Karen Fasimpaur

TTT#355 What education stories need to be told? with Karen Fasimpaur, Jim Nordlinger, and Marina Lombardo (Youth Voices) 7.3.13

On this episode of TTT, @kfasimpaur @JimNordlinger @paulallison @monk51295 and Marina Lombardo consider what video or videos might come from the Youth Voics Summer Program.

This is a planning-in-public episode on Teachers Teaching Teachers, which we held less than a week before we launched into the three-week Youth Voices program this July, which was the New York City Writing Project's participation in the Summer of Making and Connecting and part of the National Writing Project's Educator Innovator.

The week before this episode of TTT, with my colleagues in the New York City Writing Project, Grace Raffaele, Jim Nordlinger, Noah Gordon, and Aliyah Hayes, we had been individually meeting 13 high school students were joined by five teachers for a three-week summer program focused on http://youthvoices.net/grid and http://youthvoices.net/play

What an exciting group of youths we were lucky enough to gather for this program! And thank you to all of our supporters who contributed to make this possible!

On this episode of TTT, Jim Nordlinger our video production lead and Karen Fasimpaur (who joined us in the third week) and I continue an ongoning conversations we've been having about the story we want to tell with a video that Jim has been shooting about the deep learning students and teachers do together on Youth Voices. Even as I type these notes for the podcast (from my one-week vacation in mid-August) Jim is working to finish editing the many, many hours of video that he captured during our work together in July. Reviewing this episode of TTT and seeing your comments should at least inspire Jim, and might also suggest an angle that he had forgotten.

From the intake interviews in the last week of June (and even before in a teacher's classroom) to the final exhibition on July 25th Jim has been pointing his camera at our interactions. On this episode of TTT we be talk about what story we want to tell with this video project.

Please take the time to listen to this podcast, then we would love for you to add any insights you might have about what audience we should be aiming to connect with (the average civilian?) and what message we want to convey about the way teachers and students can work together in an online learning space built on National Writing Project values and beliefs.

Enjoy this episode of TTT, as we make transparent our planning process. We would love to have you challenge us and support us, to make us re-think and to be inspired as well.


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TTT#349 Crowdfunding to Rethink Ed- IncitED's Campaigns: Open Road, Imagining Learning, Youth Voices - Plus: Spokes 5.15.13

On this episode of TTT we invite you to go to IncitED to learn more about these projects and support them if you can:

Whether or not you plan to or can not make a contribution to one of these campaigns, please join us for a conversation about crowdfunding on this episode of TTT.

We are joined by the following on this episode of TTT:

Jaime R. Wood Jaime R. Wood's profile photo and Peter Lindberg Peter Lindberg's profile photo from IncitED

IncitED is the crowdfunding community for education where ed supporters can fund, share, and replicate important education initiatives worldwide. http://incited.org

David Loitz David Loitz's profile photo and Charles Kouns Charles Kouns's profile photo from Imagining Learning

Imagining Learning is working to create a national collective voice on the wisdom of young people on how they would reinvent education. http://bit.ly/15IE8P6
http://www.facebook.com/imagininglearning
http://www.twitter.com/imaginingl
http://www.imagininglearning.us
Charlie's Ted Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDQd04BfkpI
What is a Listening session? video http://youtu.be/GhTZ58I495w

Alan Burnce Alan Burnce's profile photo from Open Road

Providing individualized, non-coercive education that empowers teens to direct their own learning and fulfill their potential.
openroadteens.org http://www.incited.org/projects/9

Turner Bohlen Turner Bohlen's profile photo and Claire O'Connell from Spokes talk about their plan to ride bikes across America to work for passion-based education for high school students and to find a mentor for every high school student in America!

We're people who love what we do. And we all love teaching!
http://www.spokesamerica.org

Karen Fasimpaur Karen Fasimpaur's profile photo and Paul Oh Paul Oh's profile photo to help us talk about a Youth Voices Summer Program that will be part of The National Writing Project’s Educator Innovator Initiative http://blog.nwp.org/educatorinnovator/ this summer.

Youth Voices is a site where students share, distribute & discuss their digital work online.
http://youthvoices.net
More info at http://www.youthvoices.net/summer2013


Links to IncitED crowdfunding campaign planning documents
1. Overview document covering pre-planning to post-campaign follow up
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8lWBi6aQDI-cTh2N0d1UDA0RHc/edit?usp=sharing
2. Document with tips for making an effective campaign video
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8lWBi6aQDI-bHhBdlRBWEpYQ1U/edit?usp=sharing
3. Document with tips for creating effective campaign perks
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8lWBi6aQDI-RDA2bUpkME5BclE/edit?usp=sharing
4. Document with tips for writing a basic campaign story
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8lWBi6aQDI-UC1FQUtRVlFmWUk/edit?usp=sharing


Enjoy!


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TTT#348 IDEC 2013 - International Democratic Education Conference w/ Sally Anderson, Scott Nine, Joye Otto, David Loitz - 5.8.13

On this episode of TTT we have a conversation about democratic education and IDEC 2013, the 21st annual International Democratic Education Conference, which will be held in Boulder, Colorado this August 4-8.

Participants in this episode of TTT are:

Paul Allison's profile photo Sally Anderson's profile photo Scott Nine's profile photo monika hardy's profile photo Karen Fasimpaur's profile photo Joye Otto's profile photo David Loitz's profile photo

What is IDEC?
IDEC 2013 will be a unique international gathering of changemakers—practitioners, organizers, academics, youth, and educators—built around how we can transform our communities, schools, and learning to ensure that all young people can engage meaningfully in their education and gain the tools to build a just, sustainable, and democratic world. The experience will include a rich blend of pre-scheduled events and the fluidity needed to host conversations, workshops and strategy sessions using a hybrid of Open Space Technology. Be prepared for a conference experience unlike any other – we’ll be pushing the boundaries of what we mean by learning, sharing, connecting and creating.
http://www.idec2013.org/about/democraticeducation/
http://www.idec2013.org/registration/

What makes IDEC 2013 remarkable?
IDEC 2013 is a place where the world learns together about learning. IDEC, now in its 21st year, is hosted by teams of educators from different countries and continents each year. This is the first time in ten years that it has been held in the United States. From Korea to Israel and Brazil to India, IDEC offers participants the space, prompts, and process to learn about the future and history of learning.

What is democratic education?
In communities around the world, a story is unfolding of young people, educators, networks, and communities generating solutions to the challenges of today’s complex world. That unfolding story is the story of democratic education.

Democratic education is not a type of school or research-based practice. It isn’t one kind of learning program or philosophy. It is a frame. It’s a way of gathering together a vast set of ideas, resources, and visions so that a powerful story can be told that reclaims education for people and communities. There are thousands of people and organizations around the globe engaged in democratic education. Many have similar values but different definitions. IDEC 2013 is for all of them.


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TTT#337 A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age w/ Bonnie Stewart, Jesse Stommel, Anya Kamenetz... 2.20

On this episode of TTT a group of educators discuss "A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age" http://goo.gl/9pIiq Here's who joins the conversation:

Paul Allison, Timothy Burke, Jack West, Chris Slon, Anya Kamenetz, Bonnie Stewart, Monika Hardy, Karen Fasimpaur, Jesse Stommel, and Nikhil Goyal

Paul Allison's profile photoTimothy Burke's profile photoJack West's profile photoChris Sloan's profile photoAnya Kamenetz's profile photoBonnie Stewart's profile photomonika hardy's profile photoKaren Fasimpaur's profile photoJesse Stommel's profile photoNikhil Goyal's profile photo

Here's the version of the document we are discussing that was published at Hybrid Pedagogy (Jan. 22, 2013):

On December 14, 2012, a group of 12 assembled in Palo Alto for a raucous discussion of online education. Hybrid Pedagogy contributors Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel gathered together with folks from a diverse array of disciplines and backgrounds, representing STEM fields, the humanities, schools of education, corporations, non-profits, ivies, community colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. Among us were adjuncts, CEOs, a graduate student, several digital humanists, and two outspoken educational technology journalists. As a group, we’d chaired online programs, designed MOOCs, dropped out of MOOCs, and the term "MOOC" was even coined in one of our living rooms. The goal of the summit was to open a broader conversation about online learning and the future of higher education. See the story in The Chronicle. This co-authored document, which calls for hacking and open discussion, was the result.

A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age

Preamble

Work on this Bill of Rights & Principles began in Palo Alto, California, on December 14, 2012. We convened a group of people passionate about learning, about serving today's students, and about using every tool we could imagine to respond better to the needs of students in a global, interactive, digitally connected world.

The Internet has made it possible for anyone on the planet to be a student, a teacher, and a creative collaborator at virtually no cost. Novel technologies that can catalyze learning are bubbling up in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Some have emerged from universities, some from the private sector, some from individuals and digital communities. In the past year, Massive Online Open Courseware, or MOOCs, have become the darling of the moment--lauded by the media, embraced by millions--so new, so promising in possibility, and yet so ripe for exploitation.

We believe that online learning represents a powerful and potentially awe-inspiring opportunity to make new forms of learning available to all students worldwide, whether young or old, learning for credit, self-improvement, employment, or just pleasure. We believe that online courses can create "meaningful" as well as “massive" learning opportunities.

We are aware of how much we don't know: that we have yet to explore the full pedagogical potential of learning online, of how it can change the ways we teach, the ways we learn, and the ways we connect.

And we worry that this moment is fragile, that history frequently and painfully repeats itself. Think of television in the 1950s or even correspondence courses in the 1920s. As we begin to experiment with how novel technologies might change learning and teaching, powerful forces threaten to neuter or constrain technology, propping up outdated educational practices rather than unfolding transformative ones.

All too often, during such wrenching transitions, the voice of the learner gets muffled.

For that reason, we feel compelled to articulate the opportunities for students in this brave electronic world, to assert their needs and--we dare say--rights.

We also recognize some broader hopes and aspirations for the best online learning. We include those principles as an integral addendum to the Bill of Rights below.

Our broad goal is to inspire an open, learner-centered dialogue around the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities for education in the globally-connected world of the present and beyond.

I. Bill of Rights

We believe that our culture is increasingly one in which learning, unlearning and relearning are as fundamental to our survival and prosperity as breathing. To that end, we believe that all students have inalienable rights which transfer to new and emerging digital environments. They include:

The right to access
Everyone should have the right to learn: traditional students, non-traditional students, adults, children, and teachers, independent of age, gender, race, social status, sexual orientation, economic status, national origin, bodily ability, and environment anywhere and everywhere in the world. To ensure the right to access, learning should be affordable and available, offered in myriad formats, to students located in a specific place and students working remotely, adapting itself to people’s different lifestyles, mobility needs, and schedules. Online learning has the potential to ensure that this right is a reality for a greater percentage of the world’s population than has ever been realizable before.

The right to privacy
Student privacy is an inalienable right regardless of whether learning takes place in a brick-and-mortar institution or online. Students have a right to know how data collected about their participation in the online system will be used by the organization and made available to others. The provider should offer clear explanations of the privacy implications of students' choices.

The right to create public knowledge
Learners within a global, digital commons have the right to work, network, and contribute to knowledge in public; to share their ideas and their learning in visible and connected ways if they so choose. Courses should encourage open participation and meaningful engagement with real audiences where possible, including peers and the broader public.

The right to own one’s personal data and intellectual property
Students also have the right to create and own intellectual property and data associated with their participation in online courses. Online programs should encourage openness and sharing, while working to educate students about the various ways they can protect and license their data and creative work. Any changes in terms of service should be clearly communicated by the provider, and they should never erode the original terms of privacy or the intellectual property rights to which the student agreed.

The right to financial transparency
Students have a right to know how their participation supports the financial health of the online system in which they are participating. They have a right to fairness, honesty, and transparent financial accounting. This is also true of courses that are "free." The provider should offer clear explanations of the financial implications of students' choices.

The right to pedagogical transparency
Students have the right to understand the intended outcomes--educational, vocational, even philosophical--of an online program or initiative. If a credential or badge or certification is promised by the provider, its authenticity, meaning, and intended or historical recognition by others (such as employers or academic institutions) should be clearly established and explained.

The right to quality and care
Students have the right to care, diligence, commitment, honesty and innovation. They are not being sold a product--nor are they the product being sold. They are not just consumers. Education is also about trust. Learning--not corporate profit--is the principal purpose of all education.

The right to have great teachers
All students need thoughtful teachers, facilitators, mentors and partners in learning, and learning environments that are attentive to their specific learning goals and needs. While some of us favor peer learning communities, all of us recognize that, in formal educational settings, students should expect--indeed demand--that the people arranging, mentoring and facilitating their learning online be financially, intellectually and pedagogically valued and supported by institutions of higher learning and by society. Teachers’ know-how and working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

The right to be teachers
In an online environment, teachers no longer need to be sole authority figures but instead should share responsibility with learners at almost every turn. Students can participate and shape one another’s learning through peer interaction, new content, enhancement of learning materials and by forming virtual and real-world networks. Students have the right to engaged participation in the construction of their own learning. Students are makers, doers, thinkers, contributors, not just passive recipients of someone else’s lecture notes or methods. They are critical contributors to their disciplines, fields, and to the larger enterprise of education.

II. Principles

The following are principles to which the best online learning should aspire. We believe the merit of specific courses, programs, or initiatives can be judged on the strength of their adherence to these principles and encourage students and professors to seek out and create digital learning environments that follow and embody them.

Global contribution
Online learning should originate from everywhere on the globe, not just from the U.S. and other technologically advantaged countries. The best courses will be global in design and contribution, offering multiple and multinational perspectives. They should maximize opportunities for students from different countries to collaborate with one another, to contribute local knowledge and histories and to learn one another’s methods, assumptions, values, knowledge and points of view.

Value
The function of learning is to allow students to equip themselves to address the challenges and requirements of life and work. Online learning can serve as a vehicle for skills development, retraining, marketable expertise. It can also support self-improvement, community engagement, intellectual challenge, or play. All of these functions are valid. The best programs and initiatives should clearly state the potential contexts in which they offer value.

Flexibility
Students should have many options for online learning, not simply a digitized replication of the majors, minors, requirements, courses, schedules and institutional arrangements of conventional universities. The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs. Ideally, they will also suggest and support new forms of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary inquiry that are independent of old gatekeepers such as academic institutions or disciplines, certification agencies, time-to-degree measurements, etc.

Hybrid learning
Freed from time and place, online learning should nonetheless be connected back to multiple locations around the world and not tethered exclusively to the digital realm. This can happen by building in apprenticeships, internships and real-world applications of online problem sets. Problem sets might be rooted in real-world dilemmas or comparative historical and cultural perspectives. (Examples might include: “Organizing Disaster Response and Relief for Hurricane Sandy” or “Women’s Rights, Rape, and Culture” or “Designing and Implementing Gun Control: A Global Perspective.”)

Persistence
Learning is emergent, a lifelong pursuit, not relegated to the brick walls of an institution or to a narrow window of time during life; it has no specific end point. The artificial divisions of work, play and education cease to be relevant in the 21st century. Learning begins on a playground and continues perpetually in other playgrounds, individual and shared workspaces, communities and more. Learning can be assessed but doesn’t aim itself exclusively toward assessment.

Innovation
Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments. A wide variety of pedagogical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices should support students' diverse learning modes. Online learning should be flexible, dynamic, and individualized rather than canned or standardized. One size or approach does not fit all.

Formative assessment
Students should have the opportunity to revise and relearn until they achieve the level of mastery they desire in a subject or a skill. Online learning programs or initiatives should strive to transform assessment into a rich, learner-oriented feedback system where students are constantly receiving information aimed at guiding their learning paths. In pedagogical terms, this means emphasizing individualized and timely (formative) rather than end-of-learning (summative) assessment. Similarly, instructors should use such feedback to improve their teaching practices. Assessment is only useful insofar as it helps to foster a culture of success and enjoyment in learning.




Experimentation
Experimentation should be an acknowledged affordance and benefit of online learning. Students should be able to try a course and drop it without incurring derogatory labels such as failure (for either the student or the institution offering the course). Through open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of programs, the industry should develop crowd-sourced evaluative guides to help learners choose the online learning that best fits their needs.

Civility
Courses should encourage interaction and collaboration between students wherever it enhances the learning experience. Such programs should encourage student contributions of content, perspectives, methods, reflecting their own cultural and individual perspectives. Online learning programs or initiatives have a responsibility to share those contributions in an atmosphere of integrity and respect. Students have the right and responsibility to promote and participate in generous, kind, constructive communication within their learning environment.

Play
Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play. Play allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change--a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century. We must cultivate the imagination and the dispositions of questing, tinkering and connecting. We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.

* * *

DATE: January 23, 2013

SIGNATURES:

John Seely Brown, University of Southern California and Deloitte Center for the Edge
Betsy Corcoran, Co-founder, CEO, EdSurge (edsurge.com)
Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Co-Director PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, Duke University, and cofounder Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (hastac.org)
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Stanford University; blogs about literature and digital pedagogy at literatureilluminations.org
Todd Edebohls, CEO of careers and education service Inside Jobs (insidejobs.com)
Mark J. Gierl, Professor of Educational Psychology, Canada Research Chair in Educational Measurement, and Director, Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation, University of Alberta, Canada
Sean Michael Morris, Educational Outreach for Hybrid Pedagogy (hybridpedagogy.com) and Part-time Faculty in the English and Digital Humanities Program at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR
(Jan) Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU, p2pu.org) and MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow
Bonnie Stewart, Ph.D candidate and Sessional Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Jesse Stommel, Director of Hybrid Pedagogy (hybridpedagogy.com) and Director of English and Digital Humanities at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR
Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity (udacity.com), Google Fellow and Research Professor in Computer Science, Stanford University
Audrey Watters, Writer, Hack Education (hackeducation.com)

* * *

INVITATION:
To join the discussion, visit one of the many platforms where this Bill of Rights and Principles is being published and blogged about (each of us, and each of the platforms, will likely create a different sort of engagement). We invite further discussion, hacking, and forking of this document. On Twitter, please use the hashtag #learnersrights when you share your versions and responses. Finally, and most importantly, this document can’t be complete (can never be complete) without continuous and dynamic contributions and revising by students. We invite students everywhere to read this beginning, to talk about it, to add to it.

Additional resources: We have not included reading resources here but invite you to add the ones most meaningful to you in the public, crowd-sourced version on GitHub. (There’s also a Google Doc hack under way.) Collective contribution is the principle we espouse in this document. We look forward to your participation. - See more at: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Online_Learning_Bill_of_Righ...


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TTT#335 Play Youth Voices "It's not a game" Anthony Flores, Christina Cantrill, Emily Goligoski, Karen Fasimpaur, Paul Oh 2/6/13

On this episode of TTT, we finish Digital Learning Day http://www.digitallearningday.org/ with a conversation about open badges.

Paul Allison takes some time to reflect on a the use of badges in his high school English class, and look who joins him:

Paul Allison's profile photoPaul Oh's profile photoChristina Cantrill's profile photoKaren Fasimpaur's profile photoEmily Goligoski's profile photoAnthony Flores's profile photomonika hardy's profile photo

+Anthony Flores http://youthvoices.net/users/anthonyf- One of the first students to earn 15 badges and earn a credit in English: http://youthvoices.net/play

+Emily Goligoski, Open Badges Design & Community Lead at the Mozilla foundation who can help us think about Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure and Badge Backpacks. http://openbadges.org/en-US/

+Paul Oh, Senior Program Associate at National Writing Project, involved in many technology projects.

+Christina Cantrill who works with the National Writing Project and directs the Digital Is project http://digitalis.nwp.org

+Karen Fasimpaur who currently runs a small educational technology company that works with mobile technology integration in schools.http://www.k12handhelds.com/ She also runs the K12 Open Ed web sitehttp://www.k12opened.com/blog/and more!

+monika hardy, and +Paul Allison are on this episode as hosts, although Paul asked Karen if she would facilitate this episode of TTT because he wanted to talk about his experiments with badges, using P2PU, Open Badge Backpacks, and Youth Voices.

Enjoy listening to us trying figure out what we've been up to!


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