Curriculum design taboos you should try today

Rules are meant to be broken.

1. Courses with vague intentions are a waste of time! Your lesson should have a clear purpose and stated learning objectives, and then you should teach and assess to that purpose! Avoid digressions and tangents because you’re not being paid to chase questions down rabbit holes!
   
   Courses always need a thread to follow, and we can’t suffer every fool prof to let conversation take us where it will. However, the most memorable moments in my education were happy accidents, moments that were unplanned and sometimes unrelated. Being open and responsive to curiosity allows the students to become active and engaged participants, taking learning into their own hands.
   
   We often have courses that are heavily planned and prescribed, and as teachers we need to protect nooks and crannies for possible magic.
2. Avoid sensitive or controversial topics at all costs! When in doubt, give a trigger warning!
   
   When will students learn how to have difficult conversations across divide? How will they build resiliency and learn self-regulation when confronted with something triggering?
   
   This needs to be handled skillfully, but normalizing and appreciating difference and conflict in the classroom will help set up learners to participate in a diverse civil society. Supporting students to care for themselves in the classroom will help them feel more safe in the real world.
   
   That said, this isn’t a cruel psychological experiment. When sensitive topics come up, they should only be entertained if they are relevant to the course purpose, so that students aren’t blindsided.
3. Memorization is a no-no! They can always look it up on their phones!
   
   I’ve been starting to question this one. I remember hours spent learning how to recite The Ballad of Semmerwater in grade 5, and studying the lyrics to my favourite songs. Times tables, new vocabulary, all the rules and exceptions in spelling. Playing music and remembering dance moves. So much of history and culture has been passed down orally, it’s a part of us, isn’t it? Memorization can feel really good, like we’re meant for it.
   
   Consider creating a larger lesson around memory, when students have a lot of new and unfamiliar content to digest. Get students to come up with their own mnemonic devices, and present their strategy to the class. They could work in groups to write songs, map word associations, and write lines as performance art. Observing their own ways of thinking, and the thinking of others, will help them build more attentiveness to their learning style.
4. There is no place for course content without a real-world application!
   
   In the classroom, we are often preparing students for the world that was. Better if we’re teaching to the world that is, but what students really need to think about is the world that will be. There are connections between the past and the future, but there will also be transcendent leaps, where technology, cultural shifts, and changing environments suddently alter the playing field beyond recognition. Learners will need imagination, and the ability to make new and divergent connections. Even in the most practical courses, there needs to be room for whimsy and dreaming, what-ifs and whatnots.

This post is for DS106 Daily Create, where I was prompted to generate a blog post title and run with it!

Rabbit hole wrap-up

I’m sad to end another iteration of ONL. By the time the next one starts up, I wonder if I’ll have time to join again. Round 2 did not disappoint.

I enjoy so many things about the course, but I think the biggest one is divergence. New and different people, perspectives, and ideas are my jam. The experience is refreshing, inspiring and expansive. The world got bigger, and I have more energy and desire to create and explore.

As a follow-up to my last post, I am getting a start on closing open tabs. I’m creating a resource guide of all the interesting stuff I want to remember, reference, and/or invesigate further. The items below came from ONL referenced materials and course-inspired rabbit holes. I don’t know how I’ll organize it just yet, but it’s a place for the ideas, until I make a place for the ideas – highlighted items are for future investigation.

Co-Design¹ Community of Practice: Emma Blomkamp launched CoDesignCo in 2022, and I was soooo excited until I read that it’s already in sunset mode. This is something I wonder about CoPs – how often do they sustain life, without feeling like they are being forever rolled uphill? Searching for CoPs online for curriculum design, they seem to be affiliated with (and exclusive to employees of) specific universities. There’s more about CoDesignCo in this UX Magazine article, including this great nugget:

A framework for building learning networks for systems change, focusing on the enabling conditions: mindsets; relationships; processes; and structures. Image source: McKenzie 2021.

This framework is speaking to me. I especially like “install boundary spanners” and “build a collective memory” – but I like just about everything else, too.

The Walkshop Model: Teachers at Örebro University in Sweden developed this model for beginner programming students. I’ve seen some similar things before but here’s their process:

1. Divide students into random groups.
2. Post problems around the room on walls where you can also write (ie, post paper, whiteboards, etc).
3. For 2 hours, groups circulate around the room and work on problems. The teacher and senior students listen and observe, and assist when needed.
4. Occasionally students are told to talk with other groups to compare thinking and solutions.
5. Halfway through the time, students are prompted to reflect on the ways they learn, and the ways they are contributing to their group. This gives them an opportunity to change the way they behave in their group for the 2nd half, if they feel the need.
6. At the end, the students watch a video of the instructor with a colleague, talking through the way they solved it, and what guided their thinking. They can watch this video from home.

I really like 5 and 6. They are what make this activity complete and well developed, beyond what I’ve seen before. Hearing the instructor with a colleague, talking out their own thinking, is invaluable.

This model could be used for design challenges, ethical dilemmas, and many other kinds of problem-based learning.

Dancing with Systems: Now this is exactly the kind of woo introduction to a subject that I go crazy for. Donella Meadows was an environmental scientist and systems thinker, who among other things was the lead author on Limits to Growth, which through computer simulation (in 1972!) posited that our economic and population growth trajectories with limited available resources aren’t sustainable. Seems controversial. 🙃² Dancing With Systems is a posthumously published work on how to disrupt systems for positive change. Hackernoon summarized her key guidelines well. The abbreviated list follows:

• Get the beat: get to know it before you muck with it
• Listen to the wisdom of the system: look for what’s good and self-sustaining
• Expose your mental models to the open air: put your assumptions out there to be challenged, and be open to change your ways of thinking
• Stay humble. Stay a learner.
• Locate responsibility in the system: look for the ways the system itself creates certain impacts, not just how it behaves to random outside stimuli (ie specific external events)
• Make feedback policies for feedback systems: create an evaluation culture
• Pay attention to what is important, not to what is quantifiable
• If something is ugly, say so
• Go for the good of the whole
• Expand time horizons: think about short term and long term
• Expand thought horizons: take an interdisciplinary approach
• Expand the boundary of caring: not just our immediate community
• Celebrate complexity
• Hold fast to the goal of goodness

DS106: AKA Digital Storytelling is… I think it’s an open online course which also runs at an actual university sometimes. Not exaggerating, it took me the better part of an hour to confirm that this is actually still a thing. The website feels like a ghost town that thrived in 2005, all broken links and outdated references. Posted content is almost exclusively from 2011-2013, back when the teacher was fresh and full of passion, or had a budget, or perhaps before they lost the password to the website back end. It’s like teaching that once-annual class and reaching that powerpoint slide and oh god I still have that data from 10 years ago dear lord why haven’t I updated that yet. But if you click just the right link, you can find evidence of recent activity. There are residents in the ghost town, after all.

I have so much curiosity³ – why hasn’t someone tidied it up? Are there enough open learners to foster a sense of community? If I start this course will I be sucked into a spooky alternate reality internet nerd drama (I hope so)?

Scanning the more recent activity, there’s mention of Daily Create prompts like “find the background code of a website and use it for art” or “explore poetry of endangered languages”. Fuuuuuuuunnn! After a little hunt, which included signing up for a twitter account only to find a twitter post pointing me somewhere else, I found the Daily Create site. Today’s prompted to leave a message at the anonymous answering machine at After the Beep. I did. Does this mean I’m registered?

1. As far as I can recall, this is my first introduction to the word Co-Design – defined as “a participatory approach to designing solutions, in which community members are treated as equal collaborators in the design process” – though it’s much of what I do. ↩︎
2. WHY have I only figured out TODAY that this is a sarcasm emoji? Where have you been all my life? ↩︎
3. Curiosity and mystery on the internet is something I want to investigate more. I almost never feel curious on social media. 2 hours worth of DS106 exploration was so refreshing and motivating! ↩︎

Sticky notes & Open tabs

I applied for a job recently, and it got me thinking about one of my shortcomings when interviewing with people who don’t know me already. I’m a great synthesizer – I can hear and process many pieces of information, and quickly articulate big-picture meaning in a way that many people have noticed and appreciated as exceptional. However, as soon as I have done this, my brain discards many of the details. I don’t care about the name of the theory, or the theorist. Perhaps in a connected way, I can re-experience favorite books and TV shows, because I’ve forgotten the details. In my working memory, I am very detail-oriented. I don’t miss things. I know I’m great at my job. I remember the names of a class full of students very quickly, but if I meet a new person on the street that I suspect I’ll never see again, I have forgotten their name by the time it’s out of their mouth.

Again, this is a problem for job interviews. It’s also difficult when I come across a piece of information that I know will be useful… but I haven’t hit the appropriate context yet.

My passion is curriculum design. In my perfect job I’d be helping instructors from diverse disciplines design learning activities, courses and programs, while teaching a course or two myself. Bigger picture, I’d love to be building teams, culture, and capacity. My current job isn’t too far from this, with about 50% paperwork thrown in. Thinking about applying for other jobs (with less paperwork), I realize I need to find a way to track and organize all the great ideas I’ve come across, and come up with. This iteration of ONL has added many new ones to the pile. Currently I have a few half-baked blogs, some folded-over book pages, a bazillion open tabs, and old work journals with sticky notes poking out. Realistically, I’m not sure I’ll go back into all the past stuff, but I need to develop a system for going forward. A blog with a good tag system? A wiki? A giant annotated bibliography for my brain?

I’m deeply curious about how other people’s brains work. Is your brain a filing cabinet, a map, a junk drawer? What systems have you developed to support your thinking (and not-thinking)? How are you integrating all the things you’ve learned in ONL?

How do gardens grow?

Another of my group members shares my nostalgia for the promise of the early internet, and it has me thinking more about what it was that excited me at the time. I remember poetry, busy background images, card games, forums, and chat rooms. A bit later – music pirating, blogs, early social network sites, skype, artfully designed websites, internet radio. And then chat roulette, and google maps street view, podcasts, and what felt (to me) like the mainstream settling in of online communities and social media as cultural phenomena that were here to stay. There was always this pesky, trollish aspect: endless pop-up windows, viruses, chat room trolls, rick rolls, Nigerian princes. Chat roulette felt like the perfect mascot for internet experience: One moment you could be dropped into a house party in Russia, then you’re awkwardly staring at someone in Japan who’s awkwardly staring at you, then you’re enjoying a piano practice session somewhere in America, and then there’s someone masturbating. So much random, so much magic, so many curious people, and then a troll. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I learned HTML, and flash, and photoshop. I built websites and discovered new music. I met two people IRL that I first met on the internet – one of them is still in my life, along with his whole family. The internet enriched my life, or at least it had the potential to. I was an explorer, a creator, an intrinsically motivated and empowered learner. The old internet felt like nerf-ball dodgeball and the internet now feels like constant unavoidable low-level radiation.

Last week my PBL group talked about the potential of open learning, and I couldn’t help but think about how the internet got it wrong. How could we do it better? I plan to apply for a job that would mean a lot of involvement in open learning strategy. It’s a wonderful thing, to imagine designing something that doesn’t yet have an archetype.

In my research, I came across an interview with Catherine Cronin. She said that our roles as educators should be to support learners in developing competencies, literacies & voice required to “contribute to the shared production of knowledge and culture.” I find this exciting, and baffling. If the internet felt out-of-control in the old days, like a vast, sprawling, underweeded garden, it feels like a different out-of-control now… Like unknown forces are playing god, regularly changing the rules as to what plants well with what, how deep to sow this, when to water that. I spend so much more time on the internet now, but I don’t have fun here anymore. How do I support learners to co-create an open learning landscape where we all have potential to be enriched, to develop mastery, to make friends, to have fun?

A Strange Crochet Mantle

As the costume designer for our Strange Crochet video production, and taking inspiration from Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes, teacher as bricoleur, I gathered old materials and brought them together in new ways. Working with these new media, in a different scale, I was clumsy in something that had felt natural to me before. I was forced to make the intuitive explicit, like thinking about breathing. Building new connections left my hands sore the next day.

Process: I took old fabrics that I had no use for and tore them into strips, making big balls of fabric-yarn. Some were hard to tear up, they felt precious, and a friend helped me find courage. I hated it and loved it in many stages of in-between, and I fought the immobilizing power of perfect and not-perfect, embracing the forever becoming.

Designing for online and blended learning requires so much more planning, and yet also requires an openness to shift and pivot as needed. We work to plan the ways our learners interact with the content. We use our imaginations to foresee possible future outcomes and accommodate them, but each human experience is delightfully unpredictable and our learners will inevitably transcend the bounds of our constructed universe. Part of our job, of course, is to rein them back in as needed, but we must also leave room for the spontaneous happy accidents that bubble up so easily in a physical classroom. How do we create a sandbox, and not an obstacle course?

On Stuckness and Superpowers

Watching the recorded webinar for topic 4 (Design for Online & Blended Learning), I am aware of the privileges I bring from my background area of expertise. Teaching in, and administering an applied program, so many of the principles described explicitly by Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes are intuitively and implicitly part of my practice.

In normal times, we have a few courses which are lecture-based (fashion history, for example), but even yet we incorporate as many applied activities and assessments as possible. Most of our courses are hands-on, many project-based. With 15-person cohorts of maker-types, we can’t avoid knowing when our students are bored or disengaged. When the pandemic hit, we were one of the few programs that were allowed to resume in-person instruction. We transitioned anything we could online, and were very conscious and purposeful about it (in part, because we had to justify every in-person learning experience in mountains of paperwork).

I recognize the stuckness* of a teacher-centred approach – we have some stuckness in our department as well – generally older instructors who are teaching courses in the ways they have always been taught. When I first started teaching, I had the same stuckness. With these team members, it’s so hard for them to even comprehend that transmission does not equal reception, integration, and future application. There is no appetite for study, experimentation, or reflection – but these long-term team members are valuable parts of our team otherwise, and for their knowledge in a niche area. One ongoing challenge in my leadership skills is honing strategies to meet these instructors where they are, and build on their strengths – as Dr. Cleveland-Innes says, we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Preparing for a job search, I’m painfully aware of how bad I am at dropping names and theory into descriptions of my practice – even when what I do aligns with theory and best practice. I’m great at creating a culture of learning, collaboration, evaluation, and creative courage. My superpowers: emotional intelligence, excellence orientation, openness, authenticity, imagination. Do I get better at name-dropping, or do I try to find a work culture that will appreciate my approach?

*nod to Annika who told me about an activity she does with her students – collaboratively creating a digital collage to better know their ‘stuck’. I love this.