Recently I was thinking about ways to connect my classroom to the larger world outside our door. I noticed each morning on my way to work, a beautiful space in my building that was not being used for anything. Long corridors of empty wall space. Aha! A perfect space for an art show.
I created an assignment for my integrating new digital media into the curriculum course as a way of getting students to use social/participatory media to share, communicate, create, organize, collaborate, and network focusing on a specific project/problem: creating, organizing, advertising,and managing, a showing of art that they themselves create (see assignment for details).
But there's a catch: once I introduce this lesson to the class, they are not permitted to talk about it in the classroom physically. They must use social media tools to support the planning, communication, coordination, and co-production of the show. Sound like fun?
The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens' to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see flow]. Community projects like an artshow require the use of many important participatory skills. Such project-based learning permits a classroom to act and learn through experience, placing ownership of the learning in the participants hands. Event planning, organization and communication will take place outside of the formal class environment using social media [Twitter/Facebook/Blogs].
This art show is a pro-social initiative designed to connect learning, schools, students, teachers, administrators, family, community, peers, and friends with and through digital media. In addition, utilizing digital, participatory media allows us to connect our learning and experience with others interested in participating in similar initiatives.
Come on and rock this party! Your thoughts and comments are encouraged.
Recently I was reflecting on the skills we want our kids to possess as they enter adulthood and participate actively as g/local citizens. Here are two major skill sets defined by Henry Jenkins, et al., and Tony Wagner:
Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
As I look over these lists, I noticed one important skill was missing: empathy.
Empathy can be defined as “a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself.” This is an important skill to posses as it permits us to work toward understanding perspectives and points of view different from our own. Empathy is an important social and emotional skill that requires us to practice listening, another important skill that can be easily overlooked as well. Empathy is also a function of cognitive maturity; that is, the ability to take another’s point of view requires a certain degree of cognitive complexity. In this sense, perhaps empathy falls under discernment wherein we learn how to detect feelings, ideas, sensations with our senses.
In look back over distance education literature, Holmberg (1996) noted what he called “the empathy approach.” Through empathy Holmberg suggests that “feelings of personal relations between student and teacher promote motivation, study pleasure and effectiveness” (Holmberg, 1996, p. 489). Such relations Holmberg insists involve a personal style of presentation by the teacher that engages students emotionally, asking them to share their personal reactions, views and experiences. Similarly, in Daniel Goleman’s (1995) work on emotional intelligence, empathy is defined as a critical facet of social awareness and a key component to an overall feeling of success in life.
In light of such examinations, I feel that we should consider including empathy in our list of 21st century skills as a distinct category. Goleman’s (1995) research suggests that empathy is positively related to intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. The need for empathy is increasingly important in the workplace where teamwork and social competencies are a critical factor in success. Similarly, globalization, and the challenges associated with intercultural relationships, make empathy a important managerial competence.
References:
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Holmberg, B. (1996). On the potential of distance education in the Age of Information Technology. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2(6): 484-491.
Wagner, T. (2009). The global achievement gap : why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need–and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.
In preparation for my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I have been sifting through hundreds of bookmarks in my Delicious account. I have started a document containing 150+ resources/links, many of which will serve as assigned readings and starting points for students. This collection of resources is divided into 12 categories that include social media, learning with technology, adolescence, social networks, tactics, strategy, failure, critical thinking, games, social action, lifehacks, and other teaching and learning resources. The list will grow and change over the coming weeks; nevertheless, I felt compelled to share what I have so far.
This slide deck is being used for an overview discussion for my Spring 2010 course on integrating technology into the secondary curriculum. The audience is a collection of undergraduate students who are minoring in education. This presentation is used to provide a visual narrative for discussing the many concepts associated with teaching and learning in the 21st century.
Interestingly enough, I am working on developing course called Instructional Computing 2 for our department. And there are so many ways to think about designing a course, so I decided to try something different.
Since June 2008 I began tagging my favorite Tweets from my Twitter network. Twitter has a tool that will allow you to do this, i.e., marking a tweet as a favorite. For me Twitter is a learning network, a place where I can follow the shared thoughts of hundreds of local, national, and international teachers, scholars, movers, and shakers.
I started sifting through the two hundred or so favorited tweets. Some tweets were to weblinks, some were simply thoughtful reflections. As I sorted through them I noticed specific patterns emerging related to topics I wanted to cover in my class, like social and participatory media, identity, change, innovation, life on the screen, trust, safety, opportunity gaps, relationships, sharing, communication, collaboration, social action, civic engagement, and the future.
This process of using Twitter and my learning network (i.e., social media) has allowed me to develop a comprehensive course that embodies the collective intelligence of hundreds of brilliant people. In this sense, social media has clearly impacted the way I think about course content and course design. I can learn from experts, share in their thinking and discoveries, and engage them with follow up questions and comments. This is a large shift in the way I develop course content. I used to begin designing a course based on what I know. Now I start with what others know and and work my way from the edges to the center.
Recently a colleague asked me how I might define Web 2.0 (two point oh). Since I always like a challenge, the first thing I thought about was my dear old dad.
Even though my father worked on computers when 8K was the size of a refrigerator, he is not much for jargon. In conversation recently, I dropped the word "wiki" into a sentence. He then asked, "What's a wiki?"
My first reaction was, "Oh lawd, I've forgotten that I live in this techie bubble! I need to remember to speak in plain English."
While I am aware of many resources that speak of "user generated content," I am wanting to approach this definition from a more concrete base. At the risk of over simplification, here's what I've come up with so far. Let me know what you think and/or how I might improve upon this working definition.
Web 1.0 = me Web 2.0 = me + you
Web 1.0 = read Web 2.0 = read + write
Web 1.0 = connecting ideas Web 2.0 = connecting ideas + connecting people
Web 1.0 = search Web 2.0 = recommendations of friends/others
This experiment suggests that many people do not process the myriad of information coming through their eyes. Consequently, many people experience a form of change blindness, i.e., we often miss large changes to our visual world from one view to the next. As such, we are often unable to see large changes that would appear to be patently obvious to somebody who knows the changes are going to happen.
In this experiment, 75 percent of the participants do not notice the change in the person behind the counter. So what might this finding suggest? What separates those who do notice the change from those who do not? Individual differences? Coincidence?
So much depends on where our mind is focused and the ways we choose to participate in the world. This experiment is a helpful illustration of perceptual blindness and the slippery slope that is memory. Clearly we all share a limited capacity for attention that limits the amount of information processed at any given moment. If we do not see something, consequently, it will not exist in our mind.
Fostering Change
This illustration is also important to consider when examining what is involved in getting others to see things differently, i.e., change their ways of seeing. Whatever a change agent's cause — global warming, ending risky financial speculation, reforming pay to reward performance, corporate culture change, or innovation in an established institution — confronting change blindness is essential. Rosabeth Moss Kanter offers a set of tactics that have been found to be helpful in getting people to move from a state of denial to a state of acceptance and change. These tools include:
Start with the facts -- Change advocates must make sure the evidence they marshall is beyond reproach, which often means gathering appropriate evidence from multiple sources.
Consider the alternatives -- Change advocates must know the other side as well as their own. They must confront, not deny, alternative explanations and respond with compelling arguments, sometimes incorporating grains of truth in skeptics' positions.
Show where the change will lead -- Facts are only a starting point. Significant change rests on beliefs. Change advocates must identify long-term benefits that will be valuable to the shared values held by many (i.e., the stakeholders).
Pressure and repetition -- When pressure for change is in deniers' faces every day, they often succumb.
Getting people to see what is in front of their eyes is challenging for educators and change agents alike. Clearly, much of what passes for existence is uncertain. As such, we are often comforted by keeping things the way they are. Doing nothing different or nothing at all is easy. Everyone has silent veto power. Change blindness is always in play and in every aspect of our awareness, judgment and politics exists. For educators and change agents, leadership is key.
Three-takeaways
To successfully confront change and change blindness (in this case, think of change blindness as a form of resistance), consider the following strategies:
Collaborate -- working with others in a collegial and supportive manner can help orgainze, facts and counter arguments.
Communicate -- in working with others to foster a new vision, communication is vital to insure show where the changes will lead.
Learn how to learn together -- learning, uncovering the facts, moving in positive and appropriate directions works best when it is done within a culture that tolerates diversity, collaboration, failure, and learning from all of these combined experiences.
While what I offer here is nothing new, per se, I believe it's important to reflect on both the barriers to change and the conditions which can foster positive growth and development. The contexts in which change blindness occurs may be unique depending on your situation, but the ways to address change, denial, and resistance, remain relatively consistent and are always relevant.
I have been thinking more and more about learning typologies lately. Specifically, I am trying to better understand the spaces between formal, non-formal, and informal learning.
As such I ran across this diagram which you may or may not be familiar:
I found this on Patrick Dunn's site quite by accident. I have found it helpful in thinking about intentionality and learning. Constructivist and situationalist arguments aside, this diagram suggests that so much of what learning is depends on accident or improvisation, no?
I'm not sure we can say that one learns by accident. One can learn accidentally, yet so much depends on where one's head is. The implications of this diagram for learning designers might be that so much depends on creating situations where people appear to learn by accident. In reality, learning designers can help create conditions that foster creativity and problem-solving, providing a proverbial koan that can be opened at a later day/time when the proper conditions are present.
This is a list of the tools that my students and I have used or played with this semester. Many I rely on. Others I am experimenting with. Feedback and/or recommendations welcome. (^ ^)
A GMail account. All sharing collaborating, communicating starts with GMail including GoogleDocs, Spreadsheets, Surveys, Presentation, Google Reader, Google Sites, iGoogle, and Google Groups. I have replaced my Entourage calendar at work with Google Calendar (and I am excited to start playing with Chrome someday). Wave is still in the "gaming" stage. And while use multiple search engines for differing purposes, I start with Google Search (with ads off and Twitter search). Google Scholar is also useful for finding articles and research quickly. Google Earth has been used as well for student activities and "play."
Social bookmarking is done with Delicious. While I use FriendFeed and Diigo weekly, I still rely most heavily on Delicious. I have also taught student to search it and SlideShare to find helpful resources and information.
When playing with concept maps, we have explored Gliffy, Bubblous, Wisdomap, and MindMeister. For rubric development we use GoogleSpreadsheet and Rubistar with some success.
I am experimenting with Mendeley as a bibliographic resource. I started with EndNote, then switched to keeping spreadsheets in Google.
We used Audacity to support digital audio recordings and Jing for our screencasting activities. Prezi has also been used to create unique presentations. Glogster has been discussed but not integrated into our curriculum in a meaningful way.
VoiceThread was introduced as a way to combine audio, visual, and textual interaction online.
Wordle is always fun for looking at patterns in bodies of text.
Twitter has been used to support discussion and dialogue as well as collaboration and assessment. I use Tweet Deck to stay in touch with my Twitter PLN.
YouTube has served as a host for several student projects plus serves as a great resource for teaching and learning.
I recently discovered hundreds of wonderful music playlists on LastFm.
I use my uni's library catalog and WorldCat for searching books. I use Amazon for examining similar texts and recommendations.
While visit Facebook on occassion, my students are all dedicated users. They have even presented lesson content and quizzes with it. My students are quite savvy!
I use Flickr for personal photos and Picasa for professional work. Flickr is also used to find Creative Commons media.
My college uses Moodle as a course management system and we recommend Firefox for browsing. Additionally, Firefox has hundreds of add-ons for enhancing our time on the Web.
When I think about a classroom one of the first things I think about is movement.
A classroom is a small hive buzzing with energy and diversity. And in this hive, when you pay attention closely, you can see a host of dances taking place.
In a recent post, Ways to think about movement, Celine Llewellyn-Jones shares her thinking about the connection between dance and classroom activity. According to Llewellyn-Jones, dance embodies four specific elements that she learned from the work of Anne Green Gilbert, Director of Creative Dance Center Seattle, Washington, :
Space 1. Place self space (personal space), general space (room space) 2. Size big (far reach), medium (mid-reach), small (near reach) 3. Level high, middle, low 4. Direction forward, backward, right, left, up, down 5. Pathway curved, straight, zigzag 6. Focus single focus, multi-focus
Force 9. Energy sharp (sudden), smooth (sustained) 10. Weight strong, light 11. Flow free (continuous, off-balance), bound (controlled, on-balance)
Body 12. Parts head, neck, shoulders, arm, wrists, elbows, hands, fingers, hips, pelvis, trunk, spine, stomach, sternum, legs, knees, feet, toes, heels, etc. 13. Relationships over, under, around, through, above, below, beside, between, near, far, in, out, on, off, together, apart, alone, connected, mirror, shadow 14. Shapes curved, straight, angular, twisted, symmetrical, asymmetrical 15. Balance off balance, on balance
Llewellyn-Jones also reminds us that movement can also be defined as loco and nonlocomotor skills such as crawling, rolling, running, leaping, skipping, dashing and bending, twisting, stretching, swinging, melting, gliding, kicking, slashing and so on. Thinking Aloud The language of dance gives us a common lens to approach movement in the classroom, a common vocabulary to describe our action, our individual and collective activity. This vocabulary provides a way to re-vision the ways that we teach and learn. Such a reframing provides another set of triggers that can possibly lead to deeper and more effective learning.
In this sense, the connections between dance/movement and the classroom are both physical and metaphysical. Physically one can express feelings about words in movements, role-play, own, re-enforce, translate words and concepts. Role-playing reinforces the the importance of living an idea, acting out a concept. This builds on mental, emotional, and physical connections to our knowledge and understanding (Moyles, 2005).
Metaphysically, the four major components of movement described above can provide a framework to look at "translating movement from one body into another medium and back" [2]. In this case, when thinking of ways in which to organize a learning environment, it is important to remember that there is a dance taking place, that there are movements both within and without participants' thoughts and actions. Multiple dancers requires coordination of multiple movements sometimes happening all simultaneously. As a classroom leaader, it is important to provide participants guidance when needed, point towards pathways when warranted, allow participants to zigzag, focus, fold, relate, weigh in, breathe in, breathe out.
As a classroom leader it is also important to recognize participants' needs to flow free, work off-balanced as well as within bounded and controlled settings. Words and ideas can twist, extend, shape, force ways of thinking. It is important for members of a learning community to pace themselves, to reach, to share, to extend interactions in meaningful and supportive ways for the learning community to offer value. This dance involves learning to express oneself and how to participate. If this dance offers no joy, no reward for the effort, we are probably want to walk away. When the dance is fun, when we enjoy the company and commitment, we begin to develop trust and experiment with rhythms and energy levels, moving forward, backwards, skipping, kicking, flipping topics, activities, across multiple exchanges.
Like bees, our hive dances attract attention across consciousness levels as well [3]. Stances, postures, positions all offer hints at the way we feel and what we're thinking. Tip-toeing is a different approach than slashing, spinning, and melting.
Does the dance evolve over time? In what ways are time, context, intention, and design related to message content and the levels at which participants are finding value and engaging with one another?
Recently I was thinking about ways to connect my classroom to the larger world outside our door. I noticed each morning on my way to work, a beautiful space in my building that was not being used for anything. Long corridors of empty wall space. Aha! A perfect space for an art show. 
The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens' to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see flow]. Community projects like an artshow require the use of many important participatory skills. Such project-based learning permits a classroom to act and learn through experience, placing ownership of the learning in the participants hands. Event planning, organization and communication will take place outside of the formal class environment using social media [Twitter/Facebook/Blogs].
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License.
Recently I was reflecting on the skills we want our kids to possess as they enter adulthood and participate actively as 
In preparation for my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I have been sifting through hundreds of bookmarks in my 
This process of using Twitter and my learning network (i.e., social media) has allowed me to develop a comprehensive course that embodies the collective intelligence of hundreds of brilliant people. In this sense, social media has clearly impacted the way I think about course content and course design. I can learn from experts, share in their thinking and discoveries, and engage them with follow up questions and comments. This is a large shift in the way I develop course content. I used to begin designing a course based on what I know. Now I start with what others know and and work my way from the edges to the center.
Even though my father worked on computers when 8K was the size of a refrigerator, he is not much for jargon. In conversation recently, I dropped the word "wiki" into a sentence. He then asked, "What's a wiki?" 
This is a list of the tools that my students and I have used or played with this semester. Many I rely on. Others I am experimenting with. Feedback and/or recommendations welcome. (^ ^)
Twitter
My college uses 
Metaphysically, the four major components of movement described above can provide a framework to look at "translating movement from one body into another medium and back" [2]. In this case, when thinking of ways in which to organize a learning environment, it is important to remember that there is a dance taking place, that there are movements both within and without participants' thoughts and actions. Multiple dancers requires coordination of multiple movements sometimes happening all simultaneously. As a classroom leaader, it is important to provide participants guidance when needed, point towards pathways when warranted, allow participants to zigzag, focus, fold, relate, weigh in, breathe in, breathe out. 
