The second half of today is up to team 3.
- The hype and the hate around the iPad
- Your developing intellectual projects
The second half of today is up to team 3.
We are really coming down the home stretch with only a few weeks left. Please make sure you are keeping up with the schedule as it is laid out on the Course Syllabus. We’ve arrived at the stage of the course where Scott and Cole will be peeling back and letting you dictate much of what goes on from here on out. We’ll still have things we want to discuss, but the onus is now going to be placed on you to drive the intellectual work of the course.
Today is Team Synthesis day, so Scott and I will mostly be sitting back and interacting based on your designs. After your teams are finished presenting we’ll want to have an open discussion related to the readings we completed the last couple of weeks.
Some Guiding Questions
Readings
So it looks like we’ll be turning over much of the class to Team 1 today to lead us through a discussion of the readings and our overall reactions to them. It should be interesting and we expect you to speak up — both in the face to face space and online. Scott and I will take a cut at the first half of class, take a break, and then turn it over to Team 1. Here are some of the things we will want to talk about:
Schreyer Meeting
ANGEL and our Collective Thoughts on Design
Readings
, Bridging the Gap Between the LMS and PLE
Today we are going to explore the relationship between identity and community in a very specific context – intellectual and creative work. To do this we will first start with you and your intellectual world and then we will try and place the academic language game into the context of the social movement around mashups, copyright and creative commons.
Once again I will be solo, so Tweeting out to Cole would be appreciated.
Last week we had synthesis, so what came up was not as much about the new readings as it was about you synthesis of core ideas so far. Given that we are going to dig into come of the readings and lay out some questions to guide us forward as we get deeper into Wenger’s world (not at all like Elmo’s).
We are also going to look a little at data visualizations. We are not quite to the stage of having completely one button data visualization, like we do with text on the web, but the day is coming. Specifically, we will look at:
One thing that came up in the blog posting and comments that you should keep in mind is the affordances of these representation. Many commented that Team 1’s visualization for this week was not very helpful in helping to understand their thinking, though Team 1 indicated it helped them develop their thinking. This goes to two issues connected to our readings, Pea’s notion of distributed intelligence, and Wenger’s idea of reification (and eventually boundary objects). What role does reification play in a community? How about across communities?
No schedule today, we will have a break when we need one. See you in class.
Readings for next week: Wenger (continued) p. 72-133 (Community, Learning, Boundary, and Locality).
Include Cole via Twitter
- Use a tag ci597
- Repository (unlike Twitter, which is ephemeral)
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
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:
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
Total Points in Course 1000
Weekly Schedule (Subject to Lots and Lots of Change!)
Week 1: 1/12/2010
Out of Class
Week 2: 1/19/2010 (Community)
Face to face welcome
Week 3: 1/26/2010 (Identity)
Week 4: 2/2/2010 (Design)
Week 5: 2/9/2010 (Synthesis)
Week 6: 2/16/2010 (Community)