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The KUWP & The Hour of Code 2015

We live in a world surrounded by technology. We know that whatever field our students choose to go into, their ability to succeed will increasingly hinge on understanding how technology works. But only a tiny fraction of us are learning computer science, and less students are studying it than a decade ago. Good news is, we’re on our way to change this. If you’ve heard about the Hour of Code before, you might know it made history. The Hour of Code campaign has an audacious goal: to introduce 10 million students to one hour of computer science. Spend an hour and experience a brief introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code and show that anybody can learn the basics.

The Kean University Writing Project is joining this massive campaign to prepare students OF ALL AGES for the 21st century. We extend this invitation to the entire Kean University community. Please join us on Monday December 7, 2015! We will hold an “Hour of Code” drop-in session from 2-4pm at the Kean University Writing Project office in CAS 314 (3rd floor of the Center for Academic Success, Kean University).

You might be wondering what does coding have to do with writing? The Kean University Writing Project knows that writing in its many forms is the signature means of communication in the 21st century. We envision a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world. Writing today is a more expansive undertaking than simply just taking pen to paper. Digital writing (in its many forms) has expanded our collective means of expression. Connect with the KUWP team and explore the basics of coding while we continue to consider the many new ways to write.

HERE is the link to discover the world of computional thinking via fun, engaging tutorials. Join us and HOMAGO!: (Hang out, Mess around, Geek out!)

For more information on what the Hour of Code celebration is all about, click HERE. For fantastic teacher resources, click HERE.

Obama writes his first line of code:

WorldLiterate 2015-11-05 20:07:43

In my current “Writing Theory & Practice” course, we have been discussing the elusive notion of “voice” in writing. What makes a writerly voice distinct, audible, sincere, authentic? What makes a voice compelling? We have recognized that voice is connected to both embodiment and subjectivity. We have talked about the important link between voice and empowerment. We have acknowledged how hard it is to hone one’s writerly voice, as we reach for a kind of agility that allows us to shift our voices depending on audience or context.

All of this to say that finding one’s voice in writing is a complex task, and one that has become more daunting as the tools of the trade have expanded. The connectivity of web-based networks and myriad digital applications have opened up vast new opportunities, formats, and audiences for writing. Digital writing has certainly evolved well beyond the basic word processing function. Blogs, texting, crowdsourced research, the hyperlink, and multimodal composition are now somewhat ubiquitous. Digital writing is not simply a matter of integrating new tools into an unchanged repertoire of writing processes. Rather, digital writing today is about the dramatic changes in the ecology of writing and communication — what it means to create, compose, and share. In short, digital writing is a mode of thinking.

With this change in ecology in mind, my students and I have decided to join Digital Writing Month. And, I would like to extend the invitation here to anyone who is interested in writing in the 21st century. Digital Writing Month (better known as #DigiWriMo) is a month-long writing challenge and collaborative adventure. This November, participants will work to redefine “writing” in the digital. We will not confine digital writing merely to words, but open up the possibilities of composition to transmedial embrace. To quote this year’s @DigiWriMo organizers @Bali_Maha, @dogtrax, and @NomadWarMachine:

Would you like to spend a month experimenting with new forms of writing, or even just focusing on writing goals you have for yourself, amongst a supportive community? Would you like an opportunity to get inspired by other digital writers, and learn about different forms of digital expression? Would you like to find collaborators for your digital projects?

Digital Writing Month is an open invitation for anyone who is interested in writing and its evolution in a digital context. Participants from all over the worldare invited to take risks, to play and to explore creative forms of expression. #DigiWriMo participants will network and build community in the context of their writing. “They may conspire, co-author, cooperate, collude, or even compete.” The point is to experiment, to push our boundaries and create, and to locate our creations on the web, in relationship with other creations, other words and other authors. #DigiWriMo is also about building networks and community while creating an audience. There will be activities, online events, and contributions during each week of November to help and to inspire.

Four broad weekly themes are designed to push our creative faculties throughout this #DigiWriMo journey:

Writing: The Shifting Notions of Writing;
Visual: Using our Lens to Compose;
Audio: The Story of Sound and Waves; and
Transmedia: Pushing into the Edges of Stories.

Because Digital Writing Month is an open networked experience, this means you can come and go as you please and contribute as you see fit.

Writing is no longer a solitary undertaking. As my own “Writing Theory & Practice” students continue to contemplate the task of “finding one’s voice” in writing, they have teamed up with #DigiWriMo in order to broaden their own audience. They will pursue these questions publicly and share their reflections as true 21st century learners. And, they will engender further conversations as they conduct a twitter chat on the topic (Nov. 23 from 6-7p.m. EST with the hashtag #DigiWriMo). Please join us in building this dynamic, playful, and thoughtful learning community. Writing in its many forms is the signature means of communication in the 21st century. Let’s explore together as we envision a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world.

This post was originally published with DML Research Hub.

Advancing New Forms of Scholarship in Writing

I continue to think a great deal about how new media has grown the possibilities of our collective academic work. As the director of a Masters in Writing Studies Program at Kean University, I often reckon with how our traditional forms of scholarship are merely one reference point when considering how to produce and create new knowledge. As a result, I have for some time been a proponent of a more expansive sense of what writing might entail in the 21st century, and I have often spoken about “Writing-as-Making.”

The digitized and computational environments of our new mediascape have inherently expanded our understanding of what it means to compose. In many cases, my students have come up with innovative ways to harness the affordances of a digitized environment to envision the work that will matter to them. They are working with new media tools, and that work leads them to new and important questions about the nature of writing itself. Thesis work can indeed exemplify innovative, experimental formats — including video, websites and other multimedia interactivity. Most of my students yearn to complete a final project that might make sense in the broader context of “the real world,” and new media tools provide for them the means to reach that goal. They often aspire to produce work that can be shared and distributed beyond the confines of a small academic readership. As a firm believer that scholarship should be connected, I offer here a few models for inventive, digital and experimental new forms of academic thesis work.

The following three MA projects, which I directed this Spring 2015, exemplify what is possible when a student is given the freedom to think of the his or her work from a “making” perspective:

Advancing New Forms of Scholarship in Writing

“Ravenous” is a creative/literary MA thesis project, written by Kristi Kulcsar, that explores the opportunities that Twitter and other social media platforms afford to generate plot, setting and character development in the act of storytelling. An interesting spin on “twitterature” by using tweets and conversation posts on social networks to tell a story, Kristi playfully remediates the literary classic “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Kristi’s project incorporates multiple writing genres. Her work is part reference guide, part reflection, part creative remediated fiction. The project offers useful resources for digital storytelling enthusiasts as it highlights many practical current tools, research on Poe and his context, as well as extensive assessment of ongoing writing methods/processes with her embedded “Ravenous” blog.

Advancing New Forms of Scholarship in Writing

The spark for Gina Jorge’s MA thesis was found while participating in the Kean University Writing Project’s Invitational Summer Institute, which lead to further research on Connected Learning. In her MA project entitled “Engaged Learning: Digital Practices for Writing Instruction,” Gina explores digital practices for teaching writing and rhetoric to undergraduate students, merging theory and the best practices for writing instruction. As she was researching, she decided to build a resource for educators that focuses on pedagogy for interactive learning. With the digital teaching resource, she examines which digital practices and current trends are most effective for student engagement. Hightlighting connected learning theory and her own case studies, her work uses technology as an intuitive tool to introduce new forms of literacy while meeting pedagogical goals.

Advancing New Forms of Scholarship in Writing

As a player of MMORPGs and other roleplaying games, Nicole Dreste learned not only to write but to code and compose digitally in creative, original ways, both collaboratively and independently. She decided to consider this further with an authoethnographical perspective for her MA project, “Play, Code, Compose, Write: An Autoethnography.” Probing the relationship between writing and gaming practices, her autoethnography studies her own perspective in roleplaying and writing discourse within the context of fan-based content from the MMORPGs “World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.” From turning chat-text into narrative through the use of third-party apps to attempting to produce video narrative as a “gamer-author” (Johnson 278), Nikki has transitioned back and forth between successes and failures, highlighting her journey through play and learning.

Each of these special projects has at its heart a theoretical inquiry, but each student chose to foreground their exploration from different writing stances (whether creative, professional or pedagogical). My students have effectively shared their own recursive writing methods through a record of reflection on their own shifting processes/methods. Simultaneously, they also forged new territory in thinking about a final “product” in an academic context. The result highlights that it is not simply the outcome that should be prioritized. Rather, the journey in getting there is stressed as equally significant and meaningful.

Advancing New Forms of Scholarship in Writing

Anyone interested in adding their voice to the discussion about new media and the changing nature of academic scholarship, use Twitter hashtag #remixthediss. Another great resource is the ongoing/lively forum about this topic explored by HASTAC Scholars.

First four images from projects by Kristi Kulcsar, Gina Jorge and Nicole Dreste. Last image, from left, are Kulcsar, Jorge, Dreste and Mia C. Zamora at Kean University Graduate School commencement in May.

This post was originally published with Digital Media & Learning Research Hub

Speculative Design for Emergent Learning: Taking Risks

As I look in the rear view mirror at this past semester, I marvel at the grand experiment of my #WritingRace class at Kean University that I blogged about as we embarked on our journey. I decided to take co-learning one step further. When I first met my fantastic group of graduate and undergraduate students for this course, I announced that they were in charge of their own learning outcomes. I also mentioned that there was no prescribed syllabus for the course. Rather, they would design their own syllabus as they considered their collective goals. Along with planning their own learning outcomes, my students would also determine their course materials, select their readings, and design their own class projects. I took a deep breath as I listened, watched, reassured, and guided my students. I often tried to step out of the way, and it was not easy. Eventually, they formulated an inspired vision of authentic learning. And, with time, perseverance, and collaboration, they realized that vision, despite the fact that there was no path marked for them to get there.

Speculative Design for Emergent Learning: Taking Risks I must mention that I have successfully taught this “Writing Race & Ethnicity” class in the past. These earlier iterations have followed a more traditional design. I have distributed a well-honed syllabus which included significant readings in the fields of both race theory and literature. I have provided a clear break down of course expectations, including learning outcomes and class assignments. By all accounts, my earlier versions of this course have had clear favorable outcomes. The work submitted by students has been significant, the discussions have been memorable and engaging, and the class chemistry has led to a true feeling of meaningful community. Some of my favorite teaching memories are attached to this particular class in its earliest form. But, despite this successful track record, this time around, I stepped back, and really thought about the point of this class.

Why would anyone take a university course entitled “Writing Race & Ethnicity?” Inherent in the title of the course itself is an urgency about matters of the real world. Why does race matter? How has it been written and rewritten in our society? What conversations can we have to improve our understanding of each other? How can we include new voices in such conversations? Considering our headlines and the real challenges regarding race that we face together, I knew deep down that the course needed to connect to the world as we know it in more explicit ways. A prescribed series of academic readings and writings on theories of race seemed to fall short of that urgency.

So, I summoned the courage to cast the purpose of this learning experience first and foremost in the context of the real world rather than a familiar academic exercise. As I considered new ways to design this class, I found I was seeking an experience of learning that would matter more to my students. But, how does one design for unplanned experience without falling back on the overdetermined perspective of one’s own authority on the issues at hand?

I let the students decide for themselves what they wanted to learn, and I gave them the space to figure out how to make their learning matter in the world beyond our four literal walls. The conversation began with certain questions. Their personalized answers brought forth diverse perspectives that revealed authentic forms of knowledge within our own ranks. (Knowledge rooted not necessarily in theoretical engagement, but knowledge direct from my student’s lives). Students were stressed, struck by the notion that they would have to step up and claim their own forms of learning. They were taken aback by the amount of control they were given to learn on their own terms. They hesitated, they waited for signals and structures. It was a delicate dance in supporting without commandeering process. I had to practice a certain kind of discipline in mirroring back to them their own inquiries as I reminded them that vulnerability is the seed of true learning. All the while, I felt vulnerable myself as I continued to push back the fear that my “experiment” would go awry, that it might turn out a complete class “disaster.” I learned that they needed time “to steep in it” as they found their way to their own goals.

Early on, they identified a collective goal of creating a “digital omnibus” — a website of resources that they would curate and aggregate in order to share their understanding online in the hopes it would help others. Soon, students identified their particular concerns regarding why race matters. They organized themselves into five small groups around five central concerns: Race and Identity; Race and Popular Culture (especially the role of humor); Race in the Classroom; Race in the International Context; and Race and the Politics of Language. They were self-reflective as they blogged steadily about their emerging interests while researching and reading on their chosen topics. In due course, there was a remarkable turn of course. As Baltimore burned, they decided that the “digital omnibus” design was too static a design for them. They wanted to reach out to others more explicitly. They created a mini-MOOC — a course experience that they planned and implemented with the express intention of sharing and conversing with others.

In final self assessments for the class, students wrote extensively about how surprised they were at how much they learned from their own classmates. They wrote eloquently about their increased sense of empathy. They also marvelled at how they were able to gain new digital confidence, as their instinct for self directed learning (i.e. just google it!) became a newfound form of self-reliance. My students also wrote about how much they thought about this class outside of class. They wrote about how they realized they were talking with many other people in their lives about the issues we grappled with in class.

When students readily admitted that the learning experience seeped over to shape their real lives, that is when I knew the experiment was truly working. They spoke about the course opening up difficult conversations in their personal lives — conversations that they would not have the courage to engage in before. Several students wrote that their “biggest takeaway” was that they had more clarity about themselves — that they knew better who they were in this complex world. A refined and nuanced sense of self was an unforeseen outcome, and I couldn’t be more pleased that this outcome emerged. Perhaps the most telling comment was when one student wrote, “This is the most important work I have done for any class in my entire education.”

I have learned that if you give freedom and trust to students, they will find their own way to the learning that matters the most. Thinking about this course as a re-design has been a means of speculating about how things might be — to imagine possible futures. This kind of classroom experiment opens up space — the space for emergence. What emerged was the inherent knowledge within our own ranks, and the need to connect to a world outside in ways that matter.

It is no coincidence that this year’s DML Conference is a “Call for Equity in Design.” Designing for emergence is always intrinsically a risk. Which leads me to my final reflections on risk taking: Playing it safe is not going to yield the opportunities that will make a difference. Off-script is when you don’t quite know where you are going, but you have the courage to commit to the journey knowing that it is the process itself that will hold the worth. Breaking outside of conventional form is where excitement lies. Being an effective educator cannot remain a quest to be a master with a masterful product. Rather, it is dynamic performance and a practice.

Banner image credit: opensource.com; inset image: Pixabay

This post was originally published with Digital Media & Learning Research Hub

The Minecraft Camp

Ode To The Minecraft Camp

I am blessed to wear two special “hats”. I am simultaneously both an educator and a Mom. And I often marvel at how these two roles are truly integrated. I find that many of the reflections that emerge from my educator self are mirrored by the experience of my parental self, and vice-versa. As an educator, I am always looking for “in-roads” to enhance the peer learning experiences in my classrooms. I ponder the ways that I might harness the power of connecting in order to revitalize learning. And as a parent of two young children, I often wonder how such habits of empowered social learning take hold, and in what spaces and experiences do these instincts take flight? One particular opportunity has shed powerful light on these questions.

Enter the virtual Minecraft Camp.[x_video_embed type=”5:3″ no_container=”true”][/x_video_embed]

Launched last summer in “beta” form by Pursuitery, and this summer being offered by Connected Camps in collaboration with Institute of Play, this special opportunity for my own kids has offered a enlighted lens into the power of learning beyond the traditional classroom context. Â I have grasped so much by simply observing my own two young sons’ enthusiasm for Minecraft, especially as they have become avid members of this special Minecraft Camp community. Â The Summer 2015 camp consists of a complete 4-week camp experience on moderated camp servers from July 6th – August 2nd, 2015. The Minecraft camp can be accessed in the comfort of your own home and at your convenience. Kids have the opportunity to learn with expert peer counselors in a safe, moderated, multiplayer environment.

Like so many other parents of young kids, there has been concern regarding the amount of “screen time” our sons experience and we have strived for a healthy balance. Â We have also been big advocates of good old fashioned “go outside and play” time. Still, the Minecraft bug has bitten both my boys. And God knows, they are not alone in this phenomenon. Parents everywhere are adjusting to minecraft obsession. Minecraft is a sandbox video game that has most certainly taken the world by storm. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft enable players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Think digitized legos, with activities including exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat. Minecraft is an open world game that has no specific goals for the player to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. When a child becomes a Minecraft enthusiast, an early step along the way is an interest in joining a community server in order to play this open game with other players. This social and participatory element of the Minecraft experience is at once an exciting growth opportunity but also presents a daunting risk. Parents are understandably concerned with keeping their children safe in an online environment. This monitored and safe Minecraft Camp has provided the chance for my own sons to experience participatory game play, while also learning problem solving and design, advanced building techniques, online web literacy, collaboration and community organizing, and ultimately, digital citizenship.

When they joined the first iteration of the camp last summer, they quickly acquired new skills. The most obvious acquisition was a myriad of new building techniques, some of which required more explicit computational thinking in order to execute. They also made new friends, and they learned how to communicate and plan with others while co-designing the world around them. They negotiated, built teams, designated roles, and worked with others to realize shared purpose. I was surprised how quickly they both improved their keyboarding skills. I guess when you want to communicate something quickly in real time (like texting), your fingers learn quickly to keep up with the pace of play. Each time they logged on, they were excited to see who was on the server. It reminded me of the real world experience of swinging by your local coffee shop or library. You wonder what friends or colleagues might be there when you decide to drop by. You delight in the serendipity of meeting new friends. There is no doubt that their virtual environment has mirrored the experiences of community building in the real world.

This summer I expect to see them “level up” around certain skill sets. They express the ambition of learning how to develop “let’s play” videos that capture their adventures as they build in the Connected Camp server. These short homemade videos are narrated by the individual players themselves as they explore and discover the virtual world that they are building. My sons are also especially excited to engage in “challenges” like adventure games with maps, and time based design jams. They have expressed interest in blogging about their in-game adventures. And they will also be participating in a coding week of the Minecraft Camp where they will learn to code in-game using the Lua programming language.

There is no doubt that there is considerable learning involved when kids play this game in a safe and productive environment. And their learning is often fueled by the social engagements which open up new possibilities for their creativity. My colleague Mimi Ito has written eloquently about her own son’s involvement as he gears up to take on the role of camp counselor this summer. Once an enthusiastic younger player, he is now a teen able to take on an advisory role as he guides the little kids-a great example of peer learning by design.

The “Mom” in me has been wary lately of the effect that traditional forms of classroom learning has had on the vital spirit of my children. I have observed the necessary transition from their early childhood exploration and play to the much more “hemmed-in” expectations of their elementary school curriculum. I have felt a sense of loss for them as they have experienced the gradual shift from open discovery through play, to an educational system ridden with worksheets and assessments. From kindergarten to the fourth grade, the fun factor has certainly waned. But in the summertime they feel free again for a myriad of reasons. In many ways that freedom mirrors the wisdom originally realized on the toddler’s playground. For deep and lasting learning is also about freedom. Make no mistake, the summertime is most certainly a time for powerful forms of learning. And in an open virtual game like Minecraft, kids can discover their own self-driven interests a new. They are free to learn in powerful intuitive ways from their friends. They can create on their own terms, and in the process they have room to discover what makes them tick.

Originally published by Connected Camps

A Pedagogy of Empowerment: Taking a Leap of Faith

In a previous article written for my Digital Media & Learning Research Hub blog, “Striving for New Ways to Learn How to Learn,” I wrote about co-learning as the heart of the connected learning experience. We have heard quite a bit about the limits of the “sage on the stage” approach and the dawning of new affordances in teaching with the “guide on the side” model. It goes without saying that a changing relationship to authority and hierarchy in the classroom is no small feat. It can certainly induce anxiety for all involved — the teacher must relinquish familiar control, the student must claim learning on terms that are not prescribed by anyone else. Unlearning is not easy for all involved. It is a radical shift setting everyone a bit adrift on an unknown course. But, this kind of paradigmatic sea change is about transformation. Transformation is indeed a complex, energy requiring developmental process. Like all meaningful change, I suspect it cannot occur without some necessary discomfort. And, I am experiencing this now first hand.

As a part of the Connected Courses community and, more recently, with Hybrid Pedagogy’s #moocmooc network, I have explored the topic of co-learning with many inspired colleagues/practitioners throughout the world. We continue to conduct open conversations and gather excellent resources regarding co-learning. Along the way, these engagements have prompted me to dig deeper, considering what co-learning methods truly challenge my comfort zone, pushing beyond the practices that I have already established. The truth is, for some time now I have incorporated open, networked, and connected practices in my teaching. As a matter of standard (intuitive) practice, I have always made student agency, student choice, and student instinct a listening/actionable priority. I suspect every seasoned teacher has a kind of momentum which is rooted in the purposeful design of the learning experience. One learns what “works,” what readings/conversations/exercises equate with memorable and meaningful moments. It is most definitely easier to stay the course, especially when your well tested methods have yielded positive results. So, if a class has worked really well in the past, why redesign the experience? Said another way, why mess with success?

This semester, I am revamping/uprooting a course that “works.” I am taking a great leap of faith because I am not sure these changes will yield the same successful results as the previous version. “Writing Race & Ethnicity” is a cross-listed undergrad/grad class in my Department of English Studies at Kean University. This is a course about story, the story of the Rhetoric(s) of Race and Ethnicity, and its structure and function in the places we live — home, school, work, the world. It is a course about writing, about the writing and the re-writing of race … of my/your identity. It is a course that has always been incisive, empowering, and inherently personal. With the affordances of a networked classroom, we have the collective power of engaging in this conversation publically. And, although this presents some “risk,” this is not what I find most challenging. The really difficult part of this revamp is relinquishing my own version of what works. In short, I will not outline their course of study, I will not tell them exactly what to read, and I will not list their learning outcomes. My students will do all of that — through reflection, collaboration, and negotiation with each other. I will guide from the side.

Each course has its own chemistry, and I guess for some educators, courses are almost like unique children we will always cherish. (Each class has its own special charms, produces a unique learning community …a great class leaves us with the trace of remarkable memories). I am fortunate to be teaching a course this semester that I have successfully taught before and I have always loved to teach. I must admit that when it comes to my course rotation roster, I am always happy when it is time to teach this one. But, this semester, my new approach feels like I am hanging on a limb. I am uncertain. I feel vulnerable. I fear my experiment will fail. (Despite the fact that I know we really need to rethink this notion of failure.) So why do this? Because somewhere down in my gut I know that vulnerability is the heart of learning, and I know I need to learn too. The students just might think that by relinquishing my directorial lead, I am exempting myself from the “real work” of being a professor. But, I can assure them that this guiding (but not professing) work is much more difficult. It requires me to be responsive and candid, and generous without reassurance. As colleagues Maha Bali and Jesse Stommel have recently written:

In the Introduction to Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes, “any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged.”(8) She describes the process through which we become self-actualized in the classroom. “Teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.”(15) And, it isn’t just that students should be empowered to show up as full selves, but that teachers must as well, in order to model, but also to show the kind of care for the work that only comes when we make ourselves at least somewhat vulnerable.

Connected learning boils down to risk taking in the end. To quote colleague Jade Davis from her recent DML blog post, “I think the biggest risk in connected learning is Not Trying.” Mostly, I find that co-learning is somehow linked to a kind of “life attitude.” When I became a mother, I realized quickly that everyday my children teach me myriad vital things. These brand new people, who have so little experience, are in many ways masters of what is significant in life. A truly wise person learns from every person he or she connects with in the most unforeseen moments. This is of course the soul of co-learning. And, perhaps it is also the seed of equity and justice. But, it is not necessarily easy to maintain this outlook, especially as we continue to navigate institutional demands, programmatic expectations, and expected outcomes.

So why all this talk of leaps and risks? I truly believe there is much at stake in what is considered here. Institutional change that matters must generate first from the heart of the learning communities we design. These co-learning steps we are taking together are indeed the seeds of a kind of personal growth that can play an important role in contributing to a healthy citizenry. The transformative force for equity and justice in society lies first in the way we come together to learn. In the ways we are educated lies a foundation for how we meet the world. Striving for equity in the classroom context will set a course for collaborating and negotiating — a habit that will certainly yield fair-minded moments in unforeseen futures. A connected co-learning model is essential not just for reimagining education, but more importantly, for realizing our democratic aspirations.

P.s. A helpful resource for preparing to “flip the syllabus”: Fieldnotes to 21st Century Learning. Some resources that helped me rethink the terms of evaluation (grading): Miriam Posner’s lucid outline of her “contract grading”; Gardner Campbell’s APGAR system for learning self evaluation and Steve Greenlaw’s resulting criterium for grades.

Banner image credit: Vishal Patel

Join the Hour of Code!

We live in a world surrounded by technology. Information, commerce, communication, and entertainment all rely on computers. But only a tiny fraction of us learn computer science, the basics of how computers work, or how to create software, apps, or web sites. Computer Science provides a foundation for virtually any career and everybody can benefit from learning the basics.

Did you know:

Software jobs outnumber students 3-to-1. The gap is 1 million jobs over 10 years – these are some of the highest paying jobs.
In many countries, it’s required (China, Vietnam, Estonia…)
The basics can be learned by anybody, starting in elementary school. But fewer than 10% of students try. Only 2% are women.
1% are students of color.

The Kean University Writing Project is joining a massive campaign to prepare students OF ALL AGES for the 21st century during Computer Science Education Week (Dec 8-14). The Hour of Code campaign has an audacious goal: to introduce 10 million students to one hour of computer science.

The invitation is extended to you and any of your fellow colleagues, friends, students, or children of your own, to celebrate the national celebration known as the Hour of Code. HERE is the link to discover the world of computional thinking via fun, engaging tutorials. HOMAGO!: Hang out, Mess around, Geek out!

For more information on what the Hour of Code celebration is all about, click HERE. For fantastic teacher resources, click HERE.