I’m fascinated by “Ge Wang: The DIY orchestra of the future.” It’s not so much the music he makes that fascinates me though. Watching this musician and computer scientist – but even more, watching this human being – I am struck by his curiosity, his experimentation, his integrated exploration and his interdisciplinarity.
He’s got a project, and he’s exploring. And that’s a cool way of journeying to learn.
As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood.
I’ve been studying the TED talk below – “Dong Woo Jang: The art of bow-making.” In a high-pressure, high-stakes testing environment, Dong Woo Jang pursues a personal passion and extended project that helps him construct knowledge, skills, understanding, and wisdom from areas that we would typically separate and subdivide in school, likely with no intentional, threaded connection.
What drive and persistence it takes for a young person to make time for such committed exploration and discovery while living in a system that dominates so much of his day having to study someone else’s interests.
What if school were more purposefully designed for the committed pursuit of our passions and curiosities? So that a story such as Dong Woo Jang’s would be ordinary instead of extraordinary.
Colleague @jgough sent me: The Cockroach Beatbox. YouTube’s version is below. Fascinating! Made me think we should facilitate more of this kind of work with students. Yet, I hope the students would be the scientists, not just the audience. I hope they could produce the equipment, animations, video.
Then, I read comments at Cockroach Beatbox; my brain sparked to invaluable discussion and debate possibilities, too.
A powerful thought-provoker that speaks for itself, this video has been on my mind since September when I participated in RE:ED Next Chapter 2011 – Imagine Designing the Future of K-12 Libraries.
Twenty-four, eighth-grade synergists are working in six discreet groups – their projects originated from the data-mining of over 300 observation-journal blog posts that they collected. The projects are:
Because Jill Gough, one of the two Synergy facilitator-coaches, was presenting at the Learning Forward Annual Conference on Monday, Dec. 5, she was in Anaheim, CA. The other facilitator-coach, Bo Adams, was in Atlanta, GA. Having grown accustomed to and convinced of the viability of team-teaching in such a project-based course, Bo and Jill felt some anxiety about having only one facilitator present to serve best the six groups during this critical phase of their project development.
[In your mind’s ear, cue that quintessential cartoon superhero intro theme.] Never fear…video conferencing is here!
As we think about preparing students for a work world that will most likely include significant use of such tools as iChat, Facetime, Skype, and other video “conferencers,” then it seems natural to practice such work processes. Perhaps students already use such tools socially, but school could help coach the use of such tools for more formal, business-like purposes. Additionally, we should all be thinking more about how we can invite various co-teachers into our classrooms – to break down the walls that seem to preserve the arcane model of one adult per group of classroom students. Practice leads to enhanced proficiency. On Monday, Dec. 5, Synergy engaged in some additional practice of tearing down those 20th century classroom walls. Who knows who else we might next invite to teach with us…from the exterior of our learning space’s four physical walls.
As one student-learner can be heard exclaiming in the video: “This is so next level!”
[This post is cross-published at Experiments in Learning by Doing.]
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