Our ability to learn whatever we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want is rendering the linear, age-grouped, teacher-guided curriculum less and less relevant.
Experts are at our fingertips,
Content and information are everywhere, not just in textbooks.
And the work we create and publish is assessed by the value it brings to the people who read it, reply to it, and remix it.
Much of what our students learn from us is unlearned once they leave us; paper is not the best way to share our work, facts and truths are constantly changing, and working together is becoming the norm, not the exception.
It's about solving problems together and sharing the knowledge we've gained with wide audiences.
Inherent in the collaborative process is a new way of thinking about teaching and learning
As connectors, we provide the chance for kids to get better at learning from one another.
In fact, we need to rely on trusted members of our personal networks to help sift through the sea of stuff, locating and sharing with us the most relevant, interesting, useful bits.
That means that as teachers, we must begin to model our own editorial skills
Collaboration in these times requires our students to be able to seek out and connect with learning partners, in the process perhaps navigating cultures, time zones, and technologies.
they come into contact with: Who is this person? What are her passions? What are her credentials? What can I learn from her?
As Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, "Knowingly sharing your work with others is the simplest way to take advantage of the new social tools."
Fortunately, social tools like wikis, blogs, and social-bookmarking sites make working with others across time and space easier than it's ever been. They are indeed "weapons of mass collaboration," as author Donald Tapscott calls them.
The Collaboration Age comes with challenges that often cause concern and fear. How do we manage our digital footprints, or our identities, in a world where we are a Google search away from both partners and predators?
What are the ethics of co-creation when the nuances of copyright and intellectual property become grayer each day? When connecting and publishing are so easy, and so much of what we see is amateurish and inane, how do we ensure that what we create with others is of high quality?
I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape.
And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools.
World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others
How to teach when learning is everywhere.
By Will Richardson
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Four teachers from High Tech High.
Bringing Their A-Game:
Humanities teacher Spencer Pforsich, digital arts/sound production teacher Margaret Noble, humanities teacher Leily Abbassi, and math/science teacher Marc Shulman make lessons come alive on the High Tech campuses in San Diego.
Credit: David Julian
Earlier this year, as I was listening to a presentation by an eleven-year-old community volunteer and blogger named Laura Stockman about the service projects she carries out in her hometown outside Buffalo, New York, an audience member asked where she got her ideas for her good work.
Her response blew me away. "I ask my readers," she said. I doubt anyone in the room could have guessed that answer. But if you look at the Clustrmap on Laura's blog, Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference, you'll see that Stockman's readers -- each represented by a little red dot -- come from all over the world.
1
She has a network of connections, people from almost every continent and country, who share their own stories of service or volunteer to assist Stockman in her work. She's sharing and learning and collaborating in ways that were unheard of just a few years ago.
Welcome to the Collaboration Age, where even the youngest among us are on the Web, tapping into what are without question some of the most transformative connecting technologies the world has ever seen.
These tools are allowing us not only to mine the wisdom and experiences of the more than one billion people now online but also to connect with them to further our understanding of the global experience and do good work together. These tools are fast changing, decidedly social, and rich with powerful learning opportunities for us all, if we can figure out how to leverage their potential.
For e
Universal Design for Learning
is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn.
UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.
expression and communication of
these values is essential in any valid explanation of your educational
influence in your own learning and in the learning of others. I am thinking here of values such as
freedom, justice, care, love, compassion, respect and knowledge-creation
three assumptions
'How do I improve what I am doing?' in
your professional practice.
onversations between pairs of practitioner-researchers
in which we take some 4 minutes each to outline our contexts, what really
matters to us, and what we would like to improve
motivating you to improve your
practice it often helps in the development of realistic action pla
After the initial
conversation on values and context in relation to your desire to improve
practices that relate to helping students, yourself and/or colleagues to
improve their learning, I believe that you may find the following action
planning process most useful.
'How do I improve what I
am doing?'
tions,
ideas and actions that can distinguish an action reflection cycle:
1) What do I want to
improve? What is my concern? Why am I concerned?
2) Imagining
possibilities and choosing one of them to act on in an action plan
3) As I am acting what
data will I collect to enable me to judge my educational influence in my
professional context as I answer my question?
4) Evaluating the
influence of the actions in terms of values and understandings.
5) Modifying concerns,
ideas and actions in the light of evaluations.
Making public a
validated explanation of educational influences
7) As I evaluate the
educational influences of my actions in my own learning and the learning of
other, who might be willing to help me to strengthen the validity of my
explanation of my learning about my influence with responses to questions such
as:
i)
Is my explanation as comprehensible as it could be?
ii)
Could I improve the evidential basis of my claims to know what I am
doing?
iii)
Does my explanation include an awareness of historical and cultural
influences in what I am doing and draw on the most advanced social theories of
the day?
iv)
Am I showing that I am committed to the values that I claim to be living
by?
nhancing professionalism with TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context)
. In producing a valid explanation for our educational
influences in the learning of others I believe it to be necessary for the
other's explanation of their own learning to be included in our
explanation.
ecognises the creativity of the
other in engaging with ideas
I believe that Sally's writings make an original contribution to
educational knowledge whilst showing that she has found useful some of my own
ideas in making this contribution.
Educational Enquiry (EE), Research
Methods in Education (RME), Understanding Learners and Learning (ULL) and Gifts
and Talents in Education (G & T) you can access these at: http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/mastermod.shtml .
To see the criteria used in assessing these units click on this link for
the MACriteria.
virtual learning space for this CPD project go to http://www.spanglefish.com/livingvaluesimprovingpracticecooperatively/ . You can also read Walton's (2011 a&b) ideas on developing a collaborative inquiry.
In an inclusional way
of being and knowing an individual recognises that they exist in a relational
dynamic of space and boundaries. Hence one of the tasks of the
practitioner-researcher is to express and communicate this relational dynamic
in explanations of educational influence.
An example
here would be the use of Foucault's (1977) ideas on Power/Knowledge to
understand the relationships between the Truth of Power and the Power of Truth
in the workplace when seeking academic legitimation for new living standards of
judgment.
Appendix 1
Action Planner
You can access this curriculum at http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/bishops/bish99.pdf
How do we contribute to an educational knowledge base
Hymer, B. (2007) How do I understand and
communicate my values and beliefs in my work as an educator in the field of
giftedness?