I caught only the tail end of this presentation the other week, so I am happy to see it archived. It centers on the concept of “illuminated notebooks” that use circuits with writing. Check it out:
And here is the link with the chat room notes.
Peace (in the lighting up of ideas),
Kevin
The one session that I wanted to attend but could not attend at National Writing Project Annual Meeting was about “hacking the notebook/illuminating the thinking” in which some very inventive folks are revamping what we can do with a notebook by using circuitry stickers to add electronics to notebooks. (I was presenting at te same time). Friends were raving about it for days.
How cool is that idea?
I just added my support for the idea by ordering a kit, still under development, at a crowd-sourcing site. And I am hopeful that I might be able to join a webinar this Thursday afternoon about the notebook circuitry kit. Here is the blurb I received from NWP:
When: December 5, 2013, 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. PST
Where: Via Google Hangout on Air from this page.
In a reprise of a National Writing Project Annual Meeting session, Jie Qi of the Responsive Environments group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Cole and Jennifer Dick of Nexmap.org and its I/O (Inside/Out) program walk you through the building of low-cost circuits that allow writers to hack the traditional notebook and tell stories with interactivity. Tune into this webinar to learn how you can work with circuits, writing, and your creative impulse to turn the writer’s notebook into a repository of STEM-powered storytelling.
Interested in learning more about this work and its approach and materials in advance of the webinar? See the I/O notebooking page and Jie Qi’s recently announced crowd-funding project, Circuit Stickers. Check out the video and take a look the circuit stickers she and her research partner, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, are producing.
Tell me you aren’t intrigued, too?
Peace (in the systems),
Kevin
While at the second day of the National Writing Project meeting, I spent the morning in a session around Scratch and coding for storytelling, and then the afternoon in a session around e-textiles and puppetry, and how to use circuits for storytelling. This collage shows a few photos from the day:
There was a definite Makers Ethos to the NWP sessions this year, beginning with a plenary talk about the value of remixing Moby Dick and other works of literature. And speaking of remixing Moby Dick, a cool thread of iteration happened over the course of the day, as my friends Chad and Andrea launched a Twitter activity called #Twitcatastrophe, in which folks made suggestions for strange things happening and Chad and/or Andrea would illustrate it and tweet it out.
I suggested a literal close reading in which the book snaps shut on the reader’s nose.
First, Chad drew this:
Then, in our Scratch session, Andrea created this:
I went in and remixed her project, adding the element of the reader itself:
And Christina came over and shot a Vine of Andrea and the game:
It was a blast, and reminded all of us how iteration and inspiration and creativity are at the heart of the remix culture. Each step — from creating the twitter game to the reader/artist response to the gameplay and remixing of the game — are different points on the compositional spectrum that we need to nurture and value.
Peace (in the make),
Kevin
As part of our session around the Making Learning Connected MOOC, co-presenter Joe Dillon and I had participants “represent” themselves with clay and wikistix, and then they pinned themselves on the giant map we brought. This was a way for us to talk about Connected Learning principles and some of the creative “makes” that took place during the MOOC. (It also was a live version of the virtual map we did in the MOOC, which now has almost 5,000 views)
Thanks to Chris and Tricia for tweeting out pictures of the map.
And here is a funny video I took of me wrestling with the map at home before heading to Boston.
Peace (on the grid),
Kevin
For all my friends coming into Boston for NCTE and NWP annual meetings, you may want to educate yourself on how to speak Boston.
🙂
And you can even do a little vocab work, too.
Peace (in the east),
Kevin
I am going to be in Boston next week for the annual meetings of the National Writing Project and National Council of Teachers of English, and I am presenting a few times over a four day period. I created this little teaser video:
But more specifically:
A glimpse at some writing I did this weekend in between baseball games, Halloween parties, assessing student writing, and being a father.
The Daily Create at DS106 yesterday asked us to begin a story about the “sky never being the same” and I had this idea of our perceptions of the solar system being upended. This is what I wrote:
We laugh now to remember the ways in which the world made fun of Galileo for presuming that the Sun was the center of our solar system, not the Earth itself. So long, Copernicus! Who among us hadn’t gazed up at the sky and wondered at the Sun, and how that large glowing orb was keeping us all together, as if the planets were a system of yo-yos set off on an elliptical path?
We laugh now, but not comfortably, because now we all feel like Copernicus, don’t we? We who believed Galileo. We who took it for granted that the largest object in the sky must be the most powerful, the center of the action. No doubt the discovery by Charniegi will forever haunt our imaginations.
How did he see it when no one else did? What was the first spark of doubt that Galileo was wrong?
Charniegi refuses to explain, and only his diagrams are his story, and so we peruse them carefully, wondering how we missed what Charniegi saw. We translate them, talk about them, share them in all of our communication spaces.
There are always those faint lines of history where in hindsight, you realize that you made assumptions and inferences based on incomplete facts. Charniegi did not. He dove in and discovered. He inadvertently made us all look like the fools we were, believing in Galileo.
Now, we look towards Pluto — that misaligned former planet dangling on the outskirts of the solar system — in order to see more clearly. Pluto. The smallest of us really are the most powerful. The sky will never be the same again, will it?
Charniegi made sure of that.
I was also working on some poetry this weekend.
The first piece was inspired by a prose poem by my friend Brian Fay. Brian had this line “Another crease becomes a tear here” that really jumped out at me, so I crafted a poem around that idea.
The second poem was inspired by a group of us on Twitter who seem to get up early in the mornings to write and connect and share. I tossed out the idea of the Sunrise Writing Club, and that name sort of got lodged in my mind a bit. The poem that came out captured the idea of finding things to write about left over from the night.
The third poem was very different, indeed. I have some friends who were over in England for the Mozilla Foundation MozFest, working on ideas for the ever-growing Webmaker space. One friend (Peter) shared out a collaborative document with a Thimble project for kinetic/animated text. I was really intrigued by it, and worked on a poem in the space. Later, another friend (Christina) told me of an update and invited us to go back and rework the poems in the new Thimble.
I just started over new and created Improvise with Me.
What I found fascinating is that I did a bit of reverse-engineering writing. Instead of bringing a poem idea to the Thimble, and animating with the original text in mind, I went into the space with the animation in mind, and built the poem around the kinetic movements built into the Thimble page. This is not ideal for writing, but I still had fun with it, writing about the playing of jazz. (You should follow this link to the get to the kinetic text poem, and then, heck, make your own by remixing mine.)
Peace (as writers),
Kevin
Over at the National Writing Project’s Digital Is, I posted a new resource this week that looks at a six month professional development program in which we incorporated digital learning into many facets of the work, trying to make the technology invisible and a natural part of the learning for teachers (with hopes they will turn around, and do the same with their own students).
Take a look at SEED Grant Partnership: Technology as Learning
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
Our weekly writing prompt over at the iAnthology had us thinking recently of telling the story of teaching via game theory. I went in another direction and created this video game to share over there, and here.
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
I am fortunate to be hanging out with some wicked smart people, yo, as many of us facilitators in the Making Learning Connected MOOC begin thinking about all that has gone on in the various spaces that make up the MOOC, how we might help others learn from our experiences, and just plain ol’ making sense of what has been happening. (I know, good luck with that, right?)
We’re here at an online learning retreat with other National Writing Project groups also moving into developing online learning spaces, although I am confident in saying that the MOOC is a completely different collaborative animal than any other project represented here.
And we’re lucky to be in Seattle, which has a beautiful waterfront and fish market area with Mt. Rainier rising up above the horizon like some magical mountain. It’s a stunning view. Last night, we took a group shot before dinner, but since we were missing two important companions — Chad and Anna — I added them in as webcomic avatars. I suspect they won’t mind.
Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin
