Update on Tiny House Survey / Online Summit Project

[For those who have been interested in what I've been doing in the tiny house world!]

This is a report back on the progress we’re making toward holding an online tiny house “summit,” and a chance to share with you some of the responses from the survey we sent out this summer.

1. Survey Results. We received an incredible 102 detailed responses to our survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/tinyhousesummit). It would be an understatement to say that collating and digesting this information has been a huge task--but it’s been a task that we’ve been super-grateful to have, and we have so appreciated the willingness to help us identify topics and people that will be key to creating an event that will make a difference. A huge thank to all that have replied (and you can still do so if you haven’t already).

A detailed outline of the topic categories that were identified in the survey can be found at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/topics-survey-results. You can comment at the bottom of that page, or you can email Sera (sera@learningrevolution.com) directly.

2. Community Website. As you will have seen if you went to the above link to the survey results, we’ve created a community website at http://www.TinyIsBeautiful.com that will also be home base for the online summit. The survey questions have been posted there, as well, for any responses directly in that venue. Other features of the site include:

• An events listing at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/events that we will try and keep updated, and that you can add to, with local tiny house events, festivals, gatherings, Webinars, etc. We’ve put in the events we are currently aware of, please do add any others you know of (or run!).
• A groups feature that lets you create or join topic-, affiliation-, or location-based groups, with forum discussion capability for each group. We’ve seeded this with some to get started: DIY Builders, Commercial Builders, Facebook Group Organizers, Skoolies, etc. We encourage you to add your own. http://tinyisbeautiful.com/groups.
• General forum discussion capability. We are anxious to support all the places on the Web where there is discussion about tiny houses, and as this site will become the main landing place for our online summit, we assume there will be a desire to talk and connect here as well. http://tinyisbeautiful.com/forum.
• A “highlighted” blog posts page at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/highlighted-blogs.
• A tiny house books list at http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/books.

We welcome any ideas or suggestions for the site.

3. Webinars. We’re working on a series of weekly, free Webinars as a means of building connection with the tiny house audience, and in some ways, to prove our intentions to the community. While my projects are well-known and appreciated in the education arena, we recognize that we’re going to need to build trust with those who’ve put in lots of time and hard work related to tiny houses. We’re working on the following topics:

• Tiny houses as student/school projects;
• Running successful Facebook and Meetup groups;
• The DIY aspect of the tiny house movement;
• Homelessness projects based on tiny houses;
• Tiny houses and alternative building materials;
• Skoolies - converting school buses for tiny living;

4. Summit plans. We’re currently planning to hold our online summit in January (credit to Andrew Odom for this suggestin, and much smarter than our original and over-ambitious October/November time-frame). As we’ve described before, we’re following a model for week-long online “summits” where the keynote talks are free to view daily, but as each new set of keynote talks comes up, the previous ones go away and become part of a package that can be purchased with all of the event recordings and special bonus features. There will be a way for those who would like to advertise the summit to become an “affiliate” and make a commission (50%) on the summit recording package sales. We’ll also have a community day where anyone willing to learn the online platform can propose and then hold their own session--kind of an “unconference” day--which I’ve done with great success at my other events. We’ll be figuring out and inviting keynote and workshop speakers in the coming weeks, and will also be working to figure out compensation for them in case the affiliate model isn’t attractive to them.

5. An apology. The fall is my busiest season--I hold a large “Future of Libraries” conference in October, and then a massive “Global Education Conference” in November. If you’ve emailed me and I haven’t responded, or there’s been any other way in which you expected to hear from me and didn’t, it hasn’t been intentional. I will catch up, I promise! In the meantime, Sera (sera@learningrevolution.com) is dedicated to the tiny house summit and she will be a great point of contact for you.

"Hack Your Education" - Brainstorming a Library Program for Students

This post is to encourage you to take a quick moment and fill out a survey. But if you don't need that encouragement, feel free to skip past the detail and right to the survey!

https://goo.gl/forms/iSiA8Rf4nwkhNaol2
Last week I spoke at the annual Washington Library Media Association conference, called "Hack WLMA." The core idea of my keynote talk was that libraries and librarians are, in many cases, the last bastion for helping students to navigate the incredible world of information as a part of pursuing their own independent learning paths--something that, sadly, is often lost sight of today.

In fact, you could argue that students today largely fall in two groups: those that don't see themselves as the "smart ones;" and those that are good at threading their way through the world of adult expectations and don't necessarily see themselves as good learners, but just at being good at the "game" of getting good grades and figuring out what college admissions officers are looking for.

So in my talk I proposed working together to build an "open source" set of resources and ideas that could be used to create a conversation-driven class or club that librarians could convene for students. This class or club would help the students see their formal education within the context of their own personal learning--to take charge, so to speak, of their own learning and to figure out how to make their school classes a part of that individual journey.

A radical idea, I know. Except that I went to a liberal-arts college so many years ago, and this radical idea of self-driven education and learning was actually the mission of the college. It's just an idea that has gotten lost in the standardization model of education, a model which has increasingly overtaken secondary, and now even, higher education.

Later in the day at "Hack WLMA" I held a 90-minute brainstorming activity around this idea of building a "hack your education" program for students. This brainstorming turned into an incredibly rich and exciting discussion, showing that I was not alone in caring about these issues, nor alone in my desire to create some kind of program to help students... and in my belief that the librarian is often uniquely positioned to lead in this effort. (The chalkboards we filled with ideas were a testament to the energy! You can see them at https://goo.gl/photos/9m78BAheZrSnGwov7.)

If you've got a few minutes, we could really use your help. Here's the link to the SHORT survey: https://goo.gl/forms/iSiA8Rf4nwkhNaol2. In return, we'll share everything back with all those that reply. By calling this effort/class/club idea "Hack Your Education," we're playing on the same use of the word "hack" that WLMA did--in the current vernacular, that is, how to take something apart and rebuild it to make it work for your own purposes. When we share back the answers to this survey, we won't use any names or put anyone in an awkward situation.

Thank you for your time. Here's to building something together to really help students! Feel free to pass this survey link (https://goo.gl/forms/iSiA8Rf4nwkhNaol2) along to anyone else you think might have an interest in responding. If you want to talk to other teacher-librarians about this idea, you can do so in the group we created at TeacherLibrarian.org: http://www.teacherlibrarian.org/group/hackyoureducation.

Steve

Steve Hargadon
The Learning Revolution Project
Classroom 2.0, Library 2.0, + TeacherLibrarian.org