I’m having as much fun making promos for the Making Learning Connected MOOC as I will be doing the MOOC itself. Ha. Please consider joining us for playful learning this summer, and pass this short video along to friends.
Peace (as if it needs explanation),
Kevin
When: TONIGHT, May 20, 2014, 7-8 EST, 4-5 p.m. PDT
Where: Via Google Hangout on Air from Educator Innovator Webinar page.
Making Learning Connected (also known as #clmooc) is a collaborative, knowledge-building and sharing experience offered through Educator Innovator. It is open to anyone interested in making, playing, and learning together about the educational framework known as Connected Learning. In #clmooc, educators of all types have an opportunity to play with new tools, make projects and friends, and share projects and reflections with colleagues across the country and around the world. Join members of the Making Learning Connected 2014 team as they discuss the plans for the upcoming summer, how to get involved, and why “you’re in the right place” if you participate in #clmooc.
Come check out the hangout for information on the launch of the CLMOOC in June. Plenty of room for you!
Peace (in the mooc),
Kevin
I am dipping into this year’s Teach the Web by Mozilla. I took part last year and learned a whole lot. This year, I might not have as much time, but I love how they have really broadened the inquiry along a few different lines. One of the introductory activities is to do a Make with one of the Webmaker tools, so I took Chad Sansing’s Planet Project and remixed it into a sort of belief idea around Connected Learning.
Peace (in the world),
Kevin
I’ve been having a blast making teasers for this summer’s Making Learning Connected MOOC (Massive Open Online Collaboration). This is the second year of the CLMOOC, and last year was so much fun, we are doing it again –with various wrinkles to allow last year’s folks to keep playing with learning and enough entry points for new folks to come on board and have fun.
I am one of the facilitators of the CLMOOC, leading up the “support team” that will make sure folks feel welcomed and assisted as they move their way through the Make Cycles of possible activities and reflection. But as we move towards the “hard launch” of the CLMOOC, I’ve been tinkering around with various means of “teasing” folks to sign on up (it’s free! lurkers welcome!)
Alan Levine, over at DS106, recently shared out an online generator for creating your own Monopoly game cards, and I thought: Gotta use that! So, I’ve been creating Chance and Community Chest cards with a CLMOOC bent, and sharing them one at a time on Twitter (our hashtag is #clmooc). I decided to move all of the cards into a comic, too.
I invite you to join our Making Learning Connected MOOC this summer. It’s sponsored by the National Writing Project and it is part of the Educator Innovator Network’s Summer of Make, Play and Connect. The MOOC is designed to get you playing, learning and reflecting, and connecting with other educators in a stress-free environment (hey, it’s summer). The whole thing kicks off in mid-June and goes until August, although you should feel free to enter and exit as your schedule permits.
I’m already making things …. come join me.
Peace (in the slice of MOOC pie),
Kevin
Once again, my friend Chad Sansing has created a cool remixable project via Webmaker that I just had to check out and remix myself. Chad made a ‘zine template with Thimble, which you can adapt for your own area of interest, print out, fold up and hand out to friends.
How cool is that?
I went in and made a little zine for the Making Learning Connected MOOC, which launches into its second iteration this coming summer (Come sign up and join the fun!). If you hit the remix button on either Chad’s or my #CLMOOC zine project, there are all sorts of helper notes in the code that Chad has written than will walk you through the process of coding the page.
After making the #CLMOOC zine, I printed it out (this took a few trial and errors to get the setting right on the page — I went landscape, at 60 percent, with my Firefox browser), and folded it up, and then shot this short Vine piece of the zine.
Peace (in the zine),
Kevin
I’m in a flowchart kind of mode these days as part of creating teasers for this summer’s Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (that’s a mouthful, so we just say CLMOOC). Last year, we had fun. This year, we’ll have a blast. And you are invited — all of you.
We’re still in a “soft launch” mode — just getting started and we will be ramping things up in the coming weeks. You can sign up for news already at the CLMOOC main hub site. But if you need some help thinking it through, here are two flowcharts for ya.
First:
And then (adapted from a teaser from last year):
And now? Come sign up for the CLMOOC experience, which kicks off in June and goes for six weeks of making, learning, playing, exploring and connecting in ways that will have you think closely about your own learning experiences.
Peace (in the CLMOOC),
Kevin
We’re starting our planning for this summer’s Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (notice how we don’t say “course” — that’s important) or CLMOOC. We’re in a very soft launch mode right now, but you can visit the FAQ page and add your email to our update lists.
Basically, it will be a summer of play and exploration and learning, all under the umbrella of Innovator Educator‘s Summer to Make, Play and Connect. We had great success, and a blast, last summer and we’re working to build on that experience for Round Two. Making Learning Connected runs from June 13-August 1, 2014 and we use the Twitter hashtag #clmooc.
More information (and periodic teasers) to come …
Peace (and play),
Kevin
Let me disclose a few things:
All that said, I highly recommend a read of this important collection around teaching and learning.
Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom is in many ways a classic National Writing Project production through and through: Teachers sharing their classroom experiences (successes and trials) through the lens of inquiry and writing, all viewed through the overarching frame of Connected Learning principles. What are those principles? These ideas emerged from extensive research done by Mimi Ito and others on the ways that young people are learning in this digital age, and center on a few main concepts (better seen in this infographic).
Connected learning is:
Watch this video:
Which is all good and everything but what does that mean for the classroom teacher (like me)? Editor Antero Garcia and the fabulous writers and curators here try to answer that question by focusing the lens on classrooms with stories from teachers grouped around those themes, with curation editors framing those specific stories in the light of inquiry.
“I believe connected learning principles can provide a vocabulary for teachers to reclaim agency over what and how we best meet the individual needs of students in our classroom,” Garcia writes in the introduction. “With learners as the focus, teachers can rely on connected learning as a way to pull back the curtain on how learning happens in schools and agitate the possibilities of classrooms today.”
And so as educator Christopher Working shares how his third graders took blogging to new levels, and how their writing flourished as a result, other teachers (such as Chuck Jurich, Gail Desler, and Danielle Filipiak) explore the dynamics of multimedia production and global audiences and collaboration for student work that goes above and beyond expectation.
“… I was able to see firsthand how centering production afforded opportunities for students to construct affirming identities, make authentic connections to classroom texts, and develop new and specialized technical skill sets,” writes Filipiak, of projects undertaken by her students that merged media and culture together for a social justice message.
Still others are pushing boundaries, even if they are still grounded in literacy. Jason Sellers has his elementary students creating interactive fiction games and stories, mixing in the overarching lessons of programming with the lessons of writing stories. “The unforgiving nature of programming languages was a frustrating but valuable experience for some students, ” Sellars admits. “Small mistakes in a line of code often would render their games unplayable” and yet, lead to revision and iterative design.
One of the more fascinating projects here is the Interactive ‘Zine project, and Christian McKay’s insights into the merging writing, publication and fabrication/maker techniques to create bound collection of writing that has electronic elements built right into the design (with Makey Makey circuit boards and Scratch programming systems). “The Interactive ‘Zine provides opportunities for learners to consciously engage in the creation of their artifact for a public audience, ” writes McKay. “The public entity is developed through the written word that the students share — at a minimum, within the classroom, and more broadly, through public sharing of their Scratch projects at the Scratch website.”
There’s more, much more, that I could share here, but I think you’d be best to get your own copy. And you won’t need to pilfer it from the table off an unsuspecting friend, as I did. Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom is a free PDF and a relatively cheap ebook for Kindle right now. It is published through the Digital Media and Learning Hub.
Oh, did I mention that just about every article here has a link to a media resource at the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site? That alone is worth the free price of admission. Links are embedded right into the ebook itself, allowing you to see student samples and teacher resources and more, so what are you waiting for? Get connecting.
Peace (in the book),
Kevin
One of the themes of our presentation about the Making Learning Connected MOOC at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Boston last weekend was the planned learning versus the unplanned, or the emergent, learning. I found it incredibly exciting over the summer when the unexpected happened. It was something we facilitators hoped might happen but when you are planning, you can only lay some groundwork. You can’t force unknown ideas to emerge.
You can, however, notice it and focus the spotlight on it.
For our session, I went in and created this visual, showing what we planned (the trunk) and what emerged naturally (the branches) from each of the Make Cycles of the CLMOOC. I like that this kind of illustration allows me to document and remember the emergent ideas from participants, and values their innovative ideas.
Peace (along the branches),
Kevin
We had folks in our workshop session at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Boston “making maps” as part of our presentation around the Making Learning Connected MOOC. It was so cool to see the different approaches to ideas and to representing pathways of discovery. Some folks created flowcharts of their conference learning. Others did mind maps of where they want to go next with some ideas. A few built three-dimensional representations of their online worlds and connections.
Since I had already done a learning map the other day, I went into another direction: representing my affiliation with bands that I have been in over the years. (that’s mine, on the right). This is my learning map:
The image on the left is the collection of maps from participants, as we lined them up together at the end, stitching together our learning into one larger map. The pattern on the rug helped …
I guess maps are having a moment, right now. In my RSS feed yesterday, I found two interesting links around mapmaking as learning. The first showed maps as an example of “digital empathy” and the other focused in on sharing of maps as the new meme.
Peace (along the lines),
Kevin