Make/AssignmentBanks/Repositories/UserGeneratedContent

The font of deliberate practice research

So what is a learner to do when faced with this. Act randomly or be focused and filtered. Or both but consciously so?

This just seemed to fit as a bookmark into the idea of passion directed learning. Is this what a maker bank is--a sharing of passion and self?

Good teachers don't approach a child with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

Just love the Jonathon Kozol quote here. I think it points to the larger context of usergenerated content. As teachers we have to allow the willynilly (what Whitehead called the romance) of random stuff to do and we also have to demand purpose and deliberate practice arising from the hive of the all possible. We need to encourage to tug on one side of the string as we tug on the other.

The ability to leverage user-generated content is one of biggest trends in marketing, but it can also be challenging to do without puting an actionable plan in place and developing baseline metrics. But when done strategically, the results can be inspiring and rewarding. It's fun to see students and coworkers get excited, and enthusiasm is contagious.

The dark side of user generated content, the possibility that those who are asking for it don't have the best of intentions and whose intentions are guided by larger motives that have nothing to do with the learner. Dark side of the force of ds106.

I finally settled upon the keywords "user generated content" for my Google Scholar search. Then I realized that what make banks and ds106 style repositories do is take user suggestions, give them a platform, and channel energy. That is exactly what a teacher might do with a learner and it what Chad talks about in his Digital.Is post from a few years ago: http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/3969

This is not a make bank, but one could have generated this with a make 'directive'. Get together and talk about how a MOOC might be generated. I suppose that every creative act can be reverse engineered into a make--a recursive, imperative. I did this and if I was to help someone else generate something similar then I would give these instructions and suggestions. Described this way it doesn't sound very creative at all. Sounds more like a recipe, very instrumental. Yet...great creativity can arise from a template completed with love.