Saturday, March 5, 2016

Our Project: Format and Principles

My students and I are working together to create a short, video-based, historically-informed, collaborative argument around a central theme of contemporary relevance that connects communication and civilization. For more on this theme, see my post, "Our Message [version 1]." In this post, I explain our project format and the principles it is built upon.

We are experimenting with a centralized / decentralized
hybrid text-video project
An innovative format
Arguments on contemporary topics may appear in text or video form, but are typically authored by individuals or by organizations. We are innovating by combining text and video (so that each format carries the message independently, though they are complementary); and by using a hub-and-spoke model by which our central argument (a video + blog post overseen by me, the instructor) refers to and draws upon topics which individual students develop in greater detail and from their own personal angles within their own video + blog post.  We are seeking a balance between centralized and distributed development of an argument, an argument with a clear center but with logical extensions more owned, developed and branded by individuals.


Authentic audiences and publication
We are getting outside of the classroom to engage many different audiences as we seek social proof on our concepts and format. Such formative feedback will steer our developing project. And we have the goal to publish our completed central project in the online journal, Hybrid Pedagogy, a cutting edge periodical that is open to the innovative formats.



Design thinking
We will be following design thinking principles, iterating and prototyping within this blog, producing content individually and collectively each week, seeking and giving feedback, then iterating again until we have a finished product.

Accountability and independence
Each week the students have the same two requirements: move forward their individual contribution; and contribute to the collaborative project. They are to blog twice weekly in order to report on their individual efforts. They will become members of teams and will be responsible to work within that team to achieve interim goals. 

Risks and rewards
The risk of allowing for such independence is that students may not perform or may not create content that contributes cohesively or meaningfully to the central project. At a certain point, as the project leader, I will indicate my confidence or lack of confidence in individual contributions. Only those individual projects that add to the project in a meaningful and timely way will be included in the final publication.

The potential reward here is that students will acquire skills in collaboration and online communication, and in crafting arguments responsive to present concerns and audiences. Hopefully they will benefit by beginning to understand the need to experiment with various communication formats and formats for collaboration as well.


15 comments:

  1. After reading this post I think that I'm going to make my own rewards list. As a student I would love to have influenced someone, particularly millennials, to regulate how much they use social media by recognizing the bad effects it has on their personal identity.

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  2. This post helped me realize that I need to change my argument a bit to a more specific problem, than the simple argument that we should put our technology away and improve our personal relationships by talking with people face-to-face. Maybe incorporating how civilization has been effected by this, and what we should do about it.

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  4. Agreeing with the comments previous to mine, I feel I need to hone in on a more specific and passionate argument so that I can create a meaningful contribution to the group project. I think that I will steer my argument in a way to appeal to older generations to persuade them to be more involved in utilizing technology in order to teach future generations and to benefit their own lives as well. Most people seem to disregard the 40-50+ age range, but I think that this group of people is just as important in helping the digital society to progress.

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  5. It's extremely useful to have something concrete to refer back to as we are honing our ideas now, thanks! Also after taking a look at Hybrid Pedagogy it gives me more guidance on what level to be steering my content towards.

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  6. This post definitely helps me to have a more concise sense of direction. As I was reading this post, it almost seemed like reading an abstract in a scientific paper. I like that concept--because what we're doing is experimenting!

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  7. I have a better understanding of our project thanks to this post. I feel that I have made progress in merging my argument into the main topic. I look forward to seeing what becomes of this project!

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  8. I think that your purpose of helping, us, the students experiment and use other media means in order to spread ideas going really well. I feel like these assingments have helped me learn how to use digital media in a way that i would have never sought to learn on my own. As well I am wondering what individual themes want. I feel like I understand the main concept but I need to ask you if my personal concept corilates with the over class idea.

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  9. This post helped me realize a bit more what our class assignment was. Though very simple, the picture shown above actually helped me a lot to understand the concept of this project. I had originally started my topic (globalization) as a general course of information on inter-connectivity. I've realized now that I need to make it about communication... not necessarily commerce and trade (like I had originally planned).

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  10. I think the methodology for this project is one that will take a lot of coordination, but will have a high payoff in the end. The interlocking web that will be created from such a project could be a great tool for future learners who don't have the time or interest to read through a long, linear presentation. At the same time, it's easy to see that such a project will require a lot of sacrifice on the individual level to get the project to work as a whole.

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  11. I think that this will be a highly effective way to carry out a class project. If all else fails at least we will learn better ways to communicate in the digital age. I like the fact that our work will be accessible to anyone who want to read it unlike my previous research paper like endeavors.

    I think that my own section of the work needs to take on more personal angle to be interesting and relevant.

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  12. I need to look through the Hybrid Pedagogy site a bit more so that I can get a better idea of what the final product will be

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  13. I like the idea of letting the students work independently and kind of find their niche. Like Eli mentioned, there's going to be a coordination problem. If we all feel a sense of accountability then we won't have that issue.

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  14. Over the weekend I did ample research into Hybrid Pedagogy, curating articles that seem pertinent to our topic. I came to a conclusion: this website is mainly written by and for educators. This has its drawbacks - some articles are not easily accessible due to the formality in which they are written. It is a hybrid academic journal mixed with blog post, but I think it's more academic journal than blog post. How will our final project fit in with this trend on the site? I'm not sure if it will be very natural.

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  15. After our discussion in class today, I think that having smaller hubs of ideas is a good way to have a more coordinated structure of thoughts. From the little exercise we had today to find our topic siblings, I think we can do a better job of finding topics of more similarities.

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