So basically my street art project has moved to a different city: san francisco! It’s coming along, and I’m busy working with the coolest bunch of people at Big Tree Learning (an educational website company that’s launching at the end of the summer). Everything is going really well. Sorry about being mia, so to speak, the past two weeks. I was scrambling to get my travel plans set up and packing for my five week living arrangements.

We should talk soon about meeting up in SF and other things.

I was wondering when you would make it over here. I am not moving to Belgium abnd will be in Doha for next year. It is good to hear from you. I have not been acitvely recruiting from ASD, but I was hoping you would stop by. Look around. Get involved. Check out the Ning!

Have a great summer.

Mr.R

Ooh.

There’s what I do in the morning when I get to school. I’ll miss it in summer…

It’s pretty much the picture, minus the blue bubbles.

This course is built upon collaborative inquiry:

We are committed to asking questions together, in person and online. The texts, the in-class-discussions, and online discourse in multiple mediums revolve around collaborative inquiry in which students pursue as a group questions about the issues suggested by the texts and raised by the communication media we use as part of the course. The instructor, together with student teaching teams, leads co-exploration of and co-experimentation with social media theory and practice. There is no canon to be transmitted. Knowledge is to be actively explored, interrogated, critically analyzed, collaboratively assembled by the class as a whole. Cyberculture studies requires tunneling through disciplinary boundaries and looking at questions through multiple lenses. The instructor will invite exploration, suggest themes, point out linkages, ask, guide, contest, participate, provide resources; but from the beginning, students are charged as individuals and as a community of learning with constructing the knowledge we harvest from these inquiries.

Collaborative inquiry requires individual committment to active participation

Learning and practicing social media competencies and understanding the social dimensions of cyberspace should be fun and should enable students to have a voice in one of the most important emerging aspects of global society — the power of every desktop computer or smart phone to function as a worldwide printing press, broadcasting station, community center, political organizing tool. Students will develop important skills that are directly relevant to their personal development and their place in the world after graduation, but the price for learning to use the Social Media Collaboratory for collaborative inquiry is a serious committment of time and attention by every member of the learning group. We will be engaged in a continuing discursive process that cannot be fulfilled by just turning in homework when it is due. Peers will need each other’s input in inquiries, debates, collaborative writing, team teaching, and group projects. To get the most out of this course, and to get a good grade, students should be expected to devote approximately eight hours per week:

Individual work

4 hours reading per week

1 hour each week viewing video online

1 hour each week in written reflection in personal learning journal

1/2 hour each week in preparation for student teaching or group project collaboration

1 1/2 hours of individual online activity each week in forums, blogs, wikis, chats, twitter, and/or other media

Collaborative projects

Each student will participate in two different kinds of collaborative projects. First, students collaborate in preparing, teaching, and leading inquiry during a class on a specific text. In addition students will organize teams of five to conduct an independent inquiry (research project) during the last half of the course.

Key Theme Team Teaching Project

Each student will use the wiki to sign up with two other students to be responsible for co-teaching a specific text. Teams must sign up at least two weeks in advance, arrange to meet with instructor during office hours at least a week before the presentation. Each team will be responsible for going beyond a book report or identification of material likely to be on a final exam — “teaching,” in the sense of this assignment means, in the words of Keats, “igniting, not pouring.” In addition to succincty presenting the key arguments and important terms, issues, and ideas of each reading, the teaching team formulates five questions for five different student groups, designed to initiate inquiry likely to lead to deeper knowledge of the text’s subject, The teaching team leads the wiki-based process of capturing and distilling collective knowledge from classroom and online discussions.

During Class

During class, the teaching team will

(1) Present what they decide is the essence of the texts — use of interactive multimedia for presentations via Google docs, Voicethread, Wiki, PowerPoint, Youtube, mindmapping, is encouraged.

(2) Distribute their generative questions to five break-out groups who will convene, then report back about their discussions — conclusions, open questions, conflicts, key arguments and insights.

A key objective of this course is to develop a mindfulness about and the beginnings of a literacy about the way we use attention in a situation with other co-present humans, each of whom has wireless Internet access. During student teaching presentations, the presenting team will be the the only students to keep their laptops open. One member of the team will initiate a section in the wiki collaborative learning journal page for that class session — entering before class the key points of the team’s presentation, and other essential elements, and amending it with notes in real time during the classroom discussion. Another member of the presenting team will be the keeper of the lexicon, identifying in real time the key terms and phrases raised by the text and discussion, and entering them into the lexicon portion of the collaborative learning journal. The third member of the team will search the Web in real time for relevant links and add them to the wiki during class discussion.

After Class

During the week after each class, each student is required to add at least one substantial contribution to the learning journal — expanding on existing notes, adding new material, adding links to relevant sources, posing questions and comments. Each team member is expected to put in at least 4 hours in preparing for their teaching session, and to meet as a team with the instructor before their session.

Final Course Project

During the last five weeks, teams of five students will use social media of their choice and face to face meetings to design, implement, and docment independent inquiries into some aspect of the course subject matter; multimedia group presentations, no longer than 20 minutes, will take place during the last class meeting; over the last five weeks of the course, each student is expected to devote at least 9 hours after class to the team project in addition to the six hours of individual work required weekly.

I think that this talk was able to happen because you are not Lindsea’s “real,” formal teacher. The teachers that we interact with every day see both our mature actions and those ever-so-rare immature days. I guess it can be hard to take us seriously when talking about ideas. Perhaps some can’t get the immature us out of their minds and so we’re discredited.

However, more of these talks need to happen. Everyone has input of value that just needs to find a platform.

As for online safety, assume the best at first. If the person becomes inappropriate, we get rid of them. Block them or whatever, but you just ignore them until they go away, or remove them from your online locations. Because not everyone will know someone when they join, we need to be open to new names.