Project 1:
Build Your Own Theoretical Background
This first project consists of multiple parts and is a self-directed learning experience using the Think Model: Read, View, Listen
Project 1: An Overview of Your Self-Directed Learning Experience
Umbrella Central Question:
Theoretically, can the Library Learning Commons and its professional staff make a major difference in teaching and learning that goes on today?
Content Objectives:
- Each student will create and follow their own reading plan to build a solid theoretical base in four topical areas.
- From the reading plan, each student will then contribute substantive summaries of only the best items to the course blog.
Process Objective:
- Each student will be able to utilize various technologies and resources effectively in order to build a deeper understanding of the four topical areas.
Assessment:
Content: Students will be assessed on how well they followed their own reading plan to build their content knowledge. Students will be able to write four substantive and scholarly one-page essays (one per topic) exhibiting their personal expertise and collaborative intelligence.
Process: Students will demonstrate their ability to utilize and apply the techniques of collective knowledge building as they contribute to the various activities of the entire class.
Summary of your self-directed learning activities:
- Assess what you already know about four main topics:
- Educational Theory and Practice
- Curriculum and Assessment
- Collaboration
- Inquiry and Design thinking
- Devise your own reading, viewing, and listening plan.
- Pursue the ideas, adding the most relevant to the course blog.
- Participate actively during all the workshops as theoretical ideas are discussed. Do you have unique ideas of your own to add to the pot?
- By the third workshop, recount your journey and write one-page essays about each of the four topics you studied.
- If you have a better idea on how to build your theory base, propose it to the professor.
Culminating Activity: All semester long, the thinking, construction and building theoretical and real learning experiences together will constitute a constant demonstration activity of what we know and are able to do based on the theory base we are all developing individually.
The Big Think: At the end of the semester, we will reflect on what has happened, how it worked, and how it could be better for future students.
What Does This All Mean?
Project 1 is a self-directed learning experience.
This means that you are in charge of deciding what you want and need to learn, pursuing your own journey, and then reporting out what you have learned.
Each member of the class starts at a different place and every person will end up in a different place, although there is plenty of opportunity to combine what you know and can do with other members of the class.
Novices need not panic at the immensity of the task. Likewise, experienced educators should not presume they are experts and have already arrived. We will all try to help everyone else in the class along the path. We are not in competition...
The why of Project 1 is to prepare you as a librarian to use the very best teaching and learning strategies as you co-teach alongside educations of many disciplines.
Look at the steps listed in the section below to get you started as you design and map your journey. You will then spend the rest of the semester working through that journey.
Project 1 Breakdown
(It may prove useful to print out the above Google Doc in working on your plan)
Sample Reading Plan and Self Evaluation
Read, View, Listen
At this point, you have completed your Reading Plan for the four topical areas and you have charted your course. Now it is time to embark on your journey of reading, viewing, and listening to as many quality sources as you can find to help you learn what you need to learn.
Your instructor will send out (via email) articles or resources he finds valuable in his own learning journey. You are most welcome to use these as a part of your own journey. Occasionally, he finds something that is so important, that he will say that it is required reading or viewing because it will contribute directly to everything that is happening in the class.
You will log all of what you read, view, and listen to in this course Google Doc.
Post to the Course Blog:
From what you have read, viewed, and listened to post only the most relevant materials to the course blog.
Not all of your fellow students will be interested in everything you find, but you will run across materials and ideas that you think that others in the class would profit from. So, all through the semester, when you find a gem, add it to our blog. Thus, your postings are but a subset of everything you are consuming for your own journey.
Actually, the course blog is our own database that students before your have created and which you can add to.
Build During Workshops:
The instructor will often ask the class to concentrate their reading and consumption for the next workshop. This is the perfect time for you to concentrate on that part of your own journey so that you have something to say and questions to ask at the designated workshop. Everyone will help everyone else along on the journey. None of us know or can know everything! And, we are not in competition with each other in a self-directed learning experience like this one.
Synthesize:
This is the final step of Project 1. You will describe your own journey and write four one-page syntheses of the four topical areas we have covered. The paper will be six pages total.
Page 1 - Introduction/Description of your entire journey
Page 2 - Summary of your experience in Education Theory and Practice
Page 3 - Summary of your experience in Curriculum and Assessment
Page 4 - Summary of your experience in Collaboration
Page 5 - Summary of your experience in Inquiry and Design
Page 6 - A complete bibliography of what you read, viewed and listened to on your journey
The Big Think:
From your textbook readings, you will learn that a Big Think is a post learning experience review of what went right, what went wrong and what we should do if this type of learning experience were to be created.