Group items tagged

a new P2PU course that I am facilitating, Crowdsourced Art: A Participatory Exercise in Collaboration and Collective Creativity.

creativity should not be – and was never meant to be – the prerogative of a few chosen individuals.

This course will be an introduction to crowdsourced art, and an experiment in collective creativity. We’ll learn about crowdsourced art – the central topic of my PhD research – and we’ll work together to develop a children’s book about a snail called Hashtag and his adventures on the Internet.

what does a group of people need to know about pedagogy in order to self-organize into a peer learning community? 

Attitudes and methods are essential, too.

ersuasion - when everybo

1.  Learning is, and should be, much more participatory than ever.   2.  We truly can learn from anyone, anywhere, anytime, including the “experts” and “amateurs” in any given field.  We need to take advantage 3.  We are truly at this “printing press” time in history for not only schools and learning, but for our world.  It is amazing and honestly, sometimes overwhelming, but we really have to accept and embrace it.

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.

My conclusion is that to do justice to using the term “curating” for educational resources, inquiry must be a part of the process. Part of this process is deciding what goes “in” to the collection – meaning many, many items are evaluated and set aside.

Themes have a common unifying element – but don’t necessarily explain the “why.” Theme supports a central idea – Context allows the learner to determine why that idea (or in this case, resource) is important. So, as collecting progresses into curating, context becomes essential to determine what to keep, and what to discard.

curating, it seems that collecting serves primarily the needs or interests of the collector. With curating, a larger goal is to benefit not only the collector, but other potential learners as well. It is meant to be shared. And, both the process and the product of curating help the curator as well as those who view the curated collection to understand and to learn.

So here’s how our 1:1 has helped students in our school- everyone now has a computer no matter their economic circumstances students have the ability to create all kinds of digital media to express themselves and their ideas music webpages graphics students have the chance to work on this media outside of school hours (that’s key for me- the school day just isn’t enough time) students are learning (sometimes the hard way) how to be responsible for both their digital actions and their computers students are taking part in as well as learning from the participatory web

Deep-listening experiences, wrapped in a pedagogy of music listening, take students far beyond the surface of their barely noticeable surround-sound environment and into the nature of music and its workings.

Attentive-listening experiences occur when teachers point out specified points of focus, put questions or challenges to the listeners, or merge graphics or visuals with the sound experience itself. Graphs or maps of particular musical features can be helpful, since visual cues may enhance listening. Teachers can provide diagrams of the contours of the melody or depict rhythmic components of a piece through iconic symbols-staff notation, splotches of color, or geometric shapes, for example. Instruments, real or illustrated, can focus student attention on their entrance or continuing presence in the music.

Engaged listening invites listeners to enter into the groove or the flow of the music, pick a part to contribute, and consequently feel more involved in the music. A phenomenon of "participatory consciousness"[ 5] unfolds as engaged listeners find their place in the music, find something in the music to hang on to (a melody, a pulse, an ostinato, a groove), and select a contribution to make back to the music. In this way, they connect with the music, joining the recorded musicians and their live participant-colleagues in a musical team.