 Good morning everybody or good, whatever time is if you're watching on replay My name is Matt Lingard and I am chairing this session I've got a couple of announcements tonight before I introduce speakers for this session Firstly just a reminder of the various hashtags and ways of getting help at the conference And in particular we wanted to thank our session sponsor for for this session Alt works with a lot of partners and relies relies on their sponsorship for our event So this session is followed by followed sponsored by TALIS And there's a web address there where you can find out more TALIS.com forward slash alt The session itself I should say is not about TALIS, but they are kindly sponsored sponsoring it for us So moving on to the main event now I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Honeychurch I'm all all over the place this morning. Let me introduce you to Sarah Sarah Honeychurch and Wendy and Wendy Tellio who are going to give this morning's talk and TALIS on the screen. I hope you're in the right place. I will stop talking because I'm not doing very well of it and hand over Hi, so I'm Sarah or whatever You like here with my friend Wendy and We're going to talk to you about our presentation, which is lines of thought the serendipitous emergence of collaborative learning So how this all came about we've watched a collaborative project unfold in ways that just continue to amaze us And it's opened up for us and for a wider audience a conversation about the power of online Collaborations and the adaptability of what we do the more formal models of learning and what we're going to do today is We're going to talk you through the emergence of our poem and our project Talk a little bit about the theory behind it and then show you some of the remixes that came out of it Thanks, Sarah. On this slide. We're showing some of the Statistics behind the poem that we're talking about so the poem is called a hundred and six lines of thought It was created in February this year with 44 contributors and we also acknowledged the lurkers that May have not chosen to put their name down there's a hundred and six lines in the poem and it was it came about through a series of tweets and Because of the 90th 90th the ninth birthday of daily creates in DS 106 there was four thousand over four thousand edits on a Google doc over a couple of days and One of the lines in the palm is wrapping wings of hope around the world So I'm just going to show you two extracts of this poem that was created It's a global collaborative poem. It's beautiful. It's hopeful It flies high and it goes deep and it starts with a bird so you can see line numbers listed there and You can imagine us watching this poem grow It started with line one. I'm just going to read the first couple of lines for you a bird Flying through the sky cuts through dark clouds Circling on windrifts your mind shifts to stars So we followed this and watched this grow There's a section there on the left and on the right. There's another extract of line 25 through 230 you can read the full poem in the blog there So Sarah is just going to ask you these couple of questions So as we go through our presentation, we'd like to you to start thinking what do you think? How do you feel about the practice of remix? How do you feel about remixing yourself and how would you feel about doing this sort of thing with your students and For us, this brings up questions about what is collaboration and again? How do you feel about collaborating on projects and how do you feel about getting students to collaborate and we'll come back to all of this later, but For now what we're going to do is we're going to talk through some of the theory that underpins all of this Okay, so we have an awful lot of fun doing these collaborations We do that's an end in itself Offering yourself is just a very important part of life, but Underneath all of these practices is some serious And I'm just going to take a few minutes to go through all of these we'll share the slides later I've put references at the end so you can pick up on all of this because it is an absolutely Fascinating rich stream So we think the pedagogy that underpins this best is constructionism the constructionism of Seymour Pappert Pappert sometimes is paraphrased as being learning by doing but he rejects this because he thinks it's more than just learning by doing it's more than just active learning and Berlin I think Captures is very nicely when he says in constructionism. It's learning that occurs by creating personally meaningful Working artifacts with and for a community and all of these three aspects are vital It's personally meaningful. You're actually doing something and you're sharing it out with other people So you're doing it collaboratively. You're getting feedback about it when we do this we talk about it as being remix And Anna Smith and her colleagues have defined remix as the negotiation of meaning across modes platforms settings tools and media and when you see the remixes you'll see how important this is because we do hop across lots and lots of different places and Different tangents now in constructionism. We often talk about the practices we do as tinkering and it is tinkering It's rapidly iterating and reiterating from variations on a theme But when we think about it as tinkering it makes it sound quite trivial So personally I like to talk about this as being bricolage because bricolage is a big word It's a French word to start with. It's a serious word And bricolage. It's very much tinkering. It takes objects that have been used before and reorganizes them with So to go back to Anna et al's Definition of remix that very much to me is remix is bricolage And the other good thing about all of this is it very much it comes from an indie perspective So it's not your sort of formal traditional learning, but it is learning that has a very Very serious point to it. It's a DIY culture. It's grass root Zandy music. It's everything that really makes my heart sing And the really really fundamental point of all of this is that it is emergent learning And this really is learning that you can't script so Mimi Ito talks about how this how adolescents learning our participatory culture You see you'll see them sort of sitting around on I was going to say Facebook But that's a bit old now. It's probably tiktok or whichever they are on now And they are playing around they're hanging out and messing about they're geeking out But it's not just fun. It is serious fun And I think a quote from terry eliot absolutely encapsulates this for me terry talks about designing the first connected learning MOOC, which is one of the communities that Wendy and I belong to and He talks about the idea that you They couldn't design the MOOC. It wasn't just serious play It was all the sitting around and talking to each other and reiterating and hanging out and geeking out on those mornings together And messing about on the river And I think for me this just encapsulates this emergent learning that what you can do is all you can do is provide spaces You can give people permission Inside opportunities for these types of learning to happen We often talk about it as rhizomatic learning and a word that we use a lot is serendipity That when you give yourselves permission to play permission to fail Then serious learning can happen. It happens for us And what we want to do is make this happen for others And another really really important point is in order for this type of learning to happen. It has to be authentic I can have the next slide Oh that seems to have gone right to the end Oh dear So there's lots to say here I'm not going to have time to talk all about authentic learning The references are in there, but for us what this brings up is questions about what is real academic practice I've mentioned before that what we're doing isn't just fun. It's serious fun I've talked about how it's underpinned by serious pedagogy For me, what happens when you start to iterate and reiterate around all of these types of play Is you can start to uncover the academic practices that sometimes we think are so obvious but are Not obvious to students and what we often call the hidden curriculum So you can start to teach people about writing styles You can start to have alternative types of assessment. You can start to get students playing Having permission to fail And actually having fun but doing serious learning. The other thing of course, and I I know here is it starts to raise very very serious questions about Because we want students to collaborate. We do a lot of work around active learning and collaboration with our students And then certainly at my institution When we suddenly say to students write all that collaboration you've done forget that now you need to write an individual assignment Um, and we actually put up videos for students telling them that they can't collaborate on revision notes They have to do it all individually and there's such attention I think between the best practices that we know for collaboration and then how we assess students So I really think that we need to start thinking about appropriate types of assessment That don't talk about cheating but do talk about attributing and referencing And they do what jenkins does is like constructive versus destructive distribution So when we remix we honor the original participant. We don't talk about it. It's cheating And What i'm going to do now is hand back to wendy and wendy's going to talk about some of these actual remixes that we did Thanks, sarah I'll push page down instead of end this time So In this exercise not only did we collaborate with 44 other people Or 42 other people to create this poem We went another step and opened it up for remixing so Kevin created this word cloud By putting you know putting all the words of the 106 lines of the poem into a generator And he commented that quite often word clouds didn't mean much or add much But in this case he felt that the word cloud really highlighted some of the things that he understood from the poem And he went on to create Some remixes based on this word cloud I also use this word cloud in the What you can see here from sound cloud where we posted the Audio recording so the audio recording was an intentional design of a remix if you like we had the poem in a google doc And we said wouldn't it be fantastic to get some of the contributors to read the poem as an audio happening Now i'm going to try and play this and if it doesn't work that's fine. We'll we'll share the link to it so Just one moment And they need to share that i'm just swapping over to the sound cloud and Just play you the the start of this recording so there's 20 contributors in this recording and Hopefully you can hear that No, we can't hear it Okay, that's all right. We'll stop that share and we'll go back to the slides so the audio recording What it bought for us was a it brought to life not only the poem but the people that contributed to the poem Now let me just go back to the slides And some of the people that contributed to the poem we hadn't heard their voice uh for quite a while even while studying with them And I found it very evocative to hear the the contributors Reading this poem so that was an audio remix Another remix was from this line line number 95 a tapestry of many colors And what you see there is all the contributors names using a color font and The question here was does it make us think differently When we use color for our text this uh remix again I completed this remix from line 12 now replaced by light and what I did was I crocheted The poem so one thing we found with these remixes is that people would use the skills that they have And I do a lot of crochet. Sarah does a lot of knitting And what I did was across the top of this light shade There's a hundred and six stitches and then for each letter Each character including the spaces so the spaces now had a bit of a voice if you like I I crocheted a single chain for every character and every space For each line and then the beads that you see there are for all the contributors to the poem so I had this uh at my home and I often think about The the poem and what it means to Swap from a very colored variety that you saw in the previous slide in digital format To these this physical bank Now I think the next slide Sarah will talk about Sorry, I muted myself So I just obsessed about some of the lines in this poem so take this hammer take this chisel take some time to work alone That's what I wanted to do. I was in the middle of a pandemic. I had teams Email I had everything shouting at me And so I actually took some time to work alone And I made a papier-mache a version of the plate It took me some days to do it. I Cut the poet I printed the poem out several times. I chopped it up. I put it onto a papier-mache plate um, I got some beautiful beautiful fountain pen ink and I Put that all over it. I varnished it. I put masking tape around it I thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed it and as I did it I started to think about the different ways of remix and the importance of personalizing it This plate now just sits on my bookshelves and it just it takes me back To this very very happy time And all of the learning that I was actually doing through it um, and I think next we've got a video by Susan Spellman. Are you wanting to play a bit of this Wendy? See if it works Yes, I will um Hopefully we've got sound shared here and just tell me if you can hear it It's it's very soft audio Um, so I'm just going to flick through some of the images. Yeah So what we love about this is the way that Susan has taken the words from the poem and put them over her own artwork and really again personalized it and made it into something totally beautiful and taken it into a different media Did you want to say something about the the heading of this video? Yeah, the creating is so good for your mental health 2021 It's so good for your mental health. Whatever year you do it It really does highlight I didn't realize how much I needed to do things like this until I had done them and I remember commenting to Wendy and Kevin about just how much it had grounded me Um and brought me back to myself and that's a constant thing that when we spoke to other participants They said the same thing, but yes, it had really really helped them So I think there's one more that we want to show and then we'll move to questions So this is another absolutely superb one by Irwin. Um Irwin has actually written a whole classical um version of the lines of thought Which again, we don't have time to show it all the way through and it is very classical, but it's absolutely superb And we would very much recommend you listen to it But I think what we want to do now is just prompt some questions from you I can see matt's come back on which means it's time that we hand it over to the audience to do some participation and what we'd really like to ask is Wendy mentioned that she does a lot of crochet. I do a lot of knitting Irwin is a classical composer Susan is an artist each of us have taken this poem where we've taken it into our own medium So how would you remix the poem? And how would you encourage others to remix? And I think we have a set of slides the lines of thought reflect and if any of you would like to add To those we would love to hear from you Okay, thank you Yeah, you're sorry go ahead wendy Well, I I'm I am looking at The question that you've posed matt and I was going to comment. I'm just going to go back one slide to The musical album because Irwin put a lot of consideration into the copyright and The shareability I guess of the music that he created and So the band camp He's put it on band camp. It's free to download. It's free to play There's also an ability to contribute if you wanted to And you can also see that he's done a remix of a remix which is the color font Which I created as a remix he used that as the cover of the musical album and I mean he asked for mission but of course the The blog post that I created with the color fonts is also open and available for people to remix So I've now missed that question. Did you want to just put it up again? Do you think cautious messaging about copyright plus academics? of trying remix projects Well Where uh, sarah mentioned About you know, what's what's academic? What's an academic project and All of the contributors in this project are all educators from across the world I'm based in central australia and Been working with sarah and some of the other contributors For a number of years and some contributors. I hadn't worked with before but I do I have talked to some of my colleagues here that are very they're like Oh, whoa, how can you attribute a poem to 44 people? You know is my name if I was a contributor is my name going to be in your presentation and that's what Encouraged me to put the contributors names in color For one of the slides here because everybody is acknowledged and it's all listed There's listings of the 44 contributors But we're not precious about that. We're not precious about whose name comes first or should it be in alphabetical order? Or should it be in the order of line one through two? Line six. Was there any other questions from the chat? I think I'd just like to comment on that. Yes. I think it can put people off trying remix and certainly for me when I was starting getting my head around creative communist licensing was the thing that took me a long time and Nuffiest to me what license I would put put on so there probably is a bit of um digital literacy that wendy and I absorbed by doing these things Um, and again, this is very much the learning by doing And the daily practice Sarah with the ds 106 we've been in a in a pattern Sarah probably more so than me But of doing a daily creative activity a very short activity that we usually Share on twitter, but it could expand and this is a project that just expanded from one of those daily our creative practices that are open and There's sort of no wrong answer That's great. Thank you. I'm really sorry. I'm gonna have to just interrupt and to draw it to a close Because I don't want I don't want to overrun because obviously there's other sessions coming and that was an absolutely fascinating Talk and possibly one of the most beautiful things I've seen there some of those artifacts are wonderful really really wonderful So thank you very much for sharing it today And I know there's been lots of really positive comments in the chat I hope you take time to have a look at them if you haven't had chance already and we really do appreciate the time you will have taken To put this presentation together and to come along today So thank you so much and thank you everybody who attended this session and for your input as well And have a good day everybody Thank you. Thank you