Circles / Círculos (Abstracción 011) / Claudio Alejandro Mufarrege / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I'm trying to get my head around using Google+. The Circles feature fascinates me; the G+ contact/group management system. Initially I read everything I could about how people were using it. I continue to wonder about this and thought I'd ask.


This is the conversation some of us had on G+ about it. I thought I'd share it outside the closed sphere of G+. I imagine (hope) all these G+ discussions will become part of the open web soon.




Ryan Bretag has been doing some real heavy lifting around co-constructed learning spaces. I learned lots from talking to him on G+ about the use of Circles. It'll be really interesting to see how the use of Circles and G+ plays out in classrooms in the coming year.

(I wonder if sharing this conversation here fractures the discussion or adds another layer?)

I'm a big fan of TED. They've published over 900 talks to date, not counting all the TEDx talks and I expect they'll hit 1000 just about in time for the new school year. (I wonder if we should do something about that?) Anyway, I've used many TED talks in my math classes in various ways and I thought it might be nice to have them all gathered together in one place. So, here they are, the 24 TED talks I think are most connected to math in some way. (Actually, I cheated, the last one is from TEDx Observer.) If you know of any I left out, or any TEDx talks that should be included leave a comment here and I'll add it in. Feel free to copy and repurpose this in any way you like.

So the blog's been pretty quiet, I haven't blogged much since the summer. I've been sharing stuff in a number of my other online spaces and I figured it was time for an update so here's what I've been up to ...

All the workshops I did last year in my day job are housed on my Sr. Years ICT wiki.

This year I'm doing a similar job in the French sector. My new wiki is called Litteratie avec les TIC. It has some content in both languages.

My Slidespace is where I share almost all my presentations; all of them that aren't housed on wikis.

I've made a few of them into "slidecasts" (slideshow+podcast) three of which are below:

I've Got 5 Minutes


 Teaching Interdependance v3

I've been slowly growing my YouTube channel. It has some instructional screencasts and a couple of presentations including my Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference cut up into three bite sized parts:


5 Minutes To Make A Difference - about 5 min




Teaching (a pedagogical framework) - about 8 min





The full uninterrupted Keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference, called interSections, is available on my blip.tv channel - about 25 min





I've been sharing lots of stuff via my flickr account; I'm trying to keep up with taking at least one photo a day and cross posting them to my photo blog. As I read interesting things I've been trying to get better at designing visual learning objects by mashing up interesting images with interesting quotes. I've been sharing them in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change photo pool and in two photo sets, one in English and the other en français. (I've got some catching up to do with my French flickr set.) Everything is licensed under Creative Commons so feel free to reuse them in any way you like.









Some of my workshops housed on wikis are:

SMARTen Up! (how to use an IWB effectively in the classroom)

All Things Audio (hands-on educational podcasting workshop with my buddies John Evans and Rob Fisher.) It's also available in French as Toutes choses audio (I flew solo on this one. John and I are planning to make it available in Spanish and German at the upcoming B.Y.T.E. Conference at the end of February.)

Gettin' Googley (an introduction to select Google Tools in education)

I also have a presentations wiki for other workshops I've done but it really needs some cleaning up. If you don't mind the mess you can poke around.

And finally, here are some of the varied spaces you can connect with me online.

Cross posted from the November Learning blog.

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Community First

Michael Wesch by flickr user poptech

Michael Wesch's keynote this morning was simply breathtaking. In the follow up breakout session someone asked him: "How do you stop students seeing themselves as students, and as collaborators?"

Mike sighed, put both hands on the podium and said: "That's really hard work."

He went on to explain "community first." He uses the first two weeks of class to build a sense of community and togetherness in a shared quest to solve a real world problem. A problem he himself doesn't know the answer to.

"Doing crazy things together creates community." 

Micheal plans his most passionate and enthusiastic lectures for those first two weeks. And he has his students do zany ice-breaking activities to help them get to know each other and break through the veneer of passivity they arrive in his class with. But it's not just about having fun; these activities (like human scavenger hunts) all have a serious edge to them. They have to see that they'll have fun learning here, but we are working hard at learning.

The Lesson Design Arc: schedule-research-paper-video 

The kids begin by co-creating a schedule on a wiki for the research they'll do to solve the problem they've decided to work on. They begin by digging into the problem and reading everything they can on it. Summaries of all their reading are compiled on the wiki. Typically they'll read over 90 articles, papers, or books in the first week of class as they do this. (In more typical University classes they read about three articles in the first week.) Mike guides them, having a little deeper experience in the field then they do, by suggesting other sources they might wish to explore. They continue this research and co-create a research paper for publication. When that's all done, they create very brief condensed video summaries of their research, submit them to Mike who then weaves them together into a brief (5 min?) video. All this is only possible because of the community building work they do together in the first few weeks of the course.

There's a lot more to all this, I'm just summarizing (his integrated, collaborative, calibrated peer review assessment scheme – which goes well beyond <-- that link back there – is brilliant), but that's the broad strokes takeaway I got.

When Things Go Wrong

My Pencil by flickr user jbelluch

Sometimes, when people work together closely on a real world problem things wrong. People get upset. Students goof off in class.

When that happens Mike intervenes using a ritual he learned from an African(?) tribe. It's very similar to the Talking Stick ritual used by many First Nations people of Canada. They use pencils instead. Anyone who is holding the pencil lets go of the little voice in their head that says "You can't say that." and speaks from the heart about what's upset them. The rest of the group talks with them about it. They don't put the stick down until they've resolved whatever the problem is. Mike usually goes first. Sometimes he cries while he's talking to his 400+ students. Then the next person in the group takes their turn.

A Pedagogy to Aspire To

Isn't that an amazing example of "intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?" I had wanted to write about the amazing conversations going here: in the halls, in sessions, over lunch, every time someone stops me to talk really. But this morning's keynote. Just breathtaking. Good teaching is what comes from building strong relationships between teachers and students; relationships with a serious educational edge. (I hear echoes of John Seely Brown in this.)

I've got to think more about how to weave together such a set of diverse sensitivities into my teaching. How do you build a culture of caring in your class?

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.)

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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!