[RE]LEARN 2020 - The Learning Innovation Festival

Co-presented with colleague Bea Leiderman, this second workshop gives participants an opportunity to design a project for their own classes or institutions according to the File/Tinker/Play/Share (FTPS) framework — and it uses the FTPS framework to accomplish this.

Beginning with specific guidelines, participants will create a ‘platform project’ (‘Follow’) that will become the basis for the rest of the workshop. This initial phase will ask participants to consider and design elements appropriate for their own disciplinary and institutional contexts so they have a resource they can use well beyond the conference. In the next phase (‘Tinker’), participants will experiment with, alter, and transform parts of their ‘platform project,’ creating space for more kinds of participation by their own students and communities and adding flexibility to their initial projects as they consider and develop them further. Participants will then design a prospective affiliated or subsequent project (‘Play’) that pairs with the project they’ve been developing, concluding by presenting these to the larger group for feedback and critique (‘Share’).

The key to this workshop is to provide participants with a project that makes sense structurally, disciplinarily, and culturally within the contexts of their own classes and institutions. Many people attend conferences and witness energizing presentations and ideas, but leave with little that lasts or translates into their own milieu. Much of the opportunity these conferences present is therefore wasted. Our goal with this second workshop is to overcome potential friction by supporting participants in developing their own meaningful content and in giving them a guided, hands-on experience that they can carry back with them. By using the FTPS framework as the structural foundation of this workshop, we also give learners another opportunity to understand and experience it even as they design their own projects using it.