Two weeks ago I did a presentation at the Digital Media and Learning Conference (DML 2013 : Democratic Futures) in the format of an Ignite Talk. This format is challenging. You have 5 minutes to tell your story, explain you idea, and ignite the audience. You have also 20 slides that change every 15 seconds, automatically. The format is inspired by the Pecha Kucha presentation style. Although it was first popular among designers and technologists, it is increasingly becoming accepted in academic and professional conferences. In my talk, From Theory to Practice: Designing and Implementing a Connected Learning Experience, I told the story of DGZiN, a digital design summer camp I helped to create and run in 2012. I enjoyed very much performing this kind of presentation. Although it was a little bit scary, it was also rewarding. Lots of adrenaline happens when you are running against the clock and the changing slides. The pay off is that you get the experience of being on stage and talking to a big audience, and also have the opportunity to inspire other people with compelling words and images. As Mimi Ito said, after doing an Ignite Talk you are leveled up. It feels good to have done that. In this entry I share some tips about how I prepared this kind of presentation.
The most important advice I can give is to practice as much as you can. It is very important that you prepare the talk as if it was a theatrical play. You need to write a script of your speech and then, rehearse it as if you were an actor. Since time is short, you need to identify the main points of your story. In the case of my talk, I decided to focus in the four design principles of connected learning experiences (participation, hands-on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness). Once I identified the major points I plot them across 20 different slides. I divided a blank page in 20 different sections, and then fill them with one or two sentences. Once I have created a draft of the script I collected and edited the images I wanted to use. The task of illustrating your talk could take different approaches. You could select images that are metaphorical, descriptive, or literal. Since I had lots of material from the DGZiN project I decided to have a combination of photographs, illustrations, and graphics. I also decided to use very little text in the slides. In fact, only one slide of my presentation had text. After you have put together the slides in a program such as Keynote or PowerPoint, you need to set up the automation of the slides so they change every 15 seconds. Then, you need to practice running the presentation and delivering the talk. As you rehearse, you will edit the talk and adjust both the speech (usually cutting it down) and the visuals. The final edit of my text, after many rehearsals is bellow.
Connected learning experiences seek to integrate three spheres of learning that are usually separated: peer culture, interests, and academic content. When students link their practices and identities across these spheres, meaningful learning happens.
Connected learning has the potential to transform educational systems and create enrichment opportunities for more youth, especially for young people from marginalized communities.
Today, I want to talk about a connected learning pilot experience I helped to design and implement at Texas City High School, a low-income, majority-minority, low-performing school in Central Texas.
Our intervention was a digital design summer camp we created in collaboration with a school teacher and a group of 16 students.
For this experience, we purposefully integrated new media tools for linking the classroom, community and home.The major goal was to produce an interactive book about how the pervasiveness of sugary foods and beverages is creating an unhealthy environment.
This theme allowed us to tell a research-driven, community engaging, and interactive story about a social problem that affected the everyday lives of young people and their families.
We implemented 4 major principles in the design of our learning environment: participation, hands on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness.
We redesigned the space of a classroom in order to make it more participatory. A computer lab became our design studio, an environment of shared culture and practice where everyone could contribute.
Participants came to the project with a variety of interests and identities. Working in teams, they found out ways to translate their different passions into creative designs and productions such as hip hop songs and music videos.
Students researched the real world in order to validate what they were learning. They investigated their homes and identified added sugars in the foods and beverages that their families consume.
They also researched the environment at their own school, finding out several sources of unhealthy foods and keeping track of the contents of the cafeteria lunches.
Furthermore, through a series of field trips, students had the opportunity to map their neighborhoods and pinpoint the food swamps that exist in their communities.
We constantly challenged the students to create multimodal designs. The challenges connected what students were learning through readings with their real-world explorations and their interests in digital media production.
For example, they designed interactive info-graphics and animations explaining the effects that sugary beverages can cause on the human body and the industrial process of making high fructose corn syrup.
Students were motivated to take up the challenges either because the problem context was itself engaging, or because it connected to an existing interest they had.
Through a meme madness competition they connected their passion for Internet memes with the research on toxic foods. They used online tools, classic meme imagery, and their own photographs for creating a hilarious designs.
Finally, we embraced the principle of interconnectedness in two ways. On the one hand, we had a group of mentors and experts that helped students to find bridges across domains and contexts.
On the other, our studio had an open network infrastructure, that encouraged young designers to share their work with other publics online. Using Tumblr websites they documented their daily activities and discoveries.
The design principles of connected learning are powerful. Participation, hands-on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness work well in practice and foster meaningful and engaging learning ecologies.
I invite you to create and experiment with the design of connected learning experiences in order to learn more about their potential and expand enrichment opportunities to more youth.
The video of my Ignite Talk has been uploaded to YouTube. As you will see if you watch it, the delivering of the talk changed a little bit the script. I had to improvise at some parts of the talk because either I forgot the lines or I went to fast or I simply got distracted by looking at the audience. When you are speaking live and on stage, it is very easy to forget a fixed script. Therefore, it is important that you are prepared to improvise and to catch up with the slides in case you lost the timing. The best way to achieve this is to practice and to know the story of your presentation by heart. You can check out the video of From Theory to Practice: Designing and Implementing a Connected Learning Experience bellow:
