19 slide Wiki-to-Speech presentation on idea of socially constructed systems which exhibit emergent property of finding shortest pathways to understanding.
Our
goal by engaging educators in digitally-connected, asynchronous forms of
collaborative learning was that they would gain an organic, authentic understanding
of what we (NML) mean by "participatory culture" - and thereby adopt the value
of its practices and bring them to their students and
districts.
We originally intended the course to utilize our existing public Ning community as a way to offer transparency to this learning process and allow others in the NML community to tap in and learn from what the early adopters were doing. Though each of them was equipped to share a plethora of expertise and experience that would have undoubtedly been valued by the larger community, the idea of "failing in public" overrode their desire to contribute.
So is it little wonder that it was so
difficult to get participation from educators (posing as students) while
offering all the affordances that flexible learning has to offer?
In classrooms, the way they currently
stand in most places, the teacher is still the distributor of all knowledge,
and students acquire and "bank" this information as valuable. Therefore a
teacher's expertise, while no one would ask this be stripped from a learning scenario,
remains the main asset in the student-teacher equation.
the experience of exploring your own pedagogy in ways
that challenge, perhaps, some of your most trusted and practiced ways of
teaching, and that mandates an openness and willingness to explore what failure
might look like in order to rebuild a learning environment that addresses the
shifts necessary for a new wave of learning - is, well, overwhelming.
How much structure is too much structure, and which constraints
fruitfully nurture inspiration?
Experiences running a MOOC-like one year worskhop for K12 teachers; many lessons learned, and design of a better workshop named PLAY Paricipatory learning and You. Interesting reflections