Is Self-Paced Participatory Learning Possible?

by Suraj Uttamchandani and Daniel Hickey

In this post, we discuss current efforts to offer the flexibility of self-paced learning with the interactive social engagement of participatory learning. We describe two new features in the Big Open Online Course (BOOC) on Educational Assessment that allow current learners to interact with prior learners and let learners proceed at their own pace.

Fostering a Self-Sustaining Professional Learning Community in Online Professional Development

by Rebecca C. Itow

Since 2011, I have been studying ways to help teachers adopt and adapt new practices that value learners’ experience and expertise as they explore new concepts. Often, this necessitates that teachers find ways to reconcile their experience and existing beliefs about knowledge & learning with the underlying assumptions of the new practices so that they can be worked into curricular designs. In Spring 2013, an opportunity arose to redesign the English Language Arts (ELA) courses of a university-run online high school. While the high school was ranked the #2 online high school in the United States, they wanted to update their pedagogy both to attend to the push to foster connected learning in participatory spaces and address accreditors’ concerns about their use of a correspondence model. Dan Hickey suggested I take on this task, enabling me to aid the school in redesigning their courses and to realize the potential of the research I had been doing for the last two years.

Google Funds an Assessment Practices, Policies and Principles BOOC

by Dan Hickey

This post describe the Big Open Online Course on assessment that was recently funded by Google.

The Role of Artifact Reflections in Participatory Assessment

By Rebecca Itow and Dan Hickey

On June 7, 2012, we hosted Bloomington’s first Hackjam in conjunction with the Monroe County Public Library. In our initial recount of the day’s events, we mentioned that we used artifact reflection and digital badges as ways of gauging, evaluating, and rewarding progress in each activity. In this post, we will explain how and why we chose to use reflection and badges as forms of assessment. To read more about the theory of badges as Transformative Assessment, read our June 10 blog post. 

Assess Reflections Rather than Artifacts

We have been struggling for several years to refine practices for assessing artifacts that students create.  It seems pretty clear that badges are going to highlight a problem that teachers and proponents of portfolio assessment deal with all the time: rubrics.  If you attach consequences to the quality of student artifacts, there is a natural tendency to demand detailed rubrics and individualized feedback as to whether the artifact matches what is demanded by the rubric.  Most learning environments are more concerned with the learning embodied by the artifact than by the artifact itself.  So focusing so much on the artifact and the rubric can be quite problematic. 

Summer 2012 Hackjam: The Wiki

Rebecca Itow and Dan Hickey

In the Fall 2011, we decided to put on a Hackjam in conjunction with the Monroe County Public Library. We adapted the curriculum outlined in the Hacktivity Kit to fit our needs, and partnered with ForAllSystems to implement a badging system for the event. You can read an earlier post giving an overall account of the event here.  We were particularly interested in aligning the hackjam with a Common Core English standard on multimodal writing.  We also wanted to make sure that all of the hackers learned how to discuss coding and writing for the web in networked spaces.  This was where they would want to go for help in the future.

Why Use a Wiki?

In adapting and designing the curriculum, it became readily apparent that, if we were going to have the participants hacking pages and reflecting on their learning, they would need a central place to do this. We began thinking that the best space would be a wiki because it is meant to be edited by multiple users, but each page can be customized to individual participants’ personality and needs. Rebecca had used Wikispaces with her 9^th and 11^th grade English students successfully in the past. Her experience in her own classroom combined with her participation in Dan’s online classes where they used “wikifolios” to house work and promote discussion convinced us that wikis were the right space for the type of engagement we wanted to foster.

Rebecca made a simple wiki on wikispaces, using the homepage as the place to access general information such as links to tools and websites that would be used throughout the Hackjam.

Flipping Classrooms or Transforming Education?

Dan Hickey and John Walsh

Surely you have heard about it by now.  Find (or make) the perfect online video lecture for teaching particular concepts and have students watch it before class.  Then use the class for more interactive discussion.  In advance of presenting at Ben Motz’ Pedagogy Seminar at Indiana University on March 22, we are going to raise some questions about this practice.  We will then describe a comprehensive alternative that leads to a rather different way of using online videos, while still accommodating prevailing expectations for coverage, class structure, and accountability.

Compared to What?

A March 21 webinar by Jonathan Bergman that was hosted by e-School News (and sponsored by Camtasia web-capture software) described flipped classrooms as a place where “educators are actively transferring the responsibility and ownership of learning from the teacher to the students.”  That sounds pretty appealing when Bergman compares it to “teachers as dispensers of facts” and students as “receptacles of information.”