Exploring Learning

In the final two weeks of the semester, The Octopus Garden Project team was given two challenges: 1) create a display to showcase the project to the community on Open Day: deadline: 5 days 2) create a presentation for assembly to showcase the project to the school: deadline: 2 lessons BEFORE My learners have come so far in this project that there is no longer the 'cannot lah' attitude evident at the start of the school year; the fact that I have pushed them and coached them into embracing deadlines and challenges sees once-lethargic learners, unable to work without cajoling, now able to pick up and run with anything and everything I throw at them. I am so proud of their progress. AFTER The first challenge was the display space - a week of every free, every break and eveery evening after school was spent creating an under-the-sea foundation suitably created to showcase the work of the learners. My need to not do things by halves can, and often does, mean exhaustion...

A response to an article about Collective Intelligence Ratio in Team Projects ____________________________________________________ “Teams often create novel and unexpected combinations of knowledge in ways that individuals could not” (Hargadon, 1999, Kim et al, p.44) As educators, we know that “when we assemble a group, we inherently create other problems and questions” (p.44). I am currently implementing a project-based learning (PBL) unit using a scaled-down version of a Flat Classroom (FC) method that demands a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for the team to work towards the common goal. The article’s keywords of ‘Intelligence, Team performance and Communication technologies’, along with Kim et al’s aim to attempt to “analyze the interaction of “people gathered for a specific purpose””(p.42), appealed to me in light of my current practice; what I wanted to learn from this article was if, in fact, a collective intelligence ratio could be gleaned fro...