For the past several weeks I have been mulling over the idea of participation, transparency, and connectivism. All ideas that I believe are the corner stones to the next big shift in education. Several people have been influential in helping me reach this point. I have been reading work from the likes of Henry Jenkins from Project New Media Literacies, Mike Wesch from Kansas State, David Wiley from BYU, and George Siemens and Stephen Downes from Canada.Today I went to a conference at MIT hosted by Project New Media Literacies. The focus of the conference was on participatory culture in education. As the day went on I began to piece together some things.
Our students participate. They want to be involved. They are connected, ALL the time. If we ignore that fact we will lose our students. Henry Jenkins alluded to this fact in his 2006 white paper on participatory culture. It is vitally important that our students create, circulate, connect, and collaborate. Research by Project New Media Literacies highlights this point. But not only will this participatory model be useful in engaging our students, it is an opportunity to teach ethical behavior when working with digital media.
If schools follow a participatory model, using open education resources to examine real issues through our curriculum, while using a framework that promotes collaboration and discussion, we can change the game.
The idea is based upon what I heard today and have read from Mike Wesch, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, as well as countless others.
This is what I have in mind for a grade 6 through 12 school:
The Framework
All course content is free using Open Education Reources (OER) available via online resources. All disciplines would frame their course curriculum around the free materials. This would not only cut costs for a school but also lend itself to opening the class to the online community.
Individual courses, their syllabi and resources would be housed on a Course Management System (CMS) like Moodle, Wikispaces, or EduCommons. Having the platform online would allow the class to include participants from around the world.
All student work would be created and managed via a blog based e-portfolio. This system would be build off of Wordpress Mu. Every student would have a blog. This would be their home for all written work, digital media, and presentations. It is an opportunity to not only record a student's work but have their voice be a part of a larger conversation. The work would be separated by tag and each class would have a site where the aggregated feeds for the class appropriate posts and comments as well as all relevant information would be posted.
Here is the Google Doc of the proposal I created.
The Participation
Create
If students create online content, whether written or media, that is a part of a larger conversation, the work takes on a new meaning. Students who can express their ideas and produce something concrete that they can publish, will be more more engaged.
Connect
If there is anything I have learned in the past few days, it is that to make a model like this work, it MUST connect to our students. There must be relevance and it must mean something. Whether it is a Biology class creating HIV/AIDS PSAs for a local AIDS center or working to develop tutorials on algorithms for a village school in Ghana, if curriculum can not only teach content but connect students to something bigger, it will make an impact.
Collaborate
At the heart of this model is collaboration. When the curriculum is designed to have students work with experts outside the classroom, community organizations, or other classes around the world, the learning becomes real. When a student's blog entry on civil rights gets comments from a community leader who the class had been working with, the connections becomes real, the work meaningful. These collaborations can take place in many forms: Second Life, Skype, Elluminate, uStream, on a wiki, or Google Doc, or in real life. No matter the venue, what makes the work engaging and relevant is the collaborations and relationships that stem from creation of the content.
Circulate
The blog becomes a platform for the circulation of student created content. It a means to promote not only writing but all digital content created by a student would be available online. Here, the e-portfolio plays a role. Now all of the work that a student produces over four years is housed online on one site. The ability for a student to simply send a URL to a friend, family member, or potential college and show their work speaks to the true nature of the platform. Their works is now accessible to the world.
This model does not only support the ideas of transparency, participation, and connectivism, but it teaches another important lesson: digital citizenship. Using a platform like this, digital literacy and the ethical use of digital content becomes interwoven into each class. Students will become aware of fair use and copyright not because they read a case study but because all their work is online.
I borrowed a lot of ideas from people much smarter than me who have been proving this model in higher education but I believe this is an idea that could work in a grade 6-12 environment.
This is a very rough outline of what I am envisioning but to be true to the idea of participation, please leave your comments and criticisms. They will be extremely helpful as I improve this model.
Photo Credit: Today Is A Good Day
Hi. Thanks for this summary of the conference and for sharing this model!
ReplyDeleteI've been teaching graduate students with a model similar to this for a couple years (especially in a course of mine called "Authority and Credibility in Online Communities"). While I recognize this is a very different type of student, I think there are also many commonalities, and from these experiences I personally endorse what you write above.
In my experience, the trickiest part of this sort of class model so far has been negotiating between degrees of "public", "protected" and "private", especially as the quality of a student's work improves. But this can probably be overcome via clever tagging/staging processes to allow for the current status of (and hence standards for evaluation of) a piece of work to be marked and managed and is the topic of a whole separate essay
(Aside: the weakest part of this experience as I implemented it so far has actually been the "connecting to something bigger" component which you write about above -- I think this is a very important insight and am planning to try to incorporate this next year.)
I think it is very important when presenting a model like the above to not only justify it with respect to the students and learning, but also with respect to teachers and teaching. The above model drastically changes the role of the teacher, requiring different skills/training and philosophy.
Here's an anecdote about why I think this is important: when I talked about my class to one of my colleagues in another department she said something to the effect of, "boy that sounds great for students, but I wouldn't want to be the teacher in such a class! I would never do that myself."
She had two main categories of worry here. First was that the amount of time involved for the teacher to both "cultivate" and "curate" the community would be immense, especially given that if you are successful there will be really in depth discussions that require lots of your attention and time (even if students are also sharing some of the cultivation burden with you). It becomes an all-consuming flame. It's a far cry from coming to class, giving your lecture, and going back to your office to grade assignments and write!
Her second worry was related to how the *persistence* of the online interactions would affect teaching. For example, if everything a teacher says is recorded, archived and searchable, some (many?) teachers will feel the need to "be more careful", for example, treating their responses to student questions more like (time-consuming!) research papers as opposed to one-offs.
In that particular conversation, I was able to tell her about how I personally managed these issues in my own class, but I don't think I convinced her that the model was generally applicable (and of course, it probably isn't!). But my main point here is that if a more participatory model is going to achieve widespread adoption, it needs to be "marketed" to teachers (and within universities' schools of education) from both a pedagogical standpoint *and* from a more practical standpoint of how it will affect their own job and role.
Just to be clear, this is not a criticism of the model, but rather a suggestion for "marketing" it.
P.S. Thanks for tweeting from the conference today. I followed it with interest. I wish I could've been there!
David, thanks for this post. As an NML'er, I can only emphasize how absolutely wonderful it was to have all of you at the conference, grappling with the ideas and materials we've been working on. I look forward to following your blog and ideas.
ReplyDeleteStephen.
ReplyDeleteWow. Thank you for your feed back. In regards to the public and private spheres, you are right that is an issue but in my mind in a connected world where so many could benefit, we should embrace an open society. If we promote the idea of openness with ideas and teach proper media literacy skills for attribution I think we will be doing a lot more good than if we hid our work behind gates. With that in mind, our students are constantly connected, this would become a great platform to teach them about digital citizenship.
You are right about the marketing. If an administration at a school buys in, there is no doubt that I/we would have to help faculty understand the value in such a move. While that may take some effort to help teachers understand, in a world where we are becoming more open (MIT Courseware etc.) rather than not, we need to think ahead to how we should educate our students. This can be done.
In regards to time, there is no doubt that redesigning a curriculum like this is a big task. It cannot be done immediately but if a school is willing to take the time and make a shift over a few years the pros far outweigh the cons.
It will take time to develop the relationships and make the connections to build such a curriculum but once a program like that is developed, the outcomes from this kind of participation will be well worth the time and effort
Privacy is a real issue but if we want to make a difference, providing access to our content, making it connect to the real world, and allowing students to show their work will be important shifts to incorporate into education.
Thanks for bringing these points up. They are definitely ideas that need to be addressed if something like this is to work.
Check out: Developing Digital Learning Spaces: From Vision to Reality ~ http://educon21.wikispaces.com/Conversations#e311-3
ReplyDelete@ Dennis.
ReplyDeleteThanks. This is a great resource. I'm sure i'll be in touch with some questions.
I can't help but feel blown away by just how much of a fundamental overhaul of the education system this would require to enact. It's all going to come down to how we can measure success in a system like this. We're going to have to find a completely different way in doing so. You were at the 21st Century Assessments session, right? There was very little in the way of producing concrete evidence of success. Which is what it all comes down to (unfortunately). If we're going to change the way we think about education with this, the hurdles are going to be immense. I loved reading this and really look forward to seeing more.
ReplyDeleteShane.
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt that this requires a massive shift for a lot of people. It is being done but this will require a great deal of work to make it universal. The assessment issue is definitely a piece that must be fine tuned. Despite the fact that this idea needs to fine tuned, I believe this model can improve how we educate our students.
Oh, absolutely. I didn't want to sound like I had a problem with it. I love it. I was just thinking about what critics might address.
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