A comment left to @cogdog on content in #Youshow15 and #Rhizo15
As someone who participated in #Youshow15. I thought I would throw in my comments. I got a lot out of #YouShow15 but completed very little of the pre-ordained content. Which is a shame because I wish I had the capacity to have dove into the the work around audio and video storytelling.
As a result of #Youshow15 now have many more blogs I update and created a portfolio for an edtech award (which I lost because the reviewers felt I didn’t put any effort in my application since I didn’t have binders full of tech). I did little of the assigned content. Like every MOOC I do I quit early after taking what I need.
Maybe content as people is the wrong metaphor. Maybe its community. If we define community as the people and activity they create together. Communities take leaders and your “trigger events” helped to organize different pathways.
Maybe its content as pathways. I poach the idea of multiple landscapes of knowledge from Wittgenstein all the time. Your trigger is the starting gate but where we go from there is up to us.
I do wonder if these more open pathways only work when the content is what Rand Spiro calls ill-defined domains. I love the post-modern theories but then I always get back to the hard sciences and math.
I do think we can create pathways that allow folks to gravitate to well-defined domains of knowledge that may require less off-roading.
Playing in Open Spaces. All content licensed using Creative Commons BY-SA
A couple of my thoughts from a #rhizo15 participant trespassing on your knowledge landscape:
-Once you are required to blog as part of a class it changes things. No judgement, but the reality remains. Assessment changes our motivation to learn. Mandated blogging is different than blogging. Playing in spaces like #rhizo15 is different then getting credit. Not good or bad. Different.
I have seen very few blogs that I assign to students carry on past class. They are put out to pasture on some server farm. Like veal, the young were pumped for early meat and discarded.
Nor do students establish these spaces for themselves after class. I think recreating networked spaces in formal learning environments is difficult. These difficulties are compacted by access and inequity as you look around the world.
If getting students connected was my goal. I fail by every metric you can count.
However, as my first group of teachers approaches graduation they are now thinking about how they curate their identities in online spaces. It isn't about holding the spigot on the bad, its about opening the flood gates on the good.
I hope more students continue blogging. I also think a model of on the ground nodes attached to a much larger global hub is a better approach to bringing in principles of connected learning into the classroom.
If you go and read the few students who did continue to blog after class you will see all the metrics that really count.
I just want more of my students to focus on what counts.
I saw three main points of hesitance of entry:
- An outsider feeling (as both off-putting and motivating).
- Vulnerability in sharing our identities.
-Especially the truth in art.
- Questions of ownership.
- The tool use.
I am coming at this with my own subjectives. Specifically as someone who attempts to shape places like #rhizo15. I want to build off of Maha Bali's column on caring. How do we take into account the hesitance of entry?
You and +Autumm393 have me thinking on this.
