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.

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.

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.

Heading 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.

Diary
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
My Room, Mom & Dad’s Home, Winnetka, IL, USA

Finished publishing my blog post last night around midnight, but decided a little afterwards to screw around and then to place a call to my old Chinese teacher in Anqing, China and before I knew it, two hours had rolled off the clock. Naturally I got to the course a little later than planned this morning, but it turned out not to matter as almost no caddies worked today on account of a series of showers by mother nature.

Aside from writing, chatting, reading and napping I also used my down time to re-write the syllabus for the course I am planning on teaching this fall on Peer 2 Peer University, Collaborative Lesson Planning. It will be a course building off the talk I gave this summer at Wikimania 2010 on the topic and my own efforts at creating a resource with all my old lesson plans on Wikiversity. The idea is that teachers should publish their lesson plans online for their own archival purposes, to personally review them, to share them with others, and ultimately that the teaching community can work together to improve one another’s work. If you’re interested in more details you can visit the course homepage here. You can find the updated syllabus here, or download the PDF here .

Published the new syllabus from a cute local coffee shop following a delightful Mocha and coffee cake snack. Had an incredible Mexican dinner with Mom and Dad I was unfortunately a little too full to enjoy, then came home and finished the open book exam online for being a USA Ice Hockey referee. Tomorrow morning I’ll be driving North to attend my one day seminar so this fall and winter I can referee ice hockey.

To close the post I’ll dial in the bullpen for my reliable uploaded lesson plan. Today’s is Mr. Danoff’s FWE 7A Lesson 13, its part of that lesson plan resource I have been building I mentioned earlier, more details can be found here.