On Webogg-ed, Will Richardson has excerpted out a part of his new book coming out in May 2011 called PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORKS: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education at:
http://weblogg-ed.com/2011/personal-learning-networks-an-excerpt/. It looks like a great book!
In this excerpt he sites a teacher (Clarence Fisher) working in a very remote place who has connected himself and his students virtually via the internet and how it has significantly changed his classroom. He notes the power of a personal learning network to become "a connected learner." The students skype with other students around the world, watch Youtube and other videos and while doing so are involved in a virtual chat.
This teacher says his classroom is "thin-walled" to denote the ever-changing and shifting way that students gain knowledge. Fisher wrote on his own blog, the following:
"The connections have had very little to do with me. I’ve provided access, direction, and time, but little else. I have not had to make elaborate plans with teachers, nor have I had to coordinate efforts, parceling out contacts and juggling numbers. It is all about the kids. The kids have made contacts. They have begun to find voices that are meaningful to them, and voices they are interested in hearing more from. They are becoming connectors and mavens, drawing together strings of a community. They are beginning to expect to work in this way. They want to know what the people in their network are saying, to hear about their lives and their learning. They want feedback on their own learning, and they want to know they are surrounded by a community who hears them. They make no distinction about class, about race, about proficiency in English, or about geography. They are only interested in the conversation and what it means to them."
Richardson goes on to note the overwhelming amount of knowledge we have at our fingertips as compared to before the web. How, do we as educators, share the knowledge with our students? We can't spoonfeed them as was done in 19th and early 20th century paradigms of education. Instead, we must teach students to think about the journey of knowledge--where to find, access, define and use all of this accessible information. Richardson further notes that the old system of education--one size fits all, classrooms based on ages, traditional evaluations and assessments just don't work anymore. I agree. Richardson notes, "For each of us as learners in the world at large, the fundamental change is that we can be much more in control of the learning we do." The changing shift is that students and teachers can, should and need to be connected to one another in sharing knowledge. Personal Learning Networks like Delicious, Google Reader, Twitter and more make us one step closer to the knowledge each one of us has and each one of us is passionate about. So, as Facebook tells you: like it or share it. See you online!
EDUBETH---IDEAS ON EDUCATION
This does sound like a really interesting book. So often you hear educators talk about how the internet has made things too easy for students nowadays, rather than embracing it and really “teaching student to think about the journey of knowledge”. How can they find this information? Is it accurate? Etc. I think the idea that the present tools and technologies put us in control of our learning is exactly correct. They give us ease of accessibility and an enormous amount of resources that we never had before. And with this, we need new teaching and learning strategies to take advantage of it all. By being able to connect to anyone, anywhere, at pretty much anytime we are opening ourselves up to an extreme amount of knowledge sharing which is great.
ReplyDeleteAs you mentioned about our Google reader, Delicious, and Twitter accounts, we are much closer to the things we are passionate about, and these passions are ultimately at our fingertips. And to go even further with that, they are ultimately at all of our friends, colleagues, classmates, etc. fingertips as well. The ease of sharing with all of these tools make knowledge transfer completely impossible to not do.
This idea of becoming a “connected learner” seems to be growing and I can’t wait to see where it takes us. As I have mentioned in my own recent blogs, I’m very interested in this idea of using Skype or any other video conferencing tools in the classroom. I see and hear about it happening more and more and I would love to hear more about how different teachers are incorporating it into their lessons.