Tag Archives: Joe

P2PU Cycle 4 Collaborative Lesson Planning Weeks 2 & 3 Recap

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Cf. P2PU Cycle 4 Collaborative Lesson Planning Week 1 Recap

Our six week course is halfway finished now, and we have done some really exciting work, especially compared to where we were at the halfway point last cycle. Speaking of last time, two of the returning members Joe and Brylie have continued their impressive work.first-public-schools-4

Building on his discussions about paragogy in his cycle 3 journal, Joe had a thorough clarifying of the term with Dr. King the past couple of weeks. Additionally he shared an intriguing lesson plan for those interested in implementing paragogy (PDF version / Wikiversity version). Brylie has continued refining the “Music Theory” lesson plan he started last cycle and announced plans to create new lesson plans for people looking to learn the English language “I will begin the English course by identifying/outlining overlapping phonemes between the learners’ native language(s) and the English phoneme inventory.”

Additional developments came as Med started his journal and introduced himself to everyone. He’s an English teacher in Morocco whose also “working on my master degree in Information Communication Technology ( ICT ) in Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada” and who has “a blog called Educational Technology in which i post articles about web2.0 tools and applications educators and teachers need in their daily work.” Celaina also asked Brylie about his work researching the Free Culture movement  which yielded a very original answer from the man, or at least one I’ve never heard before.

Positives noted, there is always room for improvement, beginning obviously with myself. I have not been as active or supportive of the other members the past couple of weeks. I didn’t even announce an optional weekly reading assignment for week 3 as I said would in the syllabus.

Luckily we have a special group so they picked up my slack.

Moving Ahead

On the dawn of week 4 I want to continue with the plan, first by giving out the week’s reading: a NY Times article about Girl Talk, aka Gregg Gillis. He’s a musician whose music is made entirely by re-mixing the work of his peers. I want members to consider how teaching is usually a similar practice as we re-mix what teachers taught us as well as resources we find in textbooks and online. Ideally they’ll be inspired by Gregg as I was.

In addition I feel one of the faults of the course is being too theoretical and abstract, instead of really digging our teeth into Collaborative Lesson Planning [CLP]. Drawing from Joe and Dr. King’s discussion I am asking students to collaborate on the lesson plans I have shared on Wikiversity. I want their opinions, ideas and ideally wikignoming as I prepare my lessons for print publication. Hopefully this exercise will give some who haven’t published lessons a better idea of how-to, and those who have, a better understanding of how to improve resources already online.

Finally, I am going to try and schedule short online chats via IM, voice or video with each member to hopefully make them feel more connected to the course and, for me, find how I can better assist them. I know participating in a chat with Phillip Schmidt this morning as part of the Open Governance & Learning course I’m a member of made me more invested and motivated to participate.

image: “First Public Schools: The School Master” (scroll down in gallery) from McConnel on U.S. History Images. Public domain.

p2pu Cycle 4 Collaborative Lesson Planning Week 1 Recap

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Some of you may recall last fall I organized a Peer 2 Peer University course on “Collaborative Lesson Planning” [CLP] along with Dr. King. Courses started again at the beginning of January and Dr. King are once again offering our course. Besides us there are 9 members in the course this time, up from 4 last, and as organizer’s we have a much better sense of what’s going on.

School_BoyHeading in to week 1 I outlined the expected work from members in the syllabus, basically: start a journal & introduce yourself, respond to someone else’s journal, write a plagiarism statement and do the weekly reading. We had 3 people start journals & introduce themselves: Joe, Erich & Celaina. In her intro Celaina did the plagiarism statement and slightly later Joe did his as well. The reading was about hacking, which perhaps was a little too abstract (side note I linked to the same article in my writings about Public Domain Education scroll down on the linked-2 post). I feel some people might’ve seen it and wondered what the hell it had to do with CLP, thinking of the popular conception of the term hacking: breaking into someone else’s computer and messing s&*t up. I tried to contextualize it with a Stallman article about hacking, but my suspicion is more people were still thinking about like Julian Assange in a bad way (not how I think of him) when they heard hacker. As I expected however, Joe did respond to the readings with this intriguing book idea he’s had ruminating.

Heading into week 2 I am a little behind. Week 2 began on Wednesday and I didn’t give out the weekly reading assignment till Thursday, nor write this recap till Friday. I still haven’t done personal e-mails/contacts to everyone, something I found to be very important in the last cycle.

Do you have any ideas about how any of this? Please share them in the comments.

image: “School Boy” by, gustavorezende, 2011, dedicated to the public domain. Pub’d in the Open Clipart Library.

back just for a flash

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Diary
Thursday, September 30th – Friday, October 8th
Written Late on Friday Evening

Big event of last weekend, was Brad and his girlfriend Alli’s visit. Did my best to show them the Chicago red carpet treatment.

Chig3_DSCN0433

Even though I stayed in-county, I was worse about getting back going in my work-life afterwards, like I was following the wedding adventure, unlike post-seeing America’s future leaders. Evidence enough is that I have not been publishing here.

That acknowledged, I have done a few things. I received another article from Kitty, this one is about music, and worth a look. My course has taken an interesting turn with Grandma’s formal introduction, and Joe’s quest towards paragogy.

After Tuesday the weather around here has been incredible, which has kept me busy at the course making money, which is usually a positive. After finishing last night I met up with Pat to watch the Hawks come from behind to tie the Avalanche in their season opener as they try to defend the ‘Cup. Biggest impression of the game was how Turco’s puck-handling ability will change the Hawk’s offense. Their roommates, the Bulls, started their pre-season this week, and the new guy I’m most intrigued with so far is Ömer Aşık. Moving East, I hope Todd Collins does as well Sunday against the Panthers as he did in his pre-season start.

Image: from the Entourage Weeknights Wandering Red Carpet’s Chicago Max Bar visit.