Saturday, April 26, 2008

Wanted! Experts and Sounding Board Participants

All 11 classrooms in the Horizon Project 2008 are busily editing wikis and providing content based on the 6 trends and 7 meta-trends in emerging technologies as studied in the Horizon Report 2008. This is a difficult time for all students and teachers. To be working with content that is not fully documented in text books (of course) and is often still relatively new online, students are being pushed to their limits of understanding.

The wiki editing requirement for the project is to collaborate with their team members (3-5 on a team) to provide content based on a template with headings 'Background', 'Examples' and 'Citations'. Remember of course that topics include Grass Roots Video, Data Mashups, Computing in 3 Dimensions....and 10 more! The hyperlinks just given go to the main wiki page for each topic. Feeding into these are the 4 areas of impact wikis that cover Education, Arts Entertainment and Leisure, Government Politics and Employment, Science and health.

As part of the project we are looking for more people to be involved. This is a true, global collaborative event that includes both students and adults, teachers and experts. We use the wiki medium to collaboratively create content, and the Ning (social networking) medium to foster an online learning environment and support each other.

How can you help?

1. Expert Advisor
Are you an expert or have an educational interest in a field that we are studying as part of this project? See the Teams wiki for a full list of the 13 topics (from the Horizon Report 2008). If so we would love you to volunteer as an 'Expert Advisor'. Here are more details:

We are looking for a group of "experts" who agree to leave 'during project' feedback for the teams during this project. We have two feedback periods: May 2-8 (leave a message for them) and May 9-15 (leave another message).
  • Each expert is asked to take at least two times to read and leave feedback on the main wiki page of the group on the discussion tab.
  • You may also join the group on the Ning and advise and give thoughts there as well.
Your job is to provide feedback and point out resources to the team. You are an "advisor." You may also choose to use delicious and the tagging standard for your group to help them. (Or you may join the horizon 2008 diigo groupfor our standard tag library -- but YOU must send your diigo bookmarks to delicious for this to work -- Learn how to do this.)

More details about being an Expert Advisor

2. Peer Review Classroom
We need sounding board classrooms from all around the globe to come in and give meaningful feedback to the students for their wiki content. We have about 80 wikis to cover in the next few weeks! We are very lucky to have Kim Cofino, Jo McLeay and Steve Madsen as our sounding board leaders. They will show you way and provide lots of sound advice as to how to get your class involved.

Why bother to be a peer review classroom? The experience of asking your students to read and comment on a wiki page gives them the responsibility of learning something about the topic to be able to respond in a meaningful manner. Also they will be responsible for commenting on spelling, grammar, design, structure etc.

Peer review is also part of the new NETS standards from ISTE and is something that we are going to have to do correctly, we need to begin to share best practices.

More details about being a sounding board / peer review classroom

Not convinced yet? Watch this video of two sounding board educators from the Horizon Project 2007, and the Flat Classroom Project 2007, Brandt Schneider and Chrissy Hellyer.




How do you sign up?
We welcome your input and hope you will join us on the Horizon Project 2008! If you are ready and willing contact one of these people: Vicki Davis (Expert Advisors), Kim Cofino (Sounding Board) via our project Ning and leave a message.

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