Tag: communities of practice

70/365 Audience Must be Curated

The advent of the “read/write” web was a boon to the conversation about voice in classrooms around the country. All of a sudden, all a teacher needed to ask a student to do was click “publish,” and whatever that student had created would zoom across the world to a real audience.

This was a striking departure from the time-worn tradition of teacher assigns, student completes, teacher grades, repeat.

Here, we were faced with the possibility that student work would make it to billions of eyeballs and earholes. Their work mattered.

Or, so the common line of thinking goes.

Audience, as it turns out, is more complicated than simply saying something (even if it is said with volume and nuance). Multitudes of trees are falling in forests, and people are there to hear them. Now, the question is do they make a sound when they are trying to get attention over the din of all the other trees falling.

In the schools we need, audience will be curated.

A few years ago, I asked students to select a problem in the world they thought needed solving and identify something (no matter how small) they could do to affect positive change in that problem. This was no groundbreaking assignment. It was akin to the traditional research paper.

One key difference was the realization of the possibility of audience and the need to curate it effectively. Students were choosign topics as varied as child slavery, litter in the city, and substance abuse. Even if they posted to the open class blog, there was no reason to believe they would happen into what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger refer to as communities of practice.

The first step in our discussion of audience curation was the inclusion of metadata in their posts. We examined the idea of tags on their blog posts as they conducted their research and how those tags increased their visibility to outside audiences. Next, we talked about links. Because the students were accumulating many sources from many places, they were sitting on piles of data to back up their claims. Whereas the traditional paper would have them including parenthetical citations and works cited pages, we discussed the power of hyperlinks in helping their audience get to the material they were referencing as well as increasing their visibility in Internet searches.

While these steps helped the students think about how they were crafting their messages for audience, it remained passive. It rested on the hope someone might be looking for what they were saying. The next step was jumping in to the conversation. If they were talking activism, they needed to go where the activists were. I asked them to find online communities that had already formed around their topic and to go and take part in the conversations that were going on in those communities. It was a step toward what Lave & Wenger refer to as “legitimate peripheral participation.”

Aside from communities, students started to find other bloggers in their research who were posting on related topics. Here too, was an opportunity to curate audience. We discussed how they might craft comments on these external bloggers’ posts in ways that would establish their voices as credible and important. If they could do this, we reasoned, they would increase the rate of those bloggers following comments back to the students’ blogs. And, it worked. Every day, students would share with the class that someone they’d been following and commenting on had left a comment on their posts – often with questions. This had the added benefit of legitimizing the participation. They were in it.

Some of this may sound familiar to those who have had their classes send letters to the editor of the local paper commenting on a community issue. It has pieces of that exercise, but it is not that exercise. By giving students the space to have a conversation over time, to curate an online presence, and cull a body of knowledge to establish a novice-level expertise, this takes a long view on establishing deeper knowledge and seeing learning as relational.

Audience curation takes time and space. It means having conversations that ask what you want to say and to whom you want to say it. It also means students being prepared to respond to challenges to their thinking that may not care so much that they are students, but that they are thinkers engaging in real-world knowledge construction. Game must be upped.

The thing that’s beautiful about all this is its contagious nature. If one assignment or project finds a real audience, then students and teachers will want to find ways for the next assignment or project to have one as well.

3/365 Let’s Have Students Perform without Nets

When I lived in Philadelphia, I became enamoured with story slams. Produced by First Person Arts, the monthly slams had three rules for those who signed up to participate:

  1. Keep your story to five minutes.
  2. Tell your story in the first person.
  3. No notes.

Around the same time, I discovered the Moth podcast featuring the Moth Theater’s best stories from their storytelling shows.

A similar rule featured in the Moth podcast – stories were told live and without notes. As someone who’s been performing in improvised theater for about 15 years, this rule never really struck me as exceptional.

As a classroom teacher who worked to help students scaffold their knowledge and prepare for presentations, it gives pause.

Today, I finished reading the article I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As the writers were describing some of the mechanisms deployed by teachers to foster knowledge-creating communities, the issue of notes appeared again.

No Notes Permitted

When students did research on a topic, such as Buddhism, they were not pennitted to use notes from their research when they were writing their entries in the Knowledge Forum database. This was designed to prevent students from copying out what they found in books into the database. Students had to synthesize their own understanding of the topic they were writing about and characterize in their own words what they bad learned. They were encouraged by the scaffolds in the system and by the teachers to develop their own theories and questions, and to pursue them through reading and discussions with other students and adults. The emphasis was on students creating their own understanding and expressing it in the tentative voice of a learner rather than repeating the words of an author.

Mostly, I noticed this section because it seemed strange to me and so I asked myself why.
Notetaking is a skill I’ve heard discussed ad nausseum in faculty meetings and various “So you wanna be a teacher” books. Pulling out key information, organizing it for easy retreival, and stowing it away in a tidy notebook are steps with which I’m intimately familiar as both a student and a teacher.

This suggestion, though, highlighted a key step that has been missing for me in both of those roles – leaving the notes behind. Much like improv or storytelling, presenting new knowledge and forming it into something useful loses its luster if you haven’t owned the ideas in real and personal ways. A student still reliant on the notes she’s taken isn’t yet the owner of this new knowledge. She’s leasing it.

Building an activity where students have to synthesize and apply their knew knowledge without access to or use of notes based on the old knowledge pushes them a little farther out on an intellectual limb. It will be scary, but I’d wager the learning will be deeper.
If you’d like to see my highlighted copy of the article, you can download it here (PDF).

2/365 Some Ideas Worth Building a School Around

A few forevers ago, a post on P2PU’s Researchers’ Homestead flashed across my screen, I pulled down its attached document and saved it in a folder literally called “ETC” full of PDFs I save for someday.

I got around to it yesterday, and I have to say this chapter from Collaborative Learning, Reasoning, & Technology started to move some furniture in my head. The chapter, “Fostering Knowledge-Creating Communities” by Katerine Bielaczyc and Allan Collins threw around some ideas with which I’m familiar with such as “communities of practice.”

Newly interesting (and responsible for the aforementioned mental furniture shuffling) were Bielaczyc and Collins’ seven “characteristics of knowledge-creating communities.” Coming from a school built around core values that were embodied in most all choices – curricular and not – made regarding learning, I’ve been on the lookout for other core values that strike me as meaty enough to feed a school’s mission. These seven might fit the bill:

  1. Sharing Ideas – “Knowledge sharing leads to knowledge creation, because invention involves bringing together different ideas into a coherent new idea.”
  2. Multiple Perspectives – “Rather than separating different ideas, it is critical to solicit different ideas within the community, so that all may be considered in devising new solutions.”
  3. Experimentation
  4. Specialization
  5. Cognitive Conflict and Discussions – “Therefore, it is important that people discuss and argue about ideas without rancor or blame. Arguments must be resolved by logic and evidence, rather than by authority. Ideas are sought from many different sources, particularly ideas that challenge prevailing wisdom.”
  6. Reflection
  7. Synthesis – “When a community is faced with a problem, the solution does not usually come from a single source. Rather it is cobbled together from past ideas and ways of doing things, from different people’s suggestions, from the artifacts and technologies in place, and from ideas and ways of doing things that exist in other communities.”

I’m still working my way through the piece, but can see how these seven could drive structural and curricular decisions within a learning organization. I see how they could help prepare students to be participatory citizens.