I’m Not Beguiling My Brain: My Top 5 Movements in Thought in CEP811

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child.

– Shakespeare, Sonnet 59

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I struggle with the idea of “new.”

Perhaps it’s because I over-interpret this word in the most literal possible sense.  Or perhaps it’s because before even watching Kirby Fergeson’s series, I could tell in my heart, like Shakespeare, that “everything is a remix.”  There are new ways in which we blend and use and understand, but it’s rare that the things themselves are truly never-before-seen new.  Even the bemoaning of a lack of newness is ancient – Shakespeare was remixing Solomon after all.

So while I don’t think I’ve had any completely brand-spanking-new thoughts this semester, I can see how my thinking has been pushed to the next level in some ways.  And while Shakespeare might argue that I’m “beguiling my brain,” I think I’d have an easy time convincing him that the stuff he remixed was worth the effort, and so mine have been, too.  Not beguiled, just stretched.

Top 5 Movements in Thought

1. Remixing can be embraced and celebrated as an art form – it doesn’t have to be seen as a second-class citizen in the creative world and can even be a great way to talk openly about “intellectual property” and “piracy.”  Thank you, “Everything is a Remix” for helping me to appropriately value and appreciate (instead of bemoaning) a lack of “newness.”
2. Technology tools aren’t going to solve the world’s problems, but they also aren’t a waste of time.  I have a tendency to stick to a few programs and tools that I’m super comfortable with and excuse away my lack of curiosity by reassuring myself that pedagogy is more important anyway (“there’s no app for pedagogy,” right?).  While that is true, tools are helpful and there are certain things we can’t do without the proper tools.  Thank you Maker Kit exploration for encouraging me to explore again.
3. How we do what we do matters.  Now obviously this isn’t a brand new thought, but I was reminded as we designed classrooms toward MakerEd purposes that so much of what we do as teachers is in the “how” not the “what.”  How we organize the physical space was the focus here, but I thought a lot about other “invisibles” impacted my teaching too.  It’s things like tone of voice, use of images and video, linking in fun or even the use of emoticons that seem to really impact my online teaching.  Thank you classroom redesigns for showcasing the “how” for me again.
4. Focusing on students’ deficits only encourages us to forget the innate potential they have to make.  Dougherty’s insistence that “we are all makers” really stuck with me.  It’s not that some kids I teach have “it” and others don’t – the potential is there in all of them.  It may be my job to wake them up to this urge to produce, but it’s still something they have, not something I’m transferring to them.  Thank you, James Paul Gee for reminding me that most of them are involved in creation already, just outside of the school system!
5. I must practice what I preach.  This is one of those long standing battles of any teacher, I think.  It’s so easy to get lost in teaching writing or reading or creating that we forget to set aside time for our own learning and doing.  If I’m to lead students into a life of innovation and creativity, I’ve got to be living that life myself.

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References

Ajifro, A. [2014] Brain power. (Image file) Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/125992663@N02/14601014695.

Fergeson, K. [2011]. Everything is a Remix. (Video file) Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/14912890.

Dougherty, D. (2011, January). We are makers.  Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/dale_dougherty_we_are_makers.

Gee, J. P. (2010, Jul y 20). James Paul Gee on Grading with Games. Edutopia’s Youtube Channel.  [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU3pwCD-ey0#t=6.

Pedagogically Sound Classroom Design

The Design Challenge

The challenge to recreate our classrooms using Sketch-Up is a very welcome one.  I’m a true believer that places convey feelings and so I’m always conscious of what feelings my home and classroom produce.  (Confession: I once had ,yes “had”, to make valances to cover the ugly institutional windows.)

Although I now work online, our blended school has learning labs.  I took the opportunity to design the “ideal learning lab” in our newest lab space which was a blank slate the last time I saw it.  It’s a beautiful space with a glass wall between the main room and office building in which it’s located and huge glass windows letting in tons of natural light on the other side.  There are two student spaces leading from the main room and an office space for staff.

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Design Influences & Goals

Here are the big questions I considered and the pedagogy that influenced my design goals.

• What message should this space send students and teachers?  What design choices will communicate most effectively?

Sir Ken Robinson, a world renowned specialist creativity, is straight forward in his observation that the current schools views students as a product to be mass produced.  He observers that, “the whole process of public education came about primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution . . . and the current system doesn’t just represent the interests of the industrial model, it embodies them. To begin with, there’s a very strong sense of conformity. Second, the pedagogical model is based on the idea of transmission. . . . And the third big feature is the hierarchy of subjects: You have science and math at the top, and languages, then the arts further down.”  (OWP/P Architects, 2010). His point is well taken that this is not how to encourage creative, critical thinkers.

GOAL:  Create a space that is set-up to move easily between a variety of subjects and a variety of instructional methods

• How can the design encourage higher level thinking from various intelligences?

Howard Gardner is perhaps best known for his Theory of Multiple Intelligences, an idea claiming that there is a wide variety of intelligence and now simply one human intelligence easily assessable  by a psychometric instrument.  In thinking about how school can reflect a variety of intelligences, he observes that, “School would be far more individualized that ever before. . .  Young people would also be able to keep their own records of what’s been learned, what’s been produced, critiqued, etc. . . it is also important to display scientific, artistic, and historic works that have been fashioned by students and teachers.” (OWP/P Architects, 2010)

GOAL: Create a space that provides for choice and a wide range of ways to explore, experiment, express and share learning.

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The Design

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Dreaming BIG

To translate this plan into the real world, there would need to be a lot of money (a conservative estimate would be at least $15,000) and a lot of DIY building going on.  Keep in mind that this space houses ALL subjects and content areas across the gambit of high school, so for a whole high school set-up this would run pretty cheap.  Within PBL learning experiences we could build most of the straight forward furniture like tables, desks and shelving and certainly create all of the artwork ourselves.  White boards are also fairly cheap to make if you use shower liner.  The labs already have computers. 1-2 weeks of intensive work would complete most of the transformation.

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References

OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture, & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher: 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching & learning. Retrieved from http://thethirdteacherplus.com/s/Ch2-TTT-for-Web-0y6k.pdf

Sending Out an S.O.S with Play Dough

Some weeks life runs smoothly.  Other weeks I’m bailing water by the bucket full.

Last week, this was me:

Kookaburra, H. J. (2012 July 23). “Dec.10,1993: Drama. Ex-ASR KUNGAH MARIS sinking as HMAS HOBART [II] approaches – Scott Corson Collection” [Online image]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/7627833146/

Not the best frame of mind with which to enter into creation, the exact thing, of course, which I was needing to do.

Having received my Squishy Circuit kit, the time had come to actually adapt this bad boy to my educational context.  I made the dough and spent an afternoon with my kids making LED lights light-up with play dough.  It was pretty neat, to be honest – my three year old was impressed at the very least and complained when it was time to clear the table for dinner, a sure sign of success.  (And, when the electricity went out at a restaurant we were trying to eat at last night, he actually had a decent idea of why the lights weren’t working – bonus!  Shameless mommy-brag, sorry.  Back to my “creation while drowning” experience.)

As much fun as the play dough was, I struggled to see how to connect the idea of basic circuits to Language Arts standards.  Maybe we could sculpt luminous metaphors?  It was an idea, but I wasn’t super crazy about it.

I did a bit of digging around online to try and stir up some ideas.  It was fun seeing little kids learn about circuitry, but anything more advanced seemed to require basic computers, which was a bit beyond my skill, and certainly beyond my reach for this sub-par week.

I went thrifting and found a music box which I thought I might be able to rework to run with the little motor that came in the kit.  I came home, pulled it apart as much as I could.  I couldn’t find a way to removed the right pieces without taking a hammer to the thing, so that dream died pretty quickly.  I remembered that our instructors had reminded us about the need to be comfortable with failure and tried to reframe the smashed music box in a positive light.  I couldn’t quite manage that so I wrapped the parts up so I wouldn’t have to look at them.

I pulled out another of the pieces of the kit that I hadn’t explored much yet – the buzzer.  “What a horrid noise!” I thought as I hooked it up.  I pulled it out of the play dough quickly, only able to stomach very short sounds, wondering what possible purpose such an annoying device could hold.  And then, as I was listening to the sequence of the noise, it occurred to me that this sounded an awful lot like a telegraph machine!  I made a quick makeshift play dough bridge that I could manipulate to bypass the buzzer on the circuit, looked up Morse Code and sent my first telegraph into the atmosphere . . .

S (di-di-dit)     O (da-da-dah)     S (di-di-dit).

How appropriate for the week I’d been having!  Ha!

My initial design was not user friendly, so I went around the house collecting materials I thought I might use to make a device more resembling a real telegraph machine.  I only ended up needing two of the materials – Duplos and a clothespin.  The clothespin had the right amount of tension in its spring to lift and replace the bridge.  Every time it lifted the bridge a short burst of sound could come from the buzzer making the dits and the dahs of Morse Code distinguishable. I also insulated the buzzer a bit by attaching it to a Duplo brick for the sake of my sanity.

This is what the new contraption looks like:

I’ve brainstormed different ways I might be able to reach ELA standards with a play dough telegraph.  Certainly the idea of a telegraph is to make communication as short as possible while still getting across your main ideas.  A lot like text talk, to be honest.  Hmmm . . . maybe we could teach summary that way.  Boil down a short story into a sentence easily transmitted in code.  Maybe.  A start, anyway.

This is where I ended the week:

My current plan is indeed to link the modern idea of text talk back to the days of the telegraph, and then bridge into a discussion of summary (for those using Common Core ELA has two summary standards one for literature and one for informational texts – either could be used for this idea).  The same skill of boiling down a body of text into key points and main ideas is used in each, so this shouldn’t be too difficult.  In the PBL context of the school I work for, I’m considering a driving question something like: “How can effective communication happen quickly?”

I’ll keep you posted as to my progress. My play dough telegraph can’t send an S.O.S. very far, so you’ll just have to check back here to see if this next week yields more successful results or not.

*Note: Multimodal elements help to visually tell the story, connect to readers on a personal level, provide necessary detail for DIY moments and add a overall sense of fun.

Play: The Maker’s Natural Habitat

Challenged to learn and reflect about “maker culture” this week in my new course, CEP811, I have found myself thinking again and again of play.  The first run in with this notion came during the introductory TED Talked embedded in our weekly “lecture.”  In it, the founder of the MakeFaire, Dale Doughtery, defines makers as “enthusiasts; they are amateurs; they’re people who love doing what they do. They don’t always even know why they’re doing it.”

And it occurred to me that I know two such people who exhibit exactly this kind of behavior on a daily, if not hourly basis.  Here they are engaged in loving what they do without knowing exactly why they’re doing it:

You guessed it; these are my kids. My son, who is 3 1/2, and my daughter, who is almost 2, bear an uncanny resemblance to these makers.  Things in our house rarely remain in the context for which they were intended.  Mop handles quickly become swords and buckets repurposed as helmets, even though we do have toy replicas of those exact armor pieces.

Some how it’s just more fun to make your own!

How true I have found this in my own experience.  It’s sort of fun to watch other people’s remix videos, but not nearly as fun as making your own.  This week I was tasked to “play” with Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker, and was not disappointed to find myself delighted with the challenge to remake and recreate.

Sure there were moments when I bumbled and lost work, cursed poor key word search choices that made my searches less than helpful and the like.  But those brief moments of “failure” were well worth the cost because in the end this new toy has opened up a plethora of new ideas for me to take back to my work with students and perhaps use again for my own purposes.

I think this is why play is so foundational for any “maker.” There’s the need to open oneself up to the new, to see past what something is and think instead of what it could be. The irony in some sense is that we all come into the world knowing how to play. My children, for example, did not have to be taught playfulness. Sure I do my best to put the time and right materials in their path, but they instinctively know how to approach things with curiosity and questions.

Oddly enough I don’t always allow myself the same creative space. It can be hard to find time to play. That is why this assignment (and this class as a whole) is so exciting to me. I am being forced to play!

Here are my first playful attempts at sharing why I believe play to be so fundamental to learning in general, but specifically related to the idea that we are all makers.  Enjoy them for what they are! At the very least I hope this 60 seconds helps remind you of immense possibilities that open up when we encourage ourselves and those around us to play.

https://ajhenning.makes.org/popcorn/2tjn_

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Remix Credits

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Askew, Nic. [DMLResearch Hub]. (2012 Oct 30). Connected Learning: Playing, Creating, Making [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9xyrAsCe0M

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