FirstRoot Rays of Light

Like the sun, our CEO & Founder, Luke Hohmann, shares near daily rays of light that strive to warm your soul and make our world a bit brighter. And while that introduction is admittedly a bit ‘over the top’, you’ll find that Luke’s updates are practical, thoughtful, and just what you need to grow

April 2022

Building on the work of the Brown Center and other institutions, I’ll define the goals of civics education as equipping youth to participate in our democratic system. To accomplish this goal, we and others propose that civics education must comprise three components:

1) Civic knowledge: an understanding of government structure, government processes, and relevant social studies knowledge and concepts.

2) Civic skills: abilities that enable students to participate in a democracy as responsible citizens.

3) Civic dispositions: attitudes important in a democracy such as a sense of civic duty and concern for the welfare of others

Now the questions:

a) Are you satisfied that the level of instruction your children receive in civic education prepares them to participate in our democratic system? Why or why not?

Drop me a line and let me know what you’re thinking.

#civics #civicengagement #education #participatorybudgeting

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Let’s explore these ad in the process see if we might find a few more Cs.

Today I will explore creativity.

Creativity is associated with such actions as trying new approaches to getting thing done, exploring, generating new, diverse, and unique ideas, while also being extending, expanding, and building on the ideas of others.

Creativity can help us see problems as opportunities, apply a different rule, custom, or norm to generate a different result, and imagine a better world that is unencumbered by the present.

Participatory Budgeting in schools provides numerous ways for youth to practice their creativity, from generating ideas in the Dream phase to developing novel ways to implement ideas in the Design phase.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Let’s explore these and in the process see if we might find a few more Cs.

Today I will explore critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning, emphasizing skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing.

It includes skepticism, verification of information sources, the ability to separate fact from opinion, and the positive impact of learning how to openly challenge the world around them while respecting diversity of opinions.

Participatory Budgeting in schools provides numerous ways for youth to practice critical thinking.

  • During the Discovery phase, students can gather data and use critical thinking to help identify patterns that lead to the identification and quantification of problems of the reframing of problems into opportunities.
  • During the Dream and Design phase, critical thinking is essential to determining if Proposals are feasible and viable/affordable.
  • Critical thinking forms the foundation of the Decide (voting) phase, in which students must determine which proposal(s) are the best for themselves and their school.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Let’s explore these and in the process see if we might find a few more Cs.

Today I will explore Communication.

Communication is the set of skills that enables students to read, listen, interpret, speak, write, persuade, and negotiate through an increasingly complex set of media.

Communication in the modern world is more than reading, writing, and language arts. It includes understand the benefits and limitations of short-form media such as texts, videos, or tweets.

Effective communication encompasses such skills as understanding what you’ve read and sharing your ideas in a way that others can understand your communication goals.

Participatory Budgeting in schools provides numerous ways for youth to practice their communication skills.

During the Discovery phase, students practice listening for the deeper insights that may exist as other students share opportunities and challenges.

During the Dream and Design phases, students need to communicate their ideas to others, with an emphasis on sharing why a given proposal is a good idea for others.

We’re especially excited that the @FirstRoot platform enables students to integrate a video pitch into their Proposals, which enables students to practice ‘selling’ their idea. This is essential, as every person, from an #agile software developer trying to convince their team to adopt Test-Driven Development to a customer service agent trying to convince their managers to adopt a different tone in their support documentation must learn ‘selling’ skills.

Because Communication is naturally integrated into every human activity, we may not always recognize opportunities for intentional communication. Fortunately, intentional communication is integral to Participatory Budgeting, which means that PB is uniquely capable of providing the context in which teachers can help students improve Communication skills.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Let’s explore these and in the process see if we might find a few more Cs.

Today I will explore Collaboration – arguably my favorite topics and the focus of my book “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play”.

Collaboration occurs when two or more people work together to accomplish a shared, common goal. To build effective Collaboration skills, students must be given a shared goal and supported as they work with different groups of people in pursuit of that goal. In the process, students also learn how each of them can contribute to the shared outcome.

Participatory Budgeting is fundamentally based on collaborative behavior. At a macro-level, the all of the students are pursuing a common goal. Once Proposals are created, students are encouraged to form small teams to refine a ‘raw’ into a fully ‘refined’ Proposal that can be added to the ballot. If the Proposal is funded, students can collaborate with adults who may be involved in implementing the proposal.

Like the other Cs, Collaboration is naturally present in every phase of a Participatory Budgeting program.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

I’ve previously explored how PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Today we’re going to add a new C to the mix: Civics.

The astute reader will already note that I’ve talked about Civics in the previous paragraph. Here are some of the ways in which PB promotes Civics.

Three key components create an effective civics education:

1) Civic knowledge: an understanding of government structure, government processes, and relevant social studies knowledge and concepts. PB programs in schools are always conducted within a defined structure, using the PB process, and provide numerous ways in which educators can compare a school-based PB process to other forms of government.

2) Civic skills: abilities that enable students to participate in a democracy as responsible citizens. In a PB programs students create Proposals to make their school better. Creating proposals, determining if they are desirable and sustainable, and voting for the proposals that make the school better area give students the chance to practice the civic skills they require in their adult live.

3) Civic dispositions: attitudes important in a democracy such as a sense of civic duty and concern for the welfare of others. One of the most powerful aspects of Participatory Budgeting in schools is that it creates a genuine opportunity for educators to explore proposals with students. Should a Proposal that benefits a small group of students who are historically underserved or have special needs be favored over a proposal that benefits a larger group of students? How does this consideration impact larger social decisions?

Each lesson in the @FirstRoot civics curriculum is explicitly organized around the components of Knowledge-Skill-Disposition, making it easy for teachers to leverage these concepts in their work.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

Speakers include: Whitney Quesenbery, Christopher Selth, Laura L. Levine, Andrew Miller, Nicole Baker Fulgham, Patrick Geddes, Amy Conrad, Jeremy Vollen and others!

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

#participatorybudgeting in schools is a democratic process in which a group of students determines how to invest a small budget to improve a school.

I’ve previously explored how PB authentically motivates students to learn and practice the “Four Cs” of the 21st Century curriculum: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration while teaching design thinking, civics and jump-starting the journey to increasing financial literacy.

Today we’re going to add our sixth and final C to the mix: Cents.

The astute reader will already note that I’ve talked about Cents – financial literacy – in the previous paragraph. Here are some of the ways in which PB promotes Cents, using the same curriculum model as civics:

1) Cents knowledge (factual knowledge): This is such things as understanding what money is, what a loan is, what stocks and bonds are, that insurance is, the difference between simple and compound interest, total cost of ownership, and so forth.

2) Cents skills (ability): These are such things as the ability to make sounds choices with money, such as knowing when a loan may be a good choice or when it may be detrimental, the ability to forecast the total cost of ownership of purchase, and determining when it makes sense to pay more for a good or service to purchase a more durable good.

3) Cents dispositions (attitude): This includes developing and understanding of our temperament, our understanding of risk, and for us, including a sense of how our choices about money both affect and are affected by others.

Each lesson in the @FirstRoot financial literacy/personal finance curriculum is explicitly organized around the components of Knowledge-Skill-Disposition, making it easy for teachers to leverage these concepts in their work.

Join us May 6/7 at the 2nd annual FirstRoot conference where we will be exploring these and other exciting topics related to PB in schools. www.firstroot.co/conference.

Speakers include: Laura L. Levine, Patrick Geddes, Amy Conrad, Aamnah Khan, Greta Ríos, Anita Lankford

PS. If you notice that our speakers have a wonderful blend of women, people of color, and people from outside of America you noticed correctly. DEAI is not found in hopes and dreams… DEAI are created by the actions we take…

#creativity #projectbasedlearning #criticalthinking #designthinking #communication #collaboration

FirstRoot is evolving from a platform that teaches financial literacy and civic engagement through Participatory Budgeting in schools into a much bigger platform that includes a fundraising component based on NFTs.

This is the first of several newsletters in which I will be sharing our evolution, starting with what an NFT is and how they are and will be used in the future.

And expect a HUGE announcement at our 2nd annual conference, May 6th/7th, in Washington, D.C.

So, what’s an NFT?

While a lot of websites have very good descriptions of NFTs, I wanted to share a perspective that is grounded on a familiar process with known solutions.

Let’s start with an example of something that isn’t an NFT: a notarized document.

Let’s say you’re want to give a limited power of attorney to another person. After you’ve prepared your documents, you’d take them to a notary. The notary verifies your identify, certifies that you’ve signed the document, and creates a record of that transaction.

Every time I have used a notary they have also made the document I’ve signed unique, doing such things as imprinting it with a stamp, signing their own name to the document, or otherwise physically altering the original document in which a way that it can be generally proven to be unique. in the process, notarization is an official fraud-deterrent process that assures the parties of a transaction that a document is authentic, and can be trusted.

Most of the time the notary also makes a record of the ‘creation transaction’ in a separate book, often taking your fingerprint, as a proof of the transaction that is a direct reference to the original document. Subsequent transactions associated with the asset are also stored, albeit often in other systems, which increases the complexity of knowing the full history of the asset (it is possible, and often involves thousands of dollars of forensic legal fees – common in mergers and acquisitions or probate).

Even if you make 1,000 or even 1,000,000 copies of the document, you could still prove that they were copies. The original is truly unique. (Yeah, I know forgeries can be really good – there is an entire industry associated with asserting authenticity of documents).

Now… imagine that you could perform a similar function without a notary. And for a digital asset, like a PDF or a picture of your power of attorney. And in a way that eliminated, for all practical purposes, the need to hire others to prove the authenticity of documents.

That’s an NFT.

An NFT is a provably unique, one-of-a-kind digital asset. The asset is typically stored outside of the blockchain and the ‘proof of the uniqueness or proof of a transaction’ (the fingerprint in the notary ledger) is typically stored in a blockchain. All activity associated with that asset, from its original creation to any transference of ownership, is tracked with perfect accuracy through the blockchain – which dramatically lowers ‘forensic legal research costs’.

That “asset” could be a power of attorney, a deed to a house, a copy of your tax return, a receipt from a purchase at a store, a marriage certificate, a birth certificate, a will, a driver’s license, or a certificate of completion.

That “asset” can be a creative work, such as a picture, a song, or a video.

I started my description of NFTs with something other than art because I firmly believe that NFTs will emerge as one of the most foundational technologies of the future. I envision every single kind of document or asset that is unique and/or owner will be completely replaced by or coupled with an NFT.

Want to talk to me about this even more? Meet me at our conference!

And I’ll post more about NFTs this week.

Continuing from yesterday, where I gave my definition of an #nft…

The NFTs we create from documents – especially legal documents – will be managed as a ‘one of one’ digital asset – we will only want and/or need one unique version of the asset. A parallel in the art world would be an oil painting: there can only be one physical copy of an original oil painting.

However, many times in the art world we want more than one of something. We want several, each in some way unique, yet each undeniably similar. Examples would be a limited edition lithograph, in which a specific number of copies are made and then the plates that created the lithographs are destroyed. The uniqueness of each edition is often found by the artist signing and numbering each print (“1 of 10” or “1 of 100”).

Because an NFT can be created to be either ‘one of one’ or ‘one of many’, there are a wide variety of creative applications.

I’ll share a few tomorrow.

There is an incredibly large and growing number of creative applications of #NFTs. Here are a few – and I hope you reply to this post with even more examples.

• Musicians are releasing their music as NFTs. In some cases, an entire song is released as a one-of-one. In other cases, a song specifically created for a specific concern is released as a one-of-many, where each song is correlated with a physical seat in the venue (“By this song, get a get a seat at the show”). The advantage to the artist is that they don’t have to distribute their song through a middleman who eats into their earnings. The advantage to you is that you OWN the song!

• Stephen Curry is selling every three point shot he has ever made as an NFT. This is a growing limited edition. It will eventually be bounded – Steph won’t be making 3-pointers forever (though I do hope he makes enough of them to enable the Warriors to win the NBA championship!).

• Visual artists can create NFTs that couple physical and digital art. In some cases the physical art is sold along with the NFT. Sometimes the physical art is destroyed. Sometimes there is a one-of-one NFT coupled with the physical art and a one-of-many set of digital copies.

Of course, there are just a few examples. I’d love to hear your ideas on how NFTs will transform our lives.

Over the next few months we’re going to be sharing how NFTs will be integrated into our platform in a way that benefits students and schools and helps prepare our youth for the future they’re creating and inheriting.

One of the things teachers love most about #participatorybudgeting in schools is that the process uses #projectbasedlearning to tap into the hopes and dreams of their students.

This screen shot, from one of the PB programs supported by our partner Advisors Excel in Topeka, KS, provides an example of the kinds of proposals kids create in the #dream phase of #participatorybudgeting using the FirstRoot Inc app.

I love how the proposals range from ‘student and staff gazebo’ to a ‘soda machine’ to ‘school uniform makeovers’ (and a ‘fish tank’).

Want to learn how to empower your students and your school? Join us May 6th/7th and the FirstRoot Inc 2nd annual conference – online and in-person options available.

I have found that the distinction between a success-failure and a failure-failure is critically important in system design and team morale. Too often leaders criticize teams for success-failures. These, in fact, should be celebrated.

A failure-failure is an unsuccessful outcome in which a root cause analysis reveals that commonly known and generally accepted practices or approaches to problem solving or design were explicitly ignored. Examples:

* Facebook storing passwords in plain text (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/)

* Citibank lost $500M because commonly accepted practices in UI/UX were ignored (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/citibank-just-got-a-500-million-lesson-in-the-importance-of-ui-design/)

A success-failure is an unsuccessful outcome of a system in which a root cause analysis reveals that the root cause of the failure was the successful growth or increase of a desirable attribute in such a way that exceeded the original solutions requirements, thereby causing the ‘failure’. Example:

* PM asks the dev team to build a system that can support 1K concurrent users. The system becomes more successful than anticipated and breaks down when it hits 10K concurrent users.

I’m pleased to share that Sheri Elefant and Denburk Reid M.Ed are launching our first #participatorybudgeting program in Montreal with a strong emphasis on #financialliteracy.

Great job – and so #happy to have Canada added to the countries using FirstRoot Inc.

Learn more: https://montrealcommunitycares.com/academy-programs/#financial

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