M-Hub Comin' Back Strong!

Work and learning today is all about connecting people. Managers, supervisors, and business support functions should be focused on enabling connections for knowledge workers. Like artists, knowledge workers need inspiration. Too few connections mean few sources of inspiration and little likelihood of serendipity. Innovation is not so much about having ideas as it is about making connections. We know that people with more connections are also more productive.  -- Posted on Sunday, 3 March 2013 by Harold Jarche

As a proponent of connectivism  I have made Challenge Based Learning and other real world projects a central part of each course that I teach.  I have seen my students attain deep learning through social engagement through their work on real work challenges.  In each case, I've demanded that groups students explore their personal learning networks to connect with experts who can answer their questions or review their ideas.

To help teach students how to make connections, I started the M-Hub project in 2010.  M-Hub came online a year ago as a way for students to connect with mentors (such as alumnae) who possess specialized knowledge, training or experience.

Activating this database site and introducing it to MHS staff was a monumental achievement for us.  However, since then it has largely languished.  The nucleus of student project managers graduated, and the idea of researching real people instead of documents, did not come naturally in our learning community.  And I confess that all the founders lost their zeal after reaching such a major milestone.

I am glad to say that I am now working with a dedicated (and very young!) group of students who have two April projects in mind to renew interest in M-Hub.  First, our team will be facilitating tweeting at the Women Mean Business Symposium, April 23, 2013.  We will also be launching a movie that is currently in production.  We are hoping to disseminate this fifty second "commercial" about what M-Hub is and how it will help our students "create, connect, contact, and collaborate."  More soon!

My Presentation Proposals

With my new job I have curtailed my presentation schedule, but I have just submitted proposals for presentations to a state conference and national conference.  Here are my topics:


Free Multimedia Activities for Secondary Students that Don't Gobble Time!


 A high school American Government teacher will show how to introduce robust collaborative, multimedia activities into your curriculum without devoting lots of valuable instruction time to teaching the techonologies themselves.  Multiple activities using Google Sites, Blogger, Google Docs and YouTube (all free!) will be shared.

Teaching Students to Build PLNs through Online Networking with Alumni


Learn how students at MHS network with the school's alumni through an online database.  The best part? This unique solution was designed by students!

iBad or iPad?

Last spring I was subjected to an odd pre-emptive attack on the iPad from a techie at a private school that requires its students to lease expensive P.C.s. She forwarded a fierce criticism on the supposed limits of the iPad written by a Windows slappy.

I was targeted for this polemic because of my association with Apple (ADE ’09) and because parents at her school were wondering out loud whether or not they might be spared about $2500.00 in cost by substituting an iPad instead for the required P.C.

At the time I fired back a snippy reply saying that the comparison was apples (pun intended) and oranges-- What the school should do, I said, was save parents $2000 and outfit students with a vastly superior MacBook.

But now I admit I was wrong . . . The iPad is superior to  laptops in ways that I had not appreciated. In fact, I have seen them used heavily in favor of Macbooks by Apple educators, some who reported that their MacBook Pros had almost fallen into relative disuse. So what are the advantages of an iPad over laptops?

The iPad is lighter, smaller, and cheaper than laptops.

The 3g model allows almost ubiquitous connectivity.

Its ease of use is identical to its incredibly popular cousins-- the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

It has a beautiful presentation of most forms of media.

For many users, its basic functions satisfy all the needs of their current computer use.

Most importantly, third parties are writing ingenious apps for the device every day, pushing the envelope of its usefulness.

Now, admittedly this is an unabashedly biased take on the iPad. However,my point is not that schools should be staking their curricular futures on this or any device.

The Baker position is this: Connectivity rules, not machines.  Instead of investing vast sums of $$$ in machines that are outdated shortly after they arrive, plow more into wi-fi and professional development. Get the community of learners on the grid and let connectivism do the rest.

Student Take-away from Challenge Based Learning

This is one of the videos that has been posted at iTunes U on the Nebraska State Board of Education channel. It was posted in order to be made available to educators attending the K-12 Summit in Dallas. This puts me to mind of three things:

* The students were genuinely impacted by the power of the project. They are describing "authentic" experiences where they learned a great deal about democracy, networking, and the power of technology.

*Speaking of networking, how about the fact that videos made by a high school class in Farmington Hills, Michigan, end up on Nebraska content site? I tweeted a blog about the project and an ADE read it, and followed up on it for the summit.

*My experience with Apple has been truly transformational. Apple introduced me to the pedagogy of CBL and also help connect me to some very bright educational innovators.

Friday Take out from the Drive-thru

Jean Piaget
The principle goal of education is to create [persons] who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done- [persons] who are creative, inventive, discoverers

Tony Wagner

Students who have learned to collaborate, to think critically, and be more confident about their own ideas also tend to make better moral judgments.

George Siemens

When I hear people talk about the neutrality of technology, I get worried. . . . We are controlled by what we’ve created as much as we control it . . . . Today, I view my iphone less like a device than I do as a part of my cognition. We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.

Trung Le

Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. . . . Encourage learning to happen throughout a school building by creating spaces that allow ideas to circulate as readily as foot traffic. At Thomas Deacon Academy [click for virtual tour]. . . learning spaces freely flow into each other. Students can see different types of learning occurring all around them and every inch of the school can be used to educate.

Megan McArdle

Forget the literary giants who once traded barbs at Elaine’s or the Algonquin. Now the battle over the world’s literary territory, a contest on the epic scale of Mothra vs. Godzilla, is between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

The Inside-out Knowledge Network

In my last post I advocated helping our students learn to build personal learning networks by encouraging them to seek specific information to their questions in real time from real people. I think that this should be done "inside-out" by guiding them to familiar resources within their schools, families, and local community.

In Five 10th Graders Jump Outside of the Box, I think I demonstrated how authentic and self-directed this can be. In Rewiring the Learning Networks for Schools, I shared a video which shows how students can "cultivate their curiosity"* by asking nuanced questions to experts and then expressing the experience through multi-media.

Now, granted, at a college prep school like ours we teach students to write research "papers" with formal annotation using vetted sources from academic journals and the like. I am not demanding that we abandon this age-old "college prep" system for culling information and synthesizing it to support a thesis. But in terms of guiding our students to authentically learn about topics and get their real questions answered, why aren't we networking them with real-time experts and real-time persons? It would be ironic to suppose that the teacher down the hall is only an expert on her subject when she is assigned to teach a certain set of students a certain time of the day. To heck with the schedule. Let's make her available to any student in the school.

Then, let's build this network "inside-out". Let's add folks within the reach of our school community to our grid. Whenever I've brainstormed with classes of students about finding "experts" we've always identified parents, friends' parents, or persons these parents know. We have alumnae who are experts in all fields imaginable. In virtually every instance, whenever a student has approached one of these persons for knowledge, they have enthusiastically welcomed this. Why can't we start collecting persons like these in a database so that we can tap them with an email question, an interview or even invite them to one of our classes as a speaker?

And don't you dare shoot this idea down by suggesting that I am trying to replace a school library or setting up these "experts" to be barraged by inquiries. Our conceptual framework of research is so far removed from this at the present time to render these concerns absurd. Besides, we would not add someone to our grid without his or her explicit permission.

Yes, I have very definite ideas about approaching this exciting challenge. In my next post I am going to explain (drum roll, please) The M-Hub Project-- "A knowledge hub project designed to leverage new technologies in order to facility authentic learning experiences for Marlins of all ages."

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Screen shot of 6th period "Teen Rights" Wikispaces page
*From Tony Wagner's "The Global Achievement Gap"