Next Steps

What have we tried to do here?

It takes a local network to raise a child; it takes a national network to brainstorm the ideas for doing it. What broader communication infrastructure would link people in different communities to share their efforts to make things better in education?

Ideally, a broader network sparking ground-up innovations in education would help people connect to other people struggling and succeeding w/ similar issues in their own communities.

We're starting by this attempt to share out our own work. Tell us: Did we format our examples in useful ways? Did we offer too much information on what we did, or not enough? Do you want to know more or contact us? Are you doing related work that you want to "report out"? We'd love to spark a lively exchange between people about what is working and being explored.

Our next steps

Our PI is moving to direct CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at the University of California San Diego.

Our goal will now be to work bicoastally to improve the communication infrastructure of public education.

In San Diego, we'll explore analogous efforts and in Somerville, we hope to continue to create and test free/low cost tools and strategies for supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

We also want to connect to other folks doing similar things where they live. Could we get lots of people developing a full toolkit of free/open source communication tools and strategies linking diverse partners in public education?

Researchers and companies typically design tech tools for education and then head to schools to try them. Many avoid the bottlenecks of public schools altogether. Policymakers typically just tell youth and educators regulations constraining such tools’ use in public schools. Put together, this leaves young people, families, and educators in “traditional” public schools with little power to direct the use of technology in 21st century public education. So, how might diverse youth, educators, families, and researchers instead come together to co-design uses of social and digital media that effectively support young people’s learning in diverse, mixed-income, and traditional public schools? How might such efforts transform public schools from the inside out?

With funding from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, we're forming a Working Group to forge a collaboration between several projects concerned with this question. For this Working Group, we’ll convene a group of organizations (first at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and then at other participating institutions in the Boston area) for three week-long sessions, to analyze documentation of the first six efforts of the OneVille Project. Our goal for the year will be to keep honing documentation like this wiki's, to support and spark other diverse communities exploring such uses of commonplace and low-cost social media. By discussing OneVille’s efforts as a starter set, we’ll together hone a model across our projects, in which diverse intergenerational teams work together to design uses for social media that transform public education.

Think about it: What might happen if more people start sharing innovative ways of improving education in their own schools more generally?

Our first year’s focus will be OneVille’s: exploring everyday uses of social media for linking youth and supporters in routine communications about ways to support youths’ learning and development. Simultaneously, we’ll consider next tools in the kit for social media use in public education, such as projects to support students and teachers in online information literacy (Youth and Media Lab (YAM), Berkman), and projects to adapt citywide information-sharing and planning tools for schools (Center for Future Civic Media, MIT; CIRCLE, Tufts; and Emerson College).

Examples of Broader Info-Sharing

JEDD ADD YOUR REVIEW HERE, ADD IN FROM THE OLD WIKI TOO.

Here are some examples of info-sharing models:

Edutopia.

Peer 2 Peer University.

Connexions: http://cnx.org/content/m37276/latest/?collection=col11292/latest

IBM’s Reinventing Education initative (see Kanter’s “Change Toolkit.”).

Open Learning Initiative (“Learn how to do xxx” videos – [stuff w/ right answers.] use for CREATE? http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/visual-communication-design

MIT Open Software program

Lesley: e learning

Flossmanuals are a nice example of simple, somewhat visual documentation:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/audacity/

-Susan’s wiki is a nice example of the visual "pop" I'd love our wiki to have:

http://learn2teach.pbworks.com/w/page/15779288/Learn-2-Teach,-Teach-2-Learn

EliJAH's template: add here.

ADD MORE E.G.S HERE.

Index

• Why a network?
• Audience
• Outside Examples
• Use cases
• Example Evaluation, comparing collaborative social filtering
• Unit of analysis
• Incentive structure
  • How Commons Based Peer-Production favors unity of purpose and work
• Open licensing of content
• Taxonomy vs Folksonomy
• Network creation and maintenance
• Examples of other 'networks'

EXCESS HERE For example: how would such information best be organized, to avoid the information overload of the internet? We had an idea called an

Interaction Map

Create:

Graphic diagram with hyperlinks that will organize usable knowledge about exciting ways to improve education:

Parent – Child      Caregiver – Child
Neighbor – Child     Mentor - Child
Child – Child    Youth - Youth
Teacher – Child     Administrator – Child
Social worker  - Child
Parent –Teacher
Parent – Administrator
Community organizer  - Legislator

Other information-sharing efforts: Code for America: could a 311 line and citywide "dashboard" be used in education, to show quant data and, to support youth and adults to use cellphone and internet technology to make qualitative suggestions to improve schools?