Group items tagged

• Online networks help to define us. My Blog, My Flickr, My Space, My Facebook, My Friends, My Profile, My Second Life, My del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, My Ning Network, My Twitter, My-Whole-Life-Connected-and-On-Display-For-Anyone-And-Everyone-To-See…

On many levels, ‘access issues’ are key obstacles. Yet, opportunities abound! The web lets us collaborate in many different ways! So now I have to wonder: Do we want our discussions to be around what we can’t do? It isn’t so much about ‘New Boundaries‘ as it is about removing boundaries. There were holes in the Berlin wall for years… innovative teachers today are escapees from behind similar walls. It is time to tear the old ideological walls down. Teachers and students need access granted!

I’ve seen a real shift in my own thinking recently. Forget whining about access, never mind the slow speed of change, get over the obstacles! Go after meaningful results. Engage and empower students. Be a leader and a role model.

Some would argue that the tension and irritation between "why" and "how" is by design. That these shifts are creating a permissive framework in education where there are no clear answers (Turner, 2004). And that in a changing educational environment the needed changes in education should be negotiated from a why approach rather than a how approach.

It is no longer about information management and prescriptive outcomes, but rather about building capacity- in ourselves, our faculty, our staff and in our students and then being able to contextualize the collective wisdom we gain through those relationships to making the world a better place.

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

In many schools and even states, it's been, rather, a movement to block and bust: no blogs, no cell phones, no IM. We take away the powerful social technologies our kids are already using to learn and, in doing so, tell them their own tools are irrelevant. Or, instead of using the complex and challenging phenomenon of a site such as Wikipedia to teach the realities of navigating information in this new world, we prohibit its use. In fact, at this writing, the U.S. legislature is in the process of deciding whether schools and libraries should have access to any of the potential of the Read/Write Web at all. When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus.

I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won't be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

I have to wonder how many folks would jump in at all if they were afraid of the water. As David Truss points out, "too many people fear drowning and never get into the pool” and that in most Teacher Ed programs the amount of technology skill they leave the program with seems to be optional... to me that's like throwing a non-swimmer into the deep end.

I spend a day or two, sometimes a week “teaching folks to swim.” I give them the skills and we go SLOW.

There has been talk in the edtech community for a long time that we need to stop talking about the tools, but I disagree. You are always going to have those non-swimmers who finally find their way to the edge of the pool. Teach them what the water feels like and support them as they develop confidence in using the tool. When I share a tool like voicethread with a teacher, they can see so many ways it can be used in the classroom. They get excited about the potentials but they don’t understand the many concepts that go into it, embedding, and sharing, and privacy, and moderating comments, are so new to them…They are excited about being at the pool's edge, but it is like being thrown into that deep end for the first time.

My argument is this: when we make our learning transparent, we become teachers. Even if we are new to a field and don’t have the confidence to dialogue with experts, we can still provide important learning opportunities to others.

Prominent and transparent learners I can’t speak for them, but from reading prominent educational technology bloggers - Will Richardson, Terry Anderson, Stephen Downes, Grainne Conole - I’m left with the impression that they too seek not to proclaim what they know, but rather to engage and share with others as they explore and come to understand technology and related trends. Watching others learn is an act of learning.