Group items tagged

learning management systems (Exhibit 1).

The reality, however, is that today's students demand greater control of their own learning and the inclusion of technologies in ways that meet their needs and preferences (Prensky 2005)

Tools like blogs, wikis, media-sharing applications, and social networking sites can support and encourage informal conversation, dialogue, collaborative content generation, and knowledge sharing, giving learners access to a wide range of ideas and representations. Used appropriately, they promise to make truly learner-centered education a reality by promoting learner agency, autonomy, and engagement in social networks that straddle multiple real and virtual communities by reaching across physical, geographic, institutional, and organizational boundaries.

"I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create” (2000, 216). Social software tools make it easy to contribute ideas and content, placing the power of media creation and distribution into the hands of "the people formerly known as the audience" (Rosen 2006).

the most promising settings for a pedagogy that capitalizes on the capabilities of these tools are fully online or blended so that students can engage with peers, instructors, and the community in creating and sharing ideas. In this model, some learners engage in creative authorship, producing and manipulating digital images and video clips, tagging them with chosen keywords, and making this content available to peers worldwide through Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube

Student-centered tasks designed by constructivist teachers reach toward this ideal, but they too often lack the dimension of real-world interactivity and community engagement that social software can contribute.

Pedagogy 2.0: Teaching and Learning for the Knowledge Age In striving to achieve these goals, educators need to revisit their conceptualization of teaching and learning (Exhibit 2).

Pedagogy 2.0: Teaching and Learning for the Knowledge Age In striving to achieve these goals, educators need to revisit their conceptualization of teaching and learning

Pedagogy 2.0 is defined by: Content: Microunits that augment thinking and cognition by offering diverse perspectives and representations to learners and learner-generated resources that accrue from students creating, sharing, and revising ideas; Curriculum: Syllabi that are not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of bite-sized modules that are interdisciplinary in focus and that blend formal and informal learning;Communication: Open, peer-to-peer, multifaceted communication using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes that are iterative, dynamic, and performance and inquiry based;Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are rich in media and global in reach;Scaffolds: Support for students from a network of peers, teachers, experts, and communities; andLearning tasks: Authentic, personalized, learner-driven and learner-designed, experiential tasks that enable learners to create content.

Instructors implementing Pedagogy 2.0 principles will need to work collaboratively with learners to review, edit, and apply quality assurance mechanisms to student work while also drawing on input from the wider community outside the classroom or institution (making use of the "wisdom of crowds” [Surowiecki 2004]).

A small portion of student performance content—if it is new knowledge—will be useful to keep. Most of the student performance content will be generated, then used, and will become stored in places that will never again see the light of day. Yet . . . it is still important to understand that the role of this student content in learning is critical.

This understanding of student-generated content is also consistent with the constructivist view that acknowledges the learner as the chief architect of knowledge building. From this perspective, learners build or negotiate meaning for a concept by being exposed to, analyzing, and critiquing multiple perspectives and by interpreting these perspectives in one or more observed or experienced contexts

This understanding of student-generated content is also consistent with the constructivist view that acknowledges the learner as the chief architect of knowledge building. From this perspective, learners build or negotiate meaning for a concept by being exposed to, analyzing, and critiquing multiple perspectives and by interpreting these perspectives in one or more observed or experienced contexts. In so doing, learners generate their own personal rules and knowledge structures, using them to make sense of their experiences and refining them through interaction and dialogue with others.

Other divides are evident. For example, the social networking site Facebook is now the most heavily trafficked Web site in the United States with over 8 million university students connected across academic communities and institutions worldwide. The majority of Facebook participants are students, and teachers may not feel welcome in these communities. Moreover, recent research has shown that many students perceive teaching staff who use Facebook as lacking credibility as they may present different self-images online than they do in face-to-face situations (Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds 2007). Further, students may perceive instructors' attempts to coopt such social technologies for educational purposes as intrusions into their space. Innovative teachers who wish to adopt social software tools must do so with these attitudes in mind.

"students want to be able to take content from other people. They want to mix it, in new creative ways—to produce it, to publish it, and to distribute it"

Furthermore, although the advent of Web 2.0 and the open-content movement significantly increase the volume of information available to students, many higher education students lack the competencies necessary to navigate and use the overabundance of information available, including the skills required to locate quality sources and assess them for objectivity, reliability, and currency

In combination with appropriate learning strategies, Pedagogy 2.0 can assist students in developing such critical thinking and metacognitive skills (Sener 2007; McLoughlin, Lee, and Chan 2006).

We envision that social technologies coupled with a paradigm of learning focused on knowledge creation and community participation offer the potential for radical and transformational shifts in teaching and learning practices, allowing learners to access peers, experts, and the wider community in ways that enable reflective, self-directed learning.

. By capitalizing on personalization, participation, and content creation, existing and future Pedagogy 2.0 practices can result in educational experiences that are productive, engaging, and community based and that extend the learning landscape far beyond the boundaries of classrooms and educational institutions.

“We’ve been having this curriculum war for years.”

Mr. Kay, in contrast, painted the P21 vision as one that transcends this debate. The partnership tries to encourage states to be more deliberative about how they help students learn the skills,

“[But] the liberal arts movement, which we embrace, has not been as purposeful and intentional about the skill outcomes as we need to be.”

Mr. Willingham argued not only that the teaching of skills is inseparable from that of core content, but also that it is the content itself that allows individuals to recognize problems and to determine which critical-thinking skills to apply to solve them.

Students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains, he said.

Those techniques include student-directed methods such as project-based learning, which requires students to work in groups to solve a specified problem, relying on teachers for guidance rather than for explicit instruction.

“Teachers will rise to the challenge given the kind of supports they need.”

“If [curriculum] is just picking up a manual, or a series of nonconnected or nonsequenced experiments in science or literary works with no connection and no background knowledge, it’s not going to help our kids think any better,” she said in an interview.

Academics like Ms. Darling-Hammond said that setting forth a clear understanding once and for all about what students should know, and which teaching methods best help students engage that content in depth, will be crucial to putting such debates to rest.

The highest-scoring countries on international exams, she said, undertook efforts to outline such goals specifically 20 to 30 years ago. “When you really think about delivering a rich curriculum, it takes a very skillful type of teaching,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “It can be done badly; we have to acknowledge that. But we don’t really have a choice, if we want to join other nations.”

Meanwhile the critics go about squawking while promoting their own panaceas

he majority of kids just go right on tuning out, dropping out, or just getting by

I challenge what I read by looking at source material. These are timeless skills. It's the technology that is 21st century.

As for the topics we are unfamiliar with, the poster just before me rightly points out that the Internet is out there for just that purpose. Real teachers are also learners, and should be constantly seeking to know more.

Many recent studies have concluded that the current system is broken beyond repair and that point solutions like those being advocates above cannot fix it. We know that people learn best when they teach others so small groups that encourage peer-to-peer mentoring should be encouraged. Those same small groups require the students to learn and use the high-performance skills advocated by P21. At the same time, there is a body of knowledge that has been determined to be important to a student's future - represented by the state academic content standards. Robust, in-depth discussions of academic content help achieve the mastery of academic content. To ensure the content has meaning, it is best learned in a multi-disciplinary environment. By embedding a selected set of content standards from a variety of disciplines into a realistic setting/project the students get the opportunity to use the knowledge and go beyond the standards as their interest leads them.

The fact is, while "experts" pore over the fabric of pedagogical delivery methods, online teaching and learning is quietly replacing classroom environments globally. Educators better make some quick adjustments or the very definition of what an "education" means nowadays will make many of these folks irrelevant.

move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able

“information revolution”

new ways of relating

discourse,

social revolution, not a technological one

new forms of

Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking

nspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.

new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating.

“spirit” of Web 2.0

important

technology is secondary.

empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship

dea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.

first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.

mportance of the form of learning over the content of learning

teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world.

We can't “teach” them. We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).

love and respect your students and they will love and respect you back. With the underlying feeling of trust and respect this provides, students quickly realize the importance of their role as co-creators of the learning environment and they begin to take responsibility for their own education.

The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. The beauty of the current moment is that new media has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment. There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the questions that drive us on.

In this paradigm, information is no longer as important as the knowledge that’s created as we interpret information and create meaning. Increasingly, people are becoming more valued for their personal knowledge rather than their ability to perform tasks.

Society 2.0

Society 3.0 refers to an emerging innovation-based society that is not quite here, yet. This is a society that is driven by accelerating change, globalized relationships, and fueled by knowmads. In an era of accelerating change, the amount of information available doubles at an increasing rate, and the half-life of useful knowledge decreases exponentially. This requires innovative thinking and action by all members of society.

Kent, Washington public schools

now permit students to use wireless Web devices to help them access information to better pass tests.

Leapfrogging has become a major strategy of developing countries wishing to avoid catch-up efforts that otherwise portend a high likelihood of continued followership.

teaching, research, innovation, and service.