More Improvisations: Where is Clippy?

For today's Daily Try (#agoratry69), we're asked to answer the question "Where is Clippy hanging out these days?" and to create an image that shows where Clippy is now.

I imagine Clippy is happily performing street art in Luxembourg.

The Value of Modeling When Designing for Student Engagement

I've been a big Dan Meyer fan for some time, and have always appreciated his real-world, participatory approach to learning. His recent post -- Literally Everything I Know About Modeling With Mathematics [SMP 4] --provides links to some of his most salient work in modeling, as well as a general summary of modeling in mathematics education.

Modeling asks students a) to take the world and turn it into mathematical structures, then b) to operate on those mathematical structures, and then c) to take the results of those operations and turn them back into the world. That entire cycle is some of the most challenging, exhilarating, democratic work your students will ever do in mathematics, requiring the best from all of your students, even the ones who dislike mathematics. If traditional textbooks have failed modeling in any one way, it’s that they perform the first and last acts for students, leaving only the most mathematical, most abstract act behind.

In his post, Dan links to one of my favorite modeling examples, Is the Checkout Line a Scam? (the answer is "yes," by the way). In it, he models several things that we can all do to bring the real world into our course design in order to make our content more relevant and the concepts we're teaching more meaningful.

1. Use interesting examples from the real world -- A big part of fostering student engagement is presenting course content in relevant ways. The best and easiest way to do this is by using meaningful examples from the real world. This not only makes learning concepts relevant -- it also allows participants to make personal connections and applications.
   
2. Get participants to think about possibilities and assumptions before the formal concept is introduced -- Contextualization of learning concepts is a critical part of student engagement. Participants want to know why these concepts matter. By sharing models from the real world, and by allowing participants to reflect on and discuss these models before ever introducing our formal learning concepts, we provide a foundation of purpose and interest for our lessons.
   
   
3. Present concepts within the framework of a relevant example instead of sharing them in the abstract and then trying to link the real world to the concept at some later point -- When we lead with relevant, real-world models as opposed to formal concepts, we establish a narrative context for all subsequent information and discussions. It gives us an important anchor point for our explanations.

Improvisation Practice: Today's "Daily Try"

Today's Daily Try from the ADG Agora project:

#agoratry67 Randomly Generate a Luchador Name and Announce Yourself to the World.

As you can see, I went with the Spanish version of my name, Roberto, and was awarded a fabulous luchador handle: El Hijo del Relámpago (Son of Lightening). I'm thinking I should get to work on my mask later this afternoon.

This is really a great, entry-level student creation activity because it requires little to no skill acquisition, it's fun, and it connects users to valuable cultural information.

The Mashup Report: "MOOCs"

I've been working on a new feature for the Learning Lot and am happy to roll it out today. So here, in the the maiden voyage of The Mashup Report, I present an interview with MOOC visionary and expert, Dr. Simon Lafoon.  Hope you enjoy it.

 

 [The Mashup Report is compiled by Rob Reynolds and Vicky Woodward]

Power of Connections: Make a Connection

The first Artifact Challenge in our Power of Connections learning experience is to introduce yourself through a picture of your desktop, bookshelf or some other selfie that captures your identity.

I started out by taking a "staged" picture of my bookshelf (the shoes were an addition).

Unfortunately, my bookshelf mostly consists of the sad remnants of a former life in which I actually collected print books. What remains are a few literary and Latin American novels (top shelf), religious books and more literary stuff (second shelf), math, science, and notebooks (third shelf), and then more notebooks, running shoes, and, last but not least, my FAVORITE TRILOGY OF ALL TIME, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (bottom shelf).

While all this says plenty about me, I suppose, It's not the clear, iconic lens I was hoping for.

Then it occurred to me. I do have an object that sums me up in a whole different way. My favorite belt buckle.

In its own way, it is a great snapshot of an either-handed, bilingual kid who has deep roots in the Southwest, loves Westerns (movies and books), but who is also at home in a big city.

The Power of Connections: The Power of Constraint

One of the best ways to expand thinking is to impose constraints.

Discipline on thinking makes us think in new ways. This happens regularly in product development. There can be market constraints, materials constraints, research constraints, and those constraints force companies to be more innovative. They have to look at their products and markets differently to meet the demands of these constraints. And that’s one of the ways they improve.

This works in education as well. Constraints can force students to think differently, more expansively. In other words, constraints can help students learn.

A valuable technique to impose constraints in education is through classroom improvisations. Improvisations focus the mind on a limited number of items and situations that can be taken under consideration, and thus they require students to dig deeper and think in new ways.

Here are some principle values of constraint when it comes to critical thinking:

1. Constraints encourage us to see the same things in a new way. We’re patterned to see the world and the objects and ideas in it in a repetitive, non-creative way. We are prisoners to our thought habits. It’s difficult to break through the patterns of seeing and thinking that we’ve become accustomed to. We’re stuck with what we know. But if we take away some of the elements of the normal narrative, all of a sudden the world looks and behaves differently. We have new perspective.

2. Constraints prompt us to explore paths we probably wouldn’t ordinarily consider, paths we might not even ordinarily see. If you ask students in a class for solutions to particular problems, they’re like to throw out the same-old same-old they’ve grown used to. If you impose constraints it’s likely that the usual solutions won’t work anymore, and so they have to consider new alternatives.

3. Constraints allow us to re-consider solutions we’ve previously marked as “This will not work.” We tend to operate under the mantras of “We’ve tried that and it didn’t work,” or “But that’s not what it’s designed for,” or “This is the only way it can be done.” But constraints can be the mother of invention and encourage us to question our previous assumptions. This is what happened in the movie Apollo 13. “We only have this much time, this much amperage, this much oxygen, and by golly we have to make it work!” Most importantly, it was a situation the engineers had never dreamed of. And those seemingly impossible constraints made the ground crew think beyond the limits they’d previously set for themselves.

4. Constraints help us see the real value of certain elements or information. We operate with unquestioned assumptions regarding solutions we need, and we lazily do not stretch ourselves to consider novel ideas to recurring problems. But by taking away some of the parts of a solution, we’re often able to see the remaining parts in a new light, recognizing value we previously ignored.

I’ve watched student and student come out of their shell and surprise not only me and their classmates but themselves as well with remarkable creativity when put in a situation that forced them to consider the variables in a whole new light. It’s a fulfilling sight to see.

The Power of Connections: What Is Student Engagement?

Julie Lindsay: Social Entrepreneurship Student Workshop
https://flic.kr/p/ptg9aV

Student engagement is something we talk about all the time. But what are we really talking about when we’re talking about student engagement?
What we’re talking about, simply put, is how to get students to be more active in our courses.

We want to see evidence that students are participating in ways that are meaningful to them, but I think we struggle with understanding what makes participation “meaningful,” particularly in online and hybrid courses.

We need to ask some fundamental questions about student engagement – why it’s important, how to design for it in our courses, and who is ultimately responsible for making it happen. Specifically, we need to ask:

• What is the relationship, if any, between student engagement during the course and learning that endures beyond the course?
• Can meaningful participation be tracked through assignments and recorded in a gradebook? If not, how do we measure it and design for it? 
• If we define student engagement as network activity and/or connectedness with other learners, learning communities, and information sources, how do we measure that engagement? 
• Is meaningful student engagement about designing better assignments, aligning those closely to course objectives, and working to get students to complete those assignments? If so, what do we need to do differently in our content design to foster greater student engagement? 
• What role does the instructor or facilitator play in student engagement? 
• Who bears the responsibility – or the greatest responsibility – for student engagement in a learning experience?

One of our purposes with Power of Connections is to ask these questions and to build exploratory, collaborative models to help us begin framing answers to them. Naturally, we want to ask our course participants and teaching colleagues – we’d be crazy not to take advantage of crowdsourcing opportunities – but most of all we want to ask ourselves these questions.
Personally, I’m sympathetic with institutions and their emphasis on measuring student engagement by hard data points – attendance, measurable participation in class activities, and grades. Institutions are not teachers. They’re trying to solve macro problems such as retention.

And yes, student engagement can certainly be an important factor when we’re talking about retention, but there are other factors as well. From my experience, discovering new ways to increase student engagement doesn’t come from macro analyses. There are too many dynamic elements and too many personal ones, and they simply can best be discovered and cultivated in the day-to-day teaching and learning “weeds” of a course. 

So now let’s come back to the question, “What is student engagement?” or, better yet, “What do I think student engagement is?”

To be honest I’m still working on my final answer, or at least my next iteration of it, but here is the foundation for my thinking and exploration – student engagement is about helping learners grow their personal learning networks.

In other words, I believe we should replace our course-centric model with a learner-centric one.

We should think of each learner as the center point of a vast network of nodes. Each node in that network represents a connection to a person or a source of information. The learner’s network can also intersect with other learner networks and communities. And perhaps most importantly, these nodes, if student engagement has been successful during the course, those nodes will evolve and expand over time.

Our proper role as teachers and facilitators is to foster the greatest possible increase in connections within each learner’s personal learning network that will benefit the learner over the course of a lifetime. That will lead to the biggest impact on learning.

And that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about student engagement.

Power of Connections: Teacher Engagement and the Iceberg Dilemma

As part of the build-out of Power of Connections, I've been giving a great deal of thought to the notion of teacher engagement (see here and here). As part of this reflecting process, I've been thinking about how course creation and delivery differ in online and face-to-face environments.

Specifically, it seems to me that we often fall prey ot what I call the "iceberg dilemma" when it comes to online design and instruction. This dilemma, I think, can be attributed to a fundamental difference/assumption between teaching face-to-face and online.

When we're preparing and teaching face-to-face courses, we generally look at the course content as a foundation for the actual course, but are keenly aware that this is only a point of departure. Once the content is prepared we, as instructors, must go in and present that content. We must also elaborate iteratively throughout the course of the curriculum based on feedback we receive from students, and work to connect students and information beyond the base content. Using my iceberg model, we realize that content, and even initial delivery, are only the tip of the iceberg. The real teaching engagement and learning happens beyond that (beneath the content surface).

While it certainly doesn't have to be that way, many of our models for online course design and delivery focus almost exclusively on content, or just the tip of the iceberg. We design our content and build it within a platform, and then we allow the platform to do the majority of the delivery. This is the majority of the course apart from managing assignments. In other words, there is little in-course iteration and sparse effort at student engagement through connection.

The realization I am coming to is that, in online learning, teacher engagement is what happens after the content is built and delivered (with exceptions like Laura Gibbs who build her content openly and engages even at that level). Again, it doesn't have to be that way but it seems to be the rule as opposed to the exception.

What excites me about Power of Connections is that we are going to be spending so much time "beyond the content," working on the part of the iceberg beneath the surface. I think this is where teacher engagement really happens (at least for me), and it's certainly where I'll have lots of fun.

Power of Connections: Real-Time Design Inquiry and Teacher Engagement

Stacy and I had a great meeting on Power of Connections yesterday. The main focus of our discussion was on how to make our learning design decisions transparent to participants, and how to engage them in different forms of elaboration and feedback.

Practically, what this amounts to is creating reflections and comments about all course content, and posting those comments contextually, in the "margin" of each reading or assignment. Participants will see these as they go through the experience and will be able to join our dialogue if they are interested. Since the course in on student engagement, we wanted participants to be able to see in-the-moment, ongoing dialogues from the "teachers" about their decisions and thinking. We wanted them to overhear us talking about "why we thought this was a good idea (and, perhaps, realize now that it might not be exactly what we intended)," or "how this content is linked to an assignment way down the line that you can't see yet (and asking if that makes sense)", or "can you think of a better way to present this activity (we like the activity but know it could have been more)?"

In some ways, this means creating both a "course" and a "meta-course," but the result, at least for the two of us, is lots of fun. Obviously,  we hope this will be something that engages our course participants, but the benefits of this "designing out loud" make it a worthwhile process regardless.
Here are two reasons why.

• It reemphasizes that the learning experience we've designed is a point of departure rather than a destination -- Since participants can see our decisions, expectations, and doubts, they can also see that we do not envision either the content or the thinking about our subject as something that has been resolved. I believe the evolution is/will be apparent.
• It makes us care what participants think about our process almost as much as we care about what they are getting out of the process -- This is an interesting one. Normally, when we think about teaching we tend to focus almost exclusively on student outcomes and how students are benefiting from what we have planned. It's simply a matter of the ends proving or justifying the means. In our model, we are constantly concerned with "how could this be better," and admitting up front that we require learner contribution and assistance in making the experience truly meaningful. We are now engaged, as teachers, because we have invited evaluation as a core part of the experience.

Once Power of Connections kicks off next week I'll begin showing examples of this "teaching out loud" process and writing about  participant feedback and the evolution of our thinking.

Power of Connections: What Do We Mean When We Say Student Engagement?

Laura Gibbs commented on my Google+ post yesterday that she was voting for PARTICIPANT CREATION (all caps and bold are hers). She said this with regards to my post on design decisions for our Power of Connections Course, and it reminded me why Stacy and I have been working on this in the first place -- we believe that learner creation is a core component of student engagement.

Without it, in fact, we would argue that it is highly difficult to create learning that endures.

Admittedly, talking about learner creation as a key part of what we call student engagement doesn't explain the different ways we can facilitate such creation in our courses, or how/when it leads to meaningful learning engagement.

This question or learning design challenge --  how/when do we create learner creation that leads to meaningful student engagement? -- is actually a driving philosophical force running through Power of Connections. And, as we have worked through the learning design process, we have designed with the following guiding principles.

• Effective learner creation is about the "why" as much as it is about  the "what" -- Stacy and I have been working on Artefact Challenges for Power of Connections and, while there are so many cool things we could have participants create, we find that the value of their creation is directly dependent on its purposeful integration into a learning objective objective. Meaningful engagement comes when we can get learners to move past the act of creation into the acts of learning and accruing wisdom through experience.
• For optimum student engagement, learner creation should be personalized/personalizable -- Good creation prompts appeal to a diverse group (meaning they are valuable or interesting to a heterogeneous class cohort), but they are also activities that can be personalized to a degree by each individual learner. This makes every creation truly unique and personal, and gives the learner creations greater meaning.
• Ideally, learner creation should be sharable if we want it to result in real engagement --For creation to be engaging it must matter. It is important that the created work having visibility within the learning community, that it get out of the learner's head and into reality. This leads to multiple possible levels of impactfulness. It also, quite oftten, leads to greater reflection.
• Creation is more than just making stuff -- it can also be active engagement with and personal internalization of information --This last one may seem strange but it is extremely important. Learner creation is also about students engaging in the formation (creation) of their own ideas and opinions about information. It is about helping them move beyond passive consumption, which is fairly antithetical to real student engagement. A key to facilitating this type of creation is to find good models for turning information into something that feels more "active" and "dynamic" to students. In Power of Connections for example, we do this with dialogues, which are intended to invite learners into a discussion about the information. By doing this we model information engagement as well as create a gravitational pull that, hopefully, gets the student to do more than skim the information at a surface level.

Power of Connections: Initial Design Decisions

Yesterday, I posted about the self-imposed design constraints Stacy and I have placed on our Power of Connections course. Today, I want to elaborate a bit on some of the initial course design decisions we have made based on those design constraints. In the spirit innovation, I would like to think that our constraints have made us more creative. However, I am aware that we are at the early stages on our design thinking and that some of our decisions may prove problematic once the actual learning experience begins July 13.

Here, in a nutshell are, our initial design decisions for Power of Connections.

• Focus on a limited set of content types that can be elaborated in many ways -- We have tossed out many, many content types and ideas as part of our planning. In the end, we decided to go deep instead of broad. We have stuck to a few, basic content types -- those available to everyone and that can be executed by pretty much anyone -- and have focused our design on elaborating these types in different ways. We believe that this will help us achieve out goal of modeling student engagement activities for the largest audience set possible.
• Focus on a limited set of activity or technology types -- We do not want Power of Connections to be about cool technology or student engagement activities that necessarily require learning new technologies. So, as with content types, we are sticking to the basics when it comes to technology. We want the activities we explore and discuss in this experience to be accessible and usable by instructors with a broad range of online/hybrid teaching experience and technology expertise.
• Encourage as wide a range of participant creation as possible -- The first two design decisions certainly address our goal of making Power of Connections work for teachers and course designer with different backgrounds and differing levels of expertise. However, we also want participants to be able to "engage" according to their own personal preferences with regards to how and where they create content and conversations. We also want participants to be able to engage when they want and with only the content that interests them. That means designing the experience in a modular fashion so that someone can engage only with a particular activity from week three and still receive tremendous learning benefit.
• Encourage dialogue in as many places as possible and make it our responsibility to aggregate and connect the community -- Of course, all of this puts a bit pressure on Stacy and me because it means we must be committed to supporting/integrating both a closed learning environment as well as open Web activity and communication (for blogs, social media, and public access to course content). It's usually an either/or proposition when it comes to course design, but we're trying to do both (and it could be a miserable failure -- i.e. there may be a good reason we never mix the two).
• Ensure that all content can be accessed from multiple environments -- both open and closed -- One of the goals of Power of Connections is to create a catalog of sharable information, activities and ideas related to student engagement. We want to make sure that all the work created in this experience lives on after the experience and remains discoverable, editable, and sharable by others. We also want to encourage participation in our experience by everyone, particularly those who don't have time to engage in the course experience but who want to view what's going on or add to the conversation casually through social media.
• Commit to engaging with the community as facilitators for as long as its active -- As I have said, this is not a traditional course, it is a learning and community experience. And, Stacy and I are not acting as instructors, but rather as facilitators for the learning community. To that end, we are committed to supporting community conversation and the curation of community content/ideas as long as people are interested.

Power of Connections: Course Design Constraints

Okay, while it's taken some time in various planning stages (mainly because my attention has been pulled away by other projects), Stacy Zemke and I are happy to announce our Power of Connections open learning experience, which will commence July 13. You can follow the link above to watch our promo video and enroll, or check out my more formal description post here.

What I would like to do in this post is begin sharing information about our actual approach to designing this experience, and to explain some of the decisions we are making about the experience structure and platform/technology usage. To kick this off, I want to talk a bit about our self-imposed design constraints.

Constraints

To begin with, I should note that part of our thinking is informed by beliefs about the importance of constraints in shaping innovation and creativity. Essentially, we find that teachers and learners are often more inventive and willing to stretch their thinking when they have fewer options to work with. You will see us model this notion of constraint throughout the experience n the form our improvisations and artefact activities.

For the purposes of designing this experience, we established the following as our initial design constraints.

1. It should be  more of a learning experience and not a course in a traditional sense -- We felt that we should design something we would want to take, something that was more about doing and connecting with others, something from which participants could take away valuable experiences and ideas that could incorporated easily into their own teaching or learning design.

2. It needs to be both structured and unstructured -- This may seem like a strange one to some, but if you've taught with journals or blogs you probably know what we're getting at here. Some find the completely unstructured, "build your own experience" adventure to be exhilarating. Others find it terrifying because they want a much greater sense of linear structure. By the way, this seems ot apply to teachers as well. So, for this experience, we wanted to constrain oursleves to a design that would, the the greatest extent possible, satisfy both those wanting to explore freely as well as those desiring more structure.

3. Content and content design should model what average instructor can do in almost any learning environment -- Again, call us pragmatists. Stacy and I both work with traditional institutions and instructors, many of whom are not ready to embrace new technologies or  innovative approaches to teaching. With that in mind, we wanted to design content that pretty much any teacher/instructor could create and implement. We also realize that all teachers/designers work with additional environment/tool constraints (beyond their own expertise ar willingness to innovate), so we are also focusing on content models that can work pretty much anywhere.

 4. The experience needs to be both closed and open -- It is important to Stacy and me that we model something that can be incorporated into a wide range of institutions and teaching environments. We want our colleagues at every point on the teaching spectrum to be able to use some of the concepts in modeled in this experience. As a result, we feel like we need to embrace both open and closed environments. For those constrained by traditional LMS environments, and who feel constrained to  work entirely within those platforms, we wanted to show that you can create incredible engagement  there. However, we also wanted to support teachers/designers working in more open environments, and those wanting to add open options to a closed environment.

5. The focus should be learner-centric -- If we're going to focus on "student engagement," the design of the experience should place the learner at the center of his/her learning network as much as possible. As much as possible, all energy should be generated by individual learners and learner groups/communities.

6. Participants should have the ability to see what is going on within the community network  -- One of our beliefs about student engagement is that the more genuine engagement/activity achieved by a student within her/his learning network, the more meaningful and enduring the actual learning will be. To that end, we feel it is important to find diverse ways to help "show" learners how both they and the learning community are engaging, and how they might benefit form more or different types of engagement.

7. Participants should be able to join and leave at any time -- If we are designing an experience for the learner (as opposed to for the institution or instructor), it should be as flexible as possible. People should be able to come and go, regardless of whether or not they are talking of Michelangelo . They should be able to drop in for a single activity, a lesson, or the whole experience. They should also be able to do this in the order of their won desire.

Showing vs. Telling: Using Dialogues for Interaction and Reflection

The dialogue emerged as a genre in antiquity, and has been used across the centuries as a mechanism for demonstrating an exchange of ideas between two or more people. From a teaching and learning perspective, dialogues are particularly useful as a way to show and invite participation with information as opposed to simply displaying it for passive consumption. They represent the difference between “showing” and "telling."

There are a number of fine modern examples of the dialogue form, but one that stands out for me is Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, Hofstadter uses a conversational structure inspired by Plato’s dialogues to demonstrate his thesis on consciousness and, through this construct, has been able to make highly abstract and advanced concepts both understandable and interesting to a broad audience.

I first read Gödel, Escher Bach back in the eighties, and it inspired me to use dialogues in my face-to-face courses as a device to structure student participation and understanding in literature classes (admittedly, this may have seemed like a particularly easy transition based on my experience as a beginning language instructor, a discipline that has long championed model dialogues as a tool for helping students internalize natural language forms). For my literature courses, I would take character dialogues from works we were reading, add several lines to those in order to demonstrate what I had in mind, and then ask the students to elaborate on the dialogues according to specific themes. The purpose of the assignment was: 1) to give students a purpose for reading selected portions of the text carefully; 2) to provide a framework for gaining a deeper understanding of character, motivation, and viewpoint, and; 3) to facilitate a fun way to stimulate interaction and conversation.

I had pretty much forgotten those dialogue assignments until, one day, Stacy Zemke showed me how she was using dialogues in her online courses. She was using them as a form of instructor mediation at the beginning of her lessons, as an alternative to posting "one-way” reading or reading assignments. What I found really valuable was the way she used the form to model conversations she might have with a student about the topic or information being covered. This approach, based on her cumulative experience covering the same information with real students, afforded her sever advantages. Fist she was able to “show” the topic being discussed as opposed to simply “tell” about it. In addition, she was able to engage students as active participants int he reading process by including them through her composite student participant int he dialogue. Finally, the form also allowed her to answer frequently asked questions in a way that was completely contextualized and, thus, more valuable.

As I’ve designed training courses and other learning experiences over recent years, I have resorted more and more to the dialogue as a valuable tool for creating increased student engagement around concepts and information. I have found that this kind of modeling can be particularly valuable for the students, and it is also a fun way for me to teach. And, like our improvisations, it is a highly flexible model that can be used in any learning environment, and that can be morphed easily to match different teaching styles. Equally important, experience has shown me that sharing concepts through dialogues often results in deeper and more extended reflection by students.

Taking all of this from me telling you about it to actual demonstration, here is an example of a dialogue I created for a linguistics course.

Dialogue: The Gap into Meaning

[TO BE READ ALOUD BY TWO STUDENTS]

Sancho: So we might say, then, that language is evidence of our fall from Grace?

Sancho: Ignorance, your Worship?

Don Quixote: Yes. With each turn of the game human language inevitably moves further from the Meaning from which it sprang.

Sancho: Come again?

Don Quixote: From the derivative comes the derivative comes the derivative. Each iteration becoming more moronic as it proceeds.

Sancho: This is dour news indeed, your Worship. It weighs heavy on my heart and robs me of what little courage I have.

Sancho: Perhaps this understanding would weigh less heavily on me if I were able to grasp it with greater clarity.

Don Quixote: Perhaps. Knowing the depth and breadth of a mortal enemy, seeing the many weapons he has to vanquish you – this can bring a clarity of purpose to a knight’s battle.
Sancho: Your courage is a valiant comfort.

Don Quixote: A knight’s courage comes through faith, loyal squire.

Sancho: But, your Grace, assuming that Meaning exists apart from human language, that it is something altogether different, then where did it come from?

Don Quixote: Where did the triangle come from? Or Pi?

Sancho: Obviously these existed in in the universe independently of human awareness.

Don Quixote: Precisely.

Sancho: And these, along with many other wonders, were discovered by human civilization, which in turn created a special language called mathematics to describe them.

Don Quixote: Also correct, Sancho. And let me say again how I marvel at the distance you have traveled in your learning.

Sancho: Your Grace is too kind. But my understanding is still incomplete.
Don Quixote: What aid can I provide?

Sancho: I understand that the marvels of our universe have been discovered through empirical observation and rational thought.

Don Quixote:  This is true.

Sancho: What I cannot see is a path for discovering Meaning. It does not seem to be open to empirical observation, and I can think of no rational argument for reaching it, particularly as the starting point would always seem to be human language, which is only moving us further away from Meaning with each passing generation.

Don Quixote: Ah, yes. I see your dilemma now. Perhaps I can lead you through another thought experiment to help you understand more fully.

Sancho: I would be forever in your Grace’s debt. What I mean to say, of course, is that I would be even more eternally in your debt.

Don Quixote: I understand what you mean, Sancho.

Sancho: What a relief. I have begun to despair that all communication was hopeless!

Don Quixote: Very well then, let us imagine that we are standing on a blank sheet of paper.

Sancho: There is nothing on it?

Don Quixote: It is completely empty of markings. And, since any markings would represent possible language, can we not assume that this piece of paper represents every possible sound, word, phrase, and thought in the universe?

Sancho: How is that?

Don Quixote: No choices have yet been made about what will be written. There are no limitations. This blank sheet of paper, through its very silence, represents an almost infinite number of available meanings.

Sancho: Yes, I understand now.

Don Quixote:  Next, imagine that my sword is a pen that I take and make a mark on the paper.  [Don Quixote removes his sword from its scabbard and draws an imaginary mark on the ground with its tip] It is a single stroke of ink. It is the beginning of some letter or sound but, in this form, is only a small individual line. The start of something bigger, perhaps.

Sancho: Yes, it could be any combination of lines or sounds at this juncture.

Don Quixote: By making this mark, however, even though it is small and unformed, I have also reduced the number of possible meanings for this page. Can you see that?

Sancho: I can see that there is less space for future marks than there used to be.

Don Quixote: Exactly, This is because each mark on a page necessarily defines a limitation. The blank page, the one without any language, contains all the possible expressions of meaning in the universe. Anything and everything is out there for the choosing. With each mark, however, the writer makes a decision. A particular line increases the likelihood of the next stroke and eliminates the possibilities of others. One or more possibilities are inevitably covered up, obliterated.

Sancho: And this will continue as you draw more marks, will it not?

Don Quixote: Indeed it will, good Sancho. As I draw more strokes the process continues. I form an entire letter, and then a syllable. This letter and syllable preclude other letters and syllables.

Sancho: [With great enthusiasm now] And before long, you will have written an entire sentence. This sentence will naturally suggest new sentences, ones that would seem to follow logically or make sense. It will also eliminate the possibility of other sentences that would make no sense within the context being created.

Don Quixote: Yes, yes, and so it goes. The more marks I make on this page, the more writing I do, the more limitations I place on meaning. Once I have filled the page with words, I move onto a second page but this new page is now confined by the context of the first. Whereas the first blank page represented the entire universe of possible meaning, this second page has a much more modest body of meaning from which to draw.

Sancho: This is incredibly helpful. Your Grace! I see how the possibility of Meaning is constrained by the continued use of language.

Don Quixote: Good. Now, let us pursuing this line of thought to its logical extremes.

Sancho:  I will defer to your Grace’s wisdom, although I must admit I am hesitant to wander into any extremes.

Don Quixote: Let’s imagine a novelist, writing late at night in her study, tapping out page after pager on her keyboard in an effort to create a perfectly clear narrative and Meaning, one that eliminates all other possible narratives or meanings. We might even say that this is what, ultimately, defines the great work of fiction: it eliminates definitively the possibility of other marks on other pages, of every other possible utterance or meaning available in the universe.

Sancho: But according to our previous conversation, that narrative cannot actually be complete or definitive. The language the novelist is using too much too loose for wrapping up Meaning.

Don Quixote: That is absolutely correct, dear Sancho. She has been working under a false assumption, an elaborate hoax that human beings have perpetrated on themselves for many generations, actually since the advent of writing itself. It is a hoax founded in our misguided belief that the locus of utterance and Meaning is in the markings on the page. We have convinced ourselves that the music of written language is expressed in the formation of written signs. In reality, this is less true than if we were to say that the entirety of the sounds that can be created on a piano can be expressed by pressing on different combinations of the thirty-six black keys.

Sancho: That would be strange and incomplete music indeed, your Grace.

Don Quixote: To answer your original question, friend Sancho, Meaning is found in the white spaces on the paper, in the silence. It is in that silence that Meaning is inevitably wrought and rendered.

Sancho: And how are we to interpret this silence?

Don Quixote: For that, we must learn a new skill. We must learn to listen.

Don Quixote: Indeed, Sancho. The magic of von Neumann has allowed us to see this invisible evolution toward ignorance.

Don Quixote: Dour but inevitable, dear Sancho.

Improvisation Activity #1: Improvisation with an Object

Now that I've provided a general overview for improvisation activities, I'm ready lay out the learning design philosophy and basic setup instructions for the core improvisation types I like to use in both online and face-to-face learning.


The first type, and the one I often use when I'm working with groups of any kind is Improvisation with an Object. The purpose of this improvisation is the encourage participants to see the familiar differently, from new perspectives. It is an extremely flexible activity, and can be set up easily in any kind of environment.


The basic setup for this improvisation is really simple. I tell the group that I'm going to show them an object and then give them a set amount of time to write down as many ideas as possible about what the object might be. The only ting they can't write down is what the object really is or what it's actually used for.

In the simplest version of this activity, I ask participants to work individually and I set the time limit at 30 seconds. The time constraint works well as it helps provide focus for the activity. It also produces creativity by "forcing" people to accept possibilities that they might reject if they were given sufficient time to evaluate.

When I do this improvisation for the first time, I deliberately choose an object that is readily recognizable, such as a pencil. I do this because I want participants to begin with a sense of familiarity, and using a familiar object helps achieve that. I also want to force them to see things differently, think beyond the familiar, translate the known into what they can imagine. 

This jump from the concrete-known to imaginative possibilities is not automatic, however. Typically, when I begin an improvisation series with a pencil, the initial set of suggestions I generally hear are simple translations from one concrete, known object to another. For example:

• It's a thermometer
• It's a straw
• It's a cigar

As I facilitate further stretching with this activity I will ask participants to work in pairs, and  I will also re-introduce objects we have used before. At this stage, both because of group synergies and because they have already discarded obvious translations, the suggestions will evolve into more distant and/or narrative-driven possibilities.

• It's the model the Beatles used as inspiration for Yellow Submarine
• It's a rocket ship from the planet Balsa
• It's the Egyptian skyscraper they called the Needle

At this point, the elaboration portion of the activity is particularly fun. As a facilitator, I'm able to ask questions, extend the narrative and imaginative possibilities, and draw other group members into the discussion.

There are many possible permutations of this improvisation. I have done this online and face-to-face, and as both oral and written activities. I have used it successfully to reinforce concepts with language and composition students, and with software developers and biology researchers. 

It is also an improvisation that I can implement successfully in any situation with, literally, no advance planning.

The bottom line is that it’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s a great way stimulate lateral thinking and imagination. It’s also an activity that gets us out of our set ways of seeing things.

What's in an Improv?

So, today I'm starting work on the different kinds of improvisation activities that Stacy and I are thinking about using in our open course course.

[Stacy: Don't you think this might be a good time to explain about improvisation activities in general?
Rob: Good idea. I can do that now, unless you want to?
Stacy: I'm happy for you to handle it.]

Like I was saying, I thought it might be a good idea if I shared some of our thinking behind improvisation activities and why they're important in the context of creating learner engagement.

From a student perspective, improvisation activities are useful for stimulating immediate, focused interaction and reflection related to specific concepts or skills. They also encourage both lateral thinking, or brain stretching, and creativity. Finally, these activities are great for both individual and group activities,

For learning designers and instructors, improvisation activities have four basic traits that make them valuable for student engagement strategies.

1. The are environment independent -- To begin with, improvisations are activities that work extremely well for student engagement regardless of the physical or digital classroom setting. In other words, they can be conducted easily in both face-to-face or online environments. That's particularly useful for instructors who teach the same courses in multiple environments.


2. They are subject independent -- In addition to being "environment independent," improvisation activities also work equally well across all disciplines. They can be used effectively in Humanities, STEM, and Business courses alike. So the old excuse of "that's a great idea but it worn't work for _________" just doesn't hold true with improvisation activities.


3. They are time flexible -- Improvisation  activities are also extremely flexible with regards to time. You can create improvisation activities that last under 2 minutes, or more elaborate exercises that take up to 10-15 minutes. The choice and design are entirely up to the instructor.


4. They support many different delivery options -- Finally, improvisation activities can be delivered or implemented in many different ways. This means that they can work for any type of teaching style or personality. This means the other old excuse of "that's a great idea but it won't work with my teaching style," is also a non-starter with these activities.

So, What's in an Improv?

When we set up an improvisation activity, we generally think about three separate parts -- 1) the setup; 2) the activity; 3) the elaboration.

The setup is really important because it explains what the improvisation activity is and why it matters. This also helps everyone feel comfortable with the activity. That's a big part of doing improvs with students since the open-ended nature of these activities causes a certain amount of anxiety for some. Not that discomfort is necessarily a bad thing – a bit of healthy anxiety can generate lots of creative thinking – but we generally want learners to be comfortably uncomfortable.

The activity part of the improv is the actual improvisation itself. That’s the part where everyone reflects, interacts, and creates based on the setup. 

But a good improvisation doesn’t stop there. We also want to capture the energy and ideas created by the community, and then use that to extend the connectedness of the activity. That’s what we call the elaboration.

In my next post, I'll outline our first improvisation activity example and discuss its many possibilities and permutations.