Next Steps

The Last Layer: Facilitating Public Knowledge-Sharing on Education Innovation

Our PI is moving to CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at UCSD. There, we'll explore the "layer" of regional and city-wide information-sharing, and, explore analogous efforts in SD to improve individual-level, school-level, and district-level communication infrastructure a la OneVille. Goals:

1. Continue to improve the local communication infrastructure of public education. Create and test tools for supporting the people who share children, to communicate re. improving young people's lives.

2. Create direct usable access to knowledge about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. (Twitter? Video documentation? Wikis?)

OneVille has been an attempt to create communication infrastructure within a district and schools, but the same infrastructure can support information-sharing nationally and beyond. Indeed, the ultimate scalable intervention in education may be organized local inquiry into ways of improving local education. And the most potent accountability model may be knowledgeable local stakeholders pressing each other toward doing “what works.” So, what forms of information-sharing would help the public see existing education innovation, and catalyze more of it?

Policy efforts alone cannot “fix” education from above; nor does knowledge on “what works” automatically get shared across localities. Instead, educators, mentors, families, and students themselves need direct access to the best knowledge available about improving and increasing learning opportunities for young people. So what forms of information-sharing would make this possible? We'll be exploring this.

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A few e.g.s 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

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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?