RemixED:
the power of remix, mashup, and recontextualization in the classroom
Make du Jour: Strategies for Encouraging Integrated Daily Creativity
“There is no win, there is no fail, there is only make” (John Cage). One of the greatest challenges is developing ideas, finding time, and offering opportunities for students work on creative projects. More importantly, how do we move beyond the “assignment” stage and encourage students to be intrinsically motivated to make beautiful things on a regular basis? How do we foster the shift from consumption to production? Even if you don’t have the luxury of offering a project-based curriculum, you can still develop a steady diet of ongoing, “back-burner” projects that gets student to “dare to make and share”. This session will explore ways to instill a creative culture in your classroom, with everything from low-entry point crowdsourced uses of social media to the #showyourwork movement which asks students to be overt about their design thinking, creative process, and troubleshooting and contribute to collective knowledge. At the heart of personalized learning is creative freedom, but students often need a spark of inspiration, a design brief, or mentorship to get them on the road to making. Finally, we’ll look at teacher-as-creator as well, and the importance of transparency and curation in facilitating creativity in the classroom.
Mozilla’s Doug Belshaw says that the “heart” of “digital literacies” is the Remix. Kirby Ferguson eloquently encouraged us in his TED talk to “Embrace the Remix”, because, as his enlightening documentary series reminds us, “everything is a remix”. Newspaper blackout artist and award-winning author Austin Kleon’s advice to budding creatives is to “Steal Like an Artist”, because “you are a mashup of what you let into your life”. Our students are engrossed in remix culture - they are the appropriation and recontextualization generation. Remix calls for knowledge and understanding, critical, higher-order, and design thinking, a variety of tech skills, and, frequently, collaboration and navigation in the greater media landscape. Most importantly a remix task offers students a chance to truly transform a work and create something unique - something that will contribute to their digital presence and legacy. This session is part pedagogical/philosophical and part participatory. Attendees will leave with a “goodie-bag” of resources and ideas as well as have the opportunity to develop, practice, and share several types of remix projects.
*mobile and/or laptop device is needed
How do we inspire students to demonstrate both creativity and critical thinking? Kick up video production notch by encouraging augmentation - the careful addition of the “meta”. In this hands-on presentation/ workshop we’ll be exploring Web tools and apps that allow students to add rich layers to their visual and audio creations. Augmentation with external links, multi-media, and hypertext makes both original work and appropriated resources more “meaty”. Most tools allow for remix, collaboration, and crowdsourcing as well, so that students may hone key “21st century skills”. Experience each through play and experimentation, and showcase at least two of your creations with our group. How do we embrace the #showyourwork movement and ask students to demonstrate their design thinking processes and troubleshooting strategies, contributing to collective knowledge? These techniques are highly adaptable and applicable to almost any age and discipline. (*laptop and mobile device required) TOOLS: Popcornmaker, TED Ed, Weavly, YouTube, Thinglink, Soundcloud, Touchcast, and Treehouse
“The tag is the soul of the Internet”, says Derrick de Kerckhove in The Augmented Mind. How can educators exploit the use of tagging content in a variety of mediums in order to help students practice these new literacies and understand the workings of the Web? In this session we’ll look at both practical and creative (or “meta”) tagging and explore ways to organize a course in Twitter, G+, Storify, Instagram, and Wordpress blogs. We’ll explore playful uses of tags to recontextualize, add commentary, or create art, poetry, and literature. The hashtag is a powerful device of the organization of knowledge, but it can be maximized for critical and divergent thinking.
*this is a presentation with hands-on activities. Please bring a mobile device and, if you wish, a laptop.
Getting Meta: Augmented Video, Audio, and Images for Creativity and Critical Thinking
