Tomereaders 2015 Summer Reading Circle
Online Participation Outline/Travel Guide
Facilitators/Fellow Nomads
Autumm Caines
Twitter:@autumm
Matthew Cook
Twitter: @matt_t_cook
Every summer I facilitate (or at the very least instigate) a book group on my home campus and sometimes include a small group of friends. This year, inspired by my participation in #rhizo15 (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is), I’m wondering what will happen to this thing that I do every year if I cast an open call to invite everyone.
There are many ways to participate online so if you would like to come along on this journey let’s start down the trail.
The book
The first thing is the book. If you can get a copy of the book it will make participating in the online group much richer. We are going to be reading Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning by Jose Antonio Bowen. I recommend getting it from your local library because libraries are awesome!
The schedule
In the nomadic travels of my youth I met another nomad named MiRanda who used to say “Time is nothing; Timing is everything”. There will be no “due dates” in this group. We will have “focal dates” instead that will correspond to the three parts of the book and one date for reflection. If you fall behind, jump ahead, or go off on your own it is fine – this is more about timing than time.
June 11th – Part 1: The New Digital Landscape
July 2nd – Part 2: Designing 21st-Century Courses
July 23rd – Part 3: Strategies for Universities of the Future
Aug 6th – Wrap up: What did we learn and how is it going to affect our practice
Next choose how you want to participate online. “In the wild” or “From the lodge” (you can always do a little of both).
How to participate “in the wild”
Participation in the wild will happen on the Internet at large in the open. The trail gets a little rocky here and may be for more experienced travelers but I want to encourage everyone to push their boundaries a bit and learn something new. This can be a great way to build your Internet literacy.
It will help if you know something about facebook, twitter, blogging and other online tools to play in this way. If you need help, try google or post to one of the groups with your question.
Sign up for our facebook group here https://www.facebook.com/groups/tomereaderstn/
On Twitter we will be using the hashtag #tomereaders
I would like to start a google plus page too.
How to participate “from the lodge”
Participation in the wild is not for everyone – it is a little scary out there. When I first pitched the idea of opening this up to some others they felt the need for a more private area to work. Fawn Winterwood a director at a local university over here in Central Ohio offered space on their LMS and they are offering accounts to anyone that is interested in working in a more private centralized area. If you would like to participate in this way you can sign up here http://svy.mk/1K14wDM. Once your account is created – you’ll get a link via email to confirm things. Once in the course there may not be much in there as I am still sorting that out.
Activities
(Much of this is stolen from conversation with Laura Gogia and from participating in #rhizo15 and watching Dave Cormier – I think maybe they stole some it from others but shout out them from me):
Promt’nBlog: Around each focal date Matt or I will issue a prompt/challenge to the group for your consideration. You can then blog on your own personal blog “in the wild” or the group discussion board “in the lodge”. Blogs do not have to be a written narrative! They can be a graphic, a video, an analysis, anything you would like.
Daily Spur’nMake: Once a day a short prompt will be posted (taken from the book) to spur your imagination. With the prompt make something in 15-20 minutes and post it to the groups “in the wild” or the discussion board “in the lodge”. This could be an image; a selfie of how the prompt makes you feel, some take on an Internet meme, or even some art. It could be music or a sound – post it to soundcloud or some other sound hosting service. This could be video or some text… your choice but quickly respond to the prompt and post your results. This is just to get you thinking creatively.
Read’nTweets: I’m really hoping that Laura will help me with this one. The idea is a synchronous reading of a chapter and live tweeting impressions. Laura does this several times a year with Twitter Journal Club and it is not just enlightening but also a lot of fun. I would like to have one of these around each focal date depending on interest and participation. Read’nTweets can only happen in the wild because Twitter is about as wild as they come.
I hope that you will consider joining us online be it in the wild or in the lodge. I’m excited to read this book with a bunch of others that are interested in it too. 🙂
What a great idea, Autumm. What led you to select this title?
Hi Jeff,
Do you mean the title of this blog post, the tomereaders title for the group and the hashtag, Teaching Naked as a title for the book to read this summer?
To tell you how I pick the title of any blog post would be a blog post in itself.
Tomereaders was a collaboration of several people on twitter after I put out a call for advice in general about opening up the book group.
As for why this particular book. The decision comes from my home (work) campus where several faculty have been wanting to read this book for some time now.