Working through adaptations of Service Architecture [Resmini&Rosati,2012] for Learning Experience Design [wikipedia] these milestones appear:

• validity of evaluation is relative to degree of its integration within the learning experience [what tools can we use for this?]
• constructive learning is promoted through learners' view of evaluation "where do I stand wrt my goals and the learning objectives of community, organization (as its defines discipline, skill set or knowledge base).
• a responsive or "smart" environment allows self-assessment, balances challenges to skill [ ] and affords customization of the "way in" [Gardner,2011] to a discipline, skill set or knowledge base.

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

Shadow puppets help with second language acquisition

Language acquisition: intermediate Arabic students tell stories with shadow puppets. Steps 1: brainstorm characters and plots with available vocabulary 2: write individual treatments 3: meld into common story, refine expressions 4: construct specific puppets 5: run draft story, select music, sounds, settings 6: refine story, finalize & memorize script, choreograph puppet play 7: perform These steps were executed over 6 days of a workshop at San Francisco State University May 2012. Small group work helped to consolidate language learning around Thousand & One Nights text. Participants seemed delighted to construct their own meaning and see evidence of hard-won communication proficiency. Play was called "Booba Gets a Bride".

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.

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

Book Club

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!