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Introduction

Trades apprenticeship, where cognitive skills are embodied within physical skills and shared among experts and novices, is where legitimate peripheral participation arose. (Lave & Wenger). I offer a 20 second video where you see not only LPP, but also authentic practices through activity and social interaction that enculturate apprentices into becoming journeymen. (Brown, Situated Cognition). Why we never digitized our practices is, in part, because they don't scale well. (Guralnick)

We lurched towards digitalization when COVID hit. "Hands on" cut off during "emergency remote," many didactic clik-thru LMSs feigned equivalence to centuries of labor traditions. Today, these LMSs are held out as standards. It is not the standards themselves, or even the content associated with them that is so worrisome to me. Indeed, both are in fact the gold standard for trades apprenticeship curricula in North America. Transmuted into something less through these LMSs, created during those fraughtwild days of 2020, still in use today, worries me.

Description of the Target Audience

NYC residents, 11th graders to adults in their 40s, seeking a career not leading to a higher education degree, instead, a union card. I see more and more students in my classes that would facilely graduate CUNY. A rare reentry point for incarcerated people recently released. Veterans receive preferential treatment. Pursuant apprenticeship history, many have family already in the trades. Also many first generation citizens. People seeking nontraditional employment are a significantly higher percent here than in the general public.

Yet apprentices are only one pole of our community of practice, we trades math journeymen are also necessary to consider when examining situated cognition. For this project,
we are the primary audience. Many of us have low digital literacy skills, haven’t taken any education courses, but have internalized a cornucopia of values expressed by our social milieus we aver our loyalties to.

Goals of the Project

How to take that 20 second video and migrate these learning experiences to a digital protocol is my overarching goal.

Who the learner is, and what they are learning, is problematic when considering apprenticeship.

The technology should represent the tensions of the continuity-displacement contradiction. In other words, the learners to be assessed are not just the apprentices, or the journeymen, a successful implementation of this project will produce a technology that supports the centuries old ways of the apprenticeship tradition. A possible heuristic would measure and evaluate whether an apprentice increases his sense of identity as a master practitioner, by investing more time, more intensified effort, more and broader responsibilities, and difficult and risky tasks. Simultaneously, the journeyman should accept his fading away. (Leve & Wenger)

Product Concept

The easiest opening into this concept is to say what it is not. Consider Bourdieu's distinction between academic teaching and ongoing practice. A community of practice requires talking about, and within, physical skills that embody cognitive skills. Current trades apprenticeship LMSs employ academic didactic asynchronous techniques which are the antithesis of legitimate peripheral participation.

What the product actually is, is much more difficult to say. It has something to do with offering support to high school CTE teachers, isolated from their communities of practice, who often have low digital skills and no formal education training. Expecting any HS CTE to play a .mp4, or to have heard the phrase, “community of practice,” will lead to a poor design.

If the product is successful, it will have addressed the biggest bottleneck in expanding CTE programs, CTE instructor retention. If CTE instructors could lead hybrid learning experiences among in-person apprenticeship at a local, and remote community gathering sites, we will be more likely to remain within public or local CTE schools.

Product Description

Raspberry Pis with OSMC remotes will be delivered to local trades unions, community organizations and schools prior to an in-person event hosted at a local, which will be broadcasted via distributed networks to the RPi nodes.

During the streamed event, journeymen and apprentices at remote sites will observe journeymen at the local live stream, projected by the RPi/OSMC, guiding apprentices in the hybrid learning environment, towards accomplishing examples of common goals apprentices will experience on a worksite, specifically focusing in on trades math skills.

Remote sites will be in larger classrooms, common community gathering rooms, etc. where the furniture is all pushed to the side, and groups of participants are given rudimentary materials, a tape, a panel, a pipe, to simulate the live streamed experience beamed from the local.

During intervals of legitimate peripheral participation, all Padlet posts, in-person and remote, will be shared towards developing a hybrid learning experience.

That is my long term vision of the product, a way to "scale up" a way of learning that centers on a zone of proximal development, into digital space. For the foreseeable future, the product will remain in beta version. In other words, the instructor will have to be "live" and in-person, and I will carefully monitor the queries of the apprentices and creating new information that will be refined and added to the canned experience in the next of many iterations. The only way this product will become viable is through strict compliance to ISO 9241-210.

Journeymen will use the RPi/OSMC to manage the projector, apprentices will QR scan from the projector, and use their smart phones to post responses to a challenge on a Padlet, in a way similar to the response pad described in Aldrich.

My first iteration will solely serve me and my classroom apprentices, me using the RPi/OSMC to project QR codes so we can post in Padlets, building to a physical activity using rudimentary materials, a tape, a panel, a pipe, a bag: how many panels, duct work, cement, will your group need to get the job done in this classroom?

A key component of this product is the 'i'nclusion of "circumferential" activities. (Lave & Werger). Basically a random function that will project distracting videos, construction worksites with jack hammering and other noise, a blinking message on the screen messaging 2-3 randomly selected apprentices from the roster to make coffee runs to, deliver messages, accompany others, etc. These activities will also have trades math activities built into them, e.g. how much will you need to buy all of the coffees, lunch, the message is sent through a telephone game.

The 'i' button on the OSMC will be programmed to activate circumferential activities.

It should be noted that this aspect violates the coherence principle to minimize irrelevant information. (Clark & Mayer). Ill defined problems intrude into physical spaces during apprenticeship.

Wireframes

The home page, programmed on the Home button on the OSMC, is a grid of buttons, organized horizontally by culture of practice principles.

● The first button, a circle, will bring up a situated modeling video, which the instructor can pause, fast forward, raise the volume using the OSMC buttons.

■ The second button on that row, a square, will focus on apprentices working in groups to figure out a plan on how to do a task, sending questions/feedback through their response pads, the journeyman offering direct feedback. Padlet

▲ The third button, a triangle, is where the actual activity will commence, where the instructor walks from group to group in the local, cameras tracking him for the remote sites, offer coaching in a manner consistent with legitimate peripheral participation. This is where the circumferential activities will most likely be activated by instructors in-person and remote, using the 'i' button on the OSMC.

✱ Finally, an extension activity, activated by clicking the asterisk button, will allow the instructor to "fade," and focus on assessing apprentice skills developed in the class.

Vertical organization will be different trades math problems. The first row is "how many panels to cover the wall?" The second row, how many square feet of sheet metal to crimp a duct at a 30° angle. The third row, how many bags of cement are needed to pour a city block sidewalk. Each row is a different color button.

Trades instructors are not good with computers. Anything more complicated than a grid of buttons for a homepage is fraught with drama.

Rationale

why you think this is an approach that is well-suited to the problem, why you selected this learning methodology, how this will benefit the client organization

Attracting and retaining qualified and diverse CTE instructors remains a persistent challenge. Offering authentic live streaming events that provide real-time assessment and feedback to both apprentices and journeymen would ensure higher retention rates. Local training sites, church basements, after school classrooms, could participate together in a hybrid learning experience about trades math apprenticeship.

This RPi/OSMC device would also offer CTE instructors a simple interface to project videos from a curated KODI archive, offer immediate feedback to Padlet postings by apprentices in the classroom, and granting remote control to another community livestreaming the event, so to focus his attention on the apprentices in his workshop, where the event could focus on his in-person authentic practices.

Key Milestones

Entirely personal. So I’m gamifying them.

Level 1 is me using the RPi/OSMC in one of my trades math classes. Given my workload, and past experiences making promises, by the end of this year.

• Achieving that goal will confer upon me, DWIT, "doing whatever it takes."

Level 2 would be getting another trades instructor, one who is really bad with computers (almost all are), to use the RPi/OSMC in their own classroom, me DWITing. I've already got one in mind, who would be eager to do it, but it will take a lot of politics to get everybody to sign off, and I'm very cynical about those things, so I'd say another year.

Level 3 would be the Level 2 trades instructor being remotely available to offer support for the next trades instructor using the RPi/OSMC in their classroom. Again, I will DWIT. Another year.

Level 4 would have 3 DWITs available on the RPi/OSMC distributed network.
The mind boggles.

Only after these levels are mastered can a meaningful manifest launch us deep into deep, dark waters.

Which is to say how to evaluate, either in beta, or long-term vision, is also problematic.

For one CTE instructor (me) to simply get to Level 4 surely must be considered a success. Between then and now, a template for measuring successful assessments between journeymen and apprentices needs to be hardwired.