525 Week 4

The Wild Ride project offers a wonderful organization of a learning opportunity. It integrates independent learning, contributions, and team collaboration. The 5 step process that includes accessing prior knowledge, building on knowledge through investigation, expanding knowledge, applying knowledge, and contributing knowledge is nicely organized in a table and cross-referenced with the core academic areas. I have to admit, when I first started reading the project outline, I wasn't clear on the difference between expanding knowledge and applying knowledge. I can see in language arts and social studies, the same task in the project addresses both of these. That makes sense to me. Sometimes applying knowledge IS expanding knowledge.

This model also addresses the quadrants of the 4MAT learning style design I had referred to in an earlier posting. Accessing prior knowledge coincides with quadrant 1, connecting and attending to the concept; investigating to build foundation knowledge coincides with quadrant 2, imagining a what the concept could be and gathering information on the concept; expanding and applying the knowledge coincides with quadrant 3, practicing and extending the concept; and, contributing knowledge coincides with quadrant 4, refining and performing the concept. Whenever labels are applied, restrictions are created. These restrictions are frustrating to some teachers who are asked to conform with them, but really they are only labels. The process of learning is seeming to become universal. It all involves including a students prior knowledge and experience, collecting information, using that information, and sharing that information.

A good team project also includes this process. Clay Shirky has explained the difference between institutions and coordination. They both allow for collaboration to take place, but the centralization of each system is very different; making coordination a lot cheaper for a business. The key idea, Shirky said is to tag elements of a business to form a cooperative infrastructure. There are two ways to form this infrastructure: 1) form an institution, or 2) arrange the coordination within the group (replace planning with coordination). If an institution is formed, management and structure, two costly elements form a professional class; an institution is exclusionary. Only certain persons can participate and are considered experts. But, when the coordination of the system is done within the group itself, 80% of the contributors to the group have contributed an below average amount; coordination allows many people to contribute very little because it focuses on an end product, not an employee.In the end, a loosely coordinated infrastructure will become more powerful than a highly managed institution. Flickr and blogging are examples of these loosely coordinated infrastructures. They, because of the number of participants are becoming more powerful in delivering information than the institution of journalism.
As teachers, we can set up a structure that allows our students to participate freely in the sharing of knowledge. This probably best done without micromanaging the participation of the student, but offering them choices in participation. The idea, according to Shirky, is to convene and support users (learners), not control them. It is like the system of social networking where the number of paths in the network is the number of users of the network squared. This creates many more sources of information and, assumably, many more perspectives in the presentation of that information. The greater the number of perspectives shared, the more likely every student will have his learning style attended to.