Building Learning Communities 2011

BLC
These are the slides from the three presentation I did at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston this week. While I've played with many of the ideas in these presentations before, in other contexts, I worked hard to re-imagine and rework them for the conference. In particular, the last one, Design (still) Matters! took many hours to put together and I felt like I was going out on a limb because I wanted to continue a conversation I hope started here last year. I'm already thinking about where a third incarnation of that talk might go. As alway, I had so much more to share but, alas, time is short. ;-)



The first and last were recorded as videos which will be shared soon. If you saw any of these presented or in the video archive afterward (I'll update this post with links when they're online) please leave your reflections, stories or personal tales of how they struck you. The comments of critical friends is greatly appreciated.



FYI: there are many active links to the content I discussed embedded on the slides. Click around the centre of each slide to follow the link if there is one.



21st Century Bricoleurs part one

Seymour Papert describes bricolage as a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing and playing around. How do we learn by playing around with digital stuff? Can we create deep learning experiences that encourage students to show and share what they know with the world and contribute to the global knowledge commons? We will unleash a cornucopia of concrete student centred learning experiences that leverage the power of the world wide web and focus teachers instructional design through lenses that are student centred, knowledge centred, assessment centred and community centred. We will look at both small short term assignments and larger long term projects that will amaze you with what your students can learn and share as 21st century bricoleurs.












21st Century Bricoleurs part two












Design (still) Matters!

A practical exploration of the intersection between visual design, presentation design and instructional design. Every day, several times a day, teachers everywhere are called upon to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten and maintain attention and amongst their students. With the advent of interactive white boards and/or video projectors in classrooms everywhere, the intersection of these skills is fast becoming a centrepiece of an educators toolkit. This workshop will model and illustrate concrete ways in which teachers can incorporate these skills into their pedagogical practice.












Many people asked for a copy of the Pre-Show slide deck. They are all archived in my flickr account and part of how I participate in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change group. The slides are embeded below but I also have a design challenge for you based on this and Ewan McIntosh's keynote.
























In his keynote at the end of the 1st day of the conference Ewan asked everyone to read Dylan Williams 12 page article Inside the Black Box (pdf). He also encouraged people to read A systematic review of the impact of summative assessment and tests on students' motivation for learning (pdf).



Here's your design challenge: Read those articles, or just the bits that most interest you. Pull out a powerful quotation from the article. Find a striking creative commons image on flickr analogically related to your quote. Mash them together and contribute them to the pool of photos in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change group. I can't wait to see your thinking made visible in this way. ;-)

Building Learning Communities 2011

BLC
These are the slides from the three presentation I did at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston this week. While I've played with many of the ideas in these presentations before, in other contexts, I worked hard to re-imagine and rework them for the conference. In particular, the last one, Design (still) Matters! took many hours to put together and I felt like I was going out on a limb because I wanted to continue a conversation I hope started here last year. I'm already thinking about where a third incarnation of that talk might go. As alway, I had so much more to share but, alas, time is short. ;-)



The first and last were recorded as videos which will be shared soon. If you saw any of these presented or in the video archive afterward (I'll update this post with links when they're online) please leave your reflections, stories or personal tales of how they struck you. The comments of critical friends is greatly appreciated.



FYI: there are many active links to the content I discussed embedded on the slides. Click around the centre of each slide to follow the link if there is one.



21st Century Bricoleurs part one

Seymour Papert describes bricolage as a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing and playing around. How do we learn by playing around with digital stuff? Can we create deep learning experiences that encourage students to show and share what they know with the world and contribute to the global knowledge commons? We will unleash a cornucopia of concrete student centred learning experiences that leverage the power of the world wide web and focus teachers instructional design through lenses that are student centred, knowledge centred, assessment centred and community centred. We will look at both small short term assignments and larger long term projects that will amaze you with what your students can learn and share as 21st century bricoleurs.












21st Century Bricoleurs part two












Design (still) Matters!

A practical exploration of the intersection between visual design, presentation design and instructional design. Every day, several times a day, teachers everywhere are called upon to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten and maintain attention and amongst their students. With the advent of interactive white boards and/or video projectors in classrooms everywhere, the intersection of these skills is fast becoming a centrepiece of an educators toolkit. This workshop will model and illustrate concrete ways in which teachers can incorporate these skills into their pedagogical practice.












Many people asked for a copy of the Pre-Show slide deck. They are all archived in my flickr account and part of how I participate in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change group. The slides are embeded below but I also have a design challenge for you based on this and Ewan McIntosh's keynote.
























In his keynote at the end of the 1st day of the conference Ewan asked everyone to read Dylan Williams 12 page article Inside the Black Box (pdf). He also encouraged people to read A systematic review of the impact of summative assessment and tests on students' motivation for learning (pdf).



Here's your design challenge: Read those articles, or just the bits that most interest you. Pull out a powerful quotation from the article. Find a striking creative commons image on flickr analogically related to your quote. Mash them together and contribute them to the pool of photos in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change group. I can't wait to see your thinking made visible in this way. ;-)

Creating Images with Style




Seeing History by dkuropatwa









I'm at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston this week. I've been asked to guest blog over there during the conference. I'm cross posting here as well. (Maybe it'll encourage me to do this more often ... feels good to be blogging.)















Riding a Paris Metro David Wong looks up at the ads. All beautiful images captioned with little text. One, an image of the Earth and a single star. The caption: "When you look at Alpha Centauri — the closest star to Earth — you are watching something that happened four years ago."




In their essay What If Ideas Were Fashion? David Wong and Danah Henriksen (from Michigan State University) explore the learning that comes of creating these images. What if we applied a fashion designer's design sense to learning? As they ask in the title of their essay: "What if ideas were fashion?"



Early on they write: "The experience of fashion is often characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought."



That got me thinking. What if we substitute 'learning' for 'fashion' …



What if the experience of learning were characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?



Have you seen anything at BLC that can be characterized as 'intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?" Any one of those? two? three? all four? I have. I'll mention some examples in my next post. I'm far more interested what you saw. Please share it here in the comments. Better yet, summarize it in a "slide" like one of those you'll find in Dean Shareski's flickr group Great Quotes about Learning and Change. (If you've not seen it yet I highly recommend putting aside 30 minutes or so to get lost in it.) Find a (cc) licensed flickr image that resonated with your favourite quote from the conference so far about learning and add it to the pool.



Picking up on David and Danah's work I just started a new flickr group similar to Dean's. It's called Ideas with Style. It's specifically about mashing together (designing) a striking image with an educational
thought, fact, or idea. Check it out, maybe add an image to that pool too.



Remember: neither 'social media' nor 'design' are nouns, they're verbs, and Design Matters!

Rules To Live By

I've become more and more interested in visual design as it pertains to teaching. I see a lot of teachers new to using a SMARTboard creating long, text heavy slides in their lessons. For myself, I've started a collection of feeds in my reader called Visual Thinking and it's had a dramatic impact on my own slide design process.


If you watch TED Talks you may have noticed that the visuals used by speakers at this years conference are qualitatively superior to those used in the past. TED has hired Duarte Design and assigned each speaker a small stipend to have their visuals given a makeover by the folks at Duarte. You can really see it in the visuals used in these two talks:


Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise






Here's the backstory to Barry's slide makeover.


Bruce Bueno de Masquita: Three predictions on the future of Iran, and the math to back it up






Here's the back story to Bruce's slide makeover. (Seems to be offline; wonder what happened? Here's the Google Cache of the page. You can also find it on my Shared Items page.)


The post ends with this:



Rules We Live By


  » Break apart big ideas into smaller bite-sized pieces.


  » Simplify the message (even when you’re talking about using game theory to predict the future!)


  » Give a message space to stand out and contrast to focus attention.


  » Use more visuals and less words.


  » Use clear, easy-to-read charts with simple shapes and colors to add texture and clarity.



If you're new to using an Interactive White Board (IWB) in your class I think this is an excellent list to use as a starting point for slide design. When designing slides for classroom instruction these are the ideas I use as guidelines. I'm working hard at evolving how I present information to my students daily. Particularly when teaching more conceptually difficult material.


This is how I introduced statistics the first time with the SMARTboard:






This is how I did it this year:






There's still lots of room for improvement in that second set of slides above. I'd genuinely appreciate any suggestions you may have about improving this particular slide deck or my approach in general. Can you suggest a specific image that might fit nicely into this lesson?


I'm going to keep trying to increase my use of visual images and since SlideShare added the ability to embed YouTube videos in each slideshow I've been trying to have at least one instructional video inserted into every day's set of slides.