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1.     How could the design of the school/classroom lead to a more engaging environment?

2.     What types of technology can help create a greater sense of belonging within, and

                   perhaps outside of, the classroom?

3.       Does a sense of belonging increase engagement/productivity/learning?

               Should a price tag be placed on education?

          Individual Team discussion questions:

Team 1 (students/ learners)- When do you feel more belongingness at school?  Which learning environment makes you feel more comfortable and productive?

Team 3 (teachers/guides) - Will you consider technologies as part of your community building and student belongingness objectives? How can technologies be integrated to facilitate links to communities and tie them to school lessons?

Team 4 (administrators/organizers)- How can you facilitate student belonging...transitioning to society/community? Would you create, adopt standards that include technology?   What would be a common definition of "productivity" ?  Should there be more relevant and  meaningful  measures of learning goals and costs?

Rethink learning, assessment and teaching

Overall Purpose: To create a school environment that helps students feel part of not only the school community, but as important members of larger society. (Help them become engaged, active members of a national and global community)

Consider.....

What kinds of technologies might be used to this end? (blogs, wikis allow parents, adult experts to contribute to students' learning)

How would your added measures affect/contribute to learning?

Team Synthesis Presentations

In your teams you'll go over your synthesis for the first block of the class. We're looking forward to hearing from you and seeing how each of your teams tackled this task.

Weather Check

If things are getting bad, we can split after the Synthesis Presentations.

Break

Conversations Related to (Incidental) Openness

Let's take a little time to discuss some of the notions of open education and what it might mean to us. We'll also share a few stories of incidental openness from around Penn State and talk a bit about how it may or may not constitute open education.

Readings and Activities

• Let's continue reading Wenger, this time starting on page 45 and ending on page 72.
• We'd like you to also read a few pieces from the Cluetrain manifesto. We'd like you to read the Forward, the 95 Theses, Elevator Rap, and the Introduction. The entire Cluetrain is available online for free, so have at it ... you are welcome to read more.
• Complete your team writing with an emphasis on Community. We'd like you to also consider the 95 Theses as part of your reflection, citing which of the 95 that resonated the most with your team as it relates to the conversations we've been having in class.

We've now gotten all but one of you in a custom Twitter list that you can use to keep track of what is happening with all of us. I used the Twitter List feature to add all of you ... I noticed at least one of you has protected Tweets. Protected Tweets can keep lists from working perfectly, so I'd like to encourage you to potentially open your Twitter updates up while you are in the class. The list is located at:

http://twitter.com/colecamplese/ci597

Also, we need to decide on a hashtag for the semester. A hashtag lets people easily mark a tweet to be about a specific event. A lot of times you'll see tweets that have "something" after it ... that #something is a hashtag. For our course we will use #ci597 as our hashtag. So find the list, start posting, and don't forget the hashtag!

Thanks for taking the time to participate in the class blog. Both Scott and Cole value the different perspectives and new knowledge that can come from an open, civil dialogue. By enabling comments and group posting, we hope to encourage constructive conversations regarding the specific topics on this site. If you have something to add, please feel free to use this forum and let your voice be heard by your fellow classmates and visitors.

Please know that, given the reality of spam and the potential of "a few bad apples," we are reviewing all first time comments before posting. Subsequent comments will usually go through directly.

To make sure that your comment is given the thumbs up and not deleted, simply use common sense, play fair and be civil. A few quick reminders:

• No off-topic comments.
• No personal attacks - hostile, derogatory or deliberately insulting comments directed toward a specific individual are never okay.
• No comments intended to induce an angry response or disrupt the flow of discussion.
• Remember to think of this space as an extension of our classroom -- only say things here you would in the "real" world.

Cole and Scott reserve the right to change these guidelines as the course evolves. We also welcome you to add any thoughts to these guidelines in the comments below.

The new web publishing model we'll discuss in class is something I've been calling "The One Button Web."

With that in mind, we've created a quickpost bookmarklet to let you to publish to this space on the fly. Just drag this link to your bookmark bar in your browser to add this functionality. The video below illustrates how it all works.

One of the things we'd like you to explore is the notion of the Personal Learning Environment ...