StanfordTNE Day One
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Introduction
The Stanford TNE Summer Institute provided us with four sessions, each lasting two and a half hours. We spent the ten hours in a mix of kinds of activities. In fact, each day there was some demonstration, discussion and debate, and hands-on work time. Naturally, both of these topics are rich enough to warrant much more time. Both OER by itself and Web 2.0 in the classroom could become semester-long courses.
If the time was short, it remained important to preserve some of the hands-on production time, since that is fundamental to both the OER process and the world of Web 2.0. Moreover, this direct experience is also fundamental to a view of learning that goes beyond acquisition of facts.
Icebreaker
During the Stanford workshop, the icebreaker helped the participants get to know each other and also became the basis for later discussions of the concepts of metadata and tags.
The assignment was simple. First, each participant was given a sheet of paper and a pencil. Given only those two things, they were to introduce themselves personally and professionally to the group in pictures and words. This was not to be a resume, but otherwise, anything they wanted to share was fine-- job title, school, experience, hobbies, and so on.
Once the participants had filled out this information, they could tape the sheet on the wall behind their seat.
The next part involved several rounds of "speed-dating," which is a method of having people mix and ask each other brief questions. People would pick a person they did not know, then ask them one of several generative questions-- again, both personal and professional questions. For instance, pairs asked each other "What inspired you to become a teacher?" and "What are your hobbies?" and "What is your favorite educational technology?"
Ask they asked these questions, they would write down the words and consise answers on a little pad of sticky notes they were carrying. When each pair had asked each other one or two questions, they would post their notes on that person's self-description sheet on the wall. Then pairs would break up and participants would find new people to interview. As this went on, the information about each participant was growing on the wall.
In the end, after most people had been able to interview each other, we had presentations of each participant, led by the people who had interviewed them. All the people who had interviewed Jen, for instance, told the group what they had learned about her, and then Jen was given a chance to fill in any missing information.
How do you know?
The next activity for the students was some small group discussion. We wanted to think get on the same page about how we thought about learning and knowledge without digging out educational handbooks or using a lot of jargon. Time was short, so rather than agree on words and risk confusion on the definitions of those words, we wanted to look at concrete examples of learning and understanding.
The question posed to the participants was for each person to recall an occasion where they had learned something. It could be anything at all, but it had to be a time when they were sure that learning had taken place, not just a time when they were exposed to something new.
Then, they were to discuss with one or two others sitting next to them:
- What did you learn, and how?
- How do you know you knew it?
- What made it an effective learning experience?
After groups had time to discuss their experiences, we came back together as a group and looked for commonalities among the many stories. This helped us build some working definitions that we could use throughout the workshop.
