Tony Forster regularly blogs about work he has done using Sugar. He shares that work at http://tonyforster.blogspot.com. His work includes screen shots from Sugar. I wonder whether I am able to do similar work with my current install of Sugar (a Trisquel Virtual Machine running in VirtualBox). So, I am using this entry to test. I am able to add text and Blogger keeps my work.
Then, I tried to upload an image from the Sugar Journal. The browser let me select an image and previewed it. But, when I tried to submit the image to my Blogger picture-base, it threw me out of the Browser Activity and back into the Journal. I needed to sign in again and found that Blogger kept my text but did not add the image.
Now, I see that I have multiple tabs in the Sugar Browser and that I can return to editing my post before indicating that I am "Done." Blogger was able to successfully upload the image and integrate it into my post. Will have to learn what combination steps is required to reliably reproduce this process.
Theron bookmarked (Diigo/Theron_d) a page from Crocodoc, a html5 based document rendering engine, that supports high-lighting and annotation of pdf and other challenging document types. While Google is improving its capacity to support this kind of collaboration on documents, they can use the competition.
The chunk of text below came from a copy and paste of a selection on page 22:
The longest path is the shortest and the shortest path is the longest The shortest route to learning the craft of a field is the one that, at first glance, appears the longest.To really learn something, you must understand the basic concepts of your field.If you try to skip,
I copied and pasted because the tool did not seem to work when I tried it.
A group of former Capella.edu leaders has created Sophia.org. They have a community-based learning and teaching model with checks built in for academic quality. Compare it with P2PU.org with its roots in the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
Sophia.org encourages authors to use Creative Commons Licenses to encourage reuse and remixing. I don't understand their business model and can't find much about it on their site or in reviews. Here, I test the OpenAttribute tool to see how their licenses are represented:
The Capstone Pilot seeks to help develop and share Mt. Ararat High School's approach to capstone projects. Future students will be able to create better capstones if they can see some examples of strong capstone projects. The more we can document both the process and the final presentations, the better will will understand what we need to support all students to be able to learn from their capstone projects.
For example, you gave mini presentations for the video clips. Some describe closely what you plan to do while others indicate that you are still developing your ideas. We appreciate your willingness share developing ideas because that is part of the process. Your work is an important part of developing our understanding of MTA's Capstone!
The Capstone Committee has developed some resources to support Capstone projects and shared those at: http://mtacapstone11.pbworks.com/ . The document is a draft that will improve with your testing and suggestions for improvement. We also need places to develop and share our perspectives. Where would work best for you?
The link to the MTA Capstone 11 site listed above gives this summary of our next steps.
II. Guidelines
A. Each participant will draft a written proposal that addresses the following:
Area of interest
Extent and description of work
Potential community partner(s)
Specific timeline
Goals ( connected to the four standards of the mission statement)
What progress are you making on this part of the Pilot?
The linked document also specifies that we use a shared spreadsheet in order to explore how to manage record keeping:
Time Log of Work:
I. Entered via a Google Spreadsheet which is shared to the school facilitator. This would help school facilitators to easily organize and manage the large amount of information.
This link to a Google form is one approach to collecting these logs. Alternatively each student can get a copy and manage an individual list.
As I worked on developing resources to support the Capstone Project Pilot, I saw periodic updates that Doug Ware and Dawn Prindall were also contributing. This morning, I learned that Dawn also searched for an image of capstones that she could use in a presentation for the Capstone Feedback Project (a set of four study circles). She found an image she liked and included it in a Keynote presentation that she shared on the PBWorks site.
I couldn't find any attribution on the image so I used Google Goggles to see if it could find the source. Goggles found the original image on the first try and I was gratified to see that she used a CC Licensed image from Wikimedia.
I like her image more than the ones I found which are associated with burial mounds. Perhaps I focused too much on the search term "capstone" rather than "arched stone bridges". But it also may be that she has identified a "keystone" rather than a "capstone".
When I added the Shizhao's image here, I learned that Wikimedia has also improved its support for appropriate citation of licensed materials (place the cursor over the image to reveal complete citation information in the title that displays over the image). These are tools that ITeam members can master and share with teachers as part of our efforts to support digital citizenship.
Frau Adams teaches German at both Mt. Ararat Middle School and High School. Several weeks ago, she encouraged middle school students to create a variety of multimedia submissions. ITeam members who had worked with the green screen chose to use it for their assignment. Ms. Myers, Chair of the Foreign Languages Department at the High School, learned from Frau Adams about the green screen project her students had done. She thought that it would be a useful approach for one of her upcoming assignments: Picnics in January.
Ms. Myers started sending students down to check out the video production studio. On Friday, Emma and Molly asked two interesting questions:
First, if we wear green, can we make parts of us disappear?
Yes, during our work on the middle school "Das Wetter Projekt," Alyssa wore a green shirt. We learned that we "saw" through her torso. The shirt didn't match the screen color exactly but was apparently close enough to cause parts of her to disappear. It may be tricky to get the lighting right for a convincing special effect but matching color may help. Here is the link to the product description at the fabric store that supplied the green screen fabric. http://www.joann.com/joann/search/searchall.jsp?keyword=6658660 The color is "lime green."
Second, can we superimpose video on top of video or only on still images?
I didn't know the answer to that question so, we quickly prototyped the idea with a video clip of Molly and Emma and superimposed it on a clip of middle school ITeam members building their green screen. While the lighting (script, set design, ...) need work, it is clear that concept works. With repeated additions of green screen tracks, the program may have some challenges with audio tracks.
Emma and Molly discussed how they would work that into their project as they returned to class. I'm eager to see what they create!
This post tests the online outliner LooseStitch that claims to make it possible to collaborate on outlines.
And this continues the blog text. The embed script does not render in the blogspot preview. When it does render, the outliner seems to be a little confused about where it is in the outline.
While I wonder whether Google is collecting too much information about me and others, I still marvel at the capacity for supporting the kinds of work we do. Eric and Alex recommended Google Voice so I requested an invitation. It arrived and I am setting it up and testing to see how it works and how I might incorporate it into our work.
Google Voice seems to have potential for supporting universal design for learning. Here is my first test of that function. The snippet below is the transcript. The word "voice" displays in a grey font color so I suspect that the transcriber is less confident in that part of the transcript. But high accuracy including punctuation is a pretty impressive result even if it is not 100% confident.
12/22/09 5:24 PM 10 minutes ago Hi. This is testing out whether the google voice system can accurately transcribe my voice and take a message and send it to the proper place. Thanks very much. See you later. Bye.
I have been learning to use Google Wave and want to know how I can share that with others. Here, I am testing Embeddy, the embedding robot. So, I wrote a wave, added the robot and have copied the embed code directly from the bot tools. When I preview the post, I see blank area in page but not any text. Will be interested to see what happens when I publish.
I had hoped to see the embedded wave in the space below this text but it is not there in any form that is useful for readers or even for debugging the failure to render as I intended. If it didn't display, I was hoping that I'd see some kind of diagnostic (login screen, gadget icon, or other indication of what is going on behind the scenes).
Education organizers, researchers, and funders have long debated the impact of community organizing on student educational outcomes. Across multiple data sources, our six-year study found strong and consistent relationships between community organizing and policy and resource decisions, school-level improvements, and student outcomes. Interviews, surveys, and school-level administrative data analyses suggest that organizing helps expand the capacity of urban public schools to support student success by building support for reform alternatives, increasing equity in the distribution of resources, and generating meaningful parent, youth, and community engagement focused on improved student learning.
... a richly textured analysis of community organizing for school reform. The authors examine the role of organizing in building social and political capital and improving educational outcomes for students in some of the nation’s most challenged school districts. They delineate the strategic choices and organizational characteristics that foster successful initiatives and consider how community organizing can support increased civic engagement and sustained educational reform. Finally, they discuss the challenges facing this burgeoning field in a new era of American politics.
President Obama has helped us learn where well-developed experience in community organizing can lead.
In an earlier post, I described developments in Google Wave that might apply to our situation: Google Wave for learning. Avital Oliver, a mathematician, has extended Wilson's work (and other) and has produced a Wave Emulator that shows how several gadgets can be implemented and used by people who don't have developer access to Google's Wave servers. Oliver describes some of the challenges he discovered in trying to implement the emulator for his task list.
As I started the implementation, I realized that there are certain difficulties with gadget state management with regard to Wave’s real-time concurrency. Here is an attempt to recreate the learning process I went through, with the difficulties I encountered and solutions I put in place to make this gadget work.
When the MSAD 75 Tech Department first established an Elgg network to evaluate it as part of the ZEDS initiative, users needed to self-register. I was still working as a community representative to the Technology Committee so I did not yet have a link75.org email address. I used a personal email address and chose a user name consistent with that address. In order for people to understand the value of networking for learning and collaboration, I modeled the use of all features that make sense in our context. I used the blogging tool the most.
Within a few weeks, the District hired me part-time to advise the iTeams; and gave me a link75.org email address. I tried to switch the email address of my SCSpaeth Elgg account from the personal address to the work address and in the process, lost access to the Elgg account. So, then I created a new Elgg account that conformed to the standard district naming conventions: spaeths and have continued my work in Elgg under that account. The double accounts confuse some Elgg users because they invite me to become their friend using my inactive account. But, I don't even get notified much less have the capacity to respond. But I have valuable parts of my working portfolio tied up in the inaccessible account so I haven't wanted to wipe the slate clean. This reposting of a post from that account is an effort to find out what it will take to recover those parts of my portfolio in a more accessible venue. I copied the post below.
I chose to make this adjustment now because I tried to use Yahoo Pipes to learn how to aggregate posts from multiple sources and discovered that Pipes threw an error for the SCSpaeth Elgg blog feed. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have been reading Fullan and Hargreaves' book What's Worth Fighting for in Your School. I find it very helpful because of the respect they accord teachers and the solid recommendations of ways to support transformation. During a Graduate Coordinating Committee meeting on Monday, I saw an application of the concept of strong forms of collaboration to our work. Since we don't have common language around this idea, I found this paragraph from the book to share the gist of the idea (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1996 p.47):
Little [1990] observes that the fourth type -joint work- is the strongest form of collaboration (e. g. team teaching, planning, observation, action research, sustained peer coaching, and mentoring, etc.). Joint work implies and creates stronger interdependence, shared responsibility, collective commitment and improvement, and greater readiness to participate in the difficult business of review and critique. This, says Little, is the kind of collaborative work and culture most likely to lead to significant improvement. In the quest for improvement, other kinds of collaboration may support this basic thrust, but by themselves are likely to be poor substitutes for it.
What can we do to build support for this strongest form of collaboration? How can iTeams contribute to this form of collaboration, too?
-------- Little, J.W. (1990) "The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers' professional relations" Teachers College Record 91 (4), 509-36 cited in Fullan, M. and Hargreaves, A. What's Worth Fighting for in Your School, Teachers College Press, New York 1996.
When educators first tried wikis in the classroom, the realities often fell short of expectations. Usually students were disinterested in the topics or were not familiar with the technology, or were not adept with collaborative writing. The results usually consisted of disproportionate work distribution and copy-and-pasting: in other words, very little learning. Even if the work was evenly distributed, it resembled a “quilt,” with each student stitching in their own panel with little regard for what their partners wrote.
What was missing was a sound pedagogy for learning. By infusing structured Cooperative Learning strategies (Johnson and Johnson, University of Minnesotahttp://www.co-operation.org/) student-generated wikis become a much more productive activity.
Orech continues in his post to describe Johnson and Johnson's strategies to collaborative wiki projects. He summarizes the approaches and provides examples from his experiences that I will try to incorporate into our iTeam work. I recommend Orech's suggestions to anyone considering wikis for collaborative learning. Orech also includes links to a couple of popular hosted wikis that encourage use of their tools for education by providing free educational spaces and support specifically oriented toward educators:
The selection of the most appropriate tool for your situation can be a daunting task (dozens of criteria for dozens of candidates). The third link in Orech's recommendations provides a web-based wizard to help with the selection process. Unfortunately, the Wikimatrix designers have not included many pedagogical criteria. I have used PBWiki (msad75.pbwiki.com), and Wikispaces (an experimental site before PBWiki solved the challenge of accounts for students who don't have email).
Do they differ pedagogically? Does it matter in the constant development of new features?
Dennis Harper, the lead developer of the GenYES program, sent a newsletter encouraging their community of users to prepare for the distribution of Stimulus Funds:
Stimulus package contains $650M for educational technology Get ready, get set - GO! For U.S. educators, there has been one primary source of funds from the federal government for educational technology over the past few years. It's part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, Title 2d, or Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT). With the passage of the stimulus bill, there is new, additional funding in the range of $650M that will be IMMEDIATELY shared between the 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
The key word there is immediately - so the time to get ready is NOW. The next few weeks should see a flurry of activity as state education departments decide exactly how to do this. If you've been saying -- gee, if we only had the money -- this is your chance. Watch your state ed tech department closely. This will happen FAST.
Harper's message excited me; he identified a potential source of support for MSAD 75 iTeams to use an evidence-based approach to help enhance the learning of all students in our district and, by example, the state. GenYES clearly has a marketing strategy here but I believe in the approach so, I looked at our state Department of Education's site to learn more. I found several references to EETT but no current activity. Through the grapevine, I heard that the Department may focus on extending the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI statewide 1-to-1 laptops and professional development) from middle schools to high schools. While I appreciate and benefit considerably from the MLTI, we need support for innovations at all levels in the system.
In short, I’m optimistic because the United States has always had two great assets: immigrant talent at a scale and quality unknown to the world ever before and the most liquid market not just in capital, but more importantly in business models. That is, we are willing to allow existing business models to be pulled apart by innovation. this means that we have a constant supply of hungry, smart entrepreneurs, who are allowed to challenge the status quo – who now can find it cheaper and easier to start and scale. It is a powerful combination, and the one that I think will be the real engine to take us out of this malaise.
Sylvia Martinez, GenYES CEO, points to discussion among practicing professionals from whom we can learn:
So all I'm asking, on behalf of the thousands of nerds who could one day change the world for the better, is that we give them access to simple, open, programmable devices; a little time to work on them; and a safe space to work in. They'll take it from there. They don't need adult supervision, or a certified curriculum. If we network them together, they'll answer each others' questions and collaborate on projects we can hardly imagine.
Eric – As always, your post is not only insightful but shows incredible wisdom that can only come from years of on the ground experience. My question to you is – Why would someone with such incredible ideas and professional success want to wait for bureaucrats to take action? Our current environment calls for capable individuals to act immediately. I encourage you to start moving on this idea as a grassroots program instead of waiting for others to do it.
And Eric, author of the original blog post, replied to another commenter who shared his experience March 4, 2009 9:46 AM:
How should we devise a program to network these kids together, even those that go to schools where there isn't (yet) a volunteer ready to teach them one-on-one, as you're doing? To me, this is one of the reasons why we need good public policy engagement.
Personally, I think Eric and others in this discussion are too narrowly focused on a small group of students in just one type of engaging activity. That's not enough. We need to provide opportunities for all students to engage in their learning. As I quoted Diana Laurillard recently in "Tech and Education: It's not rocket science, it's harder"
Change in education is not a matter of a small number of extremely highly educated people moving a collection of obedient atoms form one place to another. It is about large numbers of partially trained people moving minds; millions of them. (p. 320)
Sure, I'd welcome $450,000 of stimulus funds to support a regional effort to empower students to help their teachers to integrate technology in ways that will enhance learning of all students. But if Sviokla and Clement are right we don't need to hold out for that windfall, let's leverage existing resources and act as if we believe in Fosdick's characterization of democracy:
"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people." Harry Emerson Fosdick 1926
MSAD 75 iTeam members convince me every time I see them or interact with them online that they are ready to learn and engage in new roles. Let's co-create solutions.
Sally Loughlin observes that the established school schedule is packed with obligations and expectations. We frequently look for opportunities to engage students in learning outside of the normally scheduled "footprint" of school. The 2008-2009 Winter has cut into the standard schedule of school more frequently than most years. We have already missed school five or six days this year. Unfortunately, today's snow day disrupted a meeting that Derrick planned for working with Mrs. Singleton's seventh-graders on the Site Selection Technology Assistance Project. Mrs. Singleton requested iTeam assistance to help her students select a free website for their community awareness efforts associated with their service-learning project. Her students developed a list of the criteria they want a site to meet. The Site Matrix tool supports data collection and analysis of the evaluations.
Derrick and I both looked forward to that meeting. Fortunately, like Herodotus' couriers, "Neither rain, nor sleet, ..." kept us from meeting today. At 10:03 am, Derrick's chat status changed to online and we spontaneously agreed to meet online.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ SCSpaeth 10:19 AM I see that you are viewing the Site Matrix spreadsheet Derrick T 10:19 AM yes i am cool SCSpaeth 10:20 AM Do you have some time to look at the spreadsheet? Derrick T 10:21 AM the one that you made SCSpaeth 10:22 AM Yes, Derrick T 10:24 AM sure SCSpaeth 10:24 AM Let's switch over to using the Google chat so that we don't have to keep switching applications to continue the conversation. Derrick T 10:25 AM okay how do i get there SCSpaeth 10:28 AM In the upper right corner is a viewing now bar. Click on it. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
We clearly need some practice in working with these tools but they open a world of possibilities. I look forward to the time when Derrick helps other iTeam members learn to work with these tools and members routinely employ them to support new Technology Assistance Projects and community service-learning activities.
Terri Willingham, a community organizer in Tampa Bay, has created Tampa Bay Mentor Match on Wetpaint Wiki as a way to test the potential for using collaborative tools to build mentoring communities.
Tampa Bay Mentor Match is a community project of Learning is for Everyone*, a nonprofit education resource group working to empower families and learners through information and networking, on the web and off. We believe that by pooling our collective intelligences together, our kids potentially have access to some powerful learning resources we can't achieve alone. The opportunity to spend time with someone who shares a child's interests or career goals provides a more meaningful and enduring education than any classroom can provide.
I like the focus on communities, empowering learners and families, and a collective greater than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, it seems as if Willingham has not drawn in a critical mass of participants to the site. The mentor pages are only sparsely populated and I don't see much evidence for student participation. The Sitemeter for Mentor Match stats indicate limited engagement with the site. She seems to have casual visitors from across North America.
What does it take to move this promising concept to engaged and robust participation that supports a community? I wonder whether iTeams can establish a critical mass of activity that would then grow virally. What should we try?
In his post Magma Roots, Doc Searls describes his effort to search for an alternative to the "grass roots" metaphor for networked collaboration. He finds inspiration in Ron Schott's effort to build global resources for learning geology:
But maybe we can go deeper than that, below the Earth’s crust. How about “magma roots”? That occurred to me while reading Ron Schott’s post, Building a Google Earth Geology Layer. Ron is a hard rock geologist who has been a good source of wisdom (and occasional correction) toward my own geology obsessions. What Ron proposes (in both his posts title and its detail) is a great idea — for Google, for the geology field, and for the rest of us.
Ron’s goals are modest in manner and ambitious in scale:
What I’d like to do here, with the help of the geoblogosphere (via the comments to this post, initially), is to set out some goals, examples, and use cases that could guide the development of a Google Earth geology layer. If there’s interest in building on this idea, I’d be happy to set up communications tools, create KML tutorials, or do anything else to facilitate a coordinated effort to develop such a layer. Hopefully, by leveraging the knowledge and efforts of the geoblogospheric community, along with excellent new resources for developing KML, we can make a real start toward building a useful geology resource.
Searls concludes his post by disclaiming any formal expertise in geology but strongly supporting the concept:
I’m not a geologist, but I want to do everything I can to help raise this barn. Or, to keep from mixing metaphors, uncork this volcano.
Ron Schott replied to Searls' post by revealing a thought that he had considered in writing his original post but that he left on the editing floor:
The barn raising metaphor is definitely what I was aiming to evoke. In fact, I came very close to including one of the YouTube clips of the “Building the Barn” sequence from Witness (Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack captures the spirit so well), but I figured it would have been over the top.
I agree with Schott's editorial decision, Hollywood's production effects might lead readers to conclude that Amish Country and Hollywood are the only places where people work together for community in this way. Local examples from people like us may inspire us work toward similar projects. The Shelter at Berman Creekside Park in Moscow, Idaho illustrates one such example.
Groups of volunteers built the shelter at Berman Creekside Park as a community collaboration under the leadership of Nils Peterson. Volunteers pre-cut the posts, beams, and pegs for months ahead of the raising. Volunteers worked at the Farmer’s Market and other public locations to build community awareness of the project.
This news item exemplifies one of the ten design principles of an expeditionary school. # 5 Success and Failure says: "All students need to be successful if they are to build the confidence and capacity to take risks and meet increasingly difficult challenges. But it is also important for students to learn from their failures, to persevere when things are hard, and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.” The March denial and appeal process was an occasion for the Palouse Prairie Board to learn from perseverance.
How will we share iTeam processes, successes and failures? How do we build a distributed collaborative community?
In a discussion about goals, Sally Loughlin recommended a recent article by John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, and Lang Davison entitled Shaping strategy in a world of constant disruption.
Hagel summarizes the shaping strategies concepts in his blog:
The concept of shaping strategies
These strategies use positive incentives to mobilize and focus thousands of participants in shaping specific markets or industries. In times of high uncertainty, we all have a natural tendency to discount rewards and magnify risk. The result is often paralysis or, at best, hesitant small moves on the margin while we wait for the fog to clear. The opportunity for aspiring shapers is to flip that risk/reward perception by magnifying perceptions of rewards and discounting perceptions of risk. By re-shaping mindsets, shapers can unleash significant investment by many participants and ultimately re-shape broad markets or industries.
Then, Hagel points out in his blog that the ideas apply more broadly to educational institutions, too.
Broader applications
While our HBR article focuses on the application of shaping strategies in the business arena, this approach to strategy has the potential to to be applied in many other domains. For example, we have held workshops exploring its application in such diverse fields as public diplomacy and and education. Even movements for social change may find that shaping strategies can provide significant leverage.
Washington State University's CTLT is using shaping strategies in their thinking about directions for higher education - The Harvesting Gradebook
We see a conflict between the AAC&U assumptions and the goal of maintaining relevance in a Web 2.0 world.
The work we are reporting at the conference comes from a different set of assumptions about the learning enterprise. The perspective is community centered. It uses a set of assumptions that have previously existed within institutions of higher learning, and to some extent, still exist at the PhD level, but which seem to have been displaced by the challenges of increasing scale and decreasing resources. We are exploring ways in which the Internet, and particularly the Web 2.0 perspective of the Internet, can facilitate a transformation to a different set of assumptions.
In a similar vein, Jason Cole presented his ideas about reshaped higher education at the Open Education Conference 2006.
In the new organization, students and tutors collaborate to create and remix educational resources to meet emergent needs in real-time. Students are supported to create their own learning environments and pathways through a rich body of open content, guided by their peers and tutors. Academics add to the body of knowledge through research and create learning designs that students can choose to use if they find them helpful in achieving their goals. The university then becomes a platform for collaborative, supported learning and an arbiter of quality through assessment. Courses become a set of services to help the student achieve learning goals, not a packaged product based on ‘seat time’. The presentation will discuss the potential for this vision to increase access, lower costs and increase learning.
Learn more about his perspective from his presentation and a video his presentation linked at the OpenEd 2006 site:
Remixing Higher Education-The Open Content University Jason Cole, Open University Presentation (2.1 MB, PPT) :: Video (212.8 MB, MOV*)
Cole apparently prepared a couple of slides that he did not have time to include in his presentation. "Mass Amateurization" includes a reference to Doc Searls and his "Do-it-yourself IT" concepts. The quote uses comes from an interview with Searls that Doug Kaye produced for his show IT Conversations. When I listened to the podcast, I found this .mov clip about self- and peer-based learning rather than formal institution-based learning most compelling. Searl's informal survey of practitioners in this field indicate that they rely more on self-organizing learning networks than they do on institutionally organized learning.
How do these ideas apply to student and teacher learning in K-12? In our communities? Outside of the normal school day?
After President Obama's Inaugural Address, I spoke with iTeam members and wrote about the connections of our iTeam work to his messages. Last night, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and reinforced one of the ideas of the discussions with iTeam members. Identify things that need to be done and take initiative to do them or recruit others to help you do them. Here, he shares the story of a student who took the initiative to recruit the President's help:
And I think about Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina - a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She has been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this room. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says: "We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters."
We are not quitters.
These words and these stories tell us something about the spirit of the people who sent us here. They tell us that even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity.
What will we do to identify needs and take the initiative to do them and recruit help from others that can assist?
The Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching and Learning held a conference entitled "Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age" and captured perspectives of several speakers on video. John Seeley Brown describes a new world for learning.
8:35: "Put my stamp on something and then pass it back to the community ..."
9:40: "Identity gets constructed in how I have participated in these networked communities..."
We watched snippets of this clip during our last iTeam meeting. Students clearly recognized that Brown was describing the process that they are helping to develop.
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SC Spaeth cites this post in http://elgg.link75.org/pg/pages/view/62/
Stephen Spaeth 132 days ago