Tag Archives: Professional Development

Hive Toronto: Drafting Core Beliefs and Proposals for Funding

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This is a guest post by Kathryn Meisner, Director of Hive Toronto.

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Hive Toronto Learning Network (Hive Toronto) recently came together for two afternoons to accomplish two things:

  1. Continue to define Hive Toronto’s core beliefs
  2. Discuss the dispersal of funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation’s (OTF) grant to the Mozilla for Hive Toronto’s “Collaborative Community Projects.”
  3. Explore on-ramps to collaborate on Hive projects, whether funded or not

I added item number three because it was an unexpected—but very welcome—take away that was not an original goal for our eight hours together. More on this at the end of this post. Hint: Hive members can do more than they probably know.

The Why

The plan was to surface and translate Hive Toronto’s core beliefs into building blocks for the draft of the project proposals.

Why involve Hive members in this co-creation? Because in addition to reflecting the needs of our funders and our partners, we wanted the proposal process to reflect the goals of Hive Toronto and its members. And through this unique funding situation, we have been afforded the opportunity to do so.

The How

Leah Gilliam, then Hive NYC’s Portfolio Strategist, led several member organizations through a design charrette to delve deeper into these conversations. Don’t know what a design charrette is? You’re not alone—think of it as a guided brainstorming process.

Hive operates with an open ethos which means that we involve participation as much as possible. A key thing to note about working in the open—and with Hive Learning Networks in general—although we seek input and collaboration, it is not the same as consensus-based decision making.

For a glimpse into how we spent our time together and what went down, check out the agenda and notes from our two afternoon-long of conversations on this Etherpad.

Our Journey

We issued an open invitation to all Hive Toronto members to participate in this charrette process. Over the course of the two afternoons, we worked with members from eight organizations:

As is the nature of networks, not everyone could attend so we set out to document our process and outcomes so we could bring our thinking to the larger Hive.

Mapping Stakeholders

Since Hive is a system of interrelated partners and organizations, we started out by identifying Hive Toronto and its network of stakeholders. We did this by contemplating, who’s involved and how should their needs and interests be considered.

The result of that discussion? A whiteboard version of this diagram:

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Brooklyn Explorers: Follow-Up Training at Partnership for After School Education (PASE)

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This post was written by Julia Vallera, an artist and educator working with Hive NYC on Brooklyn Explorers and other youth-serving projects.

Training picture collage

Image courtesy of Yvonne Brathwaite @PASEsetter

This year, Hive NYC is partnering with PASE (Partnership for After School Education) to add a Mozilla Webmaker component to the Brooklyn Explorers Program.  The program provides 4th-6th graders attending Brooklyn-based afterschool programs with experiential learning activities that explore different neighborhoods and expose them to the rich assets in these areas. Hive NYC will help them turn their experiences into dynamic web content via tools like Thimble and Popcorn. Six Brooklyn-based schools and centers are participating.

Our initial training was back in January and lasted for two days. It was a thorough introduction to the curriculum, activities and tools. Last week we held a follow-up training for the educators running the Brooklyn Explorers program. We practiced using the Webmaker tools and talked about the process of getting content from the students’ activities onto the web. This flow chart was a guide through that discussion.

BE Media Flow Chart

After a brief recap we jumped right into the webmaking tools. A few of the participants had been practicing Thimble, so they already had great questions for me related to HTML, browsers and CSS.

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The training was divided into two parts: Thimble Lab and Popcorn Lab. Each were about 45 minutes. Three templates were provided for the educators to hack. They chose which one they wanted to use based on difficulty level.

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Everyone was hard at work for the rest of the session, and it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop! It was great to see everyone having “ah-ha” moments as they were getting the code to do what they wanted.

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We talked about how the students will be going through the same exact process and will dig into the code the same way. Through April and May, I will be visiting each site to assist with the Webmaker tools. MOUSE youth (also known as digital ambassadors) will be joining me to assist as well.  I am excited to see the student’s work in the coming months!

Go Brooklyn Explorers!

Off the Wall Learning Gets Playtested and Shared

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This is cross-posted from the Institute of Play blog, and written by Ilena Parker.

Early in December, a group of mentors attended an Institute-led professional development workshop on best practices in developing and distributing informal learning activities geared at youth.

The mentors were all members of Hive NYC Learning Network, a group of museums, libraries and other youth-facing non-profit learning organizations that work together to create new learning practices. They were there to playtest the latest from Institute of Play: a new approach to challenge-based activities called Off the Wall Learning.

Off the Wall Learning is an engaging way to share informal learning activities that represents the dynamic nature of the activities involved. By presenting a self-directed activity straight to the learner, the Off the Wall Learning series provides a shared experience to both youth and mentors that creates richer opportunities for them to interact.

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The Off the Wall Learning project kicks off with the highly visual Off the Wall Challenge posters, produced in partnership with Hive NYC. At the workshop, Hivers rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty playtesting the first activity poster – the Water Filter Challenge. With empty water bottles, coffee filters, gravel and other household supplies, teams worked to design a filter that could clean a cup of water in less than a minute. Check out this slideshow from the workshop to see what the teams came up with.

After a successful playtest, Institute designers and informal learning developers shared a template for content development and visual design of learning activity posters, which we used to create the first two Off the Wall Challenge posters. You can download our posters below, as well as an editable template that you can use to make your own Off the Wall Challenge. We’d love to see what you come up with – please send your designs our way!

Download the Off the Wall Process Template

Download the Off the Wall Water Filter Challenge

Download the Off the Wall 20-5-2-1 Challenge