BLC16

It might sound like the Parisian Left Bank but it could be your course. It’s time to re-imagine the environments in which our students learn, whether we teach in a traditional classroom setting, offer a hybrid course, or teach completely online. One possible model is the “Café - Studio - Stage”, which facilitates distributed cognition, peeragogy, maker culture, and radical transparency. What are the essential elements of these “spaces” - whether they be physical or virtual - and what tools are useful in managing student learning, production, and amplification of student work? The “Café” fosters community and is the hotbed for discussion of ideas, but can also include individual research and reflection, curation, and student-lead teaching. The “Studio” provides the “whitespace” for students to produce artifacts. The synchronous aspect of “studio time”, even in a purely digital realm, is characterized by a creative energy much like the classic artist studio. It is a time for brainstorming, prototyping, collaboration, and for formative feedback. Finally, the “Stage” constitutes the various platforms available to share and showcase student work and learning with the goal being a sense of relevance via an authentic audience as a well as the obligation to contribute to socially-constructed knowledge.
We’ll discover ways to promote transparency and assist students in amplifying their work and connecting with experts in the field. The combination of curation, creation, reflection, and amplification leads to the cultivation of a positive digital presence, where students not only consume but contribute to knowledge production.
Participants will be come away with relevant activities they can replicate in the classroom (MS-Higher ED) and are encouraged to begin to develop an action plan for implementation. A full website of resources curated by the presenter is available as a take-home “goodie-bag”.