The last day of a very interesting course. It can be a challenge to have a successful second to last day to any course. The results that we came to at the end of thursday’s class would have been more than acceptable for the event and I encouraged the team to commit to something further… we committed to creating a publishable document.
Wiki page http://nafutures.wikispaces.com
We started off the morning by doing a course review. I have had bad luck with leaving a course review until the last minute of the last day (or after the last day) so i took some time in the morning to check with the students as to how they felt about the course… I asked three questions and two of them produced results that will be a useful reflection on the course… the other was badly worded/explained by me and led to 5 identical statements from the students.
Points of clarity – things that worked or helped encourage moments of understanding
- the methodology for the freamework was helpful, a comment, really on the course design actually working (thankfully)
- collaboration. Students really enjoyed creating the curriculum together.
- OECD document to provide a model for creating a scenarios. I waited ’till day three to show it, but it provided valuable structure given the short timeframe
- Course gave them an idea of what pressures will hold us back for the future
- distinction of prediction and futures thinking
- what we did here was shared online and we got responses from other people doing the same kind of work
- no homework 🙂
- role playing exercises where we took scenarios and built skits
- the blog updates day 1-5 offered a reminder of the day before and many students suggested reading the blog post was a very useful way to start the day
- the positiveness in the chaos model. They felt comfortable with the iterative nature of the course
- hurray for rhizomes. They really did like the community curriculum model. this makes me tres happy.
Room for Improvements
- Trends from other countries would be useful to provide context for Singapore
- Working through the iterative mapping exercise was confusing for some students while others suggested that it offered room for a different perspective
- Course is very compressed in four days, something we all agreed on.
- More links out to other places to jump off with futures thinking. Even though we didn’t have alot of time to cover those resources these would have provided an opportunity for independent study
- More collaboration with other groups maybe a concurrent course
- More look at the nature of trends. how they start, how they die.
- more switching of groups? I decided to stay with the same groups throughout the course. A decision with benefits and drawbacks
We watched Martin for encouragement and inspiration and…
I then had the students create a series of stories related to their given scenario. It was only the second time where each student was responsible for their own work (something we didn’t have a terrible amount of time for) but a useful activity. They were to be stories from the years 2015/2020/2025/2030 giving some context to the way that learning would be conducted in that time period.
We spent the afternoon creating a solid model that each of the scenarios were to follow in order to make the wiki make sense, and going over bits and pieces of the scenarios in order to make them as coherent as possible.
I’m going to take the work that’s been done over the last five days and build it into one massive document that people can take a look at both the way that the course was constructed but also to hopefully take the work done by the students here to help them in their own thinking about the future of education.
A good day and a nice ending to what has been an excellent learning experience. Sometimes we get offered the privilege to be part of something very special… this is one of those time for me. Thanks muchly to each and everyone one of the 19 of you. You brought me into your work, introduced me to your lives and trusted me to help guide us through. 🙂 I think we did pretty well
Student Scenarios
- To infinity and Beyond
- Common Room Learning
- The Network is the Class
- Market-Driven Credentialization
- Business as Usual (TableThree)
And now… back to Canada.
The last four days was great fun! It wasn’t always easy and we had our share of mistakes and falls but I think that’s the great part of the learning process – can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?
Thinking about the course, I also couldn’t help but keep going back to the fact that, like you said on the first day, we created the course, we designed the material, we taught ourselves and learned from one another – it’s such a cool thing to have that happening and quite successfully, I might add.
So props to you, Dave, for orchestrating everything – it was a blast and I totally enjoyed myself!
I appreciate the feedback 🙂
As I’ve said to anyone who’s asked me about the course, and what i was doing that i was having so much fun, ‘they were awesome’
I really enjoyed working with you guys over those four days and hope very much that i will have the opportunity to do so again. We did a ton of work… but left a fair amount on the table. I’m including the middle paragraph of your comment wholesale into a presentation i’m doing tomorrow. I’ll cite you 🙂
Dear students and Dave I am excited by your hard work, transparent learning and sense/meaning making, it was obviously playful as much as it was earnest.
I’m a relatively new educator and in midst of deep discovery learning observing your collaboratively empowering on the edge explorations, thank you.
I really enjoyed working with you guys over those four days and hope very much that i will have the opportunity to do so again.
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