SubZero: Messages to the North

Over the three year stretch, the three main adventurers – Aaron Doering, Paul Pregont and Mille Porsild, are, rather surprisingly, not the main recipients of most the messages. A few counts shared here:

• Aaron Doering & Paul Pregont average about 15 messages per adventure
• Porsild recieves 74 messages overall
• Most messages can be divided into three types

1. Good Luck messages - 61 direct messages
2. Footprint messages including comments and one off messages
3. Questions - of the 105 questions asked, the overwhelming majority are about the dogs (there are over 250 references to dogs/huskies)

Expedition 3: The Ice-Men Speaketh
Mar 2009 - May 2009

Overall, in the 2009 expedition, there are about 145 messages. Over the three year period, Doering and Pregont are the recipients of 45 messages each (this is not even over the years incidentally). In year 3 most the messages are for the collective Team GoNorth!. Of the individual messages, Chris Ripken (the ‘civilian’ teacher-adventurer from Minnesota selected to join the team) receives 45 messages both from high school students and colleagues. Some of the messages describe his appearance in the Star Tribune, a newspaper that circulates in the Minneapolis/St Paul region.

Messages for Mille Porsild, seem consistent with previous years – she averages 25 messages this expedition. Of the 15 messages for Mikkel Ketil, many are not written in English.

The key difference between the posters in 2009 and in previous expeditions is that bigger contribution of high school students, in particular that of Lourdes Hill College, Brisbane, Queensland. The Australian school perhaps is the widest contrast in terms of geography and climate. The posters are mostly from an elective ICT class - again, most the messages are "footprint" messages with information about the posters rather than specific comments about the expedition.

Snow Buddy There?

Expedition 2: Teacher Trail
Feb 2008 - May 2008

Of the three message threads that I’ve looked at - the second expedition has the most postings (over 350). A key trend in the second expedition shows a interest in the trail of Wendy Gorton, a fourth-grade teacher from California – she is the recipient of over 121 messages. Over nine elementary schools are mentioned, many dropping by just to leave passing messages and comment on team’s work. The most frequent postings in this category come from Wendy’s fourth grade class at Hancok Park Elementary and regular postings from Walt Disney Magnet School from Chicago, Illinois, where the project is followed closely, in particular by the school librarian. Wendy’s journey on the expedition trail is something of an inspiration to other educators (she has now undertaken a number of adventure learning missions), and includes some one-off messages from elementary teachers across the US.

The early postings in February show an interest in the dogs as the team comes together in preparation for the expedition and this is a common thread amongst many of the children’s postings. Wendy Gorton’s class are likely to be aware of her (later role) in the expedition and start to post early message, wishing the team well and making general comments on the dogs. The questions (around 30 of them) tend to be questions around the dogs and how they are doing.

Wendy Gorton’s arrival at the camp mean that her fourth grade class start to make more frequent postings and there is upward spike in the number of postings around April, including messages from an aunt and her mother.

Walt Disney Magnet School adopts a husky, Ginger – there are several comments about this. Some of the other postings by the school reflect the multi-ethnic intake and are comments on various other countries and places.

One of the adult posters, Teddy (posting to Mille Porsild) has experience of these kinds of expeditions. He checks back on a number of occasions to follow the trail and update Mille on his own travels. Mille’s son, Aksel also makes a posting to the message boards.

A key contribution to the postings is made by Lourdes Hill College, Queensland, Australia. The college returns to the expedition in the next trail where I will be looking at the contents of some of their posts in detail.

Arctic Messages: Footprints in the Snow

Arctic Messages

The message postings that I’ve looked at span three years, each time a different expedition. They are mostly “footprint” messages from visitors, wishing the GoNorth! team or an individual well. A few questions are asked, though in general most make a comment about something they have discovered or liked. Though followed by up to 4000 schools, the visitor messages come largely from elementary aged school children from the US; for example, a fourth-grade class from California following the adventures of their grade teacher who has joined the expedition in 2008 and regular postings made by children from the Midwest (mostly Illinois and Minnesota). For the 2009 expedition, messages from high school visitors from Queensland, Australia (who made some postings the year before) feature as part of an IT elective class.

There are adult visitors; some family and friends and other educational professionals – a librarian from Walt Disney Magnet School in Chicago is a repeat poster and well wisher.

Expedition 1: Footprints in the Snow
Feb 2007 - May 2007

This is the shortest of the three message trails. Third, fourth and sixth graders from different schools follow the expedition trail from February through to April. In May most the messages are from people known to the team – often these are personal messages. A key exception is a posting made by a woman on behalf of a Minnesotan fourth grade grandson, whereby she compliments the team on their adventure and her grandson's teacher for being a school partner in the expedition trail. Another posting made to Mille Porsild by a Danish-American child makes the connection between her ancestry and and that of Mille's. Of the 30 postings, 14 are directly or indirectly about the husky dogs. The huskies are popular throughout the three expeditions and feature in many of the postings made by children.

The photo shows the northern lights in Greenland by Nick Russill. The light on the horizon is a fishing boat, and the smaller one behind, the entrance to the fjord into Tasiilaq. This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

GoNorth!

GoNorth! is a five-year Adventure Learning project which aims to circumnavigate the Arctic to observe, experience and to learn about traditional ecological knowledge and to document data on environmental change. The core team is made up of a partnership representing The College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota and NOMADS Online Classroom Expeditions:

• Aaron Doering, Ph.D, Education Director, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Minnesota
• Paul Pregont, Expeditions & Field Research Director, NOMADS Online Classroom Expeditions
• Mille Porsild, Program Director, NOMADS Online Classroom Expeditions

Since 1999 NOMADS Online Classroom Expeditions have involved students and teachers in exploration and research through following adventure learning programs and dogsled expeditions to the Arctic. School participation is growing – in 2008 for example, 3336 schools across the globe ‘joined’ the team and kept up with developments via the expedition website, participating in conversations, following the adventure trail through team blogs, joining in with the games and learning about the culture, ecology and the environment as the team progress through their mission.

Local knowledge is a key factor for each expedition, so each year a local expert joins the team as a guide. For the GoNorth! programme, a K-12 teacher is also selected to join the team for the last part of the expedition (about two weeks) - the conversations between participants and the team are the basis of my observations here.

Experience! Explore! Expand!

The reading around Adventure Learning brings up some very interesting points for discussion, but before I get onto those, let's consider the title of this posting.

Experience! Explore! Expand!

As an educator I'm fairly well placed to say that the whole process of learning should go beyond just the experience. Learners need the opportunity to explore a topic to gain deeper knowledge and to expand their understanding. It's quite appropriate therefore, that the motto Experience! Explore! Expand! appears on the GoNorth! website.

Adventure Learning projects, such as GoNorth! have a growing number of global subscribers - (about 3 million annual users, as of 2008), though the research literature surrounding the growth and impact of these programmes is remarkably small. My distance learning tutor, George Veletsianos has invited me to look at this and report back some intial findings. This is an area that is of interest to him, and having read some of the papers that he has co-authored on the subject, something that I feel is worthy of further exploration.

In a previous posting, I introduced some aspects of Adventure Learning. For this example, GoNorth! provides a good illustration - this is because educators have constructed a fully integrated K-12 curriculum with activities that run alongside the Arctic exploration mission. Typically with new technologies, how well Adventure Learning is integrated into classroom practice depends very much on teaching pedagogies and the confidence with which new technologies are taken up. Bearing in mind that most the examples come from the North American samples of their work, I shall look at four models for Adventure Learning integration identified by Veletsianos and Doering:

• Curriculum Based - using the Adventure Learning programme as is (by following the the project's own curriculum programme)
• Activities Based - by selecting key activities from the programme (both in a seemingly ad hoc, unstructured manner as well as a more structured activity approach)
• Standards Based - using the variety of material available through the programme to prepare students for state testing (i.e. tailoring the material to the students' needs)
• Media Based - this is similar to the activities based approach, but is based on a media-rich programme where students are encouraged to explore the media on offer

All aproaches generate their own discussion points, which I hope to explore in a further posting.

The Adventure Begins ...

Rather a fetching title, but really this is a chance for me to begin to articulate some thoughts on a piece of academic reading that I did today on Adventure Learning.

Adventure Learning ... What is it?

Buettner & Mason, (1996) describe Adventure Learning as a "creative and promising way to engage learners ... through educational programs that revolve around expeditions and adventures [that are] grounded on the use of technology". Doering (2007) defines Adventure Learning as an approach to the design of online and hybrid education that provides students with opportunities to explore real-world issues through collaborative learning environments. Simply put, this could be a virtual window into a real world, as in the case of Arctic Transect and GoNorth!

These projects have been based on a similar narrative: Each year a team of explorers and educators traverse an Arctic region of the world on a dog-sledding expedition. Their adventures are made available to teachers, students, and parents from around the world on a distance learning adventure. The expeditions are based on problem and inquiry-based curricula that focus on a specific issue, a region of travel, the local people, and are enhanced by electronic media sent from the trail (e.g., video, audio, imagery).

As a distance learning student, Adventure Learning is of particular interest as it exemplifies the 'ultimate' in distance learning.