Nancy White from Full Circle Associates will be our guest this Friday for the next Professional Learning Community (PLC) workshop at UT Arlington. We’re going to be chatting about Liberating Structures for Knowledge Sharing. You can find a jumping off point at the Liberating Structures website whose subtitle is Including and Unleashing Everyone. Nancy collaborated with us this past November through a webinar on the topic “Me, We, Network: Building a repertoire of possibility of supporting learning together.” We visualized drawing up our chairs into a circle to have a chat though we were all in different locations. Some of our discussion included reciprocal apprenticeship and trust as transactional rather than personal. Nancy is a co-author with Wenger and Smith of Digital Habitats, Stewarding Technology for Communities. You can find some excerpts at http://technologyforcommunities.com/. We are looking forward to her energy and inspiration! She is known for her visual representations of evolving and involving group discussions—something else to anticipate (and maybe some chocolate too)!
I really enjoyed Nancy White’s presentation. I especially enjoyed a comment she made (while eating, not part of the presentation!) about the concept of “micro-learning”. I find my students (as are we) are ultra-busy and they don’t always have hours of blocks of time to sit and read something. I also like the idea of multi-modal learning using video and audio (e.g., : https://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson) so after another inspiring talk by Matt Crosslin in our department, I created some Vine videos to help my students better understand some technical concepts about phonics. The challenge of Vine is the videos are six second long! I also encouraged them to create and post either a digital flashcard deck (e.g., http://quizlet.com/) or a Vine! Here are a few of my vines: https://vine.co/u/949568964919468032