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The 9x9x25 Challenge: Nine Posts, Nine Weeks, 25 Words

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Photo of Todd Conaway

by Todd Conaway, Instructional Designer, Yavapai College

What if professional development was a challenge?  What if you were rewarded with the recognition of your colleagues—locals and across the planet—throughout the process?  What if everything was free?

And what if you learned about critical digital literacy skills, and the best practices your colleagues offer their students along the way, and it all happened in a “class-like” environment on the open Web?

Well, that is just what faculty at Yavapai College, a small community college in central Arizona, did during the past nine weeks—17 faculty members rose to the occasion and 16 completed the challenge.

A Michigan college replicated the idea and several K-12 schools and other colleges would like to run their own version.

The 9x9x25 Challenge invited faculty to write 25 sentences a week about teaching and learning for nine consecutive weeks.  The writing had to be done on the Internet and available for anyone to read.  Those were the simple rules—anything about teaching and learning, anywhere on the Internet people could get to.

I was careful not to market the idea using the word 'blog' as I think there is still some negative connotation to it. That is unfortunate, but I do think it exists. So I just asked them to write. Of course that sounded good and academic.

The college aggregated the written contributions on the Teaching and eLearning Support Web site.  The WordPress blogging platform made the presentation easy.  Most of the participants also included their contributions on their own blogs.  Others could more clearly see how powerful a blogging platform can be, and, hopefully, see how useful it can be in the classroom.

The Yavapai faculty wrote some fantastic posts.  Authors learned from each other, as did many of the other 200 Yavapai faculty members who did not participate. Each Monday we sent out a campus-wide e-mail that highlighted the week and reminded other faculty and staff that the writing was there.  I also informed my Twitter followers about the posts.  The participants interacted with the Northwestern Michigan College faculty, learned from them, and received comments from many others.

So much happened.  The challenge gave our faculty the opportunity to learn so many things about how we teach, what works for us, and what does not.  We are looking forward to next year when we can implement some changes to improve the event.  I recently presented my ideas about the challenge and next year's possibilities at the Global Education Conference.

The feedback was all positive.  It was challenging.  It was time consuming.  And it worked!

Here are the posts, beginning with the final reflections

Here are the archives of the posts

Here is the original text sent to the faculty

 


Winter 2013 Issue of the ITC Newsletter, Instructional Technology Council.