Next Steps

The Last Layer: Connecting to Folks Doing Similar Work in Other Communities.

Want to talk further?

Are you working on improving communications in your own school or community?

Contact us here at xxxxxx.

How'd we do in sharing our own first efforts?

Our goal with this wiki has been to inform and support people in doing related work elsewhere.

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 about what we've been doing?
• Would you contact us to share what you've been doing?

We'd love to spark a lively exchange between people working on similar things. It takes a local network to raise a child; it takes a national network to brainstorm the ideas for doing it.

Think about it: What might happen if lots of youth, families, and educators started sharing out their educational innovations more generally? If more folks connected to other people struggling and succeeding w/ similar issues in their own communities, would a broader network grow, sparking ground-up innovations in education?

Why We Need More People Working on the "Toolkit"

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?

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. 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.

In San Diego, we'll hope to explore analogous efforts and link SD innovators to Somerville innovators.

in Somerville in fall 2011, we'll continue to test texting "groups," pilot and tweak our dashboard to be usable anywhere, and continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network. We also want to learn what happens when the ePortfolio seeds across Somerville High school!

In 2011-12, with funding from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine (itself funded by the MacArthur Foundation), we'll be inviting our participants to share their work and ideas with several other projects concerned with how everyday tech use by youth and adults can improve social and civic life. These include folks from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard; the Center for Civic Media at MIT; CIRCLE, at Tufts; and Emerson College. To get conversation started in this Working Group, we’ll convene OneVille's participants with folks from these organizations and other local educators and community members, to analyze the first efforts of the OneVille Project. One goal for the year will be to keep honing our online documentation like this wiki's, so it supports and sparks other diverse communities exploring such uses of commonplace and low-cost tech in education. We also want to consider a model across our projects, in which diverse intergenerational teams work together to design uses for commonplace tech that transform public education.

Simultaneously, we’ll consider the others' efforts to support students and teachers in designing policies for online information literacy (Youth and Media Lab (YAM), Berkman), and to adapt citywide information-sharing and planning tools for schools (CCM, CIRCLE, Emerson).

We hope to bring more folks who work on tech and civic engagement generally into the task of improving the core of public education! Maybe we'll get lots of people developing a full toolkit of free/open source communication tools and strategies linking diverse partners in public education. Anyway, we'll keep exploring everyday uses of commonplace, low-cost, and free tech for linking youth and supporters in routine communications about ways to support youths’ learning and development. We'll also keep trying to connect to other folks already doing similar things where they live.

Examples of Broader Info-Sharing

DOES JEDD'S REVIEW FIT HERE? JEDD, YOU COULD ADD YOUR REVIEW HERE, ADD IN FROM THE OLD WIKI TOO.

THIS STUFF BELOW IS JUST PLACEHOLDER/OLD:

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?