Dear All, A growing number of people believe that personalized, free, digital training in valueable knowledge domains, in support of hands on experience, combined with open source credentialing, may be a key piece of 21st century life long learning.
The MacArthur and Mozilla Foundations have global competitions around "badge based digital learning" and community gardening is surely a worthy knowledge domain. If there are community gardeners for whom aquaponics can be imagined as a "community garden," e.g. in faith communities, schools, community centers, etc., there will soon be an Aquaponics Life Long Digital Training/Credentialing resource for testing. This will be building upon Milwaukee's new "Aquaponics Teachers Cohort of 30," learning aquaponics for STEM and work based learning, as well as one of the nation's first Urban Agriculture High Schools at Vincent High, with 90 acres to develop! http://fox6now.com/2012/10/18/mps-vincent-high-school-starts-new-urban-ag-program/ Many now believe that personalized, free, digital training and credentialing in knowledge domains, combined with open source credentialing, may be a key piece of 21st century life long learning. We also believe that "awards," like badges, or black belts, provide incentives for learning and measures of progress. So, for example, Sweet Water Foundation aquaponics has 4 knowledge areas we're starting with, e.g. water, plant, fish science, and system design/construction/engineering/maintenance. Each of the 4 areas has 4 levels of competence, symbolized by badges to be aimed for and won. It's all spelled out here: http://dmlcompetition.net/Competition/4/badges-projects.php?id=3197? * 5 in 5* My vision is that we can aim for 5% of the schools of North America, Europe, and India to have within 5 years at least one teacher providing this digital training for students or their family/community connections. Perhaps this same teacher will have $100 or $200 to spend co-creating a demo system. *Develop Badge Based Digital Training for Community Gardening as a Career Path?* Imagine if our students could be provided with all of the social enterprise, communication, craft, agriculture, and teaching skills to launch a community garden as part of their life's work? And some comfoodie developed a proposal for the next Global Digital Life Long Training/Credentialing competition. Why not? Godsil -- James J. Godsil, ABD, co-founder Sweet Water Organics, Sweet Water Foundation President, Sweet Water Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20121020/fd0cd844/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
