Chris W, Deen and I met. Chris is going to have the BC interns begin working on creating powerpoints for the learning goals identified in the curriculum inventory/needs doc. Download Curriculum Inventory and Needs (XLS)
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
Add comment January 14th, 2008 at 01:25pm
Chris Tugwell
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Here is a rough draft of my blogging curriculum in MS Word format. It makes perfect sense
to me, but I suspect some parts might not be entirely intelligible to
others, so please send any feedback you may have.
A brief note about executing this curriculum—I wrote it with a classroom-based instructional style in mind. In this it borrows much from Howard Rheingold’s digital skills exercises, with two major exceptions: 1) my curriculum assumes less civic foreknowledge and initiative on the part of students, and 2) it attempts to leverage peer feedback as an evaluation mechanism that lets students know whether their messages are being conveyed successfully. The classroom approach is superior to placing the curriculum exclusively online primarily because it is very difficult to inculcate civic interests via the web—that is, I don’t imagine that many kids will come to the PSO site in
search of instructions on how to blog deliberatively. Rather, I believe
that skills such as these are better discussed and taught in person and
among peers whenever possible. That said, I think the technical
how-to’s of blogging would be good to place on the site in a “Help” or
“How to use this site” section, and I also think that some of the video
PSAs might be able to address some of the more normative aspects of my
curriculum. But generally speaking, it’s probably not a great idea to rely on the web site as our primary medium for imparting
civic skills to kids. The learning goals my curriculum aims to fulfill—public voice, issue definition, deliberation, active listening—aren’t the sorts of skills most teenagers can (or would necessarily think to) teach themselves. Actualized citizens will find PSO on
their own and do great things with it, but their less-engaged peers would best
benefit from as much direct civic instruction as we can provide them.
Download YVO-blogcurriculum.doc
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
Add comment December 14th, 2007 at 04:59pm
Deen Freelon
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(link to David’s original proposal–df)
This posting is in support of David’s proposal to develop regional leadership teams. In my opinion, this is a wonderful way to reach a larger audiance than having one program filtered through the Y. The Y is near and dear to my heart, but we need to engage a lot of youth in this project. The regional leadership proposal has the ability to reach between 50 and 100 youth each year. If we can reach an additional 50 youth through service learning then we are talking 100 to 150 participants a year - that is good, powerful stuff.
Here are few other reasons I like the regional team approach:
As I stated above this approach has the potential to reach a lot of young people. This is great for marketing. Young people encouraging young people to use the site will develop a strong user base, especially if they have a positive experience (summer feedback indicates they will). I also believe our leadership team will participate in guerilla marketing. Hitting the streets with flyers, mouse pads, business cards… is a great way to build interest, and an approach One Economy uses when launching the Beehive in a new community. Southend kids marketing to southend kids is great. They are going to know where and when to reach the kids.
I love the grassroots feel to the regional approach as well. Getting young people to work on issues impacting their community is extremely powerful. Utilizing the Project Citizen model (Identify the problem, gather information, examine solutions, and develop an action plan) on a community/regional, as initial approach, will keep us from overwhelming the kids. They know what is wrong in their communities we just need to equip them with the methodology (like Project Citizen) and tools (digital storytelling, blogging) to share the issues. In my opinion, Improving civic awareness from a commuinty level up feels like the “right” way.
This approach also requires us securing space for weekly meetings. I suspect that the local library would be a great spot to hold our regional meetings. Providing space does not requre a lot of time or resources (staffing), but begins to develop a solid relationship. One that we can develop into something more down the road. In my opinion, a great early approach to involving the library system.
This approach also incorporates capacity building. In my opinion, there are far too many territorial organizations that hoard curriculum and take an elitist approach. Organizations with less resources sturggle when more successful organizations don’t or won’t share best practices or learning lessons. We can help alleviate this problem by partneingr with organizations in need of some assistance (if it makes sense and what we have to offer is valuabel) through a train-the-trainer approach. We provide curriculum and the first round of training and then they can continue the program the next time around.
How do we pull this off (a few ideas):
We will need to localize the application. We can create 4-5 regional applications (one for each team) and ask that providers distribute the correct application.
Partner with community based organizations in the areas we decide to run our leadership teams. One example would be Horn of Africa.
Identify those orgnaizations that we would like to work with or could benefit from a partnership with us.
Target alternative learning environments, like YEP, Opportunity Skyway…
Use the public library or partnering organizations to hold meetings.
Stagger the meetings and we can utilize the Y’s equipment. Utilize some of the funds to purchase more equipment that floats between the partners.
Develop a curriculum menu that we adhere to from beginning to end. For example, we’re all teaching video at the same time.
Turn all curriculum into powerpoint presentations - less expense and more mobile.
Questions:
We talked about staring the leadership team during the summer. Does this still work if we take a regional approach? How do we manage the 5 group during the summer when BC isn’t around? Do we do a two to four week training at the Y during the summer to teach some of the technical skills, like video production.
Participant retention will hinge on the relationship youth develop with their regional facilitator. How will the regional teams respond when every 11 weeks a new BC intern takes over the group? Is there a way to get one year commitments from BC interns?
How do we get BC interns ready for this type of commitment? What type of training do we offer? Do we need to offer? Is it fair to ask a BC intern to assist with video produciton if he/she has never participated in digital story telling?
If using BC interns is problematic then the Y can make this happen, but it would mean groups meet once per month. Or, we would need additional staff resources.
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
2 comments November 27th, 2007 at 10:11pm
Chris Tugwell
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I can speak to the blogging curriculum, as I have been working on how
to organize that. My current thinking is this: the curriculum should be
divided into two parts—one on the technical logistics of posting,
linking, formatting, commenting, etc.; and the other on the normative
ethic of blogging we want to instill in the kids. These two pieces will
need to be taught very differently, however. “How to blog” in a
rudimentary technical sense can be fairly easily written up in
step-by-step FAQ format, with screenshots, links to more information,
and the like. But how to blog effectively, civically, civilly—in other
words, how to blog well, is something that I think would be
very difficult to convey using only words on a screen. I feel strongly
that merely posting a list of do’s and don’ts will be insufficient for
this purpose (though worthwhile in its own right).
Thus, I propose that we put the technical guide (which I’ve already
outlined and need only to convert into kid-language) online and design
the normative piece as a combination of face-to-face (classroom) and
individual exercises. The meat of the latter will be a series of
prompt-based exercises in which we ask kids to freewrite on an idea,
quote, event, or issue of some interest to them. I will start
pilot-testing the general model for the normative component with the
kids next week (assuming Amber approves), and this is what I plan to
do:
Through the process of blogging on a series of issues—national, local,
personal, philosophical—the primary hope is to hone kids’ skills in
participation (effective communication) and tolerance (expressing
disagreement in civil ways, arguing and persuading rather than
“flaming”). Since all this will be happening online, we might also be
able to get local kids who can’t come to the Y physically to contribute
comments. They won’t learn as much, but the kids in the class will
still demonstrate a blogging norm that outsiders will hopefully hew to.
I can definitely have an ongoing curriculum finished and partially
pilot-tested by 12/15. We can probably also get one video PSA done by
that time. The trouble is that we have about five kids so far who come
in for 90 minutes every Monday when they remember or have
transportation. So if we get started with the blog curriculum and video
next week, that gives the kids 11/19, 11/26, 12/3, and 12/10 to work. I
think cranking out a 30-second PSA and piloting this blog curriculum
(in addition to doing other fun things to hold their attention) is a
substantial agenda for that amount of time.
But I’m always looking for feedback, so please let me know if anything
I’ve said sounds strange or unreasonable, or if it could just use some
tweaking.
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
6 comments November 13th, 2007 at 10:14pm
Deen Freelon
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Via Eszter at Crooked Timber (a really great blog on politics from a social-science perspective) come the results of a recent Berkman Center-sponsored contest that solicited video PSAs explaining WWW cookies. A few of my favorites are here, here, and here. I’m planning on using them as examples when teaching the kids how to produce PSAs for blogging and the content rules.
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
2 comments October 29th, 2007 at 03:48pm
Deen Freelon
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PROPOSAL B:
CREATING PSO CURRICULUM
Rationale:
Folks at the YMCA program have been doing an excellent job creating new curriculum for the PSO team at the Y on the fly. However, more resources allocated toward the creation, packaging and testing of curriculum would be very helpful, especially if we think of this curriculum as leverage – an appealing resource – for new partners down the road. This proposal therefore suggests a way that we may be able to support additional curriculum construction and testing, and to expose potential new partners and youth to the PSO program and site along the way.
Adapting the Becoming Citizens Program:
In the winter and fall, BC interns would work with staff support to develop and test specific curriculum modules. These would be designed in the form of discrete workshops that BC interns would go out into the community to facilitate at youth organizations around Seattle. Each workshop would teach a particular skill and would use the PSO website as a workshop tool whenever possible. In this way, youth and organizations would be exposed to the commons while receiving valuable curriculum and a free workshop that would teach a specific skill to their youth. Additionally, we would have the opportunity to test and refine exportable curriculum modules that we could use to attract new partners over time.
What we’d need to support this:
1. Support for curriculum development (School of Education?)
2. Curriculum subcommittee meetings to decide
-What specific learning goals to address with BC curriculum
-Logistics of how to create curriculum and test it: timeline
-Resources, needs, scope of work
Comments?
Entry Filed under: digital learning skills
2 comments October 22nd, 2007 at 12:41pm
Toby Campbell
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