I wrote about Flipping yesterday.
Overnight Mark Upton commented on the post. I admire Mark’s work immensely and was delighted he shared links to examples of his flipping work:
These resources appeared in July and August last year. Mark’s sharing of them underscored for me a point made by Alison Seaman in her 3 January post:
It takes time and a level of humility to come to terms with the idea that knowledge is no longer contained solely “in [our] skulls, books, and libraries” and is instead constructed from knowledge distributed across networks and on the Web.
Alison discusses how connecting with and learning from colleagues nourishes and develops your personal learning network (PLN). I liked Alison’s quote from Dori Digenti:
The PLN consists of relationships between individuals where the goal is enhancement of mutual learning. The currency of the PLN is learning in the form of feedback, insights, documentation, new contacts … It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.
My own PLN is based on: mutual learning, reciprocity and trust. Mark is an important part of my development as a learner and I trust his judgement implicitly.
Thinking about trust and personal learning led me to David Hopkins’ post about Creative Commons licenses. I use Creative Commons (CC) images in most of my posts. David points out that “A photo or image placed under a Creative Commons license enables you, the ‘borrower’ to copy, distribute, and display the work providing the photo or image is correctly attributed to the owner. Every CC license applies worldwide, is non-revocable, is not exclusive, and lasts for the duration of the work’s copyright”. However, he notes that: more than 90% of CC photos are not attributed; more than 99% of CC photos that are attributed are not attributed properly.
When I use CC images in my posts I provide a url for the image and include the photographer as a tag for the post. In the last two months I have been providing a link to the specific license for the image. David provides a link to Photo Pin. This service searches for CC images on Flickr and provides a choice of size/resolution of the image, a link to the original image and the HTML code to attribute the photo, owner, and CC license used.
Here is an example of my search for a Parkour image:
As I explore ideas and practices of flipping through connecting I am conscious that I do need to open up to intuition and creative leaps of the imagination. An interview with Bill Duggan encouraged me to think about neural plasticity, curiosity and “presence of mind”. Stephen Downes does this for me every time I receive his OLDaily.
Today, Stephen reflected on an essay by Lev Gornick on IT Trend in Education in 2013. Stephen looks at two different issues:
- The impact of HTML5 will be widely felt (and exemplifies the change underway with this New York Times article) with widespread integration of multimedia and text in ordinary things like books, posts and articles.
- Dynamic learning materials (and dynamic reading materials generally) – multimedia posts and articles connected to live data sources (see, for example, weather bugs, Yahoo stock charts and Google Maps mashups) will become widespread.
My excitement about what might be possible in 2013 flipped learning environments was tempered by a very sobering post from Kent Anderson in The Scholarly Kitchen. He identified some of the threats posed by ubiquitous computing and connectivity and concluded his post with this observation “With the smartphone as one likely instrument of havoc in a world full of connected hostilities — personal, military, national — the benign face of technology is being remade”.
Kent is another trusted source in my daily connections and with his insights I realise I must adopt a much more nuanced approach to flipped learning opportunities. I will not try to get over excited about the possibilities afforded by the New York Times’ innovation Snow Fall … but it is hard not to take a naive view of open learning.
My next task is to look at Brook Ellingwood’s look at Snow Fall. In it he suggests “What makes the piece so remarkable isn’t that the New York Times has created anything new in a technical sense. It’s that instead of retreating from what’s disrupting their business they have embraced it and made it even better by using it to showcase their traditional strength: Meaningful storytelling”.
That seems a great way to look at transformation in teaching too … embracing connecting and flipping as essential elements of stimulating and supporting learning.
Photo Credit
Parkour Practice (JB London, CC BY-NC 2.0)
