Notes for App Build Meeting
James Bowey
Teaching and Learning in Public
"Teaching and Learning in Public" is a concept and application-set based on the philosophy that the social construction of knowledge and distributed creativity are the essential tools for building better education and a more engaged and empathetic society. We are building an approach and set of tools using the public sharing of information to show students how to assemble information, and instill an ethos in which they in turn will share information as life-long learners and teachers.
Information should not be scarce. Imagine a society in which everyone shared what they knew and how they knew it. It would change the world.
The TLP Environment
This VLE consists of Moodle and free third-party tools that students can take with them for life-long learning.
The two main applications are Evernote and Moodle. Evernote is the student's private space from which from which they capture, create and share content. Moodle provides the course platform and LMS, as well as a unified connection point to third-party applications.
Our TLP project will build an environment to host a Photojournalism course. The TLP course environment will consist of the following teaching and learning interfaces, hosted on, or connected through, Moodle:
1. LMS Foundation. This provides the connection point for students, communication, course management, work submission and evaluation. Features: Announcements, Dropbox, Syllabus, Readings and content, Feedback/grades. Tool: Moodle
2. Subject Stream. RSS feeds bring social knowledge "stream" into the classroom. Social bookmarking makes possible simple, bottom-up, collective knowledge-gathering. Students are assigned to monitor stream and read articles of their own selection, and bookmark the selections to share with the class. Bookmark Tool: Diigo
3. Creative Practice Notebooks. Students share their creative practice notebooks via RSS on Moodle. Tool: Evernote
4. Blogs/Forums. Blogging affords the public expression of individual voice, the emergence of a market for intelligent information-filtering and knowledge-dissemination, and public interactions in the form of comments. Technology facilitates many-to-many, multimedia, asynchronous discussions among small or large groups, regardless of distance, over extended periods. Could include application such as podcasting, SLOODLE, photo galleries, YouTube/Vimeo, and VYou. Students post selected work. Tool: Moodle. See also Google+.
4. Wiki. Wikis enable collaborative document and knowledge creation as well as web-building as a learning method. Course assignments build public wiki over course of semester. Tool: WikiMedia
5. Critical Discussion Forums. Private discussion forums provides space for critical analysis and professor feedback of student creative work. Tool: VoiceThread
6. Subject Discussion Forum: Lecture and discussion forum hosts academic subject posts including Web links and social media, and critical inquiry and discussion. Professor posts embed code from Storify lectures. Can be public or private. Tools: Moodle, Storify and Google+
6. Live Meetup. Synchronous online forums that can also be tuned and cultivated for back channel classroom purposes and informal discussions. Tool: Google+
7. Virtual Reality Space. Provides opportunity to work in synchronous visual environment, and explore the production of the virtual reality media form. Tool: Second Life
8. Links to Real-World Practice. Links to spaces such as M-Theory and Winona360 where theory can meet practice with public assignments. Students complete assignments for Winona360 in the second half of the course.