Monday, May 21, 2012
Environmental learning through touchpoints & themes
Physical activity in the Demonstration Gardens supports language acquisition that situates Environmental Learning as a fundamental cognitive discipline. I see it at all ages and stages of life, among people who are neuro-typical or autistic and among those acquiring fluency in a second language.
Similarly shadow puppets in representing interior realities gives a glimmer of where grammar, that is structure, comes from.
I'd like to be able to demonstrate this. Its not enough to share what I see but must be connected with others' experiences as evidence.
What frameworks can I use? Linguistics, environmental studies, neurology, architecture?
My friend Carmela reminds me that people deserve concrete experience, require it for that Aha moment.
Maybe this is more important than analysis. D'uh, certainly until its built, functional and can be tested and iterated.
So for now I focus upon structuring and situating experience.
Who are the learners, the facilitators, the community for the Demonstration Gardens?
To integrate virtual experiences and physical channels there need to be 'touchpoints' that are structured and managed so information flows easily. Focus upon the interaction sequence of:
- entranement
- contribution
- exchange
governs how to organize touchpoints.
Spreadsheet of Touchpoints:
http://tinyurl.com/bptdxpf
Themes are vehicles for ideas that can be threaded through the whole system so that participants can grok it from their own viewpoint.
2009-10 Meditteranean Biome
2010- 11 Permaculture
2011-12 Abundance
Friday, May 4, 2012
Shadow puppets help with second language acquisition
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Learning at the vertices/around the edges
For the past month I've been struggling to pare down my instructional menu.
Its time to write my thesis and I shouldn't overcommit is the thinking.
What to leave out?
chorus - singing is elevating and brings joyful connectivity, provided practice is kept up
arabic - i've invested 3 years to learning it, its one of the main reasons I came back to school & have access to a superb teacher; once I leave school can I become fluent?
land use - this is a basic techniques course for community planning
work - well thats silly everyone has to work: ASC is shadowpuppets & autism @the Y
Demo Gardens - this is my lab project
As ever - it is the interconnections between disciplines that make learning meaningful.
So if everything that has come to my hand to do is essential how to get it all done?
Simplify and only the neccessary and right on time.
Its time to write my thesis and I shouldn't overcommit is the thinking.
What to leave out?
chorus - singing is elevating and brings joyful connectivity, provided practice is kept up
arabic - i've invested 3 years to learning it, its one of the main reasons I came back to school & have access to a superb teacher; once I leave school can I become fluent?
land use - this is a basic techniques course for community planning
work - well thats silly everyone has to work: ASC is shadowpuppets & autism @the Y
Demo Gardens - this is my lab project
As ever - it is the interconnections between disciplines that make learning meaningful.
So if everything that has come to my hand to do is essential how to get it all done?
Simplify and only the neccessary and right on time.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Thankful for ThunderPuppets
The troupe performed live yesterday and it was a victory.
The bookstore setting was warm and meaningful for all of us.
All:
Logistics - Diana (DiDi), Pecolia, Robert, Joseph
Fabrication - Maria, Tita, Niani, Stu, kasey
Animators - Tita, Niani, Diana, Stu, kasey
Engineering - kasey, Stu
Soundtrack - kasey
Video - Didi
Notes so far:
Maria - people need scripts & she volunteers Didi to do more since she has a degree in theatre.
kasey - soundtrack was largely non-functional, clipping, too short cables, hard to hear the poem, needed scripts, better movies, more preparation for animators, sandbags, 'holsters', bear hat.
Next steps
- calendar for the year w practices, rehearsals & gigs
- follow-up get together from 11/20/11 performance
- script preparation
- tree fabrication
- improve website, update
- cut video, share
- improve sound track delivery & components
Monday, August 15, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Cal Educamp trip Notes
Cal EduCamp Aug 5 @ Haas School of Business was promoted as an "unconference", that is, an event generated by participants.
Twitter: #caleducamp
It lived up to the billing and more. Sponsored by UC Berkeley's instructional technology groups it featured a webinar by Howard Rheingold, workshops for learning social media tools, presentations and interactive sessions. About 75 people attended.
The best aspect of the conference was its laboratory atmosphere at once inclusive and challenging in a friendly way. Many people shared works in progress through the main live channels or back channels of twitter, wiki and blog posts.
There was lively interest in varied topics: using game platforms as learning environments, cloudware integration, persona development through comics. I was excited to see distance learning course management represented by two poles: 1) Google sites (Sage Adams, distance educator) (2 Echo from NewTech, a drupal platform for public HS that uses facebook's API as well as integrating other cloudware into a true network, that is it fosters co-construction in problem based learning.
Almost all the educators included mindmapping sw in their toolkits for collaborative learning.Mindmeister, Bubbl-Us & MindNode were all mentioned favorably.
Twitter feeds to follow:
@mashable
@edutopia
@readwriteweb
Other intriguing software:
visibletweets
Write or Die (write 500 words in 10 min or else)
Jeff Brain from SFSU CEL/ITEC lead several great sessions:
- 1-2-3 SuperHeroes (visual storytelling)
- BricknMortar to Distance where he described development of the K-12 technology competency course and techniques to make a hybrid course rich and functional
(group teams by time zone, use embedded video, integrated assessment)
What's a general purpose toolkit for hybrid, problem-based teaching and learning?
-Webinar: Elluminate or Adobe Visual Communicator
- MindMap: LucidChart, Mindmeister, Bubbl-Us
- Sound editing: Audacity
- video: iMovie
- collaborative content generation: google docs, UTube, vimeo, voicethread
Common theme: don't expect it to be immediate, ease of use takes work.
My take-away: this is all great fun, very exciting but mostly not accessible. Although design for multiple pathways of access (Rheingold and others) is attended to. Many people are still waiting for the technology to just "do it" automatically, probably because its complicated and technology does have a way of catching up - oh wait, that's us!
Twitter: #caleducamp
It lived up to the billing and more. Sponsored by UC Berkeley's instructional technology groups it featured a webinar by Howard Rheingold, workshops for learning social media tools, presentations and interactive sessions. About 75 people attended.
The best aspect of the conference was its laboratory atmosphere at once inclusive and challenging in a friendly way. Many people shared works in progress through the main live channels or back channels of twitter, wiki and blog posts.
There was lively interest in varied topics: using game platforms as learning environments, cloudware integration, persona development through comics. I was excited to see distance learning course management represented by two poles: 1) Google sites (Sage Adams, distance educator) (2 Echo from NewTech, a drupal platform for public HS that uses facebook's API as well as integrating other cloudware into a true network, that is it fosters co-construction in problem based learning.
Almost all the educators included mindmapping sw in their toolkits for collaborative learning.Mindmeister, Bubbl-Us & MindNode were all mentioned favorably.
Twitter feeds to follow:
@mashable
@edutopia
@readwriteweb
Other intriguing software:
visibletweets
Write or Die (write 500 words in 10 min or else)
Jeff Brain from SFSU CEL/ITEC lead several great sessions:
- 1-2-3 SuperHeroes (visual storytelling)
- BricknMortar to Distance where he described development of the K-12 technology competency course and techniques to make a hybrid course rich and functional
(group teams by time zone, use embedded video, integrated assessment)
What's a general purpose toolkit for hybrid, problem-based teaching and learning?
-Webinar: Elluminate or Adobe Visual Communicator
- MindMap: LucidChart, Mindmeister, Bubbl-Us
- Sound editing: Audacity
- video: iMovie
- collaborative content generation: google docs, UTube, vimeo, voicethread
Common theme: don't expect it to be immediate, ease of use takes work.
My take-away: this is all great fun, very exciting but mostly not accessible. Although design for multiple pathways of access (Rheingold and others) is attended to. Many people are still waiting for the technology to just "do it" automatically, probably because its complicated and technology does have a way of catching up - oh wait, that's us!
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
User Experience meets Learning Theory
From
UX of Learning, T. Tate on A List Apart, 7262011.
another IA's take on learning theory and designing the learner's user experience for maximal effect. Stimulating article but there's a pretty hefty reliance on Bloom's Taxonomy treated in a linear fashion. It seems clear that human learning happens in more of a network of interlinked experiences that maybe mirrors the form our nervous systems take (curly, bushy, differentiated). So Bloom's Rose has more appeal to me.
Setting up learning sequences may benefit the instructional designer more than the learner, at least this is a question. Is the specific sequential organization of material helpful to the learner -bottom up - or is it a top down convenience.
[the steps were all presented so why didn't the student learn it?]
Presenting wholeness and providing access...thinking out loud here...might lead to student or learner taking initiative to grapple with and generate knowledge on their own terms.
After reading Ron Eglash' "African Fractals" I am cautious about taking a recursive approach that leads to demanding that students know how to study something before the skills are available to them. So what would H. Gardner ("Five Minds for the Future") have to say on this: some level of a 'disciplined ' mind must be available to make self-driven learning meaningful. How is this to be decided? school board? class room teacher? act of congress?
"A further element that establishes a climate for self-initiated experiential learning is emphatic understanding. When the teacher has the ability to understand the student’s reactions from the inside and has a sensitive awareness of the way the process of education and learning seems to the student, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased." I think the word that's meant is "empathic".
Begs the question if self-initiated or self-directed learning is the goal then isn't the primacy of the teacher's empathy for the student's process displaced to the responsiveness of the system? But ... in practice the relationship btw student and teacher turns out to be key - so a system of technology alone can't do it.
Bard College prison initiative appears to be so successful precisely because of emphasizing teacher-student relationships.
From teaching (in a facilitative manner, I aspire) is how I came back around to trying to build learning systems that support relationships whether in "real" time/space or virtual, sometimes called "hybrid". [SFSU Instructional Technologies program uses this, ref B. Beatty ]
Looking for a better way of expressing the idea of close linking btw virtual and "real" I've seen other IA's talking about transchannel or crosschannel UX. Not sure if finding the right words will help with the fundamental problems of generating it.
UX of Learning, T. Tate on A List Apart, 7262011.
another IA's take on learning theory and designing the learner's user experience for maximal effect. Stimulating article but there's a pretty hefty reliance on Bloom's Taxonomy treated in a linear fashion. It seems clear that human learning happens in more of a network of interlinked experiences that maybe mirrors the form our nervous systems take (curly, bushy, differentiated). So Bloom's Rose has more appeal to me.
Setting up learning sequences may benefit the instructional designer more than the learner, at least this is a question. Is the specific sequential organization of material helpful to the learner -bottom up - or is it a top down convenience.
[the steps were all presented so why didn't the student learn it?]
Presenting wholeness and providing access...thinking out loud here...might lead to student or learner taking initiative to grapple with and generate knowledge on their own terms.
After reading Ron Eglash' "African Fractals" I am cautious about taking a recursive approach that leads to demanding that students know how to study something before the skills are available to them. So what would H. Gardner ("Five Minds for the Future") have to say on this: some level of a 'disciplined ' mind must be available to make self-driven learning meaningful. How is this to be decided? school board? class room teacher? act of congress?
"A further element that establishes a climate for self-initiated experiential learning is emphatic understanding. When the teacher has the ability to understand the student’s reactions from the inside and has a sensitive awareness of the way the process of education and learning seems to the student, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased." I think the word that's meant is "empathic".
Begs the question if self-initiated or self-directed learning is the goal then isn't the primacy of the teacher's empathy for the student's process displaced to the responsiveness of the system? But ... in practice the relationship btw student and teacher turns out to be key - so a system of technology alone can't do it.
Bard College prison initiative appears to be so successful precisely because of emphasizing teacher-student relationships.
From teaching (in a facilitative manner, I aspire) is how I came back around to trying to build learning systems that support relationships whether in "real" time/space or virtual, sometimes called "hybrid". [SFSU Instructional Technologies program uses this, ref B. Beatty ]
Looking for a better way of expressing the idea of close linking btw virtual and "real" I've seen other IA's talking about transchannel or crosschannel UX. Not sure if finding the right words will help with the fundamental problems of generating it.
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