Exercise Four: Mapping your Neighborhoods

from Hand Maps

Thinking about the spaces we inhabit and how we move in and through them, and what that might reveal to us about collaboration, connection and contact zones.

1. Draw a map of your childhood neighborhood (or one of them if you moved about).

2. Draw a map of your current neighborhood.

3. Draw a map of your in-situ work neighborhood.

4. Draw a map of your cyber-hood(s).

4. Draw your paths through these spaces, making heavily traveled routes easily identifiable to someone looking at your maps.

We’ll talk about what we notice about our paths and what this visual exercise reveals about the ways we interact with others in our well-traveled spaces.

Third-Place Learning: University, Local Community and Open-Ed Community

1. Contemplation: Slowing Down and Being Alone

Image/Word Exercise

What role does contemplation play in your university life?

2. Reflection: As Connector

Conversation, The Social Dimension of Learning, in Contact Zones
Examples:
Blogger’s Field Trip
Story with Words Exchange, an example of students becomingBenjamin’s Stage vs. Screen Actors

Blogging the World

Piya’s “Journey Back” Blogging Experience

Planning conversation within the university, within the community beyond the walls, with the world.

3. Collaboration: Meaningful, Innovative Projects with Impact/Third-Place Learning
Students Dislike Group Work

“Each participant’s individual capacities are deepened at the same time that participants discover the benefits of reciprocity” and “…the achievement of productive collaboration requires sustained time and effort. It requires the shaping o a shared language, the pleasures and risks of honest dialogue, and the search for a common ground.” Vera-John Steiner, Creative Collaborations (p.204)

Loosening the grip of over-professionalization of the higher ed learning experience by opening up our notions of expertise, of reciprocal apprenticeships, entering contact zones.

Examples:
Artmobs
Murmur Project
Murder, Madness and Mayhem Wikipedia Project

Your examples/plans:

4. Offering the PASSEGIATTA Principle but Updating to a Fluid Community Space

Ritualistic yet always the promise of the unexpected. Participatory learning. Sunstein’s Republic.com contention that “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.”

Bad Examples:
–A college buying space in town for a space aimed at students and faculty.
–One-shot blogging in courses–not sustained, not meaningful; exercises to get through, assigned and restricted.
–One-shot or lopsided service-learning projects in which the primary beneficiaries are the students and their learning goals.

Good Examples:
—Dispatx.com Artist Collaborative, Transparent, In-Process, Revising, Stretching, Ambling
–-Carrot Mobs
—smARThistory
–PS 1 Architectural Competition

Your Examples and Plans:

Exercise One: First Words

We’ll generate a tagcloud here of the first words given in response to several prompts.

If you like this sort of thing, you can also play the Word Association Game online.

Exercise Three: Old Russian Custom

Suitcases

Originally uploaded by masochismtango

1. Jot down five words/search terms that express WHAT MATTERS to you

a. in the world

b. in the university

c. in your personal life

2. Go out on the Web and see what you find matching these terms on Flickr and Youtube and Archive.org and anywhere else you like to go.

3. Share in your small group.

3. As a group, grab five of the “things” you found on the Web that resonate for you all, and create a collage on Glogster. Do not add text. Post the link to the collage as a comment to this post.

Follow-up: For faculty–how do you use the first weeks of class?

James Zull and Neuronal Networks

Students and alums sharing personal context.

Dan’s digital story

Exercise Two: Deep Learning

Maine Greene from Landscapes of Learning:
“…each of us achieved contact with the world from a particular vantage point, in terms of a particular biography. All of this underscores our present perspective and affects the way we look at things and talk about things and structure our realities.”

(A Post on The Crucial Opening Weeks of a Course, Exercises)

Deep Learning Exercise (borrowed from Rita Pougiales at Evergreen State College)

a. How old were you when the experience took place? (The experience should be the most profound in recollection, so there are no age restrictions on when it occurred.)
b. Where were you? (The physical context: outside, at home, on a trip, alone at night, during a thunderstorm—any situational details that feel relevant.)
c. Who were you with? (Alone, with a close friend, performing for an audience, babysitting—the social context.)
d. What was your dominant emotion at the time? (Fear, elation, perplexity, desperation, serenity, panic—try to capture the dominant emotional quality of the experience from which the learning emerged.)
e. What did you learn? (Frame this in the way that best expresses its meaning for you, not simply in terms of skill or content acquired. For instance, you might have learned to swim, but the meaning of this accomplishment is best expressed in terms of the inner strength you discovered through overcoming your fear of water.)
f. How did you know you’d learned this? (This realization might have come much later and might still be unfolding.)