Jon Udell, quoting his friend Ray Cote, brought me back to Castell and Cardosa’s “self-programmable worker”. Which, if we cast education in strictly economic terms, means we need self-programmable learners.
I am fascinated at what it takes to create a self-programmable learner. In the hundreds, if not thousands of hours that I have spent watching kids read, write, and participate online I have seen this learner.
The mind will move fast but also knows when to crawl. Interstices grow from the smallest nuggets of knowledge. Ideas get created on the fly. Like the courts and pornography or Wittgenstein and games I know when I see it but could never fully capture the self-programmable learner.
I will just go with Udell’s recommendations for education: Access to knowledge, access to publishing. Motivation and context.
Thus to be a self-programmable learner means to be a networked learner. A learner who shares a common purpose with multiple nodes of knowledge.
CC 3.0 Walk alone. flckr.com
I am not bullish on MOOCs. Teachers and researchers struggle with scaling up and fidelity with their teaching across physical classrooms, like across the hall close. When you then want to scale up teaching on massive scales. with a heavy influence on direct instruction mixed with a need for serious self-regulation failure will happen.
I find MOOCs cold, distant, and unconnected. Yet great learning happens all the time.Especially online. I look at phonar, ds106, clmooc with amazement.
What makes these spaces different?
#Walkmyworld helped to answer this question. I often refer to movements like #walkmyworld as accidental MOOCs. I realize now, because of the research into Connected Courses, that we did not build a MOOC at all. We built a community that relies on network fluidity.
What was #walkmyworld?
The #WalkMyWorld project was a social media experiment to provide pre-service teachers, veteran teachers, and K-12 students with an opportunity to develop media literacies and civic engagement in online spaces. For ten weeks, participants visually represented an aspect of their lives using any preferred medium, such as images or videos, applying the #WalkMyWorld hashtag on Twitter.
This emergent community completed a series of “learning events” involving reading and responding to the poetry of Robert Hass by sharing their personal histories through multimodal representations. The shift from individual to collaborative learning developed quickly.
Network Fluency and #walkmyworld
The greatest asset #walkmyworld had was its social capital. This trust grew because of a blended approach not common in most connected courses (notice the shift away from MOOC). We had a core of facilitators who lead in digital spaces but also taught in their own nodes. In essence we all had our own classes, some online and some face to face, who served as mentors in the community.
Having local nodes on a distributed network transformed the experience. Those of us in the #connectedlearning community need to continue to explore this design. Let’s design connected courses but have facilitators customizing the classes for their local context.
We also did not dictate, beyond organizing through Twitter, what network participants had to complete. This fluidity is an asset for any connected course. We had some share a portfolio of their learning events using Storify. Many participants played on their blogs. Organizers planned on email. Vines and Instagram were everywhere. @Dogtrax sent out comics almost daily. Haiku Deck made a few appearances. There were remixes made in Mozilla’s webmaker product: Popcorn Maker.
Network fluency at its finest builds social capital. It allows trust and social capital to grow as you recognize the agency folks bring to their networks ahead of time.
Network Fluidity and Documenting Learning
How do you track learning across all these nodes? Our first process involved putting the onus on the participant. They were asked to use Storify to create a final collection that documented all of their learning. This allowed us to do a fast content analysis (oxymoron).
The facilitators do not have the capacity for Social Network Analysis, nor did the methods meet our goals. Instead we invented our methodology while flying the plane.
We also used Martin Hawkseye’s TAG 5.0 system. The wonderful tool allows you to gather and analyze signals sent across Twitter. I highly recommend the tool to document learning. I have used this sysemt since version 3.0 and Martin Hawkseye deserves a medal.
If you have a really large connected course you can utilize both systems to manage how you document learning. For example you can do the number of Tweets as a method to randomly select participants for thematic or content analysis review. You could use other metrics such as ratio of original tweets to retweets to cluster folks and find themese across their practice.
For example we noticed a tension in the academic focus of the #connectedlearning occurring by using our database of Tweets. The #Walkmyworld project began as a poetry and technology exploration. Three of the facilitators had engaged in explorations of digital poetry for years. The participants, however, came from K-12 schools, content area literacy classes, and graduate English classes.
Few of the participants engaged with actual poetry and did not share much more than images of their walks.
We then cross checked this data point with other evidence for triangulation. All of the organizaer emails were saved and analyzed. It turned out this tension of content knowledge versus the social sharing goals existed at meta levels. Local node facilitators who worked with participants farther removed from poetry kept trying to pull back.
All of these conclusions began by an analysis of the TAGS database (tip: DO NOT SHARE the original database with participants. We opened it up o folks could choose the artifact for their portfolio. All the cutting and pasting eventually messed up our data collection. Luckily I rebuilt the sheet through revision history before the 7 day Tweet limit.)
In our connected course we spent two weeks delving into the idea of online collaborative inquiry. What does it mean to live and learn in a network society? Hoe does trust and network fluency affect how we learn?
I have remixed the assigned readings from our class into a video response. To do this I used a variety of tools:
I did my remixing in Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker.
I found sources from the #ccourses webinars on trust.
I made a video defining online collaborative inquiry using Animoto.
I used deviantart.com and Google presentations to create a talk on Participatory Learning
These were recorded in SnagIt for Google Chrome (sorry for the choppy audio).
I created a slidedeck and video using Explain Everything on my iPad.
The webmaker tools from Mozilla are an excellent resource to support connected learning. Webmaker tools are an open resource. They build off and support a remix culture. Most importantly they are easy for anyone to use.
Make. Hack. Play. Learn
Image Credit: The Art of Inquiry. Candace Nast. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/9q9zSM
Before I enrolled in #ccourses (if one can enroll in a community of those who share your philosophy) I strived to bring much of what I have learned from lurking around Connected Learning spaces and our efforts to develop the Web Literacy Map into my new class EDU 106 (yes the 106 is a h/t to #DS106).
The class fulfills a university requirement for tech fluency but for me the class represents an opportunity to stress a teaching philosophy beyond the state and federal mandates of testing and curriculum.
The class revolves around my “Why.”
Make. Hack. Play. Learn.
I want this philosophy permeating the class. I want students exploring, building and connecting. I want them to understand and utilize both the values and design principles of connected learning.
The class meets as a hybrid. We have a face to face session every Monday and then meet online the rest of the week. I was supposed to have access to a mobile computing cart. Instead we make due with the cadre of computers, tablets, and phones studends drag with them. Not ideal, but atleast it is device agnostic.
To incorporate the my “Why?” of Make. Hack. Play. Learn I added a twenty minute feature each week called Maker Mondays. The student walk in. I provide minimal instruction and I watch and interact as they create and redesign meaning on their world.
Maker Monday Challenge One:
The first challenge was relatively tough. I wanted to create a safe zone for failing. I wanted students to realize learning is often rooted in struggle, but failing is fun when we have a common goal. I also wanted to have a high ceiling to judge students “tech fluency.”
The students had to remix danah boyd article, “Why Youth Heart Social Media.” by using memes only. Basically they had to find a blank meme, edit the picture and insert into a class website using an anchor link.
Mission Accomplished. No group could finish the task. This let us have a frank discussion about the rule of failing in learing and more explicitly the role of failure in making.
In terms of judging tech fluency I also got a clear (but bleak) picture. Only two groups could make a meme. One group could add the pic to the class website. No group could link to the website. In fact when asked no one could explain in anyway what the letters, “href” meant.
Maker Monday Challenge Two:
In the next challenge I wanted to stress that making and connected learning do not take technology. The groups had to remix, boyd’s ideas of community without using technology. We saw Venn diagrams and even a few skits. The students really latched onto an idea that a summary in many ways is just a remix of words.
Make Monday Challenge Three:
The next week I began to focus on the Mozilla Web Literacy Map and the webmaker.org tools. I asked them the students to use Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker in order to create a class remix of our theme: Make. Hack. Play. Learn.
Maker Monday Challenge Four:
We have spent the last week or so discussing online collaborative inquiry. I have stressed that I do not believe learning or the brain has changed due to technology, but that the practices favored in a networked society have evolved. This conversation has centered around Jenkins’s idea of competencies for participatory learning.
This week we will continue to explore literacy in a participatory culture by socially annotating a reading from #ccourses:
