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| (Image credit: Andrew DeWitt) |
Update: See a preview for the event by clicking here!
Events are awesome learning tools -- far more authentic, I think, than the artificial deadlines that drive most academic work. With events, a sense of social expectation energizes collaboration. Nothing like a clear purpose, a destination, and an audience to motivate people to bring their A-game.
That's why for our Digital Civilization class we have scheduled a showcase of final projects -- projects that we are going to try to demonstrate to a much broader audience than the forty people of our class. It's been a fantastic semester, full of challenges and opportunities, and this public event on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010 is going to help bring it all together. Here's the title for our event:
Digital Revolution:
Upgrading Education for Digital Civilization
This two-hour event will imitate the Ignite event format in which speakers are given exactly five minutes to make their presentations. This is a high-energy format that allows an audience to be exposed to a range of interesting ideas and people within a short period of time. In our case, we have ten presentations based on group projects. Between each presentation, Dr. Zappala and I will recognize students and blogs for their achievements in meeting our learning outcomes and for trailblazing digital literacy. A contest is also in the works, spearheaded by our event planning team, Kristina Cummins and Megan Stern.
And of course, we will use the three C's of digital literacy (consume, create, and connect) to prepare for and carry off our event. One of our principles for "create" is to document our work in progress and not wait for everything to be perfect before getting it out there. So, even though we don't have all our publicity media ready, I thought I would get the ball rolling with this blog post.
Students, are your group projects ready to be advertised? Most of you have a wiki site going to coordinate things. A couple of the groups whose sites look ready for the public include the Sharing the Gospel in a Digital World group, and the Digital Literacy Without Borders group, which has a nice set of features on their wiki to introduce what they are doing.
In order to attract the public, each group needs to have a public face. Update your wiki with an image and brief caption on the home page that gets to the heart of what you are presenting on, set up in such a way that those outside of the class will find this engaging. Your team pages should have pictures of team members, like the Digital Literacy Without Borders group has:
Update
My image chef image, below, is now superseded by the image created by Andrew DeWitt, above
