למידה, אינטרנט … ומה שביניהם

I would contend that in many respects we were gaining the same benefits as people claim for blogging: it got us interested in writing, it was writing for a real audience, it was opening our minds to other lifestyles. It also provided an opportunity for reflection before writing, which in a sense is actually discouraged by the instant feedback online environment which prevails today.

Perhaps school administrators should introduce a rule to the effect that a teacher cannot use any technology until they have proven that they can deliver the goods without it.

Don’t worry: I am being slightly (but only slightly) flippant. But the bottom line is that you can deliver a lot of so-called 21st century skills (eg ability to collaborate, research skills) without using 21st century technology. The technology makes it easier — but it also makes it easier to mistake any practice for good practice.

The story’s headline — “How MySpace Is Antisocial” — was meant to be a play on the fact that MySpace is a leading social-networking site. I’m sorry I have to spell that out. But many of the folks who commented on the story, once it had been dugg, apparently took the headline more literally. They assumed — obviously, without reading the story — that it was about MySpace somehow making its users more antisocial.

All of you have missed the point. My opinion is more important than my understanding.

I’m 24 years old, have a good job, friends. But like many of my generation, I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable emotional high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com and pokes on Facebook. I live for Friendster views, profile comments and the Dodgeball messages that clog my cellphone every night.

She decided that since an hour session every week would probably make very little difference to our grades, we should make a blog and post just a paragraph of a story every night if possible. The plan was that we would build up our story night upon night with Mrs McIntosh giving us guidance and pointers on where we were going wrong and how to improve. My writing began to improve and I started to gain confidence again.

In my standard grade english exam this year I achieved not only an overall 1, but straight 1s in every element of english and it’s all thanks to Mrs McIntosh and her fantastic blog idea.

Here, the modest audience providing advice but above all the impetus to write that comes from that small and demanding audience have helped make a girl do more work and reflection than she would have done otherwise.

New brain research suggests that distractions that divide students’ attention–such as surfing the web or sending instant messages–can affect the way they learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on. The study could have important implications for today’s students, many of whom are accustomed to multitasking while completing homework or listening in class.

It’s a tiny study (14 students) using dubious measurments (brain imaging) and employing very artificial conditions (I mean, who tries to count high pitched tones while studying?) but that of course won’t stop the headline from being splashed across the front page of the newspaper – or in this case, eSchool News.

These researchers, however slipshod their methodology, may one day prove to have been right in spite of themselves. Those of us who took our degrees before “multitasking” was a concept, can scarcely deny that our thinking, and the written expression of our thoughts and ideas, was rather less muddleheaded back then. To follow a single thread of inquiry to its logical, aesthetic, or practical conclusion is what scholars, scientists and artists do. Or did. Now it’s more likely to be a blog entry (ironic, eh?) in the first two cases, and a “mashup” in the third.

So, what to do? Certainly, there is a central ethic that is involved here, that of owning your own work and attributing the work of others. Putting your name on someone else’s stuff is theft, plain and simple, and should not be tolerated. But as the article points out, much of the problem is simple sloppy work in terms of sourcing and attribution. And the bigger problem is that it is being tolerated.

… life is too short to be bothered by such things. The sites out there that flagrantly violate my license are very obvious to my reader and others. They reveal through their own actions that they are not to be trusted ….

Blogging is a great tool for writing and publishing in any subject area. Blogging will allow students to post their work for the world to read instead of just for a teacher to grade. What a great tool for students! Why would we want to do it any other way.

Now, in a little-noticed interview, Friedman actually went on record admitting he advocates for specific trade deals without knowing anything about what’s in the trade deals he is writing about.

David Sirota reports on Tom Friedman’s shocking admission that he often writes about trade policy proposals that he knows nothing about. Sirota writes, “… what’s truly astonishing is that Tom Friedman, the person who the media most relies on to interpret trade policy, now publicly runs around admitting he actually knows nothing at all about the trade pacts he pushes in his New York Times column.” After reading this article, I can’t help but wonder how often we, as teachers, teach something that we know very little about beyond superficialities.

Globalization will flow through the conduit of collaborative tools and new ways of communicating (as in new theories of communication) – both domains in which many educators have already accumulated five plus years experience. Perhaps it is also time to rethink what it means to educate? Maybe educators should be more like connection-makers, and less like content deliverers.

In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.

I wax hyperbole, but the point is that our times require a different kind of classroom, one that can no longer rely on gravity. We must invent a perpetual learning engine.

I hope to spend the next couple of weeks talking through some ideas concerning a flat classroom learning engine, most of which I am still forming. But I would like to begin with a list of characteristics for students in a flat classroom learning engine.

    Curious
    Self Directed Learners
    Intrinsic need to communicate
    Intrinsic need to influence
    Future Oriented
    Heritage Grounded

The keynote by Marco Torres was phenomenal I thought. And I loved the message, which was basically to tell educators that we have tools now that just about every type of learner can flourish with, and we need only to find the creativity within us to make it happen. The examples of student work he showed were nothing short of amazing, and worth sharing to every educator audience out there. His kids come from the most undereducated and poverty stricken areas of LA and yet they are succeeding in multimedia. The big question that we’re going to have to deal with is whether we can teach the fundamental literacies through the media that kids are most motivated and driven by.