David Graeber & Poetic Technologies

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I attended the David Graeber’s talk last Thursday at New York’s School of Visual Arts, On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time. I want to post some notes and thoughts from the lecture. Graeber framed his talk around the idea that the science fiction of 1900 had been, largely, realized by 1950. Whereas the ideas from science fiction from the 1950s era have gone mostly unfulfilled today. We, in the West (and especially the U.S.) suffer a sort of social trauma because of our failure.

Artist's concept of possible colonies on future mars missions. NASA

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Organization for “mobile learning” class

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I’m working on the syllabus for the m-learning course that I’m teaching this Spring. Since the course is an elective for everyone in it and we will have a small class, I have been debating the best way to structure the course. I’ve decided that we will, as a group, take the first session to plan out our semester.

Girls using XO Laptop in South America

Girls using XO Laptop in South America

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Abolish the PEP

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bloomberg godfather, pep strings

Why the NYC Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) Must Go

The Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited our social imagination and helped form a coalition of the 99%. Some of the enemies of the 99% are easy to spot: housing foreclosures, bank bailouts, Citizens United. While not as well known, the New York City Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy (the PEP) is just as emblematic of the class warfare the 1% wages. The PEP is meeting tonight, December 14, 2011, to decide on school closings and charter school co-locations in New York City. A group of concerned parents, students, and public school teachers have gathered around the idea of #OccupyTheDOE. They will attend tonight’s meeting to demand that the PEP be disbanded. I want to explain why I agree with them and why I think you should too.

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Spring courses: m-learning & video games in ed

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Spring 2012 will be my fourth semester at Adelphi, but will be the first one where I am teaching 2 courses from the Program in Educational Technology.

Mobile Learning

I’m excited about the m-learning course, especially because I have a lot to learn in the area. It’s been about a year since I’ve done a concerted review of the literature. I expect (but am not sure) that there will be some studies of tablet learning being published. Since the iPad, they have exploded in schools.

AERA Paper Accepted: Illich, Rancière, practice of equality

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I’m very pleased that my paper for AERA 2012 has been accepted. The paper with the (working – see below) title, To know is not important: Ivan Illich and Jacques Rancière’s relational pedagogy, looks at how the writing of Illich and Rancière challenges one of our must fundamental understandings of education: the centrality of the acquisition of new knowledge. Most theories of education squarely place knowledge acquisition — whether a  “banking model”, situated cognition, or critical approach — at the center of an educational project. This unchallenged assumption implicitly underlies the AERA 2012 theme, “Non Satis Scire: To Know Is Not Enough.”

Illich and Rancière challenge us to take a step back, seeing education primarily as a way to structure of social relationships, power, politics, and democracy. As I develop the full paper, I’m looking forward to exploring the different strategies and epistemology forwarded by the two authors. One reviewer blasted me for drawing “pedagogy” as a theme for the paper, indicating that it is an un-Illichean approach. I’m also looking forward to considering the implications of this critique and digging deeper into Illich’s work. (thank you unknown reviewer)

In other research news, since my paper was accepted, I will also be the discussant on an interesting games in learning symposium, featuring research from my colleagues at Teachers College: Exploring Influences of Game Types and Design Decisions: Issues of Learning, Interaction and On/Offline Boundaries.

Course: Learning with video games

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As the new Program in Educational Technology gets underway, I’m refining and organizing the syllabi for the courses. When they are ready, I’m going to post all course syllabi here, so that other people can inspect them, use them, comment, critique, and hopefully find them useful in some way.

The first one I’m posting is for a course that I’m teaching as a special topics, but will be an elective in the new program: Video games and learning. This semester, it’s kind of a soft launch for the program, testing out many things:

  • a new game study center (which has very few games in it right now, but does have an x360 with kinect, ps3, wii, and PCs with games)
  • a new gamified course website, built on WordPress, BuddyPress, & CubePoints (more on this in a future post)
  • a service learning model that I would like to be common in most of the courses in the program

Without further ado, here are the links to the course syllabus:

New York State approves Adelphi Program in Educational Technology

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Earlier this week we received word from the NYS Dept. of Education that our programs in Educational Technology have officially been approved. This means that we can start accepting applications from students and add program information to the university website. Expect both to happen in the next week or two.

The State approved:

  • Masters of Arts in Educational Technology: a 37 credit masters which will help prepare students for work in higher education, educational publishing, non-school educational institutions, research, private sector eLearning, etc.
  • Masters of Arts in Educational Technology, K-12: a 37 credit masters, with a greater focus on K-12 learning, leading to New York State Certification as an Educational Technology Specialist
  • Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Technology and Open Education: a 5 course Adelphi University certificate where students focus on the practical use of Free and Open Source Software for learning, open education resources (OER), and networked learning.

How do revolutionary teachers teach?

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Wednesday, October 12, 2:30PM @ The Adelphi Manhattan Center, Room 263

I’m very excited to host a talk by Mike Neary and Joss Winn who are in town this week for the Mobility Shifts conference.

Professors Neary and Winn talk about their Student as Producer project, which seeks to connect undergraduate teaching and learning and academic research so that students become part of the academic project of the university: as producers of knowledge and meaning. They will discuss the intellectual ideas that lie behind the concept of Student as Producer, and how that idea is being developed across the sector and at the University of Lincoln. The theoretical basis is derived from critical social theory grounded in avant-garde Marxism that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. A key issue for Student as Producer is that social learning is more than individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice.

Join us:
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 2:30 p.m.
Adelphi University Manhattan Center, room 263
75 Varick Street, Second Floor
New York, NY 10013

Digital studio course

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I’m proposing to teach a new design course, based on a digital studio pedagogy. All students will work in pairs on one semester long project. In it, we’ll look at cases of multimedia learning, read some instructional and interaction design theory, and get lots of feedback from invited guests. In terms of skill, we’ll use the web as a framework for multimedia publishing: digital video/audio/images, CSS, Javascript (MooTools or JQuery, I think), and some basics for PHP or Python for the web, depending on the skills the students bring.

I’m interested in feedback on all aspects of the course, but especially on what the challenge should be. So far, I have three things in mind:

  • teaching the BP oil spill
  • the future of textbooks
  • education for sustainable living

Please check out the course syllabus (draft), here:

http://au.curinga.com/wiki/Ed_media_studio

Wikiotics design research proposal approved

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I’m very excited that in the Spring 2010 semester Adelphi University will be supporting a 3-month design research experiment using Wikiotics with groups of language students and teachers. The experiment will examine how the Wikiotics system fits in with other formal and informal language learning schemes, ways in which the internet’s digital commons can best be leveraged to produce domain-specific educational materials, and how traditional teachers can become acquainted with and participate in online communities creating free culture and open education resources.
I expect that the experiment will help us improve Wikiotics; understanding what functionality works and why, and which parts don’t meet their goals. We hope to contribute to the larger community designing collaborative and open learning software, by examining the dynamics and tensions between online and face to face interaction, teachers and technologists, and students’ self-directed learning.