Womanifesta de aprendizaje

No sé exactamente porque, pero siempre me pongo en español cuando es tiempo de hablar desde el corazón. Tengo varios pedazos de mi 'Documento de Creencias' pero todavía me falta una idea clara de como organizarlo. Pensando en esta reflección acerca de 'frames' que nos mandó Bart Miller, busqué la traducción de esta palabra inglesa. La lista:

frame-noun
marco
framework, frame, setting, mark, picture frame, mounting
bastidor
frame, embroidery frame, trestle
cuadro
picture, frame, painting, chart, square, cadre
estructura
structure, frame, framework, build, fabric, skeleton
armazón
frame, framework, shell, skeleton, armature, carcass
montura
mount, frame, rim
cuerpo
body, corps, corpus, corpse, length, force
armadura
armor, armature, frame, signature, mounting, armour

enmarcado
framing, frame
frame-verb
enmarcar
frame
encuadrar
frame
formular
formulate, frame, state, shape, article

Otro pedazo:

Grácias a #clmooc y #clmooc-esp

Connected Learning through Arts Integration

I've pioneered using technology in the classroom since 1994 or so. I had the only internet connection in a classroom at our school, and one of the first in our county, which I got by agreeing to pay the phone installation charges myself--somewhere between $50 and $75, I don't recall the exact amount. Luckily my principal agreed to let the line charges stay bundled with the school's overall phone bill, and I was able to convince a local Internet Service Provider to donate the connectivity in the name of education. We had 5 or 6 computers, 3 Mac II's and some Mac Classics, networked and capable of surfing the net in the classroom, and they became one of the kids' favorite centers.

A few years later, I wrote a Technology Literacy Challenge Grant, which funded me to work full time as a technology integration specialist and Director of the TLC Grant. I continued as an entirely self-funded technology mentor teacher for seven years. Since retiring from full-time work in the Watsonville school district, I've continued to use and advocate for technology as a tool for students to use to create artifacts of their learning and to facilitate their self-directed learning. But the winds of technology use have shifted so far (among some quarters) towards technologies which attempt to "deliver" instruction from machines into children as empty vessels that I've become less and less comfortable being identified as a technologist.

Using computers was never about the technology for me, but rather about the connections and learning possibilities which the Internet afforded. My initial motivation for learning to use computers in the early 90's was to use the Internet to connect my Spanish-speaking students to their peers in Mexico, and thereby enhance the value of retaining their Spanish language skills amidst the relentless pressure to "immerse" themselves in our jingoistic English-only culture. I never really accomplished that goal (there's an interesting birdwalk to take about why it was so hard to do, for another time), but I did fall deeper and deeper into the world of technological communication and became identified locally as a tech mentor teacher and unofficial IT troubleshooter.

One of my goals for the #CLMOOC is to remake my identity into that of a Teaching Artist. My 2D and 3D art-making is still pretty funky; the art I want to be teaching is "Telling Stories with String." And the storytelling is as much about the teaching as about the string: string games provide a direct link to the bilateral, cross-fertilizing power released when we develop ambidexterity and digital memory, not in the figurative sense in which digits are 1's and 0's but via the direct use of our fingers to connect bodily learning to the brain's two hemispheres. And the process through which any group learns a string game is quintessential "Connected Learning": there are always a few in a group who learn a little quicker than do others, and so the teaching art is to create a group climate where each of those newly minted experts immediately becomes another teacher, and soon the reality that "We Are All Teachers in This Classroom" spreads from the string figures to the math problems to the story sequencing, structure, and composition.

Blogging for CLMOOC

Here's an attempt to create a blog post that can be linked in the CLMOOC...
I think it worked!

The New Digital Age

Recently Brad Acker asked for comment on Google+ about an excerpt from

Schmidt, Eric; Cohen, Jared (2013-04-23). The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

He quoted this:

• The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws.... Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips. And while this is hardly the first technology revolution in our history, it is the first that will make it possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content without having to rely on intermediaries. ~Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

and asked if people agree. I responded:

• The political frame which calling the spirit unleashed by the internet "anarchy" evokes points to some of the pitfalls in both our understanding of the phenomenon and our discussions on what structures we need to support in order to ensure that the Internet survives the multifarious efforts to control or at least dilute its power. Anarchists are forever tainted with the bearded bomb-thrower image of European and thus European immigrant martyrs and activists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The attempts of Anonymous and their cohorts to "protect" the internet with vandalism and aggression reinforce this association. A better analogy, I suggest, is Anarcho-syndicalism and the kind of worker- and community-led democratization efforts Gar Alperovitz documents and advocates for in his new book "What Then Must We Do?" 
• The anarchy of the Internet must be supported by governmental and community based agencies and businesses, so its supporters must abandon the purity of anarchy's extremes to collaborate and cooperate with those who protect its free nature and eschew the tactics of the bomb-throwers as we struggle against the forces that would transform the Internet into a mere tool for propaganda and commerce.
• In the education world where I live, this means supporting open source and the Creative Commons, and opposing the profiteers who want to transform our connected learning devices into mere delivery systems for the delivery of "content" into seated students who earn their overlords ADA without the expense of actual teachers.

Low-grade clerical work

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Sir Ken Robinson on why the ADHD "epidemic" is phony


 

I had to stop listening to this talk to post this line, since it's such a powerful image of what's wrong with our school system.

Discussing the Forage IV Project on "Teachers Teaching Teachers"

Here's a video of our Google+ Hangout discussing the Forage IV Project on "Teachers Teaching Teachers" :

A gift from a flower to a garden

Making a comment after signing a petition for gun regulation, I proposed a tax on gun sales that would directly fund a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, dedicated to putting as much energy into the active search for peace-creating cultural events as we now put into war-making. The work begun in the sixties, consciously creating a culture of peace, of understanding -- fully manifesting -- our common humanity, at levels of collaboration and cooperation which would transcend the illusory barriers of nations, languages, and creeds. 

Gatherings of tribes, a growing network of inter-dependent and fluid communal homes and ranches and live-in businesses in urban areas, a new oeconomics emerging parallel to the crumbling behemoth we were trying to play around the edges of...

The dreamy naiveté of that era is embarrassing today, and yet still inspires me. I liked Donovan's "Gift From a Flower to a Garden" even more than "The White Album."