Similar conversations have been taking place at major universities around the world, as dozens - 74, at the last count - rush to sign up. Science, engineering and technology courses have been in the vanguard of the movement, but offerings in management, humanities and the arts are growing in popularity (see 'MOOCs rising'). "In 25 years of observing higher education, I've never seen anything move this fast," says Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist at Stanford and one of the leaders of an ongoing, campus-wide discussion series known as Education's Digital Future.
Our
goal by engaging educators in digitally-connected, asynchronous forms of
collaborative learning was that they would gain an organic, authentic understanding
of what we (NML) mean by "participatory culture" - and thereby adopt the value
of its practices and bring them to their students and
districts.
We originally intended the course to utilize our existing public Ning community as a way to offer transparency to this learning process and allow others in the NML community to tap in and learn from what the early adopters were doing. Though each of them was equipped to share a plethora of expertise and experience that would have undoubtedly been valued by the larger community, the idea of "failing in public" overrode their desire to contribute.
So is it little wonder that it was so
difficult to get participation from educators (posing as students) while
offering all the affordances that flexible learning has to offer?
In classrooms, the way they currently
stand in most places, the teacher is still the distributor of all knowledge,
and students acquire and "bank" this information as valuable. Therefore a
teacher's expertise, while no one would ask this be stripped from a learning scenario,
remains the main asset in the student-teacher equation.
the experience of exploring your own pedagogy in ways
that challenge, perhaps, some of your most trusted and practiced ways of
teaching, and that mandates an openness and willingness to explore what failure
might look like in order to rebuild a learning environment that addresses the
shifts necessary for a new wave of learning - is, well, overwhelming.
How much structure is too much structure, and which constraints
fruitfully nurture inspiration?
Experiences running a MOOC-like one year worskhop for K12 teachers; many lessons learned, and design of a better workshop named PLAY Paricipatory learning and You. Interesting reflections
This is not one of my regular posts about a review of a web2.0 tool that you used to read in my blog . This is web2.0 itself under spotlight. Today as I was navigating the web collecting resources about Digital Ethnography , a topic I am working on now, I came across this great video entitled web2.0….The Machine is Us/ing Us .