Category Archives: Connected Learning

This post is “extra” as the kids say… I really just want to share and celebrate these amazing “human body system” projects from my grade 10 Vocational Science students. It’s not just that they all turned into works of art. It’s also the engagement and thinking that went into their work. Nearly all students were highly intellectually engaged in this project. So I tried to find a way to relate it to Learning Sciences. It reminds me of the diversity of research topics and methods that I have read in the articles for my courses and for my own work and that my fellow students in my cohort are proposing. To name only a few: online learning–both engaging online teachers in communities of practice and using learning analytics to improve students success, project-based learning in medical school, professional learning communities in secondary schools, policies for mathematics curriculum at the national level, open educational practices within K-12 schools, teacher and administrator identity and agency in research partnerships, makerspaces and many more. The research methodologies are very diverse as well. Like these human body projects, each research study is both a work of art and very personal to the graduate students. Like I tell my own students, you need to deeply care about and want to make a positive impact on the issue you choose for your inquiry. The topic must be able to sustain your energy and passion for a long time. #100LSreflections #100dayproject 14/100

Dialectic—a word I did not know before starting my EdD courses. It shows up everywhere for me now. It has several layers of meaning. The most basic is “the juxtaposition or interaction of conflicting ideas, forces, etc.” (dictionary.com). A dialectic can also be “discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation” (merriam-webster.com). Those two meanings are just the beginning. When you embrace two conflicting or opposing ideas at the same time, you can expand your learning and develop new ideas. A couple of years ago, I went to a workshop at Rotman School of Management on integrative thinking and was introduced to the Pro-Pro chart—like a pro-con chart, except you put the pros from two competing or dialectical ideas to a solve problem into the chart. These photos are for the redesign of schooling. The dialectical ideas are a brick and mortar school vs an online school. The “cons” are not considered, at this point, because you want to make a solution that integrates these dialectical positions in a positive way. Then you find a new and transformative solution that will bring to fruition as many of the pros from both sides as possible.
Another way to look at the dialectic was in a chapter about critical pedagogical research I was reading tonight. “Critical teachers, therefore, must admit that they are in a position of authority and then demonstrate that authority in their actions in support of students. One action involves the ability to conduct research and produce knowledge. The authority of the critical teacher is dialectical; as teachers relinquish the authority of truth providers, they assume the mature authority of facilitators of student inquiry and problem posing. In relation to such teacher authority, students gain their freedom—they gain the ability to become self-directed human beings capable of producing their own knowledge” (Kincheloe, McLaren & Steinberg, 2011, p. 165). It is dialectical to use your power of authority to give power to the students to be authors of their own learning. I struggle with that dialectic every day. #100LSreflections#100dayproject 10/100

A post shared by Susan Campo (@susancampo) on Apr 13, 2018 at 10:00pm PDT

My heart wants to write about the word dialectic. Everything is dialectic. My mind says no. It’s too important and you are too tired. #100dayproject #100LSreflections 9/100

My students have been exploring Micro:bits in grade 9 Science the last few days. I gave them no instructions except: “Here is the website.” and “Be careful with them.” They rose to the occasion, as students do when you let them. Note that these are students who spent the fall semester with me in Geography doing inquiry-based learning and now we are doing Science together. I have a high level of trust for these beautiful people. They made basic “press the button and a word is displayed” and then, Magic 8 balls (lots of fun and laughter using that), rock, paper, scissors and many more things. No one has successfully used the bread board yet, but they are close. To be frank, I don’t know how to do it. At all. I didn’t even know to tell them to turn it on again with one of the buttons after uploading the program turns the Micro:bits off. But one of the kids figured it out. I also know very little about coding but I know it’s important and want to expose the students to it. Today, one of my students excitedly stated, “I coded a program! And it worked!” and it made my heart sing. They are teaching me. I almost don’t want to “connect it to the curriculum.” But alas, soon, we will be drawing circuits and calculating power and energy. This brings me back to my first day on campus at UofCalgary and I was playing around with an interactive display where touching the screen changes the actions of the moving “boids” or digital birds and someone came up behind me and said, “You can change the code too.” It was the professor (@pratim123)who created the program and display (and, eventually, taught one of my courses) and he intentionally created it for the public to “Hack the Flock.” I had no idea how to hack anything and, when he opened the code, I only changed the colour because that was pretty obvious. I remember feeling quite out of my league. I also did not have the agency or skills to play around with the code just for fun, like my students do. #100LSreflections #100dayproject 7/100 #swipeleft for more

A post shared by Susan Campo (@susancampo) on Apr 9, 2018 at 7:06pm PDT

My students have been exploring Micro:bits in grade 9 Science the last few days. I gave them no instructions except: “Here is the website.” and “Be careful with them.” They rose to the occasion, as students do when you let them. Note that these are students who spent the fall semester with me in Geography doing inquiry-based learning and now we are doing Science together. I have a high level of trust for these beautiful people. They made basic “press the button and a word is displayed” and then, Magic 8 balls (lots of fun and laughter using that), rock, paper, scissors and many more things. No one has successfully used the bread board yet, but they are close. To be frank, I don’t know how to do it. At all. I didn’t even know to tell them to turn it on again with one of the buttons after uploading the program turns the Micro:bits off. But one of the kids figured it out. I also know very little about coding but I know it’s important and want to expose the students to it. Today, one of my students excitedly stated, “I coded a program! And it worked!” and it made my heart sing. They are teaching me. I almost don’t want to “connect it to the curriculum.” But alas, soon, we will be drawing circuits and calculating power and energy.

This brings me back to my first day on campus at UofCalgary and I was playing around with an interactive display where touching the screen changes the actions of the moving “boids” or digital birds and someone came up behind me and said, “You can change the code too.” It was the professor (@pratim123)who created the program and display (and, eventually, taught one of my courses) and he intentionally created it for the public to “Hack the Flock.” I had no idea how to hack anything and, when he opened the code, I only changed the colour because that was pretty obvious. I remember feeling quite out of my league. I also did not have the agency or skills to play around with the code just for fun, like my students do. #100LSreflections#100dayproject 7/100

Slides from today’s presentation