This is the P2PU Archive. If you want the current site, go to www.p2pu.org!
Collaborative Lesson Planning
My recent threads
You haven't posted any discussions yet.
Recently updated threads
- Danoff's Journal Wed, 2010-11-10 14:17
- Joe Corneli's journal Tue, 2010-10-26 20:44
- Brylie's Journal Tue, 2010-10-26 17:19
- Dr. King's Journal Mon, 2010-10-25 15:56
- Irene Martinez's Journal Wed, 2010-09-22 03:53
Brylie's Journal
My name is Brylie Oxley. I am studying Information Technology and Free Software/Culture. I am very interested in the emergence of Open Educational Resources and would like to dedicate some of my time to producing and remixing our educational materials.
The license I choose is CreativeCommons - Attribution - Share Alike. This is the license chosen by the Wikemedia Foundation, P2PU, and Wiki Educator. CC-by-SA, most closely of the CC licenses, resembles the GNU GPL.
I like the syllabus and appreciate that this course is being organized. The flow of the course seems to be progressive and the assignments build off of each other, as is the goal of collaborative and reusable OER in general.
In the speech there are some good points about the difficulty in finding and assessing the quality of certain types of online educational resources. I agree that it is important for us to peer review and improve educational resources. College Open Textbooks and Connexions both have a peer review system. Connexions encourages community members to re-rentextualize resources in uniqe collections called Lenses.
I agree that it is important to license these educational resources to allow derivative creations. The act of translating a resource, for example, creates a derivative work.
Similarly, the use of proprietery formats can pose as a technological barrier to free distribution, access, and modification of our cultural heritage, even when these proprietery tools are given away for free* (*with a catch.)
The collaborative aspect of sites such as Wikiversity and the Connexions GroupWorkspaces are great to enrich our resources with a diversity of perspectives. Collaboration also helps teachers share the burden of creation. Breaking resources down by class size seems like a worthy pursuit; this practice seems similar to a recipe for educational goodness.
This process of collaborative resource development can be institutionalized as a part of the student educational process. If stuents understand the nature of Collaboration at early stages in their development, contributing to community resources will become second nature.
Brylie,
Thanks for your lengthy post. Understand your choice with CCASA, and I'm glad you like the syllabus. Thanks for pointing out the College Open Textbooks & Connexions sites. Connexions in particular looks interesting, especially their lenses and workspaces. Have you used them yourself?
I like your metaphor of a "recipe for educational goodness" that might be a good title for a book/document from this course, eh?
Finally, I really enjoyed your final paragraph about institutionalizing collaborative resource development. Obviously this course was designed with only teachers in mind, but I think you're right, if students are involved early on in the process it will become second nature, and then when they become teachers the same thing will be true.
Overall, thanks for getting involved and starting the document, which I'll look at now. I'm looking forward to you "dedicat[ing] some of [your] time to producing and remixing [y]our educational materials".
I outlined a pathway for learning Music Theory today that I have been teaching/learning on a peer-to-peer basis for about two years. The course is currently divided into 8 lessons. The lessons are progressive and pragmatic in that they build up a foundation of knowledge that has direct, generative application.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Brylie/LessonPlans
I plan to include a diagram, which I am currently designing, that will encompass the foundations of tonal music composition and that can be used as a quick reference for improvisation, composition, and memorization. Additional lessons will include additional triads, sevenths, extended, and 'exotic chords', aleatoric composition, and the overtone series.
The realm of music theory also provides many opportunities for metaphoric and mnemonic realization. Mnemonics and patterns can help to reduce the amount of rote memorization a student must endure. Metaphors include the solar system (chord function and compositional probability), moon phases (chord leading/resolution), ocean surf (occlusion, chromaticism, musical movements, orchestral composition), Escher's stairs (the octave and compound intervals), lightwaves (synesthesia and visual recognition), and constellations (stringed instrument chord and scale forms at various resolutions, e.g. triad, seventh, pentatonic, heptatonic.)
Hi Brylie: your music theory notes reminded me of a couple of resources I was working on in this area, cf. http://metameso.org/~joe/music/docs/circle2.txt (http://metameso.org/~joe/music/docs/circle2.pdf) and http://metameso.org/~joe/music/docs/musical-mode.el (makes the .txt file look pretty in Emacs, see some related playing around at http://hyperreal-enterprises.posterous.com/colorful-letters and listen at http://metameso.org/~joe/music/marimba.mp3 -- I can send you the other .el file I used for this if you like).
Perhaps quite idiosyncratic but I found it all very useful from the "mnemonic" point of view you mentioned. I'm not a sight reader, but I was able to learn a lot of chords by thinking about the associated color patterns. It would be interesting to expand this sometime to deal with the various more advanced topics in music theory your lesson plan talks about...
Brylie,
Thanks for posting your fascinating plan about Music Theory. I really look forward to seeing how you develop the resource. Can you include what you're writing here about "metaphoric and mnemonic realization" into the plan?
Also, not directly related, but reading your plan reminded me of part of the novel I'm reading, Infinite Jest http://openlibrary.org/books/OL9674499M/Infinite_Jest.
"Not 100% clear on this, but the thrust is that T and Q are the two basic courses of study leading historically to the like 18th-century equivalent of a H.S. diploma and a B.A., or maybe M.A., respectively, at nodes of hoary classicality like Oxford and Cambridge U. during the time of Samuel Johnson - more or less the original grammato-lexical-and-pedagogical hard-ass - and that the trivium makes you take grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then if you're still standing you get the quadrivium of math, geometry, astronomy, and music, and that none of the classes - including the potentially lightweight astronomy and music - were in fact lightweight, which is one possible reason why the portraits of all these classical and neo-classical B.A.s and D.Phil.s at Oxford and Cambridge look so pale and wasted and haunted and grim."
from footnote 64. on p. 996
Hi Brylie: I liked you idea of using Wikiversity as a place to post lesson plans. I got started by posting the latest version of my "paragogical principles" here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Arided/Paragogy.
Brylie: I like your pragmatic approach to your lesson planning. But, I am confused as to the approach you will be using to teach each activity in your lesson plan. It would help other teachers to have that knowledge when evaluating your lesson plan. If my suggestion is confusing please let me know. Thanks, Dr. King
I will work to fill out the learning path with specific resources and practice activities. Thank you for the suggestion Dr. King.
Brylie: Good luck with the specific resources and practice activities. I look forward to reading them. Thanks, Dr. King
My experience with the Collaborative Lesson Planning course has been positive, useful, and timely. I appreciate the opportunity to work with others to develop Open Educational Resources and find great value in the open-ended learning available in our Free Cultural Commons.
This course was timely because I have been working on music theory for a while now and have recently had an insight into a paragogic and progressive (building upon foundational knowledge) method for learning music theory that I have been working on for a couple of years.
I have briefly outlined my intention for the learning path in a prior post. I would like to augment the, currently eight, lessons with additional concepts and supplement each concept with generative and constructive practice challenges. I would also like to share the learning resource(s) with my near peers who are interested in exploring music theory.
Brylie: Thank you for your comments about the course. Dr. King
Hi Brylie,
As Dr. King said, thanks for sharing your comments about the course. I also appreciate how you've outlined future steps you wish to take. From your encouraging comment post in my journal http://p2pu.org/general/node/5574/forums/8463#comment-2152 through your help of others and the wonderful resources you've posted its been a pleasure to have you in this course. Thanks for all your hard work.
I took what you wrote here, and what others have suggested and put them onto your lesson plans in Wikiversity. I also added a couple of templates and links to the course to make your resource a little easier for others to understand/contextualize. You can see the changes here http://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=User:Brylie/LessonPlans&oldi.... If that isn't helpful, please feel free to get rid of it all.