March 19, 2024

What is CMK About?

Constructing Modern Knowledge may be the most important work of my career. For five years, we have demonstrated the competence and creativity of educators who spend four days of their summer vacation learning to learn in the digital age. I marvel at the complexity, sophistication and ingenuity illustrated by the educator’s projects created at Constructing Modern Knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to say that several of the projects created at CMK 2012 would have earned the creator(s) a TED Talk two years ago and an MIT Ph.D. five years ago.

CMK remains committed to creating a space where educators remake themselves by engaging in personally meaningful projects and learn through firsthand experience. It is NOT a conference. It is a samba school, laboratory, playground, library, maker space, film studio, atelier or workshop filled with people and objects to think with.

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a reflection of each participant. Some alums will say that CMK is about being at the forefront of the Maker movement, or about the Reggio Emilia approach, or about creativity, or robotics or filmmaking, or history, or school reform, or about S.T.E.M., or music composition or collaboration or visiting the MIT Media Lab. CMK is all of those things and what each participant makes of the experience.

Our remarkable faculty supports the learning of each participant and our guest speakers share a daily dose of inspiration. Given the diversity of the participants and the enormous range of projects created, CMK means different things to different people. So, what is CMK about?

Constructing Modern Knowledge is about:

  • Jamming on a cupcakeIMG_1682
  • Looking up
  • Looking in
  • Cool tools
  • Floating above the classroom
  • Bringing Edison back to life
  • Reinventing yourself
  • Painting a piano
  • Programming random Shakespearean insults
  • Giving Lego a ukulele lesson
  • Teaching a robot to use Twitter
  • Becoming the next great YouTube filmmakersmiling learners cropped
  • Getting lost in the flow
  • Learning to solder
  • Scoring a cartoon
  • Snapping lots of photos
  • Creating an animation
  • Having lunch with your hero
  • Sneaking around the MIT media lab
  • Feeling smart
  • Time lapse photography
  • Laughing really hard
  • Charging your iPhone by peddling a bike
  • Tinkering
  • Being a historian8022636190_3d5593b600_o
  • Working alone
  • Working in teams
  • Cool tools
  • Aluminum foil
  • Understanding astrophysics through dance
  • Being silly
  • Being serious
  • A digital butler keeping your beer cold
  • Engineering
  • Secret ice cream
  • Measuring your whiffle bat swing
  • Manch Vegas
  • Brightening a Rwandan child’s day
  • Flow
  • Fixing the future with air-curing rubber
  • Makey Makey
  • Conquering the geometry of islamic tiles
  • Conductive paint
  • Mathematical thinkingworking on floor cropped
  • Designing a video game
  • Making friends
  • Expanding your personal learning network
  • Feeling smart
  • Feeling foolish
  • Confusion
  • Finding science in your art and electronics in your peanut butter
  • Satisfaction
  • Scratch
  • Learning to learn
  • Bursting balloons
  • The Reggio Emilia Approach8023331155_8565f7ff3f_o
  • Clarity
  • Turning trash into treasure
  • Reading
  • MicroWorlds
  • Constructionism
  • Computer graphics
  • Storytelling
  • The 100 languages of children
  • Chatting with Marvin Minsky
  • Ingenuity
  • Choreographed t-shirtsResnick and Minsky
  • Turtle Art
  • Coffee with a legend
  • Writing
  • Progressive education
  • Creativity unleashed
  • Computing
  • An amazing faculty
  • Powerful ideaspitts2
  • Changing the world
  • A smile-controlled robot
  • Exploring linguistic patterns of the 1940s
  • Challenging yourself
  • Sounding like Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Brazilian churascaria
  • Wearable computing
  • Whimsy
  • Never finding the pool
  • Raising standards
  • Blowing your mind
  • MIDI
  • Conversation
  • Re-imagining educationx 5948920464_208e89e344_o
  • Expanding your comfort zone
  • Being super awesome
  • Taking off your teacher hat
  • Putting on your learner hat
  • Action!

Join the learning adventure with us July 9-12, 2013 in Manchester, NH!

Register today!

Download a printable brochure for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013

 

 

2 thoughts on “What is CMK About?

  1. Can you provide links to all these great sounding projects? I want to learn more! Jamming on cupcakes? 100 languages of children? Smile controlled robot? Come on! Those sound so great!

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