Connecting Learning and Life through Collaboration and Respect for Messiness #ce13

My closest connection to a classroom project right now, besides the ever-present string games, brought out on every sub job I do, is a collaboration my colleague Dan Spelce from the Forage Project and I have been talking about for some months now: a genealogy and family history curriculum for students, perhaps in a Winter or Summer Institute format, or as an after-school program. We'd not spoken for several weeks, and I called him to check in. he said I was on his list to call today [!] because he's made such progress with outlining what he's thinking of that he's reached the limits of what Microsoft Word can do for him. So we'll be meeting at the "Connecting Art and Education" drop-in at the Arts Council Santa Cruz offices on Thursday, October 17, and hopefully connecting before then to develop some of the web resources we're gathering into an accessible format.

Looking forward to this collaboration, as I read and reflect on the many blogs and comments from classroom teachers about their efforts to make learning connected. The role out-of-classroom educators like Dan and me can fulfill is to provide frameworks and resources for students and teachers to explore topics of interest, and perhaps reach small numbers of students if we can secure funding to launch an Institute. Slow, modest work. Here's a photo of Dan and his wife Yoli from our #CLMOOC Face-to-Face group.

Messiness comes in when one tries to manage a group of students each doing self-chosen, self-directed projects. They are clearly meaningful and connected to students' lives, but they are also then each unique. The role of the teacher becomes facilitating each students' journey, and balancing multiple needs and directions puts many teachers out of their comfort zone. How can we build in scaffolds for teachers that will help them deal with these challenges?

Looking at Yoli's smiling face reminds me of another Connected learning agenda item I have, just to make sure this post has a messy bit to lead it out of coherence: ¡Más discusión en español!

Do you have time for beauty?

  Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist, was interviewed this week on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," one of my favorite radio programs. Galeano asks, "Do you have time for beauty?" I have many times found during these past weeks of the #CLMOOC activities, that I had to answer that question No. This or that part of my daily activity that was perhaps a tiny bit beautiful – for example, stopping for ten minutes to glue some origami paper over the corporate logos on a conference-freeby notebook, so that I will have a journal book that at least in a tiny part I remade myself – but the doing of it, stopping from making checkoffs on the perpetual list of household and work and personal chores which fill most of the day's time to do a small bit of beauty-making, was as much as I could allow myself. Stopping as well to photograph the process or write about it or even really note in my mind that I was doing it, well, somehow that was TOO indulgent.
But I have done many such small acts of beauty-making, and at least had the thought that this was a "make" that would be fun to share with the MOOC, since the first week – picking a bouquet of flowers and arranging them in a vase, highlighting some of the long-neglected cultivars in our garden at our home under reconstruction by removing the volunteer plants which have grown up around them [a long-winded way to say "I did a little weeding" – and the seed of a long post about how destructive that pejorative word about some of the most vital plants in our floral environment {in Spanish, "yerbas malas" the bad plants} can be, if we fail to understand what cultivation really means].
I designed in my mind a #toyhack, taking a traditional Mexican hand carved top with a wooden cradle launcher and turning it upside down, so without the bother of the string and the tricky launching process, which I know my four-year old grandson would find challenging and probably frustrating, he could simply spin it by hand in its cradle and perhaps enjoy it for a moment. But I've not made the time to demo it on camera, as I had fantasized, nor even to bring the top to him and film him doing the hack I had in mind, and then just watch him do whatever else he might with this unfamiliar and venerable toy.
So one legacy I see already of the #clmooc experience is a heightened awareness of the importance of making time for beauty. Thank you all.

Womanifesta, parte dos, en donde se cambia al íngles...

Finalmente encontré un párrafo que comunica lo que puedo llamar cómodamente una filosofía de aprendizaje y enseñanza:

• "I propose a structural approach to differentiation and personalisation, positioning kids as free-range learners rather than battery-hens. Firmly supported in a community-of-practice, and guided by on-the-shoulder experts, young people can self-direct, problem-solve, get creative, and develop an unstoppable love of learning."

From Stephen Collis, http://www.happysteve.com/bio/ 

 Free range learners is such an evocative phrase, and I love the "community-of-practice" formulation and the image of the teacher as an "on the shoulder expert."

Here's a drawing from Steve that appears in his blog, giving a more personalized set of examples for the four frames:

Correlating the four frame types with Talcott Parsons' AGIL schema of social organization for #clmooc

Below is an interactive Mind Map, correlating the four Frame types from Stephen Collis via Terry in the #clmooc

with my vague memories of Talcott Parsons' AGIL schema, which has stuck with me ever since. I'm not sure of the utility of either, nor of my theoretical correlation, but it was fun to do and great to discover MindMup.

http://www.happysteve.com/blog/2013/6/1/introducing-frames-theory-for-reinventing-learning

Frames on MindMup

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!