Harvesting what we already know about collaborative experiences and empowering groups to create collaborative guidelines Dear collaborative discussion friends, Welcome to the Collaborative Discussion Project Newsletter. In our first newsletter, we highlighted two...
Pre-program surveys Dear collaborative discussion friends, We are kicking off the new year with our first Collaborative Discussion Newsletter, highlighting a new Collaborative Discussion Toolkit activity each week. We have heard your feedback! Our open source...
Exploring What Makes a Positive Research Experience “Think of a positive learning experience you had in a research class as a teacher or student. Take a moment and jot down what it was and what made it work.” That’s how IF Fellow Jeff Prudhomme started the Faculty...
I am currently taking a special topics course on Citizenship Learning, Participatory Democracy, and Social Change. Even before starting the course, I knew I would be able to link much of what is studied in the class to things I have learned through my involvement...
As I was digging through old posts, I would like to add my thoughts to the topic “setting up student discussions” 18 months ago. I am particularly going to recommend the website www.doodle.com for scheduling. Scheduling an event and selecting a topic is very time...
One of the things that the Interactivity Foundation does is to teach people how to think about public policy possibilities. This will sound patronizing only if you misunderstand why, what, and how we do it. I heard an interview with former Supreme Court Justice...
Once you have a basic understanding of the policy possibility---what it says and what it doesn’t---the next step is to understand why someone might actually propose it. In order to do this, you will typically need to go beyond the description of the policy...
The first step, of course, is to understand the possibility: what it says and what it doesn’t. This almost inevitably means reading the description of the possibility, and the reasoning behind it, and paying attention to the words that describe it. We did this the...
One of the core aspects of IF is that our sanctuary projects have non-participating yet ‘strong’ facilitators for their discussions. But what, exactly, is a non-participating yet ‘strong’ facilitator? The non-participating part is relatively easy. IF facilitators...
The Democracy Imperative's most recent newsletter has an interesting write-up detailing a recent forum exploring how federal policies and programs might be expanded to enhance the civic skills of American...