Week Five - Class Critiques, Delicious, Social Networking Papers

Week Five started out with a bang - or was that a crash?  There was a major problem with this assignment. We were supposed to send out a mass email (with the links to our Wiki, Ning, and Facebook groups) to all of our classmates through Blackboard's Communication section. Unfortunately, when setting up in Blackboard upon entering this Master's program, almost all of our classmates used the privacy settings to hide their email addresses! One of my classmates was really on the ball and discovered this problem with the Roster early in the week. She posted it in the Question & Answer forum. As far as I can tell, only a handful followed her directions and changed their settings. In total, I was able to acquire only about twelve of the twenty email addresses needed before the deadline.
      Many students had trouble with sending only the link to Facebook in general instead of the link to the page containing their group. The impact of all of these problems is that those of us attempting to turn our work in on time had only a handful of selections to choose from as we tried to provide feedback on 3 each (nine total) of our classmates' wikis, nings, and Facebook groups.  This means that only a few people will receive the benefit of their classmates' feedback. 
     The Student Reflection was on a rather loosely thrown together article from a USA Today reporter with the titillating title of, "Scientists ask:  Is technology rewiring our brains?"  The article quoted very few actual facts, only a few studies, and, from the "experts," only "suggestions" not actual findings. The premise was that students are different today than they were twenty years ago because of electronic games and the Internet. A further premise was that children are not learning or are forgetting the necessary social skills for dealing with people face-to-face.  My response to the article is found here in a separate document.
     We were instructed to open a Delicious account.  I already did that in Week One so I just needed to refine it a bit according to the directions given.  It seems that it will be a very helpful tool for organizing and retrieving bookmarks.  I am certain it will be of tremendous help in research.  Will Richardson, in our text, mentions how we used to search for information in a library or an Internet search site then makes the case for social bookmarking:
     But today, when we now have the power to organize vast libaries of information on our own, the process is being run by millions of amateurs with no real training in classification.  Not to worry, however, because as with many topics on the new Net, users of social bookmarking systems have created a new concept to deal with the change:  the process is no longer taxonomy but "folksonomy."  The idea is that in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emerge and become accepted that will allow us all to participate in the process.  Although this might seem as chaotic and not effective as
traditional methods, by being able to apply many tags to one particular link, we get the added potential of  seeing how others might interpret or use resources that we share.  Thus we get connected to information  in ways that traditional libraries cannot duplicate.  And the more people contribute in the creation of
folsonomies, the more valuable they become to all who participate (2009, p. 90).
On a personal note, this will now make it possible for me to actually be able to organize and easily retrieve the over three hundred ungrouped bookmarks that I have accumulated in just a couple of years - hooray! 

Letter of Request
This assignment was interesting.  It made me put my knowledge into words.  We were instructed to write a fictitious letter to our principal/boss asking permission to use a social networking tool in our class/training. 

Critical Thinking Exercise
This assignment was basically designed to make us read two chapters from Richardson.  The questions required answers that pretty much had to be paraphrases or direct quotes.  That makes for a lot of in-text citations.  The instructions said a "1-2 page paper" but it would have taken that much (double-spaced) just to write down all of the questions or lead-ins from them!  I ended up with 7 pages in the body.  There were about twelve questions.  We'll see what happens. 
  
Reference
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains? USA Today. (11/10/2009). Retrieved from http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Scie4ntists+ask%3A+Is+...

"Minds on Fire" Critical Thinking Response Assignment - Week Four

Minds on Fire Response

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, in the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” discuss the evolution of education as a result of “massive improvements in transportation and communication” (2008, p. 17).

“Flat World” Implications

According to Brown and Adler, the educational implications of Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” are:

 

 Every place has the potential to become globally connected and competitive 

• The places that are globally connected are the ones with a well-educated workforce with skills that are in demand 
• To remain competitive, that workforce must also be learning and creating new ideas and skills (2008, p. 17-18)

Initiatives

 

There have been efforts introduced to deal with this demand for continuous and evolving education. Three of these efforts are the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement, MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) initiative, and the Terra Incognita virtual project based in Queensland. A present-day implication of these efforts is, according to Brown and Adler, a new “culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs (2008, p. 18). An impact we will be seeing developed fully in the future is the focus on social learning. Richard J. Light (2001) found that “students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own” (as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). This demonstrates a change in focus from knowledge transfer (the Cartesian view) to the “learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). Three of the benefits of group learning are: 

• Clarifying meaning by asking questions
• Receiving the information by auditory means through discussion
• Learning by teaching others (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18)

Professional Learning Communities

 

Brown and Adler state correctly that professional learning communities will be the next major frontier in education. It has already begun. Through the Internet, professionals have begun interacting with students in countless ways from an author’s commenting on a student blog about his/her book (see “Trainer-Expert Collaboration” in Shank, 2007, p, 150) to the “collaborative projects between students and expert astronomers” in the Faulkes Telescope Project (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 24).

 

Learning 2.0

 

The Internet has changed the way students learn. There is so much course material available online that a student can “find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). Instead of just learning “deep knowledge,” students can join a learning community and “participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning “(Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). As Brown & Adler say, when differentiating this “learning to be” from simply “learning about,” these (learning) “communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning - Learning 2.0 - which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners (2008, p. 28).

 

Equality Issue

 

It is to be hoped that someday the freedoms we cherish in this country will be common to all citizens of the planet. Access to high-speed Internet (and thereby all available knowledge) may very well become one of the essential freedoms assigned to every human being. A student without convenient, free access to a computer and the Internet is at a tremendous disadvantage. Such a student is effectively shut out of Learning 2.0. In the footnotes to the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” Brown and Adler state:

 

R. Natarajan, the former director of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, recently noted that “the half-life of knowledge” in many technical areas is now less than four years. If this is true, then 50 percent of what students learn as undergraduates will be obsolete by the time they graduate and begin seeking employment (Adler, 2007, n.p. as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 32).

 

Not only will that student be left behind in current education, but that adult will also be unprepared for the lifelong learning that will be the model of the future.

 

Conclusion

 

It is not possible to build the major university each week that Sir John Daniel mentioned in 1996 (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 17). It is, however, quite possible that the 4-year undergraduate institutions that we see today will no longer exist in the future. With knowledge changing constantly, it would be more likely that we will instead see credentials of acquired competence, which will be as fluid as the subject matter itself.

 

References

 

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.

 

Shank, P. (Ed). (2007). The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Proven Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning. San Francisco: Wiley & Sons.

 

Week Four

     Week Four gave me what I've been wanting in this program - an introduction to course design.
Building on the accounts opened in the previous week, I created a fictitious APEnglish class story creation project.  Links to those classes are on the sidebar.

      The most useful tool is the wiki on PBWorks.  It was much easier than I had feared it would be.  Eight years ago, while attending classes for a Master's in Education, I was instructed to build a webpage.  The number of steps required to make even the simplest page was unbelievable by today's standards.  All it took was a simple click on a button and typing in the name of the page to create a page.  One more click made a link to return to the original page.  Amazing.  I was able to make a home page with instructions to the student and separate pages for each assignment to take the small groups from choosing a topic and brainstorming the characters and setting all of the way to posting the finished product for peer review and then for public view on the web.  I learned how to download photos, clip-art, themes, and even videos to the wiki. 

     The Ning class was the easiest to set up, but probably not the most useful. It didn't have the versatility in terms of setting up different pages as the wiki.  It would be wonderful for blogging and for a discussion board tool.  The themes for the site were rich and well-designed.  A very nice feature is the photo slideshow capability. 
    
     The Facebook page was, well, not as versatile as the wiki or as eye-catching and intuitive as the Ning.  It is possible to make the group secret, by invitation only, which alleviates some of the security concerns presented by Facebook's more open features. 

     The "Minds on Fire" critical thinking exercise on the article of the same name by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) was a thought-provoking look at the future of education and learning in general.  My response to the listed questions will be included as a separate document. 

Reference

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.