My new friend Emma Irwin and I just discussed this in our Google Hangout to hash out our mashout for the Mozilla #teachtheweb project. She showed me github and her part of our collaboration by screensharing; made feel like I could do that to, especially since my students and I have been playing with Mozilla thimbles. Now I do have to say that remember the days of Claris Home Page — anyone reading remember that?

So in our #teachtheweb community, Emma posted a request for collaborators just as I read a tweet that Week 3 was to collaborate. I hopped right in, and as usual, the one word we’re talking about is true:  OPEN. Yes, join. Yes, you’re welcome to join. Yes. That’s the HOPE of OPEN: welcome, open, transparent, sharing, reviewing, critiquing, creating, reviewing, revising, revising to creation so others can re-create it. Janet Webster was Chief Reviewer to the brainstorm crew of Emma and Sheri, and Vivek Ananth also joined in.

It’s a great collaborative endeavor, with each of us adding our own particular strengths to bringing the project to fruition. That’s collaboration. It’s not done yet, but I just wanted share the fun of it — and the learning that occurred because of it. I learned about code, design, reflection, collaboration, privacy, and copyright. More on that in a different post.

Right now: here’s what you have to look forward to:

We are remixing, mashing-up the ideas in Clint Lalonde’s post: Open is a noun, verb, adjective, and an Attitude, which Emma directed us too. We discussed in our community post, brainstormed in EtherPad, and mashed our words and ideas with his into our github ( Open is Attitude and Hope — final ready Fri, May 17 ) and video (Open is Attitude; Open is Hope ). Clint wrote a follow-up post which tells of the power of openness, learning together: Remix My Words. He says, “Needless to say, seeing my work used, reused and remixed in this way makes this open educator very happy.” The thing is, we’re so happy he licensed his blog for us to learn better by reworking the words to better understand them. As my friend, Ben Wilkoff, says, “We’re in teaching to be better.”

Thanks to Emma, Janet, Vivek, and Clint for another wonderful collaborative project found and developed by being open and sharing.  Thank you for the experience.

Our Video (audio to be added later):

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

FYI:
The video was created in Keynote, a presentation app for the Mac and iOS.

During our Genius Project time, we are learning code through the THIMBLE projects:

Animals From Code

Avatar Maker

Cite that Image

How To Web

Meme With Code Our Work: Sixth Grade Thimbles 2013

Reporter Supporter

Show Some Awe

Six Word Memoir Code   Our Work:   Six Word Memoir Links

Soapbox

The students are engaged and collaborative, jumping around helping each other figure out the code. “Go to line 20,” one will call out, followed by directions. In each class, one student always excels and offers to help the others, even though this is completely new to them.

How did I get them started? I showed them this:

Photo by: Lachlan Fearnley from WikiPedia

I explained how the tags are like the Russian dolls, each enclosing the others.  I explained the image in Basic HTML, then a Thimble code page and the similar coding on that page.  Then I let them go, and they didn’t stop.

Coding is poetry.

A balance and symmetry.

Collaborative creativity.

At student-parent-teacher conferences, coding was the favorite part to share, and parents were amazed that their students were learning a new language!

Take a look at the projects, and then try it.  Let us know how you do!

This week we’re discussing what education might look like in five years.

We’d love to have you watch and comment.  What do you think?

Just head over to openspokes.com and listen to the different ideas.

What do you think?  Keep watching our hashtag #openspokes and join the conversation. We’re hoping to blend a few online neighborhoods to move education forward.

Here’s mine  - a vision of possibilities:

Teachers make a difference; we never know how much.
Thank you to my former student; you made my day.

Twenty-seven years ago, after a wonderful lab school experience with plenty of practical experience at Eastern Washington University, I ventured into my own classroom to teach the subjects required in projects filled with language learning.

I felt confident and competent, but I wasn’t prepared for the adversity of attitudes infused in the difficult lives of the twinkling eyes in front of me. I quickly learned that content and process may be the required, but relationships and encouragement were the necessity. Building a community of learners whose runny noses, tears, and silliness were just as important as finishing a task. In fact, the tasks became processes of caring, checking in, acknowledging, and encouraging in both content and social and emotional needs. I teach students, not subjects.

And the first grade sparkling eyes of “I’m here again today” followed by teddy bear hugs at the end of the day turned into adolescent nods of “Yeah, I’m here” and “See you tomorrow” in middle school. And always, the parent and family connection because no matter what, families want their kids successful. No matter the age, the relationships are key.

The relationships between student and teacher and among the students either inhibit or enhance the learning process. Teachers are not holders of information, we are molders of transformation. What we struggle to accomplish is to create a diverse yet integrated community of thinkers: authors, mathematicians, historians, scientists, each with his or her own talents adding to the common good and the success of each other and the class. Teaching and learning are heuristic processes, not bits of facts and procedures and not checklists of criteria. In the classroom, we are all learners, and I am the lead learner.

In those first grade eyes and middle school smiles, I felt something: I had each day and each year added something positive to the world, and created an environment for my students to each add something positive too. It’s never perfect. It’s never easy. I’m not always successful. But considering the fact that facts aren’t the most important, my classroom is a learning landscape, a neighborhood to learn together built on caring and trust to know we can think and solve anything that life throws at us. We matter. And I hope the students in my care leave my class able to go boldly and scatter seeds of kindness, to continue creating and learning in their own positive learning landscapes.

And those lessons of what really matters became #whyiteach.

How do you plan on staying connected to the people and the ideas?

This unfinal post for #etmooc reviews the path I now take with others to continue the journey: #etmooc continues to drop it’s pebble of ideas into the ocean of possibilities, creating ripples of overlapping connections forever spreading and growing.

My own questions and final thoughts:

• Given the access, technology, resources, and requirements available to me, how can I create a classroom world reflective of what my students need in the future that is theirs?
• How do I need to adapt my pedagogy to create that classroom?
  • Of course I’m torn between what it seems students need and the reality of our school district’s focus on test success.
  • As I can, technology provides us with reflection and collaboration tools. It helps one class teach another. For instance my sixth grade students created cyber-safety and Google Apps lessons for grade five students. They also, while learning figurative language themselves are creating a resource for other students in our school by collaborating on a Google presentation.
  • In all our online work, we strive to leave positive footprints, practicing our digital footprints.
  • In one class, we are learning with Mozilla on how to code. Our first project was Six Word Memoirs. Code is the language of the future, and we’re beginning to learn to translate! It was a riot: “Change size of text on line 20,” one student would call out, then hop up to guide another students. The puzzle of code unravelled.
  • More and more I learn to share with students the overall goal of our requirements, and students choose the project and details that they require to learn: personalized learning
  • This is not easy to accomplish: the requirements of school’s today are not reflective of the reality of interactions, composition, and collaboration practiced by successful workers and thinkers.

• How will like-minded teachers connect and collaborate to create connected spaces for themselves and with their students?
• How will I, as a middle school teacher of language arts, connect with others to ponder these questions, create a space to act on them, and discover together ways to improve education in our own worlds.
  • As a result of #etmooc, not only have a Connect in the Middle Wiki for middle level educators, but several of us have joined in several different communities:
    • Post-Etmooc Blog Readers
    • Reflective Vlogging and Open Spokes Fellowship
    • Mozilla Webmakers
    • Open Online Experience Planning
  • Ben Wilkoff started the Open Spokes Fellowship as a result of conversation in #etmooc. He invited a group of teachers who will weekly vlog on topics about education, forming a neighborhood of differences in order to discuss common ground and forge a future that benefits the students we teach. We are raising our voices from separate whispers to a chorus we hope will be heard, shared, discussed, and acted upon by others who likewise wish to move forward in this education transformation.

I thank #etmooc for providing connections to inspiring people, whom I thank here:

I so enjoyed the recorded session with the participants of Jesse Strommel’s DigiWriting #etmooc, A Flurry of Cursors.

Some of us began an Adventure story. ( @mrsdkrebs)

During one session, Darren Kuropatwa asked participants to record and share 5 seconds of video with him viaDropitTOme and then compiled them into this “Beauty” short video. He invited others to Popcorn it !  Here is mine after an inspirational video remix by Rhonda Jessen.

A few of us gathered videos into which I popped this for the group: Where do you learn?

I thank Alec Couros for the #etmooc that reconnected me with Ben Wilkoff who created a Professional Learning Neighborhood in the Open Spokes Fellowship. Please stop by now and then, #etmooc’ers!

#etmooc lives on because:

Who owns our data?

Our School

Our school encourages in our daily work and curricula a continuous emphasis on digital citizenship and digital safety; we practice citizenship in our classrooms, virtual and in reality. This discussion and practice we hope will carry over into our students’ personal choices, online and and off. In addition, our school board believes and is adopting a school policy that explains that students own the copyright to all their work. Our Google Apps for Education allows for transfer of their data to them should they choose to continue their work with their personal accounts after their graduation. Student accounts in online networks do not refer to students’ real names; students choose pseudonyms. We balance digital literacy, privacy, and transparency.

We are still dealing with the ownership of educator’s work, since many of our staff work well beyond the time to which our contract employs us. For innovation and creativity to develop to implement the many requirements related to teaching and learning (learning and teaching standards), the intellectual work of the staff must be acknowledged and respected. We must balance the work asked of the district during district time, and the work created by staff on their own time for the benefit of student learning and professional development.

Apps for Networking and Sharing

After the amazing presentation by Audrey Watters (Hack Education and  @audreywatters ), I now will add these ideas to our curricula:

• Terms of Service Understanding: Read your TOS — who owns your data — you or the application?
• Ownership and Portability: Who owns your data — Can you delete it? Can you transfer it? Can you download it into a human readable format?
• Curation: How do you track your own footprints? How do you manage your digital data — your footprints back to you? How do you create value in what you create?

I have always skimmed the Terms of Service in the online applications I use, looking for who owns the data. We need to share this with our students. Audrey provides links to various sites that clarify and support ideas on ownership, transparency, anonymity, and privacy. How do we guide students to curate and own the information generated by them? How do we do this for ourselves as teachers? And how do we encourage the concept that we should control our own data? What data are we talking about?

We need to think about JackieGerstein‘s  statement in this tweet: “Education decision makers use data to do things to students rather than empowering students with the data to do for themselves.” What data do the students want? What data will help them? What conversation will we have in our classrooms about this?

Data Collection

Why do we collect data? Why do we share? We are social beings and we communicate and create together. We “collect to recollect,” as Audrey puts it. We collect to revalue what we value. And that is key: adding, sharing, creating value for the communities, the neighborhoods of our real or virtual relationships and associations. Our challenge is to curate what we create and share, and maintain the value we create without giving it to those agencies that exploit what we have chosen to create and share.

Data Ownership

Whether a student or teacher, you create data — your work, your tests, your words, your numbers, your ideas. It’s yours. Or is it? What do you think?

In my mind, I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words: I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other mans rights.   The inference of that quote is that who we are and what we do belongs to us. Now we have a responsibility to maintain that right, as we have always had the responsibility to manage who we are and what we do in ways that promote the common good.

How do we do so? How do I do so?

1. Document that which is ours (mine).
2. Create more value than we (I) take.
3. Curate, declare, and manage our (my) data.
4. Model for others.
5. Accept and encourage Terms of Service that acknowledge our (my) ownership of our (my) data,  its use, and its portability.
6. Expect that the products we (I) use also creates value rather than simply takes value from us (me).
7. If an adult, be transparent in who we are (I am). [Students may maintain anonymity with pseudonyms]
8. Educate others on their own (my) rights.
9. Educate politicians.

Audrey gave us some places to help us help:

Ghostery: https://www.ghostery.com/
FERPA: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
Quantified Self Movement:  http://quantifiedself.com/
Locker Project:  http://lockerproject.org/
Electronic Frontier:  https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Flickr CC by giulia.forsythe

Think…

If you are connected to and participating in a personal learning network, then you understand the culture of today’s connected and public world. Perhaps you have created lessons and projects using Google Docs, a Wiki, or Twitter to collaborate with peers you have never met ( here and here and here ). Perhaps your students have collaborated with other students they will never meet, but have developed a common project together, creating a shared space. ( here and here  and here).

What does that mean?

It means you understand the potential of the participatory culture, as explained in Henry Jenkins White Paper: Digital Learning: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture Media Education for the 21stCentury.

It means you understand that our youth today are already joining together in communities online, creating and communicating to solve the problems within those communities. And because they are young, these engaged youth of today may need guidance in analyzing the validity of their discoveries (transparency), in knowing protocols that enhance their social endeavors (ethics), and in providing spaces so all youth can learn and participate (equity and participation).

And it means you have moved well beyond the teaching of discrete skills. As an umbrella of digital literacies includes your skills curriculum, yet students have choice in research and question-creating– and have opportunities to expand their work to collaborate with students in other communities. Your umbrella of literacies encourages and models for them how to strengthen their own personal learning networks.

You see the need to move to this, from Henry Jenkins’s Paper:

“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life.”
— New London Group (2000, p. 9)

Page 5

All students actively engage in ways that produce, share, collaborate, and curate relevant content that enhances the communites, real and virtual, in which they participate.

Consider also, these excerpts:

“Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States. Everyone involved in preparing young people to go out into the world has contributions to make in helping students acquire the skills they need to become full participants in our society. Schools, afterschool programs, and parents have distinctive roles to play as they do what they can in their own spaces to encourage and nurture these skills.”

Page 4

“Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.”

Page 8

“Blau’s report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution.The Pew study (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005) suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy. Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.”

Page 10

“We must integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools, not only through group  work but also through long-distance collaborations across different learning communities.  Students should discover what it is like to contribute their own expertise to a process that  involves many intelligences, a process they encounter readily in their participation in fan discussion lists or blogging. Indeed, this disparate collaboration may be the most radical element of  new literacies: they enable collaboration and knowledge-sharing with large-scale communities  that may never personally interact. Schools are currently still training autonomous problemsolvers, whereas as students enter the workplace, they are increasingly being asked to work in  teams, drawing on different sets of expertise, and collaborating to solve problems.”

Page 21

Keeping these in mind while listening to Howard Rheingold‘s #etmooc presentation, I pulled out these ideas:

1. Keep up with the literacies, not the technology
2. Develop an understanding of social capital – in the community: “it’s more important that people learn through me.”
3. Focus attention — be aware of and focus one’s own attention.
4. Apply skills to empower and enhance them  – once students learn to read (by grade three), why continue teaching “reading?” — but rather use and develop the skill while learning.

And in a related webinar from Classroom Live 2.0, I linked from Alex Dunn’s iPad information to this excellent “Inclusioneers” imperative:

…we need to acknowledge that no two students are alike and that changes need to be made to existing learning environments to reach and teach every student; “barriers to learning are not, in fact, inherent in the capacities of learners, but instead arise in learners’ interactions with inflexible educational materials and methods.  (CAST Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning, Preface p. iv).  http://inclusioneers.com/

Consider….

Equity in Access and Participation

Since students are already collaborating and creating online, those students are learning the ways through the web’s processes, using whatever technology supports their endeavors. So the technology is not the point, but rather the tool or the process. The point is the social collaboration and community, a chance to participate and be heard in that community and in a democracy. Since I teach in a school with a high poverty rate, it is imperative that my students have access to the opportunities to participate as online citizens; we must develop equity in access and participation so their future opportunities are as open and available as those who have all the resources available to them.

Transparency in Perspectives

Because youth are forming ideas, absorbing information, and may not consider perspectives and motives, curricular considerations must include development of skills in analyzing validity and relevance in the discoveries students find online. If we help them to see through the motives and biases, to search through to relevant and valid information, and to develop their own strategies for doing so, we create a transparency envelope that will enhance their and our future discourse and problem-solving. As we develop curriculum, we allow student choice and provide guidance in detection of validity and relevance.

Ethics as Digital Citizens

As students move to more collaboration and creation together, we have the opportunity to teach, and they have the chance to practice in their projects with each other and with others in their online network, the very essence of civil discourse. I love how my students are learning to suggest alternative ideas to their collaborators with a simple phrase, “I wonder if…” It’s not easy to truly collaborate in person, let alone online, and yet these are the skills needed for today’s workforce and for community solutions. Teams and global connections occur often, and even in small businesses, connections to other communities and agencies demand teamwork and collaboration. Our curriculum must not only work with differentiating for the individual, but also for encouraging the group collaborative skills needed to create team projects; this requires of us the social capacity of cooperation and considerate dialogue.

Literacies as a Continuum; Skills as Foundations

Have you ever wondered how we became so skills-based? I’m wondering if , in reading for example, we began to study more deeply how good readers read. Through experts, in developing dissertations, we learned the complex processes and strategies that good readers employ. Somehow that knowledge, which helps us guide readers, became required skills to teach and test. And yet, to become good readers, a learner must read: read for a purpose (entertainment, research, opinions) and read to learn. Now, we teach reading skills through eighth grade and what do we have? Low Test Scores. What if, once students learned the essence of decoding, we let them read for their own reasons and suggested strategies when they needed them? What if the test were the ability to use reading — not do the skill — but to use reading as one of the strategies to learn and solve problems?

The usable skills needed are more universal– communicate, collaborate, solve, create, revise. The extend from simple dialogue and expression through listening and receptive comprehension. They are the literacies of mentioned by many, including Howard Rheingold’s list: attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, critical consumption. It is these that need our curricular focus. The foundation skills, the reading, writing, research skills,  develop in the doing of research and problem-solving. As teachers, we differentiate — personalize — as students need the foundation skill while applying the needed skills of thinking, communicating, collaborating, solving, creating, revising during their choice of projects. The test is the process and product of their project solution, not the discrete skills.

An example of a school that does not test, but does expect demonstration of the literacies is the Science Leadership Academy. I had the honor of listening to students explain their day, their work, their goals, and their successes and struggles. The students articulated these clearly with grace and through examples from their portfolios. They certainly could focus their attention, set and evaluate their personal goals, participate as a team and an individual, and collaborate to solve the tasks. They could evaluate the successes and state the needed improvements. They did more than “explain with evidence the main idea of the topic;” they developed solutions and evaluated the results.

Four years ago I wrote this:

“The word “education” derives from the Latin “educere — lead out.” Education should lead students to find themselves, to strengthen what they do well, to discover hidden talents, and to learn from others who use their talents well so that students, too, become productive, creative citizens. Students don’t need to know everything, and they will learn what they need to know — when it’s needed to learn about themselves or to learn how things work as they create and interact in learning quests of which they have chosen the focus and in which the standards provide background, guidance, and focus.”

And suggested this:

How would educators do that? The standards provide the harbor, a reference point in content and process; the educators and students decide the direction of their journey into the river, planning the places and prospects that contain the current and forge the flow of learning, creating their own ports of explorations and expertise to which others connect. These ports are personal docks displaying each student’s possibilities and proficiencies — a lifelong legacy of learning. Moor to the dock to discover the scope of the scholarship and the compass of the course; a test isn’t required. I think classrooms would be more joyful, inclusive, and active places if we help and connect people in their process of developing their possibilities; classrooms would be places where students WANT to go — to augment and evince their odyssey. Wouldn’t that be something?

Do you think we have finally reached the point where this is possible? That the digital literacies of creation and fluency, participation and collaboration, provide the personal ports of entry and in the doing, they recieve guidance to become expert in process, content, and social diplomacy? Are we willing to be the constellations from which students learn to guide their own education?

Cross-posted at Pause2Play

Enjoy our presentation (here’s how we started- Adventure Collaboration ).

Who are we? @gallit_z   @MsLHall   @lindapemik   @mrsdkrebs  @grammasheri

Imagine your own story as you flip through the slides 1-6. On slide seven (7), click one of the links to hear a story from these same slides, but rearranged for each author. More coming soon.

Adapted from #etmooc
7: Plan a “Choose Your Own Adventure Story” (Collaborate) Adaptation:
Draw an object Then ask a peer to draw a related object. Pass your peer’s drawing on to another peer and have them draw a related object. Keep doing this until you have 5 drawings (including your original object).
Create a story that links the original object with the last object drawn. What is the connection between the first object and the last object?
Write a brief story, then try to create multiple pathways that a user could go through the story. Use a mind-mapping tool

http://etmooc.org/

What story do hear? Want to create your own? Make a copy of the slideshow and rearrange the middle three slides of the story (slides 2-5) to create your own. Let us know the link to your adventure in the comments below…

As I
tinker
I’m a thinker;
Thinking
how and where and why.

As a
thinker
my mind tinkers;
Thinking
try and risk and learn.

If a
teacher
leads the learners
Learning
with them: create, share, revise.

Then our
learners
lead the future
knowing
try, risk, learn, share, solve.

Puzzles and Kaleidoscopes.

I loved putting together puzzles and making the parts pop into life I pushed that last piece in. And as I got older I my favorite puzzles where word games — the crytograms. I felt like I was cracking the code and solving the mystery. No one else in my family enjoyed them, but I would not ever give up until I had solved them.

And the beauty of the kaleidoscopes — they were visual delights of an endless puzzle, forming ever-changing geometric symmetries like ever-blooming flowers for the eyes. And I also puzzled out how they worked.

So, today, I enjoy mystery in text and video — not horror or action, but mysteries with suspense. I love puzzling out the who-done-it before the end. And I loved geometry and Escher’s tessellations, which are a form of mystery puzzle.

I think that is part of the reason why, in my teaching, I don’t like to be boxed in with one way to do things; I like choice and creativity, like the processes I devised to solve the puzzles and create my own. If there were only one way to solve them, I would have been bored. I enjoyed the struggle to find my own way.

Even in my own time, in creating digitally, I love symmetry in poetry and images, like the one I created at the top of this post.

Note: This post is a response to my MOOC course “Learning Creative Learning” and an assignment to read the Foreword to Seymour Papert (1980): Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (I have read the book twice before), “The Gears of My Childhood.“

What childhood objects have influenced who you are today?