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Thoughtful Leadership at Education Forums

By Mario Tarradell, Public Relations & Marketing Manager

Thoughtful leadership leads to thoughtful learning. At Big Thought we’ve had an impressive run of recent opportunities to share our vision for thoughtful learning on a national and international level.

Big Thought leaders presented at the Big Bang! 2015 Conference in Dallas, at MozFest 2015 in London, and at the Dallas Regional Chamber Education Outlook Breakfast. Here’s a recap of each event and Big Thought’s participation:

Big Bang 2015! Conference: Big Thought’s breakout session, held Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 at Paul Quinn College, featured Big Thought President and CEO Gigi Antoni, along with Big Thought Senior Director of Operations Margaret Black and Program Officer for The MacArthur Foundation Tawa Mitchell.

The 45-minute session, titled “How Dallas is Changing the Way Youth Learn through a Citywide Collective Impact Initiative,” talked about the connected learning concept, and shared results of the first two years of the Dallas City of Learning program, which Big Thought manages in a partnership with the Dallas Mayor’s Office. The DCOL transition into the new LRNG model, which will take place in Dallas during Spring 2016, was also a session highlight.

MozFest 2015: Jessica Malek, Vice President of Knowledge & Innovation, and Margaret Black attended Mozilla’s annual, hands-on festival (decidedly dubbed a “non-conference”) dedicated to forging the future of the open web. The 1,700 attendees from more than 50 countries were diverse; they were passionate technologists, educators, engineers, artists, activists, journalists and creators. Their goal is unified, which is to brainstorm innovative solutions for the Internet’s most pressing issues such as privacy, ethics, web literacy, and web economy. We all believe the Web can make lives better by unlocking opportunity, spurring creativity, teaching valuable skills and connecting far-flung people and ideas.

Big Thought’s role with implementing new blended learning experiences through Dallas City of Learning led to an invitation to co-facilitate a workshop with one of our peer cites, The Sprout Fund from Pittsburgh City of Learning. Black and Dustin Stiver led a session called “Charting Achievement: Using Open Badges to Design Learning Playlists.” The session empowered participants to explore open badges and the development of interest-driven learning playlists, especially for youth. The workshop was well received. As MozFest’s tagline says, we “Came with an idea and left with a community.”

Dallas Regional Chamber Education Outlook Breakfast: The third and final Education Outlook Breakfast of the year, titled “Exploring Innovations to Shorten the Workforce Pipeline” and held Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015 at the Dallas Regional Chamber, featured guest speakers Don Baylor, Jr. of the Urban Institute and Lori Stone of GlassLab Games. Stone is now officially part of Collective Shift, the nonprofit organization spearheading the new LRNG platform. Dallas City of Learning will transition into the LRNG model in Spring 2016.

Both Stone and Baylor spoke about Big Thought, which manages Dallas City of Learning in a partnership with the Dallas Mayor’s office, and the innovative digital badging system that is part of Dallas City of Learning. Talk about digital badging addressed the issue of improving the workforce pipeline. After the Q&A session that included Baylor, Stone and the breakfast attendees, Gigi Antoni offered informal remarks to conclude the event.