Call Me Disappointed: A Connected Course and A Camp Go Kaput


flickr photo shared by corydalus under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

I’m having a hard time writing this post. Seriously. I had such high hopes for a summer in which I would bring the elements of Connected Learning in full swing to my Western Massachusetts Writing Project site with a graduate level course offering connected to two summer youth digital camps.

Summer Connected Course Description

In the graduate course through UMass, educators would learn about technology and digital literacy, with the pedagogical anchor of Connected Learning. I was really jazzed up about bringing the Making Learning Connected MOOC into the course itself (the timing would have worked) and then having teachers plan/co-facilitate two youth digital summer camps at our vocational high school that would center around student interests, with highlighted sectors of video game design, webcomics, paper circuitry, digital storytelling and more.

A WMWP educator and friend who is in a grad program around digital studies and education was going to help me facilitate the summer. He helped run a MOOC in this grad program, so his experience would have been valuable. Plus, he is doing all sorts of good work with youth programming.

It was all good …

… until reality kicked in.

Here’s how many kids signed up for the camp: Zero.
Here’s how many teachers signed up for the course: Two (and one was only “iffy”).

This week, we pulled the plug on both offerings, and I am sad about having to make that decision. That’s why it’s hard to write this post. It feels like a failed attempt to push us forward. I feel as if I failed to push us forward.

There are all sorts of factors that might be at play here — time of the year, maybe teachers didn’t want to teach kids this summer after teaching all year, advertising issues with the school that would host the summer camp — but I can’t help feel as if …

  1. I did a poor job writing up what Connected Learning is all about, and therefore, took the attractiveness out of a technology course, which WMWP teachers have been asking for, or …
  2. Teachers are just not really ready to dive into the core principles of Connected Learning because it remains an unknown idea. I have been working with the concepts for three years or so, and in the CLMOOC, lots of folks are exploring the pedagogy, but maybe I am stuck inside my own little bubble, or
  3. Something else that I don’t quite see right now.

The youth summer camp turnout (zero? really?) surprises me, to be honest, since in the past, we have had a waiting list of students for our digital camps on similar themes. We’ve engaged middle school students in moviemaking, game design, comics, and more. It’s been very popular, albeit we took a few years off from sponsoring the digital camps.

So, we will go back and mull over what we could have done differently, and think about either next summer or offering a course during the school year. I am not personally interested in running a grad course built around “how to use” technology. I am more interested in facilitating a course in which digital learning and literacies are at the forefront, with the technology being tools we may, or may not, have our disposal to use, as the backdrop.

Peace (and solace),
Kevin

 

CLMOOC: Cultivating Connections and Community

A bunch o’ folks are working to plan and launch the fourth year of Making Learning Connected (CLMOOC) in July. We’re sort of on our own this year, as the National Writing Project is turning its resources and attention to another great summer project (see below). We’re aiming to crowdsource the Make Cycle activities of CLMOOC as much as possible. A bunch of folks are tinkering in Slack space to get organized.

What will CLMOOC look like? We don’t yet know.

But we have faith … and we have an overarching theme: Cultivating Connections and Community. Cool, right?

If you want to get on the list for news updates about CLMOOC, we have a Google Form all cooked up for you.

You can follow events on Twitter (#clmooc) and in Google Communities, and who knows where else. Ripples happen, right?

Wondering how to stay creative and engaged until then? Be sure to check out Letters to the President 2.0 project, overseen by National Writing Project and Educator Innovator (the two organizations which seeded the CLMOOC to begin with, three summers ago). The Connected Learning themes resonate through that entire L2P project of raising student voice into the political stage.

Peace (it’s always ongoing),
Kevin

Distorted Graphs: A Misinformation Campaign

Distorted Graphs: Talk about Education

Maybe this idea will have some legs during the Making Learning Connected MOOC this summer (July! More to come!), but I was culling through some of the cool projects with the Letters to the President and noticed the Infographic Make activity. It occurred to me that making faulty infographics spun out out of “no data at all” to make a political point might be interesting and a bit subversive.

Infographics look like they know what they are doing. But anyone can make something pretty that seems official. That doesn’t make it so. What if I purposely ignored data and made infographics based on political stance?

So, I concocted this first Distorted Graph this morning, wondering when candidates are going to really explore our US educational system as a campaign issue, even as it dominates discussions between parents and teachers.

Peace (don’t distort that),
Kevin

Book Review: Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers

I saw this book — Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers —  on the shelf of the public library and grabbed it quickly on the way out. Sort of an impulse buy. I’m glad I did. James Gulliver Hancock, an artist, has created a wonderfully illustrated book of, as the title says, many people with big dreams.

But it is the subtitle that says it all: Portraits of 50 Famous Folks and All Their Weird Stuff. This is not a typical biographical book. Rather it is a sort of sketch book, in which Hancock devotes a single page to one of the 50 folks, and weaves a sketch map of ideas, noting quirks and little known facts about them.

We learn about Helen Keller’s glass eyes, and about Buzz Aldrin struggling to get the flag on the moon, and about Billie Holiday dying with 70 cents to her name, and Salvador Dali’s fear of bugs, and about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s song entitled “Kiss My Arse,” and about Marie Curie’s notebooks still being radioactive, and (personally) that one of Babe Ruth’s wives has the same last name as me. (That was of interest to my son, who know wonders is maybe we are related to the Babe.)

I also appreciated that Hancock has shared a pretty diverse list of people to focus on, from Margaret Thatcher to Louis Armstrong to Coco Chanel to Bonnie & Clyde to Ghandi to Muhammad Ali, and more. I guess you could criticize this very diversity by saying no single theme emerges, but I appreciated the surprise of not knowing what the next page would bring.

And Hancock gives himself over to his art at the last page, too, making fun of his own foibles and quirks, showing that not even the writer is immune to the strange ways we live our lives.

Peace (in all of its quirkiness),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Fostering Fan Fiction

sol16

Can I confess? I was inspired to do this writing activity …. by PARCC. There, I said it. I never would have even thought of writing a sentence like that. But, it’s true. Our state has merged some PARCC elements into our state testing this year, and the PARCC Literary Task reminded me of Fan Fiction, and so …

Let me back up. My students are deep into their independent reading books this time of year. I give them a good 20 minutes every class period to stretch out around the room and read, quietly. Even in May, with the end of the year jitters in the air, they revel in their quiet reading mode, and complain loudly if they don’t get that time. How great is that, eh?

We’ve been doing writing about reading activities, but the other day, a few weeks after getting them ready for the state ELA test, one element of the new PARCC elements has stayed with me as something rather interesting. In the task, students are given a passage from a novel or short story, and then they are to either continue the scene or do some variation of the story, paying attention to character or setting or whatever.

It dawned on me one day that this writing assignment was really just a twist on Fan Fiction, and that I could easily get students thinking in terms of the ways that technology and social spaces encourage readers to become writers. It also harkened back to a keynote address by Antero Garcia at a local technology conference, where he extolled the Connected Learning virtues of Fan Fiction communities. That planted a seed that just needed time to grow.

So yesterday, I gave a mini-lesson to my students on what Fan Fiction is (a fair number knew the term but not too much about what it was) and how it works. I mentioned how some Fan Fiction writers connect with others in online spaces (like one of the Harry Potter site that has 80,000 fan fiction stories) around shared interests of books and authors,  and then:

  • write prequels
  • write sequels
  • spin off minor characters
  • create alternative histories
  • create alternative story paths
  • mashup characters and settings from different novels

So, we wrote, and then, instead of sharing out the stories they wrote, we shared out the technique they used to write their Fan Fiction stories, and the struggles they encountered (or not) in doing so. It was such an interesting discussion, and I think many now have their interest piqued about Fan Fiction. Certainly, all have now experienced it as a reader/writer.

Side Note 1: So, I did not get into some of the adult themes that emerge for some Fan Fiction sites, such as sexual trysts and other, eh, explicit materials. And I realize a day late that I should have broached the copyright conundrum (is it protected derivative work?) of using someone else’s material for your own writing, and publishing it to the public view. Obviously, this did not pertain to our writing activity, where the stories were in their writing notebooks, but still …

Side Note 2: I wrote, too, of course, taking a minor character from the book I was just finishing up — The Boy Who Lost Fairyland — and creating a short story that could have happened in the book during a time gap when the character was “off stage.” The character is a magical Gramophone, who spins records to communicate, and I had the character, Scratch, meet with a mysterious character who is a DJ who spins discs. You can see where my story was going, right? Scratch gets scratched into a little hip-hop in the Fairyland. It was blast, writing it.

Peace (among the fans),
Kevin

Writing 30 Poems (maybe more) in 30 Days

It’s not the first time I have tried to write a poem every day for an entire month, but I always start and think: I am never going to do this. I am never going to find enough things to write about. I am going to bore myself and everyone else with my feeble verse. This is what I think before I write and then forget about while I write.

Luckily, I had some friends along the way. Mary Lee, Carol and Carol, and Steve, and Margaret, and assorted others who were also writing poems, if not every day than most days. Actually, Mary Lee’s project to write poems about her family tree inspired by an old photo album got many of us writing poems in her blog’s comments, too. Writing is a different experience — more connected — when you write with others.

I started off the month in a sort of free-style mode, not choosing a particular style/genre nor topic, and I used a variety of technology tools to construct the writing into something more design-friendly. As always, when writing in bursts, some of the poems came out better than others. But overall, I was happy with many of them.

Day nine poem

After reading Mary Lee’s family poems, and Steve’s poems inspired by the digital archives at the New York Public Library, I decided to revisit the Flickr archives of the US Library of Congress. There are treasure troves of available images by the Library of Congress, and many are evocative for storytelling. I tried to vary the subjects of the images so that my poems might take shape in different ways. There are a few gems in this mix, I think.

Jazz in the Air

I then ventured into Blackout Poems, where you remove words to leave words that make up verse. I always feel a little hamstrung with Blackout Poems, struggling with trying to suss out a poem from existing text. But when it works, it is very cool.

Blackout Poetry1

I ended the month with haikus, but my twist was I went back into my recent image files, seeking out pictures that might inspire three lines of poetry. For the most part, I liked how they came out, and worked hard to ensure that the image was partner to the words. Finding that balance with these kinds of poems are critical.

Image Haiku: The Swallows of the Swamp

Beyond my daily poems, I also left scattered poems as comments at people’s blog sites. I don’t even know where they are anymore. But I hope they were well-received. I did do a poem for a late April DS106 Daily Create that I liked. The prompt was to put a poem on a door of a refrigerator and take a picture. I sort of cheated — no real fridge — but the poem was real, and I like how the poem is about the poem being a poem.

TheForgottenPoem

and

forgotten poem on fridge

Peace (it’s poetry),

Kevin

What If the “M” in MOOC Meant Minimal?

Going Small

Those of us who have been part of the Making Learning Connected MOOC for the past three summers (and beyond) have been fortunate indeed. The National Writing Project not only conceived and launched the CLMOOC with help of a grant program through the MacArthur Foundation; NWP also funded the work behind the scenes, from stipends for facilitators (I was one) to the technological infrastructure. We all knew the NWP funding would not last, and so it has come to be, it seems. It’s OK, too. NWP and Educator Innovator have a whole lot of cool projects underway for the summer of 2016, including Letters to the President.

But the CLMOOC is not one of them.

While the support of NWP and all of the folks there over the three years has been critical — with extra huge props to Christina Cantrill and Paul Oh and other key current and former NWP players for making it happen — what if we, the denizens of the CLMOOC, took over CLMOOC and made it happen ourselves? NWP has done its part – seeding an idea. Now it’s our turn to nurture the seed.

dandelion seeds - What begins as a seed blooms into flowers

The coming summer, and the status of CLMOOC, was the center of an informal hangout discussion I was having with Joe Dillon and Terry Elliott the other morning as we bounced around how we might get the CLMOOC up and running for Year Four on our own, with little or no NWP support.

Well, not “our” own, meaning the three of us. I mean “OUR” own — meaning you, too. All of us. Together.

Groot Dude - We are (still) CLMOOC

Isn’t that the real dream of the connectivist MOOC ideal? That the people in the learning will run the show and not just participate in what the Oz the Great and Powerful behind the screen says should happen. Granted, turning the keys over to all of us (or in this case, sneaking in through the window at midnight to host a party in the CLMOOC house) potentially makes things messy, and a bit complicated. But it’s our house, after all. We all built it.

And you know what? It doesn’t have to be Massive, as in Massive Open Online Collaboration. Maybe the M in MOOC can also mean “Minimal,” as Linus Torvald’s quote above (shared by Terry in a blog post) notes. What happens when connections get stronger because they are tighter and smaller as opposed to disparate because they are larger? What if we invite the inversion of scale?

Don’t get me wrong. Being part of activities with lots of people has its appeal. You get a sense of the nodes of the world. You feel less isolated in your interests. You feel part of a movement, or something. It’s all part of the Connected Learning theory that the CLMOOC is built upon.

small fact froggy - Small is the new Large And it's a beautiful thing

However, you can also get lost in the shuffle when the scale is large and massive. Your voice gets lost at times. But if “Small is the New Large” (that might be a cool meme activity, right?), we might all benefit from tighter connections. We might be more apt to ask more questions of each other or to dig into inquiry together. We might come to know each other a bit better. Our learning would be more than a summer project. It would be part of our professional life.

The somewhat dehumanizing effect of a massive network might be balanced out by the stronger connections among us. We might be “people in a community” as opposed to “nodes in the network.”

So, we’re going to try to plant some seeds this spring for an “unofficial” CLMOOC summer, and we hope you might come along with us. We have no idea how it will go. You can help make it happen, if you want.

BDO Nodes - Smaller Maps Stronger Connections

Peace (and beyond),
Kevin

PS — Thank you, NWP, for setting this all in motion to begin with!

 

Continued Reverberations of Online Connections


flickr photo shared by priyaswtc under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license

Three posts recently had me thinking again about the reverberations of online networks or communities or whatever term it is you wish to use to indicate projects that never quite end.

First, there was this tweet from my Making Learning Connected MOOC friend, Allie:

My answer to Allie was: Truthfully, I don’t know.

It may be that the CLMOOC has run its official course and that some variations of it may continue into the summer. I’ve been a facilitator in the past, and enjoyed it immensely, but I am not in charge of the official decision of whether another six week CLMOOC will happen this summer. I don’t think National Writing Project, which has hosted CLMOOC, envisioned supporting CLMOOC forever, and I know a focus right now by NWP is on Educator Innovator projects such as Letters to the President.

So, I don’t know.

I think I can safely say this. The #CLMOOC Twitter hashtag isn’t going anywhere, and until Google pulls the plug on Google Plus Communities, there is still a home there, too, and people are still sharing links, resources, ideas and a weekly #SilentSunday image share. And we have had some “pop up” Make Cycles this spring, thanks to Joe Dillon and Terry Elliott and others. I know I am planning to use the CLMOOC Make Cycles for a graduate class I am teaching through the University of Massachusetts and our Western Mass Writing Project this summer.

Second, I saw a blog post by Alan Levine, reflecting on the Western version of DS106 earlier this year, which he explains better than I can, but I want to note in that in his reflection he reacts to a comment about a sense of “fading” in DS106. I suspect that any online adventure has its time of high activity that slows down after time, even as it continues to persist in some fashion.

DS106 is an intriguing example because some university classes use it as a framework of classwork, connecting the physical classroom to online exploration. At times, there are “headless” DS106 courses that are not connected to a university — with only nominal direction. Come and go, as you please. Other times, a theme starts and ends, and echoes in the Daily Create. People keep making stuff. Cool stuff. Every day.

Alan writes:

I was talking to someone who’s been around the DS106 corral and it was this person’s contention that DS106 had “faded” suggesting in so many words it was past the top of a curve, and maybe it was missing a “charismatic leader”. Many people who got crazy bit with ds106 in 2011, 2012 are not much less or non-active. That’s not a problem, that’s a natural curve of evolution.

And DS106 does persist and it continues encourage continuous creativity, even if you never dipped a toe into any of its online course mutations. Just look at the DS106 Daily Create. It rolls on and on. People don’t just come and go; People come and go long after their first connection to DS106 ever took place.

And then the third post that caught my attention was by Dave Cormier, who has spearheaded Rhizomatic Learning communities since 2014, wrote a fascinating post that references an article he wrote two years ago, in which he responds to a question his young son asks as he is watching Rhizo14 unfold. (The question: Are you in charge? The answer: Not really.)

Dave begins:

… we are potentially radically redefining what it means to be an educator. We are very much at the beginning stages of our learning how to create the space required for community to develop and grow in an open course. These field notes speak to the my own journey in the design of ‘Rhizomatic Learning – the community is the curriculum’. They are, in effect, a journey towards planned obsolescence.

Interestingly, the Rhizomatic Learning connections seem sort of shackled by the hashtag. We began with #rhizo14 and then #rhizo15 and now #rhizo16, but adding a number hampers the ability of the community to last beyond the year, it seems to me. This sort of calls attention to the importance of early course design — how to design for something to never end in social media circles? (This is not a critique of Dave or any of us in Rhizo, by the way, but merely an interesting observation of how a time element stamp can lead to unexpected narrowing of community reverberations.)

How do these three strands/posts come together for me?

Well, I’m intrigued by Dave’s notion — made years ago but seemingly more and more relevant — about “planned obsolescence” of the architect of online experiences. Dave’s notion of “the community is the curriculum” is intriguing, as is Alan’s notion of the “natural curve of evolution” of an online experience.

We may not yet be there. Dave is launching a third iteration of Rhizo under the banner of Learning Resilience.  Maybe we still need someone behind the wheel. While the Rhizo community remains active and vibrant, I think we were waiting for Dave to kick off something for 2016. (I know I was but I didn’t realize it until I was writing this post.) I wonder if the person who wondered about DS106 “fading” was waiting, too, for someone like Alan to step up and lead the way. Did Allie think I was in charge of CLMOOC?

How do we encourage folks to take over and be the learning itself? Dave and Alan have certainly encouraged that every step of the way. Yet we still gravitate towards someone to get us started. (Maybe that’s not a bad thing. We all need a spark.) How does that decentralizing of learning translate into our classrooms? That’s the question of the longer journey many teachers are on in the Connected World, I suspect. I know I am. Maybe you are, too.

If someone comes looking for CLMOOC activities and exploration, perhaps the best answer is to encourage them to create and share Pop Up Make Cycles and invite others to join in. Do we need someone in charge to tell us that CLMOOC is taking place or not? Probably not.

We can make learning happen just by making it happen. The fact that Allie had a “serious remix moment” that reminded her of CLMOOC is incredibly exciting. I wonder what that moment was? Can I join in? Don’t you wonder, too?

Peace (in the make),
Kevin

Amid the Grids; Among these Gestures

Lots of people this week have taken up the call by graphic artist Nick Sousanis to create “Grids and Gestures” — a comic-creating visual activity in which you move beyond a literal interpretation of your day or moment or some period of time. Instead, you let your mind wander, drawing (without words, if possible) a visual representation (that’s the gesture) of the time period (that’s the grid).

Gridgestures4

I’ve done this once before with Nick, but doing a series of them over a few days has been interesting. Sort of like our Slice of Life writing activities, but with lines and circles and smudges instead of stories and vignettes. How would you “write” your day if you could not write, but only draw? How do you represent moments of joy? Frustration? Confusion? Boredom? Love? What does those ideas look like when you sketching at the edge of it all?

Gridgestures5

My five Grids and Gestures used the same six-panel grid, and I used the Paper app for my drawing. So each has a similar feel to them (and exposes my limited artistic abilities). I tried to explored different topics, and used the title on each to indicate what I was thinking about.

It does occur to me that while I can “read” the gestures, others outside of my head (that would be you, dear reader) might wonder, what the heck is that? I wonder if how you read my grids is different than how I wrote my grids? Maybe that is the case with writing, too, at times.

Gridgestures3

There was a community question in the Twitter hashtag about whether these Grids and Gestures are really comics, or something that comes before the comics. In other words, are they incomplete ideas, only part of the brainstorming process?

Nick suggests that this method of creating art with gestures is where much of his time is spent before moving into a larger project, and that it is an effective way to gather ideas and explore the flow of connected concepts. I suggested that the grids are comics in their own way, moving ideas through inferential design and using art to represent abstract ideas.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. Art is what you make of it.

Gridgestures2

If you are interested, explore the Twitter hashtag of #GridsGestures (actually, check out the link to photos only in the Twitter hashtag stream — that’s pretty cool) or check out Nick’s website and some of his amazing work.

Make your own. Share them out. Be creative. Every day.

Gridsgestures1

Peace (beyond the grids),
Kevin

 

Grids and Gestures: A Comic Make

Gridsgestures1

Nick Sousanis, whose work as a graphic story/artist is always intriguing (see Unflattening) and interesting, is hosting an informal week of Grids and Gestures, his activity that invites you to make a conceptual comic built around time and design. Nick did a Make with Me hangout with CLMOOC this past summer, and we all did the activity. He also wrote a great piece for Digital Writing Month about the art of comics.

The image — done in the Paper app on my iPad — above is my first Grid and Gesture attempt for the week .. tracking my weekend day over time.

Here, Nick explains how Grids and Gestures works:

Give it a try this week. I’ll be doing mine, too, as I think about my days in terms of conceptual design. You don’t need to be an artist or a writer or a comic creator. That’s the beauty of Nick’s activity. Anyone can enter, at any level, and still come out with an understanding of the world.

Comics space time

Peace (inside and beyond the grids),
Kevin