Kaleidoscope65

Communities of Practice: How to create virtual communities. Knowledge Networks by Lauren Lee, Ohio

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) – Washington, DC

http://www.podcastpeople.com – fastest way to get a podcast up – upload a file or record a file.

http://www.voicethread.com – images, text, etc. approval..

ACTION: It would be wonderful if our community,the Upper Valley Teacher Institute, could share our strategies for helping new teachers with the teachers in India. That would be a stretch, as we have never ‘consulted’ about our ‘model’ before. But the reality is that when you are working on a project, even if it is a work in process, it is essential to share. That sharing will enable new perspectives that might just enable all to grow in new and powerful ways.

Core Questions:

1. How can teachers in India go beyond their silos and feel part of a larger community?
2. How can teachers in India access resources that are relevant to them, and not from other countries?
   
3. How can teachers have places to go for asking questions and getting input from others?
4. This is a significant example of creating community where one did not exist before.

Core Ideas:

• Creating communities is possible, but you have to model what it means for those who have never been exposed to this kind of sharing before.
• You have to create the supply and someday there will be a demand. People aren’t asking for it because they don’t know about it.
• Community Building is a SLOW process
• Numerous India-specific issues – Not everyone is comfortable with English communication – many can speak, but not read…; Few even understand the idea of the basic how-to’s.
• People will only come back if they have a sense of ownership.
• Need to have moderation – lead by example

Logistics:

• http://www.educatorslog.in : Open since mid-March 2007.
• Building learning communities and sharing resources.
• Shuchi Grover, Educational Technology Consultant, Bangalore  shuchi_grover@post.Harvard.edu and http://shuchi-edblog.blogspot.com
• Currently teaching digital storytelling.
• Freemind – Free mind mapping tool.
• Have used Surveymonkey to survey their users – generated useful statistics

Go to Bob Spranke’s Web Site.

Using Podcasts in the classrooms are meaningful. It is more than the doing, it is the living it, that matters.

Core Issues:

• Students don’t understand it if they can’t teach it. Watch them!!

The process:

• Corners on specific topics.
• Sometimes the groups come together, discuss what to present.
• Student news takes 1-2 days, but only a few minutes to record.
• We teach other people in our podcasts.

Misc. References I need to manage:

• Women of web 2.0, Cheryl Oates
• Al Gore’s Assault on Reason – Now we have a two-way dialogue

Core Questions:

1. How can student voices become expert voices?
2. What does assessment look like in a Web 2.0 world? What is authentic assessment?

Core Ideas:

• When you are creating, you are using all other levels on Bloom’s taxonomy. It would really make sense to invert the triangle, wouldn’t it.
• Students take ownership – there is nothing more authentic than teaching others and then engaging in conversations with others even after projects are over.

Process:

• Invites us to join a skype conversation…
• Mentors in the class: Student Scribes post – summarize what happened in the class…mentors in the class comment on what students write. Grade 12 student talking to a university professor.
• Students create blogs, web sites, films and/or slide shows demonstrating their understanding for one or more problems/ideas in the class.

To learn more, access Darren Kuropatwa’s presentation on slideshare.

Core Questions:

1. What knowledge is of the most worth?
2. How do the realities of this new world impact the kinds of talents needed?
3. How are we helping our students become effective digital citizens?
4. If we shape our world, how is the world going to shape us?

Core idea:  Re-imagining Education given the realities of our current world.   We need to redefine what academic success means and what talents are needed.  In order to accomplish this, we need to reconfigure our institutions.
Realities of the day: Technology has transformed our world

• When a new tool evolves, only those who know how to use it can use it.
• Challenge: International warfare in cyberspace.
• Virtual marriage and second life, socializing virtually
• Second Life – Merges virtual and real worlds (real dealerships for cars!)
• half-life – another game – violent (stress-relieving)
• Digital famers market: Gold farming and digital produce – sweatshops??
• YouTUBE, podcasting:  Everyone is an author, running your own show
• Media changes lives

The Global Realities:

• Friedman:  The world is Flat
• Marshall McLuhan “As electrically contracted, the globe is more than a village.”
• Global free flow of goods.
• McDonaldization and Starbucks in the Forbidden City – Global consumerism brings a way of living, a threat to traditional cultures – in Japan, abandoned idea of eating with chopsticks.  Exported obesity, but they have also done something good – taught people how to wait in line and to be polite!
• Our students are affected by global forces – what talents and attitudes should we
•  Global supply chain – it’s a big job to make the ipodMini – created in China…
• Global economy, virtual world – MULTIPLE IDENTITIES – Where do your loyalties lie?

Realities:

• More people are self-employed
• Children can act like adults – they can have identities
• Daniel Pink: “Moving from the Information age to the Conceptual Age” : A Whole New Mind
  • Asia, Automation, Abundance are causing changes from the information age – left-brain directed thinking (sequential, literal, funcational, textual, analytic)
  • Conceptual Age – Righ-brain: simultaneous, metaphorical,

New Skilss

• Design: ipod and Starbucks (software engineering)
• Story
• Symphony
• Empathy
• Play
• Meaning

Digital Citizenship: Are we preparing students to be citizens in a digital age?

• Living in a digital world (consumers, citizens, community leaders – in virtual communities?)
• Making a living in the digital world (digital workers, global workers)
• (Re) creating the digital world (Innovators, entrepreneurs)

How are we ruining our chances?

• NCLB: more math, science and English – even if test scores are as good as the Chinese and Indians, probably not b/c those people are cheaper.  Instead, find our NICHE talents – what makes us different?
• These reforms are different from what is happening in Asia…
• If you understand the realities of multiple intelligences, how can you apply one standard, you are only testing one ability.  You are dropping most other kids.  Is that OK???

Have we made a mistake?  Asking teachers to do too much in 45 minutes?  How can they redefine their talents?  Where should their talents be taking them?

In second life – Learning a new language…visiting islands with actual products, like DELL computer .  This is a different world!!

Questions:

1. How do we make ideas work in different learning settings?
2. Challenge – How can you integrate this idea into a content-focused environment?
3. How do you assess what the students are learning? What is the learning that is going on?
4. We are all designers – How do we design our own learning? How do we design so that others can learn?
5. How can what we create evolve in the media ecology?

Goal: Learners create the content. Greater expressiveness with more interactive and dynamic media. What would be the relevance for a social studies class? Teachers have a hard time connecting the abstract concept with a practical application.

Logistics:

• Use tags creatively.
• What is the age range? 8 and up for classrooms. Scratch is used at introductory computer science classes.
• Is the material monitored?
• Create Galleries so that you can create individual groups of projects
• You can embed a Scratch project into a web site

How do you introduce this? When you try to teach the logistics, they don’t want to think your way. Content project… give some structure to their play.

Motivating: Create a project with your name and picture. With their own name – personalized. Theme: Where in the world? Grab in images from Egypt…walk to different objects…make a project around it. [Create an interactive map] Theme and flexibility.

[Never use the word PLAY, use the word EXPLORE] What is the design process?

Research: How do individual learners evolve over time? What experiences do they have and how do those evolve? These are not quantitative? Why doesn’t this shift over to general educational research? Many people want quantitative measures.

Gender questions: There needs to be a narrative, reason for the objects to create. Some are more interested in building a story… Dramatists and Patterners: Different styles of approaching a problem. The girls wanted a story around the merry-go-round.

PICO Blocks – company in association. Crickets. Software will run on the Mindstorms RCX for Robotics.

• Plug software into the computer. Beamer sends information to the Cricket. Connect light to the Cricket. Learn about scale, volume, etc. You can collect volumes.
• The best strategy is for them to experiment and figure it out. Encourage experimentation. Instructions can be limiting.
• Programming does not have to be textual – this is a visual representation of a program. You can create procedures – Type a name so that you can reuse it.

Keynote.

Questions:

1. Why do so few people want to take ownership of their educations?
2. Why have we lost sight of formal education as a process of personal enrichment?

Challenge: We need to stop privileging the action of the individual over the the production of the team. B/c of the structure of the institutions.

Process: There is tremendous enthusiasm for blogs at first, but then others don’t make comments on a blog, so people stop using them. It is really

Needs not just infrastructure, but cultural change. Impression that in school in order to be successful. But success is more than economic success – it is about finding your passions and actually getting paid for doing things you like. We need to have the skills and ability to be able to get genuine pleasure out of what we do. Your educaiton should be about making your life richer – educare – to draw out.

“We no longer educate kids anymore, we train them.”

We need to educate kids to ask good questions. Online communities are the most effective when there is talk about actual work. A great deal of sharing about particular things.

Science Teachers: Challenge with discussions, especially ethical questions, like bioethics. Bioethics Education Project.

Skills needed: Challenge for kids – astute consumers of quality media in terms of the aesthetic – assume that if it looks good, it must be right. They are not astute at being critical readers, not good at information filtering and quality assessment.

• Need to select the right thing to cut and paste and then use it appropriately.
• Need to question the authority of web sources and other information sources.
• Teachers have the opinion – children have a dimished vocabulary compared to the past.
• Teachers have the opinion – Children don’t like to think -
• They are too overloaded to care.
• Cut and paste without engaging.

Generations of people who can take tests, but who can’t learn. The only difference b/w the rich and the poor kids is that we give the rich kids certificates, even if they can’t learn.