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 cupcake
- 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 filmmaker
- 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 historian
- 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 thinking
- 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 Approach
- Clarity
- Turning trash into treasure
- Reading
- MicroWorlds
- Constructionism
- Computer graphics
- Storytelling
- The 100 languages of children
- Chatting with Marvin Minsky
- Ingenuity
- Choreographed t-shirts
- Turtle Art
- Coffee with a legend
- Writing
- Progressive education
- Creativity unleashed
- Computing
- An amazing faculty
- Powerful ideas
- 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 education
- 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!
Download a printable brochure for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2013
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
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!
The 100 Languages of Children refers to a philosophy by Loris Malaguzzi, the father of the Reggio Emilia Approach. You may read a book of the same title here: http://amzn.to/12wRHOQ
The cupcake jamm was based on Makey Makey. You may learn more here: http://constructingmodernknowledge.com/cmk08/?p=1747
Please look around http://constructingmodernknowledge.com to learn more about our activities.