I got a chance to take Unhangout for a spin today with some friends. Two of my old cronies from Edtechtalk (@jenm and @schinker), my good UPEI buddy @daniellynds, @mozzadrella from P2PU and Srishti from the unhangout project all took a run through thinking about what a good session might look like for the folks in rhizo14. We’ve got a plan and, as is only right, it’s going to take a little feedback from you folks.
Essentials
- Thursday January 16th, 2014. 8:30pm Atlantic Time
- https://unhangout.media.mit.edu/event/rhizo14
- You need a gmail account and the event is collaborative
- We’ll be collaboratively working on a shared google presentation as an output
(world time zones, thanks to Jim Stauffer)
What an unhangout means for you
Unhangout is a neat little project being run out of the MIT Media Labs. Basically it allows you to combine a series of hangouts together. You NEED a google+ account to make this work… I’m sorry about that, but it’s what we’re going to be trying this time. You’ll come to the session, and, at some point, break out into one of the rooms to talk about something you’re interested in. Or, alternatively, you can hang out in the lobby and chat with folks.
This will be by far the most structured event of the week during the course. It is ‘designed’ that way because after having done a few of these, it seems that they are incomprehensible to the vast majority of people if they are left wide open. I heartily encourage all and everyone to organize their own live events and allow them to be as chaotic as they like… this one will be structured (by my standards at least 😛 )
The schedule
- I’m going to do a 10-20 minute jam session of some of the conversations that are going on this week to get us all started off.
- We’ll login to the same google presentation document
- We’ll break out into breakout rooms
- Each breakout room will report back with one slide from the document
- I’ll present from whatever you guys have put in the slides
- We’ll breakout into different room than we were in the first time
- We’ll update the slides
- We’ll wrap up
- We’ll post the slides for people to critique/remix/steal
What I need from you folks
Each breakout room holds 10 people. The course currently has about 300 people registered in it. Lets figure we have about 35-40 people who actually come to the live event.
In the comments, I need
- people to suggest topics (figure we need 5 or so)
- People to volunteer to be the ‘moderator’ for a topic
- People to support a topic
If that works for people, we’ll go with those topics. If it doesn’t, I’ll make something up tomorrow night.
I propose “Does intent matter when considering cheating as learning, and is this contingent on circumstances?” as a topic and
I’d be happy to moderate if it makes the cut
It would help some of us who have Time Zone challenges if it was recorded? Can it be? And could a group write up the process to enable us to may be run another? A discussion on how this technology is aligned with the idea of Rhizomatic learning would be interesting to me – If I can stay up I am happy to moderate – but it will be 30 mins past midnight here… I am also seeing a potential use for running Open Space sessions online? http://www.openspaceworld.org/bookstore/images/understanding.gif ??
Here is Time Converter for others:
Atlantic Time is AST
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/na/ast.html
MESSY PROJECTS
This topic started on Facebook & could morph into an interesting discussion:
PB : We used to joke in our office of maths/science teachers…which Mum got the best mark for the latest assignment. Sure, there’s an “unwritten code of conduct” assuming the work submitted for assessment is done by the student. But hey, if one of my students was smart enough to go home and work with his/her parents to learn more about something…good on them I say. All you need to do is sit and chat with the student, it’s easy to spot what they have gained from the task. Better than any copy and paste effort.
SS: I know what you mean – how good is it that students are working with their parents? What a positive model of social learning. But a bit of a bummer for those whose parents cannot or do not work with them – or for those who pass the project over to their parents and relinquish all engagement with it.
LS: The line is not always clear. I mean how do you tell a mom or dad or some guardian that you should help the kids with their homework but you cannot work the problem out. You have to sort of help them enough and let them independently work the problems out. That could be more frustrating to a little kid more than anything else. I wonder!
PB: Here’s an example of how things could turn out…this young student wanted to investigate how long potatoes take to shoot. Grandma supports buying spuds, driving car, prompting with open questions etc. Something new arises from the task, chemical intervention effects budding etc. Student demonstrates understanding via shared video.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=exBEFCiWyW0&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DexBEFCiWyW0
Proposed topic: What are the goals of the cheater, and how do these goals align with the the goals of the person(s) or entity who is being cheated?
-Is this misalignment of goals intentional on the part of the cheater, or is it a result of misunderstanding the goals of the cheated?
-What is the end result (on a vulnerable public, on the cheater, on the organization) of cheating, and does this end result have any relationship to the ethics of cheating? In particular, is there a positive learning result?
This is similar to the topic of intent proposed by Doug Symington above. I would gladly participate in his group. Or I am willing to co-moderate this topic with someone who has more reliable bandwidth, if there is sufficient interest to make it a separate breakout session.
I’ve created a world clock event for the live session at
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Rhizo14+Week+1+UnHangout&iso=20140116T2030&p1=286
so all can find the time for their own timezone
Two things:
Is cheating a design fault built into a system (education) deaf and blind to the objects (students) it is entrusted to serve?
More inclusive times for the unhangout. Lisa in California is going to need to lessen her beach time to have her hair dried and the Brits will be up almost as late as their kids.
Totally understand re: timezone Scott. It’s pretty tough though… I only have so much time in my schedule. Thursday after next i have a 4:30-5:30 time available. I could probably also squeeze something in on the weekend.
Hiya, sorry i missed that (would’ve been like 4am Cairo time). Any way to get a recording or see the output? Would have loved to be part of the process… But am thinking maybe folks on a GMTlike timezone could have a separate live session ? Unsure how to find everyone though… I mentioned on twitter but no responses
I posed this question on FB but didn’t get a good answer there. This is my question is from 2:38 in Rhizo14 Week1 – Cheating as learning YouTube (you should embed that here, btw :-). Dave was talking about Diigo, and then he said, “the tags explorer is out of this world. If you click on the link in the chatroom to the tags explorer you’ll notice that everybody’s tweet, every hash tag #rh14 tweet is in there, you can click on every of of the nodes, every one of the little dots, it will pop up that person and I encourage you if you have an interest to open up this tags explorer, and click on a dot that doesn’t have a respnse to it, take a look at it, and if the person is actually talking about the course just respond to them, create a line there, you know make a connection for them. These things are really great.
I’d love to do this but I’m missing that critical link in the chatroom. Would anyone have it?
I posed this question on FB but didn’t get a good answer there. This is my question is from 2:38 in Rhizo14 Week1 – Cheating as learning YouTube (you should embed that here, btw :-). Dave was talking about Diigo, and then he said, “the tags explorer is out of this world. If you click on the link in the chatroom to the tags explorer you’ll notice that everybody’s tweet, every hash tag #rh14 tweet is in there, you can click on every of of the nodes, every one of the little dots, it will pop up that person and I encourage you if you have an interest to open up this tags explorer, and click on a dot that doesn’t have a respnse to it, take a look at it, and if the person is actually talking about the course just respond to them, create a line there, you know make a connection for them. These things are really great.”
I’d love to do this but I’m missing that critical link in the chatroom. Would anyone have it?
Ok, going from the answer on Twitter, I found and managed to generate this
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj1610-nt0u4dHNCSDhvM0Z0NVJEc3RsemhvZEt6ZVE&usp=sharing
It’s cool in its way but does not seem to fit the description above ( … (help).. 🙂
Making progress, exploring the links in my spreadsheet, I FOUND the one for TAGS EXPLORER. When I click on the link,
http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tsBH8o3Ft5RDstlzhodKzeQ&sheet=oaw
I reach this msg
Oops
The data you are requesting isn’t available.
(TAGS Owners: Check spreadsheet is
File > Published to the web)
The scripts with instructions were only slightly cryptic, well documented actually, considering it worked this far, but I seem to have fallen short of the grail. I’ll go back and revisit ….
aha, found http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/ and now putting in spreadsheet URL, clicked 2. Get sheet names .. it’s swimming …
back again, got it, put in the key (I generated)
0Aj1610-nt0u4dHNCSDhvM0Z0NVJEc3RsemhvZEt6ZVE
and now i have sheet names, which sheet?
http://screencast.com/t/wZqGHvCg
I’ll experiment
Eureka! http://screencast.com/t/J8UDPlKm00n
Nope, the tag clouds, no matter what key I use, always take me to tweets on #studentexp, hmmm … time for a jog
This time I really got it
http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=tsBH8o3Ft5RDstlzhodKzeQ&sheet=oaw
The part I’d left out was step 9 here
http://mashe.hawksey.info/2011/11/twitter-how-to-archive-event-hashtags-and-visualize-conversation/
Now I see how it works, what’s the link for Rhizo14, if anyone has it handy (or I suppose I could make it myself, if no one’s replied by the time I’m back from my jog)
I think this was an example of enforced independence
(formerly known as stubborn doggedness)
Haha, I finally found this
https://davecormier.com/edblog/2014/01/19/connection-activity-how-you-can-help-make-more-community/ (from Jan 19, the day before Rhizo14 started)
But still I appreciate that I have documented my process in Enforced Independent Learning in my comments above, and also I blogged how I persevered to crack the nut in my own way here: http://evomlit.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/revisiting-the-question-of-tagging/
Thanks for the phenomenal learning opportunities, some of which those of us participating here have managed to sip from the incessant firehose 🙂
Dave, I wonder if you’ve done any further writing/thinking about the unhangout format, especially as it relates to rhizomatic learning, enforced independence, etc. After the course/community is done, I’d love to hear your reflections and hindsights on this.
Hi – we’re also testing unhangouts for peeragogy and I have a question – the main, recorded session, or HOA, how does one start that and integrate it into the unhangouts website? I have a message in to Srishti about that but since it’s Sunday I don’t know if she’s around.