 Walk My World project. In thinking about the Walk My World project, this originally began as an open learning and research project. It was a group of colleagues that were exploring the use of digital text and tools and trying to identify ways for connection and collaboration and sharing among educators and students online. Within the project there have always been two areas of focus, the first of which is it was an open social experiment. We were looking in online spaces trying to figure out ways to get educators to play with digital text and tools, first as a response to poetry and then after that in the second year as a way to build, construct and curate your digital identity. So we were looking at ways to enable educators and their students to play in these digital spaces and create a digital identity. In conducting this work in the open, secondary focus became the fact that now as we were researching and learning collaboratively in the open, now we happened upon an accidental MOOC or massive open online community in our framing. So initially this was just an open research project and then it became something more. The first year of the project occurred in 2014. Like I said earlier we focused on the poet laureate Robert Haas. For the most part it was as I explained earlier that the different participants in different classrooms and learners globally. So we had K-12 students globally, we also had some higher ed students and we had teachers and instructors all sharing and connecting online. But for the most part what we would do is we would give people a prompt, they would respond to the prompt, they would create some content and they would reach back out and share content on Twitter using the hashtag and then learners would interact and connect and we would tweet and retweet and favorite different pieces that people shared. So to see more about it you can go to the URL redirect bit.ly slash Walk My World 2014. The first year we ran the Walk My World project was in 2014. Basically as we said earlier a lot of the learning events, we had 10 learning events. Each learning event lasts a week. Each learning event has a basic or a simple starting point. So there's a common shared experience, something that anyone can do, anyone can get started on regardless of expertise or digital savvy. We wanted it to be approachable for everyone but then extended so that anybody that really wanted to dive in and do more or remix or had expertise in a certain way by all means they could jump out and try new things. In the first year in 2014 a lot of the work focused on Robert Haas, the US, one of the US poet laureates. This was an artifact of work that we did previously in different versions of these research experiments where we play with digital tools and connected to language and literacy. So the learning events, the 10 learning events are all available on the web page. You can click through and see what we shared. But basically we wanted people to get out there. We wanted them to in weeks one, two, and three get started playing with Twitter, play with digital text and tools, play with tools like Instagram and Vine, create content and share it out online. In week four we remind participants that we are focusing on Robert Haas and poetry and thinking about ways that we can use digital tools to unpack poetry and literature and figure out what these things mean for us, but then also use that as a vehicle. The poetry and the digital content and the project use that as a vehicle to start to unpack our own identities and the ways that we name things and our own private histories and the narratives that we create and we share out with others. Weeks five and six we have participants continue to read Haas's poetry. At this point we have them not only reading the poetry but we started adding the poetry to spaces like Poetry Genius so that people could annotate and comment on the poems and we wanted them to think about human condition and how we interact with each other in these online and face to face spaces. Week seven we extended a little bit more and we think about feelings and specifically the feeling of happiness and how we connect and what do we see in the human condition as we share and create and connect with others. Week eight we asked participants to create their own poetry so they started to create short poems or haikus and create this and remix it with digital content and share that out on the Walk My World hashtag so that others can see what you've done and how we play with text and the digital content. Week nine we wanted people to curate all of the work that they shared from weeks one through eight basically pull it all together add it into a tool like Storify or Digo Outliner pull the content together feel free to annotate it and mark up and say what you were thinking from learning event to learning event share that out so that people can see how your naming and identification of the world separates or makes the world that you live in and then week ten share that content out with someone else in the project and get some feedback on what they see about your world or what they see as you allow them to take a walk in your world in 2014. The second year of the project in 2015 we expanded a little bit from the initial year we did not focus on one poet laureate or one piece of text across the entire experience instead we looked at expansion of digital identity and helping educators and their students think about their own digital identity and create and construct online content to stretch across the 10 learning events so we instead of focusing on one laureate and the poetry we focused on summarizing and synthesizing across multiple texts trying to make sense of this and then what that does to your digital identity as you create and share and collaborate online to see all 10 learning events for 2015 you can visit the URL at the bottom of the page bitly slash walk my world 2015 in the second year we ran the walk my world project in 2015 we started to think about identity and not really focus on a poet or a poet laureate we wanted people to think about digital identity and what we do and how we construct it so the first week we had an onboarding week where we just got started we talked about twitter and how we use twitter and some of the different tools that we might use we also wanted to start to think about having individuals start to blog and start to create content and think about where they're going to share it and where they're going to house this content we were believers in you know in open learning and creative commons licensing but also publishing on your own space and syndicating and sharing it out elsewhere we started off with the first real learning event by opening new doors we wanted participants to take a picture of their front door and share it out so we can see you know the different spaces that we live in and and how we connect and where we enter and exit through different portals in our life the virtual high five we wanted to start folding in the community immediately and getting people connecting and collaborating so we wanted participants to reach out to someone else online and give a virtual high five to someone else in the learning event three we wanted people to reflect on their own identity learning event four we brought in some different multimodal content and wanted people to think about dawn and the start of their day and how we you know the routines and rituals we use as we start our days and how they might be similar and different across the globe learning event five was a lot of fun we were talking about totems and about different things that almost religiously or spiritually make us who we are so we're really pushing participants to think about their identity and things they believe to be you know taken sacred taken to be sacred rip broadly the learning event six we thought about dreaming and how sometimes when we dream there's these in between places where we can go and and what are things that we dream about or also the the con converse of that what are things we might have nightmares about the mirror was another fun learning event for learning event seven where we thought about some of the magic involved in mirrors learning event eight we've we talked about the hero's journey and the journey that we're all on learning event nine we had participants start to think about themselves as journalists and start to document this journey that we've been on and then learning event ten is a way to wrap everything up think about the story that we've told and then how do we conclude all of the work in 2015 in terms of next steps at the end of this year usually around December January we start to plan for and you know get the the next year up and rolling once we start these different meetings these meetings we've conducted in the past online openly using a hangout on air anybody is welcome to come on in and join us as we plan all of the work that for the the last iteration of this were available on google docs in a google hangout on air so you can go in and see what we did but as we get ready for the upcoming year by all means join us come on in get involved sit in on the hangouts or watch them after the fact you can see the google docs and the planning pieces we'd love to have the opportunity to bring in more people to help us push our thinking and shape the ultimate project so come on in and join us as we connect and collaborate and share as the project gets started and find out more you can go to the the main project website right now at least unless we relaunch it at bit.ly slash walk my world or just go ahead online to the hashtag walk my world and you can see what we're doing and we'll start to announce and send out posts as the new version is getting started so the main website right now is this website that we built up in google sites so if you take a look we have the the last round of learning events we have where exactly in the world are the different participants the so what question which is terribly important when we do anything in our classroom the list of organizers and most of all the the research that we've conducted different elements that i want to make sure that we pay attention to as we look at the website one of which is my colleague ryan rish and greg mcvary they did a great job pulling together different maps so we can see globally where some of the participants are and where people are connecting from i'd also want to highlight the at least on the first page the fact that this is an open research project we want to foreground our use of your data in our research and let you understand where we're coming from so i think it's really important that we talk about exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it to give you an example of of what we're doing we basically give you the privacy and research guidelines built into the site so that you know exactly what we're doing what does privacy mean what does public mean what do we mean by open we want to be open and forthright with what we're doing and why we're doing it and we've had other colleagues other researchers reach back out and find value in this and start to take these guidelines and modify them for their own purposes so i think it's it's important that as as researchers and i think as educators we're all researchers we provide opportunities to explore this and explain what we're doing and why we're doing it on the research page we talk about a lot of the research that we've already conducted we had a piece published on the first year in the mit civic media reader we'll share those links out in the broader materials we also have different theoretical perspectives we have case studies these are individual learning events and work by people in the first year of the project and then we had some of the the follow-up and the wrap-up from the first year it was basically us trying to make sense of what happened and some of the larger themes that people shared out the case studies piece is interesting because you can see a lot of the work that people shared that first year this is a lot of the work that went into the initial the mit civic media reader pieces and it's also work that went into some of the other publications and presentations that we had and then to wrap things up at least looking at the overview for the site once again this is great work that that greg mcvary and ryan rich put together i'm pulling in these maps and making better use of exactly where are we as we reach out and share so you can see already there's a lot of different groups from across the globe that are getting involved individuals that are getting involved in sharing that's a pretty powerful visual to see what people are doing and this is people that are hanging out online creating sharing opening themselves up and trying to figure out what these different social media and digital tools can possibly mean for teaching and learning so if you want to get involved we love to have you this is an open experiment this is an open community of learners we're busy develop a personal or professional learning network of people that are interested in teasing out these ideas we are openly experimenting online so pile means first of all just get involved the learning events are out there we'd love to see what you create feel free to use all the materials modify it share remix the content that's out there everything is creative commons licensed so please go ahead share it recreate it remix it it's by no means is is the content that we put out perfect we'd love to see people fork what we've done and create something new and better because that way we all learn if you want to get into you know invested in the work that we're doing create and share and send your materials out on twitter using the walk my world hashtag it's also suggested a couple of the groups at different organizations and institutions and schools they would have their own group hashtag so you would include in it you you know have your students include the walk my world hashtag but then also have a secondary hashtag that they include in content they share out so if you're using a tool like hootsuite or tweet deck or whatever twitter aggregator you use your students could lump those tweets together to see what people are doing and sharing and then by all means blog about what you're doing on my blog I would routinely share the different prompts share my work and then I would reflect on the week we're very interested to see your thoughts and your feelings about the experience so blog about what you're learning blog about what works what doesn't work but share out what your thoughts are and then we can fold this into our ideas about how we collaborate create and share content online