Open Learning

Creative Learning - Week 5

Video: Audrey Watters, Mako Hill (Moderator: Philipp Schmidt). Opened discussing peoples teaching/learning videos which they did by Hangout. People noted the courage needed to document publicly your learning or teaching. Then on to Open Learning.  Ultimately there was acknowledgement that these methods might not be for all, but they're important.

Audrey started to think about it because of blogging and the way she was doing professional learning. She blogs to learn, but it's also about how she licenses her work. It requires being willing to put out half-baked ideas and to then collaborate on them. Worries that so much of online learning is replicating traditional lecture. (Hmm.)  Mako does open programming on a number of big projects. He sums up his unlearning experiences in a post at his site.

They discuss how blogging is similar to open programming. We need a way to fork with attribution. Audrey is even trying putting work up on github. Mako notes how a big part of the open programming idea is that the user owns the work. I think similar to the idea of student-centered learning. Both this and the Learning Web article talk about the benefits of systems being hackable. If education is not a blackbox, then we can adjust and understand what's going on. (Previously in the course this was a point about technology for learning, that if it's inscrutable there's no learning, and if it's hackable it leads to creation.)

At 54 min in response to a question about the classroom application, Audrey makes a strong statement of collaboration as the first step towards openness. Mako echoes, encouraging students to document learning not just for themselves but in an open space where others can engage. Actually, let's clip that.





Reading: "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0" (pdf) by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler.; Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society (Chapter 6: Learning Webs); Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar a essay on the development of fetchmail for Linux. (links are all pdf)

Minds on Fire: an advocacy piece pushing for online, social learning. Nothing constructive, I think, but pretty descriptive of the hopes of the backers of this. I liked the pictures.

Learning Webs: "In school registered students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient resources--money, time, or buildings--for their mutual frustration." The article gets into the difference between schooling and learning. It is literally radical and often rambling, which might be off-putting to some readers, but I found it thought provoking. On people's desire to have Aristotle for their Alexander: "The person who can both inspire students and demonstrate a technique is so rare, and so hard to recognize, that even princelings more often get a sophist than a true philosopher." Illich is advocating liberation pedagogy.

Cathedral and the Bazaar: interesting as an analogy for curriculum development. This is what I would like to see; I think it's what tends to happen with Dan Meyer's projects/movements. What does debugging mean? In the midst of writing this, Michael Pershan led a Global Math session to fix his broken Complex Numbers unit. He's put a lot of work into where it is now, but 20-30 teachers put in a good hour to discuss and revise. Great experience. In the video debugging is contracted with the 'you learned it or you didn't' vision of education.

Recommendation: watch the video, skip the parts irrelevant to you. If you're ramble and revolution tolerant, read the Learning Webs article.

Assignment:  Teach & Learn = Ask & Answer

1) Go to stackexchange.com/sites and choose a site that you find interesting

2) Post (at least) one question and answer someone else’s question (at least one)

3) Reflect: What aspects of the experience contribute to a sense of a learning community? What aspects limit a sense of community?

Learning match (extra activity): Offer to teach something & sign-up to learn something from someone else - Post it here

I'm new to Stack Exchange, but there is a large Mathematics section with 115,000 questions. The questions on the front page were math major or grad student level questions, with some research level questions. Fascinating. I chose to answer a question about mathematically related online games. There was some frustration with posting, getting used to the editor, etc. But not too bad. Here's the question and answer. They wouldn't let me put more than 2 links, so I put them into a Tumblr post. 

Harder to think about what I would ask. I wound up asking about those Escher spirals I never finished (Tumblr posts one and two) and my secondary sabbatical project, a common core sharing framework. The reputation bit reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom... "them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose."

It's an interesting site, and I'd love to hear from people who like it how they like it. How does it compare to Quora for example? It feels more focused and less social, but that's an initial impression. (I'm not a big Quora user, either, though.)

Powerful Ideas

Creative Learning - Week 4

Video Notes: Panelists Alan Kay and Brian Silverman. Discussing the nature and implication of powerful ideas. Trying to get at the so what. The idea isn't to assemble a list of powerful ideas, then we teach that. The idea is... we're not sure.  Bruner's advice on curriculum: if you don't know what to do, implement Piaget's stages. In other words, create an opportunity for tinkering. But tinkering is not inherenty valuable. When computers were first on the scene, teachers were happy to see students tinkering. But they weren't doing anything valuable because they weren't playing around with powerful ideas. Maybe tinkering should be "design process with materials in hand"( contrasted with engineering process of plan then assemble).They seemed to feel like there is some tension between story and tinkering, which was mystifying. On the whole, chock full of academic hemming, hawing, citation and, hence, not worth your time.

Reading: the star of the reading again was Papert. His article on the Pedagogy of Powerful Ideas. One paragraph: "Or consider the cognitivist who says: Michael will have a better relationship with fractions if he understands the concepts behind them. This might be so if he could really understand how the invention of fractions was as awesome as the invention of the mousetrap and how the intellectual methods that were used to invent fractions could be used to make new inventions of his own. But the cognitivists are not trying to recreate the intellectual situation in which fractions were invented—and (as far as I can see) could not do so in the context of an elementary school math class. They simply want Michael to see the connection between one set of ideas about which he does not care and another similar set." (There's a story in the article about a previously disengaged student recognizing the cool idea behind the Rat Pack. Er, a rat trap.) Close to the end, he notes: "What I am suggesting here is a program of idea work for educators. Of course it is harder to think about ideas than to bring a programming language into a classroom. You have to mess with actual ideas. But this is the kind of hard that will make teaching more interesting, just as idea work will do this for learning."

Assignment: Create a project with TurtleArt, and reflect on any “powerful ideas” you engaged with in the process. (Why TurtleArt instead of StarLogo?)

• Zeroeth powerful idea: I want a turtle script with some randomness and some pattern. So that in repetition you can see an abstraction of the pattern.

• First powerful idea is one that's missing: I want variables!  There's no way to save or store a randomly generated number, that I know yet. [Tinker, tinker] Oh... that's what the boxes are.

• Second powerful idea: progression. Hmm. Is the random too crazy? What if there was progression instead? Only two variables, though. Might have to do same fancy-schmancy manipulation of the numbers. Does it obey order of operations? [tinker, tinker] Seems like no. Parentheses to make up. (Might be stack based like RPN. Explore later.)
• Third powerful idea: undoing/inverse/solving. If I'm incrementing a value, how do I recover how many times it's been increased?
• Fourth idea: copy/paste is a very helpful function, but I don't know how to do it in this context.
• Fifth idea: repeatable blocks. Finally figured out how to make subroutines. The nicer neater structure appeals to me.

Other thoughts about TurtleArt: at first the limitations bothered me, but I do believe in general that restrictions help creativity. The help took me a while to try (I prefer documentation. Nerd.) But it was intuitive once I gave it a go. Never did figure out how to copy blocks or groups of blocks.  Somehow they get the code to save in the .png file when I thought I was just saving the canvas image. That is COOL.

I got my polygons basically working but thought they made for boring art. So rather than fine tune for aesthetics, I switched to spirals. Knowing what I needed to about the program I could make subtle shifts to get what I liked. I did put some randomness in, and made a rule for "finishing" - three runs of the program without adding to the screen meant it was done. Here's my favorite spiral TurtleArt.

Dave in the comments had the good idea of sharing the actual files: polygon progression and spirals. Once you've saved the files (which are .png), just open with TurtleArt instead of your default image editor. Thanks! His point about better social sharing would be a good thing. Scratch totally gets that right. Here's the code to read:

I do like the idea of discussing with students what they see as the big ideas, but it probably needs to be done in an inquiry/tinkering style culture.  I'll be trying that out for some workshop reflections in my classes. 



Image credits: He-Man is totally owned and operated by Mattel, I have no rights to the images.

Interest-based Learning & Constructionism

Creative Learning - Weeks 2 and 3
Huh? What? No - I didn't fall asleep in class. We took a family trip! (I.e. look for a vacation math post soon.)

One of the many things to catch up on is the Creative Learning Class. (See Week 1.) Phil Aldridge has been a better student - maybe you should copy his notes, instead.

Week 2 was a video session with Joi and Mimi Ito on interest based learning, main reading the Foreword to Papert's Mindstorms, and the Macarthur Foundation Connected Learning report. More resources linked from the course syllabus.

Video Notes: The Itos talk about informal education. Interestingly a lot of former physics majors who lost interest when teachers couldn't explain things intuitively and relied on formalism and symbolic manipulation. They want education to be motivated, and recognize that learning can be motivated by interest and relevance, but attention to diversity is important. Don't feel like they addressed well the questions about how do you deal with less productive interests and time scale (can't learn-on-demand the night before a recital). Important point: have to have a broad range of acceptable work and kinds of recognition. Broader mission, learning, social networking, traditional rewards. (Again the gamer types.) Joi:"The whole idea of higher ed... is that you need a standardized degree ... so it's all about individual standardized skills." Beware curricularization of all of student interests. Mimi cited Katie Salen's schools that have boss levels after the standards required units. Since academia is geared to formal, structured thinking, those are the learners that flourish. It just doesn't motivate a lot of kids.

Assignment: Read Seymour Papert’s essay on the “Gears of My Childhood” and write about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you (and share with your group). Also try the Marshmallow Challenge. (Done that, never wrote it up. Dave has a nice piece on it, though.)

Haven't seen too much activity from my group yet.

It was a straight line kind of building and play.

 I was really fortunate to have so many building tools/toys. I'm old enough that video games weren't dominating, but a curiosity. Mattel handheld football was the star, unbelievably. Sometime later Intellivision, but that was more my younger brother's speed. Erector set, Lincoln logs, and, ultimately, LEGO.

Really any robot, really,
though Zeroids and Robot were my faves.

Thinking about it, though, my play was always story motivated: the things I was building were for Micronauts, early action figures and any kind of robot. To some extent it's the same now, where teaching becomes the story that lets me build the things that are fun to build and play with. (Games, GeoGebra, cool math ideas and relationships, etc.) Looking back at these things was suprisingly emotional and I still have strong connections to them.

Recommendation: read Papert.

Week 3 video chat with Leah Buechley, Dale Dougherty (Maker movement) on Constructionism (not -ivism but -ionism), read Papert Mindstorms chapter 1 and The Children's Machine chapter 7 (on instructionism vs constructionism). Also of note: Maker-Education Initiative.

Papert quote from Mindstorms, Chapter 1: "But 'teaching without curriculum' does not mean spontaneous free-form classrooms or simply 'leaving the child alone.' It means supporting children as they build their own intellectual structures with materials drawn from the local culture. In this model, educational intervention means changing the culture, planting new constructive elements and eliminating noxious ones." There was a quote in The Children's Machine I had to posterize.

Video: They discussed the value beyond just making, and that 'just making' misses the point. That is human culture. The difference between learning by doing and learning by making, or why making is not just an activity. "School is famous for being overly structured... do all 9 steps and everyone gets the same result. (Barbie, anyone?) Blend maker cultures to appeal to a wider variety of learners; computation, electronics and textiles or paper, for example. Maker movement won't be equitable and diverse until its part of school. Concern for efficiency is a problem, as is emphasis on content that will make money. The old game design saw came up again, too: too often making is designed to hit a content objective rather than the content being involved in the making the learners are doing.

Part of what they said reminded me of a Star Trek exhibit at the science museum that had a section for what toys the engineers on the Apollo program played with as children.  Lots of construction.

Assignment: For this week's activity, create an Scratch project about things you like to do, then share it. (See 180ish projects in a Scratch forum.

This assignment reminded me of the Discovery Channel theme song.  I love my family and spending time with them, playing games and also making some. I love mathematics and I love teaching, too. Good writing - in book or film or tube.  I love music and any form of art, time in my faith life, that should have a part. Not much here that I can leave out, I guess learning is what it's all about. Boom-de-yada...



Press the green flag to play. Fun to make, once I figured out to do the image changes as costume changes for a sprite. I think I'd like to have Terry Gilliam's old job, if anybody wants to pay me to do it. 

Learning Creative Learning

Creative Learning - Week 1
Former student and learning pal Nick Smith found the Creative Learning course from the MIT media lab. It didn't take too long for me to shout "I'm in!" and join the par-tay.  The leader of the course is Mitch Resnick, one of the leaders of Scratch development.

• Course Page and syllabus (lots of great readings linked there)
• Google + community and twitter feed
• Lifelong Kingergarten Project Home

I never did get around to writing my reflection of the nice Python course I took from Rice on Coursera in the fall. So when I saw Dave Ferguson's reflection on week 1, it  was the prompt I needed to try to be better about keeping record of this course.

Video - First seminar (youtube of a Google Hangout)

Media Lab model for
creative thinking spiral

• overview of online component. Materials by email, idea of the weekly seminar (mostly panel discussions), Google+ for the course and small groups. (25,000 students)
•  Resnick: anecdote about current state of learning - fun stuff is for after school. School is for drill and information delivery. This course should be about rethinking learning.
• Question traditional model, how to prepare people to be adaptive learners.
• Inspiration from kindergarten. [Ironically was talking to a K teacher this weekend about how Michigan's new all day kindergarten is making it much more academic.]
• Goal is to provide information and resources, but also a chance to create and make. We'll be using Scratch for that. (Brief explanation about Scratch.)
• Great story about a scratch user who went from making a card, making and sharing sprites, working as a consultant making sprites for others, to a teacher making a sprite tutorial, to a collaborator on an adventure game.
• Course will have weekly readings, Mon morning (10 am ET) panel conversations, design & learning activities, small group discussions. Overview of the course week by week.
• He also shared the Marshmallow Challenge, which also has a TED talk.

A little long winded. I'd watch Resnick's TEDx talk first and you'll hear a lot more of his ideas in a lot less time. If you have more time, watch the Marshmallow Challenge TED talk.


Article All I Really Need to Know (about Creative Thinking) I Learned (by Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten (pdf), Mitchel Resnick

• Expansion of the Imagine Spiral framework above.
• "The goal is not to nurture the next Mozart or Einstein, but to help everyone become more creative in the ways they deal with everyday problems."
• "As we develop new technologies for children, our hope is that children will continually surprise themselves (and surprise us too) as they explore the space of possibilities."
• This excellent advice from 12 year olds for kids about to start a Crickets workshop. (The MIT media lab project that inspired Lego Mindstorms.)