Webmaker/HiveCookbook

The Hive Cookbook

This cookbook is designed to offer you specific recipes that can be used as a guide, or as way to share specific formulas that you can use to cook up the Hive model of networked learning in your community. Each section concludes with a selection of recipes submitted from Hive members, leaders and stakeholders.

What is Hive?

Hive is a city-based community model that brings educators, learners, and community partners together to create transformative digital and web literacy learning opportunities for young people and a community as a whole. Through the establishment of Hive Events, Hive Learning Communities and Hive Learning Networks, cities around the globe are able to mobilize, catalyze, create and grow high quality connected learning opportunities and programming.

Hive actively supports an open source, laboratory-approach to learning by generating and supporting opportunities for exploration, experimentation, iteration and share discovery. Taken together, Hive models and mechanisms provide a recipe for the spread of new ideas, tools, and digital media practices. Through participation in Hive, a community's civic and cultural organizations, business, entrepreneurs, educators and learners of all ages can build, shape, teach and learn together.

Additional Resources:

* Hive one-pager: http://hivelearningnetworks.org/wp-content/themes/hive-learning-networks/resources/Hive_Global_1pager.pdf

Attributes of Hive

Each Hive city around the globe brings a unique local perspective to the entire network but shares the following attributes:

• Professional Learning Community: A community of youth-serving organizations committed to testing new ideas to initiate a Connected Learning framework

• City or Metropolitan Area Presence: A strong and credible voice representing the Hive vision for learning at important events

• Sustainability: A sustainability and financing plan to support Hive administration and innovative programs

• Programming and Shared or Open Assets: The regular development of innovative learning programs and activities that contribute to a pool of shared and open assets for others to use and remix.

• Youth: Young people willing and able to participate in Hive programs and activities, and a commitment to launching a community of youth to help advise on Hive operations and programs

• Research: A Hive will collect information through member communications, informal discussions and standardized data collection to ensure that the contributions of the Hive is working to improve learning to you

• Technology: A commitment to implementing a technology infrastructure that connects young people to one another and to mentors for shared learning and critique, and to collecting real-time data about activities for continued improvement. This may include specific tools like digital badges as a way to value and make visible the learning that takes place in informal spaces.

• Connected Learning Commitment: Active participation in Digital Media Learning networks, discourses and communities.

What is the value of the Hive

Hive recognizes that in the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks. When coordinated to work together, organizations can provide opportunities beyond what they can do on their own. When networked in this manner, learning experiences are connected, extensive, easily accessed and align with local interests. Mentors and educators are learning guides who direct youth on pathways to proficiency and expertise in specific content areas and fields, enabling them to build and curate a diversity of experiences that develop the necessary skills to navigate their world.

Hive is made up of participating organizations with a wide range of missions, youth populations, institutional sizes, media art forms, disciplines, and engagement strategies, but who share a clear set of values and aspirations. Reflective of the intentions of connected learning, Hive members act on and advance core principles and practices in their programs, in their partnerships, and throughout the network itself that are:

• Collaborative & Cooperative: multidisciplinary teams have shared goals, objectives
• Experimental & Catalytic: efforts nurture new ideas, new ways of working, new partnerships
• Relevant & Consequential: experiences address needs and potential of children, youth, and teens
• Equitable & Open: productive exchange of ideas and opportunities for all
• Engaging & Participatory: connects the personal with shared interests of the community to actively produce, create, design and test new knowledge

The value of Hive is best described through two perspectives; its core organizers and its members. The Hive is an opportunity to collaborate and engage different individuals and organizations working to equip more youth with the skills needed to be critical thinkers, creators and citizens of the web. Hives provide space for innovation and solving challenges of being part of the global connected network.

Value is placed on the creation of programming to support youth in the exploration of their interests, development of news skills and to encourage them to follow their passions through the integration and application of digital media and technology in adult-supported environments.

To view the full Memorandum of Understanding from Hive NYC which describes the value of Hive NYC membership: http://bit.ly/hivenycmou

Active members of Hive echo similar values but because of their close work with the community, they are able to experience the value of Hive from a whole new perspective. Steve Ausbury, Deputy Director at Brooklyn College Community Partnership, a member of Hive NYC, discussed his first seven months of being part of a Hive. He focused on four areas of demonstrative value:

• The People: Hive has picked some great organizations. A key feature of their picks is diversity, e.g., of skill-sets, missions, geography, age, cultural background, styles, and sizes. This level of diversity combined with opportunities to share in the multi-platform meetings and other events creates tons of access points for organizations like ours to listen, share, and learn.

• Minimal Agenda: In his words, the Hive encourages members to " want members to remain who they are while they explore, create and share at their own pace and in their own way".

• Programs: Hive itself is not a program for youth, but virtually all of its members. Members are exposed to the great work of other organizations in their cities creating better community building opportunities and relationships. Opportunities are abound which is great news for students from all member organizations.

• Explore, Create, Share: The Hive provides an opportunity for member organizations to explore new programming pathways, ideas and goals and grow the impact of their work. Working in a Hive allows big ideas to come to fruition through the support of your Hive team as well as other member organizations.

Read the perspective of a For-Profit Edtech Start-up and their thoughts on being part of Hive Chicago.

The Three Tiers of Hive

Hive Events:

Hive Learning Events are gatherings that bring network practice and connected learning principles to life for an mixed or focused audience of youth and adults. Community meetups, Hive pop-up events and stakeholder meetings are a few examples of pathways for Hive Learning Communities work to bring together learners in a dedicated space.

Hive Learning Community:

Hive Learning Communities works with diverse networks of community partners, educators and earning institutions to create engaged digital and web literacy programming opportunities for their communities. Community meetups, Hive pop-up events and stakeholder meetings are a few examples of pathways for Hive Learning Communities work to bring together learners in their communities.

Hive Learning Network:

Hive Learning Networks like the Hive Learning Community continues to demonstrate commitment to providing sustainable, connected learning and web literacy opportunities for youth and a community as a whole. As Hive Learning Communities grow in scale and scope, many Hive teams begin to explore opportunities of sustaining a Hive and mechanisms to seed innovative programming which can foster cross-community collaboration and innovative programming.

Bringing Hive to your City

Hive Global functions as a “big tent” for educators and organizations with diverse approaches to come together around connected learning and web literacy. A unified Webmaker with the Hive Network project functioning as the city network deployment strategy, will build momentum for and global adoption of the philosophy, tools, and strategies of connected learning.

As steward of the Global Hive network, Mozilla will construct and convene a governance structure, create materials, offer badges, run events, provide web platforms, and collect metrics that support the work of local Hive leaders.

Hive Global and Bringing Hive to your City

Over the last two years MacArthur and Mozilla have grown Hive NYC and Hive Chicago, helped on-board Hive Pittsburgh and Hive Toronto and responded to a growing chorus of communities eager to incorporate Hive values, ideas and platforms, or as we have dubbed it, “Hivey-ness.” As a result, we’ve developed a three-tiered engagement ladder, outlining ways to contribute to Hive as well as the path towards creating and sustaining a Hive Learning Network.

Recipes

• Taking Hive Global- Blog post by Chris Lawrence
• Three Tiers of Hive- Blog post by Chris Lawrence

Building a Hive Learning Community

Hive Chattanooga

If you are interested in bringing Hive to your community, you can begin by familiarizing yourself with the three tiers of Hives. Building interest for connected learning and making activities in your community can be an initial first step to work towards launching successful Hive events. Some individuals have used social media to share out information on connected learning and the types of events that are possible to build interest and enthusiasm.

Hive Toronto

Finding out if there are organizations that want to collaborate to create a connected learning experiences for youth is a great early step to bring Hive programming to your community. With individuals such as librarians, teachers, youth workers, technologists and makers, you may be able to plan a Hive event. Organize a meeting to gauge interest and establish a team motivated to plan and execute a Hive event. At an initial meeting, you may find it helpful to use video clips showing a Maker Party event in Pittsburgh or a Connected Learning TV topic of your choice.

Leveling Up: Becoming a Hive Learning Network

Hive Learning Events are gatherings that bring network practice and connected learning principles to life for an inter-generational audience. Examples include Pop-Ups, Hack Jams, media production sessions, Maker Faires and other events. These events are branded in two ways:

Hive Pop-Ups have an intentional program design towards fostering a “Hanging Out, Messaging Around, Geeking Out” (HOMAGO) experience. For more on HOMAGO check out this handbook written by the Yollocalli Arts Center and Hive Chicago. At these events, multiple organizations come together with some of their best programs and deliver activities via learning stations tailored towards three levels of users:

• Those who sample (Hang Out) by searching the room for what interests them most
• Those who lightly experience all the activities offered (Messing Around)
• A smaller but focused group who lock into one activity for the duration of the event (Geeking Out)

Participating educators and mentors get to both contribute to and observe what it’s like to see youth self-direct their learning and design their own experience in a networked space. Often the question, “Why Hive?” is better answered after seeing a Pop-Up in action: adults see youth interacting and learning with peers, remix and re-interpret their programs, become part of the energy in the room, and perhaps most importantly, see youth travel from different activities/interactions guiding their own path through the controlled chaos. We have distilled the Hive Pop-Up into a Webmaker Teaching Kit [ADD LINK]and this video details the Brooklyn Public Library Storymakers Maker Party/Hive Pop-Up. [A]

Hive NYC

• What is a Hive Pop-up-submitted by Heather Payne Hive Toronto
• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
• consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. * Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo