Weblogg-ed » Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) - 0 views
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Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher has an interesting way of describing his classroom up in Snow Lake, Manitoba. As he tells it, it has “thin walls,” meaning that despite being eight hours north of the nearest metropolitan airport, his students are getting out into the world on a regular basis, using the Web to connect and collaborate with students in far flung places from around the globe.
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there is still value in the learning that occurs between teachers and students in classrooms. But the power of that learning is more solid and more relevant at the end of the day if the networks and the connections are larger.”
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But, what happens when knowledge and teachers aren’t scarce? What happens when it becomes exceedingly easy to people and content around the things you want to learn when you want to learn them?
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Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them "educated" when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a "literacy" in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they've pretty much delivered what we've asked them to.
