The Best Damn New Media Curriculum evah! – has a new title.

EdTech Barnraising – Building a New Media Curriculum

There’s the title. Others might be considered, or better found, but i like this one. I like the image of a community coming together to build something we all agree needs to be built. All contributing the skills that they have, their more specific knowhow, bringing their bests to a project that supports the entire community. yes, nice image, but what does it mean.

Introduction – what is a barnraising?

This barnraising is the prototype which, if it works, will be the first in an infrequent series of live online working conferences which are dedicated to the creation of pieces of content that are needed for the advancement of bleeding-wave new e-learning 2.0 media educationy stuff (note that i’m not super worried about what peopel call it, i call it new media). Our intention is to create a repository that reflects the views of our community, that being defined as the edublogging community, its friends, and the larger association of educators that know (or will soon) of its existence.

What is this barnraising all about?

This barnraising intends to build a new media curriculum that could be the starting point of, or an asset to, a course or program intended to help teachers blend new media into their classroom.

Who can come to this conference?

You can. By reading this blog, and making it this far into the post you have qualified to come. The things needed are an interest in education, new media and a basic knowledge of the technology. The live audio show will be offering the gravitational pull for this conference. Listening to this is a one click operation. In orbit around the show are the textchat(like MSN messenger), virtual white board and the wiki. If you can find edtechtalk, click on the audio and make it to the chatroom, your in.

What will happen if i go to this ‘barnraising’?

You will work, hopefully. There is room for everyone to take on a job, a responsibility. There is room for the experienced and the inexperienced. You can check out the agenda and follow your way through what we are planning, or contribute your own ideas of how you think it should work. The basic layout however, is this.

first – we will establish a common starting point with a statement of peda/andragogy. This will be boring, but necessary. I must insist on people bringing up their objections to this statement BEFORE the conference. If we start arguing about this during, nothing will get done.

second – choose the ‘modules’ and ‘module team leaders’. Each module team will be responsible for building part of the curriculum. A sample will be provided, but i generally expect, and indeed hope, it will be ignored. It is meant as a starting point. We will also discuss various rules and posting guidelines at this point.

third – the work begins in earnest. People will go to various whiteboard areas in order to begin work with their teams. i expect people to start various skype conferences, text chats etc… and encourage everyone to record their work for the archive. The responsibility for each module being posted to the wiki falls to the leader, but all are welcome to start their own strands as different points of view arise. Two ideas of how to solve a problem would be considered better than one in this project.

fourth – the wandering talk show. We’ll be dropping into various work groups as the conference progresses, getting a sense of what is going on, briding the modules together for crossover work, recruiting help and advice for difficult issues.

fifth – the recap. We’ll try to bring as many people together at the end to get a sense of where were at, where we need to go, and overall, to see if the project worked.

How will we know we’ve succeeded?

Always the most important question. Success will be measured by whether or not we’ve created something that can be built upon.

Author: dave

I run this site... among other things. View all posts by dave