Reflecting on CLMOOC – Part 3

One of the most important things I think about as I wrap up an experience like CLMOOC is how I’m going to take my learning forward.

One of the big things on my mind right now is a small local kids maker day I help coordinate each September. This year’s program is being influenced by CLMOOC 2014. Here’s the current outline:

Morning:

Welcome and Introductions
Marshmallow challenge (collaborative design activity)
Storytelling activities (with options)
Planning for afternoon

Lunch

Afternoon:

Creative play options

    • Cardboard challenge
    • Duct tape crafts
    • Jewelry making

Cooking

 One of the constraints of this event is that there is no technology available. Also I have no idea how many kids will come or what ages will they’ll be. In the past, we’ve had as many as 15 kids ranging in ages from 3 to 18.

The influences of CLMOOC on this event are related to connected learning. We have a lot of choice for participants and try to encourage them to follow what they want to do. We encourage peer collaboration and making. The storytelling options will include a couple variations on the 5-image story make (without computers though).

I’m looking forward to this event and to whatever unexpected ways I am able to carry forward the CLMOOC magic!

Reflecting on CLMOOC – Part 2

As a part of my reflection, I’ve been thinking about the various ways that our experiences together in CLMOOC have brought to life the Connected Learning principles.

I wanted to come up with a way that we could collaboratively link our experiences to the Connected Learning principles and ended up with this ThingLink:

If I’ve done this right, everyone should be able to edit this and add your own tags with links. (Once you’ve clicked edit, just click the spot on the image where you want to add a tag, and then add your own link/image and text description, and save.)

Perhaps this collection is growing even as you read this. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

Reflecting on CLMOOC – part 1

With the formal part of CLMOOC 2014 drawing to a close, I’m reflecting on all we’ve done together during the 7 weeks.

As with last year, overall I am amazed by everything everyone has done — all the things we made, the amazing conversations we’ve had, the writing and making we’ve done together, the new friendships we’ve made, the old ones we’ve deepened, the learning that we’ve started and will continue into the year. It is a testament to the goodness all around us that so many people have shared so freely and invested so much for the purpose of learning and playing together.

In terms of my personal participation, I wasn’t able to participate in as many makes as I wanted to [insert personal excuses here], but I know I will continue making, writing, and connecting with the CLMOOC community far into the future. Here are a few things I did during this round of CLMOOC that I feel good about:

  • CLMOOC Make Bank (new version) – In my “facilitator” role for CLMOOC, I helped set up and foster a new make bank. Over 7 weeks, the community has added over 60 new makes and 80 new examples and tutorials to this bank. I know that many will continue to use and add to this in the future, and I think this is a huge success.
  • Book art (that I made)
  • Light painting – I’d been wanting to play with light painting and long exposure photography for a while and finally did that in week 5.
  • A 10-shoe memoir (I struggle with these extremely short form memoirs. This was one I felt good about though.)
  • “What is a story?” – A group of us got into an intriguing conversation about what makes a story. We pondered questions such as can a recipe be a story — not just inspire or remind of us  of a story, but actually tell one? Our conversation culminated in a hangout about this, which was one of the highlights of this year’s CLMOOC for me.

I am always a bit sad when events like CLMOOC reach their formal “end,” but I know that the friendships and the learning will continue on.

Thank you everyone for being a part of my summer of making, playing, and connecting.

 

Light painting – part 2

In the continuing experiments on light painting (see part 1 here), last night I played with some outside shots, none of which I am particularly enamored with.

Then I tried some of the third type of light painting, where you move the camera. A few of these I really like.

There’s one more round I want to try. Think burning things.

A new take on the CLMOOC make bank

Last year, in CLMOOC, we launched the first iteration of the Make Bank. Inspired by DS106, we were very enthusiastic about this way to encourage participants to self-direct their learning and to generate and reuse content.

This first iteration of the bank was built in WordPress using Gravity Forms, an approach which I’ve subsequently used successfully in several other projects as well.

Of course, like all projects, by the end of the first year, there was a wish list of new features we had, and a better way to organize and preview the content was high on the list. So when Alan Levine announced the availability of a new WordPress theme implementation of the DS106 assignment bank, we jumped right on it!

The facts that this theme hadn’t been deployed yet, our own technical resources were limited, and time was short caused us (me, really) some trepidation, but we forged ahead.

Now the new Make Bank has been rolled out, and we love it! The advantages we’d hoped for — better organization, a more graphic display, and the ability to add examples and tutorials — all proved to be very beneficial. Just a few weeks into CLMOOC 2014, the community has already added 40 new makes and over 60 new examples and tutorials. To me, that demonstrates the usability of the bank.

mb

In terms of development, we did some customization to make Alan’s theme do what we wanted. Alan was a great help with this, as the learning curve for us was high and he knows the code intimately since he wrote it. As often happens, our use case wasn’t exactly what was originally envisioned. Some of the things we customized included separating out “difficulty ratings” from general user ratings, adding category sorting, adding tags, adding notifications (we moderate all posts), allowing multiple categories to be selected, displaying the submitter’s name with examples and tutorials, and some bug fixes. Some (most?) of this has been incorporated back into Alan’s build as appropriate.

(Note: For CLMOOC, we did not use the syndication/aggregation features.)

And there are still some additional enhancements we’d like to make, but for now things are sailing smoothly.

For others considering implementing this theme, it is worth considering that as a theme, it requires a separate WordPress installation. This can make it challenging to integrate with other existing WordPress sites. Personally, I think it could be advantageous to implement this functionality as a plug-in rather than a theme, but that’s a project for another day/year….

Much thanks to Alan Levine, Brad Emerson, the National Writing Project, and the CLMOOC community for making this work possible and shareable. I am excited to see what the future brings for our Make Bank.