Flipping the Facility: Blended Learning in a Web 2.0 Classroom

I am very excited by the idea of flipping. The last 2 posts look at this in a way that takes it far from watching a video for homework.  The idea of a "Flipped Facility" is an attempt to communicate what is unique about my classroom in hopes of inspiring others and learning from my PLN how to deepen the experience and my own teaching and learning.

I think about my facility as flipped in the sense that the students have responsibility for the product and content that emerges from it.   I point out that it is a facility to show how our classroom is interconnected in a building and its related systems.  It is a web2.0 classroom because it is based on student created content.  There are faculty and programmatic structures in place-- but the learning activity is the production of content created from a student community --through design, productions, and media.  When I created my program, I envisioned a transformed learning community and encouraged the components that nurtured community and collaboration.   The facility would be a 100% student operated facility, including: a stage, the Box Office, costume shop, scene shop, videostudio, a recording studio--  Students take responsible, meaningful roles such as: Stagehands, Actors, Musicians, Technical Directors, Production Managers, Stage Managers, Designers, Directors, Dancers, Choreographers, Master Electricians, Master Carpenters, Master Sound, Master Props and Master Video, Costumer, etc. They do it all.  

Creativity and Innovation come from collaboration--NOT competition. Here is a picrture of the production cast and crew, along with the hosting crew from a visiting college production. Student Centric!

Giving students the responsibility of the various positions helps them take ownership and commit themselves.  This collaborative and cooperative team structure is one of reciprocal apprenticeships.  It creates Department Heads (Masters), Assistant Department Heads and crew in each area.  The teacher in all of us emerges in this scenario.  I am inspired by the Barefoot College  where their model is to find the teacher in everyone.  The apprenticeship and peer to peer model values the contributions of the newcomers as much as the students further

along.  As students take more ownership with their position and responsibilities they passionately dig into the subject area. The learning objective is to have the students become self directed learners following their passions.

In a design based, productivity focused learning environment, students are incredibly creative and highly productive.  They must collaborate in a high stress, constantly changing, diverse and technology saturated environment.  They create tangible, measurable and assessable events and artifacts that, over time, give full testimony to their talents, interests and growth.  It’s often messy, overtly dramatic; there is a tremendous amount of growing up going on--and not.  This is the part where the culture of the students, creates the learning environment --and you have to learn how to collaborate within it.

 

 

 

Community Supported Archaeology2.0

Trying to re imagine a way to experience geography--space, and time: falling through the present into the past. I am hardly an archaeologist. But we aren't we all archaeologists of our selves? What is cultural heritage if not a re imagining and mash up of the past with the present?  Drawing strength and vision from each other.  If the presence of archaeological sites beneath your feet is like the hummus of the cultural garden, then rich indeed is the soil.  Which follows, what marvelous infinte resources can be harvested?

 

Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

My presentation/hands on session for Free ELearning Conference Appalachain State University, Boone, North Carolina July 15

http://lts.appstate.edu/conference-sessions

Since then Google+ has swept me away and added an entirely new dimension to what the real time internet looks and feels like.

 

 

Real Time Internet for Passion-Based Learning

                                                                 Jan Herder #FLC11

 

A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM

 

What does the Real Time Internet ‘Feel’ Like?  How do I step in and check it out? Is there a way to manage what I am learning on line? What about the learning?  I’d like to see where learning is ignited and the wealth of world information can be found. I’d like to see my students find their passion and become life long learners. How do I do this?

 

Yesterday an article came out (great timing for this session. ) Many thanks to Angela Maiers, Amy Sandvold, Lisa Nielsen, and George Couros, and Steve Hargadon

Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning:  

●     REACH OUT TO THE DISENFRANCHISED

●     SHOW RELEVANCE TO LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL

●     INDOCTRINATE PASSION INTO THE SYSTEM.

●     TRY USING THE SCHOOLWIDE ENRICHMENT MODEL

●     DIGITAL MEDIA IS KEY

 

this one is key to my technique:

●     TAP INTO THE WISDOM OF YOUR TRUSTED PEERS.

 

Social media and Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are necessary. Teachers need to publish their innovative work and share it with their personal learning networks. It’s also important for teachers to help students get connected to PLNs via social media.

 

●     BECOME A DIGITAL CITIZENS

●     PASSION IS INFECTIOUS

 

and their number 9:

●     CONNECT WITH PARENTS

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/07/nine-tenets-of-passion-based-learning/ 

 

Which I would add:

●     10--FOLLOW YOUR PASSION.

 

A variety of strategies exist for integrating new learning paradigms: social media, the immersive internet and collaborative learning.   And if you are like me it is all very overwhelming--exciting, inspired--but difficult to manage. 

 

What I would like to share with you today is a technique I  use to explore  my own learning and teaching, that worked very well.  This is an Informal Learning Model that seeks to ignite passion for learning.  So many of our students are not connected to their learning journey, and have disassociated their passion from the classroom and the content that we offer.  The element of discovery, of exploration-- of passion is missing.  And yet when I immerse myself in the internet, in the web of contacts, links, thoughts and ideas I am wholly absorbed--my passions are free to explore.  What an incredible opportunity as a learner to have the world’s knowledge available on line! 

 

Let us dig right in and get started:  

Go ahead and set up a http://twitter.com account if you haven’t already. Give some thought to your profile, use keywords that reflect your passions. This connects you to people who share your passions and interests.

 

I like the mash-up approach for an LMS, --What works in this situation;  the emphasis is on the learning.   I see this as an experiential, hands-on and student empowered approach to learning. By using emerging technologies we actively combine a constructivist and connectivist philosophy of learning.  We construct our Personal Learning Plan by defining our streams, our networks of followers and hashtags-- by connecting ideas, people, links and actions in our learning journey, which we as learners actively pursue on line and off.

 

What is a #Hashtag?

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark the keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any Twitter user can categorize or follow topics with hashtags. Hashtags are the symbol which establishes that the phrase following it is an element of a folksonomy of some kind.  Whereas a keyword search is just that, while it picks up hashtags which are the same as the keyword, it doesn’t describe an intentional community of practice using the word.

 

You can check out http://hashtags.org/ to see trends and see if a tag exists. or check out http://hashtags.twittersearchengine.net/wiki/Twitter_HashTags_Wiki the hashtags wiki, or the dictionary: http://www.hashdictionary.com/Hashtag

 

I want to spend just a second on the important experiential difference between a taxonomy and a folksonomy.  A taxonomy has already been established, or started by other people  --fundamentally you are absorbing content that was created by someone else. 

 

 

 

Taxonomy 

...is the practice and science of classification. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Taxonomy       

 

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is constructivist/connectivist in nature, created by a local or familiar cohort of participants. It is only by connecting the use of our words, labels, terms and participants that develops their meaning.  This empowers the participants because they can share and collaborate in the creation of  content, expressing their passion and individuality.

 

 

http://pinterest.com/myan_duong/smarchitecture/ 

Sites like http://pinterest.com are building folksonomies of images.

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content;[1][2] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging[3], social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy 

 

Real Time Internet

Real time internet is encountered in a variety of social media--but by far Twitter is the most comprehensive for learning.  Facebook is taking on more and more of a real time character as it moves into enhanced chat and video, massive multiple on line games and other immersive technologies.   Twitter is also moving into a variety of enhanced real time media through twitpics, video and geo-tagging. But I think of Twitter as The Stream, or the Pulse of the internet, the synapses of the world brain if you want. 

 

I find I need to manage Twitter with http://hootsuite.com

 

 

So go ahead and set up an account there and link it to your Twitter.  You can add a Facebook tab if you want to start exploring the tool, especially if you mange a couple of pages.

 

Create a new Stream in your “Featured “ section of Hootsuite. Create a couple of things that interest you:  this is the architecture for your learning media ecosystem. Try creating a stream for our conference hashtag  #FLC11 which would be our hyper local tag, These Hashtags can be as fleeting as the Tweets.  As an example of how hashtags work in terms of communities of practice and developing a Personal Learning Network, take a look at this tweet:

 

Emory Maiden posted this tweet, retweeted by Steven Anderson:   @web20classroom RT @evmaiden: 150 Ultimate Round-Up of Helpful #Twitter Articles - http://bit.ly/buCnmR

 

 

This was only a couple of days before the conference, and it is perfect for this session, so I retweeted it and added the hashtag #FLC11, so we could find it in this session.

 

 

and let’s try #GIS--which would take us into the global context.

 

This is a map generated from social media reports of incidents during the Christchurch, NZ earthquake.

 

When I first typed #GIS in I was surprised how many jobs were posted here.  Now I see that many hashtag categories are full of job opportunities.  So I have my students look there for work. I bring #GIS up intentionally because geo spatial tagging and is where everything is going

 

Geo-tagging.  

If you notice on your settings in Twitter, you can allow your location to be included in your tweet as a metatag, not part of your 140 character allowance.

 

Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, SMS messages, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names. It is commonly used for photographs, giving geotagged photographs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging 

 

But if you think about the use of geotagging in the context of a regional development strategy,  it has tremendous potential to enhance a local area network or region.
 
There are applications such as http://www.tweetglobe.com/ for iPhone. And Google Chrome has an application http://globaltweets.com/ 
 
 
http://trendsmap.com/topic/%23thinkagain 
 
 
 
 

Delicious.com

You find all this cool stuff, links that you have to organize.  I find I am not as apt to read a tweet if it doesn’t have a link with it. I dislike being excited about an idea but having no original or primary source to go to.  If you do some digging with the hashtags you can track it down, if you want to give it the time. But essentially it is an ocean of links, of bookmarks, organized by tags.

Here’s my Delicious account http://www.delicious.com/herderjan. Go ahead and create one of those if you haven’t. Delicious organizes my tags, my meta language. Get the button for your browser.  Avos just bought Delicious from Yahoo, the guys who started YouTube.
http://www.delicious.com/help/transition
Delicious helps you develop your vocabulary and organize your bookmarks through the use of tags

I admit I haven’t even scratched the surface of Delicious, Twitter or Hootsuite.  Each of them give you fabulous sharing, networking and aggregation tools.  You can tell how much of a newbie I am because I only have 495 bookmarks and 672 tags, so my vocabulary is in its infancy.

Its great to see Ed Gehringer at this conference talking about “student authored Wiki Textbooks: Authoring and Review”, which is where sense is made out of this massive amount of information.

This is an excellent wiki based on the community of practice of K-12 teachers using the hashtag #edchat.  #EDCHAT actually has a weekly schedule--It happens every Tuesday in a structured exchange based on a voted on topic the week before.  http://edchat.pbworks.com/w/page/219908/FrontPage created by  Tom Whitby, Steven Anderson, and Shelly Terrell.

Where you take if from there depends on your passion.  Remember its what we get OUT of the computer that really matters! Let’s use the tag and see what we learned. I would enjoy keeping the #FLC11 tag alive for awhile and you can experiment with it and this group of people. It would be great to have everyone say something about the conference, tweet it using this hashtag and see if it goes anywhere. I hope that we have made some good new contacts for our Personal Learning Networks.  Let me know if this takes off for you. Thank you--

Jan Herder
Jan.Herder@gmail.com
http://155.42.33.13/Academics/FineAndPerformingArts/Faculty/JanHerder.aspx
http://twitter.com/#!/jherder
http://www.delicious.com/herderjan
http://www.3de4e.com
https://www.facebook.com/jan.herder

Is Web 2.0 Redefining the Arts?

This is probably way to vague to get much traction on the idea--but I'll give it a shot.  What motivated me to think about it like this was the recent spat over Jon Bon Jovi's odd claim that Steve Jobs and iTunes killed the music business.  This is like saying that the printing press killed writing.  But in terms of user generated content, and some of the other features of web 2.0, such as free access, the Arts hold a rather special place. In so far as we are all 'artists' to some extent, in the sense that we all can be creative beings, we all generate content, espcially as children.  There is no doubt that using technology has increased our ability to be creative in many new and exciting ways. Often the Arts are juxstaposed to STEM, or other more 'career' based disciplines like Journalism or Business. Yet if you loosen the idea of the arts to be inclusive and think of them as creativity it is universally applicable. This is definitly the way Richard Florida is thinking about creativity, as cross disciplinary or interdisciplinary.  And so we now have "intermedia" where, for example the Minnisota Arts Organization "Intermedia Arts" emphasizes the multdisciplinary feature of the Fluxus movement and clearly identifies it with the creative economy of that state. The computer immersed new media form of hyperformalism is another great example of the synthetic influences of emerging and hard to define artistic forms, allowing viewer/participant interaction and altering of the experience of art.

Here are some snaps I took in Second Life of DCSpensley's ZeroG Dancers performance.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The silos of disciplines tend to distort and homogenize people and ideas. The arts are no less suseptible to this. User generated content and the internet's explosion of resources and opportunites brings me to wonder if there aren't opportunities in what we consider the "Arts" to be. If we re envision these silos and see the blending and emergence of new forms of media as offering us the chance to by pass the limited view of a juxstapostion of these disciplines-- suddenly the world looks different. What is technology? What is Dance? What is Film? What is Music?  What is visual art or Painting? They are blending. The boundaries are getting fuzzy.  Here is a young student of mine working in these new areas. Be patient with the video, its not fully revealing the effort, but it gives you the idea.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13406727

So the question is this: If we blend the disciplines--espeically the Arts, we open new possiblitlities to enhance all of the disciplines. The seeds of STEM are growing in the Arts--

 

 

How Would Universal Broadband change the culture of Vermont? Micro Grids and Media

Its a big question. I am challenging myself to envision the world with 100 gigabytes download speed, here in every house in Vermont.  I see some big changes possible with education, which I started to get at in my last post.  The excitement is that with unfettered access to the internet the world's on line repositories of knolwedge and the global brain are there to help you learn anything you want. Anything. Anytime. For example, a network of micro grids makes much more sense than a mega grid for our electricity generation, distribution and uses.  The technology and resources are there to create your own micro grid and be liberated from the constraints of the power companies. In many cases this is possible. I envision the smart grid as the web 2.0 of electricity. In other words, that user generated power is the future.  The cost of the power lost in transmission along monolithic networks are precisely the savings we can leverage to decentralize our grid.  This democratization of power is part of the paradigm shift accompanying the transition to the digital age, and a component of what it means to have ubiquitous broadband here, or anywhere for that matter.

But think about simple day to day commerce. Instead of each household going out to buy individual items, things are ordered all on line and a delivery service stops by as needed.  This makes much more sense than endless trips to the store; instead, fleets of energy efficient delivery vehicles routed through a GPS system would be making their rounds.  More people would be working from home, perhaps tending gardens or creating other localized enterprises, perhaps participating in their children's education.  Travelling would be special, not a commute. This reduces emissions and wear and tear on the roads.

I see a dynamic between a hyperlocal intensification of  the value and understanding of location and a global connectedness that is always learning, being exposed to diversity and new ideas. The content that we create as we live our lives in our specific location is like the water beneath our feet and flowing around us. Our content is, like our water, our most precious resource. Is it being bottled and sold? Our media is as vulnerable.  Equally our participation in the emerging global web is what defines and adds value to our unique content. That dialogue with the global village is an important part of what rejuvinates our ability to be creative and innovate.

I would love to hear how you envision what effects broadband to every household in Vermont would have.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Rest Stop Living Machine on Route I-89, Northfield, Vermont

Vision for a new Architecture for Overcrowded Classrooms

Open Architecture Classroom Redesign for Creating a 21st Century Classroom:
Vision Statement


--Thinking about ICT4 education it is clear that an entirely new paradigm must emerge
--160--300 million students cannot be crammed into 19th Century Factory methods of pedagogy: the traditional school, classroom and its instructional hierarchy.
--Telecenters offer a trim tab (point of leverage) to create a new pedagogy based on 21st Century Literacy's
--One element of scalability is the peer to peer network of teacher/facilitator's that will be needed--the other is technology
--In expensive wireless computers and free wireless broadband must become ubiquitous so that education can go on 24/7/365
--The Telecenter is the wireless hub and "University/Library" of the 21st Century, it is where the certification process begins to be a teacher of basic 21st Century Literacy’s.
--Individualized Plans of Study can be created for each facilitator, who then may move on to further credentials or employment. Telecenter Certification is localized, and IPS are Course Modules being created in a local, hyper individualized way.
--When access to facilities are needed, use is staggered for different populations to ease crowding and maximize resources. --Students of all ages can study 24/7/365 in the comfort of their homes, immersed in learning activities, and a curriculum that provides the foundations for sustainability, and the MDG's.
--The physically challenged and otherwise disabled are one of our greatest assets--because they may be equally adept to the computer--leading fulfilled and prosperous lives as managers and data processors, and many other IT dedicated virtual occupations: designers, artists, developers, teachers, etc.
--Active, mobile and engaged students are immersed in real Life learning activities that contribute to sustainability--not locked away for their most productive times. Meeting at
the new school perhaps once a day for clarifications, instructions and reflections--there is no overcrowding. Small working teams meet intimately and share their projects and developments.
--The New School is a Community Biome Sustainability Laboratory, where renewable, ecological and sustainable systems are demonstrated and examined to be replicated community wide. A variety of data feeds give living numbers for measurement, evaluation and monitoring.
--A Common Area for presentations, demonstrations, celebrations and performances can occur for the wider community, and to give a sense of the whole systems involved
and necessary for sustainability.
--the value proposition in a knowledge economy is learning, learning how to aggregate, co create and collaborate: to gain more knowledge, as it were
--There is a teacher in all of us, and this teacher should be honored and paid as a facilitator in a 'peer to peer' or 'reciprocal apprenticeship' relationship.
--Job Creation--that the drive to be paid as a teacher/facilitator, will help power the economy of content creation, through the willingness to pay something for being certified and able to work as a teacher/facilitator. (Somewhat of a tautology)

What does this New School look like? The School or Telecenter is the Generation Station in many ways. And it is managed more as a resort or conference center.
It has many income strategies built into its very nature.

Some of its features are:
Solar Array or wind powered battery charging stations for laptops and other electronics
(Income generator)
Living Machines processing waste into food and other experiments
A Teaching Kitchen with Green Walls, Aquaculture and gardens, a source of nutrition and education about food and health.
Recipe books, local dinners and competitions raise funds
LAN Servers and Computers for instruction, general use and data monitoring
Wireless Broadband Hub--free to students/community
Instead of classrooms--meeting rooms where teams and work groups gather daily for instruction, collaboration and reflection: comfy, cool, practical, resource rich
These are scheduled on extended hours and to maximize the facility
Data feeds and monitoring from all of the systems, Real time accurate diverse data feeds from a variety of systems, including media
Constant content creation through wiki’s and aggregation of community knowledge projects and sustainability initiatives that the students are undertaking.
A place to crash if you need to sleep, a sanctuary, some place safe.
Media of all types: Radio, TV, Visualization Labs, Design Labs
A stage or Open Space for performances, presentations, celebrations, demonstrations, etc.
A shop repairing, learning installations and other maintenance tasks essential to the local systems.