Instead of viewing plays as individual texts to be studied and examined, theatre knowledge building invites teachers and students to examine the work together, to question why the play was written, to understand the relationship between form and content, to see how the play fits within theatre history and the work of the playwright, and to ask how the play has been performed and what challenges it presents to other theatre workers.

For example, in November 2014, the Grade 3/4 class at at St. Sylvester participated in a learning project devoted to set and costume design in connection with the theatre’s production of James and the Giant Peach

opportunities for mastery of specialist language and practices.

xperiences invite participation and provide many different ways for individuals and groups to contribute.

Digital and net-worked media offer new ways of expanding the reach and accessibility of connected learning so it is not just privileged youth who have these opportunities.

learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity.

Clarissa

Connected Learning in Teaching Practice

They do this by being sponsors of what youth are genuinely interested in — recognizing diverse interests and providing mentorship, space, and other resources.

Learning is irresistible and life-changing when it connects personal interests to meaningful relationships and real-world opportunity

Connected Learning

Genus Species + Species Hybrids Example

Lessig (2005) provides a range of examples of the kinds of digital remix practices that in his view constitute “the more interesting ways [to write]” for young people. These include remixing clips from movies to create “faux” trailers for hypothetical movies; setting remixed movie trailers to remixed music of choice that is synchronized to the visual action; recording a series of anime cartoons and then video-editing them in synchrony with a popular music track; mixing “found” images with original images in order to express a theme or idea (with or without text added); and mixing images, animations and texts to create cartoons or satirical posters (including political cartoons and animations), to name just a few types. We accept this conceptual extension of “writing” to include practices of producing, exchanging and negotiating digitally remixed texts, which may employ a single medium or may be multimedia remixes. (We also recognize as forms of remix various practices that do not necessarily involve digitally remixing sound, image and animation, such as paper-based forms of fanfiction writing and fan-producing manga art and comics, which continue to go on alongside their hugely subscribed digital variants.

where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact.

10 Authentic Spanish Materials to Take Your Class to Spain!

Find Native Speakers

for caring adults, teachers, parents, learners and their peers to share interests and contribute to a common purpose. The potential of cross-generational learning and connection unfolds when centered on common goals.

Powered with possibilities made available by today’s social media, this peer culture can produce learning that’s engaging and powerful.

For more than a century, educators have strived to customize education to the learner. Connected Learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream a reality — connecting academics to interests, learners to inspiring peers and mentors, and educational goals to the higher order skills the new economy rewards.

organizations and caring adults can form partnerships, broker connections across settings, and share on openly networked platforms and portfolios.

earners need to feel a sense of belonging and be able to make meaningful contributions to a community in order to experience connected learning. Groups that foster connected learning have shared

hrough collaborative production, friendly competition, civic action, and joint research, youth and adults make things, have fun, learn, and make a difference together.

They do this by being sponsors of what youth are genuinely interested in — recognizing diverse interests and providing mentorship, space, and other resources.

Learning is irresistible and life-changing when it connects personal interests to meaningful relationships and real-world opportunity.

embraces the diverse backgrounds and interests of all young people.

Many writers have highlighted the power of the global digital tribe, particularly the way groups tend to solve problems more effectively than individual experts (Surowiecki, 2009). We read of how groups can self-organise and co-ordinate their actions in connected global environments (Shirky, 2008) and that there seems to be no limit what a tribe can do when it is given the appropriate tools (Godin, 2008). Mobile and personal technologies that are connected to global networks have afforded us with the priceless ability to collaborate and cooperate in new and inventive ways (Rheingold, 2002), and allow us to rapidly self organise into new collective forces (Tapscott and Williams, 2008). Connected technology not only gives us access to existing knowledge, it encourages and enables us to create new knowledge and share it widely to a global audience.

Learning is irresistible and life-changing when it connects personal interests to meaningful relationships and real-world opportunity

The kind of participatory connected learning experiences that we are advocating for arenot easily described

Recent statistics suggest that the average person spends about 50 minutes per day using Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Add that to the fact that most people spend over five hours per day on their cell phones, and it's clear that we love our technology. While it's awesome to make an effort to cut down on screen time in the name of health (especially before bed!), why not use the time you spend on your phone to your advantage? That's what members of health and fitness digital accountability groups are doing, and they're seeing amazing results.

What would it mean to consider an educational agenda that includes more flexible, informal, diverse, and interest-driven learning environments? Can we do this in a way that elevates all youth rather than serving the privileged minority?

Despite its power to advance learning, many parents, educators, and policymak-ers perceive new media as a distraction from academic learning, civic engagement,

attributes her success to the writing skills she developed in the role-playing world (see Case Study 1).Clarissa’s out-of-school engagement in creative writing is an example of what we have dubbed connected learning—learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity.

harness these new technologies for learning rather than distraction.

The “connected” in connected learning is about human connection as well as tapping the power of connected technologies. Rather than see technology as a means toward more efficient and automated forms of education, connected learning puts progressive, experiential, and learner-centered approaches at the center of technology-enhanced learning.

A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”

Clavier has been part of that unexpected sequence of events and the network which has stretched around the world has seen me working with colleagues in Egypt, Poland, Sweden, Australia, the USA, Spain, Finland, Canada and the UK! 

the connected approach to learning and teaching has been overwhelmingly positive for me

Otherwise, changes in the school institution and tradition will be looked at as the arbitrary inventions of particular teachers; at the worst transitory fads, and at the best merely improvements in certain details—and this is the plane upon which it is too customary to consider school changes.

Connected learning is when someone is pursuing a personal interest with the support of peers, mentors and caring adults, and in ways that open up opportunities for them

Connected learning isn’t a burden that one organization shoulders on its own, and is about building connections across different sites of learning

Traditional education is failing to engage many students as they enter their middle school, high school, and college years.

Connected learning posits that by connecting and translating between in-school and out-of-school learning, we can guide more young people to engaging, resilient, and useful learning that will help them become effective contributors and participants in adult society. We also believe that networked and digital technologies have an important role to play in building these sites of connection and translation

onnected learning is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement.

Connected Course Design at Virginia Commonwealth University

I have Serious Rant-y Thoughts on requiring that students inhabit public spaces in professional contexts, and I do wonder how much a class hashtag is useful beyond self-promotion of the course and its amazing instructor.

To borrow a phrase from libraries and archives, how do we get to a point where we curate connections rather than curating content?

The Student-Centered Lecture

A PLN is a self-directed system meant to support lifelong learning through the development, maintenance, and leveraging of digital networks.

Connected Learning is based on the notion that learning is about expanding the connections between people and information within a learner's personal network

We are naturally creative and curious. We just have to build systems that nurture our inherent abilities. Schools do not do that.

networked discovery of connections would be at the center of both the learning environment as designed by faculty and the learning environment as experienced by students

Small Blog On Networked Learning

What is “Connected Learning?”

the use of networks is gradually nudging aside more traditional problem-solving approaches based on the marketplace and the choice of a small leadership group or “hierarchies.”

As Fung explains, wicked problems require “multi-sectoral problem-solving” and ways to remove the barriers to “pooling knowledge and coordinating action” through the formation of networks that connect organizations.7

And this leads me to another thought- it seems like in our field there is this desire to go big, to scale, to teach hundreds of thousands, to affect an entire sector. Scale at the dimension is really only achieved by a process of mass duplication where the level of heart-felt connectivity is probably low.

“We wanted to create threads between courses so that students can understand connections,”

A Framework for Identifying and Evaluating Openly Networked Connected Learning Course Designs

Connected Learning & Integrative Thinking: Teaching History at Virginia Tech

Crafting Connected Courses

Pictures of Philosophy

Moreover, the experience of building and participating within a digitally mediated network of discovery is itself a form of experiential learning, indeed a kind of metaexperiential learning that vividly and concretely teaches the experience of networks themselves.

The whole organic nature of learning experience through the #walkmyworld learning events meant that I learned what I needed to learn as I needed to learn it. It wasn’t a top down dictate of learning outcomes because the outcomes were determined by the process. It is a revolutionary concept — yet as ancient as Aristotle. Learning should never be measured solely by standard outcomes; people learn, and I mean really LEARN, when they discover for themselves what they know, what they want to know, and how they want to know it.

The importance assumed for collaboration within NL has almost become ubiquitous and is frequently seen as unquestionably desirable.

Over time these things you write up start to form a deep network that helps you think.

Our design model builds on this approach by focusing on supports and mechanisms for building envi-ronments that connect learning across the spheres of interests, peer culture, and academic life.

Connected learning addresses the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning, intergenerational disconnects, and new equity gaps arising from the privatization of learning. In doing so, connected learning taps the opportunities provided by digital media to more easily link home, school, community and peer contexts of learning; sup-port peer and intergenerational connections based on shared interests; and create more connections with non-dominant youth, drawing from capacities of diverse communities.

Connected learning is a model of learning and social change that is not defined by a specific technology, tool, or technique. Instead, connected learning is defined by a commitment to social equity and progressive learning, and seeks to mold the uptake of new technologies and techniques based on these commitments.

connect in- and out-of-school learning

Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.

Bennett Merriman, young entrepreneur and director of a workforce management company, told a recent higher education conference that connectivity in our work place is important. He recommended that students should spend time developing their networks throughout their studies.

learning is the act of recognizing patterns shaped by complex networks

Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience.

the learning is the network

Learning is considered a “. . . knowledge creation process . . . not only knowledge consumption.”

The capacity to know is more critical than what is actually known

Connected learning boils down to risk taking in the end. To quote colleague Jade Davis from her recent DML blog post, “I think the biggest risk in connected learning is Not Trying.”

The “connected learning” term seems to derive from this infographic on connected learning and the folk who developed it. Their “What is Connected Learning” provides more of an overview, including principles (see the following table) and a research synthesis report.

as researchers and policy makers look to build more sustainable futures, they would be wise to design creative ways to support parents even as they pour more resources into supporting students. We instinctively understand that our public institutions (i.e., schools), policy initiatives, and the spread of media technologies must be a valuable resource for students. But, how can these institutions, policies and technologies become an asset for parents?