Meeting with Dr.Iiyoshi of MIT: UPDATE
Had a great meeting in Cambridge with Dr. Iiyoshi the other day. He is the editor/author of Opening Up Education, which is available for free here. We talked about his work at the Carnegie Foundation and his heart for helping educators become better teachers. I shared the NIXTY vision with him and he immediately understood what we are doing and then offered insight and advice as to how we can make it even better. At Carnegie, Dr. Iiyoshi spearheaded a program called the Knowledge Media Lab. One of the goals of the Knowledge Media Lab was to advance teaching scholarship (a.k.a. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and promote educational knowledge building and sharing with Web 2.0 technologies. They did this by helping create digital representations of exemplary teaching practices and educational improvement efforts by and for educators, celebrating great teachers (they even had an online Educator Hall of Fame called the Gallery of Teaching and Learning, and providing various online tools and resources to help educators excel in their teaching and student learning. At MIT, he is now helping build similar tools and resources such as the Gallery of Educational Innovation. In our discussion about NIXTY, it quickly became apparent that the NIXTY platform could be used to reach some of these same goals.
We do not want NIXTY to simply be a place to find great content. Rather, we want NIXTY to be the premier place to find great content AND great teaching. We drilled down a bit more and started to find ways we could practically reach this goal of excellence in teaching. Initial thoughts include pointing to stellar teachers as examples. This would include examples of open courses that expert teachers develop. Reviewing these work examples will help other educators learn how to better communicate in residential, blended, and online environments. We also discussed ways of including tips in the process of building out a course. For example, if an instructor uploads a set of slides, then an information box could pop out and query them as to a best practice in PowerPoint presentations. These types of tips could be strategically placed throughout the course development process. The goal here is to better the process and method of course development. Another way would be to promote student teaching. The hard division between learners and educators is weakening and NIXTY will help this along by providing a real peer2peer platform. We could start by focusing on teaching assistants and graduate students.
Overall, it was a very enlightening discussion. MIT is fortunate to have Dr. Iiyoshi on board. I count myself as blessed and fortunate to be able to work with him in our future efforts.
