Two events are coming up shortly after Spring Break.  Read about them below, and look forward to the next full newsletter after break!

Unleashing Learning Engagement in the Classroom, April 6:  A special event co-sponsored by the College of ACES and CITL facilitated by Nancy White of Full Circle Associates.

Is it a challenge to engage all student voices in your classes? Do you look for ways to spark deeper student engagement the subject matter and with each other? Do you wish they would take more ownership and risks in their learning? Engagement deepens learning and application. It strengthens the muscles that help students work with ambiguity. But it can be challenging, in both small and large groups.

Come explore Liberating Structures, an easy to learn and deploy repertoire of of 33+ open source interaction structures that can build patterns of easy, regular student engagement in the classroom.  They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

You can start with a short 90 minute introductory workshop, or stay for all three learning sessions. First is an introduction of the easiest and most often used Liberating Structures, second, a focused application to solve a real challenge, and third, a deeper dive into the theory and practice behind Liberating Structures.

Friday, April 6, 2018

Venue: Illini Union Ballroom

Registration required:  http://citl.illinois.edu/about-citl/calendar

8:30 am to 10:00 am    

Liberating Engaged Learning (Workshop 1): discover and use four structures that can immediately increase engagement in your classroom.

10:30 am to 12:00 pm

Stringing Structures to Tackle a Challenge in Your Classroom (Workshop 2): learn how a sequence of multiple structures can address specific challenges (student, passivity, unequal participation, lack of critical thinking, etc.) and larger outcomes. This builds on Workshop 1.

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm    

Lunch Break (grab lunch in the food court or on Green Street) with someone you just met this morning.

1:00 pm to 2:30 pm

Understanding the Theory Behind Liberating Structures (Workshop 3): an advanced workshop that looks at the underlying elements of Liberating Structures and how they can become part of the everyday pattern of highly engaged classrooms. This builds on Workshops 1 and 2.

It’s worth your time to come to all three, but if you can only attend one, then come to the first. If you can do two, then combine workshops 1 and 2 or workshops 1 and 3.

Playful By Design, April 5-7

The Illinois Project for Research in the Humanities Playful by Deisgn Research Cluster is pleased to announce the 1st Annual Interdisciplinary Games Studies @ Illinois Spring Symposium happening April 5th-7th in locations across the UIUC campus. It is free and open to the public.

The event will kick off Thursday April 5th at the Spurlock Museum at 3:00 with a reception for the opening of the museum exhibit "Past Time Pastimes: Vintage Board Games". At 4:00 there will be presentations on the history of games and gaming by Dan Cermak, former General Manager of Deep Silver Volition, and David Dubin who teaches game design for the School of Information Sciences at UIUC.

On Friday, April 6th, 9:30-5:00 at the Armory, there will be panels, roundtable discussions, and workshops addressing topics from game design to e-sports, to gaming pedagogies to new gaming technologies. There will also be an all day "Open House" inviting students to come in and play digital, VR, and table-top games, and to share their own games in development.

The Keynote Address, "Gaming the System: How Games Make  Meaning in a Mixed-Up World" will be delivered Friday at 4:00 in Armory 101 by game designer Colleen Macklin, Professor of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design, and co-director of PETLab (Prototyping Education and Technology Lab) which develops games for experimental learning and social engagement.

On Saturday, April 7th, the CU Community Fablab will be hosting a Board Game Make-a-thon from 10:00-6:00. Pre-registration will be required. The registration link and a full schedule of events will be available after Spring Break at http://el3.judithpintar.com/playful-by-design/.