The Expo!
December 9, 2009
Last week was our final class, in which we showed the projects we had been working on to visitors to our expo. We were not over crowded, but there was a nice showing of interested people. It was neat to see the breadth of projects that my classmates created. The projects addresses social needs of marginalized populations globally and locally, evidencing how my classmates thought about the best way to educate the people of the world. I had many interesting conversations at my booth, where I presented the School of Hip Hop, a hip hop based curriculum that encouraged critical thinking as well as writing, reading and math skills. The School of Hip Hop also includes a music component, allowing the students to have a creative outlet as well, which I find to be very useful in engaging youth. Anytime something smells of school work, they shut off. So I designed my website and curriculum to appear as far from that as possible. There is more work to be done. My greatest goal would be to have users of the program working on their projects outside of school, in more casual environments. If someone has a passionate relationship with the medium that they use to learn (like music for example) then their learning will be greatly enhanced. The only issue I had with the expo is many of the attendees seemed to be just as interested in finding talented engineers and programmers as they were in finding out about innovative strategies.
The class is now over and I think about what lessons to take from it. In terms of educational lessons, the strongest came in the beginning of the quarter, when we discussed how to create a proposal. Audience, Behavior, Conditions and Degree are all necessary concepts to consider when designing research or project proposals. Similarly Situation, Culture, Usability, Leaning Theory, Scalability, and Sustainability are all conditions in your project that should be investigated. I will use this teaching in my future classes and projects. We also did one day of review of learning theories, which though just a taste, was exactly what I came here to learn, and was glad to finally see.
The greatest takeaway from the class, however, was inspiration. Inspiration for one’s self, to help others, and know that education can be a route to bringing a brighter future to the oppressed people of today’s world. Dr Kim made it clear that it should be now, now that we are students that we should get to work on these goals of ours. Secondly, inspiration for those who are using the educational tools may be the strongest aspect to any product. When using your product, or curriculum, or whatever form your educational design takes, one should always look to inspire the student. That kernel of inspiration and motivation can carry them further than any piece of knowledge that they might gain. I will remember that rule as I move forward through this career as an educator, and a designer.
