originally published October 18, 2005 in my blog Schooling ≠ Education.
We just completed a two day collaborative event with about 100 educators focused on Rethinking the High School Experience. We documented the event a little differently from what we typically do – using blogger.com and flickr.com as the two primary tools.
The major outcome from this event was a focus on a vision that included 9 planks:
- A sense of purpose
- Personalized learning
- A vision for what ‘it’ looks like when it’s done
- Innovative assessment
- Relationships with students
- Broader responsibility
- Connected learning (integrated, interdisciplinary, relevant learning)
- Teacher as facilitator
- Learning Communities
Each of the 19 different school districts made specific plans to work on at least one of these 9 areas in the next 18 months.
NOTE: at this point in the evolution of our facilitation methodology (October 2005) we primarily created a stand-alone website for the client to use after the face-to-face part of the event was complete. This web site text documentation of the major conversations, photographs from the event, visual models created by graphic facilitators and copies of the ‘assignments’ (instructions for each activity – for the part of the ‘problem’ the group was working on along with the outputs intended to be produced).
The choice to use blogger.com and flickr.com was an experiment to see what kind of product those tools could create and whether that would be as good as or better than what we were already doing.
Result: this was the only time we documented an event in this fashion.
