Tech for Experimenting.
Having some fun with a new app.
As 21st-century educators, we are called upon to perform a variety of roles. This week’s posts are highlighting online tools that can help us with these tasks.
Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash
In the 21st-century educator model, one of the hats instructors wear is that of experimenter. This one has always left me wondering what exactly is meant by it. But lately I’ve come to a better understanding of it.
An educator today needs to be willing to try new things, to innovate, to take chances - in short, to experiment. It’s the only way to prevent education becoming stale from ossified tradition. Tradition itself isn’t bad, but tradition for tradition’s sake - often expressed as “that’s the way we’ve always done it” - will be the end of civilization. I’m not just being hyperbolic: when societies can’t adapt to new situations, they crumble and fall.
But experimenting with an app - putting it to use in a course - without having a clear purpose for that app is usually counterproductive. I know this from experience. Like a cat, I’ll jump at any shiny thing that comes along, so I have to guard against the urge to use something just because it’s new. So I try to curb my impulsive behaviour while still satisfying my experimentation tooth by using new apps myself for awhile in order to see if (a) I find them useful and (b) they might be useful to students in their learning.
One such app is Milanote. It describes itself as “an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards.” A visual wiki, in other words, and it’s the visual aspect - an infinite bulletin board space where you can put almost anything - that I like quite a bit. It’s less linear than a good wiki like Notion, a little more flexible than Padlet, it can do more than a good kanban board like Meistertask, it can replicate a concept map like Mindmeister while still bringing in all the documents you might want, and it has fewer gadgety bells and whistles than Miro.
I started using it to plan and map out courses and presentations, and I liked how it helped me get all the things organized. And I realized it could help me meet two objectives I’m developing for the my students’ learning:
I want students to have a space where they can think/create, organize, learn, and present in a contiguous fashion, and Milanote enables this in a simplified manner.
I want students to do more learning in the open. I want to ease them away from handing in assignments to me, furtively, and instead developing the confidence to share their work with their peers. Milanote can manage this as well.
The other thing about Milanote is that it allows me to experiment. In that way it takes on a concept map function, and though it is not as visually smooth as a really good concept map app, it gives me the space to think things through. The app is aimed at the hip young “creatives” of today, and so it has that “creativity vibe” as the youths say. Which I have to admit I kind of like because it helps me to free up my thinking, to get out of certain ruts in order to explore new ideas. All I need now is a beard and a hipster hat.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 59/60.