 Hi, my name is Bud Hunt, I'm an Instructional Technology Coordinator in the St. Rain Valley School District in Northern Colorado, and I want to share with you today for the K-12 online conference some ideas that we're thinking about and how they relate to learning. We call this presentation, Make Hack Play, Lenses for Learning. In a minute I want to define these terms for you and help you to think about how we're thinking about ways that these ideas can be lenses for our classrooms and our professional development spaces, but first I need to tell you a story. It was about three years ago that I was invited to attend an event with the National Writing Project called the Digital Is Conference. During that day we spent some time looking at and thinking about and discussing what it means to be writing online, what it means to be composing in digital spaces. It was a very interesting event, we looked at a lot of student work, and there were teachers there, there were researchers there, there were business folks there, it was just a good mix of people talking about these sorts of things that were emerging, and we looked at a lot of student work. I remember saying during the event that this felt like the beginning of an explosion of writing and composing and making, and I'll come back to that word making in a minute, but I also noticed at that event that so much of the work that was really interesting that I was seeing at this event was happening not in the classroom, but near the classroom. It was happening in after-school clubs or after-school care, community centers, museums, classrooms after the lights had been turned out and folks had gone home for the day. I thought that was really interesting and I started to wonder about what the role of school was in situations like these and these types of learning situations. Are schools the ceiling of learning and is our work with standards, the ceiling of what we should expect from kids, or is it the floor? We use our time with students not just to work towards those standards but to work from those standards into those bits of interestingness that I saw in places like digital is. It really got me thinking about learning and its place in a school. About that same time I was introduced to the work of the digital media and learning group. It's a group studying learning in all sorts of places, not just schools but in the community. What happens when learning happens at school and not at school and what are what are learners doing right now? They've since released some principles. They call them the connect and learning principles that lay out the six things that they think are essential for good connected learning. They talk about production centeredness, that you're making stuff, that it's interest driven, that it comes from a place of shared purpose, that peer culture is very much a part of connected learning, that it's openly networked and also that it's academic and important. I left that conference wondering about those types of folks and learning in school and places like that and I came home to my school district and around that same time a colleague of mine and I were rethinking what it meant to do professional development for the teachers that we work with. We were certain that the one-shot classes that we were offering weren't beneficial. They were folks just beginning to scratch the surface of an idea and then leaving. They were four hours or eight hours of here's how the here's how the mouse works or here's how word works and we didn't like that as a model for learning about technology specifically but in general learning at all and from there we developed what we call the digital learning collaborative and that became a project where we helped folks work through two years of learning about technology. That first year is just a year for them to learn and explore and a team of committed folks to think about a piece of technology or to dig in and try it out with an emphasis not on teaching it to students or using it in the classroom but just figuring out what it's about and what it means and then in year two we ask our teachers in the DLC to go through a teacher research process to apply what they learned in their learning year into their classrooms and to pay very close attention to what happens when they do that. This was this was hard learning for folks to do it was a very different model of professional development to spend a year exploring something to not be told all of the answers to the questions that might come up to help them figure out how to figure out what those answers might be and where they might find them and it took a took a special sort of teacher to be successful there and I say that same meaning that I think most teachers are capable of this work but there was something present in some of our successful teams that that seemed to be missing in some of our teams that we would say weren't as successful or that really struggled in this process. Paul Tuff would call this grit as we thought about it we realized that it was really about agency about this sense of understanding that that one was in control of their own learning situation to some degree even amidst constraint and and culture and obstacles and things. More on that in a second I mentioned the connected learning work and in March I had the opportunity to hear Rafi Santo speak in a very short presentation about why kids need to know how to hack and he put some language around some ideas that I'd had for quite a while about why tinkering and fiddling and playing are really important and coupled that with this conversation about agency that Michelle and I were having in our school district along with our colleague Kyle Addington and the notions of connected learning and and some of the really interesting work that was emerging from from that research and ideas we realized that that we wanted hacking to have a place in our school district to some degree so we we brainstormed what a a four-day hack the curriculum session might look like and as we as we as we tried to figure out what that could look like we realized that this wasn't another class this wasn't an opportunity to teach just one thing one time we realized that these notions of agency and hacking and and and making as I mentioned earlier composing these are really essential and thus the the center for make hack play was born so let's let's talk about these lenses and we're not certain of many things here but we do know that these are important and I just want to blow these up for you and hopefully help you to be thinking about where making and hacking and playing make sense to you and your work so to make means to give certain properties to something to cause to be here to become to compose or represent making is writing and and making is composing and making is building things we are we are creators and the maker movement has has really emphasized some of these elements making brush bots for example or making websites Mozilla is doing some really interesting work and helping people think about what it means to not only consume the web but to make the web and recognize that the web is is made of people makers on television like mythbusters will show you that gadgets and circuits are great the maker education initiative is an idea suited to making kids into makers these are important ideas but they're not just about the circuits makers don't just make technology it's about the actual making my children when they paint and draw and write and build things are makers in that same sense and making isn't just about electronics it's about any act of creation we know that creation comes from its synthesis and it involves higher order thinking and taking knowledge and being aware of what's come before and and that leads us to actually hacking which is improving a system not necessarily building something new but fiddling with something that's already there most of the making that we do is really hacking we we write a poem that's hacking language that's been used before or taking our feelings and experiences and putting them together these this sort of tinkering often is expressed in code you know and when you say hack in a school environment sometimes folks get a little nervous we're not talking about folks who are breaking things or destroying things we're talking about the original sense of hacking is a definition improving a system making it better fiddling with what's there to make it great but that's not just about code you know we hack the the classroom spaces that we find ourselves in we we as hackers begin to believe that we can influence what we're working with and that we have agency in whatever system we find ourselves in and it requires a deep knowledge of the system and of the structure and of the culture of the thing that you're hacking in order to do this well just like making a birdhouse requires extensive knowledge of of woodworking and tools and math and measurement and the needs of birds so too hacking requires that you understand the the parts and the pieces that you're taking apart and putting back together so we're thinking about you know what does it mean to hack our classrooms the third teacher and other folks have done great work to help us think about redesigning the spaces that we learn in to to make them more beneficial to learning but what is hacking the textbook look like what does it look like when we take the book and and through the use of oer and other things really start to fiddle with this notion of the book of stuff of learning what it was hacking our curriculum look like and how might we hack school these are questions that we're openly wondering about in fact we were asked very specifically as a result of some of our teacher research in our school district to to explore this question of how do you make school feel less like school so we're engaged in some teacher research work around that and that's a hacking project lastly let's talk about play play is a multi definition word but in our sense of course we mean the elements of fun but I think this notion of play as the removal of constraints or the movement or space for movement a state in which action is feasible these are these are definitions of play that don't usually get pardoned upon play but they're just as important when you are able to play in a system it means that you feel freedom even though there might not be much of it but you found it and you you're figuring out how to fiddle that that freedom can lead to hacking and fiddling with the system it can lead to creation too because you understand the constraints and the limits and you're able to make something happen within those improv is a great playground for thinking about play we we like to use the the techniques and and tools and language of improv when we talk about play inviting people in to play with you yes and thinking these are these are important elements of a playful learning environment and they're essential so when we think about how can we make school and not like school we want to set a high bar for learning we don't believe that the standards and the and the core instructional work of an educational system are the ceiling that's the floor and there's lots to build on ultimately we want all of our students to reach a place of agency we want our teachers to be there too we believe that active agents are better learners they're more thoughtful learners they are more capable learners and they learn much more interesting things and they're really going to make an impact in whatever system they happen to find themselves in so those are the lenses of hacking making and playing we hope that you are exploring these ideas we'd be very interested in learning more about what you are learning as you go I hope that you are thinking about how you might apply the lenses of make hack and play in your work but specifically one of the constraints that you face in your teaching or in your work how might you fiddle or create your way through or around those constraints in order to affect change or to improve outcomes for your students or to improve opportunities and then where the moments of creation and play in your learning it's oftentimes really easy to forget about the importance of making something to of using your hands to express a concept over necessarily taking in all the time where are you being playful where's where's the freedom for your students to move in your systems and how are they moving those are just three of the many questions we're trying to better understand and explore here at the center for make hack play just three of many questions you might ask yourself as you're thinking about how to apply these lenses and where they fit for you you can learn more about make hack play at make hack play.org we hope you enjoy the rest of the k-12 online conference thanks for joining us we'll see you on the internet