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EdCamp MSP 2012 Keynote: Bradford Hosak

On Saturday, June 2, I attended EdCampMSP, an "unconference" styled day of learning at Park Center Senior High School. While most of the day was user generated and facilitated content, they did open with a keynote by Bradford Hosak, the lead designer and member of the University of Minnesota Learning and Technology Media Lab. He has been working on developing the Eartheducation Project, and was the creator of VideoAnt, a video annotation tool.
Prior to the keynote, people were able to post session topics that they either taught, facilitated, or wanted to learn more about.



The title of Hosak's talk, was "My Story of Designing Effective Collaboration with Online Learning Tools."
The Media Lab is like a "grant factory," where professors can bring their ideas and have people design digital content for them. The mission of the lab is to create, inspire and change the world!


What is collaboration?
Here are some terms that come to mind: teamwork, cooperative-no collaboration has to take place.
The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. He used the team on a bike as an example. Working together they create something greater than they could have done on their own.


Where can it go wrong?
He used the example of Google+ and Google Wave as examples of places that went wrong. Wave was a mashup of all successful projects. But as users, they were all ready doing each of those things well individually. The massive "swiss army knife!"
Google+ was an attempt was another design fail. 
You need collaboration, coordination and communication through the users experience!
Still, failing as quickly as possible is not a bad thing!


How do you fix it when it does fail?
Avenue
He gave the example of Avenue, a tool that creates assessments for students learning ASL. It allows for student self assessment and annotation. It allows the instructor to add feedback as well. This could be feedback on video projects, speeches, or any other visual project.
Explore 15
Aaron Doering's environmental project that has students create curriculum on environmental science. Students submit proposals and 15 projects from 15 states are selected. The team captures media from those projects, and then it gets shared with the LT Media Lab, and the share resources and connect the learning from all of the projects.
The top 3 teams get to present their project in Washington, DC with National Geographic.


Where do we go next?
They are continuing to partner with schools on designing learning systems. I see this as having incredible potential, with people taking on that role in school systems.

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