There’s nothing like a conversation to get the year started off right.
I’m optimistic about 2018 because of the amount of work I’m producing. The first book is online. I’ve stayed on top of blogging. I have submissions going out, and I’m finding time to produce and consult somehow.
The conversation I had on Friday night, however, hinted at a whole other direction.
Quinnipiac didn’t accept my social media curriculum proposal, but writing and submitting the document only brought its ideas into greater focus for me. The Interactive Courses need an implementation strategy. They are already lesson plans, but how do they fit into our existing education system?
That’s a good question and that’s what the conversation I had on Friday was about. I spoke to the principal of an innovative New England academy about giving my courses to his juniors and seniors.
This high school wants to become a “maker” school where the typical high school courses—math, science, and history—collaborate through applied, interdisciplinary, months-long projects that bring all of the subjects to life. So far they’ve built a Conestoga wagon and a weather balloon. Anyone who knows my original Bumpspark Project knows interdisciplinary conversation was a predecessor to The Interactive Courses.
The principal wants to know how I would build a digital component around such projects. I told him digital wasn’t the word he wanted to use; the relevant word is interactive. The projects already involve the larger community outside of the school. Each project could use the Web in different ways to build different skills, but the larger question is why put the projects online? What does that process offer?
I’ve always felt—ever since that first graduate student was surprised by the openness of my first syllabus—that graduate school was too late for my ideas to reach school children and that a communications school was too specific in terms of a student body. It’s a different world now, where all students are communications students.
As I said in my Quinnipiac Proposal, I initially modeled my course on The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun, the textbook for Columbia University’s famous survey course for all incoming freshmen on how to study. I wanted to create the interactive, multimedia, 21st century version of that freshmen course—but maybe it’s high school freshmen I want to reach.
The World Wide Web is not the antithesis to deep academic work, but its more dynamic successor. Academia built the Internet, but it will be one of the last institutions to embrace interactivity.
Exhaustive research is no longer the domain of universities anyway. All students—all citizens—are now citizen journalists and citizen scientists too. That’s not a watering down of either discipline, but a growth of the populace. In the age of fake news, understanding the veracity of a source should be a 8th grade skill, tops.
The best schools cross-pollinate departments and disciplines. The best students design their own majors. That was already true of NYU’s Gallatin School when I was going to Tisch and Stern in the 1990s.
I treat every new semester of my courses like a new draft to keep them open to growth and improvement. This past fall semester was my 22.0 beta of The Interactive Voice. Once again, I’ll teach drafts 23.0 and 24.0 at Quinnipiac over the summer and fall of 2018.
I also give each new semester a theme to focus certain questions in my mind. This spring, in addition to possibly teaching at a high school, I have two sections lined up at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth College. Osher is a continuing education program with a passionate following.
In The Interactive Voice, I mention the old spitballing lesson that says your concept is only ready for the real world when you can explain it successfully to your youngest and oldest family members. With these new audiences lining up and these new conversations developing, I’m designating the theme for this spring semester as one for #allaudiences.
How do the needs of a high school student and a high school teacher change my courses? How do the needs of adult learners and retirees change them too? How do both groups see the Internet right now?
I have a lot of new ideas to write about and a lot to do.