Vancouver Foundation – LOI

Title: The Innovative Learning Centre- technology enhanced learning

Introduction to your organization:

The Faculty of Education at UBC’s Okanagan campus fosters academic excellence and life-long personal growth through the pursuits of learning and teaching. Our program integrates exceptional teacher educators with innovative research and modern technology. Our intent is to inform educational thought, practice and policy and to continually engage in transformational learning opportunities.

Statement of the issues that this project will address:

In our global economy, employers seek a workforce of problem solvers, innovators, and inventors who are self-reliant and have the ability to think creatively and logically.  These attributes are critical foundations for educators and students in order to foster innovative capacity.   Enhancing Math literacy is one example that supports these attributes. The BC Ministry of Education and educators recognize the importance of Math skills in the 21st century economy and have identified Math literacy as crucial for students’ academic and personal success. However, educators continue to struggle to find appropriate resources, training opportunities and access to relevant technologies that support the needs of learners. The current Math curriculum lacks adequate examples of excellence in technology integration that support the development of creative skills and a love of the subject matter.

Exploring possibilities at the ILC:

The Faculty of Education is committed to working with industry, educators and students to find creative ways to integrate technology into learning.   The Innovative Learning Centre (ILC) in the Faculty of Education will be interactive, engaging developmental space at the intersection of research and practice for both real and virtual environments and will empower all parties to think differently about how learning takes place.  The inclusive design will encourage companies in the technology sector to work more effectively with academic partners and imagine and create software, tools, and resources to keep British Columbia on the cutting edge of educational innovation.

For the past 10 months the Director of the ILC has been working with educators, researchers, software designers and technology companies to explore how advanced technology can transform education, especially Math.  Questions guiding the research and collaboration within the ILC include:

  • In what ways can advances in technology increase student engagement?
  • In what ways can innovative technology enhance students’ ability to problem-solve, reason and analyse information?
  • In what ways will technology innovation shape educational practice and professional growth?
  • How will teaching and learning evolve within a student-focused learning environment?

Concise description of activities to be undertaken:

Through the ILC, this pilot project will design and test interactive, web-based Math modules, applets, and apps to enhance Math literacy. The objective of the ILC and its collaborators is to build joyfulness and competence into learning and to stimulate student engagement.  The team believes this can be accomplished by incorporating real world examples into course content and by making learning visual and interactive.  The project will also seek to provide students with the tools to think in creative and innovative ways.  Further, it seeks to develop self-assessment skills and personal motivation and agency.  Longer term, the ILC and its partners will be encouraged to work together to create quality creative content in all subjects to help build teachers’ and students’ skills for a global economy.

The Director of the ILC will oversee the coordination of the project and will be responsible to ensure that expertise is provided throughout the life of the project.  The initial phase will have a research associate working directly with regional Math educators and UBC O faculty to design course content in partnership with local companies, creating highly visual and interactive engaging content that leverages cutting edge technologies.

Supported by researchers from the ILC, teachers will test the modules in the classrooms in Kelowna, Vernon and Nelson.   Feedback from the research and input from instructional designers will inform the design and redesign to ensure the end products meet and exceed both Ministry of Education expectations and the demands of 21st century educators and their students.  The goal of the project is to foster excellence in pedagogy through technology enhancements.

Expected Outcomes:

Initially, the outcomes from this project will provide educators with resources to enhance Math literacy in classrooms and provide practical tools to incorporate technology into curriculum development and delivery.   This project will (1) create a learning environment to support professional growth for educators, (2) engage students with innovative content and technology, and (3) keep British Columbia on the cutting edge of educational innovation.

 

Assessing 21st Century Skills

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project (ATC21S) is being conducted by the University of Melbourne and funded by Cisco; Intel; Microsoft; and the founder countries Australia, Finland, Singapore, and the USA. The white papers were commissioned for the project in 2010 and were written by academics world-renowned in their fields.  These white papers have formed the basis for subsequent work on the ATC21S project.

The ATC21S white paper topics are 21st Century Skills; Methodological Issues; Technological Issues; New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building; and Policy Frameworks for New Assessments.

http://atc21s.org/index.php/resources/white-papers/

Documentation Centre – Wheelock College

The Making Learning Visible Project began as a collaboration between researchers at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and educators in the municipal schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. They sought to bring together Project Zero’s experience of creating authentic and ongoing assessments and Reggio’s experience documenting the individual and group learning of young children.

The first phase of this project was geared toward better understanding the practices in Reggio Emilia’s municipal schools and the ways they supported learning. Two key practices came to the fore—learning in groups and documenting learning through a variety of media to support learning. These became the two foci of the Making Learning Visible (MLV) Project, which worked in subsequent phases to support these practices in U.S. classrooms preschool thru high school.

Teachers who have participated in the MLV Project are collaborating with the Documentation Studio in a number of ways: they share documentation they are working on, exhibit their work, and share perspectives on the work of others.

For more information about the Making Learning Visible Project, visit their website. For resources developed by the Making Learning Visible Project, visit their Weebly page.

http://www.wheelock.edu/academics/centers-and-institutes/documentation-studio/inspiration-and-key-ideas

Learning Studios

Active Learning Collaboratories Begin to Define the New Classroom Experience

Classroom facility planning and attendant faculty development to leverage new active learning collaboraties will come into focus in the 2012 calendar. New gold standards for this category of learning spaces are emerging on campuses like the University of Southern California. Rhetorical commitments to bring learning experiences into the 21st century are made possible through an alignment of academic strategic planning, academic technology leadership and focused project planning and partnerships with facilities management — no small challenge on most higher education campuses.

Traditional lecture halls are being replaced by active learning studios. Dialogue cafes with telepresence video conferencing capabilities augment and support experiential learning curriculum focused on cross-cultural and cross-national understanding. Integrated “magic” touch screen panels are enabling geospatial and GIS explorations in a wide range of disciplines from statistics to poverty studies, from history to astrophysics. Scientific visualization walls are working their way into learning spaces to support learning of technique, active discovery and “lab work,” presentations, and collaborative explorations.

Many campuses have a showcase learning space. Relatively few have a systematic approach to building and supporting learning spaces across the campus. While others on campus will continue to romance the value of the nailed to the floor student desk (“that is how I learned”), the time has come to create a new “standards” orientation to different levels of technology-enabled learning spaces informed by a catalog of different teaching and learning approaches. Technology, governance, and focus on student success in the classroom have all matured from the era of the wild, wild west over the past two decades. In 2012, I believe we may see the development of a draft taxonomy of such a new standards orientation developed by a coalition of architects, technologists, instructional designers, students, and yes, even a couple of instructors.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012#ixzz1ijKjC6In

 

Origin of Good Ideas

http://facultyrow.com/video/where-good-ideas-come-from

The Genius of the Tinkerer – The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends

… ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.

Adjacent possible

Stuart Kauffman – the adjacent possible – the linkage between and among first order combinations. The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read