I'm taking a break from Spreadable Media because I'm at iNACOL this week. Palm Springs is beautiful! Here is a picture I took while here:
One of the 1/2 day sessions I went to discussed the emerging blended competencies. You can find a link to those by looking at the iNACOL resources. The mindset part, which surrounds the rest of the thinking, is what I found interesting. Here is the mindest iNACOL looks for in blended teachers (which I think works well for online, too...):
- entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, imagination, and drive
Orientation toward change:
- embrace change
- embrace ambiguity
- change in response to student’s needs
The document moves to qualities, which includes:
Qualities -
Grit
- Persevere
Transparency
- open and frequently share successes, failures, challenges
Collaboration
- balance individual with team and proactively seek to learn from and with others
We ask for a lot of these qualities from the students. I'm glad iNACOL brought up some of these qualities and mindsets needed from the teacher perspective. In particular, the ability to embrace ambiguity and be flexible strikes me as important. Embracing ambiguity means not seeking to order everything too quickly, and being okay with multiple interpretations of an event and a little bit of flux. This goes against our nature - we want to organize - to look at clouds and see things we understand.
Here is a video from IDEO about embracing ambiguity:
The video brings up some key emotions about ambiguous situations - there can be fear, discomfort, and frustration. Realizing that is natural may help us remember SCARF with no just our students but with our teams.
What stands out to you about the qualities and mindsets? Let me know - I think this is an interesting conversation...
For the next couple of weeks, I'm focusing my posts on reflections from the book Spreadable Media by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. I chose this book because of the relevance to our desire to create engaging and meaning learning experiences.
In his introduction, Jenkins defines spreadability as "the potential - both technical and cultural - for audiences to share content for their own purposes" (2). If you've created or shared a funny meme like this one I made:
then you have spread media. Sites like memegenerator make spreading media easy and fun. My question as I read this is, what should be spread? When is the right time to get maximum benefit?
To add a further wrinkle, Jenkins moves into the distinction between "stickiness" and "spreadability." Stickiness, a concept mentioned by Gladwell, refers to content that attracts attention and engagement, a term focusing on numbers of hits on a page or mentions. Spreadability differs from stickiness because spreadability focuses on making connections. One could not track all the uses of the meme above because so many generators offer this as an option. Even without generators, several users could create them on their own. Another difference lies in the fact that spreadability leads to participation in unanticipated ways. Stickiness, as a rule, provides only one kind of experience. For example, when I shared this link on Twitter taking people to a quiz identifying their medieval alter ego (I was a princess, which made me laugh out loud), I showed the quiz to be sticky. I did forwad the quiz, and many others can take the quiz and share, but the only experience we can have is taking the quiz. I can't change the quiz or remix the quiz immediately into a new quiz (even if I get a link the tool).
Here's more - watch to see what King Arthur, Kony 2012, and other texts have in common:
According to Jenkins, both should exist. In a "world where citizens count on each other to pass along compelling bits of news, information, and entertainment, often many times over the course of a given day," the tendency to forward what sticks and remake and circulate what spreads seems almost organic (12). This means, in the world of education, I need to think about what should stick with them and what I want them to spread. I also want to engage students in the metacognitive practice of thinking about sharing in either form. Jenkins writes, "people make active decisions when spreading media, whether simply passing content to their social network, making a word-of-mouth recommendation, or posting a mash-up video to YouTube."
So, what needs to stick? To me, the list would include:
Learning targets - what do I want my students to leave my course knowing, understanding, doing?
Improved communication - I want my students to be able to share their knowledge and passions in an articulate and profound way
Significance - I want my students to understand the "so what" of my course
What needs to spread? To me that list would include:
Significance - I know it's in the list above as well. Things overlap, and that's okay.
Transfer - I want the students to know how to spread the learning targets of my course to their own lives, other courses, the world, etc.
Reflection - Metacognitive thinking on their part about what they share and why
How can I start? Here are some ideas:
Discover the extent your group feels comfortable participating within culture. In my online learning course for teachers, I begin the participatory learning course with a survey to do that. Yours would fit your situation. Here is my survey:
Discover the comfort level of your group with spreadable tools. In your survey, you could add a few questions about spreadable tools such as meme generators, social media proficiency, etc.
Design with participatory experiences in mind. As the book discussion continues, I'm looking forward to more ideas about this.
What do you think? What sticks? What spreads? Do students sometimes leave with topics sticking that you did not intend to stick? Why? Comment below - I'm looking forward to the conversation.
I was intrigued by some of the coverage over Scotland's upcoming vote. Many journalists covered the economic and political ramifications of a free Scotland, but PRI's The World used a different angle: the ramifications of the flag. You can read the story at this link to PRI.
I had not thought of the ramifications to the flag, or of the process needed to change a flag. The complications involved in discussing how a nation's identity and makeup change over time can provoke a lot of reflection.
Just the presence of a flag can produce an effect called priming (talked about in this article). We've already done that in our classrooms. We spent much of the first weeks crafting welcoming documents, breaking the ice, and trying to show students our expectations and what matters most to us.
Just like the presence of the flag, we have to keep priming the students. We need to keep reminders present in our online, blended, and traditional classes. We do this through establishing and reinforcing the community building we started those first weeks. We can look at what we post on our walls / site, what sayings we repeat, and what we demonstrate we value based on emphasis and assessment.
Giving the students a chance to build the norms and expectations of the class helps them create a sense of ownership and belonging as well. Strategic Design includes this kind of co-creation, and students enjoy these opportunities. For example, when Kid President asked for input on how to make things awesome after his video, he got a ton of responses that became part of the conversation:
I like ending on a high note with Kid President, because he reminds us that what we say and how we act sends a message about us, our course, and what we value. I think you all are awesome! I've enjoyed getting to see the great things you are doing and look forward to more conversations.
I'm a big believer in the importance of perspective. Changing perspective can change so much, and some don't realize how much of our perspective can be changed. When I'm feeling that a learning experience doesn't seem to generate the curiosity, complexity, or engagement I want, I try to shift perspectives and encourage people to re-examine from another point of view. Here's one TED talk about the importance of perspective:
Tolkien once said in his lecture "On Fairy Stories" that fantasy began with a shift in perspective, saying, "The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction,
sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon),
but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very
faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is
more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another
view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light,
heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and
able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water." The change in perspective, creates the mythical world and also provides us with new ways to view our own. How to start? A good hook for beginning a change in perspective can be found in lots of ways on YouTube. Here, thanks to my children, are some of my favorites. The first is one that has gained a lot of popularity: "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On":
Students can look at how Marcel lives in our world and uses the objects we use but in different ways. It's a great way to start looking at the world around us in a new perspective. I certainly don't look at lentils or Doritos the same. You can segue Marcel into real life by looking at some of the fabulous photographs of Vyacheslav Mischenko and his documentation of tiny snails moving through our world at this Distractify site.
If shells and nature don't fit in as well into your learning experiences, we can look at the human experience through either of these series. The first series is "Convos with My 2 Year Old", and here is the first episode:
By taking conversations with his daughter and giving those pieces of dialogue to a grown man, the conversation changes entirely. Why is it creepy? What makes that one change such a significant change? How does this perspective on the words change when a new speaker recites them? To continue with the child perspective, excerpts from Jason Kotecki's The Escape Adulthood Manifesto (personally, I would skip the religious part).
Children have a natural curiosity and imagination that this video and others in the series show with this altered perspective. This can move into a great exploration of what our students are curious about. Here is a great post from te@chthought about the stages of curiosity, the characteristics of those stages, and how how stages process and the role of the educator.
Regaining the childlike perspective and celebration of the everyday can lead to great discussions and products. Here is a TED talk from poet Billy Collins about just that:
In this talk, Collins reads some of his poems that celebrate the everyday and discusses how those poems changed perspective some when turning them into animated films. Transfer of a genre is a great way to encourage a new perspective and shows a high level of synthesis! Students can remake things in a new perspective - whether the things are their own or someone else's. Students can also respond in a different genre than typically expected. After reading nonfiction, how about taking those annotations and building a haiku?
If you want to just remain with the childlike perspective, here is Collins reading "The Lanyard," which is in the voice of an adult considering a childhood gift from this new perspective:
To continue in the vein of creepy changes in perspective, Buzzfeed has a playlist of creepy videos also all about perspective. Here is the one called "Things Cats Do That'd Be Creepy if an Adult Did Them":
This piece resembles the video above with the notion of changing the agent of the action. By turning the agent into a human instead of a cat, the actions look creepy and out of place. Yet, we have no problem with expecting cats to do cat-like things. What other actions of people and animals do we accept because we expect this to be so? How does turning this on its ear help us reevaluate the action in the new and original contexts?
To move this into more depth, here is Billy Collins again, this time with his poems from the voice of dogs:
Collins discusses how he writes these poems in this excerpt as well. In the second poem, "The Revenant," the dog reveals that the human's perspective of their relationship was completely wrong. This gets into assumptions. What assumptions do we make about others? about animals? about how we see the world? Where do those assumptions come from, and why do we accept them? What happens when those assumptions are challenged or proved untrue?
Once the hook is there, perspective can be gathered and investigated in other ways. Sites like ProCon.org provides multiple perspectives surrounding current issues of the day. Students can debate perspectives and provide reasoning for their perspective on sites such as Tricider.
So What? In all cases, the simple change of perspective provides a variety of meaningful ways to enter into a topic, explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and grow in our thinking. Encouraging a new perspective also reaches into the 21st Century Skills involving Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as well as Creativity and Innovation.
