THE STUDENT OESIS - Planning for October, 2014

THE STUDENT OESIS

Student Online Leadership & Community Conference

October 2014

Conference Overview:

The two day Conference will be a stand-alone conference (20 months away in 2014) but be held immediately after the OESIS East Coast Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Student OESIS for secondary students interested in the opportunities and issues surrounding community, leadership and collaboration in online education.

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The Need

There is currently no student conference for online learning leadership. There are several student only conferences (with teacher chaperones) but they are focused on offline environments: examples include the SDLC run by the People of Color Conference that focuses on Diversity and annually has enrollment of 1500 students and other regional conferences.

The world of online education offers significant opportunities for leveling the playing field for students of varying ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. It also offers students as a whole, an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate across diverse populations and provide leadership. As the world of online and blended learning empowers students to a new level, a forum is needed to allow them to present their ideas and initiatives, to voice what is important to them, and to learn how they see the opportunities and risks of a highly connected world they understand. This forum needs to be one of learning and leadership, of collaboration and discussion, and a forum that is highly diverse.

Management

We plan to recruit a number of schools - teachers, administrators, and students - to collaborate in planning this effort. Schools will be primarily required to dedicate personnel with passions in areas such as those profiled below to help (a) develop the program structure (b) network with like-minded educators around the country (c) attend and help manage the conference.

Timing

We will start to get expressions of interest from schools during the summer of 2013 particularly those part of our Organizing Committee and active Consortia, present the concept in an open forum format at the Boston Cambridge Conference in October 2013 to recruit other participant schools, set up wikis and other technology collaboration assets to refine the Program between October and January, present the finalized concept with website and sponsors in Marina del Rey in February 2014 and launch registration immediately thereafter.

On equity and access

As with other leadership-oriented student conferences we expect schools (and some foundations) will provide financial aid to students who are unable to afford the cost, with support from the conference organizers themselves.

Conference Framing Questions & Format

The Student Oesis will be modeled partly on the innovative culture of the TED Youth conferences and partly on the affinity based “Diversity” conferences. The format of the conference will be broken into a number of strands:

· Keynotes from leading adult voices in the field

· Quick fire 15 minute presentations from student leaders of their own generation.

· Leadership Break-out sessions, where students share their experiences on how the world of

education can become more customized for their own needs and how they have launched innovative initiatives using web 2.0 opportunities.

· Affinity based break-out sessions, where community groups or networks concerned with the needs and opportunities of different interests, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, will offer leadership and discussion.

· Group based projects and Case Studies.

Framing Questions.

The following series of Framing Questions are designed to encourage presentations and submissions by high school students for the conference. Each presentation submission would require a Teacher Sponsor, who would be attending the conference in their capacity as a Chaperone and Mentor.

1. Community Service. The online world offers great opportunity for innovative community service through the mobilization of many individuals, the raising of funds, the raising of awareness for specific causes and the sharing of expertise. What areas of leadership have already been shown in this regard by our students? How can they leave high school with the right tools to participate fully in these areas as adults?

2. Ethics. Ethical education has suffered from the lack of emotional depth that role playing paradigms have offered. Does the rich content offered by online video and film alongside virtual conferencing and collaboration present an opportunity to change this?

3. Citizenship. The dynamics of citizenship in the online world requires a real culture shift in many of the assumptions we have taken for granted including definitions of safety or paradigms of etiquette or bullying. Have our students prepared themselves for the new kinds of necessary literacies and how can we help?

4. Games based learning environments. As digital natives, technology is a given for the modern student but they are discerning consumers of many forms of interactive environments? Games can be fun but can they really help learning and what do students need to ascribe them value?

5. Mobile Opportunities. Will the use of phones, tablets and the BYOD movement enhance learning for students by enabling enhanced collaboration, research, fieldwork and the like?

6. Collaboration and Assessment. Has project-based learning now come of age at the high school level? With tools that can now reveal how much students contribute to projects, how should collaboration be assessed?

7. College Readiness. Online courses are becoming a prerequisite for preparing for College. What do students consider they need for College? What do students want us as educators to know and prepare them for, in the knowledge that our College and job experience is very different from what they will face?

8. Content. Course content is increasingly being placed in the hands of the student to choose. Have we empowered a generation of high school students with multicultural choices and content like never before? What content is being used to enable students to support their own cultural perspectives and preferences?

9. Social Networking. How should students go about building their own personal learning networks and what do they expect from educators in terms of the importance of networks to accessing and filtering content? Do we have the right social networking environments at our schools? Are we too cluttered and bombarded and should we be looking at better closed social networking communities within our school environments?

10. Affinity Groups. Online environments can enable affinity groups of many kinds but many today seem to be teacher led and somewhat reactive on the part of the students. How can these communities generate the kind of engagement and passion found offline? What are the important ingredients or the secret sauce to make these communities vibrant? What are the opportunities to close the achievement gaps that exist amongst our diverse communities by enabling the choice offered through online learning?

11. The School. What do students think a high school of the future will look like? With high school students now taking free College courses instead of APs and taking required courses from many different schools, what does the word “school” mean to this generation?

12. The Classroom. What do students really want their classrooms to be like? With most virtual class environments not requiring participants to enable webcams, is real discussion possible when a student is simply talking to a photo or an avatar? Does online education enable authentic voices or unfiltered opinions free of social nuances? How does a flipped classroom work when the student has no identification with the “recorded” lecturer? Should classrooms be clustered around a Resource Center or a Cafeteria? How should the physical footprint of a school be transformed?

13. Homework. Can online, blended or flipped learning transform traditional notions of homework as a group reinforcement tool? With many learning environments such as Aleks and Knewton looking to customize how much reinforcement is necessary for each student individually, is the notion of homework now a misnomer?

14. The Teachers. With the role of teacher changing from managing a group to more emphasis on the knowledge, competency, progress and needs of an individual, what do students need from their teachers?

respectfully submitted by SanjeRatnavale, Jonathan Martin, Dave Ostroff

last modified on October 10, 2013