Commonality Sprint

From Studyplace

Each has a specialty, but what's our commonality?

Contents 1 Tasks 2 Goals For The Sprint 2.1 Content Goals 2.2 Design Research 3 What's A Sprint?

[edit] Tasks

1. An Educator's Oath
2. Articulation against a core (and a counter argument)
3. Education Autobiography
4. Proposal for a Subject Based Core (Segments)
5. Reading (Media) List
   Aaron's list
   Seth's list

At the Commonality Sprint Teachers College students and others can gather to explore the role of core curricula in professional education and to pose the question of whether a TC common core, cutting across all programs, would strengthen the educational experience students receive at the College.

Tentatively, let's try to put the question to ourselves. Were everyone to take a rigorous, year-long course, what should it cover? Might it be a course that we would hold in classrooms, or might it only occur online, for instance within this wiki? Discussing the idea of a year-long course will help us to focus and constrain considerations. That format would offer 30 sessions, a syllabus, reading list, possible assignments. . . .

We can ask specific questions:

• what do educators hold in common?
• what sequence of inquiry would develop it?
• what will tie the sessions together?
• what do we expect students would produce as participants in the course?

Through the sprint, we can produce a framework on StudyPlace for developing initial ideas more fully.

[edit] Goals For The Sprint

[edit] Content Goals

At this sprint, we are hoping to build a conversation around what we believe could be common knowledge for all Teachers College students. While we don't expect to complete this task in five hours, we do believe that, by coming together for this short time, we can frame the problem and begin to put forth our ideas. After this session concludes, we hope that the larger Teachers College community and beyond will build on our initial work, carrying the conversation forward.

[edit] Design Research

As StudyPlace is still a young wiki, we are interested in understanding how content is created for it, how original thought can be produced in common, and how people adopt to 'authorless' (or at least less authorful) writing. We are also interested in the interaction between the physical TC campus and the online space StudyPlace affords. The idea of a sprint (see below) in particular is something novel in terms of group authorship and we hope that it will become a useful tool in moving StudyPlace, and the question of 'what educates?' forward.

[edit] What's A Sprint?

For this event we borrow the idea of a 'sprint' from the Free and Open Source Software movement. In software development, sprints are coding events where teams gather for a short period, typically a few days, to cooperatively write software and move their chosen free software project forward. In our sprint we will focus on the peer production of wiki articles rather than software. Software sprints often take advantage of the Extreme Programming practice known as pair programming. Using this technique, two programmers sit together to work on one piece of software. One actually writes the code while the other programmer considers how it fits strategically into the larger program. While writing an intellectual essay is not the same as writing code, we believe that by working in pairs and teams we will be able to produce high quality content in a short time.