My part of the dialogue in the EduBlogger Event08
In late August I listened into the conversations in this event. I have to say that although made for an interesting day, it really began to seem that the invited bloggers were mostly chatting to each other with a few 'eavesdroppers' like me adding our 2 cents worth. (It might have been a time zone thing as I am in the Pacific Northwest.)
Here's my bit. For the full context, you can go to Dan Guhr's contribution: Web 2.0 and knowledge acquisition.
RE: DAN'S OBSERVATIONS OF CALIFORNIA TEENS MAKING "A LOT OF COMMUNICATION NOISE BECAUSE THEY LACK A FRAMEWORK TO INTERACT WITH THE WORLD IN AN INSIGHTFUL WAY":
Hmmm... I have to say that of all the comments I've read anywhere in this event today, paragraph 4 in Dan's post above rings the most true for me.
I think some people's ultimate vision for social learning is a world in which the teacher/learner distinction will be gone and we will all merrily 'wiki' our way towards constructing knowledge together. Tech advances will make us all the same when it comes to learning. If this is indeed what's coming, 'old school' teachers should begin seeking other occupations now because we'll soon fade into obscurity just like buggy whips, 8 track tapes, and dial telephones.
I am convinced, however, that although school district administrators may be looking forward to the day when education can take place without teachers, they have a long wait ahead of them. As Dan suggested, the young need our guidance in making sense of the world.
Just because young people can access more of it faster than we ever could, does not mean they can process it any better. In fact, I would argue that although my students think they are 'living large' with their circles of friends and their constant 'connectivity', their world is really very small. Although they talk a lot, they don't really have very much to say. We teachers are still here to create educational experiences that will expand our students' worlds and world views by helping them learn about, question, think, assess and integrate that which is outside their normal lives. In that way the teacher's role hasn't changed much since the first schoolmarm stood in front of the first one room school in the frontier.
So... it's for us to create and, to some extent, control these kinds of learning opportunities in the regular and e-learning class, so that students don't just play, chat, and piggyback on the work of others. They're already experts at that. My students love it when 'old school' meets 'new school' within the realm of a collaborative project. The kids bring their facility with devices and their adeptness learning how to make new tools work. I find the tools for them to work with and interesting resources for them to learn from.
Once they have acquired the prerequisite skills and knowledge, I set the project task, and its objectives and parameters. I then become the accountability grit in the oyster shell. As a project evolves, all participants become both teachers and learners because we bring different stengths and perspectives to the table.
Where kids in the frontier school understood the importance of hard work and knew little about the world, my students know a lot about the world but need to come to value of perseverance. My kids need to learn that struggle is part of the learning process, that seeing the work through to the end is worth the struggle, and that when they are done they will have produced something of substance that they can be proud of.
AND MY RESPONSE TO GABRIEL KENT RE: DESTRUCTURING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS:
My greatest concern is that 'unstructured' can devolve into 'directionless' unless there is some organizing principle behind it.
Consider the instruction: learn about penguins. For some that would be an invitation to do the minimum; for others it would pose a daunting task that might take weeks to complete. Guidance and clarification of expectations pull more from the former and set some limits on the task for the latter.
Students have different learning styles: some will come away with more faster from an open-ended learning environment; others do better with more structure. Generally, however, both types like to know the expectations up front. Some will use those as a platform from which to follow their interests more deeply; others will struggle just to feel competent and do well just to handle to basic load well.
At this point I am not willing to leave the setting of the main objectives for my students to decide any more than I would trust myself to a doctor who had trained by exploring his/her interests and who had ended up with lots of interesting and useful but unstructured knowledge.
I think the art of teaching is knowing when to inject yourself and when to hang back. One benefit that online tools provide is that we don't have to deliver a 'one size fits all' educational experience to an entire class. We can more easily craft learning experiences that excite the imagination and energy of those who are ready but which also provide a more secure path to follow for others. We want every learner to become self-directed and capable of learning independently, but they don't all come to us that way.
Some educators would say that project-based learning -- completely open-ended with the problems and questions set by the participants and the information/skills acquired growing out of the needs that arise as the project develops -- some would say that is the way to go. I'm just not comfortable with that -- it's too amorphous for me.
I think more interesting questions will be asked and problems discerned by students who are more knowlegable, so I set the agenda for basic content and skills, but at the same time use new tools to open up how students can go about acquiring these.
Projects can be used to accomplish this as long as the expectations are clearly laid out ahead of time. They can also be used as way for students to then progress to the more "unstructured" learning that comes from their posing and trying to answer the sorts of questions Dan asked. You're right -- there are no right answers and that's why they need to be asked, and why most students need guidance in learning how to take on such issues.
There is a place and a need for both unstructured and formal learning experiences. That has always been the case. The problem has been how to get both enterprises going in a class of 35, how to nurture the growth of all learners as learners rather than allow them to remain as simple collectors of content, and how to do that within some sort of manageable time frame.
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