Creativity is a remix | Kirby Ferguson

Cultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito on Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media

hotoshopping remixes (e.g., Lostfrog.org)•Music and music video remixes (e.g., Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” and the Grey video)•Machinima remixes (e.g., Machinima.com)•Moving image remixes (e.g., Animemusicvideos.org)•Original manga and anime fan art (e.g., DeviantArt.com)•Television, movie, book remixes (e.g., Fanfiction.net)•Serviceware mashups (e.g., Twittervision.com)

By “remix” we mean the practice of taking cultural artefacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend. Until recently this concept was associated almost entirely with recorded music.

The kind of person who can live well in this world is someone who has acquired the capacity to navigate from one domain of social activity to another, who is resilient in their capacity to articulate and enact their own identities and who can find ways of entering into dialogue with and learn new and unfamiliar social languages (Cope and Kalantzis, 1998).

Meanwhile, school was a place which inculcated a rudimentary ‘basics’. Literacy, in fact, was two of the ‘three R’s’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Children memorised spelling lists, and learnt the parts of speech and correct grammar. School was a universe of straightforwardly right and wrong answers, of authoritative texts and authoritarian teachers. The underlying lesson of the basics was about the social order and its sources of authority,

Students collaboratively (with the instructor) identify an area of interest and co-construct a driving question to guide inquiry. Students engage in online collaborative inquiry as they search and sift through online texts using digital tools to address their focus of inquiry. Students critically evaluate online information by considering the credibility (truthfulness) and validity (usefulness) of the information obtained. Students synthesize what they have learned during their online inquiry by actively curating and synthesizing information across multiple, multimodal sources. Student engage in online content construction by synthesizing what they have learned and selecting the best digital text or tool before sharing this answe

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helping your weakest students become literate in a new technology first

learning how to learn

each online tool regularly is updated; each time this happens new affordances appear, requiring addi-tional skills and strategies.

For one group of preschoolers, the outcomes were created together with the children, as explained by the teacher: “In one group, we put together an artifact about deer using the ThingLink application. The children chose the facts and pictures for the work with some help from the teacher”

Teachers often have inadequate (or inappropriate) experience with using digital technologies for teaching and learning. Many teachers earned degrees at a time when educational technology was at a very different stage of development than it is today.

By their very nature, newer digital technologies, which are protean, unstable, and opaque, present new challenges to teachers who are struggling to use more technology in their teaching.

Although connected learning can apply to any age group, we focus here on adoles-cents and, secondarily, on young adults.

These spaces are not confined to online worlds.

Without this focus on equity and collective outcomes, any educa-tional approach or technical capacity risks becoming yet another way to reinforce the advantage that privileged individuals already have.

the online world opened up a new site for learning and specialization.

Identify and discuss the relevanceandappropriateness of various electronic information sources (e.g., online databases such as Discus; web search engines).

Digital

Societies must teach their children from a young age how to perform research, understand sourcing, triangulate information, triage contested narratives and recognize the importance of where information comes from, not just what it says.

Teacher preparation—Preservice teacher education and in-service professional development are needed to provide educators with the media literacy and technology skills to select, use, integrate, and evaluate technology tools for young children.

I facilitate the discussion about the picture, adjusting my level of questioning for each child. This activity provides a natural way to assess a variety of communication skills, such as a student’s ability to recall events and answer a variety of wh questions.

classroom job called the journalist. The journalist is responsible for taking pictures on the tablet during center time to document the activities of the other students in the class, and reporting about one picture during closing circle.

Examining and understanding the consequences of sharing data online.

“Write” is how we build the web. Web literate individuals can transform a word into a hyperlink and add media to websites. As abilities are honed, one becomes more adept at remixing other users’ content and understanding or writing code.

A textbook should be viewed as a guide, not the curriculum.

Have self-knowledge by showing meta-cognitive awareness, using productive habits of mind, and reflect-ing on the meaning of the learning and experience.

Essential companion questions are used to engage learners in thoughtful “meaning making”

The UbD framework reflects a continual improvement approach to student achieve-ment and teacher craft. The results of our designs—student performance—inform needed adjustments in curriculum as well as instruction so that student learning is maximized

Effective curriculum is planned backward from long-term, desired results through a three-stage design process (Desired Results, Evidence, and Learning Plan). This process helps avoid the common problems of treating the textbook as the curriculum rather than a resource, and activity-oriented teaching in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent.