Great articulation by Kevin Clark of a really important shift in thinking that we have to get to:
Politicians often rationalize technology initiatives by saying “We’re educating our students for the future, they need to know how to use technology for their future professions.” It’s not the technology that they need to know how to use. They can use it already…a lot better than your local representative. The connections and community-building that can occur within student blogs is what they need to know how to do.
This is similar to the interesting discussion from a post a few days about about mis-understanding blogs. It’s getting to be less and less about the tool and more and more about the opportunities the tools create, the “why”, not the “how.” And the “why we should use any of these tools” question is all about their capacity to build connections and community. It’s one thing to master the skills to create whatever artifact you want: PowerPoint presentation, claymation sequence, screencast, blog post…whatever. But it’s another thing entirely to know how to take that creation and use it to connect to people, ideally to other learners, and start conversations with them about the value and meaning of whatever it is we create. That’s the shift. Creation in the relative vacuum of the classroom can no longer be the final goal. It’s publishing. It’s teaching through that creation, connecting through that creation that we should be striving for.
As the whole thing about blogging and Web 2.0 social networking evolves so practice must evolve.
Looking at Danah Boyd’s talk (http://www.danah.org/papers/Etech2006.html) to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference I was struck that this is a highly relevant to education as well. I think it cross-pollinates and the idea that we have to design these networks for the communities coming into being are really, really important.
So how do we design for all this – which designs work and how do you contextualise the distributed to the local and vice versa – what social “lenses” do we need?
Couldn’t agree more! The challenge is this — how do we get some educators to see that true learning is a constant dialogue? Translation: conversation. Which equals social software.
Perhaps because so much of education is still in “broadcast mode” — we (the teachers) send out the data, you (the students) receive it, send it back exactly as sent(if at all). Isn’t this changeover from the broadcast mode something that’s happening in business, politics, etc. as well?
So it’s a bit discouraging that many don’t get it. But not surprising.
This reminds me of Mark Prensky’s statement “Digital Natives need Digital Immigrants”.
What I think he meant by that is that young people already know how to use the technology, what they need is guidance from adults on how to use it for effective learning.
The problem is, many teachers not only don’t know how to use the technology, they don’t even think it’s relevant.
In order for teachers to see the value in adopting the technology in their classrooms they have to be willing to change the way they teach, perhaps relinquish a bit of control and adapt a more student-centered, self-directed model of education with is about showing students how to make connections, tap into the network and have conversations. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem, in my experience.
If a teacher gets it, then there’s an interesting opportunity for the Natives to teach the Immigrants about the tools, providing the teacher is willing to accept that change in the teacher/student dynamic.
It’s also worth noting that technology isn’t required to teach in this way. Many teachers I know have always taught using this model. I find these are the teachers who instantly “get” what blogs and other read/write tools can be about in education. They are the ones that eagerly jump at the chance to learn about them and introduce them to their students.
The value of connection is the thing that LearnDog is trying to harness – to provide recognition services for kids. We are coming at the issue from the opposite direction. I cannot really articulate the value of this approach here, but if anyone is interested take a look at the LearnDog site and drop a comment on our blog.
The case studies will attempt to show examples where we encourage kids to publish something fairly trivial/mundane so we can provide ‘recognition services’ – via things like peer / subject matter expert review. We are finding that connections then occur fairly naturally between the parties involved.
“It’s getting to be less and less about the tool and more and more about the opportunities the tools create, the “why”, not the “how.” And the “why we should use any of these tools” question is all about their capacity to build connections and community.”
Thanks for such a great ‘summary’ of what is all this about.
Anita