Category: education

WebTools For Teachers 06/14/2008

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Autodidacts and Web 2.0 – Are Universities Still Needed?

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“Autodidact” was, at one point, a mocking term. Someone who had taught themselves was someone who didn’t really know because they hadn’t learned in the authority-approved, academy-approved, institutional manner. They were “undisciplined” because they were outside of the academic disciplines. Yet the connotations around this word are shifting. As the web, with the immediacy of its access to information, becomes more and more a part of our lives, more people are learning outside of the traditional institutions. Being an autodidact now has more caché, and more real value.

Most people who are web 2.0 savvy are autodidacts because they have taught, and are continuously teaching, themselves about what is available and what can be done with it. All kinds of people are learning outside our educational institutions. Some are now skillful learners despite having struggled to learn inside the institutions. And inside our educational institutions, the most exciting and dramatic changes in human communication EVER are often being ignored and avoided by many who should be leaders in learning. In my opinion, universities and colleges are just not keeping up.

Don’t get me wrong; there are amazing people out there doing amazing things in their classes. I loved Virginia Yonkers’ description of a course she developed; it blew me away. It’s a course that everyone should take, IMHO. We all need to know about “communication (mobile communication technologies such as cell phones, pda’s, video conferencing), information sharing (pod and vodcasting, visual information software, blogs, pageflakes), collaboration (wikis, groupware), and networking (facebook, LinkedIn, Ning)”. I admire the hands-on action research approach she uses with her students, but what I admire most deeply is the framework she has created so her students are learning the complexities of the impact of the new communication tools – (read her post!)

Yonkers demonstrates something very important with her design of this course, something that educational institutions should be paying close attention to because it is the value-added aspect of the expensive education they are meant to provide. It is easy, now, to find information on the web, and tutorials, both free and with a price. All kinds of people offer books and videos for sale on all kinds of topics on the web. But what Yonkers offers, and what universities should/ could be offering, is a rich learning context lead by a fellow learner who is skilled in shaping learning for herself and her students. Her students are learning applications, and the communications implications of these new tools, in a rich social learning environment. (A comment of hers on her post reveals that the technical environment wasn’t that rich.)

I have taught myself at least basic use of most of the applications she has her students use. I am an autodidact where web 2.0 is involved. I chose what blogs to follow, I harvest links from Twitter and my Bloglines account, and I use del.icio.us (and diigo) to be able to re-find links I value. But when I read this –

http://connecting2theworld.blogspot.com/2008/06/lessons-learned-from-new-communication.html

Connecting 2 the World: Lessons learned from New Communication Technologies in Organziational Life via kwout

I know that I need deeper, richer, more contextual learning than I can get from being alone f2f with my computer screen. I need a learning community to bounce ideas off and learn new possibilities from. I envy Yonkers and her students. I’ll leave you with Yonkers list of what current and future workers need to know, and a question: How widespread, do you think, is the teaching and learning of these work literacies?

http://connecting2theworld.blogspot.com/2008/06/lessons-learned-from-new-communication.html

Connecting 2 the World: Lessons learned from New Communication Technologies in Organziational Life via kwout

WebTools For Teachers 06/12/2008

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  • Connecting 2 the World: Lessons learned from New Communication Technologies in Organziational Life

    Information can now be presented in multiple formats to fit different user needs. This includes creating visual representations, networking and connection information so it no longer has to be presented linearly, and allowing greater access and control over who and when information can be accessed. The result is that information becomes much more situated and user driven.

    tags: communication, course, web-literacy

  • Is Google Making Us Stupid?

    Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

    tags: web, reading

  • Revoluminary | The Global Learning Community

    Interesting set-up to allow learners and teachers to find each other and set up tutorials.

    tags: online_lessons, teaching

  • arts-informed

    Poetry, Perception and Pedagogy: Thinking Through Art – essay and poems illustrating how poetry can be used to know oneself.

    tags: JVC, arts-based, narrative-inquiry

WebTools For Teachers 06/08/2008

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WebTools For Teachers 06/06/2008

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WebTools For Teachers 06/04/2008

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  • Innovate: Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum

    Brilliant description of how learning is currently occuring in rapidly changing fields. Must join to access, but free
    “In a sense, the rhizomatic viewpoint returns the concept of knowledge to its earliest roots. Suggesting that a distributed negotiation of knowledge can allow a community of people to legitimize the work they are doing among themselves and for each member of the group, the rhizomatic model dispenses with the need for external validation of knowledge, either by an expert or by a constructed curriculum. Knowledge can again be judged by the old standards of “I can” and “I recognize.” If a given bit of information is recognized as useful to the community or proves itself able to do something, it can be counted as knowledge. The community, then, has the power to create knowledge within a given context and leave that knowledge as a new node connected to the rest of the network.”

    tags: Innovate, learning, learning_tools, metaphor

  • The Rapid eLearning Blog

    Interesting ideas on how (and why) to create a PowerPoint that doesn’t look like a ppt.

    tags: WorkLiteracy, ppt, e-learning

WebTools For Teachers 06/03/2008

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