Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Academic Spotlight (Bowdoin)

Bowdoin's Academic Spotlight on Tess Chakkalakal's course on using place-based resources to connect with 21st Century reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Includes a brief video clip of a class held in the First Parrish Church:

Can we build digital resources to support asynchronous access to experiences similar to this.

Learning Analogies

SAT Question of the Day:

Redstone Circuits : Minecraft :: ________ : Arduino Robotics

1. LEDs
2. AppInventor
3. Modk.it Editor
4. Cellbots and Servers
5. All of the above and more!

We use a project-based learning approach for ITeam. I want students to engage with the work so that they choose to spend time outside of school to work on their projects. So, I give them latitude in selection and encourage them to shoulder part of the project management responsibilities so that we can customize their learning. Since many have never learned this way in school, we have challenges making the transition to this way of learning. One of the biggest challenges is getting them to document the work they have done in ways that we can share with stakeholders and other interested parties.

Our recent foray into Minecraft originated in student engagement that they used to convince me that I had misinterpreted the genre. I saw the chopping as destructive and did not yet understand the real intent of the activity as gathering raw materials for creating new materials and artifacts.

Now, I am learning that some middle school ITeam members are setting up multi-user Minecraft servers at home and are developing the ability to tune-them to meet specifications that support our learning needs. Coby told me today, that he has shifted his focus from creating objects and structures in Minecraft to understanding and creating tools for others to use. He clearly has established a Pre-Capstone Project that shows potential for transferring what we are learning in the MTA Capstone Project to middle school and beyond. Clearly, we are shifting roles and moving toward authentic co-learning.

How can we help all students at all levels to take more responsibility for helping to manage their own learning?

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The answer is clearly 5. All of the above and more!

Now, if I can just keep up with them. But, Coby described getting help from the Minecraft admin community in setting up port-forwarding in his network settings. So, I hope we have reinforcements ready in the wings in the form of mentors in new cultures of learning that David Thomas and John Seeley Brown describe in their book the New Culture of Learning:

In this connected world, mentorship takes on new importance and meaning

Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.

ARIS and Local History

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine

By Hugh C. Leighton Company (en wiki) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

ARIS is promoting a Global Jam on April 18-20th to create 50 'games' in 50 hours. I took this occasion as an opportunity to share the idea in more detail with Dennis Edmonson. I wanted to learn whether he knows of students who might be interested in helping to create ARIS exhibits for Topsham and Brunswick as Capstone Projects.

Dennis made the connection with the Museum in the Streets^TM initiatives in several communities in Maine (and beyond). They have a well established and protected concept that they have developed and refined over the last twenty years. Communities pay a fee for the assistance to develop walking tours and then provide free tours (brochures and physical plaques with pictures and short texts) to visitors to their communities.

The ARIS Dow Day and BikeBox approaches reduce the need for physical signage and increase the types of media that can be shared (e. g. video clips of re-enactors). But they increase the need for technology infrastructure (devices and support). Next, I need to visit with Chris Nulle to get his perspective on the degree to which the re-enactors (local and beyond) would be willing to share clips.

Exploring inverted pendulum control

In December, I wrote about finding a Mathemetica notebook that helped me start to understand the classic Inverted Pendulum problem as it relates to the Woodside-One-Wheelers learning to turn themselves into stable inverted pendulums.

With the release of Mathematic 8, Andrew Moylan, a Mathematica employee, has created blog presentations highlighting its new features. He has written Stabilized Inverted Pendulum and Stabilized n-link Pendulum. In the first article, he describes Mathematica's capacity in terms that make sense to me and perhaps to some of our ITeam members:

Using the new control systems features (one of several new application areas integrated into Mathematica 8), I’ve been experimenting with models of stabilized inverted pendulums. I’m no expert in control theory, but you’ll see that one doesn’t need to be.

I'm no expert in unicycling, physics, control theory, or any other arcane elements of this story but I don't need to be to appreciate and explore the connections. And, I suspect that our ITeam students don't need to be experts either to find some age-appropriate insight into something that catches their interest.

The Bowdoin Robotics Team came to Mt. Ararat Middle School last week and inspired several middle school students to think more about balancing on one foot (inverted pendulum with fixed base) to kick a soccer ball. Matt worked in ITeam meetings, CET, at home in the evening to install and start to learn Python because the Bowdoin Team uses it to control their robots!

Moylan include several video clips (generated with Mathematica) in order to illustrate the ideas he discusses. He also includes a link to the notebook that he created. Inside the notebook, he hints at even greater support for explorations by experts-in-training.

In the next article in this series, we'll derive pendulum-and-cart equations programmatically to make it easy to explore more general cases.

Samuel Chen commented on Moylan's post with this observation:

Simply amazing! One single post from Moylan covers the entire mechanics course from college!

Compare that with Sophia.org's concept of learning packets.

The material on Sophia is organized by "learning packets," which are small, bite-sized tutorials focused around a specific learning objective, including thousands of standards-aligned objectives. Each packet includes a question and answer conversation, giving learners the benefit of learning from both the content itself as well as the supplementary discussion.

I'm finishing this post now so that I can go and explore Moylan's notebooks with the new Mathematica CDF player.

Sophia.org and Creative Commons Licenses

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:

Work found at http://www.sophia.org/packets/creating-a-learning-packet-publishing / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

It captures institutional information but not authors. Will that provide the necessary incentive to participate?

Allie: Ambassador Actors and Bullying

Allie is using her work on the Ambassador Actors Project as the basis for her Capstone Project. For several years, the Ambassador Actors have used playback theater support anti-bullying and restorative justice work in our schools and communities. Seems like the Ambassador Actors have established some important precedents. MSNBC responded to President Obama's recent initiative to control bullying by producing a Dateline NBC show about Bullying:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Seems to me as if we have a reciprocal learning opportunity!

Making stuff smarter- Invisibility cloaks

When this show aired on our local station, I wanted students to see parts of it to compare with our work on MAMS ITeam. I hope that it will show the connection between our activities in ITeam and activities in places outside of school.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Here, I am testing to see whether it is possible to deep link into the content of strongest connection so that it will draw them in to watch more. Yes, the embed code contains an easily identifiable parameter 'chapter=n' that can be changed (in two places) in order to start the video at the beginning of a section. This strategy is not as precise as deep linking to time-code values but it embeds easily and provides context for what the viewer will see. This illustrates another service that the ITeam Html crew can learn and share.

Nova: Making things Smaller

The PBS show Nova has created a new series of four hour-long introductions to exciting new developments in material sciences. David Pogue hosts the show in his quirky and engaging way. On January 26, they aired the Making Things Smaller segment. They introduce nano robots that will help doctors to treat patients. The segments support the work that we have started with ITeam on using smart phones and AppInventor to control Lego NXT robots. Initially, they provide video to the 'trailer.' But eventually they will provide the entire segment.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

They also provide activity resources that we should explore. While we are waiting for the full video, we can use a selection they provide as resources for education.

Capstone Planning and Video Clips

We are working to establish better means of communication and collaboration to support students in their work on their Capstone Pilot Projects. But the deadline for presentations to the faculty and School Board are pressing. So, I resorted to any means available: email, Facebook message, and face-to-face explanations of this challenge.

Thank you for your willingness to help develop the concept of Capstone Projects at Mt. Ararat. The MTA Capstone Committee has made progress specifying characteristics of the Capstone Project and Pilot ( http://MTACapstone11.pbworks.com ). We hope the Capstone Study Circles that some of you have also chosen to join will help to explain and help to refine those ideas. Clearly we still have more work. I suspect that you have many questions. Please come to MTA 107 during AST if you want to discuss the process and your plans.

The Committee is preparing to present a summary of their work to the MTA Faculty during the professional development day at the end of January. The Committee wants to convince the faculty that Capstone Projects will be valuable learning experiences. Then they will present to the School Board. They very much want to have brief video clips (literally 10 seconds) from each of the participants in the Pilot about their project plans. Since several of you are going out into the community to do your projects, we'd like to include an image from your work (if you have or can take one) as part of the clip. We will film in MTA 107 during AST blocks for those who are able and by special arrangement for those who have other commitments.

Please consider what you might say in 10 seconds about yourself and your plan for a Capstone Project. Sara has already started hers so I can guess what she might say:

"Hi, I'm Sara. I am in the health careers program at the Region Ten Tech Center. For my Capstone Project, I'm job shadowing a radiologist at Parkview Hospital to learn whether I'd like to specialize in that field." [Cut to an onsite picture of controls for a CAT scanner at Parkview.]


Credit to Liz West with a Creative Commons License.

If you don't know what to say, then come to 107 and we can figure it out together. I work both at the high school AND the middle school so send a reply so that I'll be sure to be there to meet with you.

Stephen Spaeth
Student Projects Coordinator

Clearly, we need to improve this facet of the operation if we are going to develop a sustainable program.

Segway NXTway-Gyro self-balancing NXT robot with remote PSP joystick con...

This clip shows the possibilities of NXT WOW. I spent several hours trying to improve my understanding of PID Control. After quitting last night, however, I refocused on the human intelligence. What can we learn from kids who have developed these kinesthetic skills that will help us to help all students to achieve at high levels?

ReTest post to blogger with attached image

This post ideally should contain a title. This text with appropriate formatting.

The AndroidLegoRemote video. It did not take the video.

Now trying a jpg image. And a tag escape.

And none of the signature stuff after an end command. The end command worked as described in help but my attempt to probe the system for undocumented functionality did not produce the desired result:
#tag test
I needed to add the labels to the post manually.

Sharing video of learning process

Blogspot gives me a tool for adding video to this post. Will it work any better than the Video Upgrade at Wordpress.com?

I have been trying to locate one of my videos of this subject on my MLTI laptop and it is anything but straightforward. I can easily find and view the video I want but so far, I cannot get the file url into the upload tool.



By using the "Save for Web" item under the file menu of QuickTime, I was able to create and find the file for upload. While that convoluted process might have sufficed in the past, it doesn't encourage routine use. What can we do to facilitate easier use?

How to make a fake UFO video

Avery has been looking forward to joining ITeam. He found one of my YouTube accounts and subscribed to my channel. When I looked one of his videos, it bore a striking similarity to one I posted recently:

Avery's:



Mine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv7xG9KA4Ss

Until he pointed it out, I had no idea that I had been making "ufo videos." I'll have to ask him how he is getting his viewers!

Respect Awards - New York 2010 - Danielle Smith

"GLSENvideo — May 28, 2010 — Danielle Smith is honored as this year's Student Advocate of the Year, presented by AT&T, at GLSEN's seventh annual Respect Awards - New York."

In this speech accepting this national award, Dani describes the process by which she became a student leader. Peers, teachers, administrators, parents and community members can benefit from seeing this autobiography of leadership development and asking themselves, "What can I do to help develop leadership skills for myself and others?"



Where do we see other students and colleagues take the responsibility for informal leadership that would otherwise not be noticed? What can we do to share these so that they become the norm rather than the exception?

Seth Godin describes ways drive change at TED

The TED Conference invited Seth Godin to present "The Tribes We Lead" at TED in February. They posted the video of his presentation in May. At 8:45 (minutes:seconds) he presents a diagram that ITeam members recognized as similar to our work on infecting people with good ideas.

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During the talk, Godin refers to Kevin Kelly's concept of 1,000 True Fans:

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

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Note that TED talks now include a linked-transcript that helps navigate between text and videographic respresentations. I tried to capture the time-code anchor url but the system did not provide it and I could not find the hand-coded equivalent. You need to open his presentation on the TED site to open the transcript window.

ITeam support for STEM learning

In Wolfram|Alpha data for analysis, I wrote:

Ruben Puentedura describes some of the Promise and Perils of Wolfram|Alpha. If we want to create cultures that use data to improve our practice, then we should invest some effort in navigating between the promise and the perils.

Image by SCSpaeth aka k6 via Flickr

I have been thinking about Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) because the MLTI Student Conference next week chose it as a theme. I hope we can address the theme in our presentation in ways that will engage both students and teachers. An ITeam member told me that he thought the abstract I had written about our work for the conference was accurate but not engaging for students. He predicted that teachers may attend but students may choose to go to sessions that capture their interest.*

If Wolfram were interested in hoarding their data, then why do they offer access to it in various forms? The Live Mathematica link obviously promotes the purchase of their flagship product. But they encourage use and make Mathematica available to K-12 educators for a reasonable investment of time and money (30 Minutes to Mathematica: Watch three video tutorials for 30 minutes and pay only $50 for two copies of a program worth hundreds).

I don't expect mobs of K-12 teachers breaking down the gates to take Wolfram up on the offer. But if we find ways for ITeam members to do for Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica what Brandon is doing with iTouch, then teachers may welcome the contributions as some are doing with the Air Mouse, screenshots, and other tools he and other ITeam members are exploring.

The ITeams Lobsterman's Research Project (Center Island Weather Station) seems to have potential as a driver for this approach. This project grows out of members' interests and may provide them with a motivation to apply math in a meaningful context that I did not experience until I was a graduate student. Wolfram|Alpha's Examples - Weather and Meteorology may provide us with starting points.

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*Reflection: We are clearly making wonderful progress developing ITeam as a collaborative community of practice if they feel free to assess my work with such candor.

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Leno: 3-D Printing for Everyone

This video clip from Jay Leno's Garage shows why iTeams should devote some effort to understanding 3-D printing and manufacturing. Note that the embed tool made it incredibly easy to post this video to a variety of places including this blog. I will need to show this to iTeam because the blocking software needs some adjustment.

Tech Studios- places for iTeam work

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.


Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Production in a Digital Age: John Seely Brown from carnegie commons on Vimeo.
Here are some key points (load the whole video and then use the sider to go to the indicated minutes:seconds):

• 0:40: "Play with creating knowledge ..."
• 1:20: "Create, reflect and share".
• 1:35: "Peer-based learning communities..."
• 2:33: "How do we construct an environment where we are constantly learning and teaching eachother?"
• 4:50: "The architectural studio ... all work in progress is made public" (ideas similar to Donald Schon's Reflective Practitioner.
  
• 7:00: "Technologies- Distributed communities of practice ..."
• 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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Videos - a reflective learning medium

Image by berpala via Flickr

The videos we are taking as part of our iTeams work are intended to help us observe, reflect and share our learning processes. We hope to develop a cadre of skilled videographers who can explore and support the use of video as a reflective learning medium. While the video we took yesterday needs quite a bit of refinement, students seem to be sufficiently engaged by the potential to commit time and effort to the project. Two reactions to the activities convince me that we are on the right track:

First, I reminded iTeam members that we will need to collect permission from parents (release form) before we can proceed much further with the project. I thought that I would have to find a suitable form, copy it, and distribute it to students. Jacob interpreted my reminder in a much more exciting way. While other students worked on creating the prototype video, Jacob spontaneously opened a blank document and created a form asking parents of iTeam members to give permission for their students to participate in our video project. Then he submitted an iTeam Activity Log entry describing his work:

1/29/2009 10:55:11
Rough Draft Release Form
iTeam members
JK
I created rough draft for a release form so videos can be showed to the school board.

Jacob helped me understand additional ways that members can contribute to our collaborative work. I thanked him for his initiative and encouraged all members to consider this as an example of skills, processes and culture that we are trying to develop. I also gently pointed out that we may need to get help to include legal issues that the district will want to see, too.

Second, two students asked if they could return after school to work more on the video project. Shortly after the regular school day ended, four students came to the media center and we reviewed the raw video clip and discussed how we could improve the quality and effectiveness. They are already considering multiple cameras, ways to improve the sound quality, and "stage" presence.

While helping students learn to use the new iMacs in the Media Center, an iTeam member and I noticed the adjacent iMac importing video from one of the Library's cameras. He asked me what I thought it was. While I didn't watch much, it seemed as if the subject of the video were a classroom and a teacher working with students. I know that the NBPTS certification process requires that teachers take such videos of themselves and submit them as part of their portfolios of evidence. Was the video we saw being transferred yesterday related to that process? If so, then we should explore whether iTeams can help with support for that kind of activity.

Moonrise at Dawn over the Sound

We look southeast over the Sound and often see spectacular sunrises. Here, the moon rises and its image is reflected in the sound as dawn starts. Flickr makes the sequence into a simple animation. Next time, I'll know to plan the sequence more carefully. The Sound was relatively still that morning. Waves make interesting patterns of reflections. Masts and shrouds remind me of Fourier Transforms.