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The new approach might include a four-week course in videogame creation or an in-depth animation program. That contrasts with the library’s historical approach to teen programming, which relied heavily on one-time events that lasted a couple of hours at best.

Multnomah County’s not the only one to jump on the connected learning bandwagon. In Chicago and San Francisco, for example, libraries have learning spaces dedicated to fostering collaboration, creativity and learning among teens.

sound clash

“It gets them comfortable with being at the library, which is essential,” Vu said.

low-income families

programs are free.

Interest-powered

In order to realize these values, connected learning seeks to harness and integrate the learning that young people pursue in the spheres of interest, peer relations, and academics based on the following three learning principles:

Social connection

Peer-supported

Academically oriented

Connected learning builds on what we’ve long known about the value and effectiveness of interest-driven, peer-supported, and academically relevant learning; but in addition, connected learning calls on today’s interactive and networked media in an effort to make these forms of learning more effective, better integrated, and broadly accessible. The following design principles involve integrating the spheres of interests, peers, and academics, and broadening access through the power of today’s technology.

Shared purpose

Production-centered

Openly networked

The principles of connected learning weren’t born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it.

Libraries Leading Learning Partnerships

What’s in Your Digital Backpack - Recognizing Learning Anytime, Anywhere

What’s In Your Digital Backpack

Connected Learning in Action: YOUmedia and Learning Labs

Curious: A rigorous curiosity underpins the most fruitful work scholars do.

Dynamic

a series of iterative experiments.

a resolution to the inquiry

Derivative

attentive and alive, responsive

Critical: We can’t be afraid to critique our own circumstances, our own context.

Cormier suggests rhizomatic education — constructing and negotiating community knowledge through a series of interdependent nodes — as a pedagogical solution within quickly changing fields of information. In other words, by connecting to each other, no matter our expertise or station, knowledge grows.

We may provide the content, but this is no different today than scattering LEGOs on a table: what happens next is not up to us

from a traditional model of schooling to one more compatible with the realities of the digital landscape. Experimentation, inquiry, and play are both the research tools we must use to create online and hybrid classrooms, and also the methodologies best employed within those classrooms.

Testing and canonical content are less vital to the new media landscape than interactivity, play, and relevant application.

that students “show up,” be curious, collaborate, and contribute.

The digital has reminded us that learning happens unexpectedly, and so should our approach to learning be unexpectant. We must return play to education, to pedagogy, and to all scholarly practice.

Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: This book was produced by graduate students in a course with Cathy N. Davidson. The text of the work is itself rigorous, but what we find most intensely rigorous is the way the reader is brought into the book’s ongoing creation through simultaneous publishing on communal platforms like Rap Genius, HASTAC, GitHub, and Google Docs.