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".

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!

BART Accessibility Maps

Information scientist, Josh Miehle has been leading a collaboration between Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute and Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco to develop feature maps for BART stations and environs. This has tremendous potential to improve autonomy and safety for blind travelers.
 The tactile station maps are designed to be navigable with a Smart Pen, a low-cost ($150) audible, hand-held tool. Mapped features are categorized into three layers (Street, Concourse, Platform) within a highly selective taxonomy.  Map readers would peruse maps during route planning to memorize station layouts in advance rather than consult them in real time during travel. To facilitate communication with sighted or low-vision map readers and those who don't read braille each feature is displayed in high-contrast colors, embossed, braille and with single character acronyms. Because of this 'Rosetta Stone' characteristic of the map elements and the necessity that layouts be committed to memory the taxonomy has been deliberately  restricted to no more than 8 -12 per layer.

 [Images]

Sample map book, 03-05-11

Tactile cartographer, Greeta Ahart (LFTB), accessibility architect BJ Epstein and project manager Greg Kehnart (LFTB) have been working with Dr. Miehle to produce base maps, design team workflow and organize volunteers to collect feature sets by station. This team has produced tactile map book samples and a first generation tactile map of the Oakland Coliseum BART station. All other BART stations were surveyed on March 5, 2011 by a volunteer team of approximately thirty Occupational & Mobility experts, architects and cartographers.

Tactile maps will be produced from the data sets in the coming weeks. 

Interim results of this mapping project were presented Friday March 11, 2011 at the CTEBVI- California Educators Transcribers for the Blind and Visually Impaired, http://www.ctevh.org/conference.htm. In the conference Dr Miehle spoke about his hope that this effort can provide a useful model for transportation systems around the world.

ThunderPuppets Field Report Summary

ThunderPuppets Players
Field work Report, December 20, 2010
San Francisco

1. Context, frame
2. Who; for whom, with whom
3. What; objective, solution set sought, elements produced
4. With what; tools, materials, activities
5. So what; why it matters
6. Now what; conclusions, next steps