Informal Learning: VoiceThread

I was in love with VoiceThread until I started recording my narration. Remember that time you first heard your voice recorded and you hated the way you sounded? Well, I forgot how different I sound in my head. Some of it was fumbled words, some of it was vanity, but I recorded and rerecorded my narration to each slide at least three times. And that last slide, well I had to take a break twice during that because I flubbed it up so many times.

But alas, I have resigned to how my voice sounds to everyone all the time and finished my VoiceThread, so much as a VoiceThread is ever done. See, VoiceThread is participatory by design. Don't just watch. Type, record, draw a comment. Add to the dialogue. My intention was to present an explanation of informal learning within the context of VoiceThread and the "Knowing, Making, and Playing" chapter of A New Culture of Learning, but what does informal learning mean to you? How have you experienced the where in learning, in contrast to the what?

Though it is not reflected in my VoiceThread, I am particularly fascinated by the notion of geographic illiteracy v. a limited definition of "Iraq on the map" (Thomas and Brown, Chapter 7). I have heard these debates in the teachers' lounge.

     What is the value of memorization?
     Do we still need to memorize anything in our wired/wireless world?
     Why are we still giving tests that only measure the lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy?

Instead, can we teach students to evaluate and decipher information, to know where to find it, and how the where informs the what?

Despite my embarrassment with my recorded voice, I am assigning a VoiceThread tomorrow in AP Art History. I love the format wherein one can start a dialogue around a piece of art. Each student will be assigned a different time period from medieval art. After reading The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown, students will use Brown's repetitive nature to develop an outline emphasizing the most important information. To communicate this outline, student will create a VoiceThread that includes three specific works of art. The students will have one week to make the VoiceThreads, then an additional four days to add to the dialogue in the other VoiceThreads.


Assignment: Create a VoiceThread that provides a definition of informal learning and makes at least one clear connection between VoiceThread technology and one of the themes or theoretical perspectives outlined in chapters six through eight of the course text. Write a synopsis of the VoiceThread, including a statement about how Voicethread could be used in an art education setting, either by an art teacher, students, or both.

References:
Brown, J. S. and D. Thomas. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace.
Bloom's Taxonomy VoiceThread
VoiceThread Recorded Webinar by Michele Pacansky-Brock