A lot of the learning I experienced was hands-on with manipulatives like those suggested by Dewey. I remember how we would often try to make perfume from flowers, water, and other smelly things. That’s what I thought back to when reading about Dewey’s “real world” framework for learning environments. We learned different chemistry concepts when experimenting with mixing all the ingredients, though nothing ever seemed to come out right.

What I really loved most about the creek was that it was everything and anything we wanted it to be. When I was on my friend’s side of it we often engaged in a lot of role-playing, often pretending we were siblings (I always wanted to be the “brother” for some reason, hah) lost in the woods trying to survive with the materials we could find.

On other occasions I learned about testing the limits and boundaries set for me when I tried to wad through the tunnel the creek originated from (a tunnel under the main road near my house) to the other side. It was like that tunnel separated two completely different worlds and I was told not to go through it (by my parents), but I went against authority and checked it out for myself.

Like a lot of others mentioned, I enjoyed the open, unstructured environment that the creek provided. My friends/neighbors and I were able to let our imaginations do the deciding.

My first idea was attaching a web-cam to the Pleo and building off the new perspective that provided for children. I was somewhat stuck on where to go with this Pleo’s-eye-view idea and left it be since I couldn’t really think of what activities it best supported or what I could help children learn by using the Pleo that way.

I then moved on to using the Pleo and combining it with visual programming to allow children to program choreographed dances with their Pleos.

My third idea involved building off a construction kit concept of letter blocks that was suggested during a class exercise, but it did not really bring anything new to the table that wasn’t offered by current technologies.

I finally went back to my Pleo’s-eye-view idea and decided that augmenting the Pleo in this way could help bootstrap literacy and act as a Story Listening System (SLS). This especially builds off the idea that children and adults have this very intense emotional connection with Pleo and relates a lot to the Evocative Objects we discussed earlier in the semester.

So my project, SLP(leo) - Story Listening Pleo - actually directly relates to storytelling. It involves using Pleo as a platform for the Story Listening Systems (SLS) that Cassell discusses and builds off of the suggested design guidelines.

SLP(leo) encourages young children to produce personally meaningful content by listening to them. The goal of SLP(leo) is to support children’s emergent literary behaviors and aid them with their development of writing skills by building upon their natural ability to tell stories orally. I believe “literacy” is not just the ability to read and write but, as Cassell describes, the “ability to make meaning for others across space and time.” SLP(leo) acts as a story prompter and scaffolds literacy by encouraging construction of personally meaningful content rather than pure consumption of content created by others. SLP(leo) continues with encouragement of “outside-in” literacy skills, like the SLS, which focuses on “the function and features of writing in the world.” Children begin to gain these “outside-in” skills when engaging in storytelling and play activities.

SLP(leo) is a system intended for children between the ages of 7 and 9 that builds upon the naive, infantile, curious nature of Pleo who is always exploring and trying to make sense of the everyday world. Pleo acts as a story prompter, actively trying to engage the child by sharing its perspective (i.e. what it has been exploring that day) and then asking open-ended questions. SLP(leo) makes the transition from oral to written storytelling and encourages reflection and sharing by automatically connecting to Plogs (the Pleo online community at http://www.pleoworld.com).

1) Participatory Research
Over the course of 6-weeks a group of 5-10 high school seniors will use digital video camera to document their world and begin to think critically within it. During weekly “study sessions” the participants will screen footage of themselves and their community. Through a collaborative process of reflection and dialogue the group will name and research an problem that is adversely affecting their community.

2) E-advocacy
The second phase of the project begins with the students using their ‘research data’ to then launch an E-advocacy campaign, throughout their senior year, to create meaningful change that addresses the problem. Through the use of a variety of new media tools (i.e. e-mail, social networking,video blogging, podcasting, etc.) youth participants will attempt to mobilize themselves, peers, and community in order to advocate for meaningful political and social change in their world.

Designed for out-of-school programs for marginalized youth, the participatory media project builds upon Micheal Resnik’s(1998) five ‘learning through design’ principles:

1) Active participation
2) Creative problem-solving
3) Personal connection to knowledge
4) Interdisciplinary
5) Sense of Audience

From this perspective, the goal of this project is to go beyond individual acheivement as the basis of education but towards a collective, community-based action-oriented education. The Participatory Media Project provides an action plan for youth to engage in political and social change. One that fully integrates new media as strategic tools to create that change.

Although I always thought of myself as a mechanical toy kind of person, a sciency person who hated dolls, now that I think about it one of my favorite and most time consuming play activities was playing with “dolls”. However they were never Barbie dolls or baby dolls. I loved playing with those little trolls. They were stored in a shoebox, so that became their “house”. Or if I was in school I would use my pens, pencils, erasers and things like paperclips as characters. The lids were kind of like space-man helmets for the pens. Other objects would become mountains or caves or spaceships.

I think one of the reasons I liked playing with these characters so much was that I was so extremely shy when I was young, and I could learn about social interaction through playing with these made up characters. I also preferred to play alone with the dolls, maybe so I wouldn’t be “taught” or judged, and wouldn’t get discouraged.

I think it is amazing that despite believing I was a math and science kid all the way up until my first year of grad school was over, that I’ve turned into a social person who studies mostly social things. Psychology, sociology, economics, social systems, organizational behavior and education have started dominating my studies and my curiosities. Perhaps all thanks to the trolls with the little jewels in their bellies

Even though I didn’t like the test, I do like a lot of things about the theory of multiple intelligences. I think it is valuable to see that even if someone isn’t good in some things like math, science, or language, they can be extremely intelligent in things we don’t appreciate like kinesthetic. I think this has a lot of implications for education. By appreciate all of the different intelligences and spending time on each, I think students can really improve in some of the neglected ones and more importantly feel like they are good at something even if they aren’t good at everything. This last point is the most important because feeling like you aren’t smart is probably one of the greatest barriers to getting a lot out of education.

The only thing is that I think there are several “intelligences” missing. He did a great job at identifying some of the major ones though, and I like the new ones that he has added like the ability to think about abstract things like space and time. But he doesn’t have one that appreciates people who have extremely well developed sense of taste. I read in the book Blink about people who could tell you hundreds of things about an oreo cookie, including which batch it is from, and what kind of sugar they used. Also, I think some of his main categories could be further split. Like in Kinesthetic, I think the ability to appreciate different tactile textures is very different than being coordinated. Or I feel like being able to sympathize with people is extremely different from being able to manage them, and require different kinds of intelligences. Overall I think that his breakdown and categorization needs a lot of work, but I think his theory is great and has a lot of good possible implications.

On top of that, the users can kind of “choose their own adventure” by deciding where to go and what tasks they will do next. This gives them an element of control in how the story unfolds.

Finally, users will be able to make a multi-media record of what they have done in each lesson as a “chapter”. Like they can take “pictures” with their “camera” and write captions on them. or maybe their notebook will have prompts asking them something, to which they will answer. This will help them remember what they’ve learned, and also they will be able to look back at their stories later to refresh their memory if it’s been a while. Users will have the option to share their stories or see those of others, so they will provide each other with an audience.

Birdhouse is intended to function within a context of environmental and ecological exploration. By automatically generating a flow of this kind of mixd media– images, sound recordings, online information — it prompts responses. Like the nature journals or almanacs of the past, there is no set form for these responses to take. As we’ve seen, people respond to and learn from the world in different ways. But one hope is that it generates creative narratives - stories - about how plants, animals, and people interact.

In that sense, it moves away from existing “scientist” models of ecological learning, where animals and plants are seen as pre-given objects of study within various disciplines (for example, biology). Instead, it allows users to construct and follow their own ideas about what the system is “for” and what the images, sounds, words, and numbers they are encountering might mean. Birdhouse encourages interpretive flexibility. For one user, Birdhouse might be part of a citizen science project on urban wildlife. For another, it might spark a series of nature poems.

As an initial inspiration for creation of these comics, I will use popular song lyrics. Each song is a story and if you strip away all images and music from the song, it is a poem or story in poem form. My proposal is for the youth to re-interpret these stories in their own way to rewrite the story. Then they can use cellphone cameras which are widespread to take images of elements from their re-written story. Once the images have been downloaded to a computer, the children can then use Comic Life to easily enhance the images, put them in frames and add speech and narrative bubbles to complete the comic.

Once the children have developed the ability to make a comic out of someone else’s song or work, they will then be encouraged to create a comic out of their own work. Therefore, they will have to write or storyboard their own original story. This will thereby develop their literacy skills.