The Webheads are celebrating 10.
A decade, not a year
Mature we connect online and in person
Every day is celebrated
Every important day is remembered
We follow one, and tons
We care and share
A decade, more mature, more robust
Flowing where the Web and its nodes take us
Let us celebrate 10 Webheady Years!
More of the party at http://webheads10years.wikispaces.com
Archive for the 'architecture of participation' Category
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Time, overwhelmed, overloaded, chaotic are some of the frequently used words in the Connectivism online session that has just started with Stephen Downes and George Siemens.
Due to hurricane Ike and the need to evacuate from Key West, I was disconnected at first and enjoyed some quality time with my family. Then, I started connecting, reading things here and there. Now, I’m in full swing, interacting with some in the MOODLE forums, Facebook group and reading some interesting blog posts. Still a lot is needed for my synapses to make sense. So, here’s my take. I won’t complain about being overwhelmed, overloaded, time-constrained, I will take another direction. I’ll set two goals that I want to achieve during these weeks of Connectivism even with limited hours on my day.
My two main goals will be:
Get out of the comfort zone of my circles of friends and network, and connect to other participants’ ideas, reflections. I tend to stick to the Webheads, my dear ones, and I still can do it, but I’ll try to fit in other circles of like-minded educators.
Learn about learning and find ways to effectively apply what I apprehend from the Connectionist principles into my e-moderating practices. If possible, trying to adapt some of it to the Web Tools 4 Educators session which is just beginning.
With almost 2,000 participants in this open course, only by having an individual focus with attainable goals, will we have real chances of thriving and making the best out of this networked experience.
PS: I love to observe how the connections are being made and the roles people take in such an open-ended approach of a course. Interesting to say the least.
Due to hurricane Ike and the need to evacuate from Key West, I was disconnected at first and enjoyed some quality time with my family. Then, I started connecting, reading things here and there. Now, I’m in full swing, interacting with some in the MOODLE forums, Facebook group and reading some interesting blog posts. Still a lot is needed for my synapses to make sense. So, here’s my take. I won’t complain about being overwhelmed, overloaded, time-constrained, I will take another direction. I’ll set two goals that I want to achieve during these weeks of Connectivism even with limited hours on my day.My two main goals will be:
With almost 2,000 participants in this open course, only by having an individual focus with attainable goals, will we have real chances of thriving and making the best out of this networked experience.
PS: I love to observe how the connections are being made and the roles people take in such an open-ended approach of a course. Interesting to say the least.
I’ve been giving some thought on creativity these days. I read a simple and enlightening article on Scientific American mind on the topic, How to Unleash your Creativity. Three professionals of different backgrounds discuss the creative process. Julia Cameron mentions that she has found
As an educator, I can understand that we have a syllabus to follow, subjects to cover, time constraints, but my question has always been:
Just thinking out loud, but here are some ideas:
Of course, at the end of the game, I asked the kids to clean up the room, but though creativity can be messy, there`s also organization involved.
What other ideas could we add to nurture the creative minds around us?
_______________________________________________
Watch this video on Creativity by Ken Robinson:
the creative process to be teachable and trackable.The professionals talk about the techniques that can be used to awaken this creativity in each one of us. YES! Everybody is creative, but there needs to be an effort to unleash our creative potential. Creativity doesn’t come naturally to all. There are ways to enhance it. Robert Epstein mentions the four competencies to develop our creative minds:
There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.John Houtz argues that failure is also an important part of the process:
… The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
This brings me to what happened the day before yesterday at my house. I turned off the TV when the kids were having some snacks. Afterward, they just kept the big screen off and started playing around, inventing a game, creating characters for themselves, imagining some of my decorative beads were, in fact, diamonds. They also made up a character for me. I was supposed to be the bad girl (does it mean something here?!), and they were the good guys trying to defeat evil! I asked them how the game would go and also questioned some strategies. They saw that some of the plans they had would not work, so they sorted things out. We had fun. However, what called my attention was the way the creative process happens, in the middle of total mess. You can see the room in the picture here. They had to scatter their costumes all over to find the perfect outfit, they had to negotiate the moves and strategy. The creative process was not linear. There were lots of decisions and steps happening at the same time. As a mother, my tendency would be to say, “oh, my! What a mess! Clean it up now!”. However, I felt this was a wonderful moment to boost my kids’ creative thinking and see how things would unfold.The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: “Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it.
As an educator, I can understand that we have a syllabus to follow, subjects to cover, time constraints, but my question has always been:
How can we create an anti-boredom atmosphere in the classroom that leads to engagement, motivation, willingness to be in class and not doing something else?
I guess there’s no easy answer, but nowadays, with the Internet and with this exciting NetGen little ones, there’s so much that can be done to grab their little attention span and have them there with you.Just thinking out loud, but here are some ideas:
- Though we have a lesson plan, be it written or in our minds, with a clear sequence of steps, tasks, etc, let us give every class we teach “Creative Booster” moments that we let our kids` imagination fly and we just embark on it with them.
- The surprise element: let us rethink our teaching practices. How often do we change the way we present new content? Start in a totally unusual, unexpected way. You might be surprised with the result.
- Let the students be producers and not mere spectators, recipients of knowledge.
- Enchant by telling stories and listen to the kids` stories.
- How about a treasure box of ideas for fun classes with made by your students?
- Ask open-ended questions and not obvious ones.
- Explore the topic of a dream classroom and listen to your students` ideas. You might get some wonderful tips for the creative classroom.
- Find partner classes for projects. Projects are always an effective way to boost creative outcomes.
- State a problem you have or a friend`s problem (real or totally invented) and ask students to collaborate and find solutions for it.
- Use art, visuals, words, music, body, action, mind, technology to enhance the creative classroom.
- Have your own down time in which you focus on pleasurable things in your life to give yourself some creative input. Read magazines, books, watch movies, take photos, a long shower. You`ll surely find inspiration in the little pleasures of life.
Of course, at the end of the game, I asked the kids to clean up the room, but though creativity can be messy, there`s also organization involved.
What other ideas could we add to nurture the creative minds around us?
_______________________________________________
Watch this video on Creativity by Ken Robinson:
I just prepared this slideshow and would love some feedback. Did I miss something something essential to add to it? I’d love some feedback as to make it a nice one that can be shared with learners and educators, as well. There are some wonderful resources on social bookmarking. However, most of the time they are related to one service or the other. I wanted to give a broader view of the concept and why it can be so powerful in knowledge construction.
Inês brought up an interesting issue on my last post, the fact that my ideas for icebreakers might not apply for a kids’ classroom because of online accounts restraints. True that I had adult students in mind, but she got me thinking. Inês is a Portuguese educator and was mainly concerned about signing up for accounts for kids under 13.
Some solutions that might apply: instead of having kids create signing up in sites, the teacher could have one class account and invite students to be editors (generally kids have their parents’ or personal emails that could be used for the invitation), whenever this is possible. Also, in the case of Flickr, for example, the photo activity could still work if the teacher had an account, for the students could send their photos to the Flickr email connected to that specific account. Besides, I would adapt it and ask students to do the following:
One thing that is interesting for the little ones is the fact that once they have their online production, it could be a bridge between home and school. In my school, whenever I have a project, I send an email to parents to tell them about their kids’ projects.
Just make sure you have parents’ authorization and that they understand your approach to online use.
Transparency leads to understanding and appreciation of our collective work.
Some solutions that might apply: instead of having kids create signing up in sites, the teacher could have one class account and invite students to be editors (generally kids have their parents’ or personal emails that could be used for the invitation), whenever this is possible. Also, in the case of Flickr, for example, the photo activity could still work if the teacher had an account, for the students could send their photos to the Flickr email connected to that specific account. Besides, I would adapt it and ask students to do the following:
- Draw their avatar and upload them to Flickr by taking a photo of each avatar, or just scanning the drawings.
- Take a photo of something in their class that called their attention on the first day of class.
- Students could create a comic strip with Go Animate (I checked the terms of use and didn’t find age restriction), or a film with fictional characters at Dvolver
- They could create an online scrapbook page with scrapblog or glogster. Yes, I know. You need to register, but maybe you could work on teams and the teacher could set up 3 or 4 accounts in advance for the class. I have some email options to create different accounts for my groups. The teacher could have different topics for the students and they could change one of them to create a scrapbook page.
- Students could send e-cards to their parents and friends. Only rule I have: I should check the card before they hit the submit button to make sure the language used is appropriate. Or you could ask them to send an e-card to you telling you about what they wish the schools were like. I’m sure you’d get many insights from the little ones.
- You could have groups make up stories and create images for an online book at Mixbook.
- With Picwing, photo tool that I mentioned before, the teacher only needs to create an album for the class, and the students could send drawings and photos to the email provided by picwing for each album you create. Here’s one example of mine I created for my hometown, Brasilia. Anybody can send a picture of Brasilia to my album using the email address brasilia@picwing.com . So, you could have something like classxxx@picwing.com as well.
- Students could record their introductions in Audacity and the teacher could upload students’ introductions to a podcast site like Podomatic or Odeo.
One thing that is interesting for the little ones is the fact that once they have their online production, it could be a bridge between home and school. In my school, whenever I have a project, I send an email to parents to tell them about their kids’ projects.
Just make sure you have parents’ authorization and that they understand your approach to online use.
Transparency leads to understanding and appreciation of our collective work.
When you are open to explore what out there, ideas, resources seem to converge. Coincidence, convergence, whatever…The fact is that for the past days I’ve been giving a lot of thought on how to best engage, hook students up front from the beginning of their e-learning journey. I’m devising an online course for Brazilian educators and the point is that if they don’t get excited with the possibilities ahead of them, how could they inspire their own learners? So, I’ve been reading, thinking and exploring a lot and just yesterday I read two interesting blog posts on how to use starters, grabbers, icebreakers in the beginning of a course. It doesn’t mean it needs to be online. How could we use attention grabbers to hook our learners, to have them motivated to take the risk, to collaborate, to inspire them to go beyond?
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.
Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:
Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.
Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:
Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:
I just tested Picwing to make a photo album.
Interesting tool for collaboration. Once you start the album, others can join you and send photos to it via email. For example, I created this album with Brasilia photos. If others have photos of Brasilia to share, they can just attach their photos in an email post and send them to brasilia at picwing.com . The photos will be posted to the album.
Possibilities: imagine a collaborative effort in a class on a specific theme? You can start the album and have students add photos to it. If they have a mobile with email, they can send it straight from their mobiles. How fun would it be to have something like that with photos of the “First Day of class”?
Interesting tool for collaboration. Once you start the album, others can join you and send photos to it via email. For example, I created this album with Brasilia photos. If others have photos of Brasilia to share, they can just attach their photos in an email post and send them to brasilia at picwing.com . The photos will be posted to the album.
Possibilities: imagine a collaborative effort in a class on a specific theme? You can start the album and have students add photos to it. If they have a mobile with email, they can send it straight from their mobiles. How fun would it be to have something like that with photos of the “First Day of class”?
At this moment I’m admiring photos posted by Vance and aggregated in technorati for the WorldCall08 Conference in Japan.
Vance among the bright WebheadWomen is a sample of our spirit and the cultural diversity and connections only possible by such an inspiring Community For Practice and People.
Have fun, guys!
If you wonder who’s in the photo, here it goes:
Jen Verschoor (Argentina), Nina (Ukraine), Susan Marandi (Iran), Nelba (Argentina), Bobby (UAE), Vance (UAE), Evelyn (Venezuela), Nenny (Indonesia), Erika (Brazil) and Hala (Sudan).
The team has been keeping us updated at http://webheadatwc3.posterous.com/
Vacation, trips. Maps are part of our reference, our guide.
Just found out about UMapper and couldn’t resist testing it. I had fun playing with it, getting different perspectives from the city I love. It’s easy to use and has great potential for the classroom, as students can collaborate to create a roadmap for others to learn more about their countries, hometown, or neighborhood.
Here’s my first example, but I plan to explore more and add photos and more information about the city of my heart, Brasilia!
Just found out about UMapper and couldn’t resist testing it. I had fun playing with it, getting different perspectives from the city I love. It’s easy to use and has great potential for the classroom, as students can collaborate to create a roadmap for others to learn more about their countries, hometown, or neighborhood.
Here’s my first example, but I plan to explore more and add photos and more information about the city of my heart, Brasilia!
