CLMOOC in its 3rd Make Cycle—Join in Today

As the 2015 CLMOOC continues through a third Make Cycle, it’s a perfect time to look back at the first few weeks of this collaborative experience and at what’s still to come during the next month. As a reminder, participants can join in at any time—so sign up today to share in the fun!

CLMOOC is a knowledge-building and sharing experience open to anyone interested in making, playing, and learning together about the educational framework known as Connected Learning. CLMOOC provides educators of all types with an opportunity to play with new tools, make projects and friends, and share projects and reflections with colleagues across the country and around the world.

Glasslab Games, the host of Make Cycle #3, will lead a Twitter chat Thursday, July 9, via the hashtag #clmooc at 4 p.m. PDT/7 p.m. EDT/11 p.m. UTC. Make Cycles to come will be led by educators from the San Diego Area Writing Project, KQED Do Now, and the National Park Service. Stay tuned by signing up for the newsletter today.

Make Cycle #1

This first cycle was run by educator-colleagues from the Tar River and UNC Charlotte Writing Projects with a theme of “Unmaking Introductions.” Participants considered the ways they name, present, and represent themselves and the boundaries or memberships these introductions create. Questions explored by the community included: How do we name ourselves in different contexts—personally? professionally? online? What happens when those contexts converge? How might we take apart our introductions to answer some of these questions? What will happen when we put them back together again to share them in CLMOOC?

Through posts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, the blogosphere, Hackpad—from #untros to object stories to silent photos, participants addressed the Connected Learning principle of equity and explored what full participation might mean, look like, or feel like in learning spaces. More from Make Cycle #1

Make Cycle #2

In Make Cycle #2, educator-colleagues from the University of Illinois Writing Project asked CLMOOCers to think about how the media they compose within (like print, sound, still and moving image, or objects) influences how they communicate and interpret and on how ways in which moving from one medium to another changes what one is able to communicate and how they are able to do it.

Throughout the cycle, participants took objects transformed to text, text recast as music, and images turned into binary code. Highlighting the Connected Learning principle of production-centered learning, participants engaged in conversations and questions about processes, the complexities of moving from one medium to another, and the multiple iterations of products—themselves often blending and bending multiple media. More from Make Cycle #2

Make Cycle #3

Led by Educator Innovator partners GlassLab, Make Cycle #3 invites CLMOOC participants to use game design to analyze and reflect on complex systems. As the community discusses what systems they see—what will happen when they change up the rules a bit?

Games—in all their forms—are engaging tools for experimentation. As dynamic and interactive works of art, games can inspire learners to tackle and engage with complexity. Plus, games, and the ways in which they are designed, enable learners to experiment and have fun with failure: the ability to try, fail, and try again is a powerful tool. Like many things in civil society, every game has rules, players, and interesting choices that participants are “allowed” to take and ways that they, as active agents, can change. More from Make Cycle #3

Join CLMOOC today for Make Cycle #3 and connect to the various spaces of CLMOOC, including:

• The CLMOOC home website
• The CLMOOC Google+ community
• @clmooc and #clmooc on Twitter
• The CLMOOC Facebook group.