Personal Interactions in Digital Spaces
As online classrooms become increasingly ubiquitous in today’s digitized world, teachers around the globe are grappling with one question: How can we make online student interactions more meaningful?
Out of Eden Learn, an initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is addressing this question using a free online program, which allows students of similar ages from diverse geographical and socioeconomic settings to convene on a digital platform for collective learning and understanding. The initiative created a Dialogue Toolkit, consisting of six different buttons that allow students to engage with other students’ posts in a deeper and more thoughtful way. These “tools for discussion” include buttons which allow readers to “notice” intriguing ideas in someone’s post, “appreciate” a valuable thought, “connect” by writing a comment that relates to their own past experiences, and explain how the post “extended” the reader’s own thoughts in a new direction.
Nina Bhattacharya, the Incubator’s Instructional Design Specialist, first learned about Out of Eden Learn’s approach to online facilitation at the recent Global Studies Outreach workshop for middle school, high school, and community college educators. The workshop, co-sponsored by GHELI, focused on the possibilities and pitfalls of Internet in the classroom.
During the Incubator’s Learning Lab meeting—a space to share skills and prototype new pedagogical approaches—Bhattacharya translated Out of Eden Learn’s digital tool into an analog environment. She encouraged members of the pedagogy team to reflect on their own previous online interactions as a student, and consider how instructors could apply this tool to their own classrooms, whether it be a class of kindergarteners excitedly expressing their newly formed ideas, or a graduate course focusing on the intersection of public health and human rights. Aligning with the Incubator’s core principle of exploring new ideas through interactive experiences, the members of the pedagogy team got a hands-on experience with this innovative online tool. They carefully examined pieces of student writing from Youth Voices about issues ranging from unaffordable health care, the barriers in reaching the “American Dream” as a refugee, and poverty in the global context. The team mimicked the digital dialogue toolkit by analyzing what they had just read, digesting their thoughts, and writing their reactions on sticky notes using the dialogue toolkit’s template to stimulate discussion.
This experience sparked discussion on creating meaningful interactions in both digital and online spaces, while discussing current issues that are prevalent in every country yet also unique, faced by young students but also the aging population. The Incubator continues to explore new pedagogy tools that are applicable to all individuals, over a spectrum of complex issues, to bring educators and learners together in an academic setting that is constantly evolving.
Get a glimpse, behind the scenes, of GHELI’s “studio-lab” atmosphere.