Message from the MAET Director
January 30th, 2010
Dear friends,
Since this is the first newsletter of the new year, please allow me to wish you all a wonderful 2010. In this note I would like to share some exciting news about a new program that we are rolling out in our department. But before that, a story about art and science, and how the web, brings it all together.
I have been thinking quite a bit recently about how the open nature of the Internet has the potential to fundamentally change how we think about education and learning.
Shreya, my 10 year-old daughter, has a blog titled Uniquely Mine, where she posts poems and other things she writes. A few months ago her fifth grade class was asked by her science teacher to find stories related to science in the newspaper and create a short writeup about it to share with the other children. Since I wanted her to keep blogging, I asked her to add another layer of challenge to that. Once she had her report all typed up, she needed to write a short poem about it and post it to her blog.
I asked her to do this partly because I was concerned that she would not be able to keep up her blog once school started. As most people she was very excited to have a blog and wrote a bunch of stuff for it in the beginning. Then life began to take over and her postings grew few and far in between. What was needed, I figured, was a way to keep her writing regularly. So this idea piggybacked on something she was already doing. The poems she writes are often short and this task didn’t seem like much of an imposition. So over the past few months she has written a bunch of poems she calls Sci-Po’s aka Science Poems. It has also been a lot of fun, and it was just a fun little activity for us to do on weekends. Beats watching Disney Channel.
What I hadn’t thought about was the openness of the web. Shreya’s Sci-Po’s were discovered by Sean Nash, a high school biology teacher out in Missouri who wrote about it on his blog. This was then picked up my a mathematics professor out in California who posted a challenge on her blog for people to write poetry related to mathematics! All of a sudden there were all these people, from around the world, writing poetry about science and math! Incidentally seeing this, Sean Nash (the biology teacher) created an assignment for his students to write poetry on biology and provided a link to Shreya’s site. All of a sudden a group of high school students were visiting my daughter’s blog and leaving comments for her. You can imagine just how excited and happy this made her – reinforcing her intention to write more.
This is an excellent example of how ideas can spread on the web. Of course this can happen only if people are willing to share their ideas and creations openly and freely. This idea of people putting things out there, not because they seek to make money but rather because they want to share their knowledge, their skills, their interests, and that what they put out there is immediately and widely accessible is what makes the web so interesting. This way a high school student connects with a 5th grader’s blog and leads a number of people to write some cool poetry on mathematics! What an interesting and fascinating world we live in.
I would encourage each and every one of you to try the same. Explore, Create and Share. It is through this that we continue to learn and develop and hopefully make an impact on the world.
And speaking of continuing to learn and develop, I have to share two very important pieces of news with you. Both of these have to do with continuing beyond the MAET program – and emerge from discussions with current students and alumni of our program.
The first is a new opportunity for all MSU Master of Arts in Educational Technology alumni – the first ever MAET Alumni refresher.
In 2008, Jim Groom coined the term Edupunk, since then, the term has spread and come to symbolize educators who take an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a DIY or bricolage (the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available) attitude.
The 2010 MAET refresher course will embrace the Edupunk mantra and help refill your technology toolbox with a plethora of tips and tricks to help you continue your post-MA educational technology expedition. From instructional tools, web presence, mobile devices, audio, video, social networking, collaboration and personal productivity –we will cover it all. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to network with current MAET students and attend the 2010 PLATE leadership conference on July 15.
You will be required to participate in asynchronous online pre-class project planning activities June 28- July 6. This will be a self-paced portion of the course to help us make the most of our synchronous time together. The course is 3 graduate credits and runs July 11-18, 2010 in Rouen, France. Space is limited to 20 participants – to reserve your spot go to http://edutech.educ.msu.edu/MAETSummerRes.php – we would love to see you again!
The second, and bigger by far, is a new substantially online option to our Ed Tech doctoral program. This comes in response to growing demand for educational leaders (people like you) who understand how technology is transforming the world of education. This blended program is designed for experienced education professionals in schools, higher education, and research institutions who want to earn a Ph.D. while continuing in their current positions. We understand that many of you cannot give you your secure and rewarding jobs to pursue full time Ph.D. study on campus. We see this hybrid, substantially online pathway to the Ph.D. will make it accessible to a wider practitioner population that wants to enhance their scholarly abilities without leaving their current work. The program will include two-week face to face sessions in the summers, combined with one online doctoral course during fall and spring semesters. Students would enroll in courses on campus during fall semester of the fourth year to meet university residency requirements and work intensely on their dissertation research.
If you want to find more about these exciting new opportunities please get in touch with Dr. Robin Dickson. (rdickson@msu.edu)
That’s all for now. I look forward to hearing from you and I wish you a wonderful school year.
Sincerely
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~ punya
Links to stories:
Mathpoetry:
http://punya.educ.msu.edu/2010/01/27/the-infinity-of-primes-proof-as-poem/
Shreya’s blog: Uniquely Mine
http://shreya-mishra.blogspot.com/
Sean Nash’s Blog
http://nashworld.edublogs.org/
Principles of Biology class at Benton High School (with their sci-po)
http://mwsu-bio101.ning.com/forum/topics/pushing-scientific-thought
Math Mama’s Challenge regarding Math Poetry
http://mathmamawrites.blogspot.com/2010/01/challenge-write-kids-poem-about-math.html
Info about advanced MAET Rouen program
http://edutech.msu.edu/overseas.html
Info about ph.d
Next we would like to highlight is
Do you have your students write their own stories for an assignment in your class? If so, you may want to check out the website
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/




