Working on this project with Carole and Gaby was an excellent opportunity for collaboration. As language teachers (of different languages and levels) we face certain challenges regarding technology. Philosophically it is important for each of us to maximize the use of the target language (both for teachers and students), so it is important to use digital tools that both facilitate that use AND don't require a huge amount of teaching about the tool(s) itself.
With this shared perspective we were able to both agree on the kind of language that fit our students' level of development and on the appropriate tools (voicethread). The collaboration allowed us to focus on the types of language we wanted our students to master, how to use digital tools most effectively and how to maximize student interaction in the target language (both with their in-class and digitally connected peers).
Speaking more generally, today's session gave the opportunity to both develop a useful project and to evaluate the tools at our disposal. As educators, these moments are invaluable because they help to deepen our understanding of tools and to reflect on our pedagogical practice. We discover new applications for the familiar (or learn about a new tool) and refine our own understanding of our role as educators.
Given the proliferation of new tools at my disposal I believe I have a responsibility to help my students find both their own potential and the potential of tools 2.0 and to evaluate how their adoption should affect my place in the classroom. Working with Carole and Gaby was an excellent opportunity to do all of that simultaneously.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Mobile phones in schools
I couldn't get there until my group was almost finished, but...here is our video.
Handwriting as Signpost
Today I read an interesting article about handwriting and its possible future (or lack of it).
The most fascinating aspect of handwriting to me is the suddenness with which it has lost its centrality as a means of communication for so many of us. I rarely even print, except to jot down vocabulary as students ask for help or to update my lists of things to do. Cursive handwriting is obviously even more rarely used. The saddest thing about this change is connection we will lose to our past (as noted by the article as well).
If we don't learn to write in cursive, it's likely we won't learn to read it either. The huge amount of history recorded with pen and ink in cursive will be inaccessible to most of the population. Ironically, it's at the very same time that millions of original documents are now available and distributed online.
There is precedent for this type of fundamental shift in communication and it would be interesting to see how societies have coped (or not) with these transitions. Were hundreds or thousands of years worth of history rendered illegible to subsequent generations? The French replaced Chinese characters in Vietnam, Ataturk replaced Arabic script with a brand new Latin-derived alphabet in 1928 and the list could go on. In part, the new Turkish state sought to accommodate the revolutionary technology of the typewriter, seeing the new alphabet as more suitable to a keyboard than Arabic.
I wonder if the many societies that have made such changes planned on how to deal with their history.
The most fascinating aspect of handwriting to me is the suddenness with which it has lost its centrality as a means of communication for so many of us. I rarely even print, except to jot down vocabulary as students ask for help or to update my lists of things to do. Cursive handwriting is obviously even more rarely used. The saddest thing about this change is connection we will lose to our past (as noted by the article as well).
If we don't learn to write in cursive, it's likely we won't learn to read it either. The huge amount of history recorded with pen and ink in cursive will be inaccessible to most of the population. Ironically, it's at the very same time that millions of original documents are now available and distributed online.
There is precedent for this type of fundamental shift in communication and it would be interesting to see how societies have coped (or not) with these transitions. Were hundreds or thousands of years worth of history rendered illegible to subsequent generations? The French replaced Chinese characters in Vietnam, Ataturk replaced Arabic script with a brand new Latin-derived alphabet in 1928 and the list could go on. In part, the new Turkish state sought to accommodate the revolutionary technology of the typewriter, seeing the new alphabet as more suitable to a keyboard than Arabic.
I wonder if the many societies that have made such changes planned on how to deal with their history.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
For this post, I refuse to get cantankerous.
Now that I have put that out there, I am wondering how to work the science of all the technology our students find at their fingertips into school. This does not mean that they all become engineering students before they leave elementary school. I am thinking more along the lines of the CONCEPTS of how things work. By grade 5 almost all the kids have cell phones, for example, but I would be willing to bet a delicious som tam dinner that perhaps 2 know how they work.
In the 1800's meetings were organized all over Britain to explain the remarkable advances in science and technology to anyone who wanted to listen. Evolution, steam power, industrial production - they were all revolutionary in their way and leading scientists came out to explain them. Today, we are surrounded by things that are essentially a mystery to us but we use them habitually.
When 4 million transistors can fit on Intel's newest chip which just happens to be the size of the period at the end of the sentence (see my earlier post and link), it's a pretty awe inspiring concept. Our students could and should have the opportunities to talk about how things work. At the very least, it might inspire some of them to first "mess around" and then "geek out" (thank you MacArthur Foundation - I don't know where I would have found equivalent words to describe what I am talking about) with their techno toys. As it is, I find it hard to imagine that any of our students will ever get to the point where they are designing new technologies if they don't start talking about and taking apart the devices all around them.
Now that I have put that out there, I am wondering how to work the science of all the technology our students find at their fingertips into school. This does not mean that they all become engineering students before they leave elementary school. I am thinking more along the lines of the CONCEPTS of how things work. By grade 5 almost all the kids have cell phones, for example, but I would be willing to bet a delicious som tam dinner that perhaps 2 know how they work.
In the 1800's meetings were organized all over Britain to explain the remarkable advances in science and technology to anyone who wanted to listen. Evolution, steam power, industrial production - they were all revolutionary in their way and leading scientists came out to explain them. Today, we are surrounded by things that are essentially a mystery to us but we use them habitually.
When 4 million transistors can fit on Intel's newest chip which just happens to be the size of the period at the end of the sentence (see my earlier post and link), it's a pretty awe inspiring concept. Our students could and should have the opportunities to talk about how things work. At the very least, it might inspire some of them to first "mess around" and then "geek out" (thank you MacArthur Foundation - I don't know where I would have found equivalent words to describe what I am talking about) with their techno toys. As it is, I find it hard to imagine that any of our students will ever get to the point where they are designing new technologies if they don't start talking about and taking apart the devices all around them.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
How I Came to Feel Like a Reactionary AKA Adopt and Adapt, Living and Learning
In reading Adopt and Adapt I realized that I find myself in an odd position. I have embraced technology in my professional and personal life. I use technology extensively to further my students' language learning and in doing so I help them develop their ability to collaborate and to use technology effectively. Yet, in reading the articles I often find myself feeling like some kind of arch conservative because of the flaws I find in the readings.
I have been teaching since 1991 and have seen different trends and programs come and go. Each time one has come, it may have taken some convincing to get adopted, but once adopted, there has been an orthodoxy that accompanies it that does not leave a lot of room for questioning. Programs like ours in which teachers have ample time to 'play' with digital tools and to talk about them provide the necessary opportunity to evaluate how to implement technology effectively.
Much of the language we use in schools today is adopted not from academia/research/psychology but instead from business. Let's not forget that Presky is founder and CEO of a for-profit corporation. We are educators and follow a long line of educators. Some are good and some are not (as always) but it makes sense that we take a critical eye when adopting and integrating new tools. In way too many cases our teaching and our curricula became slaves to the corporate publishers created texts that were purchased by far-removed administrators. Now we are entering a period of potentially disruptive technologies, but they likely will not disrupt the increasingly powerful paradigm of corporate profit from the education of our youth. Nor will they disrupt the increasing influence of business over what we do in school.
I believe strongly that we should expand the range of tools we use in the classroom, we should adapt/reinvent our curricula to reflect what we can now do, we should embed the skills that go with the tools into our newly adapted curricula, but I do not buy into the orthodoxy that to not do so is to fail as a teacher. As David Healy mentioned in class and in his blog, what about the rest of the world that doesn't have the digital tools at their disposal? Will they not be educated? What about ISB? We often don't have enough computers to implement this kind of curriculum. Do I think we should? YES. Do I think our students can't get a good education because teachers can't book computers every class? NO.
Prewsky makes no reference as to why schools might ban email, cell phones and instant messaging. Is it because teachers don't know how to understand them? Hello, we're not idiots. It's because students aren't using them as tools for school. They are using them, at best, to socialize during learning times (I wonder why we didn't encourage the passing of notes) and at worst creating an environment in which the social aspect of students' lives becomes a 24 hour onslaught. I seem to remember from my own experience and know from all the students I have supported over the years that the social aspect of our students' lives, even for the most popular among them, isn't always that much fun.
Most importantly (back to the, hello, we're not idiots point), some teachers want the tools in place to make cell phones, email, instant messaging etc. work for the classroom. A great example is facebook. I would never use it in my classroom because there is no control over what gets posted and who joins. Aside from the productive use of time aspect, the social trauma that could ensue is enormous. Ning, however, allows me to create a social/academic/collaborative network in which students can't post harmful writing or images and I can control who joins. This is a tool developed for the kind of things we do in school.
The City of Toronto, the world capital of facebook use, banned facebook from city government offices. Was it because they did not understand this emerging technology? Did they not see the incredible potential for collaboration it presents? No, they banned it because no one was doing any work. Keep in mind that this was with educated adults with important jobs to do. Is it any surprise that schools are struggling to create policies that will ensure students learn in school?
When Marc Prensky says that students "are far ahead of their educators in terms of taking advantage of digital technology and using it to their advantage," I have to wonder which students and teachers he is talking about. The students I know don't really know how to take advantage of the technologies available to them. Similarly, many of the teachers I know are remarkably comfortable with digital tools. The students I have known as digital tools have become widespread have learned only to scratch the surface of what technology has to offer. Yes, they can make calls, send texts, update their status on facebook and make lists of their top friends, but so what? Is that using technology to their advantage?
Most of my students' (past and present) use of technology is for social purposes. In many cases, that use has really become a new way to make people feel bad about themselves. Oh the tales of woe I have heard because of facebook posts, cell phone three ways, texts. And then of course there is sexting. I'm not naive enough to believe all the nighmare stories about teenage online behaviour, but I also have enough experience with students to be critical of blanket statements about young people's technological prowess.
The MacArthur Foundation Report
"Rather than seeing social¬izing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use. (p.35)"
This has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Take out the words new media use, substitute activity and you have what good teachers have always done. This is where I once again feel like a cranky reactionary old man, but I can't get over the tunnel vision of the authors of some of our readings. They seem to have forgotten all that has come before them and much of the context in which we function.
"Adult lack of appreciation for youth participation in popular culture has created an additional barrier to access for kids who do not have Internet access at home. We are concerned about the lack of a public agenda that recognizes the value of youth participation in social communication and popular culture. When kids lack access to the Internet at home, and public libraries and schools block sites that are central to their social communication, youth are doubly handicapped in their efforts to participate in common culture and sociability. (p.36)"
Ironically, on the day that I read this article, it was reported that there are potentially major health risks associated with this type of social communication. This is not a Tipper Gore, our kids our going to be monsters because of rap music report; this is in the journal Biologist, the journal of of the Institute of Biology. Then of course there are all the reports of increasing obesity and health problems associated with inactivty.
Oy!!!! Once again, I feel like the cranky old man when in fact I support both philosophically, and in my practice, these ideas. Yet some of the conclusions are so facile and so clearly the result of orthodoxy that I am compelled to say, "Sorry, I can't agree."
"And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement? (p.39)"
So many arguments for the adoption/inclusion of digital tools actually mention the absolute necessity of developing skills precisely for students' future jobs and careers. Good education has always been about guiding students' positive participation in society. That goes all the week back to Plato, but once again, someone has tunnel vision.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch some Lonely Island on youtube so I can stop feeling like an irascible old fart.
I have been teaching since 1991 and have seen different trends and programs come and go. Each time one has come, it may have taken some convincing to get adopted, but once adopted, there has been an orthodoxy that accompanies it that does not leave a lot of room for questioning. Programs like ours in which teachers have ample time to 'play' with digital tools and to talk about them provide the necessary opportunity to evaluate how to implement technology effectively.
Much of the language we use in schools today is adopted not from academia/research/psychology but instead from business. Let's not forget that Presky is founder and CEO of a for-profit corporation. We are educators and follow a long line of educators. Some are good and some are not (as always) but it makes sense that we take a critical eye when adopting and integrating new tools. In way too many cases our teaching and our curricula became slaves to the corporate publishers created texts that were purchased by far-removed administrators. Now we are entering a period of potentially disruptive technologies, but they likely will not disrupt the increasingly powerful paradigm of corporate profit from the education of our youth. Nor will they disrupt the increasing influence of business over what we do in school.
I believe strongly that we should expand the range of tools we use in the classroom, we should adapt/reinvent our curricula to reflect what we can now do, we should embed the skills that go with the tools into our newly adapted curricula, but I do not buy into the orthodoxy that to not do so is to fail as a teacher. As David Healy mentioned in class and in his blog, what about the rest of the world that doesn't have the digital tools at their disposal? Will they not be educated? What about ISB? We often don't have enough computers to implement this kind of curriculum. Do I think we should? YES. Do I think our students can't get a good education because teachers can't book computers every class? NO.
Prewsky makes no reference as to why schools might ban email, cell phones and instant messaging. Is it because teachers don't know how to understand them? Hello, we're not idiots. It's because students aren't using them as tools for school. They are using them, at best, to socialize during learning times (I wonder why we didn't encourage the passing of notes) and at worst creating an environment in which the social aspect of students' lives becomes a 24 hour onslaught. I seem to remember from my own experience and know from all the students I have supported over the years that the social aspect of our students' lives, even for the most popular among them, isn't always that much fun.
Most importantly (back to the, hello, we're not idiots point), some teachers want the tools in place to make cell phones, email, instant messaging etc. work for the classroom. A great example is facebook. I would never use it in my classroom because there is no control over what gets posted and who joins. Aside from the productive use of time aspect, the social trauma that could ensue is enormous. Ning, however, allows me to create a social/academic/collaborative network in which students can't post harmful writing or images and I can control who joins. This is a tool developed for the kind of things we do in school.
The City of Toronto, the world capital of facebook use, banned facebook from city government offices. Was it because they did not understand this emerging technology? Did they not see the incredible potential for collaboration it presents? No, they banned it because no one was doing any work. Keep in mind that this was with educated adults with important jobs to do. Is it any surprise that schools are struggling to create policies that will ensure students learn in school?
When Marc Prensky says that students "are far ahead of their educators in terms of taking advantage of digital technology and using it to their advantage," I have to wonder which students and teachers he is talking about. The students I know don't really know how to take advantage of the technologies available to them. Similarly, many of the teachers I know are remarkably comfortable with digital tools. The students I have known as digital tools have become widespread have learned only to scratch the surface of what technology has to offer. Yes, they can make calls, send texts, update their status on facebook and make lists of their top friends, but so what? Is that using technology to their advantage?
Most of my students' (past and present) use of technology is for social purposes. In many cases, that use has really become a new way to make people feel bad about themselves. Oh the tales of woe I have heard because of facebook posts, cell phone three ways, texts. And then of course there is sexting. I'm not naive enough to believe all the nighmare stories about teenage online behaviour, but I also have enough experience with students to be critical of blanket statements about young people's technological prowess.
The MacArthur Foundation Report
"Rather than seeing social¬izing and play as hostile to learning, educational programs could be positioned to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use. (p.35)"
This has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Take out the words new media use, substitute activity and you have what good teachers have always done. This is where I once again feel like a cranky reactionary old man, but I can't get over the tunnel vision of the authors of some of our readings. They seem to have forgotten all that has come before them and much of the context in which we function.
"Adult lack of appreciation for youth participation in popular culture has created an additional barrier to access for kids who do not have Internet access at home. We are concerned about the lack of a public agenda that recognizes the value of youth participation in social communication and popular culture. When kids lack access to the Internet at home, and public libraries and schools block sites that are central to their social communication, youth are doubly handicapped in their efforts to participate in common culture and sociability. (p.36)"
Ironically, on the day that I read this article, it was reported that there are potentially major health risks associated with this type of social communication. This is not a Tipper Gore, our kids our going to be monsters because of rap music report; this is in the journal Biologist, the journal of of the Institute of Biology. Then of course there are all the reports of increasing obesity and health problems associated with inactivty.
Oy!!!! Once again, I feel like the cranky old man when in fact I support both philosophically, and in my practice, these ideas. Yet some of the conclusions are so facile and so clearly the result of orthodoxy that I am compelled to say, "Sorry, I can't agree."
"And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement? (p.39)"
So many arguments for the adoption/inclusion of digital tools actually mention the absolute necessity of developing skills precisely for students' future jobs and careers. Good education has always been about guiding students' positive participation in society. That goes all the week back to Plato, but once again, someone has tunnel vision.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch some Lonely Island on youtube so I can stop feeling like an irascible old fart.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
PL Sketch
Developing this project is much more complex than it would seem for I am tortured by the desire to make something that piques my students' intellectual curiosity but driven by the need to develop the most basic of language skills. You see, a hugely successful student could, at the end of this upcoming unit, say, "I make a sandwich with tomatoes, cheese, mustard and bread." I am exaggerating slightly but we are developing (truly) basic vocabulary and language structures for daily communication.
Project Learning Sketch
Objectives/Outcomes:
1. Students will acquire core vocabulary relating to the market (mercado), shopping for food (including numbers between 0-1000) and preparing food.
2. Students will first recognize the words (oral and reading comprehension).
3. Students will make these words part of their active vocabulary (i.e. they can use the words independently and relatively spontaneously).
NETs
1. Creativity and Innovation: Students will create original works.
2. Communication and Collaboration: Students will collaborate and publish with peers; communicate information effectively using various tools; and contribute to project teams.
Learning Disposition
The primary learning disposition I seek to foster with this project, consistent with the primary goal of the class, is willingness to use and experiment with language. Students will apply previously learned vocabulary and integrate it with new vocabulary while making a consistent effort to use Spanish exclusively.
Evaluation
Students will narrate a voicethread individually or in pairs outlining the steps for preparing food or for ordering food in a restaurant. Using photographs of food, for example, they will have to describe the steps for making a sandwich, identifying which ingredients they do and don't want. This will demonstrate their mastery of vocabulary and basic language structures as they respond to images corresponding to core vocabulary.
Students will complete the project (described below) and present it either to the class in person or through a voicethread of their own.
The Project
Students will be organized into teams of 2-3 students with assigned roles (writer, researcher, vocabulary specialist).
Students make a list (English or Spanish) of the ingredients to prepare a basic meal of their choice.
Students review a voicethread prepared by me of many basic food items and match that to their list of ingredients.
For additional items, students will find the vocabulary they need by using dictionaries (online and/or print).
Using a set of links prepared by me, students will look up the cost of the ingredients they need and calculate the cost to prepare.
Using either a wiki or a voicethread, students will compile images and text/audio to demonstrate their ability to both understand and use core vocabulary.
As a culminating assignment, students will present a cooking show, demonstrating how to prepare the meal they have chosen.
Intro
Slideshow of foods that most students like
Menus from restaurants in Spanish
Cooking show video
My students cannot do research in Spanish without very specific guidance or they will be overwhelmed by what they find (or they will try and find information in English). I struggle to balance technology use because communicating about the tool often ends up being in English instead of Spanish. In short, coming up with the idea for a project is not difficult; balancing the ideas with the realities of what my students can do and what they need to learn how to do as we scaffold the tools for increasingly complex communication is the challenge.
This project sketch will surely change, but here it is.
Project Learning Sketch
Objectives/Outcomes:
1. Students will acquire core vocabulary relating to the market (mercado), shopping for food (including numbers between 0-1000) and preparing food.
2. Students will first recognize the words (oral and reading comprehension).
3. Students will make these words part of their active vocabulary (i.e. they can use the words independently and relatively spontaneously).
NETs
1. Creativity and Innovation: Students will create original works.
2. Communication and Collaboration: Students will collaborate and publish with peers; communicate information effectively using various tools; and contribute to project teams.
Learning Disposition
The primary learning disposition I seek to foster with this project, consistent with the primary goal of the class, is willingness to use and experiment with language. Students will apply previously learned vocabulary and integrate it with new vocabulary while making a consistent effort to use Spanish exclusively.
Evaluation
Students will narrate a voicethread individually or in pairs outlining the steps for preparing food or for ordering food in a restaurant. Using photographs of food, for example, they will have to describe the steps for making a sandwich, identifying which ingredients they do and don't want. This will demonstrate their mastery of vocabulary and basic language structures as they respond to images corresponding to core vocabulary.
Students will complete the project (described below) and present it either to the class in person or through a voicethread of their own.
The Project
Students will be organized into teams of 2-3 students with assigned roles (writer, researcher, vocabulary specialist).
Students make a list (English or Spanish) of the ingredients to prepare a basic meal of their choice.
Students review a voicethread prepared by me of many basic food items and match that to their list of ingredients.
For additional items, students will find the vocabulary they need by using dictionaries (online and/or print).
Using a set of links prepared by me, students will look up the cost of the ingredients they need and calculate the cost to prepare.
Using either a wiki or a voicethread, students will compile images and text/audio to demonstrate their ability to both understand and use core vocabulary.
As a culminating assignment, students will present a cooking show, demonstrating how to prepare the meal they have chosen.
Intro
Slideshow of foods that most students like
Menus from restaurants in Spanish
Cooking show video
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
32 nanometer
So intel is going to start shipping transistors 32 nanometers in size, or, as the story described so small "that 4 million of them would fit on the period at the end of this sentence." Conceptually that is a pretty staggering thought and I wonder how we convey that to our students. I am curious how we teach, just conceptually, about the 'working' of a computer.
Maybe we should have some kind of club to take apart computers and rebuild them.
Monday, February 9, 2009
9 February
The Planning reading provides useful guidelines for integrating technology into classroom activities. I feel, for example, a pressure (pretty much entirely internal) to use tech tools in my classroom activities. With the number of students I have, however, sometimes using those tools will drag me away from more important issues of curriculum or learning outcomes. The reading both suggests types of projects and a framework for evaluating their efficacy.
That said, I am really torn in my interests in the course. On one hand I am intrigued by the ideas raised by the Connectivism reading. What is knowledge? What is the role of content when facts are so readily obtainable? What implications does that have for our roles as teachers and learners. These are huge intellectual issues to grapple with as we come to understand the role of new communication tools in our teaching. At times I think that is what we need to really grapple with during class time since it forms the underpinnings of any new directions we take.
Fundamentally it is the ease of communication and the ease of finding information that are driving change. The two help to generate the big questions and inform all aspects of the day to day questions.
Aaaaaa, that four hour log-in thing at housing just made me lose my last paragraphs!!!!! I was writing about the other side that I feel we/I need to explore and that is the actual implementation of these types of learning strategies.
Anyway, to try and re-create, the practical side of it is harnessing the tools productively both for students and for me. The reading on Planning helps to provide a useful framework for evaluating both tools and plans. Careful planning helps one focus on the desired result, but these guidelines also help to evaluate the tools involved. To paraphrase a previous reading (and Marshall McLuhan) the pipe is the message, so choosing the right one merits some thought and consideration. With collaboration as a given for a desired goal, choosing the most appropriate tool is important. At the same time, if content is important or conceptual understandings, planning appropriately to make the most effective use of time must be balanced.
I often find that in my desire to achieve authentic assessments. With performance tasks and video I have a great opportunity to capture students' real language acquisition progress. I would also like to have them work with the video more and have more personal involvement in the editing and posting process. As an archive of their progress there are obvious benefits if they are doing the archiving. The reality, however, is that the need to be using language as much as possible overshadows that and I often prepare and upload video for this purpose. It's a worthwhile endeavour but given that I see my students approximately 90 times per year for 40-45 minutes at a time, I often take on that step to enable more language oriented activities.
As I said, the Planning article provides helpful guidelines but I would also be interested in creating a companion to the ISTE standards that charts a progression of important skills and concepts for our students. It could start with basic skills such as logging on (the early grades), progress to choosing appropriate collaborative tools (middle elementary?) and evaluation of content (upper elementary). Along with skills, there would be important concepts as well ('where' is a webpage, what place do facts have, what is knowledge).
As a document it would have to be fluid in order to accommodate changing technology adoptions (e.g. will ISB use fingerprints in future?) but it would chart a course for our expectations of students' ability to understand and use technology.
In the end, I suppose I hope that we get time to dabble in the theoretical while we try to put all of this into play.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
A question
So many times people trot out statistics (in the vein of) "x% of what we know now will be obsolete in x years." What does that mean. What does it mean that knowledge is obsolete?
Is anything in chemistry obsolete? Is it merely added to? Is an assumption/fact that was held as true suddenly obsolete? Or is there something to be learned from something that was proven false? Even if something is proven false, isn't there something to be learned from both how the new facts came to light and the erroneous process that took us to the wrong conclusion originally?
I can imagine obsolete technologies, programming languages. But what do those pithy quotes and statistics mean? What are they based on?
My choice - the liberal arts education
As the product of a liberal arts education I am biased but I think all the developments we are seeing mean that what we have to work towards is a liberal arts education for all our students. Where liberal arts have traditionally meant a four year degree (and a pricey one), we need to extend (and fully develop) that idea so that it extends into our institutions for children and young adults.
A liberal arts education is about learning how to think, to analyze and HOW TO LEARN. With the skills garnered in a true liberal arts tradition all the things we are talking about - career change, shifting knowledge bases, communications skills, cooperation and networking - are part and parcel. Someone with a good liberal arts education can adapt, learn new skills, tackle new projects, work with new people, use new tools...because they can learn.
We live in a world in which business more and more drives education. The terminology we use from best practice to outcomes all come from the business world. Business has also been a driving force in the development of university programs that have no place in a traditional view of a university's role. Hotel management? Hello?
Business has driven education into odd specialization when in reality a good education would mean you don't need a university to TRAIN people. You just need the university to help people learn how to learn. Then they can acquire the specific skills they need when they move into the job/the project/the task of the moment/the year/the job.
Of course this means that we must incorporate new technologies into our curricula so that students develop their skills/knowledge base while using the tools that facilitate communication, cooperation and collaboration.
Changing Thoughts
The updated taxonomy and Messing Around did not provoke any shift in my thinking. The updated taxonomy is deeply flawed in my view. Creating as a higher order thinking skill, for example, is blown out of the water by one look at youtube. I rest my very short case on Batman and Robin, a poignant (not) video on my a favourite website of my nephew. Any of us who posit creating as representative of mastery and integration of skills/knowledge did not imagine most of the creations online.
That said, I agree that we need to re-examine what higher and lower order thinking skills are. The tools available to us/our students today change the dynamic between mastery of facts, analysis and knowledge. Re-reading that, my thinking may not have shifted because of the taxonomy but it is prompting a lot of thinking and discussion, especially between Robin and I.
Messing Around, similarly, overstates the case for what most of our students are doing as some sort of radical shift. Messing around for most of our students/most online users is still a passive enterprise. They are viewers, searching out content (audio, video, gaming etc.). This is a step beyond channel surfing not in the intellectual/cognitive/evolutionary sense, but in the sense of media and technological innovation.
Our challenge remains to help our students go beyond the passive and to use tools to reshape society. They have the potential, and always have had the potential, to shape the world. New media and technology magnify that potential because of the reach they allow any and all of us. Our role as teacher/learning coach evolves because we have new things to teach with, new tools to teach about and new forms of participation in the societal dialogue to encourage.
And now the best reading for last...
Connectivism was the best thing I have read in YEARS. It challenged my thinking about what knowledge is and provided fodder for some great discussions with Robin. I am looking forward to discussing with (and reading about posts by) my peers. Knowing where to find information, especially as the 'where' is constantly evolving is both impossible to master and essential to teach. Evaluating the where (the source) is invaluable and I think developing the tools to teach/learn that is an exciting prospect. The last face-to-face provided a good starting point for that but there is so much to do in that area that it could become a unit/discipline/specialty in and of itself.
A challenge for teaching at all levels will be making expertise available and conversely finding relevant expertise. Knowledge through the experience of others when other people's experience is readily available opens up vast opportunity and possibility.
I hope we can follow these threads throughout the course and the program. The questions and issues raised by this article are the ones that will shape the future of our profession. I plan to refer back often to Siemen's website so I thank you for bringing it into the course and into my intellectual reflection on my profession.
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