Ideas

Open Batteries

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Kid's art hung on fridge.

Josh's First Fridge Art by Jessica, licensed CC BY-SA.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

When kids are little, we are quick to share their works, without worrying if they are worthy, or if sharing gets in the way of the creator’s growth. A first scribble hung on the fridge engages its crayon-wielding artist in community, audience, and their own creative evolution. I still remember my first daughter’s prolific Blue Period, quickly far too large for her limited fridge gallery.

Yet as soon as kids enter school, their work descends into an underworld of assessment: kindergarten’s finger paintings give way to worksheets, reports, and standardized tests that fall quickly to their final, lonely resting places, giving off the dying breath of grades.

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REAL Circuits of Learning

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Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL) Now that Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning has an acronym (REAL), the next thing it needs is metaphors and cocktail napkin sketches…so here goes: A key part of REAL’s “renewability” is the idea of connecting learning and experience in virtuous cycles that rotate through activities in … Read more

Getting Real: Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning

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One of the best parts about working with David Wiley (@opencontent) at Lumen Learning is how he inspires new thinking in me and others around him.

A series of conversations with David about what he introduced me to as disposable assignments—students hate doing them, you hate grading them—led us to start calling the alternative—assignments where students produce meaningful, public works—”renewable assignments”. David has expanded on this thinking, talking about the potential cognitive surplus that could be realized if all disposable assignments became renewable.

This line of thinking in turn led me to start imagining larger constellations of renewable educational activity. For example: imagine an EDU institution that has relationships with one or more local businesses, nonprofits or government organizations. Graduates from the institution are often employed by the organizations and/or organization workers often participate in professional development at the institution. These relationships exist all over and are a welcome sign of healthy community engagement and economic development.

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What difference does it make who is speaking?

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Thanks to an ongoing discussion with @twigz that has now taken place over so many days and channels that I expect she’s ready to unfriend me (or worse), I’ve been thinking on the role of the author in networked digital culture and how it might be different from the established role of the author.

At the very end of his essay, What is an author?, Michel Foucault imagines a dramatic shift in the cultural role the author plays in the “modern” era that he so carefully lays out in the rest of the essay:

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Eat Your Yard

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I’m trying an experiment with my daughters this week where I’m asking them to create a new project every day based on some simple ideas: they are participants, I am a very hands-off guide, they work together to do something worth while. They completed their first project today—Eat Your Yard—where they had to find edible … Read more