Connected Learning Summit 2019

There Is No Reason This Should Have Failed, and Yet…: A Story of Blogs and Educator Professional Learning
Emily Schindler

This presentation tells the story of the failure of blogging in the Wisconsin Teacher Studio, a maker-based professional learning group for educators. Despite the ample expertise, experience, and well-intentioned design, a blogging site, meant to connect professional development participants between monthly meetings, failed spectacularly. This presentation will detail possible reasons for failure, and what it tells us about the design and implementation of connective platforms for educator learning. Ultimately, this failure is instructive for future designs (digital and social), which must always consider interest-based learner participation as a starting point, even when those learners are also teachers.

Summertime Blues: Building Teaching Capacity Through Informal Summer Learning Experiences
Joe Diaz, Claudia Urrea

The MIT STEAM Camp brings MIT’s “Mens et Manus” approach to learning to children. Students work together, designing and building innovative projects that they can share with their communities and families. During the camp, they engage in hands-on activities and explore the use of digital technologies and tools that promote creativity, invention, and collaboration. This program has also been a vehicle for hands-on teacher professional development for educators who work alongside MIT staff to both develop and facilitate camp activities. Our goal is to allow Hong Kong-based teachers to learn from the MIT community while also supplying their own expertise about local learning conditions and areas of interest. Additionally, this program has provided us with the opportunity to develop a framework for the MIT K-12 community to come together to design curriculum and facilitate the program all while drawing inspiration from the UN Sustainable Development Goals (themes included “Energy” and “Into The Water”).

The MIT STEAM Camp has successfully engaged local students and teachers and the MIT community in a learning experience. It has been offered for two years to more than 400 students and 50 teachers from different kinds of schools in Hong Kong. They have provided important feedback and recommendations to improve future instances of the Camp. However, this process has not been seamless. In this paper, we reflect upon our model for building teacher capacity and research efforts. We describe our ultimate goals as well as our successes and failures in trying to move those components forward.

STEM Reform and the Holy Grail
Bob Coulter

Many STEM reform efforts are motivated by something of a grail quest — a well-intended effort to enable rich and complex learning environments to take root in contexts where such outcomes have persistently been difficult to achieve. In this session, an analytic framework developed by best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari guides a post-mortem of a recently completed NSF ITEST project engaging 9-11 year old students with agent-based modeling. While there were a number of successes in the classroom and the research team gained a number of valuable insights, there were strategic limitations relating to technology use, policy frameworks, and participant identity which need to be accommodated in framing future endeavors.