I am moving on to day 2 of the ALT 2021 annual conference! Tonight we watched a session with a title that caught my attention: “Lines of thought: the serendipitous emergence of collaborative learning” by Sarah Honeychurch and Wendy Taleo. This session was sponsored by Talis, and now I am curious what they do. Honeychurch spoke about the emergence of their project and how it was remixed. Taleo showed an infographic with information about a poem that was created and edited collaboratively. Honeychurch asked: how do you feel about remixing, collaboration, and working with students in projects like this? They also shared references about the pedagogy that underpins this. They began with constructionism: “learning that occurs by creating personally meaningful, working artifacts with and for a community” citing Berland 2017. Remix according to Smith 2016 et al. is “the negotiation of meaning across modes, platforms, settings, tools, and media.” Honeychurch stated that this is emergent learning: it isn’t just fun, it is serious fun! For this, “giving yourself permission to fail” is important. This all brings up as Honeychurch explained questions about what is “real” academic practice and the “hidden curriculum” as well as discussions about collaboration and plagiarism. Honeychurch stated “when we remix, we honor the original participant.” Taleo explained how an intentional design of the remix with contributors reading the poem to create a podcast! I wonder if we could do an audio remix of the class notes for metagenomics?! Contributors created videos, artwork… From the examples and discussion, the remixes are particularly appealing not just for the variety of work that can be shared, but also to start conversations about references.
