Workshops on Thursday, August 25th and Friday, August 26thPresentation on Tuesday, August 30th Additional information about our connected learning journey together, including next steps heading through August into the fall and new academic year, will be communicated in coordination with Justin, Devon, and other members of your SG community. I am excited for this opportunity to read, ponder, plan, design, enact, reflect, and grow together. Forward!

greater academic orientation.

Oneexample is the use of “talkback boards,” which are posters where librarians can quickly postquestions to participants, who “answer” by putting stickers to show their agreement. Thesekinds of assessments do not track individual learning outcomes, but they enable educators toquickly determine, at a collective level, whether they are supporting the desired experiencesof connected learning (Widman et al. 2019)

nondominant

“Educational assessment is a normativeendeavor. The ideal assessment both reflects and reinforces educational goals that societydeems valuable.” Like other progressive approaches to education, connected learning isdefined by values of excellence, democratic participation, and equity. We identified threerelated collective outcomes of connected learning in our original report: (1) high standardsfor knowledge and creative production, (2) civically oriented and politically activatedcollectives, and (3) diverse and equitable pathways for recognition and contribution.

to collective goals and community development

Today’s educationalassessment traditions grew out of a model of classroom instruction and competitiveindividualism that compares individuals based on standardized measures.

Educatorscan also support young people in developing reputations and portfolios online that willserve as a lasting showcase for their work, as well as providing a way to build social capitalthat transcends a specific program or project

articipants are engaged in activities not simply for the pleasure of pursuing aninterest, but also to make a meaningful contribution to a community, perform or create workthat is shared with others, or fulfill a collective purpose.

Young people benefit from both “stocking thepond” with caring adults with diverse backgrounds and interests, as well as from “teachingyouth to fish” for sponsors and mentors (

Finally, the study identified “sandboxing” as a parental practice in which parents or othercaring adults construct a space or provide an opportunity for children to learn playfully,guided by the child’s interests and with low consequences for failure.

“concerted cultivation”

“sponsors of literacy.” Sponsors, be they people, organizations, or even communities, “enable,support, teach, model, broker, mentor, and sponsor

Connected learning environments have emergent propertiesthat develop through time, across a range of stakeholders who share power and authority.

was now on "autopilot.” Theworld of filmmaking was very much one of personalcontacts and of being part of a neighborhood at a particulartime. He could see connections with this scene to thelarger marketplace of YouTube, and even more role-definedcareers in these creative businesses. Yet, in some sense,participating in his scene, managing to earn a bit of cash,and keeping all that activity ongoing during a period oftime had been the point of it all. Critics may suggest thatthis existential value is a post hoc rationalization for thebarriers he had faced and a failure to progress, but thisseverely underestimates how playing his part in a culturaleconomy created purpose, value, and rewa

Jermaine built a home studio and had access to technologiesquite scarce at the time. He started a YouTube-based mediachannel for up-and-coming artists, uploading their tr

s we progressed in our work, however, we realizedthat it was too narrow and limiting to assume that scholarly activity and formal education werethe only or primary pathway to opportunity. W

hese kinds of experiences are the most likely to guide youngpeople toward developing interests, purpose, and self-determinatio

ssionate interests

e believe all young people deserve to experience connected learning, butwe do not believe that all learning needs to be connected learning all the time.

MOOCs often reproduce these same outdated theories of learnin

growing consensus in the learning sciences recognizes that learning is most robust whengrounded in a learner’s cultural identity, part of meaningful inquiry, supported by caringrelationships, and reinforced across settings.

This body of work is groundedin an understanding of people’s everyday activities rather than focusing exclusively on formaleducational contexts and academic subjects. The emphasis is on how learning is supportedby practical activities that are mediated by culture and are part of longer histories (Cole1998; Vygotsky 1978). This orientation contrasts with approaches to learning, most notablybehaviorism, that focus on external and often standardized inputs, rewards, and assessments.It also contrasts with some forms of constructivism, which focus on individual developmentand locate the primary driver of learning as internal to the developing child, rather thanin the social, cultural (and technological) environment. While internal psychological andindividual processes are clearly critically important to learning, we emphasize the dynamicrelationship between learners and their social and cultural environment

Social, digital, and interactive media, peer-to-peermarketplaces, and educational technologies have the potential to exacerbate equity gaps, aswell as broaden access to connected learning

A more lasting form of equity then might be found in design that nurtures these capacities, and in so doing, counters the oppression that produces inequity in the first place. Design can certainly contribute to more just futures, especially when it helps us to imagine other ways of life or to make visible the structural oppression that frequently passes unnoticed, but design can never take the place of coordinated action and meaningful solidarity. 

A commitment to reflexivity demands that we scrutinize our own position in the social hierarchy and allow those who we wish to help to do likewise, always recognizing that professional practice, like technology itself, tends to support the status quo. 

Costanza-Chock’s work insists that the design of digital technologies neither causes nor solves structural inequality, but is itself deeply embedded in power dynamics that benefit dominant classes at the expense of everyone else. The starting point of design justice is the partial, negotiated, tentative steps that designers and their intended beneficiaries take to acknowledge and work through these troublesome relations. 

Without this work, we run the risk of a generation of students experiencing even more unequal access to the digital competencies needed to thrive in a highly digital world.

There is also evidence that caregivers’ media mentoring efforts decline as children get older, highlighting the need for more parent education in both elementary and secondary schools.

“Who is responsible for talking and teaching about digital citizenship? Families? Schools? Both?”

What great new ideas from pandemic remote learning should be amplified moving forward? What are the kinds of things that we stopped doing during the pandemic that could be “hospiced” and permanently sunset from our educational systems?

We are also at a moment where people are tired. Educators, in particular, are exhausted. There are very few teachers who are going to be up for the task of completely reinventing schools again this fall, and the call of the familiar will be compelling as schools open back up. For those of us who imagine new possibilities of education, the next paradox we face is that there will be a hunger for the kinds of changes that young people are describing combined with a deep sense of fatigue. In these kinds of conditions, the challenge will be to maintain a sense of urgency while giving folks time to rest and recuperate.

They talk about finding ways to reforge the human connections that have withered from a year of isolation.

Of course, many students found the demands of remote learning incredibly difficult—everyone is having a different pandemic. But many students are rightly very proud of how they have organized themselves and maintained their studies largely independently.

when educators obtain access to new technologies, their first instinct is almost always to use those new technologies to extend existing practice; to do whatever they had been doing before more efficiently, or just digitally.

But, generally speaking, schools used video conferencing and learning management systems to recreate schools as they existed before the pandemic.