Course Faculty
This course is co-taught by friends and colleagues, Dr. Scott McDonald and Cole Camplese. This is the second time we are teaching this course and have made quite a few changes to the overall structure, but the core tenants remain. If you are interested in learning more about Scott or Cole, read on.
Course Description
This course is different from your typical graduate course. We approach this course as a grand experiment and look forward to watching it evolve and grow over time. Our goal is to create an interesting and challenging blend of academic rigor within the context of applied technology. We will look at technologies that could be viewed as disruptive to typical classroom practices, but we will investigate them to discover the emergent opportunities for discovering pedagogy. In other words, we will not only kick the tires, but we will strip the whole vehicle down, understand how it fits together, and rebuild it with a new ability to see its potential.
This is a face to face course that will take advantage of all sorts of digital tools and online spaces. One of our goals is to press you into uncomfortable waters where you will need to be an active participant in order to thrive. Our best students are ones who are willing to take risks and make mistakes with us along the way. We strive to create more than a classroom experience — we work to create a learning community.
Readings
- Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
- Camplese & McDonald, Phi Delta Kappan Edge
- McLuhan & Fiore, The Medium is the Massage
- Gee (1999), An introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (Ch.2 & 3)
- Lankshear & Knobel (2007), “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies”
- Pea (1993) “Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education”
- David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto
- David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined
- Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovation
- danah boyd, White Flight
Assignments
Weekly Readings and Face to Face Discussion Facilitation
You will do much of the work in this course as part of a team. One of your team’s weekly assignments will be to post responses / reflections on the readings that you are doing. These responses will focus around the three themes of the course: Community, Identity, and Design — culminating with a synthesis of themes. Each week your team will focus energy on one of the themes. We will cycle through the themes three times during the semester.
Cole and Scott will provide each team with a pre-populated Google Doc that will serve as your team writing space for this activity. The idea is that both of us will be able to watch your weekly writings develop while in-progress. In this case we are asking you to rethink how assignments are designed, assessed, and feedback provided.
The idea is for you to start to build up a strong theoretical foundation for the way technology should be used in teaching and learning and the implications of the affordances of various technologies. You will also be asked to post comments to the responses/reflections of the other teams in the class.
When you are satisfied with your team’s weekly writing, ask on member of the team to post the reflection to the course blog by no later than 10 PM on Friday. Between Friday and Sunday at 10 PM you are required as individuals to leave comments on the other teams’ postings for the week. This means as a team you will make one reflective post per week, but as individuals you will be leaving comments on all other team’s posts.
During the first several weeks of the course Cole and Scott will harvest the top posts (measured through a complex algorithm related to interestingness) and will facilitate a discussion in class. By week 5, teams will begin to take over responsibility for this task on specifically assigned weeks.
There will be 12 of weekly posts, each worth 20 points for a total of 240 points. There will be a total of 36 comments (3 per week) made by each individual at 10 points each for 360 total points.
Synthesis Presentations
At the culmination of the first two thematic cycles (weekly writings on community, identity, and design) we will ask each team to prepare an artifact that will be shared with the class:
- A synthesis presentation that will guide us through your team’s thoughts and reflections. In the presentations any forms of technology can be used to expand upon your post. It is really up to you and we actually expect some creativity to engage the class and get beyond death by powerpoint. This should include a reconsideration of your current definitions of the core concepts: community, identity and design.
At the culmination of block three, we will be asking you to prepare and present an overall course level synthesis that is fully enriched with the technologies you have investigated. These presentations should be an hour in length and thought of as activities designed to engage the class and drive high levels of conversation and discussion.
The first two synthesis presentations are 50 points each for a total of 100 points. The final synthesis presentation is worth 100 points.
Class Facilitation
With that in mind, at least one week this semester your group will be asked to take a look at all the posts and comments for the week and facilitate in-class discussion. To the degree it is possible, you should focus the in-class discussion around the themes of the course (community, identity, and design). How you run the discussion is up to you. You can be as creative as you like, and draw upon technologies (either ones we have discussed in class or not) to help you. You will need to check this site after 10 pm on Sunday and then organize your discussion in time for Tuesday’s class. You should anticipate approximately one to one and a half hours of discussion, so plan accordingly.
Trust us, this is a bit difficult so work to pay attention to how Scott and Cole manage this portion of the course in the early portion of the class.
Each team will perform this task once. This task will be worth 100 total points.
Class Participation
This is an area where we will continue to explore and expand as you begin to move into additional technology spaces throughout the semester. What that means is that we will measure your overall participation in very broad terms — contributions to blog posts, comments in class, tweets, delicious bookmarks added, and more will be taken into account as a measure of your overall participation in the class.
We have allocated an additional 100 points to this aspect of the course and it is has proven to be the tipping point for students in the past.
Point Totals
- 12 Weekly Writing Assignments @ Points = 240 Points
- 36 Individual Comments @ 10 Points = 360 Points
- 2 Synthesis Presentations @ 50 Points = 100 Points
- 1 Final Synthesis Presentation @ 100 Points = 100 Points
- 1 Team Discussion Leader @ 100 Points = 100 Points
- Various Class Participation @ 100 Points = 100 Points
Total Points in Course 1000
Weekly Schedule (Subject to Lots and Lots of Change!)
Week 1: 1/12/2010
- Introductions
- Course history
- Enabling the new classroom conversation presentation
- Break
- Meet your technology: Twitter, Google Docs, and Penn State Blogs
- Fill out the account form. If you do not have accounts at all the listed services please get them prior to filling out the form. It is best to use the same username across these services were possible.
- Syllabus
- Introduce Readings (PDK Edge and Lankshear & Knobel)
- Team assignments
Out of Class
- Personal introduction posted to the course blog space
- Readings: Camplese & McDonald, “Disrupting the Classroom” and Lankshear & Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” with the first weekly writing assignment focusing on the notion of community.
- Register for the TLT Symposium
Week 2: 1/19/2010 (Community)
- Cole and Scott will not be in class (at the Educause Learning Initiative)
- What does disruptive technology mean to you posted to the course blog space
- Readings: Gee (1999) and McLuhan & Fiore, The Medium is the Massage with a weekly writing assignment focused on identity
- YouTube activity: Exploring Technology
Face to face welcome
Week 3: 1/26/2010 (Identity)
- Reactions to the first set of assignments — What sense of the others in this class do have after two weeks of interaction? Community, how did you portray your identity, and how do you think you might reconsider design of learning environments based on your experience thus far
- Meet your technology: RSS
- In teams you will craft the beginning of definitions of the two of our key themes, community & identity. These should reference specific pieces from the content associated with the class (readings, podcasts, blog posts, etc). Work in your team’s google doc and do a final posting at the end of the allotted time.
- Please list the names of your team members on your post.
- Readings, Horizon Report & Pea
Week 4: 2/2/2010 (Design)
- Meet your technology: Delicious
- Use tag “ci597“
- Tagging of twitter posts with #ci597
- Discussion of readings
- Post your team’s updated take on the themes from last week, with design now integrated
- Prepare for Synthesis Presentations
- Remember to incude your updated YouTube
- Reading Wenger & Boyd
Week 5: 2/9/2010 (Synthesis)
- Team Synthesis Presentations
- Open and Open Education
- Meet your technology: Flickr
- Reading (Wenger) and weekly writing assignment
Week 6: 2/16/2010 (Community)
- See today
- Meet your technology: Wiki
- Discussion of readings
- Reading (Wenger) and weekly writing assignment
- See today
- Managing your intellectual life
- Building a shared repository for our community
- Discuss team facilitation responsibilities for team 1
- Readings:
- Don Norman – The Design of Everyday Things
- Everett Rogers – Diffusion of Innovations
- Our thoughts on course design
- How we are making big decisions
- Thinking about rolling your own
- Team 1 leads Identity conversations
- Readings:
- Wenger 134-163
- Small Pieces Loosely Joined
- Spring Break
- No class
- See Class Today
- Team Synthesis Presentations
- Some questions to consider:
- Given the ideas presented in Small Pieces, what about Jon Mott’s vision for bridging the gap between the LMS and the Personal Learning Environment jumped out at you?
- Thinking of the technologies we are using in this class, can you envision an environment where the LMS/CMS is not the digital hub to the teaching and learning landscape in today’s classrooms?
- Now that you have an understanding of Wenger’s notion of Identity, how does it contrast or align with Gee’s?
- Please complete Wenger
- Attend the TLT Symposium
- No face to face class
- Make sure you sign up for and blog a session
- Focus on Community
- Team 2 Leads the Conversation
- Focus on Identity
- Team 3 Leads the Conversation
- Focus on Design
- Team 4 Leads the Conversation
- Final Synthesis Presentations
- Final Synthesis Presentations