There\u2019s nothing like a conversation to get the year started off right.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m optimistic about 2018 because of the amount of work I\u2019m producing. The first book is online. I’ve stayed on top of blogging. I have submissions going out, and I\u2019m finding time to produce and consult somehow.<\/p>\n
The conversation I had on Friday night, however, hinted at a whole other direction.<\/p>\n
Quinnipiac didn\u2019t accept my social media curriculum proposal<\/a>, but writing and submitting the document only brought its ideas into greater focus for me. The Interactive Courses<\/em> need an implementation strategy. They are already lesson plans, but how do they fit into our existing education system?<\/p>\n That\u2019s a good question and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This high school wants to become a \u201cmaker\u201d school<\/a> where the typical high school courses\u2014math, science, and history\u2014collaborate through applied, interdisciplinary, months-long projects that bring all of the subjects to life. So far they\u2019ve built a Conestoga wagon and a weather balloon. Anyone who knows my original Bumpspark Project<\/em><\/a> knows interdisciplinary conversation was a predecessor to The Interactive Courses<\/em>.<\/p>\n The principal wants to know how I would build a digital component around such projects. I told him digital wasn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always felt\u2014ever since that first graduate student was surprised by the openness of my first syllabus\u2014that 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\u2019s a different world now, where all students are communications students.<\/p>\n As I said in my Quinnipiac Proposal, I initially modeled my course on The Modern Researcher<\/em> by Jacques Barzun, the textbook for\u00a0 Columbia University\u2019s famous survey course for all incoming freshmen on how to study<\/a>. I wanted to create the interactive, multimedia, 21st century version of that freshmen course\u2014but maybe it\u2019s high school freshmen I want to reach.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Exhaustive research is no longer the domain of universities anyway. All students\u2014all citizens\u2014are now citizen journalists and citizen scientists too. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The best schools cross-pollinate departments and disciplines. The best students design their own majors. That was already true of NYU\u2019s Gallatin School<\/a> when I was going to Tisch and Stern in the 1990s.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. Once again, I\u2019ll teach drafts 23.0 and 24.0 at Quinnipiac over the summer and fall of 2018.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Osher is a continuing education program with a passionate following.<\/p>\n