Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Week 8 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Final Reflection


So, here we are. Week 8. The final week of INTE 5340. And what a fun ride this has been. Even in my final days in this course, I have been met by technological challenges.



But that is ok, because I have come to expect challenges. Through a lot of "playful tinkering" and trial-and-error learning throughout these 8 weeks, I have found that I can deal with pretty much any wrench thrown at me.

via GIPHY


Before we go any further, in the words of the great Oscar Hammerstein II, "Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start."


Prelude. Spring 2017. With only 1 course needed to complete my Education and Human Development Master's in Teaching in Diverse Contexts (EDHD MA TDC, for short) at University of Colorado Denver, I spent some time looking at the course catalog for the Maymester and Summer terms. I was going to sign up for  SCED 5350 Issues and Trends in Science Education, but then thought about all of my end-of-year deadlines at my school. I decided that teaching full-time, having to meet all of those deadlines, AND taking a Maymester course would be the end of me. So, I looked at what courses were offered this summer that could be counted towards my degree program. The only course out of the bunch that sounded mildly interesting was INTE 5340 Learning with Digital Stories. But what exactly is this course?


Huh? What does this have to do with teaching? Well, I figured it couldn't be too bad. I had a summer off from my full-time teaching job, so I may as well finish up my master's degree already. What did I have to lose?


Call to Adventure. So, I signed up and received my first welcome email from our course instructor on June 1.

Refusal of the Call. We were asked to check out the Get Started module of the course and set up all of our "stuff", i.e., Twitter, hypothes.is, and a blog. Ok, I have had a blog before for another course in my program. But the other 2 were foreign to me. I had heard of Twitter but had been very reluctant to sign up and use it. And hypothes.is was something I posited before beginning an experiment as a scientist, so I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. My initial reaction was, "Twitter? Really?" But I was in this to learn, so I kept an open mind and signed up for Twitter. 
I was skeptical and reluctantly jumped into the Twittersphere. I tried my first Daily Create challenge and posted it. I wasn't even sure if I was tagging everything correctly but hey, this was only tweet #2!

I got through the syllabus and encountered my first "easter egg".

I finished Week 1 and thought, "Ok, this isn't so bad."


Meeting with the Mentor. At the end of Weeks 1 and 2, I received probably the most detailed, helpful and encouraging feedback on the work I had produced thus far. Seriously, this set the bar for how I should be giving feedback to my students. I was starting to get the hang of things and even started to feel confidence in the work I was producing. Not bad for a technological dinosaur!

Tests, Allies, Enemies. The first test I encountered came shortly after week 3, just when I was starting to get into the groove.


Remix week?!? Oh, this is getting really interesting.

via GIPHY

So, here we were, remixing each other's work. I was assigned to remix Shyna Gill's work and critique it in a case study. After reviewing her work, I settled on remixing her "Me in 30 Sec" project.



Over the next couple of weeks, I found help and support from fellow classmates. And I was able to help out a few classmates as well. The culture created within our INTE 5340 class was very supportive and encouraging, and a lot of times, we found that we were all having similar struggles.


Ordeal. More wrenches and challenges were met. But we met them together.




We shared "horror" stories.


 All horror stories can be found here: https://twitter.com/i/moments/883400911967502336


Seizing the Reward. Together, we overcame our challenges. We shared a LOT of great ideas on hypothes.is. We encouraged each other on Twitter. And now as the course has come to an end, we have come out with new skills, new tools, and a fresh perspective on how storytelling, and in particular, digital storytelling fits in our educational landscape. We ended the course with an article on the culture of creativity:

Gauntlett, D. & Stjerne-Thomsen B. (2013, June). "Cultures of Creativity." The Lego Foundation. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI

This was a good way to bring together all the ideas we had shared over the past several weeks. It brought back our conversations on Piaget's Constructivism, Papert's Constructionism, and Siemens'/Downes' Connectivism.
From our Week 2 Module
We also circled back to what it means to have/use an open pedagogy. This is something that was not only modeled for us in this course but it was also something we were able to experience and participate in firsthand. Here, we learned by doing. More than that, we learned by making and sharing. We put our work out into the public using our blog and posting it all on Twitter. We received support from our instructor and fellow classmates, and we also received feedback from the greater online community via Twitter. We found that digital storytelling is a powerful means of learning and growing.

The final article gave us this model to work with.
A model of culture (adapted from Sørensen et al., 2010). Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI
When the processes of playing, sharing, making, and thinking are part of the ethos of the culture of a given community, members of the community are supported and encouraged. The creative mindset is allowed to flourish in a supportive culture. In order to develop creative thinkers, members of the community need to make things. And this culture of making things is supported through the dimensions of having, doing, being, and knowing. The members of the community are given the environment, tools and materials to create their artifacts of learning. There is inspirational activity within the community with the support of the mentor and peers. Members' identities, traditions and roles are honored within the community. And meaning is made through the process of making. All these parts of the pinwheel interact with one another. I think of this as being similar to Schrodinger's electron cloud model of the atom. In contrast to Bohr's model where the electrons circle around the nucleus in set orbits, in Schrodinger's model, the electrons are moving all over the place within the electron cloud. So, instead of having very set positions of each dimension of culture in the pinwheel model above, those dimensions move around more fluidly and interact with each other in multiple combinations and ways.

Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Bohr-atomic-model


Electron Cloud Model of the Atom: https://goo.gl/pHyWty

The electrons move around the nucleus somewhat similarly to how the blades of an electric fan do. When the fan is running, you can't really tell where a single blade is at a given time. This is how I think of the pinwheel model of culture of creativity.

Retrieved from: https://www.ck12.org/book/CK-12-Physical-Science-Concepts-For-Middle-School/section/2.44/

Sørensen et al.'s model has been expanded to show that we can be members of multiple cultures and that these cultures interact with one another as well.  And the cultures can be connected on different dimensions or multiple dimensions.

Three cultures connected by different dimensions. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2tQorpI

However, I still see this model as being limited, since Culture 3 may also interact with Culture 2, or Culture 1 may interact with Culture 3 on more than one dimension. So, let's go back to the electron cloud model for the creative mindset across related cultures.

2 atoms have overlapping electron clouds. Retrieved from http://www.uq.edu.au/_School_Science_Lessons/TWFig4.GIF

So, if we go back to the 3 pinwheels interacting together, instead of connecting at single points, i.e., Culture 1 connects with Culture 3 through "Doing", Culture 1 connects with Culture 2 on "Having", we can have the 3 cultures overlap, similarly to the two atoms above and as shown in the diagram below. Each atom symbolizes each pinwheel from Sørensen et al.'s model, and the electrons symbolize the dimensions of culture. The nuclei in my updated model symbolize the cultures from the Sørensen et al.'s model. 

Remix of pinwheel model with electron cloud model

Homecoming. So here we are at the end of INTE5340, summer term. I have learned a lot over the past 8 weeks and will be starting back up at the school I teach at very soon. I will be returning to my classroom with a whole new perspective on learning and plan to incorporate the creation of digital learning artifacts in my classroom. My students will not only conduct chemistry experiments in the classroom but will also create digital media as part of their learning process. I am excited to put into practice what I've learned in this course. I hope that by doing so, my students become more engaged in authentic and meaningful ways.

As a recap, here is a timeline of my journey through this course, which I created on TweetDeck. There were many ways to go about summarizing the work I have done here in INTE 5340, but in the end, Occam's razor won out. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. 

Click here to view my timeline on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dr_yap/timelines/889545853404192768

Finally, for those of you keeping score at home (ok, really, I know none of you are keeping score), here is my media scorecard.



This course may be over, but for me, now the real work begins. It's been real, folks. #seacrestout
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Week 8 of INTE5340: Learning With Digital Stories - Final Reflection

So, here we are. Week 8. The final week of INTE 5340. And what a fun ride this has been. Even in my final days in this course, I have bee...