XplanaZine

Session 5
Saturday 8:30 - 9:45 am
Session — Collaboratories
Joan Freedman, John Hopkins University; Ted Kahn, DesignWorlds for Learning, Inc.; Bill Shrewbridge, University of Maryland Baltimore County
- Bill Wolf - late 80’s - informal learning at work
- usual examples from big science, i.e Human Genome Project
- “Shared Minds” by Michael Schrage (1990): working together on a design problem, with constraints: expertise, time, money, competition, conventional
wisdom and accepted practices
- “go to the end point and work backwards” - the context of learning and work today and tomorrow: 75% of the learning in today’s workplaces is
informal and social, not primarily through training or e-learning; new jobs often are created out of small businesses - collaboration a plus; work is
global, must know how to communicate and collaborate
- a curriculum framework for the 21st century collaborative knowledge design, work and learning: know-what, know-how, know-where, know-when, *
know-who (social networks so important for building things), know-why
- multimedia collaboratory pulls together pieces to build a project or product (PBL: project, product, process based learning)
- …demo video of several collaboratory environments:

• Dave Master at Rowland High School - incredible classroom environment (the
  classroom is a studio!) - full of video and sound tools, lighting, students doing stop animation, videos, animation, laying soundtracks, all working on projects; former students and industry professionals often come back to offer feedback on projects - constant feedback, assessment not at the end
• product video of LiveBoard, a Xerox product for group collaboration and “document conferencing”: people were physically standing up next to each other, next to the big screen - focus on interaction between people, rather than on the face like in videoconferencing
• Stanford Center for Design Research: industry-sponsored product-based design course for a real product
• U Maryland Baltimore County and John Hopkins U Internet2 Landscapes project, creating a bi-located creative arts event: UMBC Fine Arts group and JHU group - some f2f meetings to get started, some email, some video and telephone conferencing to get things started, figuring out who the players were; thought maybe a piece of collaboratory software would have helped - email and cc-ing wasn’t conducive to involving everyone needed, would have liked some sort of threaded discussion, some many-to-many communication; also didn’t have strongly defined roles, maybe wasted time being “too polite”?

- Challenges: differences in cultures, where students were coming from: UMBC folks were all students in fine arts classes, so the students there were required as a class requirement to be involved in the process, and used to performance events; at JHU, it was more extracurricular, not part of a class, so it was hard to find places to put things in the curriculum of the professor who wanted to participate - and students were expecting a poetry writing class, not a poetry performance class, so they were a little disgruntled; academic mismatch - class expectations, academic calendars, etc., so the students never met or had a video conference in advance, needed to have more structured interaction before the event - “optional does not work” - Lessons learned: could have given the students more control (they were creating the concepts of the poetry, wrote the poems, and then people came in to do a session on spoken poetry) - needed more time for collaboration between students, to explore each others Landscapes works and make connections before the actual performance event - where to go from here? Having a senior seminar about this particular project, with students who are more comfortable with their bodies, poetry, performance - and with time to plan meetings between students, etc.
Note: My battery is dying! I should have recharged last night - shame on me. A conversation about collaboration between the audience and the presenters is to follow the formal presentation…