Weaving a Dream

In his book Mable McKay: Weaving the Dream (1994) Greg Saris tells an ethnohistorical story about Mabel, a Pomo basket maker while also discovering his own heritage in the process.  At the end of the book Saris asks Mabel why she allowed him into her oral history which so few outside the Pomo knew.  Her response...."because you kept coming back".

In our education circles we are very busy dodging, planning, creating, and dealing seemingly "against" a system that is hell bent on making the corporate and managerial school a model for reform that is palatable to our communities. I see in your tweets, blog posts and videos that education innovators are struggling and letting it be known.  It is a rough and emotional road.

In a recent blog post and Monika Hardy forwarded to me along with some sage advice coupled with my last few days at PFUNC 11 I am reminded that all of our wranglings in education need not loose site of our learning communities, and the humans behind them. We need to come back, consistently to young people.  Do you remember beyond the banter of struggle what the noise of young people learning sounds like, looks like....?  Do you remember the feeling you had; the heartache of happiness,  body and mind full of  hope.....hope.  Do not loose these feelings, even in your radical reform work to help, political struggles and battles in education. But do not rest in your classrooms, learning centers and other space of education either.

Keep coming back to the learner: not the standard, model, curriculum....Weave your dream with learners as a learner, and never forget that they are there, watching, waiting, worried and hopeful.  Listen to young people and they will do more than follow your lead, idea, design....they will lead, ideate, and design.  Your dream will be successful, inspirational and world altering precisely because you kept coming back....to what matters to us all.

A nLearning Ecology Core Design

A Networked Learning Ecology (NLE) Core Design

Image: Wiki|Networked Learning Ecology

This Core  design  exists within a framework of socially driven integrated curriculum, and at a nexus  between place based and international learning.

A Vision:

Building a Networked Civic Culture for an interdependent world.

A Strategy:

An integrative and integrated curriculum enabled through eLearning in a series of new spaces for learning .  The NLE is a powerful answer to the myriad of questions that face the failing infrastructure of the traditional school in the twenty-first century.

Methods: 

A Nexus of Curriculum Integration and Networked Learning (nLearning)



Curriculum Integration


Building on work and scholarship since 1904, NLE will seat its core design in the frameworks of curriculum integration.  Most recently, the clearest voice for this visionary approach to learning is Dr. James Beane (retired Professor of Integrated Studies, National Lewis University). The following sections on curriculum integration weave the work of Beane (1997) and specifically his salient discourse in Curriculum Integration: Designing the Core of Democratic Education  into the overall discussion. This approach to learning will be inherently learner centric.


Integrated Curriculum: Young people involved and engaged in an enormous range of knowledge, from information to values clarification, and including content and skills from several disciplines of knowledge integrated in the context of themes and activities within them.  Organizing centers are are significant problems or issues that connect the curriculum to the larger world. These centers serve as a context for unifying knowledge.  Knowledge in turn is developed as it is instrumentally applied to exploring the organizing centers (Beane,1997).

Integrative learning: Collaboratively planning a curriculum with young people (Beane, 1997).


An integrative integrated core curriculum with problem[/passion] based central themes, and meaningful concepts to drive authentic activities where ideas are explored and acted on (Beane,1997).

Personal Knowledge:
Addressing self concerns and ways of knowing about self (Beane, 1997).

Social Knowledge:
Addressing social and world issues, from peer to global relationships, and ways of critically examining these (Beane, 1997).

Explanatory Knowledge:
Content that names, describes, explains, and interprets, including that involved in the disciplines of knowledge as well as commonsense or popular knowledge, (Beane, 1997)

Technical/Twenty First Century Knowledge:
Ways of investigating, communicating, analyzing, and expressing. Finding,Validating, Leveraging, and Synthesizing Information; Communicating, collaboration and problem solving in a technologically rich environment (Beane, 1997).


 nLearning: From Curriculum Integration to Learning Ecology


The approach to learning embodied in an integrated and integrative curricular core will be intensified through nLearning.  This nexus between highly student based curriculum and  nLearning will provide the learning community with a new learning ecology. This ecology will embody the NLE vision as it allows young people and their communities both local and around the world to connect in authentic, effective and exciting ways.


nLearning systems


Project based and collaboration rich software will enable our learning spaces to have a flexible web 2.0 enabled system to work within the NLE's many project based learning endeavors.  Throughout our first year of operations and then on a continual basis, the whole community at NLE will find and validate new nLearning tools for the proliferation of our learning spaces. This integrative process will allow for young people to use and develop the technologies they see as integral to their learning.


Mobile Learning (mLearning)

NLE learning ecologies will provide the frameworks necessary to utilize mLearning in expansive ways.  Mobile Learning using, iPhones, netbooks, and other portable tools will offer the learning community a chance to take learning in highly dynamic situations to a new level.


Assessment


Networked ePortfolio (nPortfolio) assessment will be a way to weave assessment into the learning ecology as a learning tool.  The design and flexible structures offered through the use of nPortfolios will enhance the learning spaces of NLE by allowing the whole community access to research and learning outcomes while at the same time providing a personal and learner centric environment for growth.  NLE nPortfolio's will provide the community with an in-depth look at student passion, interests, intelligences, growth, and accomplishment.


NLE  Learning Ecology



Foundations for Learning: The Learning Community and Space

Learners working via nLearning in project pods locally and internationally in blended learning settings.

A learning Mesh that inspires and houses the NLE learning community

Organizing Centers Core Curricular Design: IGCC Whole Learning Ecology Programs

The core design of NLE organizing centers will emerge out of learner outcomes in Whole Learning Ecology (WLE) programs.  WLE programs will be both integrative and integrated and serve as methods investigations in learning how to learn.

Twenty First Century Literacies (TCL)


Learning how to find, validate, synthesize, leverage, communicate, collaborate and problem solve.  What is essential about the TCL's is that the investigations will engage learners through a practice of relationship building.  How to approach an interdependent world will be the focus of these sessions.  Learners may be involved in active listening workshops, architectures of empathy workshops, or design and research methods courses. The goal of these investigations will be to ready IGCC participants for the innovative and world changing work they will do in their learning spaces and toward their organizing centers.

Integrated Learning Center (ILC)

ILC programming will emerge out of the special needs or interests of learners. This program is currently being created as a space for intensive individual study, travel, or invention/business creation outside of the organizing centers that will drive most of the learning spaces in the IGCC core.

Organizing Centers Core Curricular Design: NLE Organizing Centers


NLE will offer learners a chance to create their own authentic experiences through fully integrated organizational centers (OC's).  These OC's will blend all of the NLE learning ecology together for projects that have lasting impact on the world. All of the OC's designed will have real world application and deal with the issues of living in an interdependent world. The outcomes of these projects will meet not only the curricular needs of knowledge acquisition but apply all learning to the real world.  The goal of all organizing centers is focused on integration of self into interdependent world systems for a sustainable future.

Related Posts: A Networked Learning Project: The Connected Day

A new blog site.

Well, Tumblr was getting more action than my old Wordpress blog and steelemaley.net needed to become what it was meant to be....a network aggregation space for me.  So here's to Blogger for inspiring me to move my writings and networked learning.  I look forward to it. 

Networked Learning Ecologies Part 1

A Vision: Networked Learning Ecology: A mesh of open, free and participatory media (ICT's+) and situated learning that liberate humans to create networks for social, economic and ecological resilience. Voices: (Please add more in comments)

Leigh Blackall:

• On Illich

• On Networked Learning

Stephen Downes:

• Slideshare: Groups vs Networks: The Class Struggle Continues

• Stephen Downes identifies significant differences between networks and groups, along four major axes. Drawn but not discussed at the Future of Learning in a Networked World event in Aukland, New Zealand. This short video explains the drawing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/252157734

 

Florian Schneider:

• On Ekstitutions

Roberto Greco:

• Writings

More to come....

On Networked Learning

Leigh Blackall presents a new view of learning that is critical, open, networked and participatory through his research.  In a recent twitter stream and blog post he is asks for collective and open deliberation for a definition of networked learning.  As a participant involved in networked learning research and praxis I will offer the following as an entry into the collective imaging and deliberation.

Definitions

Open: Learning is free from institutions or understood to be actively participating in non-institutional learning.

Critical: learning does no harm or actively works for social, economic, and environmental sustainability and resilience.

Participatory: learning is integrative and inclusive of participants regardless of skill level or pre-determined social hierarchy.

Networked: learning happens in a blended mesh. Learners, pedagogues, and others are nodes that exchange information to different degrees, depths and forms both online and in the field.

The best defense of these definitions I have found is presented here by Steven Downes:



Image above: Watts and Strogatz model/small world network graph, credit: Arpad Horvath

Kenai Fjoirds National Park, AK....Pep Talk

Found this picture today of a conservation work crew of amazing young people I Co-Led with my wife in Alaska.  Everyone was quite uncertain about our pending 1500 foot assent in 1 mile with this 20 foot plank (to fix a bridge damaged in spring melt)....Que pep talk.

24/7 with young people in the back country of AK=ubiquitous learning.

Readings: UNESCO

UNESCO-Earth Charter Initiative

Hersch, J (1969) The Birthright of Man

A razor's edge

Listen closely to the "lesson I want to get across" at minute 6:31...."There is no opting out of new media....it changes a society as a whole....media mediates relationships....the whole structure of society can change....we are on a razor's edge between hopeful possibilities and more ominous futures...."

At min 8:14 Wesch describes what we need people to "be" to make our networked mediated culture work, and the barriers we are facing in schools.  Wesch is right on. Corporate curriculum, schedules, bells, borders, and "teaching/classroom management" are easily assisted by technology. Yet to open learning and deschool our educational system represents the hopeful possibilities Wesch imagines and has acted on.  What we accept from industrial schooling, how we proceed in our educational endeavors, and what we do, facilitate, witness, and promote in our actions in education mean so much to learners of today and the interconnected and interdependent systems we are all a part of.

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Young People, Action and Education

I was moved today by a video of young people taking action in support of indigenous rights, cultural rights and self determination:



This example of student driven action goes well beyond adult organized marches, or adult driven activity for social justice. Many of these young people show an enduring understanding of their interdependence and interconnection with a nation and the world. For example, at minute 11:00 in the video a young woman articulates a distinct article of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (More on the declaration and UNPFII here!)


For all of us who see open and free learning as a fundamental human right, it's important to recognize that there is global deliberation and decision making on issues well beyond neoliberalism happening in the UN and in other spaces....How we participate in these movements and with others around the world on these issues will shape the common bond we have as humans in the 21st century. As ecological and economic overshoot continues, understanding how to participate and network for education and global civic culture will increase in importance.

Note:

Since [UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] adoption, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States have all reversed their positions and now endorse the Declaration.

Collective Joy

I was inspired today reading through The Blended Lifestyle a blog linked to the Dark Mountain Project site.  One of the things that drew me to Dark Mountain was the hope that Dougald Hine (a project founder) exudes in his writing (site, blogs, Twitter). I have been digging into Dark Mountain and enjoying what I find. My research into the site took a pleasant and unexpected turn as I linked out, and perused the favorite movies and books at The Blended Lifestyle.  After my last post of yesterday (writing that temporarily pulled me into a short malaise) I am overjoyed to get present and breath deep of my life today. I also look forward to reading Ehrenreich (2006) Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy....

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Farewell EDT 400 Spring 2011

"Democratic Living is not given in nature, like gold or water. It is a social construct, like a skyscraper, school playground, or new idea. Accordingly there can be no democracy without its builders, caretakers, and change agents...."-Walter Parker (2003)

"Imagining how events could be otherwise than they are is a hallmark freedom and power of human beings. Making social imagination work for us involves us in new concepts and principles, in new ways of using our minds to grasp complexities we do not yet comprehend. Thinking this way helps us construct new social realities both locally and globally. Social imagination is not merely for the sake of of academic knowing; it must include our feelings, and it must include our acting."- D. Bob Gowin in Boulding (1998)

May the river you all navigate call for your best....always answer with passion.

Conviviality, Autonomy, Interdependence

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.

The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized. Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not "work" and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.

The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person's range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that "work" for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well−programmed energy slaves.

I believe that society must be reconstructed to enlarge the contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new system of production designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines. In fact, the institutions of industrial society do just the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers......

I choose the term "conviviality" to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man−made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members.....

Again....Astra

I listened again tonight....as Lisa and I imaged our future.

Exhibitions: open a human creation

As citizens have new choices, new chances for learning, their willingness to seek leadership should increase. We may expect that they will experience more deeply both their own independence and their need for guidance. As they are liberated from manipulation by others, they should learn to profit from the discipline others have acquired in a lifetime. Deschooling education should increase — rather than stifle — the search for [people] with practical wisdom who would be willing to sustain the newcomer in his educational adventure. As masters of their art abandon the claim to be superior informants or skill models, their claim to superior wisdom will begin to ring true. -Illich (1970)

To Exhibit Learning

Exhibitions beautifully disrupt institutions and show deep learning. An exhibition, in short, is a public presentation of learning.  Exhibitions are practiced at all levels of education and in all fields.  A learner or group of learners publicly exhibit their understanding of knowledge territories and connect learning to relevant issues of today. This is important and hard work that shows the individual and group that learning does not only happen within the walls of an institution but is a matter for society in general.  Inviting the public to view, question, comment, and participate in a learning community reveals, connects and networks learning communities.  Exhibitions also decolonize the pedagogue.  When educators open their process or teaching to the outside world they ensure an essential conversation to ensue on the import of the work they do. Whether you adhere to Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools vision of exhibitions as assessment or just agree with performance assessment being public I have no doubt that you see the benefit of opening the learning process to communities outside of your institution, school, room.... in dynamic ways.

Enmesh our pedagogy with the world

Dynamism and the ability to imagine, collaborate, and co-design learning environments are hallmarks of effective pedagogues today. These are all skills that are not learned in the semester course on literacy or technology in education. Many of us face institutional constraints in our work in education and seek ways to open our learning communities. We work to collectivize, democratize, co-create and enable personal and group passions for flow in learning. Many of us have been, as a passionate educator once told me I would become prior to my first classroom experience, " a coalition in your own classroom" (sub whatever you want to imagine to replace coalition in your situation). But this is not enough. Learning is an ecology that is interconnected and interdependent. We must share our communities work, we must exhibit, the whole ecology must weigh its social imagination into the mix....We need to show learning, failure and iteration and ask for feedback, connect and network our work on new levels.... we must enmesh our pedagogy with the world.

Open a human creation

Exhibitions open education to the world. In the process of preparing for public participation in learning the individual looks deeply at the connections they are making....the common good in their endeavor....their learning moves from 8-3, 12:30-1:30, Tuesday and Thursday to their heart. When you face the public you face your heart....Yes nerves flash signals and the body quivers upon the thought of being on stage, but your heart tells the story. For the young person in high school the story might be "what does it mean to go to school in the 21st century....what is 'world history' 'literature', 'science', 'my life'.... For the pedagogue the story needs to be " 'what am I undertaking', 'what role do I have in society', 'who may look to me', 'how will I collaborate with the world'....". As one who believes in the commons and in learning as ecology I want to see more than a transcript and degree from any institution from "masters" of pedagogy or any field. I want to see a heart beating, a passion for learning....something different from books and sites....a human creation.

Find a learning ecology

Join me in finding ways to open education. Exhibitions are just one of these ways. We who have decided to be pedagogues as part of our learning ecology will benefit from making the learning communities we work within visible. This networking will help other communities change, become dynamic, and change again to make learning dynamic, resilient, and ubiquitous.

This week is exhibition week in one of the learning communities I work with

I look forward to being a part of this meaningful time.

A learning mash-up.

Greco

We need them....dedicated and passionate teachers and learners who see learning as a design that the learner moves, shapes and feeds forward as positive action in our world....educational communities need them, those with social imagination....experts, yes experts. The more I get to know Rob Greco the more he reminds me of Illich's (1970) "people with special educational competence".

Three types of special educational competence should, in fact, be distinguished: one to create and operate the kinds of educational exchanges or networks outlined here; another to guide students and parents in the use of these networks; and a third to act as primus inter pares in undertaking difficult intellectual exploratory journeys....To design and operate the networks I have been describing would not require many people, but it would require people with the most profound understanding of education and administration, in a perspective quite different from and even opposed to that of schools.

 

Greco lives his educational experiences with the learners in his communities....he sees the messiness in learning, breathes deep of the essence, and trusts in the human capacity for mutual aid....I witnessed the outcome of that journey in an  Elluminate  session on Tuesday.  The middle level learners Rob guides worked as a community to exhibit what was important to them about learning and life.  I was awestruck with joy and hope.

 

Blackall

Leigh continues to amaze me.  After a brief blogging hiatus, he is right back with thought provoking work, feeding forward amazing resources and inspiring.  His recent thoughts on "ubiquity" contribute much to the deschooling and networked learning conversation. Feeding forward Ian Hart's (2001) Deschooling and the Web was welcomed reading this week.

Hine

Howard Rheingold's bookmark quest for P2P learning networks brought me right back to Dougald Hine's School of Everything page.  I delved into his links on Free U,  The Learning Exchange and the Young Foundation

Littky

If your not on the edge, you're taking up to much space

I have read, watched and learned from Dennis for many years....I am more amazed than ever.



See
Big Picture Learning Profile
College Unbound

Much more....P2P Foundation Wiki Blog


 

 

To Create, To Design

A video and education reform's 100 year failure

A timely video inspired by Michael Wesch came across my desk today and it comes at an interesting time in my thinking on education. The Future of Ed Reform? weaves a very short yet potent story about the realities so many of us face who seek to radically change the structure of education from "places of schooling" to "places of learning".



I have written about critical education in many posts and realize that most of my ideation, design and praxis towards democratic education has met with the realities of institutions, schooling an societal structures around education and official knowledge. I would like to say I met these challenges and take the path I do now, knowing I stand on the shoulders of progressives and a hundred years of work from John Dewey, L. Thomas Hopkins et al., and their contemporaries James Beane, Micheal Apple, Deb Meir and so many others who are in the field not writing prolifically but fostering experiences and learning.

The Future of Ed Reform begs questions of reform and stasis in education. "If so many years of reform, (including some almost 100 years old that espouse the same reform we are seeking in education today) have failed why do we think it will work....this time." A good question and one I had with a visionary leader and progressive educator in the field just yesterday: More on this in future posts.

The author of Future of Ed Reform is right to question these new "reforms" and their ability to succeed. The authors points at "the revolution failed" are right. The use of Dewey as an example is illustrative of the issues here. Dewey, Francis Parker, L. Thomas Hopkins et al. faced a backlash from an American society bent on order and standardization. Though their reform was brilliant and on the mark in many ways, school in the 20th century was an institution based on order and control just as it is today. Today as in the 20th century, linear schedules, corporate curricula, and the extra-curricularization of energy and interests still combine to hold firm what has been at the expense of what is. The School structure and its meanings are the issues of today just as they where a century ago.

Dewey did call for a revolution from schooling to learning, and espoused among so many brilliant ideas a call for deschooling on the grounds that control and order do little for learning. Dewey (1938) reflects,

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his [and her] school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was supposed to have amassed during his [and her] years of schooling....but it was so segregated when it was acquired and hence is so disconnected from the rest of experience that it is not available under the actual conditions of life. (p.48)

We must reflect presently on the "reform" engines of today motoring throughschools and quietly accepting the structures imposed in what amounts to seeing learners and their communities as commodities and economies of scale, versus dynamic realities of human possibility. The author of The Future of Ed Reform? is calling out the realities of societal structures and the school not the reform which may have similarity to our 100 year past.

To Create, To Design

It is no mystery to many that I favor the design of new learning Ecologies that leverage much of what Dewey et.al espoused and practiced in the fields of experiential and democratic education. I have also focused my work on the networking of blended learning ecologies. A combination of Illich's learning webs, the mesh ideas of OLPC and my roots in experiential and mobile learning in the big outside. This design like so many is at risk when placed against the onslaught of stasis in education. No Softballs here, we have heard them in detail. Yet I find myself asking are we ready for a networked learning ecology? Is society? What will it take?

So anthropologists, critical educators, deschoolers, unschoolers, reformers, what will make your vision work? Are you part of a revolution? If so why, and will that revolution be enough force to break the dam of traditional control and order schooling to create or recreate places of learning for society? I am interested in hearing your voice and working with you.

Yong Zhao on Educational Risk and the Reason to Deschool

From: Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » A Nation At Risk: Edited by Yong Zhao. (n.d.). Yong Zhao. Retrieved March 11, 2011, from http://zhaolearning.com/2011/03/10/a-nation-at-risk-edited-by-yong-zhao/

Indicators of the Risk

The educational dimensions of the risk before us have been amply documented in materials read by this editor. For example:

• For
  the first time, research shows American creativity is declining. Since
  1990, Americans’ creativity scores have been on the decline
  significantly and most seriously among young children (from kindergarten
  through sixth grade).
• As
  a result of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a significant number of
  schools in America have narrowed their curriculum by cutting arts,
  music, physical education, social studies, science, recess, or lunch.
  “Forty-four percent of all districts nationwide have added time for
  English language arts and/or math, at the expense of social studies,
  science, art and music, physical education, recess, or lunch.”
• Meanwhile, our competitors such as China and Singapore
  have been decreasing their instructional time for math and increasing
  time for creativity, critical thinking, arts, physical education. For
  example, since 1999 China has decreased total instructional hours by 380
  for grades 1 through 6, reduced math instruction by 140 hours and added
  156 instructional hours for physical education.
• Unethical
  and dishonest behaviors have become rampant in American education.
  Teachers, school administrators, and students have been forced to engage
  in all sorts of cheating to raise test scores and state governments
  lower standards to avoid penalties.
• America
  spends $1.1 billion dollars per year testing their children under NCLB
  while many schools have to cut short instructional hours and or lay off
  teachers due to budget cuts.
• In
  2004–2005, Wisconsin students spent a total of about 1.4 million hours
  taking state tests; with full implementation of NCLB testing, that
  number will more than double, to 2.9 million. These figures do not
  include the time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking
  practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of
  testing.
• American teachers’ morale has reached a crisis level. Over a quarter of teachers leave the profession within the first three years and nearly half leave within the first five.
• Teacher unions, the last organized line of defense for public education, are being threatened across the nation.
• Yet,
  the governments continue to impose policies that connect teacher
  evaluation with student test scores although research has clearly shown
  that such policies do not improve student learning, even measured by
  test scores.
• American education has become a nationalized standardized
  education system. Locally democratically elected school boards have been
  rendered bureaucratic assistants of the state and federal government to
  enforce implementation of state and federal mandates rather than
  guarding the education of their children.
• Less
  than 20% of American students are enrolled in a foreign language course
  while all Chinese students are required to study a foreign language
  beginning from third grade at the latest.
• Only 11 percent of twelfth graders nationwide demonstrated proficiency in U.S. history.
• More
  than 80 percent of New York City eighth graders did not meet the state
  standards in social studies in 2004.  Moreover, the number of students
  meeting the social studies standards has decreased by almost 20
  percentage points since 2002.
• 25
  percent of college-bound high school students could not name the ocean
  between California and Asia. 80 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to
  24) did not know that India is the world’s largest democracy; 37 percent
  could not locate China on a map of Asia and the Middle East.
• The
  average number of languages spoken by American business executives is
  1.5, compared with an average of 3.9 languages spoken by business
  executives in the Netherlands.
• Business
  and military leaders complain about the lack of international and cross
  cultural skills of American graduates. “A 2002 survey of large U.S.
  corporations found that nearly 30 percent of the companies believed they
  had failed to exploit fully their international business opportunities
  due to insufficient personnel with international skills. The
  consequences of insufficient culturally competent workers, as identified
  by the firms, included: missed marketing or business opportunities;
  failure to recognize important shifts in host country policies toward
  foreign-owned corporations; failure to anticipate the needs of
  international customers; and failure to take full advantage of expertise
  available or technological advances occurring abroad. Almost 80 percent
  of the business leaders surveyed expected their overall business to
  increase notably if they had more internationally competent employees on
  staff.”

Time to Deschool

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A Networked Learning Project: The Connected Day

A day in the learning ecology of Piper Hahn

Piper is a 15 year old who lives in Midcoast Maine, US. A year ago, Piper heard about a new way to learn, and decided to take part in a new learning experience called the Maine Networked Learning Project. Known as "the Mesh" to participants, this learning ecology offered Piper the chance to apply her passion for learning in highly experiential and collaborative ways with groups of young people of varied ages, adult and youth mentors with knowledge territory specialties and organizations focused on ensuring sustainable and resilient societies, economies, and the environment. This is a snapshot of her day.

A day in the learning ecology of Piper Hahn

Piper gets ready for her week by sitting outside sipping tea and looking at her smart phone. She is checking project updates sent from the team she has been working with for the last two months on her Google Reader and Twitter feed. The project Piper is checking in on deals with food justice in the rural communities of her bioregion.

Seeing many updates, and much activity she decides to look at the overall "mesh" schedule for the day. She notices that the MNLP van will be moving across the local region starting in an hour. To get a ride on this local transportation system she has to ride her bike to a station stop or have her parents drop her off at the regional mesh meet-up location. But before deciding this she reviews her weekly schedule on her mobile.

Piper notices that she and three others will be presenting at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars organization to a large group on the history of local food cultivation in the region. She and her Food Justice project group have spent a good deal of time completing ethnographic studies of the areas "locals". These participant interviews are seminal to their presentation as they show that local sustainability and resilience projects are not "outside" or "rich Peoples" pursuits, but can save local economies and the historical heritage this stakeholder group cherishes. The group has also been working in restoration crews on local farms as a service learning tie in to their studies. The project has been extensive. Piper and her group have covered mathematics, experimental sciences, writing, social sciences and much more in an integrated project framework. They have relied on their mesh mentors, local experts, and the internet for research, recording (writing, video) and exhibiting their knowledge and understanding to multiple community stakeholder groups.

As the project presentation pre-work is done, Piper contacts her group via twitter hashtag to remind all that they will need an hour to meet-up before the presentation and to ride their bikes to the VAW hall from the meet-up. Immediately she gets a response from three of the four other group members that they will meet prior to the VAW event. They remind each other that a collaborative learning session will be going on for applied algebra and trigonometry concepts at Noon. This session will be special, as an innovative regional planner from rural Scotland will be mentoring at the Self Organizing Learning Environment today along with their local quantitative reasoning/systems thinking mentors. She video chats with one participant letting her know that she will be at the SOLE, and is hoping to get a ride to her house after today's VAW presentation. That done, Piper checks with her parents and decides to ride her bike to a mesh station stop. She then rides the mesh van into town and catches up on posts and replies in her Reader on the way.

At the Meet-up location (a wide open space that reminds Piper of a open market of some kind), she settles in with the other young people in study, discussion and deliberation. Today she takes out her tablet and reads a work in global literature that was suggested by a mentor she has in South Asia. She will take notes on the work over the next hour and send those notes via blog post to the mentor. The mentor, other participants and Piper are involved in a global project combining cultural understandings of place into a wiki resource for future learners to use. She sees connections everywhere in her learning and after being inspired by an experience in India she's just read about, Piper adds content for today's VFW presentation to the shared presentation document for group review.

Piper takes a run with others from the meet-up, and then decides to review the quantitative reasoning skills that figure into the edible re-vegetation project from Scotland being discussed at the SOLE today. Piper will get another chance to apply her growing knowledge and understanding with today's SOLE because the re-vegetation work they are doing locally is based on the Scottish project being discussed.

After the SOLE, and successful VAW presentation the group meets at a Mesh group members house. The group has grown from five to seven now as the crew who filmed the presentation and ethnographies over the last monthes are with them to discuss editing and working on the script for the groups public exhibition of findings. Piper and her group know that the scientists, mentors, politicians, local, global participants, and their peers will attend the exhibition. This step in their project leads to funding and further action on their multi-year food security project. After Dinner with the host family, rides home for most, and ePortfolio updates the rest of the week will be full of networked, experiential, and mobile learning directly applied to creating solutions in an interdependent world.

Plasticity, Global Movements and Bioregion Change

Ideate on

Placticity:

From Sapolsky (2006)

"Thus the savanna baboon became, literally, a textbook example of life in an aggressive, highly stratified, male-dominated society. Yet within a few years, members of the species demonstrated enough behavioral plasticity to transform a society of theirs into a baboon utopia. The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demon- strated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function eaectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, “No, it is beyond our nature,” knows too little about primates, including ourselves."

The Economics of Happiness (2011)

A new documentary we will be showing in the Midcoast Ecoregion this spring!

 

 

Deep Ecology, Deep Culture: Vital Movements

The International Society for Ecology and Culture

Schooling the World: The White Man's Last Burden trailer from lost people films on Vimeo.

 

 

Roles Interupted

After reading an illuminating post today from Joss Winn that articulated his et al ideas for an institutional shift, I was struck by how similar the vision is in many ways to my work with the Institute for Global Civic Culture. Winn, explains in the paper entitled Pedagogy, Technology and Student as Producer that work towards critical networked learning environments can be powerful catalysts for change,

“Student as Producer is not simply a project to transform and improve the ‘student experience’ but aspires to a paradigm shift in how knowledge is produced, where the traditional student and teacher roles are ‘interrupted’ through close collaboration and a recognition that both teachers and students have much to learn from each other.”

I look forward to following Winn's work and perhaps collaborating in the future on projects for teenagers. The learning environments Winn describes could be vital steps to address the failure of educational systems and institutions today.

Also very interested in finding more out with regards to Winn's et al work on resilient education.