10 Way to Shift the Paradigm!

Pedagogy ‘n Assessment

• How you teach shapes what you teach
• What you count is what you value

 

4. Make! From Critical 2 Creative Contribution

Pedagogy – Child + Lead (leading the child)
–> The child leading!

Theorists

• Jean Piaget
• Lev Vygotsky
• John Dewey – from Idea > Practice >> Learning!
• Eric S. Raymond – Cathedral (top down) & Bazaar (bottom up)

Critical Thinking is not the end point, but the beginning

Examples

• Digital Aids Quilt (48,000 panels of 64 panels) – Anne Balsamo
• CI-BER (Cyber Infrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records) – Richard Marciano

5. Encourage Students 2 Lead

• Handbook – her graduate students didn’t want to write papers just read by her… so they produced a handbook for turning a conventional classroom into a student led classroom.

• Surprise Endings

6. Make Diversity our Operating System

• John Hope Franklin

My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told accurately.

7. Make Sure What We Value is What We Count

No Child Left Behind

USA 2002 – (K-12) – Sen Edward Kennedy & Pres George W. Bush

• unfortunately the method has taken over
• If your class fails the required standardized test, your school can be closed down or privatized (corporatized)
• Teachers can lose pay
• >> Teaching to the Test
• tests cover 20% of content
• Summative testing 🙁
• >> Formative testing is better! (measure tennis by playing it, not by multiple choice exam on tennis)

8. Demonstrate

Demonstrate Mastery of Content through Performance, not standardized testing

• Badges – social justice – diverse skills for different people in different lives. Credit for the diversity of learning experiences in our many unique lives. Things learned that may translate into future careers.
• How will I cover all the content? > Content is a fiction!

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p>You can never teach all the content someone needs for the rest of their lives. It always changes. But you can teach the tools. The self-confidence that they do have skills and they can thrive. That’s the future of learning!

Interview: Akili Lee & Sheryl Grant

Akiki Lee – 8th year of Digital Literacy Program

• kids don’t have to have the same path to related skillsets & abilities
• translate what they’re learning & apply in different contexts
• making use of tools & technologies in the right context – kids interacting with mentors F2F & then 24/7 online

Sheryl Grant – Badging

• Badges are connectors
• a badge is an image file with stuff in it – grades do not have the stuff in them!
• a grade is a credential > a badge is a credential – a token of trust > typically peeps display a line of text on a resume, badges are an image file that links to all the stuff > ratchets up the trust – more agile learning – happens all your life… it should count!

Badge links to:

• Materials
• You
• Materials you produced

Badges as bridges to new experiences. You can look at how someone acquired their skills and abilities.

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Connie Yowell

Director of Education at the MacArthur Foundation
speaking at the 2014 Open Badges Summit to Reconnect Learning
Summit to Reconnect Learning, Silicon Valley, 12-13 Feb 2014

• Why Badges?
• The What of Badges

Challenges:

• Ever-widening economic gap – next generation will live there
• Incredible number of really complicated problems to solve (Climate, Immigration, Water) – collaborative, enormous new set of skills required
• We’ve never prepared our youth at scale to respond to these challenges & their complexity

The most robust, engaging learning, has to be relevant to the learner. What do they care about:

• Peer Culture, social world – not same age, but shared interest > not just consume info, but making & producing. Connecting with open networks. Sharing what you’ve made.
• Interests, thing they want to get better at
• connecting both to the real world

–> Connected Learning > Robust, Engaged learning. Content is embedded in the learning. > Learning becomes a lifestyle.

Badges

• 21st century vision of learning
• not badges for badge sake, but transforming learning
• They make learning visible – it always “happened anywhere anytime” but now it’s visible
• We live in a world of constant change – we need something Flexible, Adaptive & Granular – show people are learning 21st c workforce skills
• Open Standard
• Badges connect to Identity. We carry friends with us, but not Institutions / learning. Our learning (data) should go with us, not the Institution.
• Badges create Learning Pathways

Badges Create Learning Pathways

• Interest Driven Pathways (hanging out, geeking out & messing around pathways – HOMAGO pathways)
• Sports Pathways: (player doesn’t really need to know what the pathway is) Opportunities start to get unlocked as you get better! Opportunities & access to resources.

Industrial age is about Silos, we are about pathways!