Category Archives: Learning Commons

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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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.