Read/Write Web
One of the most obvious changes in thinking that the Read/Write Web demands of educators is the idea that we can continue to look at content and curriculum in traditional ways. Textbooks are on the verge of irrelevance, and teachers who continue to see themselves as content experts instead of content connectors will soon follow suit. We used to be able to control what our students consumed about the topics we taught. No longer.
Konrad Glogowski gets that in a big way, and it’s just been such a kick to read his evolution to this new way of thinking about curriculum. He’s handed much of the responsibility for what happens in the classroom to his students, and in his reflection on that process in his post today, the results are clear. As he puts it, he has been “dethroned.”
<blockquote>Instead, having a blogging community allowed my students to create a repository of texts and ideas, all centred around the same general topic. No one seemed overwhelmed. No one complained. Students felt compelled to research and write about issues related to the novel that I have chosen for the last term of the year. So, content generation began with me but my contribution of one text blossomed into a community of inquirers and a community of content generating teenagers who did not seem to mind the sheer number of resources they were learning about. What’s more, they kept contributing to this number by creating their own texts, texts that were generated throught their interaction with other texts. Every entry and every comment became a new text. Every entry was a text generated by a learner in the process of enaging with knowledge or with a response of another learner. Soon, their blogs were filled with entries written not only in response to articles they found but also in response to entries written by their peers. I started seeing conversations.</blockquote>
Right now, to me at least, that description sets the standard of what we all should be trying to do. Read the whole thing.
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