Resource Library

Great Resources for Webmaking

KQED has produced excellent and easy to understand tutorials on two of the Webmaker tools:

X-Ray Goggles

Popcorn Maker

Resource Library

Great Resources for Webmaking

KQED has produced excellent and easy to understand tutorials on two of the Webmaker tools:

X-Ray Goggles

Popcorn Maker

Making as Learning

..the best maker-driven learning is never just about the making. It’s about all the things that happen around the making. That initial spark of curiosity, the investigation and early tinkering, the planning and research that follow, the inspirations and appropriations from other projects, the prototypes, the failures, the feedback, and, perhaps most importantly, the iterations upon iterations towards a better make. All of these acts are done in and contingent on well configured social contexts, in communities of practice and affinity spaces.

--Rafi Santo, "Is Making Learning? Considerations as education embraces the Maker Movement"

Trying and Tinkering in the Making Process

--Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle

Different Styles of Making

"This aspect of Anne's work -- her close, almost tactile involvement with the sprites -- enables us to make a bridge between styles of programming and styles, this time, not of moral discourse, but of doing science. The fact of diverse styles of expert programming supports the idea that there can be different but equal voices even where the formal has traditionally appeared as almost definitionally supreme: logic, mathematics, and the "hard" sciences."

--Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert, "Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete"

Making and Teaching Others

Super-Aweseome Maker Show

Sylvia's Super-Aweseome Maker Show

Connected Learning

Connected Learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream a reality — connecting academics to interests, learners to inspiring peers and mentors, and educational goals to the higher order skills the new economy rewards.

--Why Connected Learning? Connected Learning Alliance

At the core of connected learning are three values:

Equity — when educational opportunity is available and accessible to all young people, it elevates the world we all live in.

Full Participation — learning environments, communities, and civic life thrive when all members actively engage and contribute.

Social connection — learning is meaningful when it is part of valued social relationships and shared practice, culture, and identity.

-- Henry Jenkin's Connected Learning

Connected Learning Communities

Openness

Learning about "open". The School of Open offers online courses, face-to-face workshops, and innovative training programs on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, and research.

-- School of Open

Rather, the Open Movement is an umbrella term that describes a number of overlapping and interrelated movements that, collectively, support the idea of a free and open society in the Arts, Education, government, computing/code, research, technology, medicine, copyright/copyleft, and other key areas.

-- ETMOOC's "The Open Movement – Open Access, OERs & Future of Education"

The goal of open is:

participation. rocket fuel for smart collaboration.

agility. speed. flexibility. getting shit done.

momentum. communities want to push boulders that are already rolling.

testing and rapid prototyping. iterating and refining as we go.

leverage. getting greater bang from limited resources. punching above our weight.

-- Matt Thompson, "How to Work Open"

You Make, You Learn

Everyone Can Teach

To warm up to the idea of teaching, we then got into pairs. The task: teach someone something in 5 minutes.

One person would go and then switch. Even if you knew what was being taught, you were encouraged to play a good learner, asking good questions and prompting the teacher.

After this exercise, we circled up and discussed what we observed from this experience. For many, it was a great way to think about how to explain something clearly, using metaphors and knowledge building blocks. It helped bring people into a teaching mindset.

--Michelle Thorne "Webmaker Train the Trainer"

Learning Objectives First

Backward design is a method of designing educational curriculum by setting goals before choosing instructional methods and forms of assessment. Backward design of curriculum typically involves three stages:

identify the results desired

determine acceptable levels of evidence that support that the desired results have occurred

design activities that will make desired results happen

--Wikipedia "Backward design"

Learning Activities for Different Styles

Consider the most popular kindergarten materials: blocks for building, crayons for drawing, dolls for role-playing, tiles for making geometric patterns. All of these materials are designed to encourage a child’s imagination. The materials do not over-constrain or over-determine. Children with different interests and different learning styles can all use the same materials, but each in his or her own personal way.

In developing technologies for older learners, we try to achieve a similar effect. Our guiding principle is “many paths, many styles” – that is, to develop technologies that can be used along many different paths, by children with many different styles...Our goal is to provide tools that can be used in multiple ways, leaving more room for children’s imaginations.

--Mitch Resnick All I Really Need to Know (All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten*

--Susan Cain, The Power of Introverts

How Do I Make a Learning Activity?

"Making As Learning" in Online Communities

Digital Humanities 106: The Daily Create

The Daily Create provides a space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity through challenges published every day. Each assignment should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily. Developed as part of the ds106 open course on digital storytelling, TDC is open to anyone who wants a regular dose of creative exercises (and it more fun than jumping jacks, pushups, and P90X).

DS106 began as a digital storytelling course offered for credit for students at the University of Mary Washington.

And ds106 is also open to anyone interested in making digital art along with us and is truly an online community of learners beyond UMW. We have an open collection of creativity assignments, a best of collection of participant works, even an internet radio station.

Making Learning Connected: Make Cycles

Making Learning Connected (#clmooc) is a collaborative, knowledge-building and sharing experience open to anyone who’s interested in making, creativity and learning. Together over six weeks we will play with new tools and processes for making projects, share our results and our learning, and explore the educational model known as Connected Learning.

The Design Process

Paper Prototyping

The sketchy feel of paper prototypes make them an effective tool to elicit users’ hands-on involvement during the design process, as they project the idea that things are still on the works and there is room for change. With paper prototypes, users are not only able to rapidly visualize the initial ideas of the design team, but can also feel empowered to adapt them to their own needs, and desires with the aid of the tangible materials.

--Catalina Naranjo-Bock, "Using Paper Prototyping as a Tool for Participatory Design Research

Participatory Design and the Web

Codesign steps into an age of open source code and digital collaboration by uplevelling such interactions in an interesting way. In a codesign approach, ‘users’ and ‘stakeholders’ become partners, working actively side-by-side with designers to make things, shaping the definition and direction of a project together.

-Kat Baybrooke, "A Mozilla winter: Web-makers, co-designers and curriculum-bakers…"

Design Thinking in the Classroom

es22 from ES22 Design Survivor on Vimeo.

Iteration and Reflection

The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation.

--Donald Schön "The Reflective Practioner"

Peers working in the Open

I feel like folks forget they are the agents of their experiences. We have agency. Power. Control. Maybe not over everything that happens. Certainly not all. But over more than we realize more often than not.

--Bud Hunt In Search of Agency

Great documentarians, who invite collaboration and feedback through their reflections:

Facilitating Participatory Experiences

Agendas for participant-driven events function more like scaffolding than script; they provide structure onto which participants can attach their ideas, interests and goals before and during the event. But letting participants drive the agenda requires a fundamental set of expectations and guidelines to encourage co-equal behaviour; at the heart of such guidelines are three tenets of peer interaction: respect, listening, and inclusion. Facilitation in participatory gatherings is the art of doing less. Success is indicated by drawing out collective energy when participants meet as a large group, and then providing guidance to establish small, focused groups of collaboration and interaction where participants drive.

--Aspiration Tech "Creating Participatory Events"

We did an activity I'm calling Existential Questions. You ask three existential questions and have each person write a one word answer to each of the three questions on post its. You then put the post its on the wall and talk about whether or not you can reach enlightenment on the answers via the Internet.

--Laura Hilliger Kitchen Table Beta with Adults

Prompt Campers to co-create. As a Camper, you’re assigned 2-3 other folks at random the week before. Brainstorm 3 of your passions, share 1 of them, and come up with a session idea that taps on all your collective ideas. For instance, if you’re all good at multitasking, come up with a session on time, being present or slowing down.

Self-introductions. Our interests were written on our name tags when we arrived (which I greatly prefer to my job title). But instead of having those pre-printed for us, in the first plenary session, prompt folks to introduce themselves to their neighbors without mentioning what they do for a living.

Select sessions at random. Have folks put their session ideas in a big, Inventables-branded molded drum and pull them out. Or have campers spin a wheel when they walk in and a session spot is one of the prized options. Or have them roll ridiculous dice. The idea here is to not separate “ideas of ladies” vs. “ideas of dudes.” It’s important that women are not reminded of their gender before they do something potentially cognitively stressful (Steele & Ambady, 2006).

--Vanessa Gennarelli How to Design Community Events that People Will Love (and Remember)

Playtesting

Working Open

While it’s impossible to fully decouple the production of software from the idea of working open, part of what we might imagine ourselves doing here is lifting and adapting some of the practices found in the open source community and asking how they might be relevant to the way we work as a network of educators.

--Rafi Santo, Dixie Ching, Kylie Peppler & Chris Hoadley, "What does it mean to ‘Work Open’ in Hive NYC? A Vision for Collective Organizational Learning"

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Finding Cohesion