A Speech

A speech to my class at Lesley (2.0)

Intro to concept 1 min

This all started 2 months ago when I stumbled upon Sugata Mitra’s Ted Talk “building a school in the cloud” I’ll say more about that in a second, but I saw him doing the impossible. Putting a computer in a hole in the wall and watching children self organize their learning. This was amazing but I couldn’t find it anywhere in my community, Cambridge. So I made it my goal to help bring it here, and I did. I developed, organized, and will be starting in January, an after school class at two elementary schools in Cambridge. But because I believe in always trying to do better I tried to think of how to make it bigger.

Questions 4 minutes

So, I’ve thought of a way to help spread this after school class quicker. It starts with a survey which has one big questions, and is followed by 5 sub questions.

The big question is How can we help Improve Sharing? (pause) like I said a big question, And I’ll touch upon in after going over the next 5 questions.

The first question is how many people here have seen Mitra’s Ted Talk?

….(Count) great real quick to explain Mitra again, hes an education researcher from Inida who developed something called the S.O.L.E. Class

(5/23)

The second question is how many people here have read the S.O.L.E.?

(Count) Once again to sum up quickly it stands for Self Organized learning Environment, which is basically a class when a teacher asks one big question and then allows students to dictate where the learning goes, while the teacher keeps asking effective big questions.

(2/23)

The third question is how many have you have heard about EdCamps?

They run what they call an Unconference, which is basically a gathering of people involved in education who develop the content and schedule at the start of when everyone meets.

(2/23)

The fourth Question is how people here have heard of the Hour of Coding?

This is a week planned in December to help try to and get coding and computer science involved in more schools, and included in the maths and sciences curriculum.

(1/23)

The fifth and Final question is how many people have heard of Flash Learning?

This one is kind of a trick question, because it’s something that I created.

(0/23)

Reveal 2 mins

So you are probably asking what’s flash learning. Well its this, it’s what I am doing right now. Hypothetically each of you can now answers these four questions (point to top 4 sub questions). And because of technology each and everyone of you can find out tons of information about these 4 by just having a name and search the internet. And technically each person in the class can try to do the same thing I did with the after school class. I’m not saying its easy, but it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. And it should be even easier for other people because I plan on sharing how I did it with anyone who wants to see. The costs are low, some laptops, a few volunteers, but it can happen anywhere.

So back to the EQ… and once again to be Honest, I don’t know. That is a really hard question. But I did think of a way to try to solve it. And so can you. It just takes asking someone else who is not in this room these same questions. That’s how we can start helping improve sharing. Thanks.

Improve Sharing Experiment

Improve Sharing Experiment

A new method of Social Experimentation

(Under Construction)

Sources

Sugata Mitra (1 2 3) Ted Talks (1 2 3 4 5) Code.org (1 2 3) My own experiences*

Examples

Big Question Beta Flash Learning* (Ghosts, Garden) Butterflies Pokemon

Essential Question

How long will it take to ask every person in the world one personalized big question?

Objective

To use modern age tools (i.e. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.) to conduct a social experiment on a worldwide scale.

Procedure

1. Have one person start an experiment to answer this particular question.

2. Have other people participate in the experiment by sharing the experiment.

3. Have other people create similar experiments based off of this experiment.

Numbers

1 person asking 5 Big questions a day, 250 days a year, for 50 years

(((1*5)*250)*50) = 62,500 Big questions asked

1000 people asking 5000 Big questions a day each, 250 days a year, for 7 years

(((1000*5000)*250)*7) = 7,250,000,000 Big questions asked

Challenge

How can you help participate in the experiment?

Become the Teacher @ImproveSharing by #ImproveSharing

Conditions

1. Everyone shares, but everyone shares differently

2. Expect questions (who, what, where, why, when, and how)

3. Encourage, Don’t Discourage

My Mission

Introduction

Hello, My name is Jake Crutchfield, and for the past year I have had the pleasure of being employed as a substitute teacher in the school district of Cambridge, Massachusetts. During this time I have personally viewed how special of a community Cambridge is, and how much this city values education. At each and every school I sub at I get a chance of seeing amazing students, faculty, and families that are all committed to improving the education of the Cambridge community.

Just a little more than a month ago I happened to stumble across the work of Sugata Mitra and his S.O.L.E. concept, and it inspired me more than anything in my life. To see everything thing that Mitra was doing, and where, I only assumed that this was happening in Cambridge as well.  But after spending some time asking around and doing research, I could not find the S.O.L.E. concept being used anywhere.

Big Questions

This all led to me asking myself some big questions. Why is this not happening here? Why can't something like this work in Cambridge? And what happens if the whole city of Cambridge takes a second to pause, and think about how we can make this happen here?

My Mission

I decided to make it my personal mission to do everything in my power to help this concept happen in Cambridge. To share the S.O.L.E. concept with the city of Cambridge, I’m pursuing this mission from three different angles.

The first way is by introducing the S.O.L.E. class to the community after-school program throughout the Cambridge schools. I am already on my way to make this happen at the Elm st and Amigos programs, but personally I believe there is no reason why this can’t be done at any after-school program in Cambridge.

The second way is attempting a new method of learning, which I like to call flash learning. Here is an example of my first attempt, which I handed out as a packet this past Halloween. Also here is a sample of my next project, a learning garden. Everyone enjoys watching a flash mob because they grab a whole crowd's attention. Why can’t this happen with learning?

The third way is I plan on asking five big questions a day via twitter. Each of these tweets will be personalized for what they do, who they are, and how they can help spread this concept. Each person will only receive one tweet. Each of these tweets will use Sugata Mitra as my citation, since without his work none of this would be possible.

My Goal

My goal is to help share this concept with as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, and as wide scale as possible. I am not saying that I have any of the answers, in fact I am a strong believer in the Mitra Pedagogy of "I don't know", but I have thought of a way to try and share this concept with a whole city.

This is my goal. My hopes are that after people become aware of both this concept and what I am trying to do that we can make it our goal. It is so simple for all of us to share these days. All it will take is a few simple re-tweets and then there is no reason that this concept can’t spread. There are plenty of videos of cats, flash mobs, and other things that go viral in no time at all. What happens if we make this concept go viral? How quickly will it spread? And how much can we help everyone improve then?

Thank you for taking your time to read this, and I look forward to sharing with you in the future,

Jake