Writing Across the Curriculum

Creating a classroom encyclopedia covering the content you are studying in class or a comprehensive collection of solutions to one common problem will be a motivating and productive task for your students. Groups can be assigned particular topics to tackle or charged with detailing the strengths and weaknesses of one potential solution, creating pages mirroring the format of Wikipedia entries. Conceptually, using Wikipedia as a model for your classroom wiki project will make your expectations approachable—and give students samples to refer to while completing their final products.

What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.

You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).

In my recent experience of integrating technology into my classroom, I’ve found that the mode of communication changes but several elements of classroom do not change.

“There’s this notion that technology is networked and social. It does alter the power relationship between the educator and the learner, a learner has more autonomy, they have more control. The expectation that you wait on the teacher to create everything for you and to tell you what to do is false.”

“At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.

Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

MOOCs reduce barriers to information access and to the dialogue that permits individuals (and society) to grow knowledge.

Knowledge is a mashup. Many people contribute. Many different forums are used. Multiple media permit varied and nuanced expressions of knowledge. And, because the information base (which is required for knowledge formation) changes so rapidly, being properly connected to the right people and information is vitally important.

MOOCs share the process of knowledge work – facilitators model and display sensemaking and wayfinding in their discipline. They respond to critics, to challenges from participants in the course. Instead of sharing only their knowledge (as is done in a university course) they share their sensemaking habits and their thinking processes with participants. Epistemology is augmented with ontology.