I had the privilege of attending #VCUAltFest this week, sponsored by the Academic Learning Transformation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Not a conference, this festival of learning included opportunities for listening but also sharing. There were powerful discussions both in and out of the rooms, and I added new colleagues to Twitter and Feedly. Not all these folks attended live. I participated in the Twitter Journal Club activity and was able to connect with lots of thinkers all over the world.
I don’t want to lose the excitement of new ideas, particularly those that came out of the #hackJAM. It focused on “hacking” the syllabus. Lyndsey Durham and Jon Becker, the co-facilitators, have already reviewed the session. What I want to do is meet D Jennings’ challenge:
Dont stop til you've taken an idea from #vcualtfest and run with it. Hoo yah to innovation
— D Jennings (@dbjennings_d) May 14, 2015
My idea is to reorganize my fall “ed tech for admins” course into a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA). I have some first thoughts:
1. We’ll start by “equipping” our toolkit for the adventure, choosing from various social media and curation tools that each student will use.
2. Blogs will serve as the adventure journals so students can share their adventures with me and their classmates.
3. I feel like we need some shared vocabulary and foundation so the adventure will have touchpoints based on the ISTE Standards for Administrators along with the Virginia Uniform Performance Standards for School Principals. It may be that we have multiple adventures that originate in these standards.
What else am I missing? I think I’ll do some CYOA research starting with this list from Reddit.
Thanks to Tom Woodward for the idea and to the rest of the AltLab team for an amazing event!
Now…for the rest of you…what idea are you going to run with?