time | Margaret A. Powers

Tag Archives: time

The CMK Series – Part 1

Posted on July 22, 2013 | 1 comment

After taking a hiatus to facilitate a PD institute at my school, start exploring my Google Glass, attend Constructing Modern Knowledge (CMK) and most recently have my wisdom teeth removed – I’m finally taking time to publish my blog posts!

July has been jam packed, primarily because it began with me heading off to new adventures in New Hampshire for the CMK Institute. If you haven’t heard of it before, CMK is an amazing professional development opportunity for anyone interested in making, electronics, Project-Based Learning and Reggio-inspired classrooms … or simply anyone looking for a new learning experience that will push you to think outside the box!

There are too many takeaways from #CMK13 for me to fit them all into one post so I’m going to break them into a couple of reflections. To start, I want to focus on time.

Time was a unique variable at #CMK13 because it was both a constraint and a mobilizer. Time was specifically scaffold to support discovery, meaning that “project development” was a core part of the institute program. Instead of spending time sitting in sessions, waiting for things to begin, or listening to lectures, time was dedicated to learning through doing. With this freedom, we were inspired to let go of our worries about making every minute productive and soaking up as much knowledge as possible from other experts. Instead, we were able to construct our own knowledge by inviting experts to engage with us when we needed their support and utilizing a plethora of resources and materials available for everyone to use.

Takeaway from the group – there’s great value in being empowered to pause, reflect, take breaks (w/food!) and respecting team members #CMK13

— Margaret A Powers (@mpowers3) July 12, 2013

Time became a mobilizer, that empowered us to use it as we wanted. We could start and stop our work as needed, taking time to pause and reflect, to furiously scour the web for ideas, to “gossip” with new friends or old colleagues, and to play with burgeoning ideas that we hadn’t yet fully formed or understood. Having the opportunity to decide and schedule things as simple as meals made time feel more flexible at #CMK13, it was something that we could mold and shape in the same ways we were molding and shaping the new projects we would create.

Interestingly enough, we were also constrained by time. The looming Friday deadline, when we would need to present our project and ideally have something concrete to show for all of our work and time spent on project development, put a certain amount of strain on everyone. There was concern and worry about having something meaningful to show and being successful in producing what we had set out to make. As most of us work in education, things like grades and assessing achievement came to mind.

Luckily, I think CMK achieves a delicate time balance. Time is enough of a constraint to push participants to actively engage and dive into something they might have otherwise avoided or put off (e.g., learning to program an Arduino or make a cardboard robot). Yet it’s flexible enough that participants begin to realize they can actually redefine success and that while it can be nice to have a “finished project” for the last day, the project can be something that’s completely different than what was originally envisioned. For example, a group that started out thinking about how 9 month old babies could complete circuits ended up creating an interactive crib with a possible build-in camera, light up (zombie) doll, and other awesome features!

Reflecting on my #CMK13 experience, I want to consider how this delicate time balance can be achieved in the classroom and other makerspaces with young children. With constraints like grades and deadlines, how can we make students comfortable enough to try something new and empowered enough to take risks? My school works on a 12 day cycle which makes scheduling a challenge and consistency difficult for both students and teachers. Is the best workaround to have a Maker Club after school that works outside those time boundaries and can allow for the time constraint (club meeting) yet mobilizing (freedom to make and try anything, week after week) balance?

1 Comment

Posted in Reflections

Tagged #CMK13, #edtech, #makered, Arduino, Constructing Modern Knowledge, electronics, making, Professional development, Project-Based Learning, Reggio Emilia, robotics, STEM, technology, time

Digital Literacy Defined?

Posted on March 1, 2013 | 6 comments

Digital Literacies Peacock (Photo credit: *s@lly*)

What does it mean to be digitally literate? And who can actually answer that question today – teachers, administrators, researchers, students? I’m not sure I can do it justice. I think that’s one of my big takeaways from participating in the #etmooc Digital Literacy topic.

I have been busier than I expected these past two weeks so I have not had a chance to follow the Twitter and Google+ dialogues very closely or read many blog posts and I am definitely feeling that lack. The amount of learning and questioning I’m prompted to engage in by participating with the group is a credit to the #etmooc community and I hope I’m able to dive back in more next week. Still, from the archives I listened to and the one session I was able to attend (Howard Rheingold’s Literacies of Attention, Crap Detection, Participation, Collaboration & Network Know-How) live, I have come to realize that digital literacy or literacies is no simple topic.

In part, this is because there are still disputes about how to define literacy itself and then there is the challenge of trying to define something that is constantly shifting and changing in response to technology developments and cultural shifts. Similar to the use of “21st Century Skills,” at what point do they just become “skills” or “literacies”? Do we need to distinguish between the digital aspects and the analog ones?

Web literacy? (v0.1) (Photo credit: dougbelshaw)

And then there is the question of whether to differentiate between skills and literacies. As Steve shares so well in this recent post, there are “nuances and emerging aspects of learning [specifically] through digital media.” I agree with the inherently contextual and cultural nature of (digital) literacies and the idea that while certain skills may be transferable between them (e.g., writing an email) the ways in which it is done can depend on the type of literacy used in that context. For example, when writing an email to a friend, young students might use very informal language or text speak but hopefully, when writing to teachers or professors, they code-switch to a more professional tone and different type of text and then they might have to adjust their practice again if they enter the workforce and learn the unique email protocols used there. I know I have found that in certain contexts, the expectation is that everyone at a conference or event will be tweeting and know how to converse in that type of 140 character, shortened URL code while at other conferences, I have to be aware that many people have never even seen a tweet and I need to be literate in other ways of communication to connect with them.

As an educator, what I think is important for me and others to consider is whether our students are cognizant of the different types of digital literacies they already know, of the digital literacies they will need to know, and of the concept of digital literacies as a whole? In reflecting on the past two weeks, I realized that while my schedule was busier I was also a little less motivated to blog/participate because I felt there was less creation work and more analysis of deeper concepts that I needed to do to wrap my head around digital literacies. Honestly, I love to sit back and just think and reflect on ideas but when I’m pressed for time, it becomes a lot more challenging and I definitely felt like digital literacies required … requires … a lot more thought before I feel like I have a true grasp of it.

So, my next project is to consider ways to create in order to better break apart and conceptualize digital literacies and then to consider projects that would be developmentally appropriate for my young students to create so they can begin to learn through this process too. When we were learning and sharing ideas about digital storytelling, I almost couldn’t resist posting multiple times during the week because I was having so much fun creating and learning and I wanted to share that with the #etmooc community. I’d like to find a way for that same level of excitement to be shared around digital literacies so that I can then invite my students into these engaging activities and open up an early dialogue with them about ways they can each define digital literacies for themselves.