monterey, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and me in Missouri — and one of our colleagues, Stacy Baker (at the time from Maryland), was really lamenting about a really stressful dilemma in her world where she was getting a ton of pushback about the teaching of evolution. And so the rest of us that night really sort of came in to try to support her and talk about things that we had done, potential strategies. The thing about Twitter is it's really not the best place for this type of interaction. There's a 140-character limit. It's really constricting. And so that night I suggested that we needed a better place to do this sort of thing. We needed to be able to support each other in an ongoing way. And so fast forward to you today, we created the Synapse on the Ning platform.
MIKO: So you guys have discussions on this platform?
NASH: Absolutely. And really the users are free to freely engage in groups and create groups around course content that they're teaching or maybe a particular course or subject area. So it's pretty free flowing, really, but yeah.
MIKO: So my understanding is it's now actually changed very recently to a new name?
NASH: Yeah. Yes, so it's still the Synapse, but a really interesting thing is that Ning over about the past year changed their business model from being completely free to now networks the size of ours are required to be paying networks. And the really interesting thing about this network is that because it was spontaneously formed by several people and not really attached to a traditional organization, we really had no funding source. We had no ability to pay for anything like this. And really I was sort of afraid that it would go away. A lot of us were. So one day I just thought, “Hey, why don't I ask?” So I asked around, and sure enough there was a lot of feedback that came back and said, “You know, that's really, that network — why would we start fresh when that network is already going well? There are already at over five hundred members. We have one of our members, Susan Musante, who is an education outreach specialist for the American Institute of Biological Sciences. She responded back and said, “Yeah, we would like to do that.” So, today, there is a really relatively new collaboration called “BioCollage” and that consists of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the University of California's Museum of Paleontology. So we do have sponsorship and we will be moving on in future.
MIKO: So it's going strong and you see a lot of teachers benefiting from this kind of shared resource and discussion platform. I'm curious. You also use the Ning platform for your teaching. How has it been useful for your teaching and interactions with students?
NASH: There's a lot of overlap, of course, because it's really the same tool. But how that tool is repurposed for that reason or that goal really does change things. So one of the things it has allowed me to do is to complete my philosophy for teaching science or anything, really. And part of my philosophy is the fact that students leave me as empowered independent learners. And one of the ways to do that, to move things away from me being the fount of knowledge and me dispensing information for students to soak up, is to do things on the network where I can present students with a topic, present them with a problem, present them with a real situation that doesn't have an easy solution, and send them out to bring back resources and to aggregate those resources in a certain spot and to debate those and to battle over those with one another and with me.
MIKO: So they're sharing their research?
NASH: Yeah. They're sharing exactly what they find. You know, and students today need a lot of help with information literacy. I mean really the Internet — it's a fire hose of information out there and they need help being able to discern authority of a resource, the accuracy, the currency. All of those good things about basic information literacy are just important twenty-first-century skills for all students.
MIKO: So the Ning platform helps them filter out the better resources from the maybe weaker ones? Do they —
NASH: —Yeah. It allows me to sort of play the facilitator. And I can play the expert on the side, but it's more just in time learning. So they're starting and I'm coming along where needed to sort of help repair misconceptions.
MIKO: Do you think it helps them be more creative?
NASH: I don't know about creative, but it's certainly — you know, really, I think part of the thing is that we're still really pretty new using tools like this. And I think we're on the up-curve of really the potential of what these things can do. So it's certainly more engaging to them than a lot of other alternatives. So yeah, that would make sense to see that in the future.
MIKO: It's kind of going to the places where they already are. They're already using networks of some kind for social reasons. And why not have their down time be partly about learning. So your biology teachers network received national attention, as you mentioned. All these societies got together to support it and keep it going because it's just relevant and helpful to teachers. But also I understand that your classroom, student-based Ning, particularly for marine biology, has been noticed on a national level. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and how it actually involved students' data collection to a certain extent?
NASH: Yeah, one of the things that it really started was in 2006 just got a cold email from a representative from the Center for Biological Diversity. And they were preparing a formal petition to NOAA, a government agency really, and they were petitioning for the inclusion of the two most important Caribbean corals to be included for protection under the endangered species act.
MIKO: And why did they call you?
NASH: A really interesting question. So they ran across images that they'd found on the Internet. So my students since 2000 have been spending a week of our course, in April, snorkeling the Andros Barrier Reef, Andros Island in the Bahamas. And so my students would do work there. They would collect — a lot of the data we were collecting was photo data. So we would throw it up on our website and we just thought it was one-way communication. We're pushing that out. And this was the first time really that somebody had come back and said, “Hey, you've got a really great resource there. You have photographs that show different stages of reef health. You know, you've got beautiful pictures of healthy coral reefs and you've also gotten the other end. Your stories really, your images really tell a story of what's going on in Caribbean coral reefs and we could use these to help teach because that type of petition really is a teaching tool.
MIKO: And didn't you also, inadvertently, because you'd been repeatedly over several years, you had sort of documented some degradation or some leeching effects that had been happening there? So you actually had a data set of images that showed the impact over time on these corals?
NASH: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's just — what's funny is you know there's nothing fancy about that pictures but the photographer brings a certain filter to what they do with the camera. And so when you've got a community of students and a teacher who are learning about coral reefs and invertebrate zoology and so on, when you put them on the reef, they are going to have, they are going to see different things, they're going to find value in different things in that situation, and they're going to bring that to their photographs.
MIKO: Yeah, and it's a document over a period of time that's very valuable. Well thanks for sharing that with us today and telling us about the Ning platform and how valuable it can be for both teachers and students in science, but probably in other areas as well. Thanks, Sean, for joining us.
NASH: Absolutely. Thanks very much.
MIKO: Thank you for listening to this edition of Nature EdCast. You can find this podcast and others at nature dot com slash scitable. That's nature.com/s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e. Please join us again next time.
