Fighting a Technological Dystopia in Student Participatory Action
Reading John’s post about ISTE catalyzed me to think a bit about the convergence of several of the projects I have been working on. I’m attending the July cPAR Institute in NYC focused on Student Participatory Action Research (altering social studies curriculum and pedagogy to focus on building empowered citizens ready to participate in a Democratic society), in preparation for one of my initial research projects during my Ph.D. program next year in which we will be scaling a current PAR program in New Jersey from 3 to 7 schools in the next year. That project is a collaborative curriculum development between several researchers and the involved teachers.
Because of the increasing difficulty to coordinate the researchers and teachers in so many schools, we’re looking into applying for a grant to put together a technological collaboration framework. Since we also want the kids in the classrooms to be able to collaborate with each other, we want to encourage as many connections as possible, and as I know a thing or two about available open-source collaborative applications and program
