Stealth Assessment, Authentic Tests

I tested really bad in high school. Some people just do. College wasn't so bad because I kissed the Blarney Stone during an adventurous year I took off between freshman and sophmore year. yeah, the gift of gab definiely helps in academia. (oh, wash your mouth out afterwards, the locals at the pub enjoy peeing on it after a good night of drinking!) As a teacher I confront the challenges of testing (assessment) students who claim they don't test very well either. I believe them.  I have a technique that works great--stealth assessment: testing after the fact, or better put, telling the students they have been tested after the fact. For me I don't want a student to cram or prepare for a test. I want the everyday, authentic, deep demonstration of their competency.  "Oh, by the way, that last event, that was your mid term." What good is assessment if what you assess vaporizes after a week?  I want to see the knowledge demonstrated day after day. I want consistency, mastery in the everyday. This is the best proof--the pudding, what comes of it, the product, so to speak. Then let them reflect upon the event (test) and they can't tell me they don't test well. With so much emphasis on testing and assessment these days, we forget about what assimilation of knowledge (action) looks like. We have to quantify everything and then compare, compete. Stealth assessment takes the pressure off. Be cool all the time, then under pressure you are confident. It's obvious in the results. You can't cheat. What you see is what you get. We have a saying in theater: 'you are only as good as your last show.'  It cuts both ways, but inspires you to go on. No humiliation. Much like self assessment--you are your harshest critic. I always ask students what they think they deserve for a grade-- you can tell right away, and usually they are much harder graders than I am. Well, I don't believe in grades anyway--I want to see growth, confidence, the assimilation of knowledge.

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The Creative Economy is Alive and Well in Lamoille County, Vermont

Dibden Center for the Arts kicked off its summer season with 4 local Dance Studios presenting their end of season finales.  The Enchanted Woods Wellness Center http://enchantedwoodswellness.com/  of Morrisville, Artistic Director Alexis George Owen; Ballet Wolcott, of Wolcott, http://www.balletwolcott.com/, which is a “collaboration between three women, Helene Nilsen, Brandy Ofciarcik-Perez, and Avi Waring”; Stowe Dance Academy, http://stowedance.com/  Helena Sullivan Director;  and The Ballet School of Vermont, http://www.theballetschoolonline.com/ formerly ‘The Ballet School and Dance Arts’ with Maryellen Vickery Artistic Director.  The growth of these studios has been very exciting to watch over the last decade, with Ballet Wolcott reviving the former Wolcott Ballet which was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ballet-abstract.html#ixzz1PAK30uQC

Attendance for these events drew 3700 people to Johnson State College’s fabulous Dibden Center for the Arts.  Featuring around 460 dancers, and including the occasional paid professional, including recent NYC transplant Lighting Designer Jeffery Salzberg http://www.jeffsalzberg.com/ who did a great job lighting Sleeping Beauty for The Ballet School—these studios demonstrate the health and vitality of a sector that is rarely acknowledged for its financial and educational benefits to a community.  The Studio Directors push the barre higher every year.  The dedication and professionalism of the dancers is inspiring to watch.

See the full gallery on Posterous

There are really no good studies of this sector that I am aware of—but a recent study by The Ontario Arts Council http://www.spotlightfestival.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=2348  found tremendous health and a significant contribution to Ontario’s Creative Economy from the dance sector, engaging over 500,000 audience members and  employing over 4000 dancers  and related occupations in the region.  Of the 20 dance companies surveyed revenues accounted for $54 million in 2008.

The report “Advancing Vermont’s Creative Economy by the Vermont Council on Culture and Innovation http://www.ksefocus.com/vcci_report.pdf  offers a peek at the vitality of the creative sector in Vermont. But the stark contrast comes when you compare manufacturing declines with robust growth in the creative industries.

Between 1940 and 1998, the number of artists working in all sectors of the

general economy (public, commercial, and nonprofit) grew at a rate roughly

two and half times faster than that of other types of workers and now number

at least 1.5 million.

Vermont lost 8,100 manufacturing jobs between 2001 and the end of 2003,

declining from 45,600 to 37,500 jobs. Manufacturing employment has dropped

from 30% of the state's non-farm labor force in 1970 to just under 13% today.

Looking at the creative industries as a whole in Los Angeles in 2010, the Otis College of Art and Design http://www.otis.edu/creative_economy/ found that the creative sector had moved to the number 2 spot as an economic driver in the city.  But what is the impact in a rural community? What types of career preparation does Dance provide? With the overwhelming majority of participants being female, what role are these studios providing that simply isn’t present in the current educational institutions, both secondary and higher ed?  With the recent emphasis on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math -- the discussion by passes the role of the fine and performing arts in nurturing creativity and innovation in our rush to prepare our youth for the new economy.  Clearly the dance community is providing critical foundation building for these young people, equally the contributions to the local economy cannot be understated.

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The Creative Economy is Alive and Well in Lamoille County, Vermont

Dibden Center for the Arts kicked off its summer season with 4 local Dance Studios presenting their end of season finales.  The Enchanted Woods Wellness Center http://enchantedwoodswellness.com/  of Morrisville, Artistic Director Alexis George Owen; Ballet Wolcott, of Wolcott, http://www.balletwolcott.com/, which is a “collaboration between three women, Helene Nilsen, Brandy Ofciarcik-Perez, and Avi Waring”; Stowe Dance Academy, http://stowedance.com/  Helena Sullivan Director;  and The Ballet School of Vermont, http://www.theballetschoolonline.com/ formerly ‘The Ballet School and Dance Arts’ with Maryellen Vickery Artistic Director.  The growth of these studios has been very exciting to watch over the last decade, with Ballet Wolcott reviving the former Wolcott Ballet which was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ballet-abstract.html#ixzz1PAK30uQC

Attendance for these events drew 3700 people to Johnson State College’s fabulous Dibden Center for the Arts.  Featuring around 460 dancers, and including the occasional paid professional, including recent NYC transplant Lighting Designer Jeffery Salzberg http://www.jeffsalzberg.com/ who did a great job lighting Sleeping Beauty for The Ballet School—these studios demonstrate the health and vitality of a sector that is rarely acknowledged for its financial and educational benefits to a community.  The Studio Directors push the barre higher every year.  The dedication and professionalism of the dancers is inspiring to watch.

See the full gallery on Posterous

There are really no good studies of this sector that I am aware of—but a recent study by The Ontario Arts Council http://www.spotlightfestival.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=2348  found tremendous health and a significant contribution to Ontario’s Creative Economy from the dance sector, engaging over 500,000 audience members and  employing over 4000 dancers  and related occupations in the region.  Of the 20 dance companies surveyed revenues accounted for $54 million in 2008.

The report “Advancing Vermont’s Creative Economy by the Vermont Council on Culture and Innovation http://www.ksefocus.com/vcci_report.pdf  offers a peek at the vitality of the creative sector in Vermont. But the stark contrast comes when you compare manufacturing declines with robust growth in the creative industries.

Between 1940 and 1998, the number of artists working in all sectors of the

general economy (public, commercial, and nonprofit) grew at a rate roughly

two and half times faster than that of other types of workers and now number

at least 1.5 million.

Vermont lost 8,100 manufacturing jobs between 2001 and the end of 2003,

declining from 45,600 to 37,500 jobs. Manufacturing employment has dropped

from 30% of the state's non-farm labor force in 1970 to just under 13% today.

Looking at the creative industries as a whole in Los Angeles in 2010, the Otis College of Art and Design http://www.otis.edu/creative_economy/ found that the creative sector had moved to the number 2 spot as an economic driver in the city.  But what is the impact in a rural community? What types of career preparation does Dance provide? With the overwhelming majority of participants being female, what role are these studios providing that simply isn’t present in the current educational institutions, both secondary and higher ed?  With the recent emphasis on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math -- the discussion by passes the role of the fine and performing arts in nurturing creativity and innovation in our rush to prepare our youth for the new economy.  Clearly the dance community is providing critical foundation building for these young people, equally the contributions to the local economy cannot be understated.

Web2.0, the Real Time Internet, Twitter and Passion Based Learning

There are 4 basic tools or platforms that everyone who wants to succeed in today’s world needs to understand and use:

1)      Twitter

2)      Hootsuite

3)      Delicious

4)      Wikis

 

What is web2.0? (from wikipedia)

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,^[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

This is the way it works. When you set up your profile on Twitter make sure you use the key words that describe your passions: This is very important as one way people find you.

http://twitter.com/#!/jherder

·         Followers, searches, links. The importance of links and creating your media ecosystem.

·         http://blogasaurus.posterous.com

Begin to explore hashtags. What is a folksonomy? What is a taxonomy?

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. (from Wikipedia)

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. (from Wikipedia)

Set up an account on Hootsuite. This is a Twitter feed manager.  Seek the key word searches that interest you.

You can link Facebook and Twitter, and manage your posts all from Hootsuite.

hootsuite: http://hootsuite.com/

A way of managing searches, twitter feeds and collaborative tweeting.

http://www.delicious.com/

Organizing your tags-searching others tags

Personal learning Network/ Personal Learning Plan

Wiki’s

#edchat

http://edchat.pbworks.com/w/page/219908/FrontPage

THA3130

http://tha3130.pbworks.com/w/page/9855286/FrontPage

#lamoillevt

http://lamoillevt.com

 

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--

 

 

New Media at Dibden Center for the Arts

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

Time and Money in 21st Century Learning

The recent article in the New York Times Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America is right on topic for my recent posts on the topic concerning the effects of broadband on rural Vermont. This has already occurred in other places, its is not like this is the first time.  I wonder what lessons there are out there to lern about this? It is something we are sharing with many diverse places around the world right now.  In the article, Kim Severson makes an important point about particpatory democracy. How quickly that access to participate and its denial is becoming important! There is a similarity between this and the dictorial relationships (fear of punishment) we have to education in this country.  Those with access and an understanding of how to learn using the internet have a big advantage over those that are on the other side of the divide.  What makes us think this is any less true for our kids?   

Jeremy's Design

It always bugged me as a kid that in the best part of the day you had to go to school.  What does 7:00 to 3:00 have to do with education? It has to do with an industrial view of the world. Bankers hours; do you still even go to a bank, how about the Post Office?  Learning can happen at any time, can't it?  With broadband more so than ever. We have constricted our productivity into a temporal and budgetary model that is no longer sustainable. We have the shortest school year of any developed county.  Can you imagine not getting into a rush hour? What would happen if we looked at learning 24/7? If the model for the school week followed a more organic schedule? Cohorts with common projects or skills levels contributing to real world projects.  More time can be available for off site projects.  Meeting at the school for a couple of hours during the day for meals with their group to reflect or get more specialized instruction on a relevant topic, experience a performance or workshop. This is school as Hub, a self sustaining, food and energy producing, living laboratory and home for the students on their learning journey. The place of Best Practice, state of the art labs, equipment, resources--but accessed across a much wider time frame and in a much less regimented way. Yes, it is much more complicated.

Zach's Design

What kinds of budgetary impacts would a different temporal model for education have? We can see what is happening in Higher Education to get an idea. An explosion of on-line and hybrid models. Global access to excellence, diversity and collaborators. Can we resolve the paradox of a staggering global teacher shortage and unemployment? We need more teachers, not fewer.  If our drop out rate is 50% we are at the tipping point. Just the market forces alone would legitimize an alternative that can include those who have given up.  Maybe it is just like electricity. All the waste to get to the end--a systemic problem with monolithic networks. It is worse in electricity, sometimes 90% line loss!!  Our schools mimic this in many ways. The web 2 transition to a losely connected network of whole systems makes much more sense. Local, glocal, hyperlocal solutions to waste, energy, food, education. We can leverage the affordances of broadband to break out of the dominant paradigm and save a lot of money doing it. I have to think about this.  Teachers would have hybrid responsiblitlies as well, fluid, flexible, allowing for Professional Development.  For example, there are opportunities to create on-line versions of their successes, for which a market exists based on use, that extends their earning power into the global economy.  This is a vision of lateral wealth creation and meritocracy, bringing the best to the top. Would we need fleets of buses to simultaneously transport students? Once and a while, for special events. Facility use would be spread out accomodating different populations of learners and projects.

Nancy actualizing a design at the board

It is very strange to see schools closing!  Is there an opportunity? Those edifices of conformity--Let the students redesign the archaic educational buildings into living green machines. Consider the facility if it could become a hybrid of teaching, creativity, learning, business and science. There is no reason that these redesigned facilities would not only be carbon neutral, but could easily produce food for the community--not only lunch as the Center for Ecoliteracy suggests. The ecosystems of the sustainable community are the curriculum. This is the doorway to all the interdisciplines, a place for passion driven learning to propogate and bear fruit.  Let the geeks geek and the thesbians act. Empowering the students this way would be a step in applying Buckminister Fuller's idea of Design Science. Beginning with design, allowing students to create their own learning environment; accustom them to solving problems using desing and allow them to effect real change in their environment --so they can see the consequences of their decisions.

Vermont Red Fox, Lamoilllevt