Silver Lining for Learning

Over the past decade, Computer Science (CS) education has been the fastest growing subject area in K-12 and postsecondary instruction. In this episode, we will talk with two Harvard alumni who have spent the past 20 years in this space in a variety of different roles, discussing their unique perspective on the growth of CS education, how they found their way in their journey, and what’s next. Kevin and Brett will share how they created a philanthropic program that utilized previously untapped expertise and built an organization that helped 1,000 high schools across the US and Canada develop successful, sustainable, and equitable CS programs. They will describe the process of starting and growing a novel education-based social impact organization that helps tech students at smaller less well-known colleges navigate and launch their careers. They will also discuss unexpected career journeys and their progression of roles as teaching fellows, engineers, curriculum designers, founder, professor, advisor to education organizations and state board of education member.

As noted in an October 2021 article in EdSurge, the pandemic allowed many high school students in Colorado to self-direct their learning. Through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), young people were leading lives of inquiry, resourcefulness, and innovation. In this episode of SLL, researchers Ben Kirshner, Carlos Hipolito-Delgago, Arturo Cortex and Beatriz Salazar talk about the ingenuity and creativity that youth in their project showed when their schools shifted to online learning. From a thematic standpoint, they will focus in on “LEARNING” that happened during the pandemic and how that is different from “SCHOOLING” in their experiences. Second, they will question and challenge several assumptions that are embedded in the prevailing discourses of learning loss and social isolation associated with online learning. Throughout their show, they will express solidarity with teachers as they navigate the politics and health risks of this pandemic.

This episode is a reflection on the impact of the last two years on learning and learners. What can we do now and in the future to push for new learning methods and opportunities to meet the new world perspective post-pandemic? Silver Lining for Learning is an ongoing conversation on the future of learning with educators and education leaders from across the globe. Hosted by Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Shuangye Chen, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao, these conversations began under the “dark cloud” of the COVID19 crisis and continue today. We see these conversations as space to discuss the creation of equitable, humanistic and sustainable learning ecosystems that meet the needs of all learners. These conversations are hosted live on YouTube every Saturday (typically 5:30 PM Eastern US time) and are archived on https://silverliningforlearning.org

In this episode, Balaji Venkataraman, Director for Technology and Knowledge Management, Commonwealth of Learning, Canada and Tadinada V. Prabhakar, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), India, explore how teachers in developing countries, with minimal familiarity with online learning, participate in design and delivery of MOOCs. They will discuss a series of case studies involving MOOCs in food and agriculture in India and parts of Africa using MobiMOOC technology as the platform. Their findings reveal that innovative deployment of messaging systems and opportunities to access content offline can increase engagement in the learning process. This project is sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning (https://www.col.org/) in Burnaby, BC, Canada.

How is learning changing in the workplace? In this episode we hear from two professionals and their journeys. We will take a virtual tour to the newly established “Experience Center” at PwC in Cyprus, an innovation and entrepreneurship hub, where Dr Maria Solomou designs and develops interactive, participatory experiences with the application of cutting-edge technologies, aiming at immersing users in the optimal possible experiences. Also in this episode, Dr. Theano Yerasimou will discuss how she manages large-scale training projects and programs for clients across the globe and in various industries. Both are involved in designing and developing highly interactive interventions in a wide array of modalities (i.e., blended, face-to-face, virtual (live), self-paced eLearning, microlearning, mobile learning, gamified, etc.).

MOOC discourses originating from the Global North can appear potentially colonizing to educators in the Global South. In this session, we contextualize open from an Egyptian perspective and refer to different open educational practices we have been involved in, including the creation of Arabic content based on Western models (e.g., Edraak MOOCs, Wikipedia Arabic, and Tahrir Academy), the creation of local OERs using local models, the reuse of existing English-language Global North content (e.g., MITx with AUC/AUB, translating EdX content in Edraak, etc.), and participation in existing connectivist MOOCs as facilitators. We highlight how openness, when contextualized to different regions, can look different and have multiple faces.

This discussion is an overview of the last three episodes, but also celebrates the entire series from the beginning. This Thanksgiving episode is an opportunity for the crew to say thank you to the listeners and to celebrate the conversations that have taken place over the past 2 years.

Noah Sobe, Senior Project Officer for the Futures of Education Initiative, and his colleagues at UNESCO in Paris authored the Futures of Education report for UNESCO, “Reimagining our futures together: A social contract for education” to appear on November 10, 2021. Discover what is in the report including ideas related to more equitable educational futures, disruptions and emerging transformations, pedagogies of cooperation and solidarity, curricula and the evolving knowledge commons, the transformative work of teachers, education across different times and spaces, research and innovation, building futures of education together, and much more! The UNESCO Futures of Education website is at https://en.unesco.org/futuresofeducation/

Life and Learning in the Metaverse, with Adam Seldow and Monica Arés from MetaThe metaverse is envisioned as the successor to the mobile internet — a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. A key feature is that it will be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be. In keeping with that vision, Facebook has a new brand for the company, Meta, to better reflect its focus moving forward. This is an exciting new chapter for the company, and Adam and Monica are excited to help bring learning in the metaverse to life. While the metaverse is still a ways off, parts of it are already here — and even more are on the horizon. This episode will describe work in development to improve virtual and augmented reality as we know them now and the steps that can help realize the full social potential of the metaverse in the future.

This episode introduces how synchronous hybrid instruction provides learning opportunities for children in under-sourced Chinese village schools. The synchronous hybrid class, built by Project VolunONLINE (支教中国2.0), a nonprofit based in Shanghai, adopts a dual-teacher model with an online instructor and a local classroom teacher. For this episode, we will have Dr. Chaoran Wang, a former voluntary online English instructor and researcher of Project VolunONLINE, and Jasmine Zhu, a teacher educator and content developer of the nonprofit. Chaoran and Jasmine will be sharing their stories and introducing their experiences, challenges, struggles, and hopes of working with rural Chinese children and voluntary online teachers. Dr. Chaoran Wang will also reflect on how, as an overseas language teacher, she made use of the online spaces to provide innovative learning experiences for rural students. She will have a short presentation of some of her experiences with children in one rural school in the program at the start.