Flipping in 2013

I have a great opportunity to become more involved in developing blended learning units and courses in 2013.
I am keen to extend my understanding of some of the open access platforms available to me. Last month I attended a Drupal Workshop and a Moodle workshop.
One of the key issues for me in 2013 will be how to encourage, support and develop flipped teaching and learning environments.
Today’s Paper.Li brought me a link to Margo Pierce’s post Online Guides Help Teachers Flip Their Classrooms. In it, Margo shares links to:

• A Ning site hosted by the Flipped Learning Network
• A guide how to create an Interactive YouTube Video
• Daily Riff posts about The Flipped Class
• Creating Vodcasts (including Camtasia)

Paper.Li brought me a link to Howard Rheingold’s Toward a Literacy of Cooperation: Introduction to Cooperation Theory too. Howard is offering “a six week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter to introduce the fundamentals of an interdisciplinary study of cooperation: social dilemmas, institutions for collective action, the commons, evolution of cooperation, technologies of cooperation, and cooperative arrangements in biology from cells to ecosystems”. Week 5 of the course includes a link to the Technologies of Cooperation paper.
Returning from Howard’s resources, I was interested to read Andrew Campbell’s take on flipping. (I missed it when it was first posted 21 November.) Andrew suggests that “the weak link in our current learning paradigm isn’t content delivery”. He argues that “It’s only with the guidance of a skilled teacher and interaction with other learners that content becomes relevant and engaging. That’s what makes  good teaching important. Future education is better served by  investing in and developing tools that support discussion and interaction, not improving content delivery”.
Andrew proposes that tools like Google Hangouts, Twitter and Skype offer opportunities to make learning more interactive and collaborative. He adds that “Promoting interaction and discussion is the most effective way to use technology to support learning. Social media promotes and extends discussion, which is far more effective and transformative than putting lectures on YouTube or textbooks on tablets will ever be”.
One of the comments on the post, from Sharon Turner, pointed to Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning as additional examples of support for interaction.
I thought I would end this post with a link to a Jon Bergmann’s post (November 2012) in which he proposes that ‘flipped learning’:

• Transfers the ownership of the learning to the students.
• Personalizes learning for all students
• Gives teachers time to explore deeper learning opportunities and pedagogies with their students
• Makes learning the center of the classroom.
• Maximizes the face to face time in the classroom.

I am delighted that Jon ends his list with the face-to-face characteristic of flipped learning. My interest with flipping is with the Socratic potential unleashed by everyone investing in preparation and thinking prior to meeting … with opportunities to reflect on discussions in preparation for the next rendezvous.
Photo Credits
Another flip (Hc_07, CC BY-NC 2.0)