The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
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- A brief history of infographics.
- You’re doing it wrong.
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- Wednesday Wisdom #10: Application and ability
- HOWTO: Create iTunes audiobooks from MP3s
- #uppingyourgame: an audio preview
- Things I Learned This Week – #10
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Weekly Roundup (23 December 2006) – Remixing and connecting knowledge
71 CommentsThis week I’ve got a festive selection box of diverse Christmas treats for your delectation. The posts I mention below are those that have caught my attention this week either because of the potential within them, their practical use, or some other interesting feature. This will be my last main post before Christmas Day, so MERRY CHRISTMAS! one and all… :D
- Chris Sessums – Cultural Implications of Social Software, Teaching, and Learning: Ready or Not
- Christian Long – Getting in Touch With Your Inner Google Zeitgeist
- Curriki – Featured Content
- Darren Kuropatwa – Flickr Assignment – Rubric in Progress
- Edutopia – Using Wikipedia in the Classroom
- The Guardian – The New 100 Most Useful Sites
- John Pederson – Educational Weblogs
- Miguel Guhlin – Flowing River
- OEDb – Top 100 Education Blogs
- Vicki Davis – How to Create Your Circle of the Wise: How to pick the reads in your RSS
- Wes Fryer – Valuing Student Creativity & Web 2.0 in School Reform
- Will Richardson – Mogopopp-ed
I’ll start off with the theoretical and then move to the more practical. In fact, no, I’ll start off with the controversy surrounding the Top 100 Education Blogs posted to the OEDb website this week. This blog is in fact listed on there in the ‘teachers’ section. The problem people have had with it is that everyone on the list seems to have also received an email promoting a particular (actually rather useful) post on the same website. Granted, the promotion email came a couple of days before the ‘top blogs’ post, but some have – perhaps quite rightly – pointed out a conflict of interests. John Pederson therefore added an Educational Weblogs section to his wiki containing the list found on said website. This can be edited: blogs added, deleted, and information altered. This seems like a satisfactory outcome. :)
Wes Fryer makes an interesting couple of posts – Valuing Student Creativity & Web 2.0 in School Reform in which he looks at the modifications made to the original Bloom’s Taxonomy (originally from the 1950s) by the American Psychological Association in 2001. Instead of the evaluation of knowledge being the highest-order thinking skill, it is the creation of knowledge that is top of the hierarchy:
Wes points out the importance of this subtle shift: our school systems in the West are set up to test what students can regurgitate, not what connections they can make and content they can create. To put a musical spin on it, we need to turn students into remixers instead of musical trivia buffs… :s
There are many ways in which we can help students to become more creative and in charge of their own learning. I’m trying to do this in a limited way through getting my students blogging which, as Chris Sessums points out, can be done more and more through the use of educational technology – Web 2.0 tools and the like. Social software, for example, can help teachers tease out the creativity within their students:
Advancing the adoption and use of social software in schools requires the three C’s�comfort, confidence, and creativity. For example, year one, teachers get comfortable using the technology, year two they develop confidence using it, and year three teachers become creative users of technology, embedding social software usage into their curriculum.
I’m not going to get into the reasons why teachers aren’t using more educational technologies here, but suffice to say the current trend for ‘personalising learning’ as well as ‘Every Child Matters’ or ‘No Child Left Behind’ will hopefully mean that more teachers will have to get to grips with technologies which will really dynamically change the classroom as we know it! :D
However, it’s not just a matter of waiting for things to change. We have to be actively advocating these things. As Chris Sessums quotes Joan Vinall-Cox as saying:
[E]ven when many of the new teachers are digital natives, that is no guarantee that they will change [technophobic] pattern[s]. A lot of teaching is people replicating what was done to/with them. And many students have kind of silos of computer knowledge. They know how to use some programs well, and how to socialize or play, but they don’t seem to make some of the connections. Plus, in education and in our society, we have to move from seeing computer work as technical to seeing it as communicative. That’s the value I see in Web 2.0.
The most important thing we can do as teachers is to be learners ourselves. Think back to your own schooling: I bet few of you can remember much of the content of what you were taught but I bet almost everyone can remember how they were taught it. The enthusiasm of the teacher, their own view of knowledge, and their status as a learner all play a huge part in how likely students are to become lifelong learners.
There’s many different types of ‘good’ teachers, but the one thing they have in common is some sort of passion for education/learning/teaching. This is all for naught, however, if they cannot communicate this to their students and motivate them effectively. This can be done in many ways, but they include:
- Making learning relevant to the world/situation of the learner (check out the Google Zeitgeist, lists of most useful websites)
- Find innovative ways of assessing students and allowing them to present their works (e.g. Darren’s Flickr rubric or Mogopop)
- Make learning into learning by doing rather than learning by listening/making notes (e.g. Miguel’s tips or Using Wikipedia in the Classroom)
- Keep up-to-date with what other teachers are doing (see Vicki Davis’ post on How to Create a Circle of the Wise)
- Share what you do with others to get feedback on your own teaching and learning (e.g. Curriki, setting up your own blog/wiki)
Whatever you do, you really should be able to answer the question Why am I teaching this? or Why are my students learning this? without recourse to answers such as Because it’s on the exam or Because I’ve taught for the last x number of years. Gone are the days when students should be learning simply content. There’s Google for that – it takes me between 2 and 20 seconds to find virtually anything I could need to know as I’ve developed the skills to do so. What teachers need to do in the 21st century is to help students connect knowledge together to create (i.e. remix) their own.
That, in my eyes, is Learning 2.0. :p
Photo credits: Buried Magazine, Blogopoly, Mind Mapping
Published on December 23, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
71 Responses to “Weekly Roundup (23 December 2006) – Remixing and connecting knowledge”
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I like the ideas here Doug. Might it be more salient to actually adapt this:
The most important thing we can do as teachers is to be learners ourselves.…. this is more along the lines of getting students to become teachers. This then links in the previous ideas about the most effective learning being when students become content creators. Thus teachers, whilst it is vitally important never to stop learning, instead don't just have to be learners instead they need to empower learners to become teachers.
Thus, in reality, teachers don't have to follow your list of five suggestions and be glued to the internet all the time. Rather, they encourage and empower students to take their place – getting them to make effective use of ICT to keep their teacher up to date.
I think also in your final comments you miss out a key role that teachers have – you've mentioned in it the past with your lifeguard analogies. Students need to be guided to have, for want of a better description, quality bullsh*t detection. Consequently with all this content readily available, students are empowered to make effective use of the tools, but also retain and develop the key skills to critically analyse what is presented to them.
That, in my eyes, is Learning. -
Thanks for your commen, Andrew. This wasn't meant to be the last statement on my philosophy of teaching, just a roundup of what others were saying with my own spin/thoughts added! :)
I don't expect teachers to be 'glued to the Internet all the time' – the suggestions came from things I read on the Internet and were therefore – understandably – Internet-oriented. I fully agree that ICT should be used in an empowering way and not slavishly…
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This is a good digest on current thinking on the use of the technology. I think that we as teachers are rationalising what we do and how the tech has relevance to our educational objectives, which is essential for us both to give it value and also to raise the new technology's profile to others as a valid tool in our armoury, enabling our pupils to create and produce, in addition to consuming.
Our 'digital native' pupils don't think of it as new technology as they are using it in their own world ( it's just the rest of the teaching profession we have to get on board !!!)- it's second nature to many of them. The need to teach it and expose them to it comes because in many of our teaching areas there are still pupils who don't have access to technology at home ( the village I teach in still has 25% pupils who don't have access to internet etc at home)- we owe it to them to use whatever means we can to give them the best start in the 'new world' I think.Keep up the good work and have a good Christmas
Paul
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